Where's your reviews
@Jorick ? I'm sure you must have a lot of thoughts on the past couple of episodes.
I do, but I've been kinda chilling and not saying much because my opinions diverge heavily from the general animus the audience seems to have toward the show the past couple weeks, and I've spent my last couple Sunday nights/Monday mornings arguing with family members about the show so I didn't have much desire left to rant here. But since you're curious, I'll go over some highlights of why I disagree with the whole "bad writing, show sucks now" bandwagon. 8D
First and foremost, for those who haven't been paying attention to anything said by George R.R. Martin, D.B. Weiss, or David Benioff (or have just been casually watching and not seeking out the thoughts of the creators), this has always been a story about humanity and the human condition. It also very explicitly aimed, from its very early conceptual phase before the first book was even written, to subvert the standard tropes and expectations of an epic fantasy tale of the destined hero defeating the great evil plaguing the world. A lot of what people seem to be angry about is stuff that falls very directly under one of those labels,
not matters of poor writing or hand-waving bullshit for narrative convenience, which have indeed happened and gotten more pronounced in these last two seasons as the pace was cranked up a few notches.
On the subject of the pacing, just because things are rushed compared to prior seasons doesn't mean they are bad, or poorly planned, or poorly written. The showrunners made a choice to amp up the pace, and frankly I think they were correct to do so. Game of Thrones has had such a slow, ass-dragging pace due to the vast cast and many locations to cover that it simply
had to speed up once the focus was boiled down to just a few important places. They haven't always made the best choices for what to cut away from in order to keep things moving (Jon's true parents being revealed to Sansa and Arya is the most obvious example), but shit happens and the long conversational scenes that fleshed out characters earlier in the show are no longer needed. We should all be familiar with these characters by now. There was no need to draw everything out with more episodes to show incremental changes in well-established characters, because anyone who has been paying attention shouldn't need their hand held with repeated reminders of who these people are at their core.
The most glaring example of people complaining about the pacing lately is Daenerys and the supposed need for more time and character development to reach this Mad Queen stage in a believable way. This is nonsense. We've seen who she is and what she's about so many times that being surprised by this is a failure of the audience, not the show. At every turn since she acquired some modicum of power, Daenerys has preferred violence and force over diplomacy. You can see this in play most starkly at a low point in her journey: outside the gates of Qarth, she refused to let the merchants even see a dragon to gain entry, and then when they turned her away she threatened to kill them all. She was pushed to the edge of desperation, and her response was entitlement and violence. We saw the same again when people defied her rule of Mereen: she saw herself as the deserving ruler of the city (and Slaver's Bay as a whole), and those who opposed her were made to suffer. Same thing with the Dothraki leaders: they refused to see her as the destined hero, so she slaughtered them. Now she gets to Westeros, gets a crash course in xenophobia, loses her oldest and closest friends, loses another of her dragons, feels betrayed by everyone she thought was a true or possible ally in Westeros, and people are somehow surprised or think it was too sudden a turn for her to choose violence? Nonsense. This is the subversion of expectations
and focus on the human condition coming into play, the culmination of some of the core themes and plot threads that have been built up in expectation of this very moment from early on in the story. I personally was shocked by the extent of what Daenerys did, but the fact that she went crazy and started torching innocents? Not a surprise at all. I thought she was just going to reduce the Red Keep to burning rubble, to hell with all the innocents inside and sheltering in the courtyard, but she also went for poor bastards just running through the streets.
The ends of character/plot arcs we've seen in this season were also very fitting given the themes of the show as a whole. All the characters who died in the fight against the army of the dead were people whose entire purpose was to fight off this threat (Edd and Beric and Melisandre) or who died at the climactic point of their own character arcs (Theon and Jorah), so all of those were pretty standard fare. The Night King not actually being the end boss that everyone thought he was is
perfectly fitting for a story about the human condition and subverted expectations for epic fantasy. Not only did the great evil force get killed by someone who wasn't a chosen hero, oops it turns out the last evil to confront is the person who was the most obvious candidate to
be the chosen hero. Not only that, it's all driven by very understandable and human motivations, not some mysterious supernatural force. Varys went out standing for the same principles he's been standing for the entire show, defending the people of Westeros at large, and his death being used as the final warning flag for the incoming Mad Queen was fitting. Then there's Cleganebowl: the Hound finally got the vengeance he's been after his entire goddamn life, but he only attained it after also displaying how far he has come from being Joffrey's rabid dog by way of his fatherly treatment of Arya. Jaime's ending was a surprising twist on what looked like a heroic redemption arc: instead of him slaying the great evil to redeem himself, or killing Cersei to rid himself of the direct cause of his evil past, he instead ended up in a mix of being a good man in comforting Cersei at the end and showing what kind of shit can come from a toxic and abusive relationship. His was a very bittersweet ending, but it wasn't a bad or poorly written one. Cersei's ending was similarly unexpected but very fitting: for all her effort to be more than the average people, all her work to stay in power, she was just another terrified victim of the absolute carnage that destroyed the commoners and powerful people alike. In the end she was just as human as the rest of us, and her humanity was laid bare in a way that even the walk of shame did not accomplish, and she died just like thousands of the nameless people she looked down upon from her lofty perch in the Red Keep.
Although the complaints about "bad writing" tend to be a bunch of annoyance regarding the pacing or people not understanding the characters and then declaring their very reasonable actions to be out of character (like apparently some people for some reason think Varys was acting out of character despite him proving to the very end that he had always been honest and up front about his core motivations of protecting the realm as a whole), there
are things worth critiquing as shit writing. Euron is the avatar of narrative convenience in Game of Thrones, and most of the things he has done this season were matters of poor writing in very particular ways, not just his character as a whole being poorly written. Rhaegal getting killed? The fact the Euron did it isn't bad writing. It's the fact that there was no scouting going on for the fleet, and Dany not seeing them from her aerial vantage point, that was bad. If he'd somehow gotten the drop on them in a situation that made actual sense (say some dudes went in and set up some of those scorpions on Dragonstone while Dany and her crew were busy up north), then Euron killing a dragon would've been totally fine. Euron and his fleet being totally ineffectual against Drogon? That actually made plenty of sense in and of itself, but it was made bad only because it followed a smaller fleet being able to totally destroy Rhaegal and then Daenerys being an idiot and showing she apparently had no idea how to deal with the scorpions despite the proper tactics being bloody obvious. If that ambush thing had been done in a more sensible fashion, then both encounters with dragons could have made sense playing out the way that they did. Oh, and Euron being the only dude to apparently make it to shore in the area that just so happened to be near the back entrance Jaime was using was also a poorly written issue of narrative convenience, but him choosing to fight Jaime and the outcome of that fight made plenty of sense given his clear obsession with glory and status. Also noteworthy, Euron's death was the major outlier of an end of a character's story that actually didn't feel like it made sense for this story.
TL;DR most of the stuff I see people complaining about has me scratching my head and wondering what the hell they've been watching all these years if they think this stuff is poorly written and/or makes no sense. Even a lot of the things that truly are poorly written aren't egregiously terrible or betrayals of the heart and soul of the story being told, they're mainly hand-waves to keep the plot moving at a fast clip to keep the tension up, so I don't see much reason to hate on the show now if they've loved it up until this point. It's always been about the highs and lows of humanity and twisting the hell out of expectations, and that is exactly what we've been getting and presumably will continue to get in the finale.
