Amph Game Of Thrones (uh i guess it's done now? Edit: No!)

Given that Corlys apparently lost his love and half his crew in Asshai, maybe that's where Elissa died - perhaps due to sadistic sorcerers seeking sacrifices.

 

At least the opening credits were consistently amazing right to the very end.

 

I really did not know it was Too Old To Be Breast Feeding Kid at the gathering until this:

 

I mean to be fair I think theres a lot of confusion between character and performance there, I would say that the character is often sposed to come across as rather entitled and bratish in the earlier seasons and that this isn't poor performance anymore than Joffery being annoying is a poor performance from Gleeson. I wouldn't say she reached the level of the likes of Dance, Dilane or Rigg as the very best performances on the show but as with Harrington she certainly improved during it building up more gravitas as needed.

I mean in terms of character to me she follows one of the repeated themes of the show, avoiding typical clichés when it comes to characters reactions to negative events. Typically we tend to see a sharp divide between some characters being shaped by them towards heroism and others towards villainy. Here though we often see seemingly heroic characters effected in a negative fashion by negative events such as bereavement. Add to that someone having the means to inflict massive suffering in a position that removes that from really having to see it on the back of a dragon(arguably a good metaphor for modern air strikes) and I think the development is sound.

 

So I've started my rewatch of the show, and a couple things occur to me.

1) Fast travel happened even in this first season. Cat leaves Winterfell in episode 2 and arrives in King's Landing in episode 3.

2) I don't understand why anyone would bring up Arya killing Littlefinger as evidence of her being a psychopath... Being reminded that he started the whole war, if anyone deserved their ultimate justice, it was him. And I say this even though he's one of my favorite characters. Executing him was just and the crown would have done the same. It's not the same thing as killing all the Freys, not all of whom were directly involved in murder.

 

In defense of her murders of the Freys....
- She gave the toast and deliberately mentioned the Red Wedding, to which everyone in the chamber cheered.
- She also was sure to not let the women of House Frey drink the poisoned wine.


Besides, Littlefinger getting offed by a dagger across his throat is rather poetic.

 

Fast travel between episodes was tolerable. Fast travel within an episode, which happened in the past two seasons, felt jarring.

 

Opinion of this article?

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/cu...ame-of-thrones-targaryen-restoration-daenerys

Daenerys was right: King’s Landing had to burn
Westeros would’ve been better off with her on the Iron Throne.

• By Matthew Yglesias
• on May 26, 2019 9:00 am

Daenerys Targaryen in the series finale of Game of Thrones.
Helen Sloan/HBO

Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen was not a “mad queen” (and, indeed, it’s somewhat unclear how mad her supposedly insane father ever was), Jon Snow was wrong to stab her to death in the series finale, and the new elective monarchy set up by a hastily assembled Great Council of the Lords of Westeros represents a step back in terms of political development.

Her death was a tragedy that reflects, on some level, the very same Stark family naiveté about politics that was such a heavy point of emphasis on the beginning of the series.

And despite the Starks’ seemingly good-natured instincts on a personal level, their approach to leadership is going to accomplish nothing useful for the long-suffering ordinary people of Westeros. Some form of actual democratic governance — as proposed by Grand Maester Samwell Tarly — would have been an enormous step forward. But it was laughed out of bounds by the high lords of the Seven Kingdoms who proceeded to set up a form of government that serves their narrow interests, while doing nothing to address the many serious problems afflicting the continent.

Daenerys isn’t crazy
The underlying presumption of the actions undertaken by Varys, Tyrion, and Jon over the course of Game of Thrones’ final few episodes is that Daenerys is in some sense unstable, as reflected by her willingness to harm the civilian population of King’s Landing.

But this simply isn’t true.

Daenerys has an objective — to induce the Lords of Westeros to bend the knee and acknowledge her supremacy — and her attack on King’s Landing in “The Bells” was well-calibrated to achieve that objective. She had previously offered Queen Cersei the opportunity surrender, and Cersei refused — packing the city with civilians and ringing it with air defenses that pose a lethal threat to Drogon, Daenerys’s one remaining dragon. A combination of skilled piloting and poor marksmanship allowed Daenerys to overcome the city’s air defenses, destroy the Golden Company, and induce the Lannisters to attempt to surrender.

If Daenerys had simply allowed King’s Landing to surrender without consequences only after she evaded its air defenses, then every other recalcitrant lord in the Seven Kingdoms would have incentive to resist her. After all, it only takes a lucky shot or two to bring down the dragon — and the Queen riding him — and if she manages to burn your scorpions, you can always just surrender.

The Breaker of Chains can be legitimately faulted for not explaining the strategic logic of her actions to key subordinates before the battle began. But in her defense, those same key subordinates had spent the previous days spreading treasonous talk about Jon Snow being the rightful heir to the Iron Throne, so she can perhaps be forgiven for not fully taking them into her confidence.

Making an example of King’s Landing was a harsh decision. It was a cruel decision. And it’s certainly a decision whose morality one could question. But it wasn’t a “crazy” decision or the act of a Mad Queen — it was a rational calculation based on a clear-eyed assessment of the strategic situation.

One should further note that while Daenerys’s critics were obsessed with rumors that Jon was the trueborn son of Rhaegar Targaryen, they missed the fact that his newly revealed heritage implies that the Baratheon/Stark rebellion against the crown was based largely on fake news about Lyanna Stark. That, in turn, raises the question of whether the entire “Mad King” narrative — and thus the supposed genetic infirmity that makes Daenerys so suspect — isn’t itself a bit of propaganda.

The only real consistent through-line in all of this is that Westeros’s great houses oppose the creation of an effective central government.

The nobility likes a weak king
Many fans have observed that there was no real reason for the participants in the Great Council to believe that Bran would be a good king, and that Tyrion’s arguments in Bran’s favor seemed extremely weak.

But that’s simply a matter of perspective. If what you mean by a “good king” is a king who will rule in the interests of the broad mass of people, then something like the Tarly proposal for a democratic election would make sense. But they of course rejected that out of hand. What they want is a king who will be good for the upper ranks of the nobility, which actually means a weak and ineffective king.

Bran’s basic indifference to governance means that the likes of Edmure, Bronn, Gendry, and whoever is now running Dorne will have a free hand to rule their domains as they see fit. That’s nice for them, and fine for the smallfolk who happen to luck into competent and moral masters, but it’s potentially a disaster for others. In a practical sense, ordinary Westerosi are shown to be much more vulnerable to the problems with weak central governance than to tyranny from King’s Landing.

“The maesters will tell you that King Jaehaerys abolished the lord’s right to the first night to appease his shrewish queen,” Roose Bolton told Theon Greyjoy in the books, describing the practice of noblemen raping brides under their jurisdiction on the occasion of their wedding day. “But where the old gods rule, old customs linger. The Umbers keep the first night too, deny it as they may. Certain of the mountain clans as well, and on Skagos ... well, only heart trees ever see half of what they do on Skagos.”

These rapes were happening despite the generally well-meaning Stark rule in Winterfell simply because, in a practical sense, the Starks exerted little control over their bannermen. The Great Council is now setting up a system of government in which the King’s Justice will be weaker than ever, with rulers deliberately picked by the high nobility to be weak and nonconfrontational.

Daenerys, by contrast, was a real threat to lordly prerogative since Drogon’s ability to travel long distances quickly and attack fortified positions meant that nobles would have to take her commands seriously. Yes, her war of conquest was bloody. And killing her before she landed on Westeros with three dragons and a foreign-born army arguably would have been a humane move by Varys and Tyrion. But by the time Tyrion started whispering treason to Jon, the worst of the bloodshed may have been behind her. And in her place, he’s set up a system that only guarantees more bloodshed.

Elective monarchy doesn’t work
Many countries over the years have walked the path from hereditary dictatorship to constitutional monarchy. It starts with establishing a popular elective assembly (the House of Commons in the UK) and proceeds over time by both broadening voting rights and expanding the power of that assembly.

What you don’t see happening is countries following a path whereby the hereditary monarch is replaced by an elected one and that evolves into democracy.

Which is not to say that elective monarchies are unheard of in history. What happens instead is that they collapse. In many cases, like the Holy Roman Empire, the nature of the collapse is that one monarch uses his authority to ensure the election of his son, and then after a few rounds of this, the elective monarchy becomes a dynastic one. To avoid this possibility on Game of Thrones, the assembled Lords of Westeros select the disabled Bran, who Sansa assures us is impotent.

This puts us in the case of a state like the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which really did have openly contested elections for its kingship. The problem with this approach is that each moment of succession becomes a crisis, with the various major stakeholders clashing for office. Halina Lerski, author of the Historical Dictionary of Poland, tells us that these elections “generated political conflicts in the seventeenth century and foreign intervention in the eighteenth century. They became a symbol of anarchy and corruption,” and were abolished in 1791. Imagine Ser Bronn’s successor squandering the agricultural wealth of the Reach on bribing other nobles to elect him king, while the Iron Bank makes under-the-table financial commitments to supporters of a rival faction that will promise to pay off the crown’s long delinquent deaths.

The elective monarchy is a recipe not only for weak governance while the monarch is on the throne, but for rounds of civil war, foreign intervention, and possible secession in the period immediately before and after the monarch’s death. Game of Thrones’ new world order is going to lead, in the long term, to much more killing than a proper Targaryen Restoration featuring a healthy dose of law and order and centralized control.

The idea of government by fire and blood cuts against our modern sensibilities — and rightly so — but no option of a modern constitutional regime was on the table at any point during the series, and that’s not what the Great Council settled on. Of the available options, Daenerys’s plan to break the wheel was the best one, and the clique of aristocrats that overthrew her has done nothing but condemn Westeros to anarchy and misgovernment.

 

They cheered when Ned Stark was killed!
They cheered during Tyrion's trial!

 

lol Vox advocating mass murder.

King's Landing's population mostly consists of noncombatants. It is not only the political center of Westeros; as its biggest city (one of only five true cities on the continent) it is a major economic engine and a center of commerce. Burning it down is actively harmful to the conqueror's future interests. Aegon the Conqueror and his dragonrider descendants mostly used their dragons against armies, warships, and fortifications-- things with military value.

And I never understood the whole "break the wheel" thing in the show. I don't know what it's even supposed to mean, and it's clear no one does (I remember people saying "She's talking about democracy!!1!"). Dany is asserting her claim to the Iron Throne based on her Targaryen blood-- that's as much a part of the "wheel" as anything. I also don't understand what the author is talking about when he contrasts strong vs. weak central government. There has never been a strong central government when it comes to control over the lords' treatment of smallfolk, or really in most senses. The Targaryen kings cared primarily about the lords being subservient to them. They didn't control the economy, they didn't have their own standing army, they mostly let the lords run their own affairs (e.g., Tywin was able to exterminate two houses in the Westerlands without so much as an objection from King's Landing). It's feudalism and really in terms of maintaining stability the hands-off policy was probably the best approach. Smallfolk don't fair well in the Westerosi civil wars that result from the Iron Throne overstepping its authority.

 

i have a feeling the last two seasons were "rushed" because the boys were sick of doing the show. should they have handed it off to new showrunners? perhaps.

game of groans.

 

why do people keep saying it was rushed ?
what should've been a final 7th season was split in 2 halves and turned into a total of about 18 hours of screentime .

seems like plenty to me.

 

i still think they were sick of doing the show. they woke up each morning and vomited into a pink porcelain bowl. they walked around all day in a weak-kneed stupor. they fell asleep at night puking on their bedsheets.

 

It's bizarre to me that they didn't hand it over. It happens all the time even with showrunners who are the creators (as an HBO example Armando Iannucci left Veep-- to its detriment). Was it because HBO didn't move forward with their abysmal-sounding Confederate series?

 

Umm that “final 7th season” was four seasons worth of adaptable material.

 

7 books , 7 seasons , 7 brides for 7 brothers .

 

And, weirdly enough, Grey Wind is pronounced in the exact same way as an ancient Norse phrase meaning "beheaded and stitched onto the corpse of a loser."

 

Honestly there are a lot of reasons people could get burnt out. But yeah, I have no idea why they didn't just hand it over to an experienced writer on the staff.

 

very droll but grey wind refers to the flatulence robbs decaying corpse made obviously

 

god that would smell amazing

 

As nice as an idea of examining the real strategic possibilities of Dany burning Kings Landing might be, it's obvious that is not the intention of the show. Dany is crazy, and that's the only narrative you can spin from it as far as the show is concerned. It is not concerned in the slightest with any other thread, and at this point, arguing something else is just pointless. The show, everyone in it, and the writers, do not offer any possibilities of "well maybe Dany had a point..." It is purely "She nutso and wants to control the world." The show leaves it open that maybe she still might have been the right choice, but it never disputes her logic in burning KL as anything other than crazy girl going crazy.

 

It was 'abolished' (which was just as smooth as any tradition fro an absolutist to a constitutional system) for... wait for it.... a constitutional monarchy (which was crushed by the absolutist monarchies surrounding it). It's almost a if Poland-Lithuania walked the path from absolutist monarchy, to elected monarchy, to a constitutional monarchy, contrary to what Vox says at the start of this section of their article. It's not as if the path to constitutional monarchy from absolute monarchy were generally smooth transitions either.

In other words Vox is advocating rule through fear and oppression of any opposition in order to bring 'peace'. It isn't like Dany is some enlightened ruler - she's brash, stubborn and cruel. It isn't just nobel uprisings she would have felt the need to suppress, but also any dissent from the ordinary population.

 

More thoughts from my rewatch... Dany threatens to cut off Viserys's hands for hitting her. Not because it's wrong to hit people, but because it's wrong to hit *her* because she's a Khaleesi.