I was spoiled about the existence of the Red Wedding but didn’t know when or who it would happen to. The biggest thing I wish I wasn’t spoiled about was when I heard GRRM talk on NPR about how he considered himself a “gardener” like Tolkien, who develops a whole world and then lets things happen naturally. The danger with those authors is that they ironically sometimes railroad events to showcase something that is so cool they have to show it. Once I heard he was a “gardener”, every time the parties in GoT travelled around and found something new I couldn’t shake myself of the suspicion that it was something George just had to show off, the primary culprit being Valyria and the Stonemen. (There are plenty of examples in Tolkien as well, but I read them and accepted them before I learned to be cynical about it.)
More than hints; as I said in a thread from last summer, Dany has been clearly been a violence-loving autocrat who believes she is ordained to rule from the beginning. She throws on some ‘good ruler’ trappings, but ultimately she’s from an incestuous family who believe and raise their children to believe that it is their right to rule because of their blood, in part because their blood lets them control dragons, and that whatever violence they commit in the path to leadership is justified because they are the right rulers. She occasionally recoils from some brutal acts (especially things like the wanton rape Dothraki enjoy), but doesn’t shy from using extreme violence to achieve her goals. She doesn’t believe that anything justifies failure to obey a ‘rightful’ ruler, she believes the Mad King should not have been deposed and threatens to kill Jamie for his role in ending that reign. And she doesn’t even have a rightful claim to the throne anymore, as Jon is actually the next in line.
And there have been signs of this since the start. S2E4 “When my dragons are grown … we will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground.” S2E6 “I will take what is mine with fire and blood.” At the end of S2, she has a vision where the Iron Throne is covered in ash and she steps towards it but never touches it. S3 E4 she executes over 100 nobles and doesn’t care that some were innocent. In season five she executes nobles in Mereen to take power, then in season six she kills all of the Dothraki leadership and in S6E6 takes over the horde with "Will you kill my enemies in their iron suits and tear down their stone houses?” In Season 7 she keeps being talked out of burning King’s Landing to the ground by Tyrion, eventually leading to the plan to bring down a wight to get Cersei to help fight the White Walkers. Which fails, leading her to doubt all of the advisors telling her not to do what she’s wanted to do ever since S2E4.
She is not just ‘ambitious’ or ‘harsh’, it has been established repeatedly that she believes she has the absolute right to rule with fire and blood. And that she sincerely believes even if she started killing people arbitrarily like the Mad King her underlings should remain be loyal to her, and that the Mad King was wronged by what happened, and that she should take revenge on his behalf. Dany was never a good, kind person, she’s always been a violent tyrant seeking to kill anyone who would threaten her rule. I think that if she didn’t end up turning into ‘bad Dany’, the show runners would actually be running deeply contrary to her personality - once the north decided that they were no longer going to submit to the Iron Throne, she was either going to force them to submit or completely alter what has been shown as core beliefs that have motivated her through seven seasons of incredible struggles.
I think the criticism of Dany’s “sudden” turn are totally misplaced. She’s a tyrant and always been a tyrant. It’s just that she had been fighting people even worse than her, so she did good when she beat them, freeing the slaves, etc. So because she was the lesser of two evils, she looked like the good guy, until she didn’t. And during the last season, she said over and over again that she’d rule by love or by fear, but she’d rule. And she tried, repeatedly, to rule by love and kept failing at it, leaving her remaining option…
Her “turn” was well established from the very beginning, and I think people simply weren’t paying enough attention or they sympathized with her too much as the good guy if they think the “turn” was unjustified. That was actually the best part of the later seasons of the show, and it’s clear that it was one of the inverted/subverted fantasy tropes of the whole story.
The real disappointment is the resolution of white walkers, which couldn’t have been more uninteresting, and all the stuff that seemed like it was being set up to be something great and just went nowhere.
What I am unconvinced of is the turn that she would burn all of King’s Landing to the ground after it has supposedly surrendered (although, the whole “if they ring the bells, that means they’ve surrendered” line was always a bit contrived), including women and children fleeing in the streets, and also her own soldiers.
Sure, she smiled a bit when the guy who abused her, sold her as a slave to a mass-murdering rapist, and then threatened her and her unborn child got what he had coming to him. But that in and of itself hardly strikes me as deviant. For several seasons, we do see her prepared to inflict great cruelty on those who resist her, yes, but we also see her struggle with the question of how to rule justly. Not only towards those she considers herself to have “liberated,” but to their former masters who have “bent the knee” as well. We spend years watching her develop and take advice on how to rule. Rather than take an episode or two to show us previously submitted Westerosi populations subvert her rule and so give her cause to question their “suitability” as subjects in general, we see her basically suffer a psychotic episode or some other sort of mental breakdown because her bestie got her head cut off. So which is it (showrunners)? This was “totally setup,” or she snapped after the loss of her friend? Because I don’t think there’s nearly enough for the former, and the latter just strikes me as lazy writing, particularly given how contrived the scenario was in which her friend was captured. Let’s not forget, that only happened because she just sort of “forgot about” the iron fleet, and was so absorbed in the ecstasy of flying that they saw her and managed to get off several well-aimed shots before she saw them.
Right.
Most of the negative comments I saw about Dany’s turn (and my own criticism) were about the way it was done. Most people can appreciate that there was foreshadowing, but that doesn’t excuse strange character decisions and inconsistency.
It didn’t seem very rational or natural from the exact point Dany was at: for example, why wouldn’t she just head straight to the red keep? I don’t see what’s motivating her to go a genocidin’
It didn’t help that you had other features like Rhaegal getting trivially killed from a couple km away, then Dany barely braking a sweat to whack a whole city (prepared to defend against Drogon) on Drogon. It’s possible to think of fanwanks but it certainly wasn’t enjoyable for me to watch, because it seems that everything we knew about the dragons was thrown away once, then again, then we had to watch an overlong “Cool dragonfire! Explosions!” sequence rather than something that looks like a real situation playing out.
I never thought dragonfire exploding things was realistic in the first place. However, I did like the realistic touch of some of the buildings exploding with touched-off wildfire that they had been keeping.
Danaerys said:S2E4 “When my dragons are grown … we will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground.” S2E6 “I will take what is mine with fire and blood.” S6E6 "Will you kill my enemies in their iron suits and tear down their stone houses?” (to her Dothraki) Kibnvara, the prophet said in S6E5 “The dragons will purify nonbelievers by the thousands, burning their sins and flesh away.”
While season 8 was clumsy, I’m amazed that someone would surprised that she would ‘go a genocidin’’ when she has stated repeatedly that she wants to go genocidin’, is prophecied to go genocidin’, and has to get talked out of genocidin’ throughout the previous season. I’m not sure how much more clearly a writer can communicate that a character wants to burn cities down than having them clearly state it as a goal, then have someone else say ‘yeah, she’s going to burn people by the thousands’.
She was a main character undergoing a critical turn. Whatever we got in terms of setup, it simply wasn’t enough. That’s an opinion, I’ll grant you.
If 8 seasons of set up wasn’t enough, I don’t know what would be.
Foreshadowing is not the same thing as actually writing a coherent story, that’s what it comes down to. You can “hint” all you want about something that might happen but you still have to write it in a realistic way. We got a highlight reel of Dany’s heel turn, not a real story.
So only one quote, back in series 2, that both implies killing non-combatants and is said by Dany.
Again, I’m not at all surprised she attacked king’s landing, killing soldiers by the hundreds. But the part about her looking at the red keep with anger but figuring “Hey, we’ve got time; I want to go street by street killing civilians first” was not justified at all by the foreshadowing.
Let me also reiterate what I said upthread – I have no problem with Dany being full-on evil in the end, and goin genocidin; my problem is in the execution. A little change like, say, having Rhaegal die during the attack would have made it more believable that she would utterly lose her cool (and would have made the sequence more enjoyable because we could still feel Drogon was under some degree of threat).
Martin says books will have a different ending. Assuming he actually writes them and releases them.
George R.R. Martin: ‘Thrones’ Books Not Ending Like HBO Series | IndieWire
I guess you thought she was kidding when she explicitly said that she didn’t consider the people of KL to be civilians or non-combatants. She directly said that every person in KL was a hostile enemy because the act of staying in KL was supporting Cersei.
This was not a hint in season 2; this is something she declared openly in season 8.
And yet if she had said it in season 2, it would be a lot more convincing than the last minute “oh damn, we’ve only got one episode to go from her fighting alongside Jon and the Westerosi and coming as a liberator, to a bloodthirsty tyrant. We’d better throw in some lines to help set that up.”
There should have been a continuum. Instead, what we got was thrown off a cliff with some lines shouted at us on the way down about how we should have seen this coming because of that one time our traveling companion stubbed a toe and said “Ouch, that hurt! I wish I could just throw myself off a cliff and put myself out of my misery already.”
Was she not a bloodthirsty tyrant when crucifying the entire ruling class in whatever slave town that was? How about when she fed one of them at random to her dragons just to make a point?
Nope, nope, there was no setup at all, la la la I can’t hear you!
She was tyrannical the entire time. She had redeeming qualities - she wanted to free slaves, she didn’t want the Dothraki to rape. She was fighting against people who did horrible things, and that’s usually something heroes in stories do, so it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking she’s a hero. The story is very much set up in such a way that she’s a hero (just like Eddard Stark’s story is set up so that he’s the hero that saves the kingdom). But in both cases it’s a subversion of the fantasy trope.
But she was always convinced that she was meant to rule, and she had no problem killing anyone who got in her way of that, and that is pretty much the definition of tyranical.
It’s easy to root for her when she’s fighting slavers. But she’d have been killing anyone that got in her way. Freeing the slaves and doing what good she did was always secondary to her coming into power and ruling.
could very well be the upset fans are making Martin change the ending. That way he can ride in on his white horse and save the day.
I doubt it, book Cersei is very clearly not being set up as the last big bad.
The crappy writing and plotting in the last two seasons can’t be fan-wanked away. The showrunners were very adept at adapting Martin’s work. Left on their own, they just didn’t measure up. The end.
Yeah, pretty much. I think it shows even more clearly when it comes to Varys. He goes from being one of Daenerys’ strongest supporters to plotting to murder her in pretty much five minutes, just because someone else happened to come along. Now, I can well believe he also betrays her in the books, but I would certainly hope Martin provides a better background for it, and a much better method. Seriously, his grand plan was to try to persuade the one person in Westeros who was 100% dependent on Daenerys’ support against the Night’s King to rebel against her, and he did so in full public view.