She did it for fun. She's always enjoyed burning people alive, since Season 1.

How would the sacking of King’s Landing play in the books?


Jon - the two armies at the gates, worries about Dany losing control
Euron - Drogon destroys ships
Dany - Tearing shit up, feeling a little too good about the burning, hears the bells
Tyrion - Hears the bells, hopes she stops but she does not
Arya - Someone has to watch Cleganebowl and then she chooses her life over revenge
Cersei - Tries to escape while reflecting, finds Jaime
Jaime - fights Euron, finds Cersei, death scene
Jon - Calls for the retreat
Arya - adds Dany to her list
Dany - justifies it to herself

Just laying it out like that makes it easier to stomach. If people knew it was coming the reaction wouldn’t be nearly as harsh.

I think the strength of GOT has been how it surprises with shocking turn of events, mostly at the end of a season starting with Ned's beheading, then the Red Wedding and beyond.

But the writing onto how those events came to take place has been pretty top notch, the Stark deaths were no less liked than the burning King's Landing, but they just came upon due to cause.

And in the most recent episodes these surprising turns just didn't come upon this way anymore, and instead happened just as a means to explain a conclusion. It's the lazy writing that makes the criticism deserved.

Oh what I meant was that if this scene had already been written and digested by book readers. There’d be less outrage and more of the funny reaction videos we got from the red wedding.

Magnus hits the nail in the head.

New theory I see - Bran is behind it all. He warged into Drogon and made him destroy the city to make Dany look bad and destroy the alliance of ice and fire. Now Bran will take his place as the new Night King.

Honestly makes more sense than what happened on Sunday.

1. I thought he cannot pop into dragons.
2. Missandei's last word Dracarys. Makes Perfect Sense
3. Dany telling Jon "fear then"

The videos that have recapped all the times she's threatened fire and brimstone make it all make sense. The stuff that doesn't make sense is Arya not getting turned to dust while being on the same street as the woman & daughter and this Jon Snow love when he's been the worst leader / decision maker evah.

** I was watching a after show reaction vid and one of the comments suggested that the show ends with Bran popping out of a vision and none of all this stuff happened up to a point. Oohh, that'd be so evil.

I've seen the script.

Ned wakes up in King's Landing and realises it was all a dream. Instead of going down to review the genealogy book as planned - he couldn't care less who Robert's children are and closes the case and goes back to sleep.

The End.

What if Bran just wakes up after falling out the window?

If it were all a vision of a possible future then the backlash would be inmense, the biggest in tv history, bigger than The sopranos backlash.

St. Elsewhere, Dallas (Season 9), Roseanne

I couldn't agree more. I have no objection with the turn and it will most likely happen in the book. Its the way that they have built up with the heel turn where you just go from 0 degrees to 500 degrees in one turn with no increments in between except for the case of Tarleys being burnt. My other issues is that the actions of some of the characters contradicted with the book because they felt they want to save money on the CGI(Jon would not just have given his wolf away like that) or because they want to appease the redit crown(Jaime sleeping with Brienne when in the books it mentions how much he was replused by Briennes look). Too many times have the characters instantly teleport from one place to another between season 7 and 8.

Its such a shame because season 1 to 4 were A+ in my opinion despite some changes on season 4. Season 5 took a big step down but still enjoyable and season 6 was slightly between. Season 7 and 8 dragged the grading down to Lost and Walking Dead levels. It reminds me that Season 1 of GOT aired the same time as Starz Camelot show.That latter show had a budget that rivals HBO and actually has good production. However Camelot was a show so bad and cliched that it was a lesson for writers to avoid when making medieval fantasy shows. GOT S7 and 8 has literally became that

This is what happens when Dumb and Dumber have too much creative control and develop an ego trip in doing so changes from GRRM book in season 5. They also got lazy because HBO wanted 13 episodes per season for S7 and 8 but they insist on 6 because they wanted to get the show over with

I think GOT writers were always better at dialog than everything else. That was ok when they could stick to GRRM story and characters though.

This twitter thread is good

Watched the first 5 episodes over the past few days and sorta agree with Mister Ecks, feels a bit like I've been watching a different show to whatever the critical backlash is directed at.

Nothing here is unexpected given the way season 7 was made: the couple of years off just enabled greater technical accomplishment; the scripts of each final season were no doubt written together, and the previous season's plotting - and soap opera style of unimaginative melodrama - should've cushioned everyone's expectations more.

"It became less about the weight of the past and more about the spectacle of the present"

Or whatever that twitter writer guy Shack shared said - he's clutching at cleverness straws to gain more followers, I'd say. Of course the creators of a TV adaptation have a different creative method to the fucking author. Benioff may be an author himself, and they might've had enough exposure and expertise from Martin as co-executive to keep the series on par with the first six seasons, but there's clearly more to it than that; they plain and simply aren't as good at plot development as GRRM is, and the idea they've burnt-out is entirely presumptive, a call made when looking at the number of episodes rather than the overall runtime and the technical effort required to pull it all off.

The more reasonable assumption is, they simply got it wrong due to their comparative lack of talent. The TV guys either didn't respect their audience in the same way GRRM did or themselves have misjudged the driver of the show's popularity, which popularity has always been due not only to the anarchial no-hero realism of the real-world projected through a slow-burning climax in a fantasy realm, but mostly for the breathtakingly imaginative plotting and the high respect paid to its characters (which created way more unpredictability-fueled dramatic intrigue than we'd been accustomed to) naturally housed therein.

Benioff and DB, straightforwardly, are no-where near as creatively deep as that. Martin is a genius compared to these guys. They thought the show was about melodramatic last-word, ego-building sequences in season 7, and that all fans wanted from the finale was to have the long narrative foreplay go straight to the dramatic - but ultimately premature - ejaculative.

Season 8 is getting such shitty reviews, because it's not the same show; but neither was season 7, and the backlash is itself way too emotionally based to justify itself. Unto themselves, these episodes are fucking excellent - the fact they went for groundbreaking technicality and missed a creative mark they were never capable of meeting, shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Case and point: the criticism of 'The Longest Night' - that it was apparently too darkly lit and resolved the WW storyline way too rapidly. This sort of reaction to an episode that objectively raised the TV bar higher than its ever gone before, is nothing more than greediness. And anyone thinking the creators were over it, clearly didn't notice the runtime, clearly didn't notoce one of the greatest and most intense battle-to-resolutions ever put to film, if not the greatest - the end of the Avengers and Return of the King (sans Mount Doom) very much included.

At this point, who gives a shit whether Danearys' arc into madness was long enough to make sense. 'The Bells' is again a major, huge, balls-to-the-wall television masterpiece. No-one got lazy; less dramatically, good plot ideas can't be forced, and the writing part is never as difficult, as the execution.

I think that, if you want to keep with the foreplay, much better to accept the show for the best it could be, and to, you know, read the books - Martin will no doubt end things more to your satisfaction; and it was always his story, not HBO's. The show is still plenty likeable for an array of good reason: the episodes are fucking enormous, and, in the end, it'll probably finish well enough to justify the complaints everyone's bitching about.

Why does everyone defending the show go back to the same two points?

“From a technical perspective, it’s like no other TV show before!”
And
“Well writing a good end to a TV show is hard so let’s not be hard on them for trying and not meeting High expectations!

The story and characters are why the show is popular. Not the dragons or spectacle. And when your reach is further than your grasp narratively, that just means that you don’t treat ending a show like Game of Thrones lightly and you either work on it till it’s as good as can be or let HBO hire someone with talent to write it.

Nah, just that that post didn't expand enough on the "episodes are excellent unto themselves" to make a different case. Meant the writing of The Longest Night, and especially the direction, are both top notch when expectations are removed. The two episodes prior are just build-up, as is the next to 'The Bells' - which isn't as good as ep 3 but it's still pretty fucking major.

Well, whether u like it or not, we are about to have the biggest finale of a tv show since.... Friends?

Love it or hate it, GOT has managed to grab the audience like no there show in decades. We should just witness history as no show will be able to pull what GoT did in a long time.

What a weird faggot of entitlement and audience-neediness this backlash has become. Blabbidy blah blah; if it were more developed than foreshadowed it would've been so obvious to people there'd have been an even bigger outcry than we're currently seeing. How is that not obvious to anyone?

The whole fucking point of the ending, from a commercial point of view, was the mystery; of course it couldn't be progressed through more obviously visible character development.

Nothing in the past couple of seasons, story-wise, has been perfect, D's arc being no exception. The issue would be significantly lessened, however, if the act were somehow made more evil-seeming in nature: which could have been done through more humanising of the city population prior - and that wouldn't have spoiled things anywhere near as much as the gradual introduction of Dany's turn would have.

The issue on-screen was, who really cares what she's doing, beyond the abstract understanding she's burning thousands of innocent people? The GoT audience has been taught to be emotionally invested in those that die, to care about their demise - and the people of King's Landing have always been somewhat conflated with the enemy (even if several other characters have been used as attempts to make up for that distance, through referring to them as potentially disloyal, and so on).

Was actually expecting the show to go all Boy in Striped Pajamas and to kill Arya (sp?) in the carnage, which would've made up for everything just mentioned by highlighting the gravity of D's vehemence without the city needing to matter. As it was, we needed to be taught to care more about the beauty and grandeur of the KL city, and to identify more with its people, for us to be invested in such a way the twist-approach justified the relatively sudden change of character.

If they'd managed to do that much, it'd have been as good a turn as any in the whole series, and completely fitting for the general anarchy of the show. But to say Dany needed to have her madness developed more carefully is stupid to what the outcome would've been. It's the intrigue that gives the show a direction for its anarchy-motor to travel in; stripping that away would have only caused even more entitled bitching about things being done too obviously.

To me it was perfectly OK as it was - even though I didn't care much about a dragon shooting fire-off in the distance, and even though no amount of women and children we don't know burning to death didn't add any drama (to this series, at least), the rest of the episode's magnitude kind of made up for it.

True, but which TV show was the biggest audience and had the best final season/finale. Breaking Bad?

The Walking Dead has had way bigger numbers for the majority of its run. Breaking Bad just scraped past 10 million in the finale premiere; and probably the episode a couple before it was better - at least everyone seemed to think so at the time.

I know that wasn't meant for me but this all has the brain ticking a fair bit. Has GoT ever been as good as BB? I think it's probably just more dramatic and binge-worthy - even at its best, it's still extremely character-ego-driven, whereas BB was straight-up masterly without any resortment to gratuity.

Game of Thrones is more...engrossing (there's the word), but given the past couple of seasons it'll be remembered mostly for things like the Red Wedding and Ramsey and Battle of the Bastards (which these last two seasons have allured to constantly, to make sure of it) and the Hodor twist; which regardless of what anyone says, could well have been an idea given by good old Groucho here (even if he himself reckons GRRM planned it all along).

I can see why people are getting upset about the general trajectory of the core drama, which was on a sustained upper until the end of season 6, and took a sudden descent through season 7. For a while there, the show just kept getting better and better, became more entertaining than practically every film epic thanks to the allowances of 10 episode seasons, and the sheer broadness of Martin's creative scope. I guess at a personal level I stopped caring about that which the show led me to feel expecting of, which went along with watching most stuff on a shitty burner phone these days. The change.org petition is nothing more than a laugh; whinging won't change anything, so better to focus on the better elements than set your ego up for a predictable disappointment, imo.

Even Breaking Bad's finale received some flack, because the final season already peaked when Hank died. I think it's mostly a case that audiences become way too greedy when they've been shown the high watermark, and the last impression doesn't reach it. There are TED talks on the psychology of that stuff, actually (Daniel Kahnemann's for example).

Backlash incoming...

Yep.

I liked the finale. But the backlash is already at an all time high.

The finale was fine. It was very dragged out, but without any material to go off of (and unknown GRRM involvement), I thought it was a mostly satisfying conclusion given the task of ending it all. Bran as King is fine, it's just a little bewildering(?) that he clearly sees into the future and knew he was going to be crowned King. It sort of opens up a can of worms regarding basically everything from the point he became the Three-Eyed Raven onward.

And the scenes with Drogon mourning Dany were the most emotional. And the real question that didn't get answered... What happened with Drogon?! I was hoping that we'd see him drop Dany's body off in Old Valyria as her final resting place, and maybe/hopefully rejoin the babies he/she laid back in season 5 (I still like that theory!), but we got a random question from Bran and the others asking of his whereabouts that lead to nothing, so...

I found the culmination of Jon Snow and Dany's relationship (and the dragon melting the Iron Throne) incredibly satisfying and well-crafted, at once tragic and creepy and infused with a genuine sense of the epic and mythic. The rest of the episode is fine, but, dominated as it is by fairly tepid (by this series' standard) political chicanery and maneuvering, it left me colder. I have lingering questions: with the Unsullied sailing away, I am not sure why Jon cannot at least live in Winterfell? Because they might hear of it and return to wage war? Between the fragility of peace with the Unsullied, the North establishing itself again as an independent land, Aegon Targaryen's continued existence (and how poorly kept the secret is), etc., the conclusion feels ripe for further games of thrones. Which is maybe the point? Is the Night's Watch now exclusively on dragon watch?

A few of the moments register a tad too contemporary and/or on-the-nose comic; the lords laughing at Sam's suggestion of democracy, for example, or Bronn's "Lord of Grammar" one-liner.

There will be fallout in the coming days amid waves of Last Jedi-flavored fan entitlement, of course, but I am definitely grateful for the emotional, visceral, and at times brilliant ride Game of Thrones provided for eight years.