Game of Thrones 8.05 "The Bells" 5/12/19 [Show discussion]

Cafe Society
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Every other place she liberated eventually treated her like a conquering hero, and she employed terror against those who threatened to reject her. Putting up miles of heads on pikes or crucified masters was intended to terrorize the powerful so they wouldn’t rise up against her. As I recall, her advisors were a bit aghast at that.

But she honestly thought the people of Westeros would hail her as a conquering hero when she ‘broke the wheel’. She was counting on ruling over a supportive people who would learn to love her. But she made a category error - her lack of understanding of Westeros made her think that they were longing for a new leader, but in fact the people of Westeros basically survived by not giving a shit who sat on the iron throne, because in their history it was almost never good. And they weren’t enslaved - just poor. If they were killed by the powerful it was generally as collateral damage in the Game of Thrones. So why should they even care if another ruler shows up?

So now she has realized that these people are different, and that they will never love her. Her one chance for legitimacy with the people was marrying into them, and she planned to do that right from the start. That’s why Dario Neharis was left behind. But now Jon has rejected her, AND he has a better claim to the throne, AND he is truly loved by his people. This essentially leaves no place for the Mother of Dragons and her need to take back the Seven Kingdoms for her family. The only way she sits on the Iron Throne now is through fear - perhaps she convinced herself that after she was in power she’d do good works that would redeem her with the people - tyrants who do despicable things often rationalize it for ‘the greater good’.

Read some more history.

Daeneris being on the brink of sanity has been shown many times. Her advisors pulling her back from the brink has been shown many times. Her inclination to burn people has been shown many times. When she first came to King’s Landing Tyrion had to talk her down from just getting on her dragon and burning villages. That led to a conversation something like this:

Tyrion: Do not do this. You are not the mad king.
Daeneris: I am nothing like my father!
Tyrion: If you go off burning cities and villages, you are exactly like your father.

It worked that time, but back then she trusted Tyrion and still believed that ruling through love was in the cards. And she still had her dragons and all her support structure (Ser Jorah, Missendai, etc). Now she had the same impulse, ut this time she had already lost two dragons, Missendai and Ser Jorah and the man she thought would be her true love and her ticket to power, And we’re supposed to be shocked that this time she gives in to impulses that have been clearly shown throughout the series to be just below the surface?

They’ve screwed up some things in season 8, but anyone who thought that going ‘mad queen’ was not a possibility was not watching the same series I was.

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A few seasons ago (Season 4, maybe?), when Dany was ruling Meereen, one of the dragons flew off and ate the child of a shepherd (or farmer, or some such person). That guy came to Dany and showed her the charred bones, and she was horrified and ordered the other two dragons chained. Not Dany’s fault, at all, but she felt horribly guilty anyway. The dragons almost starved to death as a result.

I think the issue I am (and others are) having with 8.05 is we haven’t seen a character progression from Dany that would move her from that instance – chaining her “children” due to another child’s death – to one in which she’s indiscriminately burning to the ground an entire city filled with men, women and children. I’m not saying it’s out of character for her, necessarily; I’m saying it’s out of character based on what we’ve seen from her. The problem (again, for me) isn’t that she decided to do that; it’s that she decided to do that based on events that have apparently happened within the past month or two. The writers and director are asking us to accept that Dany’s entire character, and her years-long focus on protecting the enslaved and downtrodden (“Breaker of Chains”), did a 180 within a few weeks – actually just within a few days.

It’s possible to show that, maybe. It’s just we haven’t really seen it. It’s another example of the show’s descent into hackneyed and ham-fisted writing and execution.

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I feel the same way.

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That’s an interesting contrast, between the time when, years ago, her dragons went off and ate the child of someone who considered herself a loyal subject, and today, when she sets her dragon free to burn everyone in an enemy city. But I see the two situations as really, really different. You say they haven’t shown us the evolution of the character, but I think that they absolutely have; and I and Sam and a few other folks have described everything we’ve seen to move her along her arc toward mass-murderer.

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Then don’t watch if you hate it so much.

They have set up how she has turned this way. It’s valid to criticize the speed it happened. It’s a matter of opinion whether you like how they did it. It is just plain wrong to say they didn’t lay the ground work for it to happen. There has been 8 seasons of ground work.

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Either the destruction was a calculated use of violence to further her political goals or it was a berserker move. Can’t be both.

Executing Varys or threatening Tyrion with the penalty of death is an example of ruling by fear.

Destroying King’s Landing and its population after it surrenders is a (sudden IMO) descent into madness. Only the next episode can reveal the significance of that.

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If a WWII general saw that one of his men had killed an innocent child and was confronted with the child’s body and a grieving father, that general could feel huge sympathy, try to make things right with the father, punish the soldier, and be haunted by memories of that poor child for life.

That same general could then walk into his office the next morning and order a bombing strike on a city that would kill a thousand children. We are complex creatures, and perfectly capable of compartmentalizing our feelings and rationalizing our actions.

Daeneris wasn’t ‘burning women and children’ - she was fighting in a battle for the future of the country and decided that bombing a city was the price that would have to be paid to ensure a peaceful rule. This is a decision that has been made hundreds of times in history, including by our own side in WWII and elsewhere.

It’s also true that this rationalization also helped her justify her deep need to punish the people who had treated her so badly and killed Missendai. Humans are good at rationalizing that which we really, really want to do.

The show did a good job of masking her murderous desires by making sure that before Westeros, the people she killed were truly evil so we didn’t think about it too much. Consider her burning all the Khals alive - in that episode, the show went out of its way to make the Khals as personally obnoxious as they could, so that we would cheer when she burned them all. But she loved the Dothraki and she loved being the Khaleesi to Khal Drogo. Are we supposed to believe that every Khal was a murderous monster except Khal Drogo? And were the other Dothraki really any different? They all lived to rape and pillage and take slaves. There was a real inconsistency in the way Daeneris reacted to the Khals basically been typical Dothraki and her apparent love for the Dothraki people but need to murder all the Khals.

No, she burned all the Khals alive because it’s the only way she could take over the Dothraki. That scene was her being ruthless and murderous to achieve her own ends, and the showrunners downplayed that aspect by making the Khals extra nasty at that moment so we wouldn’t see the ruthlessness Daeneris could bring to bear on those standing in the way of her attainment of power.

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Yeah, the way I look at it is that the amount of “stuff” that happened during all of Seasons 1-4 is happening between episodes in these later seasons, especially this last season, and they just don’t have the time to show it. So most changes are happening too fast for people who are still thinking of time in the same way they did in Season 1. At this point, Dany has been in Westeros for two seasons out of eight, but from her point of view she’s probably spent more time in Westeros than she did in all her time in Slaver’s Bay. So it isn’t like she just snapped. This has been a long, slow decline. It just seems like it was super fast.

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And the first battle that happened in the show consisted off Tyrion getting knocked out and then waking up when it was over. And people complained. Now they have the budget for battles and some of the exposition (and sexposition) suffers.

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Bran.

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[Moderating]

gupwala reported his own post once he realized it was problematic, so there will be no disciplinary action taken here. But, yes, that post was problematic: This thread should not contain discussion of anything from any source other than the TV episodes to this point.

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I guess if I squint, I can kinda sorta see how people might argue that this was a natural extension of Daenerys’s character.

But it doesn’t work for me. And quite obviously, it didn’t work for a helluva lot of other viewers, and I think we have a damn good argument for why it didn’t work. Her conscious use of deliberate violence has always in the past been against slavers, kidnappers, murderers, enemy armies. She has never, not once, signed the death warrant of an innocent. She kills folk what need killin. She does this to protect the innocent. She has never killed the innocent to protect the innocent. She really, genuinely has tried to deliver on that with every previous conquest. And I just don’t give a flying sack of shit about such-and-such conversation she had. Television is a visual medium. If she’s gonna turn into a bad-doer, I want to see her doin bad, not just blow wind about it. Her actions up until this point have been perfectly consistent: she uses hot violence against violent transgressors.

If I’m supposed to be convinced that she’s willing to drop an A-bomb on a large city teeming with children, then I want to see her toss a grenade into a crib at least one time before that. Or… something like that.

Not just talk about it, but demonstrate at least one time that she is willing to put a perfectly innocent person to the fire for a conspicuously, appallingly unjust reason in order to serve her empty idea of the greater good. And NOT an enemy lord who just fought a battle against her, and could save his own dipshit life by getting his trousers slightly dirty. Someone like a wrongly-accused child, a tricky situation where she looks the other way, accepts the injustice, because she thinks that will help her cause. I want there to be some minimal amount of build-up in her actions. Not in the conversations, but in her actual damn actions. She’s never done that, peeps. Not a single time. Talk is cheap. If she caught the wrong side of the Targ coin-flip, I want to see the actual results of that in miniature form, not just have people point out some discussions she’s had as if that makes the entire thing okay. Obvs I’m not the only one who feels that way.

But it was still fuckin amazing episode.

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Had anyone ever called The Hound “Sandor” before? That was sweet.

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I think one of those Brotherhood guys did, but yeah, agreed.

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She still hasn’t, in her mind. She doesn’t consider them innocent.

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Didn’t Ian McShane’s character? Before they were butchered by those bandits, of course?

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Before I dive back in, just a quick thing: this thread has gotten weirdly hostile, and I really hope it doesn’t have to stay that way. For those who enjoyed Dany’s turn and thought it was well signaled and well done, I’m genuinely glad and I wouldn’t take it away from you if I could (and I can’t!). But you have to acknowledge that there is a sizable percentage of the GoT audience for whom this failed, and failed big time - I’m one of them. I’m always interested in how storytelling succeeds or fails, which is why I’m in this conversation. But if it’s going to be a lot of “everyone who disagrees with me is dumb” then I’m out.

So here’s where we differ. I think they failed to lay the groundwork for what actually happened. To me, they laid the groundwork for a different thing. To me, they laid the groundwork for Dany to finally tire of the Game of Thrones, which has failed her at every turn, and embrace war. To conduct a brutal campaign, heedless of civilian casualties; to obliterate her enemies and everyone - even the innocent civilians - who stood in her way.

But instead, they had her explicitly target civilians. I don’t understand the responses that said she wasn’t targeting civilians - she clearly was. Once the bells rang, she no longer even made a vague pretense at attacking actual military targets - the fleeing Lannister soldiers or the Red Keep. Instead she wandered around Kings Landing and strafed entire groups of civilians. And - to me - this is no longer an interesting character making a morally gray decision. This is a cartoon supervillain doing the most evil thing the writers could imagine.

And here’s why that’s the biggest sin of all (to me): it’s boring. The lost storytelling possibilities make me sad. It’s obvious why they did it - making Dany into a cartoon supervillain makes the finale simpler to write. Dany’s going to die (no spoilers, I just have watched enough TV to know that), and because she’s been turned into a cartoon the writing of her end is straightforward. Prince Phillip will throw his sword into Maleficent’s heart and the monster will be vanquished, everyone will agree that it basically had to be done, see you in another life.

Suppose Dany had made a brutal, fire-and-blood decision, but not a comically monstrous one. The Lannister soldiers retreat behind their civilian shields. The only way to win the battle without a protracted siege that will cost Dany’s own army dearly is to wreck the Red Keep. Tyrion and Jon argue against it - thousands will die! But Dany has been hearing that shit for too long and it’s been wrong every time - if she had just sacked the Keep when she came ashore in the first place, countless lives would have been saved. Drogon obliterates the Keep. Thousands die. And the final episode centers around the questions that have driven the show for its entire run: what makes a good leader? What makes a good ruler? What makes a good person? Do the answers to these questions overlap at all? We’d have had arguments all week about who was right, who was just, how it should all go.

Instead, we will get a black and white ending where the Evil Queen is vanquished. Which is fine and I’ll watch it, but considering the possibilities I’m disappointed.

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I know that nobody has ever done a novelization of this show–and how could anyone translate this spectacle successfully to the page*?–but imagine if someone tried. If there were chapters in which Danerys’s inner thoughts were narrated, in which we could clearly read that she was struggling with the loss of her dream, and was making deliberate choices to turn to the Dark Side–would that satisfy you?

Because you’re right that this is TV, a visual medium. But I’m also okay with things being implied, and things being communicated through dialogue, even on TV. (Indeed, the dialogue tends to be my favorite part of shows like this).

And while you’re right that we didn’t see her take actions to kill innocents, I think the dialogue, and the stellar eyeball-acting of Emilia Clarke, were enough for me to justify her snap.

As for using violence to protect the innocent, she primarily uses violence to increase her own power. Protecting the innocent is a gloss, the same gloss she puts over this scene by redefining “mercy” on the eve of the battle.

  • [the books don’t exist for this thread, right? hoping I’m getting the thread rules right, really not trying to screw things up]
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I wouldn’t call it “weirdly” hostile; the people who didn’t like it feel personally betrayed, as if D&D went to their home and kicked their dog. The people who liked it are trying to enjoy it amid the “this was SHIT!!!11!!!one!!” posts shitting up the thread.

Neither viewpoint is off-topic for this thread, of course, and while nobody is “threadshitting,” there are plenty of shit-bombs to wade through. The massive disparity in viewpoints makes the hostility you’re describing mundane and predictable, not weird or unexpected.

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To be clear, I didn’t say she wasn’t targeting civilians; I said she wasn’t deliberately targeting mothers and children. She was targeting EVERYONE.

And this makes her no more of a cartoon supervillain than the folks who ordered the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, all of whom decided that destroying an entire city to demoralize the opposition was a worthy goal. (I think it’s a horrific war policy, but that puts me in the minority).