"Non book readers" - Season 8 Episode 5 "The bells" - Spoilers post 2 forward

PhuckHugh wrote: »

Better episode but the writing is just ridiculously poor --- just saw the clip for the next episode and it looks like there's about 20,000 unsullied/dothraki still left

What is dead may never die. This has been explained numerous times in the show.

osarusan wrote: »

Yes, agreed. Have Rhaegal die in the battle, and maybe even Grey Worm too (I'm sick of him), so she can look down on their bodies and it triggers her madness.


Or even, have her sit on Drogon and wait for the bell to ring. It doesn't, so she lights up a street or two, she waits again but the bell doesn't ring, she burns up another couple, it still doesn't ring...so she destroys the whole place.


As an aside, who made the bell ring? Did Cersei allow/order it? I didn't think she did.

It seems to have been some random person!

Brock Turnpike wrote: »

Or was it....?

Don't really care but I'd like to think it was, at least one sign of some proper episode plotting.

Stop moaning ffs wrote: »

What if she’s already pregnant by him?

She can't have children.

PhuckHugh wrote: »

Better episode but the writing is just ridiculously poor --- just saw the clip for the next episode and it looks like there's about 20,000 unsullied/dothraki still left

FFS can you not spoiler that, some of us like to avoid future clips

Scott Tenorman wrote: »

FFS can you not spoiler that, some of us like to avoid future clips

I wouldn't class that as much of a spoiler, given Dany did about 95% of the work in the battle, everyone else just kinda mopped up the stragglers.

Plus, after the Winterfell battle, they said about half of the unsullied and Dothraki survived, somehow, so that'd be what, 44k ish?

is_that_so wrote: »

It depends on the shot they need!

They were all killed in the battle against the NK, except for this half that we forgot about. For reasons :pac:

~Rebel~ wrote: »

Once again, what they established is like an effective and efficient general, who is ruthless about suppressing enemies, but compassionate towards the innocent population, coming home from war, and shooting up a play school. The ruthlessness they always showed up till now always had people at the heart of it.

Once again, that was your perception of her actions over the series. You saw her compassion was for ‘innocent population’, whereas when I saw being compassionate it was towards people who were on her side and even then it was only really when it didn’t get in the way of her drive for the Iron Throne.

For example, if she was so compassionate towards the ‘innocent population’ she would have made an attempt to actually rule the cities she conquered in Essos, like her advisors suggested, rather than leaving each of them in a complete mess (some former slaves feeling it a worse situation than when they were slaves).

You’ve referenced things she did ages ago as clear proof of her madness and bloodlust, but how does that square with her imprisoning her own dragons - the closest thing to children for her - after the death of one innocent child?

Because, like most characters in GoT, she isn’t black or white. She has compassion in certain instances, especially for those who feed into her god/saviour complex, but she has repeatedly shown that she has little to none when people stand in her way.

The point is, she always felt like her being in power was good for the world at large. I have no problem with her turning crazy, it was always on the cards - but we needed to see tangible shift from her caring about innocents, to not caring about innocents. I’ve already pointed out a few examples of how it could easily have been done, but they choose not to do it. Her most barbaric acts were always softened - like Dickon choosing to be burned with his Dad, rather than her forcing the issue.

Again, it all boils down to your concept of innocents and you believing that was her driver. Rarely her caring for ‘innocents’ didn't also help her further her goals. For every example of ‘caring for innocents’, like locking away her dragon, I can give you ones where she the mere association to her ‘enemy’ was enough for her to see them as guilty and barbarically executed.

Everything about this season feels like they favour “surprise!”, over proper build. Same for the dragon attack on Rhaegal. Would have been easy for them to see the ships, dive bomb, and only learn of the scorpions as they fired at the last moment. Instead they went for the surprise of an arrow appearing out of nowhere while they were flying around, fancy free.

I’m not going to disagree that aspects of the writing could be improved and that the season definitely needed more episodes to let things breath, but I’m still in disbelief about how many people see her turn as a ‘surprise’, if anything the writing was overly beating us over the head with it in the lead up. The other surprising turns characters made during the season were a lot more subtle and mostly explained after the fact.

Further on this being a ‘surprise’ move, posters who have claimed this was out of character for Dany have repeatedly failed to answer me when I've asked what was their thinking when she repeatedly threatened to burn the cities of her enemies throughout the seasons? Did you believe it was all just bluster?

~Rebel~ wrote: »

Once again, what they established is like an effective and efficient general, who is ruthless about suppressing enemies, but compassionate towards the innocent population, coming home from war, and shooting up a play school.

The ruthlessness they always showed up till now always had people at the heart of it. You’ve referenced things she did ages ago as clear proof of her madness and bloodlust, but how does that square with her imprisoning her own dragons - the closest thing to children for her - after the death of one innocent child?

The point is, she always felt like her being in power was good for the world at large. I have no problem with her turning crazy, it was always on the cards - but we needed to see tangible shift from her caring about innocents, to not caring about innocents. I’ve already pointed out a few examples of how it could easily have been done, but they choose not to do it. Her most barbaric acts were always softened - like Dickon choosing to be burned with his Dad, rather than her forcing the issue.

Everything about this season feels like they favour “surprise!”, over proper build. Same for the dragon attack on Rhaegal. Would have been easy for them to see the ships, dive bomb, and only learn of the scorpions as they fired at the last moment. Instead they went for the surprise of an arrow appearing out of nowhere while they were flying around, fancy free.

It's like a horror film that forgoes building up tension or psychological unrest, but instead just has things randomly jumping out on screen or erratic screams to get the audience to jump.

Its cheap writing.

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

Everything she advocated for in earlier seasons - even things she was talked out of - were draconian measures against her enemies with a potential high level of collateral damage.

She deemed that acceptable - her advisors persuaded her otherwise - but there was a logic and reason to it, nothing remotely 'mad'.

She's increasingly showed this cold willingness to accept severe collateral damage in the name of 'total war' and the destruction of her enemies as seasons progressed.

But there was always a distinct logic and reason to it. She's never killed, or expressed an interesting in killing, for the simple act of killing.

If she had destroyed Kings Landing indiscriminately - innocent men, women and children included - as a response to Cersei's refusal to surrender, that would've been a far more credible character development.

It would've been equally as horrifying and unacceptable to her allies, would've been a major escalation of her tendency to be willing to do anything to achieve victory, whilst still having a warped, logical, thinking to it.

But having her murder the population of Kings Landing after they had surrendered is a break that was simply just not properly fleshed out or supported by the scripting.

It would've been fine if we had 3 more episodes which explored, in-depth, that she was having a break with reality and descending into madness.

It's the equivalent of the US deciding to drop two A-bombs on Japan after they had already surrendered....rather than dropping the A-bombs to force surrender.

Daenerys was willing to drop the a-bombs, metaphorically, to achieve victory, and it made her closest allies extremely uneasy.

But what she did to Kings Landing was dropping the a-bombs after victory had already been secured, and the writing up to that point does not support that sudden switch.

Strange attempt at a comparison between the acts of a foreign invader like Dany, who wanted to conquer and rule KL, and the US, who had originally been attacked by Japan and weren't attacking the Japanese mainland trying to invade and rule them.

For those claiming that Dany should see the people of KL in the same way as the 'innocents' you believe she cared so much about in Essos, just watch her reaction to Tyrion when he used that exact that word.



To get in before the obvious responses about them rushing this side of her personality, they showed her frustration with the lack of uprising in KL over the last 2 seasons, right from the time she arrived to Westeros, and throughout the early seasons we see her treating everyone who she feels sided with her enemy with barbarism, whether they were guilty themselves or not.

nix wrote: »

Ummm, that clips from the same episode of when she went mad

Yeah... that's what I said in my first paragraph...

EDIT: Can see where you got confused, changed the order of the clip to avoid it

Stop moaning ffs wrote: »

The tagrayan words

‘Fire and blood’


But She’s actin totally out of character! Waaaaaaaaaaahhhh!

Riiiight. What are the Lannister's words and how much do they own the Tyrells and the bank? Can see Tyrion breaking out the coinpurse on Sunday.