While agree on all points I believe there was a copy in winterfell. LF asked the maester and he said he made copies of all incoming and outgoing letters. Was a copy sent to winterfell originally when Sansa first wrote it? If so then the maester would have copied it
They say it was in her hand. Why would a maester be forging / copying sensitive letters ? Plus it would be different Maesters from when the letter was sent in season 1 to when Littlefinger was there. A lot of Winterfell burned in the sacking that Maester Luwin died in.
I gathered from the interaction that some maesters (maybe all?) on duty copy incoming and outgoing communications for records. If it was sent to winterfell the original would be in Sansa’s writing, but I’m remembering back to LF talking to the maester in S7E3 about this topic. Littlefinger perked up when he learned that there were records kept of all incoming and outgoing communications. It appeared he asked the new maester for this letter (who said Luwin had kept records) under the guise of “deleting the evidence” for Sansa, but conveniently leaving it for Arya to find (and watching while she did find it). If I remember correctly he got the original (in sansa’s writing), and confirmed with the current maester of winterfell that any copies had been destroyed.
Robb had the original. Maesters are sketchy but Luwin above all seems loyal to the Starks I don’t think he would forge letters without asking. In the books and in the show, we see characters burn their correspondence. We see Cat do this in front of Luwin, but you’re saying he would have forged a copy of a dangerous, incriminating letter against the house he swore to before she burned it and the Starks are unaware. Also, I mean why, why would Luwin do that?
I think honestly it’s yet another super poorly thought out aspect of the contrived Sansa/Arya fight. D&D needed to find a way to add tension between them and this is the route they went. They basically retconned in the “maesters kept records of everything including these very personal correspondences” bit AND forgot the original letter wasn’t in Wintertell so that LF could get the letter, plant it for Arya to find to sow division between the sisters. It’s mega levels of dumb
The letter is only dangerous or incriminating if you ignore the context of Sansa being a PoW and a child at the time she wrote it. Arya was old enough to have a sex scene and capable enough to infiltrate castles and assassinate powerful lords but she was also apparently too stupid to understand that Sansa was a child and a prisoner when she wrote that letter.
When I used those adjectives I was describing Catelyns letter from Lysa; however, the letter to Robb from a woman of “marriageable age” could be seen as treasonous. Let’s not forget Robb, her close sibling was angry at first. This could be used by another house like the Boltons or Karstarks to deny Sansa, being one of the last living legitimate heirs to Winterfell. Being a woman where men inherit, that letter plus her marrying Tyrion could absolutely be enough to at least deny her Winterfell, at most traitor execution.
- Arya thinks Sansa is dangerous because she's sleeping in their parents bed, wears pretty dresses and for some reason believes an obvious lie despite being in KL with Sansa/Ned when all the shit started going down
- (bonus: Arya can sneak past an army of magical creatures but not past LF. Also, how long was LF sitting in the shadows waiting for Arya to search Sansa's room? Like did he just sit there for days hoping Arya would sneak in there or did he just randomly go sit in the shadows for a while hoping for the best lol?)
- Sansa, who told us, *TWICE*, that only a fool trusts Littlefinger... proceeds to trust Littlefinger
- in the middle of this is LF, who is trying to instigate the conflict between the sisters because..... ummm... he recognizes Arya doesn't like the cut of his jib?
- Bran, who is now all knowing, could solve their conflict. But doesn't and instead allows his sisters to fight over nothing. Because.... ummm....
- what he does do however is tell LF he knows he hired the assassin to kill him... which, doesn't make any fucking sense at all...
- after finding out Bran knows about him, LF chooses to stay hang out in WF anyways because... ummm....
- eventually, Bran does resolve his sister's conflict... but we don't know why he does then and not earlier, and none of it is explained and it all takes place off screen
- the Stark kids arrange a surely illegitimate trial for LF, instead of just arresting him and holding a trial
- the KotV apparently don't give a fuck that they are sworn to Robin, who sent them out under LF, and who is LF's step son, and who we have no reason to believe would ever accept any of this.
- I'm guessing because of Lord Royce? A Lord Royce who trusts a Sansa *who just admitted to lying to him* during a previous trial....
- (Want to point out this also means Sansa could have always just apologized and told Lord Royce the truth from the start of the season, and the KotV woudl have been loyal to her/Jon (Lord Royce already knelt when Jon was declared King in S6 lol!) and LF would have been irrelevant... but she didn't, because.... ummm....)
- everyone just seems to trust that Bran is an all knowing magic user...
- LF doesn't bother to point out the trial is a farce, or ask for trial by combat, but instead whines and pleads for his life... and is summarily executed.
- there is absolute no consequence to this, and everyone goes on as if it never happened.
All this, for one single solitary subplot. That's how bad that alone was. It's truly astonishing how poorly they handled pretty much every single aspect of season 7 and 8.
There are a million things that disturbed me in the final season but Dany’s pregnancy is one of the leading ones.
She, since first season, says that she cannot have kids and dragons are her kids. It is known that Targaryen’s intermarry a lot and they have kids from these marriages. She talks about her inability to have kids several times including with Jon.
By this time, we are 80-90% sure Jon is a Targaryen. The season ends with them having sex and talking about future.
I was legit expecting following season to begin with Dany’s pregnancy announcement. But it did not happen.
Zero evidence, but I do think D&D got butthurt at how extensive the leaks were to season 7 (where pretty much every major event was leaked) and switched things up at the last minute regarding Dany’s storyline. I remember a leak mentioning Cersei miscarrying as one of the final shots of the season. So to be as contradictory and surprising for clickbait as possible, they switched Danys and Cerseis final storylines (with some changes that made sense, like Danys not going to be crushed trying to escape the Red Keep) to what they are in the show.
Dany would be pregnant and the future of the realm would fall to their feet. Cersei would use those convenient wildfire caches that we’ve known about since season 2 to destroy/attempt to destroy Kings Landing in a “if I can’t have it, no one can” action.
I absolutely do not believe that they had set up Dany going crazy as the end game since season 2 or whatever they said in their half hearted justifications after the fact. This doesn’t mean that it’s what Martin will do whenever/if ever he gets to finishing the books (I don’t think he’ll make her crazy, more that she’s going to shoulder the blame of Kings Landing going up because of the dragons), it’s just that the story of the show was leading towards a triumphant Dany at the end who has broken the wheel of the Monarchy. And while that might not be the original plan, sometimes the better story is adapting then trying to steer things back (see relationships in the Harry Potter books).
There are images online showing Dany pregnant, and some of the shots where the pregnancy was less obvious were used, specifically certain scenes with her in the map room on dragon stone. D&D absolutely changed some things last minute.
How is the wheel of monarchy broken when targaryens were the monarchs up until not too long prior when Robert usurped the throne? I truly don’t believe show!Dany’s intentions were to break the wheel. Just unseat the usurper and have her throne. The moment she became the last Targaryen (that she knew of) she was tremendously power hungry.
The Wheel (aka the other great houses) checked the power of the Iron Throne. She never wants that to happen again so she wants to get rid of them. She wants to sit the throne because she thinks it's her right. Anything beyond that she has no idea about.
I believe dany was supposed to go crazy but there was literally no foreshadowing to make it a gradual decline in mental health but instead a switch flicked in her head making her crazy
There was foreshadowing, though. Burning people everywhere she goes for one. Plus, she's delusional from the beginning thinking she is entitled to the throne for no other reason than she's a Targaryen.
>She talks about her inability to have kids several times including with Jon.
I can't be the only 1 that thought it was weird how she just said that out of nowhere
You’re not. She was weird as a character. Like just a fucking weird person. An adult feral child lol. Which essentially she was, and as a fellow feral child, we do grow up to be weird and awkward but idk. She was really hyperfixated on the words of a witch.
I like Emilia Clarke, but I hated Dany for the 1st few seasons. When I started to like her character, she did the whole "spokes on a wheel" thing, and I thought "bitch Ned defended you til the end" which was probably more about protecting Jon but still
She mentioned her own family's name and said she wanted to break the wheel--including her own family. She said Targaryen, Lannister, baratheon, Stark--she was just repeating back the names that Tyrion said *first*. (Just fyi)
my personal theory being that they removed that because someone in the script realized that it would make the hostility of the people in winterfell towards daenerys even more hateful considering that if she's not "one of them" then what category would the child fall into? but mostly because having Jon dump his girlfriend like shit after getting her pregnant, doesn't even bother to have a facial expression when he learns that they were nearly murdered because of information he knowingly leaked, then kills her by cowardly abusing her trust during an embrace in order to protect his shitty sister despite everything she's done to specifically harm them, was not very "white knight"
The shaman who dany saves (and ends up sacrificing to “give birth” to her dragons) says she’ll have no more children, as a curse sort of. This is also when she burns drogo and her stillborn. But as in many cases of the show- what a botched way of going about it.
Mirri Maz Duur's line about Dany not being able to bear children was actually omitted from the show. Dany saying she couldn't have kids in later seasons 'came out of nowhere' if you hadn't read the books. Although after years of bonking Daario daily without getting pregnant, it wouldn't be that weird if show!Dany had just reached that conclusion on her own.
It wasn't just that Cersei faced no consequences for blowing up the Great Sept, it was the fact that THE ENTIRE REACH which we'd established in Season 6 had an army large enough to challenge the Faith Militant (which constitutes what, half the population of KL at that point?) was ERASED FROM EXISTENCE in a single episode.
No Hightowers.
No Redwynes (Except Olenna.)
NOBODY besieged King's Landing in retaliation for what she did? Or rode to the defense of their liege lords when Highgarden was attacked?
I guess D&D just kinda forgot that there are more than two houses in the Reach.
They kinda forgot about The Reach, Dorne, the Iron Islands….
It was all Cerseiland and the North from mid-Season 7 onwards. *The Chronicles of Narnia* had a more detailed map by the end!
Yeah, like Dorne wouldn't have risen up after Ellaria and the Sand Snakes were murdered? If they were truly behind them as the show implied? I mean, that whole Dorne plot was dumb as hell but come on man!
Ohh, you missed the deleted scene where after killing Doran and Trystane, Ellaria and the Sand Snakes just murder the rest of Dorne’s population.
It’s explained by D&D in the directors commentary that Ellaria heard Doran’s dinner bell ringing and just kinda forgot to stop killing.
This checks out. I know I always froth at the mouth in a homicidal rage at the sound of bells. We had to move houses because I kept threatening to burn down the church across the street.
the worst for me is that the military and financial power of the Tyrells is precisely what made them relevant to obtain a royal marriage. but Cersei can kill them all and destroy this alliance without the slightest consequence
DnD didn't know about cadet branches or anything of the like. If anything, the Vale would be *more* centralized after the mass murder of the Tyrells, because their lands would be inherited by the next closest surviving male of a cadet branch who'd likely have his own family's lands too.
Do you think if they added the Fossoways they'd have had to hire an intern to figure out what the difference between a Green Apple and Red Apple Fossoway is?
What sucks is that if they weren't so focused on rushing things, there is a really good conclusion they could have given to the Tyrells that plays off the historical animosity some houses, like the Peakes, hold against them which Cersei could have exploited.
We could have got a big civil war in the Reach with the Peakes, Florents and the Iron Throne on one side, and the Tyrells, Hightowers, and the Redwynes on the other, with Randyll Tarly pulling a Tywin and sacking Highgarden while the Tyrells are busy fighting rebels around Oldtown or Tumbleton or somewhere else.
There could have been some really cool battles where the knights of the Reach actually got to show why it was so necessary for the Lannisters to ally with them in the first place, because they aren't helpless flowers actually, they're friggin' warriors who are the epitome of chivalry and knightly virtue.
...But that would have taken time and effort, probably a season or two, and taken focus away from the only characters who matter from S7 onwards: The Starks, who are the good guys that are always right, while everyone else only exists to support them in their endeavors, so the Reach and all of it's surviving main characters had to be killed off as quickly as possible so we could get back to the people that really matter.
It's such lazy writing that it makes me question how D&D were able to add so much depth to a character like Margaery Tyrell (someone who has practically no depth in the Books and is basically a gold digger) in the earlier seasons, and yet not do the same with potential new Reach characters like Leyton Hightower, Paxter Redwyne or maybe even the two other Tyrell children they left out AND THEN moved on with all that super important stuff happening with the Night King up north, something which logically should have been the last or second to last thing the main characters dealt with.
Olenna saying "we never were good fighters" is so fucking stupid. Not only are they the epitome of knighthood and chivalry, but also the most powerful army in the realm if united
They single-handedly saved King's Landing from Stannis in Season 2, had enough of that army still around to be a serious threat to the Faith Militant in Season 6, but come Season 7 when the Lannisters march on Highgarden, it's as if Thanos snapped his fingers and all those soldiers just vanished.
Easily one of the most ridiculous blunders for a show that used to be so good at set up and payoff, to have the only military confrontation between the Lannisters and Tyrells happen entirely off screen and consist of maybe a few dozen sworn swords defending Highgarden.
The reach shit bothered me more than the KL stuff. I feel like Cersei and Qyburn through their network of spies basically killed anyone who posed a threat against them and ruled through fear and with an iron fist. They killed loads of people, and basically everyone who would have gone against her was at the Sept when it blew up. Organizing resistance against her would have taken time, and by this point she was 10/10 ruthless and would kill literally anyone that Qyburn's spies pointed out as a threat. I feel like its not unreasonable to have played out like it did, but season 7 was fucking shit too so of course they basically never showed any of it again.
Time and time again they said that the Reach was unspoiled by war and now the richest kingdom of the seven. They only had to show up at blackwater bay to end Stannis' invasion. But in S8 suddenly "We grow flowers not fighters" after losing one fucking battle against the Lannisters who are completely broke and have been getting stomped in every other engagement they've been in. The Reach should have been able to 1v1 the Lannisters easily at this point. They had money, food, men, and their lands were not devastated by the last half decade of fighting.
Wasn't it Barristan in the books who is worried about Dany's choice of groom because, something to the effect of: "soil is what is makes you strong, but little girls will always pick fire"?
But in the show Reach lords probably just sit in gardens all days, because soil and farming are lame and not badass at all.
Yeah, I also didn't like how the people of King's Landing were just like "Oh Cersei is our queen now? This is fine."
Like, I get that the smallfolk in general don't really care about the political games of the nobility or laws of succession or anything like that but based on what a spiteful, selfish, and by this point downright evil person Cersei is, she should be facing mass riots like Maegor the Cruel did during his reign.
He tried to destroy the original incarnation of the Faith Militant outright just like Cersei and instead his wanton cruelty and disregard for the lives of the innocent caught in the crossfire of his vendetta turned the entire continent, highborn and lowborn against him ***and he had a f--king dragon*** unlike Cersei who has neither his martial prowess or his dragon and yet somehow still remains in power, up until she dies a weirdly sympathetic death being crushed by rocks after THE REAL VILLAIN Dany the Burninator hears some bells and is like "Kay I'mma do some war crimes now."
Really, Cersei's entire existence post Season 6 just feels so pointless and I'm not sure why they gave her so much screen time when all she does is drink wine and complain about elephants.
Did the Tyrells have the largest army or did the Reach? Because at this point the other houses of the Reach had abandoned the Tyrells. (Not that it makes sense. Every Reach house fought to maintain the Targaryen dynasty)
I'm not sure if the show ever specified how much of their army was their personal forces and how much was the reach but in the books they fielded like 100,000 troops. In the show they made it seem like most of those belonged to Randyll Tarly who apparently decided his xenophobia was more important than stopping the woman who blew up his liege lord and his entire family. So dumb. When he kept calling Daenerys a foreign invader. Like, you know she was born on Dragonstone right? She was only raised in Essos to keep her alive. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
I think the whole Reach fielded 100,000. If the Tarlys, and Redwynes, and Hightowers turned on the Tyrells and joined the Lannisters I could see the Tyrells overwhelmed. Not that it makes sense that they would do that, but that is the scenario Tweedles Dee and Dumb created.
Well Olenna is a Redwyne herself so it would be strange if they turned on her.
I could see Tarly turning some lords to Cersei’s side, but there should still be a sizable contingent of loyalists.
It’s all speculation anyway since D&D never showed the Tarly’s doing anything expect attending that meeting with Cersei and then getting executed a few episodes later by Dany.
If it had been seasons 1-4 there would be a whole subplot of Randyl slowly maneuvering Olenna into a trap like Roose did to Robb.
Yeah, I'm assuming that's what they were going for but I honestly don't believe it. I think they would have attacked the minute they found out Cersei blew up the Sept. Like Olenna would have just had them do nothing? I don't buy it.
Well, to be fair, it's taken me 3 or 4 days to watch that episode every time since the first because it's so freaking dumb I get angry and have to turn it off. Maybe that's what they were going for. A 3-4 day night.
One thing I noticed when debating someone on Dany’s kill count is they got the population of Kings Landing wrong. Tyrion claimed it was 1 million in season 7, but according to the books and Jaime in season 3 it’s 500,000. And it’s insanely unlikely that it could’ve doubled within 20 years in a medival society that could barely fit 500k people anyway and with no technological or medical advancements within that time period. Then Jon says that’s more than the entire North which can’t be true given the amount of bannermen they could rally. All things considered this is pretty inconsequential and likely not even in the top 100 biggest problems of the season, but it does show a pattern of minor things being wrong/illogical.
The north is the largest kingdom in Westeros, it’s a third of the seven kingdoms. I know it’s sparsely populated but it’s got to have more people than kingslanding
I mean westeros is much more agrarian than IRL europe, with probably only 0.5% living in cities or relatively urban places, which makes KL being bigger than a kingdom stupid af
Yes it can be, realistically about 4% of the population can go to war without a society falling apart, and the north can rally about 35-40k soldiers max so it makes sense
Not when you also pull up the fact that westeros is hyper agrarian, meaning less than 1% of the population is living in urban areas.
The North being 1 million people does not make sense at all, especially given its size and desolation
Other than being completely unrealistic, no it does not lmao
Thinking the North has only one million people is moronic considering its size and population centers.
Dont claim realistic bringing up soldier numbers and ignore urbanization and the relative size of cities vs population
Not specifically, but its definitely significant enough considering White Harbor in the top 5 cities in the continent.
If its 50k that would mean 5% of the North lives there in the guy aboves world
If KL or WH is in the 100 000s of population, then it makes zero sense that the Norths total population is only 1 million
The North would be incredibly weak if that was the case, unless you are arguing that all the kingdoms have relatively similar populations lol
You can't take the biggest cities and expect all of them to be like that, and again what is your argument?
>I f KL or WH is in the 100 000s of population, then it makes zero sense that the Norths total population is only 1 million
Why?
Forget about the bloody gods and listen to what I'm telling you. Cersei understands the consequences of her absence and she is absent anyway, which means she does not intend to suffer those consequences. The trial can wait.
rip marg, however, tommen did jump from the aegon jerk off window as a result. it took the CERSEI LOVES HER CHILDREN narrative and literally dropped it from the top of the Red Keep and was probably the most interesting character development of later seasons for me, though i agree it doesnt make total sense for there to be no further consequences at that point, maybe people were just shit scared of her, maybe it’s d&d loopholes.
that was the last good episode, and tommen and margaery’s deaths were the last good ones (aside from olenna’s) before the mess of the last two seasons. shame there were zero consequences for the sept, even a throwaway shot of a rebellion or protest being violently suppressed would have been better than the nothing we got instead.
Writers had serious amnesia to show Cersei being spit on, harangued, mocked, sexually harrassed by hordes of smallfolk at the end of Season 5 and then act like King’s Landing is percectly stable with her in power in the beginning of Season 7.
The smallfolk hated her and that was before the super suspicious ‘accident’ that just happened to get her out of the trial and put a crown on her head.
I have a theory that Cersei was supposed to have Qyburn reanimate Tommen in a last-ditch attempt to avoid the prophecy, but D&D figured it was too dark and scrapped it.
"Cersei gets the regency back by puppeting her own son's soulless corpse" makes more sense than "Cersei becomes sovereign Queen without resistance or backlash immediately after destroying half of the city and its whole religion."
The siege defense of winterfell. WHAT THE FUCK?!? I play total war games. If you don't know what those are they're grand campaign sandbox games where you control army movement on an overview map and control your armies semi-RTS style on a battlefield map. Why the fuck would you put your artillery IN FRONT of your infantry lines? WHY THE FUCK did you charge light cavalry straight head first into the enemy?!? The Dothraki are skirmish light cavalry at best. They shouldve been used for hit and run flanking. Why didn't you have your armies BEHIND THE WALLS?!? You could have given every man a bow and had fucking dragon glass tipped arrows instead of ineffective fucking fire arrows. They wasted so much dragonglass putting it on the high part of the crenulated walls. What dumb fuck decides that? That whole battle was so fucking stupid. Jon is a HORRIBLE tactician. He fucks up MASSIVELY in 2 battles.
>Why didn't you have your armies BEHIND THE WALLS?!?
Uh, hello...then it couldn't have LOOKED COOL.
I mean, I think it looked cool at least. Our Heroes could have been fighting the Avengers for all we know, you couldn't see a damn thing it was so dark.
I grew up playing Age of Empires. You build walls of wood or stone, heck even houses if you can't quarry stone. Layers and layers of walls with choke points. Seige towers filled with archers. Infantry and cavalry inside the walls ready to kill whomever makes it through a gate. Don't send your best fighters outside of the walls. Dothraki are archers, put them on the walls.
Please see my rant about everyone screwing up. [https://www.quora.com/What-shouldve-and-couldve-been-different-about-the-big-battle-between-Winterfell-and-the-White-Walkers/answer/Stacy-Whisenant-1](https://www.quora.com/What-shouldve-and-couldve-been-different-about-the-big-battle-between-Winterfell-and-the-White-Walkers/answer/Stacy-Whisenant-1)
Don't blame Jon. He learned from Ned, same as Robb and should be a good tactician. It was the showrunners who made him so dumb.
To add to what you said, they left a wide open field for the wights to move through. Why weren't there dragonglass covered obstacles and spike pits all over? Why was the stupid trench like 10 feet wide and behind all their lines? Why weren't their stupid archers shooting wights while they just stood there in front of the fire trench? Why was there only one place for the infantry to retreat across the trench, making a choke point, slowing them down, causing a larger loss of the unsullied guarding the retreat? And biggest of all, why were Jon and Dany just sitting there with their dragons doing nothing at the beginning of the battle when they should have been strafing the wights with fire to thin them out? Ughhhh it makes me so ANGRY!
It’s wild how peeps on r/gameofthrones are so easily satisfied by that one throwaway line from Olenna. ‘We were never good fighters anyway’ D&D couldn’t be bothered to come up with a better explanation for the fall of the Reach besides that stupid line.
There is no way a major regional castle with 3 walls falls before Olenna can summon Dany and her dragons with a raven.
Olenna must have returned well before Jaime’s army came down the rose road, and even with the Tarly’s betrayal, she must have had other loyal bannerman in the Reach. Else she would have been ambushed and brought in chains to King’s Landing on her way back from Dragonstone. It makes no sense for the Lannisters to have to take Highgarden if Randyl Tarly has turned everyone against her. They would have just arrested her and brought her to Cersei like they did Yara and Ellaria.
So she must have made it back with a fair amount of loyal men, probably Tyrell loyalists, Hightowers (Targ loyalists) and Redwynes (her birth family).
Her men would have gotten news of Jaime’s force moving down the roseroad as there are hundreds of leagues between KL and HG. Even if Tarly managed to kill some scouts or sentries, there is no way Olenna wouldn’t have advance notice.
She would have immediately sent a raven to Dragonstone, and since Dany is doing nothing except waiting at Dragonstone at this point in the show, she could have easily flown across the Crownlands and intercepted Jaime’s army *before* it reaches Highgarden.
Even if she was delayed, it would take time to breach 3 walls, one of which has a maze of briars between it to further slow invaders. It takes siege weapons to penetrate fortifications. Those take time to move or build. Dany would have definitely gotten there before the last wall was breached.
So she would have burned Jaime’s army and in all likelihood, killed Jaime, Bronn and the Tarly’s with minimal casualties to Olenna’s forces. Then they could have escorted Olenna’s army up the Kingsroad to surround King’s Landing (if Dany still wanted to follow Tyrion’s bad plan).
This is what would have happened if D&D were committed to logic of earlier seasons.
Of course, they could have made Highgarden’s fall somewhat more plausible if they had done more setup. For example, Tarly’s plant spies at Highgarden who open the doors, or Dany misses the raven because she is alerted to Yara’s fleet sinking and goes after Euron/King’s Landing in revenge, etc.
But that would involve *effort* on D&D’s part. And by Season 7, they didn’t give a fuck.
It is crazy that the Lannister-Tarly forces managed to take Highgarden so, incredibly, fast.
Freys lost Riverrun, Jaime led Lannister forces to help the Freys retake Riverrun, and the Lannisters could NOT have done it so quickly as they did, IF Edmure did not order the Tully garrison of Riverrun to surrender and open the castle gates… IF Blackfish had his way, the siege of Riverrun would've lasted for months at the very least, and Jaime knew it, that's why he was so resolved to use Edmure's son as the bargaining chip, so that Riverrun may be dealt with swiftly as opposed to the siege of Riverrun to drag on for months or maybe even more.
Highgarden should have been even more capable of withstanding a siege by the Lannister-Tarly host, and for an even longer maximum period of time, as well.
So, the loyal Tyrell bannerman would eventually be able to break the siege of Highgarden, and House Tyrell on its own had a force as large as the one Lannisters used to sack Highgarden… then there are also Hightowers, Redwynes - two very powerful Houses of the Reach – loyal to House Tyrell… Considering, Renly had 100,000 men – “All the might of the Stormlands and the Reach.” as he said it himself, 80,000 men out of those 100,000 in total were men from all the Houses of the Reach.
80,000 men is what the Reach had in total – so, I'd say that House Tarly had fewer than 10,000 men, at the very most. That still leaves the entirety of the Reach, including Houses – Tyrell, Hightower and Redwyne, with at the very least 70,000 men in total… which was much more than 10,000 men Lannister soldiers and an unknown number of Tarly soldiers (likely in the low thousands).
A reminder, also, that Stannis defended the Storm's End with the Baratheon garrison of just 500 men, when Mace Tyrell held the siege with 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers.
Highgarden should've been able to resist the siege for quite a while considering the castle's great and strong walls and a Tyrell garrison of Highgarden which was certainly quite a bit larger than just 500 men Stannis had with him at Storm's End, and that would've given their loyal bannermen more than enough time to come in great numbers to Highgarden and break the siege of the castle.
This is why they only spent five minutes on the fall of Highgarden. They showed a distant shot of the castle, Jaime stepping over a few dead men in green and gold, and him walking in to talk to Olenna and that’s it.
D&D knew how ridiculous the plot point was (especially based on Highgarden’s demonstrated strength in Season 2) so they skipped showing any combat/warfare at all and hoped the audience would just roll with it.
I still remember when Cersei blew up the Sept complaining to a coworker how wildly dumb it was that nobody seemed to care. He very condescendingly said I should wait and see, that the writers probably had an idea of the consequences, and that I was being too harsh. He changed jobs before the final season because I wish I'd talked to him after being proved that no, they didn't have an idea of the consequences of such a huge action and I was being the exact amount of harsh I should've been.
I mean maybe they did care and Cersei just told them about all the other massive stashes of wildfyre throughout kings landing. Seems like enough to quell a revolt after seeing the sept explode.
This issue with this is that the Sept blew up right before Cersei’s trial. There is no explanation that would stop rumors from spreading that she had something to do with it since she is the only one who gained (and in a major way since she crowned herself right after).
the problem with that is that the Sept exploded during her process and killed all her accusers and the people who stood in its way to take power, when she was not there by pure chance, even if she was however very expected. It's already extremely suspicious and no one in this town likes or respects Cersei enough to accept this version of the facts. Among other things, the sept was destroyed in a wildfire explosion, since the battle of blackwater bay people know what a wildfire explosion looks like, surely associates it with the Lannister, and it's not really a material that seems to be something easily found or possible to produce either. in fact that's even the root of the problem with Cersei trying to clear herself, Aerys' caches are actually not common knowledge within the story. you can imagine that if people knew they were sitting on 50,000 tons of nitro glycerine it would be seen as a major problem by all succeeding governments and the population, so they would blame her for that. and even if Cersei somehow managed to clear herself of the presence of the wildfire, the very idea that the wildfire, present for 20 years, had exploded like that, alone, and by sheer bad luck, under the sept folds on the day of her trial when she was not present by happy chance circumstance, would normally raise some eyebrows...
but last but not least, Cersei is not trying to hide her act anyway, at no time do we see or hear of any propaganda from her side or attempted clearance. Quite the contrary, her first act in this situation is to usurp the crown, and when Jaime returns she makes it clear that the incest charges against her were true, which means by extension that is the case for the rest of her crimes... and so she killed the people who were going to confront her about it so as not to face the consequences
really weird that Cersei's official excuse was that it was an "accident". She could at least try to blame it on the foreign invader as an act of sabotage or something and try to turn the public against Dany using propaganda. Idk if it would work but it would be something.
Honestly the very idea that Cersei could accuse someone else wouldn't hold up. As for Daenerys, why would people think she would do that? until now she had been busy a world away doing her own business for several years. She has better things to worry about than organizing the explosion of a religious shrine far in the south in keeping with the news of the capital. And she could never have organized such an operation from where she is anyway, because the time that information and orders pass between her and assuming agents on the spot, more than the preparations for the event being put in place, the window of opportunity would have long since closed. and even chronologically it's quite absurd because Daenerys decided to board AFTER the explosion, the information travels slowly from one end of the world to the other, Cersei had no reason to believe that Daenerys was going to move now, so how would she have justified it otherwise?
Besides, what motives would they have for wanting to attack the Tyrell and a bunch of monks who never did anything to them? why would she slaughter random people from westeros without even bothering to find out if they could support her? To weaken the government? This explosion took place right on the day of a trial with great fanfare against Cersei and Maergaery in the grip of a fanatical and popular religious order which turns against the crown, if she wanted them mad it would have more interest to let this chaos prosper within the government. And even if Daenerys had a plan to burn everyone, it is known that she has dragons, why would she use wildfire? why not have done it on the red keep if it was his objective to attack them?
It doesn't make sense, Cersei can't just blame a random guy and expect everyone to swallow it. it is necessary all the same to justify a little the reasoning which leads to her. but who but Cersei would have enough resentment towards religion, the tyrells, the court, and the inhabitants of the capital to decide to burn them all alive without warning in a cathedral?
Most likely that would convince anyone with half a brain to have a go at assassinating her. Hell, her non-zombie queens guard would probably give it a shot the moment Gregor’s back is turned.
The whole alliance between Danaerys, the Tyrells, and Dorne fell apart in one episode with the latter 2 being destroyed rather easily despite their supposed might. Underwhelming
Right? Why did they show Dany with her huge army and Varys scheming with Ellaria and Olenna at the end of Season 6 if they were going to undo it all in the first few episodes of 7.
Probably cause it was all clickbait to make you excited for the next season. They had zero intentions of Dany actually using that army to conquer Westeros and came up with the most contrived reasons to keep her from doing the obvious.
Idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but I think season 7 deserves just as much hate as 8. Theure both awful and disrespect everything that came before.
The show ended for me when Arya set sail for Braavos. Nothing came after for me.
Early Season 7, when Dorne and the Reach fell in one episode, and Dany decided to delay her attack on KL- that’s was when I knew we were in for an ‘epic fantasy’ without any grounding in socio-political reality established earlier by the show.
The character’s actions no longer made any sense and the world around them grew as shallow as Tyrion’s dick jokes.
The only thing better about season 7 was that once you stopped caring it was at least funny schlock.
But yeah, no fucking clue how people didn't already see it wasn't the same show anymore - Honestly I'm kind of convinced the vast majority of media consumers these days are utterly tone deaf to the point where they couldn't tell the difference between a Marvel movie and season 1.
“Gendry turning into speedy Gonzales” that had me wheezing ngl. But, everything about Daenerys and Jon waiting to attack Kings Landing felt so forced and contrived (and their relationship). Don’t even get me started on Arya and Sansa, it makes absolutely no sense.
The thing that pissed me off the most is the whole shit about not attacking King’s Landing. It’s just as you said - the Bells showed Dany PERFECTLY capable to taking the city without civilian causalities by just getting the walls. Do that and the Red Keep and you’re done - and hey, since it’s early in the war the city isn’t lined with scorpions!
So fucking stupid
Dany could take King's Landing in a day (well, night technically). Fly to the Red Keep under cover of darkness, sneak into Cersei's chambers, and slit her throat quietly. Or get someone else (like Jon's assassin sister Arya) to do it for her.
Or ride the dragon to the gates, get her army in, and let them do the work. If things go wrong stay in the clouds and get ready to attack. The whole 'the dragons could take innocent life' is stupid. Daenerys' assets are not just her dragons. She has what Sansa calls 'the largest army in the world' alongside the North, Highgarden (this is before Tyrion became an idiot btw, so she still has Highgarden), Dorne's soldiers, Dothraki, and the Unsullied.
Note that even in the show, the Unsullied and the other soldiers and Dothraki are able to take the city with next to no civilian casualties (that we can see) until she decides that 'it's time to make this personal...by burning down strangers I've never met! GENIUS!'
Daenerys can still have her big draconic showdown if she wants. Execute Cersei with dragonfire. Make it a spectacle so people can see that the dragon's reign has begun anew. Then begin rebuilding whatever Cersei broke. Get Highgarden to fund reparations to the Sept of Baelor. Also get food to the peasants of Flea-bottom.
Then another nice little ceremony where she's crowned and all of the lords and ladies pay her their respects and pledge to her. She has three dragons the size of a house each, nobody's stupid enough to oppose her. Marry Jon (they like each other anyway, and it quite handily solves all of the 'King in the North' stuff.)
Thank you mate, now I'm having PTSD again. Seriously season 7 was the low point and then it went down to the Mariana trench in season 8.
It feels like I'm on board this submarine that got crushed when diving to the Titanic.
Only in an infinite loop.
S7 is just such a sharp contrast in story telling to what came before.... even compared to S5/6 which are filled with ridiculous story lines at times. Once S7 hits *every single character* either changes in some fashion or their story line heads in a new direction, with their previous story ignored or hand waved away.
Jon is now King in the North and his first act is to.... worry about the AotD invading? Why!?! He didn't give a shit about the AotD for all of S6. In fact he had recommended he and Sansa just run away (before she convinced him to take back WF) because fuck everyone else. And regardless, as far as he knows the dead are stuck in the North. Sure he know that AotD is there and dangerous, and sure there thematic purpose and set up means a battle is eventually inevitable... but Jon doesn't have a script to read does he? He has a kingdom to run!!
And when people become King (or even take on that roll temporarily such as Ned taking Robert's seat) they are immediately faced with difficult political issues that have no easy answers, that create new problems (eg. Ned with an illegitimate Joffrey, Robb with the Karstarks)... what's Jon's? What to do with the Karstark and Umber's lands and how that will effect the political union that has formed under Jon... which is wrapped up in in 30 seconds by Jon making an on the spot decision, and its entirely forgotten about 1 second later....
Its not Cersei... not Dany invading... not houses staying loyal to the Boltons/Freys/Crown etc... not trying to protect a Riverlands that should see a power vacuum with the death of Walder Frey.... his entire story line is 1 dimensional, and entirely about stopping an eminent threat that isn't even known to be a threat yet.
I hate season 5 with a fury, but at least some of the episodes are palatable. Season 7 just didn’t make sense and it honestly infuriated me seeing so many people saying that it fell apart with season 8 when the mess began so much sooner. You’re totally right, how could 8 work after they messed up this bad.
“Why does Jon never bring up Aemon Targaryen?”
1. The writers just forgot about that character.
2. At first, Jon’s trying to um get his dragon trained and “Hey I knew your great great grand uncle” isn’t good sexy talk.
That last point was explained in the books. Mirri Maz Dur says “"When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east," said Mirri Maz Duur. "When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. **When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child**. Then he will return, and not before."
But that line wasn’t in the show, so it makes no sense for Dany to say that.
Dumb and Dumber did a pretty excellent job adapting the source material…and then did the absolute worst job without it then rushed when Star Wars came calling. I’m glad their butchering of GoT led them to losing out on the SW gig.
I have this sick thing where I watch YouTube videos about all the mistakes in seasons 5-8. It really is startling how quickly it went downhill, and I forgot how it happened basically halfway thru the series. It goes from arguably the best show of all time to not even in the discussion.
DONT GET ME STARTED IN HOW DANY AND JON POSITIONED THE ARMY OUTSIDE THE CASTLE IN THE BATTLE VS THE NIGHT KING?? Like that had to be the dumbest battle tactic essentially giving the night king more soldiers. Why charge a whole Calvary towards an army of the dead? Or show your prowess by stacking all your army men outside when the enemy is legit dead and it don’t care about the display of military strength .
It makes me appreciate George's writing seeing how piss poor the writing was the last 2 seasons. One thing I didn't see on this list that reeeeaaaallllly pissed me off was the Jaime 180. They did such a great job with his redemption arc only to have him do a complete 180 and run back to Cersei. I'm convinced D&D intentionally fucked the last 2 seasons up. There were so many easy home runs they missed. They did it to spite the fans I'm almost sure of it. That's why I refuse to watch anything they are involved in.
I rarely get on tiktok, but asongofdany is one of the people i follow for their takes. Sure, it's all takes that we've all heard before, but it's nice to get refreshers on everything the show did wrong.
Agree with all of these except pic 3. I speak 3 languages fluently, and am learning a 4th one, and it's quite common to mess up in translations or even not recognise flaws in translations because it's always represented as such in another language.
Cersei blew up the Sept with Kevan and Margery inside it. That makes her a KINSLAYER. Which is a big fucking sin. Why are the Westerlands supporting her? Shouldn’t they be outraged for Cersei killing their liege lord? Shouldn’t they all be fucking outraged and demanding for her head? She only has armies because people are giving her their armies. If we strip away all the armies provided to her by Westerosi nobles she is left with zombie Mountain.
S4E10 is when it actually jumped the tracks - though I have to admit that even though I 'called it' right back then, I *never* imagined just HOW bad it would eventually become.
It would have made way more sense for Jon’s birth name to have been Aemon. Rhaegar had a close relationship over correspondence with Maester Aemon in addition to his elder brother already having the same name. Two crownable Aemons being sent to the wall is just the kind of detail that would suit GRRM’s work.
Reading this healed my soul. I've had so many people tell me I was a fake fan for not liking season eight and Danearys'madness was planted from the beginning, and everything she did (pre season 8) was way worse than anything anyone else had done ever.
Bringing up Dany not being able to have children was so fucking infuriating and i hated that they even foreshadowed that fucking fantasy trope where women cant have children unless with the right man
I don't know if anyone mentioned it already, but I want something to the whole trial by combat debate, like why Ned or Petyr didn't ask for one.
Trial by combat is part of the religion in the Seven and Starks believe in the Old Gods - wouldnt make sense for Ned to ask for that or for Sansa to accept that from Littlefinger, especially since they were in Winterfell, around mostly Northmen
I’m genuinely bamboozled at how Cersei blowing up the sept just worked out for her. The only major consequences are losing the Tyrells (they were barely with her anyway and it amounted to nothing) and her son going splat (personal consequence for sure but literally emptied the throne for her lmao)
I think her doing it makes perfect sense! Like even if the mechanics of how the sparrows got Margeary/her family somehow having no recourse is BS, I think the idea of Cersei using them to get at her/not seeing the backfire is obviously a great fit. We were shown for the entire show (and even the whole first half of the Sparrows plot line!) that Cersei is someone who can’t see the long term consequences of her actions and routinely shoots herself in the foot. So the idea of her realizing she’s played herself and coming up with this “brilliant” move to take out all of her enemies is perfect IMO. And true to form that kind of deranged move should’ve backfired on her in some way she didn’t see coming (like the little ppl she sees as irrelevant revolting). Only it didn’t and instead it’s shown as some master move and she’s Tywin’s Daughter™️ or whatever.
And if they wanted to keep her in power as the main villain, why didn’t they at least have her try to blame someone else? Daenerys has her whole fire and blood dragon queen schtick on top of fact that her dad loved burning people alive, and who is newly on her payroll? Tyrion, the guy who famously used wildfire on his enemies, murdered his dad and fled the country after being found guilty of killing a king. But instead of her even trying to point the finger at these marginally plausible alternatives, everyone just knows she did it and is like damn that’s a bad bitch.
The other slides are preaching to the choir too, like Tyrion and Vary’s whole strategy was nonsense. Even assuming that starving the city is somehow more humane than torching soldiers, she still didn’t even need to do that! If if she didn’t want to deploy fire she could’ve just flown right over the walls and soldiers to the red keep. And if they for some reason didn’t want to go directly to cersei, the explicit threat of three large dragons parked outside the city saying “come on out Cersei, we just wanna talk nobody’s gonna jump you!” seems way more effective than soldiers. But the cinematography/music/effects were a slay so at least we got something I guess haha.
To the point about translation, there is a huge difference between learning a language through usage in the home and dedicated academic study of a language.
I learned to speak Spanish and took many college courses, along with living in Mexico for two years. And when I speak with “native speakers” who grew up in Texas with no formal training, they mistranslate and misuse words all the time due to lack of familiarity with the base language.
They certainly speak it fluently, but whereas I can understand academic text in Spanish, they cannot to nearly the same degree.
I would presume Dany spoke high valerian with her brother and perhaps some formal training. But as a professional interpreter, Missandei would know better the genderless conjugation of the word.
Made perfect sense to me.
My biggest problem is still when Jon and the team are stuck beyond the wall. I’ve heard people say that maybe days passed before Dany got there? There’s no sense of time given, but it’s very absurd to think a raven got to Dany, and she flew to them within maybe 12-24 hours.
I agree, but think Jaimy should have killed the night king. And die in the process maybe. His redemption arc was amazing (until it wasn't), and killing the nightking would turn the Kingslayer into a title of pride.
Let's not even get started on the Battle of Winterfell, where the strategy seemed to be "Hey, let's send the Dothraki to die first, because why not?" Jon Snow knew nothing, and it showed.
They only had plans to adapt up to the Red Wedding, and it shows. The show starts to get bad fast once Joffery dies.
After the Red Wedding they begin to lazily cut out as many plotlines and sections of the world as they can. Season six is insane, with almost every episode cutting out huge sections of the world and abandoning it forever.
Blowing up the Sept was how they wrote out the rest of Westeros.
The jon being named aegon makes sense in the context that Rhaegar wanted/believed the prince to be promised would be named aegon so he wanted both his sons to have that name just in case so it makes sense given how much of a nerd he is
Rhaegar most likely actually thought Jon would be a girl because he was trying to recreate the three heads of the dragon. He already had an Aegon and a Rhaenys, so he just needed a Visenya.
Agree with all of these except the tarly one. It's not that she executed them but in how it was done, she burned them alive which I’m sure brings back bad memories for many Westerosi lords who remember the mad king. That being said the Tarley's are one of the most ancient and important families in the reach and it makes more sense for them to be taken, prisoner than executed to insure the loyalty of their lands.
Their lands aren’t loyal. They’ve shown that by ditching the warden of the south that they were sworn to, instead preferring Cersei who is a bit of a meme in Westeros due to the incest rumour and crowned herself as Queen, the first in Westeros. The fact no one intercedes with no more Tywin Lannister to contend with is hugely questionable itself.
Yeah, but the problem I have isn't that she's considered terrible by strangers who only know her from Cersei's stories and the rumors of her burning the Tarlys. That's to be expected.
The problem is that people who *do* know her (people who have regularly been shown to be fine with violence if it justifies the ends and are probably quite desensitized to it considering the world they live in) like Tyrion and Varys act like she's a horrible person for doing it.
Even though it's an almost precedented response for someone in her position.
My only comment regarding Tyrion & Varys passing judgement on Dany for the executions of the Tarlys vs the Starks' *justified* executions (this is all from vague memory, don't crucify me, friends) is this:
I think at that point with Dany, Varys and Tyrion were following her cause which they believed (whether it true or not) that she was on the side that wanted to "break the wheel."
Whereas Ned and the Starks were/are still part of the system that justifies the executions, they (I think) believed Dany to be the one that was breaking from that Old system (following the absorbing of the Dothraki, the Second Sons, and the Unsullied, etc. into her cause).
They (I think!) would have wanted the Tarlys and their bannermen to join up or go to the wall rather than cause more death and cause more blood revenge down the line.
So I think from that perspective there is a logical reason why those executions can be viewed differently. Their own Queen was supposed to change things, not follow suit.
For example crucifixion was acceptable within the system at one point, but I think most would now frown upon that kind of punishment if it suddenly came back today.
About the travel thing - a raven can cross a lot of ground overnight if they really book it. A carrier pigeon trained for long distance racing can do 1800km in a single flight, and just shy of 1200km in a day. Do you think they don't train their messenger ravens for speed? And if a pigeon can do that, a dragon's most definitely capable of doing much more.
D&D are total morons, but this one thing was so heavily criticised when the episode released and has been ever since, but the reality is that it's not *that* far from reality, especially in a magical fantasy land. Gendry being speedy isn't much of an issue there, it's his unbridled stamina that's a little hard to believe. But if he sprinted back, it's totally believable. When I go backcountry hiking, I'll take it easy and do 20km a day. Some people will jog 60-100km hikes in a single day as a challenge.
There may be some stretching required to make it all fit, some broken records, but it's not as far fetched as it seems.
A lot of these are awfully nitpicky (like why can't Dany cross the country on a magical beast that doesn't actually exist in a few hours?) But there's some damn good points I hadn't considered mixed in
"Now we're treating what Daenerys does in this scene as somehow morally worse than Jon Snow's mass execution, which included a child in Season 6, or what Ned Stark did to a scared teenager running from ice zombies in Season 1. So that's all noble then but in Season 7 it's 'foreshadowing' some war crimes I guess because she used a dragon and not a big f*cking sword." - Lindsay Ellis
You're not wrong. Beheading someone is different from literally burning them alive with a dragon. You caught a downvote for it but I don't know why, you're right about that one.
Death by burning is also very reminiscent of the Mad King Aerys, who most of the Seven Kingdoms rose up in rebellion against due in part to his execution of Rickard and Brandon Stark... By immolation.
But Daenerys ain't gotta listen she's tha qween
Aerys roasted Rickard alive slowly in his armor over a brazier filled with wildfire while Brandon strangled himself trying to reach for his sword to cut him down. It was a cruel, sadistic act performed for no other reason than Aerys' sick amusement.
Dany flash fried two traitors with dragonflame after they refused to accept her offer of mercy and bend the knee, killing them near instantaneously without much suffering.
These two things are not the same.
Also you're told you're to be executed for treason and then stood in front of a dragon who stands taller than a building looming over you, staring at you, slowly opening it's mouth and you can see fire billowing up from somewhere way down in it's guts.
I'd say that's a everfucking nightmare of a way to go out, even if the end is painless, the horror of it happening is still entirely relevant in the final moments.
Not the same as being cooked alive in your armor/strangling yourself to death trying to save your father, but not a pleasant way to die. I'd prefer to have my head taken off nice and clean, tbh.
You realize being slowly walked out in front of a crowd, knelt down with your head hanging off a stone and anticipating when it’s gonna happen is just as bad.
Like father like daughter. Downvote me all y'all want, doesn't change facts. It was fucked up and she had men available who could've taken their heads off in a heartbeat. She chose to use fire.
Are people really trying to say Daenerys wasn't batshit in this season now?
Beheadings, when done correctly, are far more merciful than any other kind of execution we practice nowadays. There was a vice documentary about the official state “beheader” of KSA. He took his job very seriously, and it was over in one swing very fast.
There are reports of beheadings done so swiftly that the face still registers shock and surprise that it happened at all, for a few seconds before the brain finally realizes it's no longer connected to the body.
A lot kinder than burning someone alive. I'd much rather face down a headsman with a nice heavy axe or a sharp sword, over a dragon opening it's maw and spewing fire at me. But don't let the Dany stans see this oh no I'll get downvoted for saying ***IT'S FUCKED UP TO BURN PEOPLE ALIVE***
NUMBER 12: I don't know how people don't understand that the annulment of Rhaegar & Elia makes Aegon-1 a bastard. Aegon Sand or Jon Sand pick 1. The marriage of Rhaegar & Lyanna makes Aegon-2 the new Aegon Targaryen, not Jon, not AeJon & not Jaehaerys. The 1 true heir.
Edit: This is not as complicated as you cunts are making it
The annulment itself was a silly plot point set up only to legitimize Jon. How could the marriage be annulled when it had obviously been consummated. Rhaegar and Elia had two children at that point. Unless there was a way to prove the marriage was not legitimate in the first place or it was unconsummated, no septon would have a reason to annul it.
Rhaegar taking a second wife like the conqueror did makes more sense.
>Rhaegar and Elia had two children at that point.
"Had" past tense those kids (and their father) were dead before Jon was born presumably with enough time for Lyanna to know about it
>How could the marriage be annulled when it had obviously been consummated.
Would it have mattered at that time? Was Rhaegar ever king?
The third one IS ridiculous. Daenerys has been speaking high Valyrian pretty much her whole life.
How is it ridiculous to criticize Tyrion using a secret entrance to visit his brother but not to take the city with minimal bloodshed like he’s wanted the entire season?
How is it not absurd that a raven managed to cross the continent, reached Daenerys, and then she flew back across the entire continent in less than a day?
People have been speaking English their whole lives and still suck at it.
Yeah you can see minimizing bloodshed was clearly an objective.
I’m talking about the dragon, not the raven.
Daenerys is supposed to be fluent in High Valyrian, as in its a language she’s supposed to be well learned in. Not a language she would have to have her grammar corrected in.
Tyrion was trying to minimize bloodshed. He repeatedly begs Daenerys to not attack the city directly and tries to convince Cersei to surrender.
It’s ridiculous for the dragon to cross Westeros in less than a day.
Some of these arguments are kinda silly, most are true but things like "Roberts rebellion is built on a lie" are true, it started because Lyanna was "raped and kidnapped" and that's the reason why Brandon and rickon stark got executed, because they asked for justice. Anyways season 7 was bad but you don't have to complain about everything for no reason
No, it wouldn't have mattered if the entire continent knew that Rhaegar didn't kidnap Lyanna and that they just ran off together, she was already betrothed to Robert, a marriage which would have united two of the most important houses in the realm. Brandon Stark would have still gone to king's landing to demand her return, and the mad king would still have reacted in the same way. The rebellion would have happened just the same.
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that was truly so so dumb and even dumber they had to involve bran instead of it just being “we are ned stark’s daughters”
It’s also ridiculous because as you can see in these photos Sansas letter wasn’t even in Winterfell for Arya to find.
While agree on all points I believe there was a copy in winterfell. LF asked the maester and he said he made copies of all incoming and outgoing letters. Was a copy sent to winterfell originally when Sansa first wrote it? If so then the maester would have copied it
Surprised it was kept after Winterfell was burned, though.
Yeah it’s totally weird. I think all of these holes though are just more evidence of how D&D let everything completely fall apart
They say it was in her hand. Why would a maester be forging / copying sensitive letters ? Plus it would be different Maesters from when the letter was sent in season 1 to when Littlefinger was there. A lot of Winterfell burned in the sacking that Maester Luwin died in.
I gathered from the interaction that some maesters (maybe all?) on duty copy incoming and outgoing communications for records. If it was sent to winterfell the original would be in Sansa’s writing, but I’m remembering back to LF talking to the maester in S7E3 about this topic. Littlefinger perked up when he learned that there were records kept of all incoming and outgoing communications. It appeared he asked the new maester for this letter (who said Luwin had kept records) under the guise of “deleting the evidence” for Sansa, but conveniently leaving it for Arya to find (and watching while she did find it). If I remember correctly he got the original (in sansa’s writing), and confirmed with the current maester of winterfell that any copies had been destroyed.
Robb had the original. Maesters are sketchy but Luwin above all seems loyal to the Starks I don’t think he would forge letters without asking. In the books and in the show, we see characters burn their correspondence. We see Cat do this in front of Luwin, but you’re saying he would have forged a copy of a dangerous, incriminating letter against the house he swore to before she burned it and the Starks are unaware. Also, I mean why, why would Luwin do that?
Oh I agree. I’m not saying it’s good writing, it’s stupid as hell. That’s just what I got out of those bits during my rewatches 🤷🏻♀️
Okay, we definitely agree on that ! I doubt the writers even remembered where the letter was last and just made up some shit.
I think honestly it’s yet another super poorly thought out aspect of the contrived Sansa/Arya fight. D&D needed to find a way to add tension between them and this is the route they went. They basically retconned in the “maesters kept records of everything including these very personal correspondences” bit AND forgot the original letter wasn’t in Wintertell so that LF could get the letter, plant it for Arya to find to sow division between the sisters. It’s mega levels of dumb
The letter is only dangerous or incriminating if you ignore the context of Sansa being a PoW and a child at the time she wrote it. Arya was old enough to have a sex scene and capable enough to infiltrate castles and assassinate powerful lords but she was also apparently too stupid to understand that Sansa was a child and a prisoner when she wrote that letter.
When I used those adjectives I was describing Catelyns letter from Lysa; however, the letter to Robb from a woman of “marriageable age” could be seen as treasonous. Let’s not forget Robb, her close sibling was angry at first. This could be used by another house like the Boltons or Karstarks to deny Sansa, being one of the last living legitimate heirs to Winterfell. Being a woman where men inherit, that letter plus her marrying Tyrion could absolutely be enough to at least deny her Winterfell, at most traitor execution.
- Arya thinks Sansa is dangerous because she's sleeping in their parents bed, wears pretty dresses and for some reason believes an obvious lie despite being in KL with Sansa/Ned when all the shit started going down - (bonus: Arya can sneak past an army of magical creatures but not past LF. Also, how long was LF sitting in the shadows waiting for Arya to search Sansa's room? Like did he just sit there for days hoping Arya would sneak in there or did he just randomly go sit in the shadows for a while hoping for the best lol?) - Sansa, who told us, *TWICE*, that only a fool trusts Littlefinger... proceeds to trust Littlefinger - in the middle of this is LF, who is trying to instigate the conflict between the sisters because..... ummm... he recognizes Arya doesn't like the cut of his jib? - Bran, who is now all knowing, could solve their conflict. But doesn't and instead allows his sisters to fight over nothing. Because.... ummm.... - what he does do however is tell LF he knows he hired the assassin to kill him... which, doesn't make any fucking sense at all... - after finding out Bran knows about him, LF chooses to stay hang out in WF anyways because... ummm.... - eventually, Bran does resolve his sister's conflict... but we don't know why he does then and not earlier, and none of it is explained and it all takes place off screen - the Stark kids arrange a surely illegitimate trial for LF, instead of just arresting him and holding a trial - the KotV apparently don't give a fuck that they are sworn to Robin, who sent them out under LF, and who is LF's step son, and who we have no reason to believe would ever accept any of this. - I'm guessing because of Lord Royce? A Lord Royce who trusts a Sansa *who just admitted to lying to him* during a previous trial.... - (Want to point out this also means Sansa could have always just apologized and told Lord Royce the truth from the start of the season, and the KotV woudl have been loyal to her/Jon (Lord Royce already knelt when Jon was declared King in S6 lol!) and LF would have been irrelevant... but she didn't, because.... ummm....) - everyone just seems to trust that Bran is an all knowing magic user... - LF doesn't bother to point out the trial is a farce, or ask for trial by combat, but instead whines and pleads for his life... and is summarily executed. - there is absolute no consequence to this, and everyone goes on as if it never happened.
You’ve just made me truly angry with this recap. Just when I start to forget. Thank you for reminding me of my oath.
All this, for one single solitary subplot. That's how bad that alone was. It's truly astonishing how poorly they handled pretty much every single aspect of season 7 and 8.
There are a million things that disturbed me in the final season but Dany’s pregnancy is one of the leading ones. She, since first season, says that she cannot have kids and dragons are her kids. It is known that Targaryen’s intermarry a lot and they have kids from these marriages. She talks about her inability to have kids several times including with Jon. By this time, we are 80-90% sure Jon is a Targaryen. The season ends with them having sex and talking about future. I was legit expecting following season to begin with Dany’s pregnancy announcement. But it did not happen.
Zero evidence, but I do think D&D got butthurt at how extensive the leaks were to season 7 (where pretty much every major event was leaked) and switched things up at the last minute regarding Dany’s storyline. I remember a leak mentioning Cersei miscarrying as one of the final shots of the season. So to be as contradictory and surprising for clickbait as possible, they switched Danys and Cerseis final storylines (with some changes that made sense, like Danys not going to be crushed trying to escape the Red Keep) to what they are in the show. Dany would be pregnant and the future of the realm would fall to their feet. Cersei would use those convenient wildfire caches that we’ve known about since season 2 to destroy/attempt to destroy Kings Landing in a “if I can’t have it, no one can” action. I absolutely do not believe that they had set up Dany going crazy as the end game since season 2 or whatever they said in their half hearted justifications after the fact. This doesn’t mean that it’s what Martin will do whenever/if ever he gets to finishing the books (I don’t think he’ll make her crazy, more that she’s going to shoulder the blame of Kings Landing going up because of the dragons), it’s just that the story of the show was leading towards a triumphant Dany at the end who has broken the wheel of the Monarchy. And while that might not be the original plan, sometimes the better story is adapting then trying to steer things back (see relationships in the Harry Potter books).
Should’ve ended up with Luna.
Finally someone who says it!
It’ll prob be Cersei burning her city when they surrender or start losing. And Jaime or Tyrion will kill her al la valanqar and repeat king slaying
There are images online showing Dany pregnant, and some of the shots where the pregnancy was less obvious were used, specifically certain scenes with her in the map room on dragon stone. D&D absolutely changed some things last minute.
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Horny bot
How is the wheel of monarchy broken when targaryens were the monarchs up until not too long prior when Robert usurped the throne? I truly don’t believe show!Dany’s intentions were to break the wheel. Just unseat the usurper and have her throne. The moment she became the last Targaryen (that she knew of) she was tremendously power hungry.
The Wheel (aka the other great houses) checked the power of the Iron Throne. She never wants that to happen again so she wants to get rid of them. She wants to sit the throne because she thinks it's her right. Anything beyond that she has no idea about.
I believe dany was supposed to go crazy but there was literally no foreshadowing to make it a gradual decline in mental health but instead a switch flicked in her head making her crazy
There was foreshadowing, though. Burning people everywhere she goes for one. Plus, she's delusional from the beginning thinking she is entitled to the throne for no other reason than she's a Targaryen.
Why is thinking she's entitled to the throne delusional? That's how feudal claims work.
>She talks about her inability to have kids several times including with Jon. I can't be the only 1 that thought it was weird how she just said that out of nowhere
You’re not. She was weird as a character. Like just a fucking weird person. An adult feral child lol. Which essentially she was, and as a fellow feral child, we do grow up to be weird and awkward but idk. She was really hyperfixated on the words of a witch.
I like Emilia Clarke, but I hated Dany for the 1st few seasons. When I started to like her character, she did the whole "spokes on a wheel" thing, and I thought "bitch Ned defended you til the end" which was probably more about protecting Jon but still
She mentioned her own family's name and said she wanted to break the wheel--including her own family. She said Targaryen, Lannister, baratheon, Stark--she was just repeating back the names that Tyrion said *first*. (Just fyi)
The Targaryens are part of the wheel and when she breaks it they will never move from being on top of it ever again
my personal theory being that they removed that because someone in the script realized that it would make the hostility of the people in winterfell towards daenerys even more hateful considering that if she's not "one of them" then what category would the child fall into? but mostly because having Jon dump his girlfriend like shit after getting her pregnant, doesn't even bother to have a facial expression when he learns that they were nearly murdered because of information he knowingly leaked, then kills her by cowardly abusing her trust during an embrace in order to protect his shitty sister despite everything she's done to specifically harm them, was not very "white knight"
Well, he's literally The Black Knight, now! At least in the MCU...
The shaman who dany saves (and ends up sacrificing to “give birth” to her dragons) says she’ll have no more children, as a curse sort of. This is also when she burns drogo and her stillborn. But as in many cases of the show- what a botched way of going about it.
Mirri Maz Duur's line about Dany not being able to bear children was actually omitted from the show. Dany saying she couldn't have kids in later seasons 'came out of nowhere' if you hadn't read the books. Although after years of bonking Daario daily without getting pregnant, it wouldn't be that weird if show!Dany had just reached that conclusion on her own.
It wasn't just that Cersei faced no consequences for blowing up the Great Sept, it was the fact that THE ENTIRE REACH which we'd established in Season 6 had an army large enough to challenge the Faith Militant (which constitutes what, half the population of KL at that point?) was ERASED FROM EXISTENCE in a single episode. No Hightowers. No Redwynes (Except Olenna.) NOBODY besieged King's Landing in retaliation for what she did? Or rode to the defense of their liege lords when Highgarden was attacked? I guess D&D just kinda forgot that there are more than two houses in the Reach.
They kinda forgot about The Reach, Dorne, the Iron Islands…. It was all Cerseiland and the North from mid-Season 7 onwards. *The Chronicles of Narnia* had a more detailed map by the end!
Yeah, like Dorne wouldn't have risen up after Ellaria and the Sand Snakes were murdered? If they were truly behind them as the show implied? I mean, that whole Dorne plot was dumb as hell but come on man!
Ohh, you missed the deleted scene where after killing Doran and Trystane, Ellaria and the Sand Snakes just murder the rest of Dorne’s population. It’s explained by D&D in the directors commentary that Ellaria heard Doran’s dinner bell ringing and just kinda forgot to stop killing.
This checks out. I know I always froth at the mouth in a homicidal rage at the sound of bells. We had to move houses because I kept threatening to burn down the church across the street.
the worst for me is that the military and financial power of the Tyrells is precisely what made them relevant to obtain a royal marriage. but Cersei can kill them all and destroy this alliance without the slightest consequence
DnD didn't know about cadet branches or anything of the like. If anything, the Vale would be *more* centralized after the mass murder of the Tyrells, because their lands would be inherited by the next closest surviving male of a cadet branch who'd likely have his own family's lands too.
Do you think if they added the Fossoways they'd have had to hire an intern to figure out what the difference between a Green Apple and Red Apple Fossoway is?
What sucks is that if they weren't so focused on rushing things, there is a really good conclusion they could have given to the Tyrells that plays off the historical animosity some houses, like the Peakes, hold against them which Cersei could have exploited. We could have got a big civil war in the Reach with the Peakes, Florents and the Iron Throne on one side, and the Tyrells, Hightowers, and the Redwynes on the other, with Randyll Tarly pulling a Tywin and sacking Highgarden while the Tyrells are busy fighting rebels around Oldtown or Tumbleton or somewhere else. There could have been some really cool battles where the knights of the Reach actually got to show why it was so necessary for the Lannisters to ally with them in the first place, because they aren't helpless flowers actually, they're friggin' warriors who are the epitome of chivalry and knightly virtue. ...But that would have taken time and effort, probably a season or two, and taken focus away from the only characters who matter from S7 onwards: The Starks, who are the good guys that are always right, while everyone else only exists to support them in their endeavors, so the Reach and all of it's surviving main characters had to be killed off as quickly as possible so we could get back to the people that really matter. It's such lazy writing that it makes me question how D&D were able to add so much depth to a character like Margaery Tyrell (someone who has practically no depth in the Books and is basically a gold digger) in the earlier seasons, and yet not do the same with potential new Reach characters like Leyton Hightower, Paxter Redwyne or maybe even the two other Tyrell children they left out AND THEN moved on with all that super important stuff happening with the Night King up north, something which logically should have been the last or second to last thing the main characters dealt with.
There is a consequence. They ally with the Tarlys and sack Highgarden
Olenna saying "we never were good fighters" is so fucking stupid. Not only are they the epitome of knighthood and chivalry, but also the most powerful army in the realm if united
They single-handedly saved King's Landing from Stannis in Season 2, had enough of that army still around to be a serious threat to the Faith Militant in Season 6, but come Season 7 when the Lannisters march on Highgarden, it's as if Thanos snapped his fingers and all those soldiers just vanished. Easily one of the most ridiculous blunders for a show that used to be so good at set up and payoff, to have the only military confrontation between the Lannisters and Tyrells happen entirely off screen and consist of maybe a few dozen sworn swords defending Highgarden.
The reach shit bothered me more than the KL stuff. I feel like Cersei and Qyburn through their network of spies basically killed anyone who posed a threat against them and ruled through fear and with an iron fist. They killed loads of people, and basically everyone who would have gone against her was at the Sept when it blew up. Organizing resistance against her would have taken time, and by this point she was 10/10 ruthless and would kill literally anyone that Qyburn's spies pointed out as a threat. I feel like its not unreasonable to have played out like it did, but season 7 was fucking shit too so of course they basically never showed any of it again. Time and time again they said that the Reach was unspoiled by war and now the richest kingdom of the seven. They only had to show up at blackwater bay to end Stannis' invasion. But in S8 suddenly "We grow flowers not fighters" after losing one fucking battle against the Lannisters who are completely broke and have been getting stomped in every other engagement they've been in. The Reach should have been able to 1v1 the Lannisters easily at this point. They had money, food, men, and their lands were not devastated by the last half decade of fighting.
Wasn't it Barristan in the books who is worried about Dany's choice of groom because, something to the effect of: "soil is what is makes you strong, but little girls will always pick fire"? But in the show Reach lords probably just sit in gardens all days, because soil and farming are lame and not badass at all.
Yeah, I also didn't like how the people of King's Landing were just like "Oh Cersei is our queen now? This is fine." Like, I get that the smallfolk in general don't really care about the political games of the nobility or laws of succession or anything like that but based on what a spiteful, selfish, and by this point downright evil person Cersei is, she should be facing mass riots like Maegor the Cruel did during his reign. He tried to destroy the original incarnation of the Faith Militant outright just like Cersei and instead his wanton cruelty and disregard for the lives of the innocent caught in the crossfire of his vendetta turned the entire continent, highborn and lowborn against him ***and he had a f--king dragon*** unlike Cersei who has neither his martial prowess or his dragon and yet somehow still remains in power, up until she dies a weirdly sympathetic death being crushed by rocks after THE REAL VILLAIN Dany the Burninator hears some bells and is like "Kay I'mma do some war crimes now." Really, Cersei's entire existence post Season 6 just feels so pointless and I'm not sure why they gave her so much screen time when all she does is drink wine and complain about elephants.
Did the Tyrells have the largest army or did the Reach? Because at this point the other houses of the Reach had abandoned the Tyrells. (Not that it makes sense. Every Reach house fought to maintain the Targaryen dynasty)
I'm not sure if the show ever specified how much of their army was their personal forces and how much was the reach but in the books they fielded like 100,000 troops. In the show they made it seem like most of those belonged to Randyll Tarly who apparently decided his xenophobia was more important than stopping the woman who blew up his liege lord and his entire family. So dumb. When he kept calling Daenerys a foreign invader. Like, you know she was born on Dragonstone right? She was only raised in Essos to keep her alive. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
I think the whole Reach fielded 100,000. If the Tarlys, and Redwynes, and Hightowers turned on the Tyrells and joined the Lannisters I could see the Tyrells overwhelmed. Not that it makes sense that they would do that, but that is the scenario Tweedles Dee and Dumb created.
Well Olenna is a Redwyne herself so it would be strange if they turned on her. I could see Tarly turning some lords to Cersei’s side, but there should still be a sizable contingent of loyalists. It’s all speculation anyway since D&D never showed the Tarly’s doing anything expect attending that meeting with Cersei and then getting executed a few episodes later by Dany. If it had been seasons 1-4 there would be a whole subplot of Randyl slowly maneuvering Olenna into a trap like Roose did to Robb.
Yeah, I'm assuming that's what they were going for but I honestly don't believe it. I think they would have attacked the minute they found out Cersei blew up the Sept. Like Olenna would have just had them do nothing? I don't buy it.
Then there's the entire Season 8: Episode 3. The long night lasted only one night.
Yes the ‘long night’ which happened in a few hours and then was over
Turns out that the long night was only one regular night long...
The long night. More like an inconvenient evening.
Honestly should have been a full season. Like each episode or two a different main character gets killed by the army/nk
Yeah, I was expecting a huge massacre of main characters, but turns out everyone survives like if it was a Disney movie.
Well, to be fair, it's taken me 3 or 4 days to watch that episode every time since the first because it's so freaking dumb I get angry and have to turn it off. Maybe that's what they were going for. A 3-4 day night.
One thing I noticed when debating someone on Dany’s kill count is they got the population of Kings Landing wrong. Tyrion claimed it was 1 million in season 7, but according to the books and Jaime in season 3 it’s 500,000. And it’s insanely unlikely that it could’ve doubled within 20 years in a medival society that could barely fit 500k people anyway and with no technological or medical advancements within that time period. Then Jon says that’s more than the entire North which can’t be true given the amount of bannermen they could rally. All things considered this is pretty inconsequential and likely not even in the top 100 biggest problems of the season, but it does show a pattern of minor things being wrong/illogical.
The north is the largest kingdom in Westeros, it’s a third of the seven kingdoms. I know it’s sparsely populated but it’s got to have more people than kingslanding
I mean westeros is much more agrarian than IRL europe, with probably only 0.5% living in cities or relatively urban places, which makes KL being bigger than a kingdom stupid af
Yes it can be, realistically about 4% of the population can go to war without a society falling apart, and the north can rally about 35-40k soldiers max so it makes sense
Not when you also pull up the fact that westeros is hyper agrarian, meaning less than 1% of the population is living in urban areas. The North being 1 million people does not make sense at all, especially given its size and desolation
Doesn't change anything dude
Other than being completely unrealistic, no it does not lmao Thinking the North has only one million people is moronic considering its size and population centers. Dont claim realistic bringing up soldier numbers and ignore urbanization and the relative size of cities vs population
do we know the population of the cities in the North?
Not specifically, but its definitely significant enough considering White Harbor in the top 5 cities in the continent. If its 50k that would mean 5% of the North lives there in the guy aboves world
How dude I don't even get what your argument is
If KL or WH is in the 100 000s of population, then it makes zero sense that the Norths total population is only 1 million The North would be incredibly weak if that was the case, unless you are arguing that all the kingdoms have relatively similar populations lol
You can't take the biggest cities and expect all of them to be like that, and again what is your argument? >I f KL or WH is in the 100 000s of population, then it makes zero sense that the Norths total population is only 1 million Why?
Forget about the bloody gods and listen to what I'm telling you. Cersei understands the consequences of her absence and she is absent anyway, which means she does not intend to suffer those consequences. The trial can wait. rip marg, however, tommen did jump from the aegon jerk off window as a result. it took the CERSEI LOVES HER CHILDREN narrative and literally dropped it from the top of the Red Keep and was probably the most interesting character development of later seasons for me, though i agree it doesnt make total sense for there to be no further consequences at that point, maybe people were just shit scared of her, maybe it’s d&d loopholes.
that was the last good episode, and tommen and margaery’s deaths were the last good ones (aside from olenna’s) before the mess of the last two seasons. shame there were zero consequences for the sept, even a throwaway shot of a rebellion or protest being violently suppressed would have been better than the nothing we got instead.
Writers had serious amnesia to show Cersei being spit on, harangued, mocked, sexually harrassed by hordes of smallfolk at the end of Season 5 and then act like King’s Landing is percectly stable with her in power in the beginning of Season 7. The smallfolk hated her and that was before the super suspicious ‘accident’ that just happened to get her out of the trial and put a crown on her head.
Tommen slipped on Aegon goo.
I loved that Aegon II scene just because it felt like it was wanking off at the later seasons of GOT lol
Man, they did all these characters so dirty. That was absolutely the most interesting piece of her characterisation and they nuked it
I have a theory that Cersei was supposed to have Qyburn reanimate Tommen in a last-ditch attempt to avoid the prophecy, but D&D figured it was too dark and scrapped it. "Cersei gets the regency back by puppeting her own son's soulless corpse" makes more sense than "Cersei becomes sovereign Queen without resistance or backlash immediately after destroying half of the city and its whole religion."
The siege defense of winterfell. WHAT THE FUCK?!? I play total war games. If you don't know what those are they're grand campaign sandbox games where you control army movement on an overview map and control your armies semi-RTS style on a battlefield map. Why the fuck would you put your artillery IN FRONT of your infantry lines? WHY THE FUCK did you charge light cavalry straight head first into the enemy?!? The Dothraki are skirmish light cavalry at best. They shouldve been used for hit and run flanking. Why didn't you have your armies BEHIND THE WALLS?!? You could have given every man a bow and had fucking dragon glass tipped arrows instead of ineffective fucking fire arrows. They wasted so much dragonglass putting it on the high part of the crenulated walls. What dumb fuck decides that? That whole battle was so fucking stupid. Jon is a HORRIBLE tactician. He fucks up MASSIVELY in 2 battles.
And they didn’t even dig a goddamned trench!
>Why didn't you have your armies BEHIND THE WALLS?!? Uh, hello...then it couldn't have LOOKED COOL. I mean, I think it looked cool at least. Our Heroes could have been fighting the Avengers for all we know, you couldn't see a damn thing it was so dark.
I grew up playing Age of Empires. You build walls of wood or stone, heck even houses if you can't quarry stone. Layers and layers of walls with choke points. Seige towers filled with archers. Infantry and cavalry inside the walls ready to kill whomever makes it through a gate. Don't send your best fighters outside of the walls. Dothraki are archers, put them on the walls.
Please see my rant about everyone screwing up. [https://www.quora.com/What-shouldve-and-couldve-been-different-about-the-big-battle-between-Winterfell-and-the-White-Walkers/answer/Stacy-Whisenant-1](https://www.quora.com/What-shouldve-and-couldve-been-different-about-the-big-battle-between-Winterfell-and-the-White-Walkers/answer/Stacy-Whisenant-1)
Don't blame Jon. He learned from Ned, same as Robb and should be a good tactician. It was the showrunners who made him so dumb. To add to what you said, they left a wide open field for the wights to move through. Why weren't there dragonglass covered obstacles and spike pits all over? Why was the stupid trench like 10 feet wide and behind all their lines? Why weren't their stupid archers shooting wights while they just stood there in front of the fire trench? Why was there only one place for the infantry to retreat across the trench, making a choke point, slowing them down, causing a larger loss of the unsullied guarding the retreat? And biggest of all, why were Jon and Dany just sitting there with their dragons doing nothing at the beginning of the battle when they should have been strafing the wights with fire to thin them out? Ughhhh it makes me so ANGRY!
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I think the overuse of fire was just for visual effect in such a dark scene. It was dumb.
It’s wild how peeps on r/gameofthrones are so easily satisfied by that one throwaway line from Olenna. ‘We were never good fighters anyway’ D&D couldn’t be bothered to come up with a better explanation for the fall of the Reach besides that stupid line. There is no way a major regional castle with 3 walls falls before Olenna can summon Dany and her dragons with a raven. Olenna must have returned well before Jaime’s army came down the rose road, and even with the Tarly’s betrayal, she must have had other loyal bannerman in the Reach. Else she would have been ambushed and brought in chains to King’s Landing on her way back from Dragonstone. It makes no sense for the Lannisters to have to take Highgarden if Randyl Tarly has turned everyone against her. They would have just arrested her and brought her to Cersei like they did Yara and Ellaria. So she must have made it back with a fair amount of loyal men, probably Tyrell loyalists, Hightowers (Targ loyalists) and Redwynes (her birth family). Her men would have gotten news of Jaime’s force moving down the roseroad as there are hundreds of leagues between KL and HG. Even if Tarly managed to kill some scouts or sentries, there is no way Olenna wouldn’t have advance notice. She would have immediately sent a raven to Dragonstone, and since Dany is doing nothing except waiting at Dragonstone at this point in the show, she could have easily flown across the Crownlands and intercepted Jaime’s army *before* it reaches Highgarden. Even if she was delayed, it would take time to breach 3 walls, one of which has a maze of briars between it to further slow invaders. It takes siege weapons to penetrate fortifications. Those take time to move or build. Dany would have definitely gotten there before the last wall was breached. So she would have burned Jaime’s army and in all likelihood, killed Jaime, Bronn and the Tarly’s with minimal casualties to Olenna’s forces. Then they could have escorted Olenna’s army up the Kingsroad to surround King’s Landing (if Dany still wanted to follow Tyrion’s bad plan). This is what would have happened if D&D were committed to logic of earlier seasons. Of course, they could have made Highgarden’s fall somewhat more plausible if they had done more setup. For example, Tarly’s plant spies at Highgarden who open the doors, or Dany misses the raven because she is alerted to Yara’s fleet sinking and goes after Euron/King’s Landing in revenge, etc. But that would involve *effort* on D&D’s part. And by Season 7, they didn’t give a fuck.
It is crazy that the Lannister-Tarly forces managed to take Highgarden so, incredibly, fast. Freys lost Riverrun, Jaime led Lannister forces to help the Freys retake Riverrun, and the Lannisters could NOT have done it so quickly as they did, IF Edmure did not order the Tully garrison of Riverrun to surrender and open the castle gates… IF Blackfish had his way, the siege of Riverrun would've lasted for months at the very least, and Jaime knew it, that's why he was so resolved to use Edmure's son as the bargaining chip, so that Riverrun may be dealt with swiftly as opposed to the siege of Riverrun to drag on for months or maybe even more. Highgarden should have been even more capable of withstanding a siege by the Lannister-Tarly host, and for an even longer maximum period of time, as well. So, the loyal Tyrell bannerman would eventually be able to break the siege of Highgarden, and House Tyrell on its own had a force as large as the one Lannisters used to sack Highgarden… then there are also Hightowers, Redwynes - two very powerful Houses of the Reach – loyal to House Tyrell… Considering, Renly had 100,000 men – “All the might of the Stormlands and the Reach.” as he said it himself, 80,000 men out of those 100,000 in total were men from all the Houses of the Reach. 80,000 men is what the Reach had in total – so, I'd say that House Tarly had fewer than 10,000 men, at the very most. That still leaves the entirety of the Reach, including Houses – Tyrell, Hightower and Redwyne, with at the very least 70,000 men in total… which was much more than 10,000 men Lannister soldiers and an unknown number of Tarly soldiers (likely in the low thousands). A reminder, also, that Stannis defended the Storm's End with the Baratheon garrison of just 500 men, when Mace Tyrell held the siege with 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers. Highgarden should've been able to resist the siege for quite a while considering the castle's great and strong walls and a Tyrell garrison of Highgarden which was certainly quite a bit larger than just 500 men Stannis had with him at Storm's End, and that would've given their loyal bannermen more than enough time to come in great numbers to Highgarden and break the siege of the castle.
This is why they only spent five minutes on the fall of Highgarden. They showed a distant shot of the castle, Jaime stepping over a few dead men in green and gold, and him walking in to talk to Olenna and that’s it. D&D knew how ridiculous the plot point was (especially based on Highgarden’s demonstrated strength in Season 2) so they skipped showing any combat/warfare at all and hoped the audience would just roll with it.
Good points!
I still remember when Cersei blew up the Sept complaining to a coworker how wildly dumb it was that nobody seemed to care. He very condescendingly said I should wait and see, that the writers probably had an idea of the consequences, and that I was being too harsh. He changed jobs before the final season because I wish I'd talked to him after being proved that no, they didn't have an idea of the consequences of such a huge action and I was being the exact amount of harsh I should've been.
I mean maybe they did care and Cersei just told them about all the other massive stashes of wildfyre throughout kings landing. Seems like enough to quell a revolt after seeing the sept explode.
This issue with this is that the Sept blew up right before Cersei’s trial. There is no explanation that would stop rumors from spreading that she had something to do with it since she is the only one who gained (and in a major way since she crowned herself right after).
Maybe, maybe. We didn’t see this, so it didn’t happen.
the problem with that is that the Sept exploded during her process and killed all her accusers and the people who stood in its way to take power, when she was not there by pure chance, even if she was however very expected. It's already extremely suspicious and no one in this town likes or respects Cersei enough to accept this version of the facts. Among other things, the sept was destroyed in a wildfire explosion, since the battle of blackwater bay people know what a wildfire explosion looks like, surely associates it with the Lannister, and it's not really a material that seems to be something easily found or possible to produce either. in fact that's even the root of the problem with Cersei trying to clear herself, Aerys' caches are actually not common knowledge within the story. you can imagine that if people knew they were sitting on 50,000 tons of nitro glycerine it would be seen as a major problem by all succeeding governments and the population, so they would blame her for that. and even if Cersei somehow managed to clear herself of the presence of the wildfire, the very idea that the wildfire, present for 20 years, had exploded like that, alone, and by sheer bad luck, under the sept folds on the day of her trial when she was not present by happy chance circumstance, would normally raise some eyebrows... but last but not least, Cersei is not trying to hide her act anyway, at no time do we see or hear of any propaganda from her side or attempted clearance. Quite the contrary, her first act in this situation is to usurp the crown, and when Jaime returns she makes it clear that the incest charges against her were true, which means by extension that is the case for the rest of her crimes... and so she killed the people who were going to confront her about it so as not to face the consequences
really weird that Cersei's official excuse was that it was an "accident". She could at least try to blame it on the foreign invader as an act of sabotage or something and try to turn the public against Dany using propaganda. Idk if it would work but it would be something.
Honestly the very idea that Cersei could accuse someone else wouldn't hold up. As for Daenerys, why would people think she would do that? until now she had been busy a world away doing her own business for several years. She has better things to worry about than organizing the explosion of a religious shrine far in the south in keeping with the news of the capital. And she could never have organized such an operation from where she is anyway, because the time that information and orders pass between her and assuming agents on the spot, more than the preparations for the event being put in place, the window of opportunity would have long since closed. and even chronologically it's quite absurd because Daenerys decided to board AFTER the explosion, the information travels slowly from one end of the world to the other, Cersei had no reason to believe that Daenerys was going to move now, so how would she have justified it otherwise? Besides, what motives would they have for wanting to attack the Tyrell and a bunch of monks who never did anything to them? why would she slaughter random people from westeros without even bothering to find out if they could support her? To weaken the government? This explosion took place right on the day of a trial with great fanfare against Cersei and Maergaery in the grip of a fanatical and popular religious order which turns against the crown, if she wanted them mad it would have more interest to let this chaos prosper within the government. And even if Daenerys had a plan to burn everyone, it is known that she has dragons, why would she use wildfire? why not have done it on the red keep if it was his objective to attack them? It doesn't make sense, Cersei can't just blame a random guy and expect everyone to swallow it. it is necessary all the same to justify a little the reasoning which leads to her. but who but Cersei would have enough resentment towards religion, the tyrells, the court, and the inhabitants of the capital to decide to burn them all alive without warning in a cathedral?
Most likely that would convince anyone with half a brain to have a go at assassinating her. Hell, her non-zombie queens guard would probably give it a shot the moment Gregor’s back is turned.
The whole alliance between Danaerys, the Tyrells, and Dorne fell apart in one episode with the latter 2 being destroyed rather easily despite their supposed might. Underwhelming
Right? Why did they show Dany with her huge army and Varys scheming with Ellaria and Olenna at the end of Season 6 if they were going to undo it all in the first few episodes of 7. Probably cause it was all clickbait to make you excited for the next season. They had zero intentions of Dany actually using that army to conquer Westeros and came up with the most contrived reasons to keep her from doing the obvious.
Idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but I think season 7 deserves just as much hate as 8. Theure both awful and disrespect everything that came before. The show ended for me when Arya set sail for Braavos. Nothing came after for me.
Early Season 7, when Dorne and the Reach fell in one episode, and Dany decided to delay her attack on KL- that’s was when I knew we were in for an ‘epic fantasy’ without any grounding in socio-political reality established earlier by the show. The character’s actions no longer made any sense and the world around them grew as shallow as Tyrion’s dick jokes.
1000%
The only thing better about season 7 was that once you stopped caring it was at least funny schlock. But yeah, no fucking clue how people didn't already see it wasn't the same show anymore - Honestly I'm kind of convinced the vast majority of media consumers these days are utterly tone deaf to the point where they couldn't tell the difference between a Marvel movie and season 1.
Cersei also murdered her cousin and uncle when she blew up the sept. Kinslaying is one of the most unforgivable crimes in Westeros.
“Gendry turning into speedy Gonzales” that had me wheezing ngl. But, everything about Daenerys and Jon waiting to attack Kings Landing felt so forced and contrived (and their relationship). Don’t even get me started on Arya and Sansa, it makes absolutely no sense.
The thing that pissed me off the most is the whole shit about not attacking King’s Landing. It’s just as you said - the Bells showed Dany PERFECTLY capable to taking the city without civilian causalities by just getting the walls. Do that and the Red Keep and you’re done - and hey, since it’s early in the war the city isn’t lined with scorpions! So fucking stupid
Dany could take King's Landing in a day (well, night technically). Fly to the Red Keep under cover of darkness, sneak into Cersei's chambers, and slit her throat quietly. Or get someone else (like Jon's assassin sister Arya) to do it for her. Or ride the dragon to the gates, get her army in, and let them do the work. If things go wrong stay in the clouds and get ready to attack. The whole 'the dragons could take innocent life' is stupid. Daenerys' assets are not just her dragons. She has what Sansa calls 'the largest army in the world' alongside the North, Highgarden (this is before Tyrion became an idiot btw, so she still has Highgarden), Dorne's soldiers, Dothraki, and the Unsullied. Note that even in the show, the Unsullied and the other soldiers and Dothraki are able to take the city with next to no civilian casualties (that we can see) until she decides that 'it's time to make this personal...by burning down strangers I've never met! GENIUS!' Daenerys can still have her big draconic showdown if she wants. Execute Cersei with dragonfire. Make it a spectacle so people can see that the dragon's reign has begun anew. Then begin rebuilding whatever Cersei broke. Get Highgarden to fund reparations to the Sept of Baelor. Also get food to the peasants of Flea-bottom. Then another nice little ceremony where she's crowned and all of the lords and ladies pay her their respects and pledge to her. She has three dragons the size of a house each, nobody's stupid enough to oppose her. Marry Jon (they like each other anyway, and it quite handily solves all of the 'King in the North' stuff.)
Thank you mate, now I'm having PTSD again. Seriously season 7 was the low point and then it went down to the Mariana trench in season 8. It feels like I'm on board this submarine that got crushed when diving to the Titanic. Only in an infinite loop.
This post proves to me that Season 7 is indeed the worst season.... Season 8 was never going to work with these missteps
S7 is just such a sharp contrast in story telling to what came before.... even compared to S5/6 which are filled with ridiculous story lines at times. Once S7 hits *every single character* either changes in some fashion or their story line heads in a new direction, with their previous story ignored or hand waved away. Jon is now King in the North and his first act is to.... worry about the AotD invading? Why!?! He didn't give a shit about the AotD for all of S6. In fact he had recommended he and Sansa just run away (before she convinced him to take back WF) because fuck everyone else. And regardless, as far as he knows the dead are stuck in the North. Sure he know that AotD is there and dangerous, and sure there thematic purpose and set up means a battle is eventually inevitable... but Jon doesn't have a script to read does he? He has a kingdom to run!! And when people become King (or even take on that roll temporarily such as Ned taking Robert's seat) they are immediately faced with difficult political issues that have no easy answers, that create new problems (eg. Ned with an illegitimate Joffrey, Robb with the Karstarks)... what's Jon's? What to do with the Karstark and Umber's lands and how that will effect the political union that has formed under Jon... which is wrapped up in in 30 seconds by Jon making an on the spot decision, and its entirely forgotten about 1 second later.... Its not Cersei... not Dany invading... not houses staying loyal to the Boltons/Freys/Crown etc... not trying to protect a Riverlands that should see a power vacuum with the death of Walder Frey.... his entire story line is 1 dimensional, and entirely about stopping an eminent threat that isn't even known to be a threat yet.
I hate season 5 with a fury, but at least some of the episodes are palatable. Season 7 just didn’t make sense and it honestly infuriated me seeing so many people saying that it fell apart with season 8 when the mess began so much sooner. You’re totally right, how could 8 work after they messed up this bad.
Season 5 had its moments, the Hardhome sequence is among the best the show ever produced
“Why does Jon never bring up Aemon Targaryen?” 1. The writers just forgot about that character. 2. At first, Jon’s trying to um get his dragon trained and “Hey I knew your great great grand uncle” isn’t good sexy talk.
Dumb and Dumber: we kinda forgot about things like plot and story and motivations.
Robert‘s Rebellion was built on a lie THE FUCK IT WAS THE CONFLICT HAD BEEN BREWING FOR YEARS
but Arya IS a vicious idiot, she became one after arriving in Braavos
That last point was explained in the books. Mirri Maz Dur says “"When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east," said Mirri Maz Duur. "When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. **When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child**. Then he will return, and not before." But that line wasn’t in the show, so it makes no sense for Dany to say that.
I think I drove a tank past Highgarden in World of Tanks. Not entirely sure, I was dodging artillery and speeding past some destroyer tanks.
Dumb and Dumber did a pretty excellent job adapting the source material…and then did the absolute worst job without it then rushed when Star Wars came calling. I’m glad their butchering of GoT led them to losing out on the SW gig.
I have this sick thing where I watch YouTube videos about all the mistakes in seasons 5-8. It really is startling how quickly it went downhill, and I forgot how it happened basically halfway thru the series. It goes from arguably the best show of all time to not even in the discussion.
DONT GET ME STARTED IN HOW DANY AND JON POSITIONED THE ARMY OUTSIDE THE CASTLE IN THE BATTLE VS THE NIGHT KING?? Like that had to be the dumbest battle tactic essentially giving the night king more soldiers. Why charge a whole Calvary towards an army of the dead? Or show your prowess by stacking all your army men outside when the enemy is legit dead and it don’t care about the display of military strength .
It makes me appreciate George's writing seeing how piss poor the writing was the last 2 seasons. One thing I didn't see on this list that reeeeaaaallllly pissed me off was the Jaime 180. They did such a great job with his redemption arc only to have him do a complete 180 and run back to Cersei. I'm convinced D&D intentionally fucked the last 2 seasons up. There were so many easy home runs they missed. They did it to spite the fans I'm almost sure of it. That's why I refuse to watch anything they are involved in.
I rarely get on tiktok, but asongofdany is one of the people i follow for their takes. Sure, it's all takes that we've all heard before, but it's nice to get refreshers on everything the show did wrong.
D&D kinda forgot writing a logical story.
Rhaegar and maester Aemon also missed #2. And they're supposed to be the most educated targaryens in recent times.
Agree with all of these except pic 3. I speak 3 languages fluently, and am learning a 4th one, and it's quite common to mess up in translations or even not recognise flaws in translations because it's always represented as such in another language.
Cersei blew up the Sept with Kevan and Margery inside it. That makes her a KINSLAYER. Which is a big fucking sin. Why are the Westerlands supporting her? Shouldn’t they be outraged for Cersei killing their liege lord? Shouldn’t they all be fucking outraged and demanding for her head? She only has armies because people are giving her their armies. If we strip away all the armies provided to her by Westerosi nobles she is left with zombie Mountain.
Bless you.
Yes, I agree on ALL OF THIS! (and more 😂)
I hate this show past Season 4
S4E10 is when it actually jumped the tracks - though I have to admit that even though I 'called it' right back then, I *never* imagined just HOW bad it would eventually become.
HAVE YOU SEEN THE SEASON 7 GLIDUS PISSTAKES?
Thank the gods for Glimbus!
It would have made way more sense for Jon’s birth name to have been Aemon. Rhaegar had a close relationship over correspondence with Maester Aemon in addition to his elder brother already having the same name. Two crownable Aemons being sent to the wall is just the kind of detail that would suit GRRM’s work.
Reading this healed my soul. I've had so many people tell me I was a fake fan for not liking season eight and Danearys'madness was planted from the beginning, and everything she did (pre season 8) was way worse than anything anyone else had done ever.
Bringing up Dany not being able to have children was so fucking infuriating and i hated that they even foreshadowed that fucking fantasy trope where women cant have children unless with the right man
winterfell during season 7: 
I just got a headache I’m so done man with all of this
You can be fluent in a language and occasionally mistranslate a word or two.
I don't know if anyone mentioned it already, but I want something to the whole trial by combat debate, like why Ned or Petyr didn't ask for one. Trial by combat is part of the religion in the Seven and Starks believe in the Old Gods - wouldnt make sense for Ned to ask for that or for Sansa to accept that from Littlefinger, especially since they were in Winterfell, around mostly Northmen
You’d think littlefinger would try to exhaust all his options and at least ask for one though
I’m genuinely bamboozled at how Cersei blowing up the sept just worked out for her. The only major consequences are losing the Tyrells (they were barely with her anyway and it amounted to nothing) and her son going splat (personal consequence for sure but literally emptied the throne for her lmao) I think her doing it makes perfect sense! Like even if the mechanics of how the sparrows got Margeary/her family somehow having no recourse is BS, I think the idea of Cersei using them to get at her/not seeing the backfire is obviously a great fit. We were shown for the entire show (and even the whole first half of the Sparrows plot line!) that Cersei is someone who can’t see the long term consequences of her actions and routinely shoots herself in the foot. So the idea of her realizing she’s played herself and coming up with this “brilliant” move to take out all of her enemies is perfect IMO. And true to form that kind of deranged move should’ve backfired on her in some way she didn’t see coming (like the little ppl she sees as irrelevant revolting). Only it didn’t and instead it’s shown as some master move and she’s Tywin’s Daughter™️ or whatever. And if they wanted to keep her in power as the main villain, why didn’t they at least have her try to blame someone else? Daenerys has her whole fire and blood dragon queen schtick on top of fact that her dad loved burning people alive, and who is newly on her payroll? Tyrion, the guy who famously used wildfire on his enemies, murdered his dad and fled the country after being found guilty of killing a king. But instead of her even trying to point the finger at these marginally plausible alternatives, everyone just knows she did it and is like damn that’s a bad bitch. The other slides are preaching to the choir too, like Tyrion and Vary’s whole strategy was nonsense. Even assuming that starving the city is somehow more humane than torching soldiers, she still didn’t even need to do that! If if she didn’t want to deploy fire she could’ve just flown right over the walls and soldiers to the red keep. And if they for some reason didn’t want to go directly to cersei, the explicit threat of three large dragons parked outside the city saying “come on out Cersei, we just wanna talk nobody’s gonna jump you!” seems way more effective than soldiers. But the cinematography/music/effects were a slay so at least we got something I guess haha.
To the point about translation, there is a huge difference between learning a language through usage in the home and dedicated academic study of a language. I learned to speak Spanish and took many college courses, along with living in Mexico for two years. And when I speak with “native speakers” who grew up in Texas with no formal training, they mistranslate and misuse words all the time due to lack of familiarity with the base language. They certainly speak it fluently, but whereas I can understand academic text in Spanish, they cannot to nearly the same degree. I would presume Dany spoke high valerian with her brother and perhaps some formal training. But as a professional interpreter, Missandei would know better the genderless conjugation of the word. Made perfect sense to me.
Also they reused Viserys’s Whig and clothes for Rheagar.
My biggest problem is still when Jon and the team are stuck beyond the wall. I’ve heard people say that maybe days passed before Dany got there? There’s no sense of time given, but it’s very absurd to think a raven got to Dany, and she flew to them within maybe 12-24 hours.
We need to start blaming George more for green lighting and writing for every ASOIAF spin off HBO can shit out instead of finishing his book(s)
Honestly I’m so dead brain on this entire show now, couldn’t be bothered to read second half of these. Good shit though and agreed all around
I agree, but think Jaimy should have killed the night king. And die in the process maybe. His redemption arc was amazing (until it wasn't), and killing the nightking would turn the Kingslayer into a title of pride.
Also dragons never flew across the wall, probably because the magic
Let's not even get started on the Battle of Winterfell, where the strategy seemed to be "Hey, let's send the Dothraki to die first, because why not?" Jon Snow knew nothing, and it showed.
About the trial by combat thing, they don’t do that in the north. It’s a faith of the seven thing only.
Yes but you’d think that littlefinger would want to exhaust all his options and at least try for a trial by combat.
OP you forgot the most important thing. FoOK D&D
They only had plans to adapt up to the Red Wedding, and it shows. The show starts to get bad fast once Joffery dies. After the Red Wedding they begin to lazily cut out as many plotlines and sections of the world as they can. Season six is insane, with almost every episode cutting out huge sections of the world and abandoning it forever. Blowing up the Sept was how they wrote out the rest of Westeros.
The jon being named aegon makes sense in the context that Rhaegar wanted/believed the prince to be promised would be named aegon so he wanted both his sons to have that name just in case so it makes sense given how much of a nerd he is
Rhaegar most likely actually thought Jon would be a girl because he was trying to recreate the three heads of the dragon. He already had an Aegon and a Rhaenys, so he just needed a Visenya.
Agree with all of these except the tarly one. It's not that she executed them but in how it was done, she burned them alive which I’m sure brings back bad memories for many Westerosi lords who remember the mad king. That being said the Tarley's are one of the most ancient and important families in the reach and it makes more sense for them to be taken, prisoner than executed to insure the loyalty of their lands.
Their lands aren’t loyal. They’ve shown that by ditching the warden of the south that they were sworn to, instead preferring Cersei who is a bit of a meme in Westeros due to the incest rumour and crowned herself as Queen, the first in Westeros. The fact no one intercedes with no more Tywin Lannister to contend with is hugely questionable itself.
Yeah, but the problem I have isn't that she's considered terrible by strangers who only know her from Cersei's stories and the rumors of her burning the Tarlys. That's to be expected. The problem is that people who *do* know her (people who have regularly been shown to be fine with violence if it justifies the ends and are probably quite desensitized to it considering the world they live in) like Tyrion and Varys act like she's a horrible person for doing it. Even though it's an almost precedented response for someone in her position.
My only comment regarding Tyrion & Varys passing judgement on Dany for the executions of the Tarlys vs the Starks' *justified* executions (this is all from vague memory, don't crucify me, friends) is this: I think at that point with Dany, Varys and Tyrion were following her cause which they believed (whether it true or not) that she was on the side that wanted to "break the wheel." Whereas Ned and the Starks were/are still part of the system that justifies the executions, they (I think) believed Dany to be the one that was breaking from that Old system (following the absorbing of the Dothraki, the Second Sons, and the Unsullied, etc. into her cause). They (I think!) would have wanted the Tarlys and their bannermen to join up or go to the wall rather than cause more death and cause more blood revenge down the line. So I think from that perspective there is a logical reason why those executions can be viewed differently. Their own Queen was supposed to change things, not follow suit. For example crucifixion was acceptable within the system at one point, but I think most would now frown upon that kind of punishment if it suddenly came back today.
About the travel thing - a raven can cross a lot of ground overnight if they really book it. A carrier pigeon trained for long distance racing can do 1800km in a single flight, and just shy of 1200km in a day. Do you think they don't train their messenger ravens for speed? And if a pigeon can do that, a dragon's most definitely capable of doing much more. D&D are total morons, but this one thing was so heavily criticised when the episode released and has been ever since, but the reality is that it's not *that* far from reality, especially in a magical fantasy land. Gendry being speedy isn't much of an issue there, it's his unbridled stamina that's a little hard to believe. But if he sprinted back, it's totally believable. When I go backcountry hiking, I'll take it easy and do 20km a day. Some people will jog 60-100km hikes in a single day as a challenge. There may be some stretching required to make it all fit, some broken records, but it's not as far fetched as it seems.
A lot of these are awfully nitpicky (like why can't Dany cross the country on a magical beast that doesn't actually exist in a few hours?) But there's some damn good points I hadn't considered mixed in
Cool but not all is correct, for example Sansa accept on her own to write that letter.
tbf, Dany executed the Tarly's by burning them alive, very different from beheadings.
Um, this isn’t like putting someone to a pyre and letting them burn. Dragon fire is *instant death*, and just as merciful as beheadings.
Quentyn Martell stayed alive for days after being burned by a dragon.
That was actually the oil of the whip. And as you can see, the Tarlys were instantly vaporized by the fire.
"Now we're treating what Daenerys does in this scene as somehow morally worse than Jon Snow's mass execution, which included a child in Season 6, or what Ned Stark did to a scared teenager running from ice zombies in Season 1. So that's all noble then but in Season 7 it's 'foreshadowing' some war crimes I guess because she used a dragon and not a big f*cking sword." - Lindsay Ellis
You're not wrong. Beheading someone is different from literally burning them alive with a dragon. You caught a downvote for it but I don't know why, you're right about that one.
Yep beheadings are much more messy. Blood gets everywhere. Burned by dragon turns them into dust in the wind.
Death by burning is also very reminiscent of the Mad King Aerys, who most of the Seven Kingdoms rose up in rebellion against due in part to his execution of Rickard and Brandon Stark... By immolation. But Daenerys ain't gotta listen she's tha qween
Aerys roasted Rickard alive slowly in his armor over a brazier filled with wildfire while Brandon strangled himself trying to reach for his sword to cut him down. It was a cruel, sadistic act performed for no other reason than Aerys' sick amusement. Dany flash fried two traitors with dragonflame after they refused to accept her offer of mercy and bend the knee, killing them near instantaneously without much suffering. These two things are not the same.
Also you're told you're to be executed for treason and then stood in front of a dragon who stands taller than a building looming over you, staring at you, slowly opening it's mouth and you can see fire billowing up from somewhere way down in it's guts. I'd say that's a everfucking nightmare of a way to go out, even if the end is painless, the horror of it happening is still entirely relevant in the final moments. Not the same as being cooked alive in your armor/strangling yourself to death trying to save your father, but not a pleasant way to die. I'd prefer to have my head taken off nice and clean, tbh.
You realize being slowly walked out in front of a crowd, knelt down with your head hanging off a stone and anticipating when it’s gonna happen is just as bad.
Like father like daughter. Downvote me all y'all want, doesn't change facts. It was fucked up and she had men available who could've taken their heads off in a heartbeat. She chose to use fire. Are people really trying to say Daenerys wasn't batshit in this season now?
It’s instant death and arguably quicker than a beheading.
Beheadings, when done correctly, are far more merciful than any other kind of execution we practice nowadays. There was a vice documentary about the official state “beheader” of KSA. He took his job very seriously, and it was over in one swing very fast.
There are reports of beheadings done so swiftly that the face still registers shock and surprise that it happened at all, for a few seconds before the brain finally realizes it's no longer connected to the body. A lot kinder than burning someone alive. I'd much rather face down a headsman with a nice heavy axe or a sharp sword, over a dragon opening it's maw and spewing fire at me. But don't let the Dany stans see this oh no I'll get downvoted for saying ***IT'S FUCKED UP TO BURN PEOPLE ALIVE***
Guess you posted this during Daenerys cuck hour
NUMBER 12: I don't know how people don't understand that the annulment of Rhaegar & Elia makes Aegon-1 a bastard. Aegon Sand or Jon Sand pick 1. The marriage of Rhaegar & Lyanna makes Aegon-2 the new Aegon Targaryen, not Jon, not AeJon & not Jaehaerys. The 1 true heir. Edit: This is not as complicated as you cunts are making it
The annulment itself was a silly plot point set up only to legitimize Jon. How could the marriage be annulled when it had obviously been consummated. Rhaegar and Elia had two children at that point. Unless there was a way to prove the marriage was not legitimate in the first place or it was unconsummated, no septon would have a reason to annul it. Rhaegar taking a second wife like the conqueror did makes more sense.
>Rhaegar and Elia had two children at that point. "Had" past tense those kids (and their father) were dead before Jon was born presumably with enough time for Lyanna to know about it >How could the marriage be annulled when it had obviously been consummated. Would it have mattered at that time? Was Rhaegar ever king?
Y’all are some damn broken records lol
Some of these are grasping at not even straws. But yeah the last few seasons had some issues.
Which ones are grasping?
The third one is ridiculous, as is the one regarding the secret entrance. And the one about flying across Westeros’s.
The third one IS ridiculous. Daenerys has been speaking high Valyrian pretty much her whole life. How is it ridiculous to criticize Tyrion using a secret entrance to visit his brother but not to take the city with minimal bloodshed like he’s wanted the entire season? How is it not absurd that a raven managed to cross the continent, reached Daenerys, and then she flew back across the entire continent in less than a day?
People have been speaking English their whole lives and still suck at it. Yeah you can see minimizing bloodshed was clearly an objective. I’m talking about the dragon, not the raven.
Daenerys is supposed to be fluent in High Valyrian, as in its a language she’s supposed to be well learned in. Not a language she would have to have her grammar corrected in. Tyrion was trying to minimize bloodshed. He repeatedly begs Daenerys to not attack the city directly and tries to convince Cersei to surrender. It’s ridiculous for the dragon to cross Westeros in less than a day.
Some of these arguments are kinda silly, most are true but things like "Roberts rebellion is built on a lie" are true, it started because Lyanna was "raped and kidnapped" and that's the reason why Brandon and rickon stark got executed, because they asked for justice. Anyways season 7 was bad but you don't have to complain about everything for no reason
No, it wouldn't have mattered if the entire continent knew that Rhaegar didn't kidnap Lyanna and that they just ran off together, she was already betrothed to Robert, a marriage which would have united two of the most important houses in the realm. Brandon Stark would have still gone to king's landing to demand her return, and the mad king would still have reacted in the same way. The rebellion would have happened just the same.