GoT finale

[beer_good_foamy]

Very quick and disordered thoughts for now, will probably have more to say in a few days.

JON: It doesn't feel right.

The eerie silence as Tyrion walks through the city. Tyrion digging out his dead family. That's good stuff. If I ever rewatch the series, I think I might hit "STOP" right there and call it a wrap.

Dany is given the full Nürnberg rally treatment. Including speaking in a foreign language with subtitles so we don't miss that this is a Mad FOREIGN Queen. Her death feels so empty because it doesn't feel like Dany. When we're supposed to believe she's gone MAD, we don't get her POV. When she's allowed to talk, we only get platitudes. When other characters try to justify her actions, they sound like fans desperately trying to patch plot holes. After eight seasons of buildup, Dany gets sidelined even quicker than she was villainified and is barely even mentioned again. Fuck this shit. (Drogon's scene is nice, though. Nice of him to realise that the throne was the villain all along.)

Wait, fucking TULLY gets to brag about his skill in statesmanship? ...OK, no. Haha.

Wait, they're seriously going to hold a referendum on... OK, no. Haha.

"Who has a better story than Bran?" You mean the guy the SHOW ITSELF ignored for a whole season? The guy who has no opinions or desires on anything whatsoever? Um... Who has a better story... EVERYONE?! Fuck, the New Prince Of Dorne has a better claim. Did they just pull his name out of a hat to get the fucking I Am Logical And Smart Reddit people to like this ending?

And Arya suddenly wants to be Columbus for no reason? Well, I wouldn't want to stick around in Westeros either.

BRAN: You were exactly where you were supposed to be.
Fucking BSG God Wills It ending.

"A Song of Ice and Fire." ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WITH THIS FUCKING HOBBIT BULLSHIT

So basically, Westeros will now be ruled by the small council while the king spends his days watching dragons. There's a metaphor for the show in here. Well, at least we can be sure that all future king elections will be held by fair and wise lords who hold the people's best interests at heart, right? I mean, Robin Arryn looked pretty healthy here, he should be around for another 50 years or so to guarantee the sanity of the election.

And everyone rides off in a very cinematic but completely meaningless way. Well, at least Ghost finally got his ear scritched. ETA: Pretty much this:

In the end, what did any of it mean? Arya with the face-swapping assassin skills, or Jon coming back from the dead, or Tyrion’s scheming, or Daenerys’s time in Meereen? Look beyond even that. What about the Children of the Forest, or the battle with the Night King? What about the ice dragon? What was the point of any of it? Did any of those things add anything to the story beyond, “Well... that happened”?

JON: It doesn't feel right.

Comments

[beer_good_foamy]

Hey!

Anyway, the most egregious issue is Dany's characterization, which is a shame because I think I get the general idea intended which makes some sense. (...) and there wasn't even really an explanation of what she was thinking, so.

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.)

Dany never once appears to consider that her own value system should demand that Jon take the throne.

True, and that would open up a lot of potential story with the Aegon thing, as opposed to just have Jon tell everyone who'd listen that he didn't want to be king, waaah. But then again Dany doesn't seem to have any form of value system whatsoever in the last few episodes.

Relatedly, the idea that Jon stabbing Dany is a solution is itself kind of crazy -- I mean, like, you are seriously telling me that the Dothraki and Unsullied and Drogon are all going to just chill out and stop looting and pillaging and burning and killing once Dany is dead?

Hey, it worked for the Night King. That's how you solve problems in a world run on complex politics. That's why the kingdom was famously at peace for decades after Jaime killed the Mad King.

HOW COULD A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE NOT MENTION TYRION. HE WAS THE HAND OR ACTING HAND TO THREE DIFFERENT MONARCHS FFS AND WAS CONVICTED OF KILLING ONE THE KING, KILLED ANOTHER ACTUAL HAND AND SUGGESTED THE ASSASSINATION OF ANOTHER QUEEN. HOLY SHIT.

And begs the question of which important character whose actions explain everything was left out of the version of the story that WE got to see.

(I did like the dragon burning the throne though.)



One thing that bugs me about this series and character endings: there's a lot of mealy-mouthed stuff where characters have to choose between two things -- between what they once thought they wanted, and what they maybe now want -- and then they choose one and then go and choose the other. It just feels like they are trying to have it both ways -- like there's where character growth will take them, and then what fanservice demands.

Yeah.

It's like they need to tell both the story of the man whose perverse undying love destroys him but never fails, and the one who is moved to change and redeem himself by the example of a brave and noble person, and they just can't pick one or the other. And I mean, it is a tension baked into the character and has been since he met Brienne, but at a certain point it gets frustrating, and it feels like Jaime's backsliding is only written as "I don't deserve any better" because they can't figure out a better reason for him to go back on the choice he's just made. And they have him still fight Euron pointlessly because it's like they are unable to actually come up with any variations on what types of stories this guy can be in besides "he's a fighter," even though that was taken from him years ago.

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.

[local_max]

Hey!

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.