I only wish that were sarcastic. Your analysis of the writers of the show borders on the ludicrous, both because who cares about your beliefs of their work habits, and also because your beliefs are almost certainly incorrect.
Discussion of the show itself is interesting. Your snide insults about the show’s creators are dumb and irrelevant.
Any dragon worth his salt should be able to selective fire that stuff. It would suck if you just wanted to roast a lamb or a Lannister for supper and instead blew up a mountainside. For that matter, if your master asked you to burn someone, you’d better not blow up the whole castle doing it. So dragons, careful with that breath!
You forgot a big one between 8 and 9. Not to mention all the times she started ranting about burning cities to dust and Jorah, Tyrion, or whoever managed to calm her down and convince her to try another way…but the step you’re missing between 8 and 9 is burning the Tarlys, after they surrendered. For the crime of not pledging fealty. Surely they could be taken prisoner instead? Nope, she wanted to make a clear and terrifying example. She was advised against it, but did it anyway. That was a big moment, the critical step in the very process you say you wanted to see, but you forgot about it or omit it. Were they innocent? I guess not, they did fight her, but it’s war. When it came down to it, though, they surrendered and were disarmed. The battle was over.
Sure, it’s another step further to start burning civilians, but there was there clear dialogue indicating she blamed them for “supporting” Cersei (which clearly doesn’t make sense, but she’s rationalizing at that point), AND the whole thing about progression is that there’s always a next step that’s “more” than the last. Walt’s prison thing didn’t come directly after 8-Ball (?) or Tuco, but it was far beyond anything he’d personally done to that point.
Yeah, I don’t quite understand the “I don’t care what she said!” mentality. If somebody says they want to shoot up a place, maybe they’re shit talking. If they buy a gun, that’s definitely beyond shit talking and you better take them fucking seriously. She’s said she wanted to burn cities to the ground, and she had the means to do so. It would be idiotic not to take her seriously, which is why they talked her down in the first place. Sure, you can make a “Good Dany/Bad Dany” list, but there is no reason to believe she * wouldn’t* have burned the cities to the ground if everyone around her was a yes-man.
People criticized Trump because of the “Fire and Fury” comments, but he did that publicly and could be construed as empty threats designed to intimidate a weaker power. Most of the comments Dany has made were behind closed doors to people she liked. Much less reason to be lying.
I haven’t re-watched that but my impression from reading stuffs was that he was completely open and unabashed about what he had done. He had “plead guilty”, so to speak. Trials determine guilt, so there’s no need for one when the guy cops to it. Only sentencing remains.
…I guess I’m still in “defend Dany” mode, still looking for circumstances that clearly tilt in her favor. Still defending my previous impression of her.
But given the fact that she’s genuinely on record having torched a guy who didn’t do anything, I need to start re-evaluating all these other things. In fact, I’m just now beginning to wonder if one of the reasons that I found all that Meereen stuff so tedious was that Dany was acting in ways that didn’t “fit” how I saw the character, so I kind of blew off the whole plot line rather than taking the effort to change my impressions of her. I mean, I don’t want to be too hard on myself. That stuff was still suuuuuuper boring. But it was trying to convey nuances about the character that I didn’t pick up on. It’ll be worth paying more attention to all that if I eventually re-watch the whole thing from the beginning.
I will say that Mereen was on par with Dorne in terms of the most boring parts of the show for me, so you’re not alone there.
Ha!
You know what, that actually seems fair to me. Call me crazy, but this makes me feel better about how sometimes dragonbreath just burns and sometimes it appears to hit with the force of a literal cannonball.
Clearly there’s a knob on the dragon’s back with settings for “Execute by frying/Melt Stone/Blow Up Stone” settings. “Dracarys” is just the start button. 
I think you can still have portions of your previous impression of her. I mean, she did free tens of thousands of slaves. She did put her ambitions on pause to help the North. Those are noble things. There is a a pretty large caveat to that though, which I am very grateful for. Dany being pure white and her arc being from the lonely outcast to the destined ruler of the seven kingdoms is a played out and boring story.
Yeah, another thing I remember is Daario or Tyrion or somebody telling her “You know, Meereen is going to shit, maybe you should stick around here and learn how to rule a little better before invading Westeros?” And she seemed okay with that idea until the fighting pits/dragon ride/Dothraki kidnapping situation, and then she came back and basically said “screw that, let’s nuke these slavers, leave a bloodthirsty mercenary in charge of the whole region, and high tail it to the pointy chair! It’s mah destiny!!!”.
So even then you could see that the “right thing” took a back seat to her ambition, especially right after she underwent some personal trauma which roused her anger.
I appreciate you putting into words what I hadn’t quite been able to express, both on the relative unimportance of stuff like time consistency, and the value in ambiguity. If the discussion of a character’s actions is “why the hell did she do that? That makes no sense,” then that’s a flaw. But when the discussion is “was the primary reason for her actions A, B, or C,” and there is disagreement among viewers, then that is a major plus for me. Holder a viewer by the hand and leading them to the one correct interpretation is much easier than giving them some reasonable conflicting interpretations and letting them decide on their own. I find the latter more enjoyable and I appreciate writers who can do that well.
Right. The lack of consistency last season and this one in how long it takes for things to happen is admittedly poor. It’s not just not showing the passing of time, it’s that time passes at different rates for different characters. This is definitely a flaw.
But I can willingly ignore it because the alternative is worse. When story threads are going in different directions, it’s easy to maintain consistency between them. When everything needs to be concluded and all the threads need to converge at the same place and time, this becomes difficult to impossible. It’s not a matter of the writers caring less now than previously; it’s a completely different challenge.
For the sake of moving the story toward the conclusion, I’m glad they sacrificed that consistency for the sake of the characters and impactful scenes. (And if it really bothers you that there weren’t trees near the gate of King’s Landing, or that Cersei didn’t have a bigger stomach, just tell yourself a wizard did it.)
Firstly, wow, overreact much? My sentence is not particularly rude about anyone, all writers necessarily overlook lots of things, you can’t think of everything.
Secondly the people I have argued against have speculated on what the writers were doing and thinking. Only one side of this particular issue is allowed to do that?
I’ve rewatched the scene recently, and yes, he didn’t hide nor deny what he had done. He rather flaunted it, in fact.
Maybe it’s an overreaction. I don’t think it is; I think it’s worth calling out silly, meanspirited, and dumb arguments that aren’t about the show. YMMV. If I, or anyone, is trying to justify the artistic decisions within the show by talking about how hardworking and goodhearted the show creators are, feel free to call that out as well.
The first thing I thought when they started ringing was WAAAAY back varyis mad a comment about hating the bells.
The bells ring for horror
Is Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s criticism / insultregarding the writers relevant?
Who are we allowed to insult while being smart and relevant?
Please answer in list form.
What I’ve been wondering is – what happened to winter? Was the coming “Long Night” just a function of the Night King, or is there still going to be a twenty year winter that starves virtually everyone?
Night King died a couple of episodes ago and it’s still winter. It may not be a twenty year winter, but one of my early hypotheses – that this multi-year season stuff was magical/caused by the White Walkers, and would go back to normal four-per-year seasons after they were defeated – doesn’t seem to have panned out.
He’s not insulting them. He’s saying that after pestering them about his character, they finally had to explain to him that they weren’t looking to workshop the script with the actors. More specifically, not with him.
Not watching a video, not sure who that dude is, and anyway you mispronounced his first name. [edit: googled, it’s the actor who played Jaime, still not especially interested in watching a Reddit video, nor do I especially give a wet fart about anyone’s insults of the show’s creators.]
No thanks.