We need to talk about Daenerys Or: A rant on Dany T

Warning: The following was written in half an hour in a confused frenzy and may not be coherent.

…

May be less coherent than usual. 

…Okay, you know what? I know I said no season 8 rants, but just indulge me. How on God’s green earth did D&D botch Daenerys’s character so hard?

Here’s the thing: in the books, where we have access to Daenerys’s thoughts, there is a clear build up to an eventual downfall. We can see her becoming increasingly narcissistic in her motivations, and she seems poised to become just as much of a monster as all of her stupid ancestors without even noticing it. It’s all quite smart storytelling. Unfortunately the show is run by a pair of clowns who literally think that stories being about something is for chumps and that it is more important to be surprising than coherent, so Daenerys’s turn to mad queen is given no sufficient build up because D&D either forgot to build up to it or deliberately didn’t do so in order to avoid fans figuring out where the story was going. Either way, it’s stupid and frustrating and these two have no idea how storytelling is supposed to work and it ruined the entire last season.

What really annoys me is that it would have been SO easy to make this work. Look, the thing with Daenerys is that she sees herself as a champion of the oppressed. She is merciless to her opposers because she learned the hard way that showing mercy to your enemies is a good way to get stabbed in the back, which by the way is why no, her caviler attitude toward executions was not any kind of foreshadowing to her fall. In a kingdom like Westeros executions are an ugly but necessary part of being a leader. For God’s sake, Ned Stark executed people without hesitation, and he’s the most morally righteous dude in this whole stupid universe. Check your moral preconceptions at the door and put yourself in the characters’ place before making dumb declarations about how killing your enemies means you’ve crossed the moral event horizon. Jeez.

Getting back to the point, other than all that Daenerys always drew a strict moral line; protect the innocent, destroy those who bring them harm. So no, it does not make a lick of sense that she would burn the citizens of King’s Landing because they would “never love her.” Like I said, that is the logical conclusion, but she was nowhere NEAR the point where her delusions had made the shift from “I must protect those who can’t protect themselves” to “I am a benevolent god and all must love me or burn.”

And what’s killing me is that the shift could have been more clearly made with one easy change, and it’s a change that needed to happen in general; don’t have the white walkers beaten so quickly and easily. I hate to rewrite the series because that’s always a tasteless and hacky thing to do, but I have no respect for D&D as artists, so fuck it here we go:

So maybe we start out on a regular giant battle with the white walkers, and it goes very badly. The Night King brings out the dragon and it lays waste to the armies, we lose a major character or two, it’s all very sad. While recovering the cast finds out that Cersei has betrayed them and decide that it is time to obtain her help, with force if necessary. They return to King’s Landing and threaten to burn it to the ground if Cersei doesn’t relent. She stubbornly calls their bluff, so Daenerys reluctantly goes through with it, raining dragon fire down on King’s Landing and its citizens until Cersei finally relents and joins the offensive against the white walkers. We see that Daenerys is at first ridden with guilt, but as those around her justify and rationalize using her powers this way she becomes more comfortable with the idea.

Battle with walkers goes down basically as it does in the series because if I try to fix THAT disaster we’ll be here all day and this has already gone on WAY too long. But afterward Cersei, being Cersei, goes right back to trying to take advantage of the situation and kill of the remaining characters to secure her rule. Daenerys realizes that Jon Snow’s true parentage is out, putting her own rule in jeopardy, so she flies of the handle, kills Cersei with massive collateral damage to King’s Landing so as to keep the population in fear of her, que the series’ downward spiral.

I’m not saying this rewrite fixes everything, there is far too much wrong with the final stretch of this show to make any kind of satisfying conclusion, much less with this sequence of events I pulled out my ass during this overlong stream-of-consciousness rant, but damnit that does work a little better, right? Because it’s something. There’s some kind of lead-in to the final sequence of events. Heck, this way Cersei actually does something in the last season, that’s nice, right?

Honestly, at first I was actually enjoying how bad season 8 was. I could never explain why the series had lost me without people arguing, saying I was wrong, saying it was still good. So sitting back and watching as the whole thing fell apart, as every bad decision I had tried so hard to explain came home to roost, that was the most fun I had been allowed to have with this series in a long time. But by the time the fall of Daenerys Targaryen had occurred, it was just depressing. It was depressing that a show that used to be this good had gotten this bad, this…this fucking lazy. The whole last act of the show makes me mad, because most everyone worked so hard and so passionately on it. Season 8 was a notorious production, a long and difficult shoot full of some of the most ridiculous amounts of effort any production could every put into a season of television. All that effort. All that passion. All of it from everyone. Except the people in charge. The people telling the story.

They

Were

So

FUCKING

Lazy.

I’ve seen people argue that the show wasn’t that bad because even at it’s worst it is so well made. The production is stunning, the effects immaculate, the actors never give anything other than their best. But here’s the thing some people don’t seem to understand, and I will certainly go into it at more detail at a later date: Writing. Is. Everything. A product with a bad script is a product broken at a fundamental level. If the script is bad, no amount of talent, effort or passion (unless the production basically ignores the script and improvises everything, there are examples of that that I will talk about at a later date). And the script of season 8 is some of the most shit-out dreck I have ever witnessed, the product of two men very obviously eager to be done with this show. Their only obvious interest being in subverting fan theories and expectations, rendering every payoff unsatisfying in a blatant disregard for decent storytelling. Their laziness let down everyone who had any actual passion for this show, from the production to the actors to the fans.

Even when I liked it, Game of Thrones was never really for me. I was never all that much into it. But so many people were. So many people cared so much about this show. And D&D, in a spectacular display of laziness mixed with egotism, let them all down. And for that, they have my seething contempt as creators.

It took the show dying for me to really care about it. And that…is not a great feeling, man.