Of course it is, you can’t just gloss over doing stupid things with “it’s his moral code”, they are still stupid. And it’s not just his honesty, when Dany rightfully points out that he fucked up he still doesn’t get it and tries to downplay Sansa’s actions. She told Tyrion because she trusts him? come on, that is either dishonest or stupid.
I think that statement also calls back to that season-opening scene in season 4(?) when she tried to pet one of the adolescent dragons while it was eating and it just about tore her head off.
Totally agreed, but I still maintain that he failed Ned, his ultimate role model. Ned kept that secret for a reason, dummy!
Are there special features? Any commentary tracks?
I love shows on disc if they have special features, like (for example) Firefly. But I’ve been increasingly finding that streaming shows put almost no effort into discs of their shows. The best example is an early one: Orange Is the New Black. The first couple seasons had tons of special features, including commentary tracks with sometimes the entire cast. Later seasons have almost none of that. And Stranger Things discs come with no special features at all; it’s literally just the shows and nothing else.
I’m not sure if HBO has adopted that bare-bones model yet. I think the purpose of it is to drive people to pay for streaming, and I know HBO would love people to sign up for HBO Go.
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it squares with his speech to Theon about being a Stark. If he’s sure that Theon is a Stark because he was raised at Winterfell, then he should be sure he himself is a Stark since he was raised there as well. There’s more to being a brother than just having the same biological parents. Heck, he considers the Night’s Watch his brothers. It just really irritates me that he sees letting Arya call him brother as dishonest just because they don’t have the same biological father. But, I concede that “real” family only being genetic is a kind of a trigger issue for me, so I’m probably overreacting to this a bit.
Ned placed the promise he made to his sister above his duty to be honest. Also, possibly, the duty to protect his nephew versus his duty to be honest.
Jon made no such promise. He was ordered by his queen to keep the secret, but he didn’t accept the order. Now you can argue that this is inconsistent with his character, but I don’t think so. I can’t recall an instance where Jon treated following an order as being more important than following his own moral code.
I don’t find any inconsistency in Jon telling his family about his origin. It was a bad move. It was frustrating. But it derived from genuinely established character, and not a plot hole or a writing conceit.
Also, I think Jon could still consider himself to be the brother of Sansa/Arya/Bran in a philosophical sense but also in the moment basically be bothered that his siblings don’t believe the correct thing because he has information that they don’t. It would eat at him that he would let them believe something false that he had the ability to correct. So I buy his internal struggle. Sure, he could’ve and should’ve kept his trap shut, but I’m not seeing an inconsistency. Jon is just very strongly principled, even if you disagree with his principles.
Yup, Ned was so honorable that he sacrificed his own honor to keep his promise.
Right, that too - he had to live with the shame of having a bastard son and cheating on his wife. Not a big deal to most of the characters we’ve seen, but that would’ve been incredibly difficult to someone who was as concerned about being as honest and honorable as Ned did. He spent his whole life basically living like the ultimate boyscout and to have to have that shame - which people assumed to be a failure on his part and a failing to adhere to his moral code - must’ve ate him up inside. But he made a promise to his sister and he stuck by it, whatever the consequences. It was actually a pretty significant sacrifice for Ned.
I also think there is the notion that honor means a bit more in the North. The phrase “The North Remembers” and the Stark words “Winter is Coming” alludes to a society that depends on honor and trust more because of the knowledge they need to trust each other to survive the frozen wastes of the North. You have to trust people to survive years of winter.
Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk
It’s his prerogative to grant Theon the status of brother because he has all the relevant information. Theon isn’t hiding his parentage. Jon feels he cannot accept the other Stark children’s acceptance of him unless they do so with full knowledge. Acceptance is true acceptance only if it is done with full knowledge of the facts. Like a contract. Or consent in terms of sex.
So Jon is self-consistent in that point. What he doesn’t recognize is what Ned recognized—sometimes there are considerations that trump full honesty.
Except that last time…
Ned wasn’t prioritizing honesty; he was prioritizing saving the innocent from being murdered. Which is exactly the calculation that Jon failed to make.
He thought he had the situation covered. His mistake wasn’t in his wish to give Cersei a chance to flee to save the children, but rather thinking that he could trust Littlefinger.
And pretty much everyone made the mistake of trusting Littlefinger at one point or another. Littlefinger used his ability to gain others’ confidence to completely tear down all of society’s institutions.
Ned also thought that Cersei was out of options. He underestimated her.
And also Jon knew this as soon as he realized who he actually was. And part of the calculation wasn’t that he thought his family deserved to know who he was, but also they deserved to know the kind of man their father was. And that Ned’s greatest shame wasn’t actually a shame at all.
That is actually a really great point. And I’m 90% sure the writers hadn’t even considered that, because if they had, they could’ve had Jon say that, and it would’ve made his motivation more explained/plausible.
Yeah, I find that compelling.
I’ve never said that she was unambiguously evil. She wasn’t. She was a complex character who no doubt wanted to do good, and did do a lot of good, but she also wanted to rule, and while in Essos her instincts to do good aligned with her overarching desire to rule, so she was a ‘benevolent queen’. But even then there were signs that something darker was under the surface.
She didn’t have to free the Unsullied, but may have intuited that if she freed them they would join her voluntarily, and that’s a much more powerful bond. If freeing them had been part of a choice that would require her to give up her quest for the throne, do you think she still would have done it?
Was she? Not in the show she didn’t. She created an army that fought for her out of love instead of fear or obligation. That’s a much stronger army.
Slaves make lousy soldiers. Make the people love you, and you can raise volunteers by the hundreds of thousands. Whether she was thinking about these things or not, the fact is that freeing the slaves was not in conflict with her ultimate goal of retaking Westeros. And I’m sure she honestly felt like it was the right thing to do.
The story of Daenerys is almost a cliche when it comes to dictators. Most dictators do not rise through fear - they rise because they are generally loved by the people - at first. Castro was a revolutionary for the people who was going to get rid of the corruption, the mob influence, American corporations, and restore glory to Cuba. I’m sure he believed it. I doubt he started out wanting to brutalize people and enslave them. But once you have power you have to make decisions, and those decisions have unintended consequences. Things start falling apart. The people stop loving you, and start opposing you. That’s when you decide that they are stupid and don’t understand what you are trying to do for them, so a crackdown on the ‘malcontents’ is necessary for the good of everyone.
You can see the same dynamic in Venezuela. Chavez started off on a high - doing things the people loved. He gave them free stuff. He nationalized industry and gave the proceeds to the ‘people’. His generosity was well known, and he was re-elected and all the rest.
Then Maduro came to power, promising to be another Chavez. But by this time the economy was reeling. Maduro tried giving more gifts to the people, but the money was running out. Once the people began to fight back against him, the generosity went away and the police state showed up.
This is the inevitable logic of tyranny. Even high-minded tyrants get broken down by reality, and being tyrants they switch from love to fear in a heartbeat.
I don’t know how you got the idea that I don’t believe there was a kernel of good in her. I said this a few pages ago:
My opinion is not that Daeneris was an evil person - but rather that her story is a complex but common one about a person who starts out with a good heart but an overriding ambition and will to power. At the beginning, she honestly believes that she is the ‘breaker of chains’, and fully embraces her role as a good ruler who frees people from bondage.
It wasn’t until she ran up against a people who didn’t need freeing and who rejected her right to rule them that the overarching ambition overcame her good nature. And the show gave us plenty of examples through all 8 seasons of times when Daenerys’ impulse was to burn cities who opposed her, or murder people when she was frustrated, scared, or simply giving in to what is probably a deep impulse in the mind of a Targaryan - if things are going poorly, you can always start burning.
This is a fair criticism of my saying that they had pulled the same trick with the Tarleys, because as you say Dickon wasn’t like that, and in fact the show went out of its way to give him a few humanizing moments just before the battle. So maybe that was the writer’s strategy - to show that Daenerys was not just about burning the worst people, but anyone who wouldn’t bend the knee. But since Dickon’s treatment does contradict what I said, you are right.
Imagine how the audience would have felt about Daenerys if she had gone to the Khals, and instead of insults and death threats they had said to her, “Khaleesi, Khal Drogo was a great man, and you are clearly still deeply affected by his loss. We will do what we can to help you, but you must follow our customs and live with the other ex-Khaleesis whose Khals have died. But fear not - your status is respected, and you are loved by our people and will make a great addition to Vaes Dothrak.” And then she burned them all to death anyway. Because she was totally planning to do that long before she entered that place. Her accomplices were waiting to lock them all in.
And when those three emissaries came to see her on the hilltop, imagine if instead of insulting her like mad (which would be stupid for any emissary to do), they had said, “I’m sorry, Khaleesi, but we cannot agree to your terms. We hope for a peaceful solution, but our masters may opt for war. We feel terrible about this, but that’s the way it is.” And then Greyworm walked up and slit the throats of two of them as a message. That would have looked pretty awful. But instead, they had them spit insults at her, and then when told what one would be sacrificed, they also had to be dicks and pick out the lowly trader, thus making it clear that they were rich assholes sacrificing the poor. So we cheered when they died. But they were unarmed, they were there as a negotiated parlay, and she murdered them.
But they surrendered, just like the city did. She had them in her full control, which meant she could just as easily had said, “Take them away and put them in a cell. Hopefully they will change their minds once they seee how benevolent I am. Anyone else who doesn’t accept my rule, step forward and you can join them in prison.”
A humane ruler would have done that. But Daeneris (possibly correctly) realized that they would be a source of insurrection, and by letting them off easily it would be harder to get the rest to bend the knee. So she made the cold decision to burn them in front of everyone else. And it worked - the rest of them got into line very quickly. But it’s the exact same kind of logic that was used to justify her burning of King’s Landing. There’s a time for love, and there’s a time for burning people to make a point. Targaryans have been established as people for whom the burning comes easily.
“The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones” by Zeynep Tufekci
A rather long but very interesting opinion piece about storytelling choices.
The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones - Scientific American Blog Network
So I guess Bronn’s story-line was wrapped up with his scene with Tyrion and Jamie? I guess he’ll never get his castle now.
Maybe Dany will give him one if he takes out Jon and Sansa for her.
Unless the ending is terribly bloody. In that case, he’ll be able to take his pick.