Plus the Jon Snow of the show was a fucking imbecile the last few seasons. For somebody who is supposedly a leader and military commander, he showed less knowledge of strategy and tactics than your average brain-dead Girl Scout. That generally goes for every leader in the last couple of seasons. Dany never should have lost a dragon to any cause. Again, your run of the mill 1st grader could have shown her better tactics.
This is what pissed me off more than anything. The show-runners assumed that because they were terminally stupid, everybody on the show and in the audience must be stupid as well. We aren’t, and they must DIE!!!
What was even worse is what they did with Tyrion, at least Jon was never shown to be very smart. Tyrion just turned into a friggin moron after being the smartest person around.
Since we seem to be pitching “scenes I would have made” scenarios I would have like to seen a few more unexpected deaths of main characters. I would have liked for Arya to go see Hotpie for what seems to be the last time and have her get unexpectedly killed by him. The shock of a serious faced Hotpie with a weapon in his hand on blood on his face only to have him remove his face revealing the Waif underneath who tracked down her prey in Westeros.
Dany shows up to Westeros with 3 dragons, is convinced by her “wise” advisors not to head directly to King’s Landing to avoid turning the city into a smoking hole in the ground.
Instead they hatch an idiotic plan to sneak across the wall to kidnap an ice-zombie, and bring it back to the ever reliable Cersei Lannister to somehow convince her to join forces to save Westeros from the Night-King.
The heroes manage to lose one dragon in the process (resurrected by the Night king, no less) and barely escape with their lives. The Night king, previously hampered by the Wall, destroys it with his new dragon.
Much like Charlie brown and the football, Cersei predictably betrays the alliance and sends no troops to help against the Night King.
Despite going from a 3-0 dragon count to 2-1, and the destruction of the Wall, the heroes manage to completely defeat the Night King in a single day, proving Cersei was correct all along.
The heroes proceed to lose another dragon and their fleet because “they kinda forgot about Euron Greyjoy”
With a single remaining dragon, Dany manages to wipe out Euron’s fleet, the castle defenses (vastly upgraded since season 7), and the central palace leadership with surgical strikes that leave almost no civilian casualties (before she goes crazy due to plot reasons, likely from all the incompetence from all the “wise” advisors around her). The army Dany brought along is completely unnecessary to this task.
So had Dany just done exactly what she proposed to do in the beginning and flew directly to the Red Keep with *three *dragons - Cersei would be dead in 10 minutes, the rest of King’s landing would have been almost completely unscathed, the people would have rallied around her, and they could have gone on to fight the Night King in a cakewalk.
Would you say that your expectations were subverted, YamatoTwinkie?
Varys, Littlefinger, Roose Bolton, Doran Martell: a whole lot of characters who were previously written to be extremely bright and cunning, end up dying in fairly stupid ways the last few seasons. At least they only lobotomized Tyrion…
I think the showrunners ran into the fact that the characters were a shitload smarter than they were. Hard to write intelligent, sneaky and above all experienced characters when you yourself have the brains and abilities of a stunned bivalve.
My problems were with the huge plot lines that were never touched or abruptly ended:
-The Ice King - this has been the big bad the entire series and it’s over in one night. Why did he want to kill Bran? What was the real threat to the South that necessitated building the frickin’ Wall? It just didn’t make sense.
-Bran - what was his point to the entire series? He’s learned things. He’s the One-eyed Raven. What does that even mean?
-Cersei/Jaime - one night he’s found happiness, the next night he’s off to hold his sister while they die. What?!
-Varys - one episode he and Tyrion are talking about how nice it would be to have a good king and a good queen. Turn around and Varys has been plotting to kill her.
-Jon & Dany - I just have no words. It was bad.
-Dany - prophesied to rule the world? Or is it Jon? What about the child? Wasn’t there supposed to be a child?
-Jon - prophesied to rule the world? Brought back from death to do great things? And?
The threat itself made sense. The dead were created by the creatures that lived under the hill to protect themselves from humans but they went rogue.
I don’t know why the night king wanted with Bran, but what is easy - Death is forgetting and being forgotten and he wanted to visit symbolic as well as actual death upon the world. It’s possible that while he was originally “programmed” to only want actual death, as an intelligent creature he interpreted it more broadly. But considering Bran was a powerful being that the Night King knew about, it’s also possible he was just on his radar screen in lieu of knowing about other powerful beings.
Come to think of it it does seem like his story line abruptly ended. What he is seems clear - he’s the memory of the world - but it doesn’t seem like they did much with it.
He was drunk?
I can’t really defend that. It was even worse the first time I saw it - when they were explaining how they were related, interleaved with shots of them becoming closer, I interpreted it as them getting together partly because they were related and that was what their house did.
The impromptu council rejected the idea of no king, so someone had to. I think that the series ends with a lot of things open, much better than most other movies and series do. It neither leaves us in the middle of unresolved situations nor gives the impression of a static ongoing world forever. So, unlike the other poster who opined that there would immediately be a revolt against him, a revolt in the brewing is not out of the question. We don’t get to see what happens immediately after the series ends. His reign could be short-lived.
Misdirection. I will posit that if you’re paying close attention, the real big bad through the series was Dany all along. Just MHO. And it worked out that way in-universe, too. Everyone was SO worried about the threat of the Night King and the white walkers, they weren’t paying attention to the fact that the chick was craycray.
