It does, but there's a huge storytelling problem here that I'm not sure how they could have solved - but I'm almost sure they didn't even see the problem. A lot of people pointed out ways they could have had Dany's actions make more sense (one of my favourites: Don't kill the other dragon in the previous episode - have Dany attack KL with two dragons, and then have one of them get killed by a lone sniper just after the city surrenders, so that Dany's actions come from a place of shock and grief shared by the audience). But the problem with that is, they don't WANT the audience to be on Dany's side; we're supposed to suddenly think she's nothing but a dangerous dictator who Must Be Stopped At All Cost. After EIGHT SEASONS of building her up as a protagonist. They can't (or don't think they can) afford to have the story be ambiguous here; Jon must be justified. (You can't sell Buffy killing Angel if Acathla never actually opens up.)
I think the main storytelling choice they could have made would be to just write up the impasse. The thing is, the show used to be able to do this, at least to a degree: we can root for both Tyrion and Davos at Blackwater. But I guess the problem is that we weren't really expected to root for Stannis or Tywin (or Joffrey, heaven forbid). (It was cute to have Davos correct someone's grammar.) Now that the people we are supposed to root for are the ones calling the shots, we can't rely on "that are loyal to their superiors" anymore as an explanation.
The Acathla comparison also helps maybe because their choice of way in which Dany dies forces them to make her SO BAD. I mean, Jon stabs her after what is in form if not content basically a state of the union address, when she has offered no specific plan for what her next proximate goal is. So she has to be a danger to an *unspecified number of people* where it's clear she can't be talked out of *future evil plans*. You have to make her not just dangerous but completely unhinged and evil and give her an unambiguously wrong death count in order to sell it. By contrast, have Jon kill her mid battle (say, put him and Dany both on Drogon's back, for instance, and have him realize the only way to stop the carnage is to stab Drogon in some previously established weak spot and bring them all down) and it doesn't matter whether Dany could later be calmed down, it's only about the present threat.
OH yeah. And I mean, they could have sold this if the show had allowed for ambiguity, for the surviving characters possibly being wrong in their reading of the story. But under D&D, it just doesn't. That could have saved this ending; if we'd just had some clue that just maybe Jon wildly misread Dany's goals and killed her over nothing, that Tyrion's idea of Bran The Broken might really be as dumb as it looks, that Brienne's image of Jaime is partly her own need to see him redeemed rather than him actually being redeemed... But that would require them to have actual character beats as opposed to just a story that takes us from A to B to Z.
Right. We've already established in the series that Tyrion has poor judgment after being locked up for weeks, after all. But yes there's curiously little ambiguity in any of this. That Sansa had just the right amount of trauma to be a good ruler and only execute the crummiest of her advisers is taken as read. Have we seen any evidence that Bran can lead more than at most his tiny cadre, or that he's capable of empathizing enough with humans to be able to make good decisions for them? Bronn being good at conning people gives him the correct skill set for high finance? (The last one is meant to be a joke but still.) Cersei makes, as far as I can tell, no decisions in this entire season (even when to screw Euron is mostly pressed by him), and her entire character is flattened to "evil but she does love her children, and Jaime," whereas there was a time when the show would find ways to wring sympathy out of her situation while having her make horrific choices. Sam and Gilly end up in a traditional family unit (?!). Bran says "You're a good man, Theon," and we know it has to be true because it's the three eyed raven talking. I was moved by the last one, and I want it to be true that Bran was not giving an objective judgment but recognized what Theon needed at that moment and decided to be kind (Theon wants to be a good man, now, even if he didn't want that in the past), but there's so little indication of Bran being other than a voice of dispassionate truth that it feels like that's that.
I watched a special feature today and basically it seems GRRM told D&D that Bran was going to be the king but that the details weren't worked out, but that D&D came up with Jon stabbing Dany as their climax. And that does maybe make sense to me. Again, GRRM's writing has problems, but I think he's got a handle on the genre anyway, of what level of fantasy realpolitik we're talking about: having Jon stab Dany in the throne room and this ending bloodshed rather than just creating another cycle of it could *maybe* work, but mostly feels like a misunderstanding of what world this was depicted as.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2019-12-03 06:38 am (UTC)It does, but there's a huge storytelling problem here that I'm not sure how they could have solved - but I'm almost sure they didn't even see the problem. A lot of people pointed out ways they could have had Dany's actions make more sense (one of my favourites: Don't kill the other dragon in the previous episode - have Dany attack KL with two dragons, and then have one of them get killed by a lone sniper just after the city surrenders, so that Dany's actions come from a place of shock and grief shared by the audience). But the problem with that is, they don't WANT the audience to be on Dany's side; we're supposed to suddenly think she's nothing but a dangerous dictator who Must Be Stopped At All Cost. After EIGHT SEASONS of building her up as a protagonist. They can't (or don't think they can) afford to have the story be ambiguous here; Jon must be justified. (You can't sell Buffy killing Angel if Acathla never actually opens up.)
I think the main storytelling choice they could have made would be to just write up the impasse. The thing is, the show used to be able to do this, at least to a degree: we can root for both Tyrion and Davos at Blackwater. But I guess the problem is that we weren't really expected to root for Stannis or Tywin (or Joffrey, heaven forbid). (It was cute to have Davos correct someone's grammar.) Now that the people we are supposed to root for are the ones calling the shots, we can't rely on "that are loyal to their superiors" anymore as an explanation.
The Acathla comparison also helps maybe because their choice of way in which Dany dies forces them to make her SO BAD. I mean, Jon stabs her after what is in form if not content basically a state of the union address, when she has offered no specific plan for what her next proximate goal is. So she has to be a danger to an *unspecified number of people* where it's clear she can't be talked out of *future evil plans*. You have to make her not just dangerous but completely unhinged and evil and give her an unambiguously wrong death count in order to sell it. By contrast, have Jon kill her mid battle (say, put him and Dany both on Drogon's back, for instance, and have him realize the only way to stop the carnage is to stab Drogon in some previously established weak spot and bring them all down) and it doesn't matter whether Dany could later be calmed down, it's only about the present threat.
OH yeah. And I mean, they could have sold this if the show had allowed for ambiguity, for the surviving characters possibly being wrong in their reading of the story. But under D&D, it just doesn't. That could have saved this ending; if we'd just had some clue that just maybe Jon wildly misread Dany's goals and killed her over nothing, that Tyrion's idea of Bran The Broken might really be as dumb as it looks, that Brienne's image of Jaime is partly her own need to see him redeemed rather than him actually being redeemed... But that would require them to have actual character beats as opposed to just a story that takes us from A to B to Z.
Right. We've already established in the series that Tyrion has poor judgment after being locked up for weeks, after all. But yes there's curiously little ambiguity in any of this. That Sansa had just the right amount of trauma to be a good ruler and only execute the crummiest of her advisers is taken as read. Have we seen any evidence that Bran can lead more than at most his tiny cadre, or that he's capable of empathizing enough with humans to be able to make good decisions for them? Bronn being good at conning people gives him the correct skill set for high finance? (The last one is meant to be a joke but still.) Cersei makes, as far as I can tell, no decisions in this entire season (even when to screw Euron is mostly pressed by him), and her entire character is flattened to "evil but she does love her children, and Jaime," whereas there was a time when the show would find ways to wring sympathy out of her situation while having her make horrific choices. Sam and Gilly end up in a traditional family unit (?!). Bran says "You're a good man, Theon," and we know it has to be true because it's the three eyed raven talking. I was moved by the last one, and I want it to be true that Bran was not giving an objective judgment but recognized what Theon needed at that moment and decided to be kind (Theon wants to be a good man, now, even if he didn't want that in the past), but there's so little indication of Bran being other than a voice of dispassionate truth that it feels like that's that.
I watched a special feature today and basically it seems GRRM told D&D that Bran was going to be the king but that the details weren't worked out, but that D&D came up with Jon stabbing Dany as their climax. And that does maybe make sense to me. Again, GRRM's writing has problems, but I think he's got a handle on the genre anyway, of what level of fantasy realpolitik we're talking about: having Jon stab Dany in the throne room and this ending bloodshed rather than just creating another cycle of it could *maybe* work, but mostly feels like a misunderstanding of what world this was depicted as.