‘I’ve never cared about the people of Kings Landing’ Said by the guy whose character-defining act was killing the last guy who threatened to burn the city down. Maybe he forgot why he killed Aerys?
Oh, the man I like turned me down, so I’m going to chimp out and burn a 100,000 people to death. Because of some bells, or something. For a group of people whose storytelling evoked the joke, ‘Grrrlpower!’ to describe their writing. Who were smugly pleased about the war conference scene a few episodes ago, that was almost entirely women, I can’t think of a more misogynistic way to describe a young, inexperienced queen’s approach to ruling. I wouldn’t have burned you all, but my nephew wouldn’t fuck me. Absolute trash.
You can sell Dany descending into madness—it probably was what GRRM intended all along, as the natural endpoint of a Joan of Arc type ruler who’d actually won—but you have to do a better job of setting it up.
The more I think about this last season, the more displeased I get with the slipshod quality, betrayal of characters’ motivations from several years prior, and general stopped-giving-a-shit evidenced by the production.
One possibility for choosing to have Cersei die that way is that no one alive witnessed her death and they might not find her body for awhile. This uncertainty could give Dany even more to be paranoid and obsessed about in the last episode. Which could be important… somehow.
It has been quite clear this season that it is Benioff & Weiss doing the writing and not Martin. None of the subtleties we’ve seen before and overall just lazy writing. If it were GRRM still writing we’d finish the episode with mixed feeling about Dany. We talked about it before in the Battle of Winterfell where no thought was put into strategy and now we have the whole lead up of Cercei using human shields in the Red Keep. Dany could have just attacked the Keep killing those civilians and not the entirety if KL to the same effect and it would have been in keeping with her personality (anything to get the throne). I get that she’s a crazy Targaryan but the jump to genocidal maniac for no purpose was too much too quickly.
A fellow screenwriter on Twitter mentioned that it’s really just a style conflict between Martin and the two showrunners. Benioff and Weiss are plot guys. Martin is a character guy. Once they ran out of books it became just a matter of getting everyone where they needed to be to finish the story, and if that meant them acting out of character to rush to that conclusion, so be it.
So that is the power balance between Cersei and Daenarys? Did Cersei have any game plan at all other than piss off your enemies and hope for a miracle?
They have been building this huge showdown between these power blocs and then… then… oh, the dragon just blows the whole thing up with napalm.
After the other dragon took an arrow through the skull like it was target practice.
No one else found it odd that Jaime, Arya and the hound left Winterfell on horseback before the main army marched and yet they arrive at KL well after in time to be intercepted?
This is a gross oversimplification. What actualloy happened to Daeneris since coming to King’s Landing:
She fell in love with a man who turned out to be a secret Targaryan and who had not just a better claim to the throne, but more popularity with the population.
That man distracted her from the reason she came to King’s Landing, and talked her into taking her army north, where half of them and one of her dragons were killed and her trusted advisor and protector Jorah Mormont is also killed.
After that major sacrifice, the people at Winterfell hardly noticed her, and kept declaring Jon to be king. Some of them, like Sansa, are openly hostile to her even though she saved them.
The man she loved revealed that he’s her nephew, and for that reason was not going to remain with her. That means if he’s King she’s the Queen of nothing.
She goes home to Dragonstone, still willing to fight alongside the north and keep up her end of the bargain, but she gets ambushed and loses another dragon (remember, the dragons are essentially children to her. So she’s had two of her own children killed. Cersei went mad for similar reasons.
She then gets to watch as her beloved Missandei is murdered in front of her. And this happened because her trusted hand Tyrion, who used to be so wise, keeps making tacticall blunders that just happen to benefit his own people and hurt Daeneris.
Her other advisor, Varys, is caught openly plotting to kill her.
Now remember, Daeneris has been talked down from lashing out mulltiple times by her advisors. She wanted to burn King’s Landing earlier, and she even just wanted to get on her dragon and start burning random villages and people. Even back in Essos she had to be walked back from taking much more brutal actions than she ultimately did.
And now she has no advisors to act as a balancing influence other than Greyworm, and he’s all about killing everyone.
Here’s the way I read that. First, I don’t think she ever agreed to Tyrion’s plea for her to stop if the bells rung. It’s entirely possible that at this point she was just assuming that the bells weren’t going to ring (she didn’t know about Jamie’s release), so she was like, “Whatever. That city is going to burn because there won’t be any bells.” Or alternatively, she ignored Tyrion because she assumed that this would either be another Tyrion screw-up that hurts her and benefits his sister, or that he was simply wrong.
But what we saw when she heard the bells was the realization that if she did what Tyrion asked, Cersei might get away. The Red Keep was still standing. And after it was all over she wasn’t going to be queen unless she ruled by fear. Showing mercy now was pretty much the end of her dream. And the hateful people of Westeros deserved to die anyway. Basically, her response to the bells was a moment’s thought, then “Screw that! These people are not getting off just because they rang some bells. I’m burning them all.”
The other possibility is that she planned it all along, and the conversation with Greyworm, where he burned the only thing he had to remember Missendei essentially meant, “We’re going out in a blaze of glory. They’ll either fear us, or we’re done.”
There is no reason to think he killed the king to save the people (and that quote showed he didn’t).
He’s nobility - destroying the capital screws up the whole thing, and in addition kills a lot of nobles that he knows. He was aiming to save the Seven Kingdoms - that a bunch of dirty peasants/whores/etc were saved was an entirely unthought of side effect.
Wowww. Hundreds of posts since I last checked the thread a few hours ago. I started to go through them, but ended up skipping to the past couple pages.
That was so great. But really, Hound? You couldn’t just give her a quick sideswipe as she passed by?
LOL, ISWYDT.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but let’s not forget that it mostly hinged on her swindling the trader who sold her the Unsullied.
Not a chance. The vibe you got was not the one I got, and I’m fairly certain not the one that was intended.
Very interesting idea. Could happen, but the show has made it very clear that getting your hands dirty in an execution IS the noble thing to do. Of course that’s where expectations could be subverted yet again - Jon going against his beliefs for love. Probably too unsatisfying though. My guess is the dragon will have to die - executed as well.
I agree that I prefer my deaths to be totally clear and shown. I still hate that Stannis’ death was in a cut away. I would have totally shown Brienne kill him, fully on screen.
However, I think that Jamie and Cercei(like Stannis) are dead and it is pretty clear. At this point(I say this aware of how iffy the writing has been), it would be incredibly bad writing for them to make it through.
Jamie held her, said only they mattered, and they got destroyed. A bit of a disappointment, but just about right.
