I tended to zone out during the big battle episodes, to be honest. I was always far more interested in the character development and interpersonal dynamics.
I guess they wanted it to be like bookends. In Season 1, Bran got pushed out a window. In Season 8, the plot got pushed out the window.
If they were going to do the Mad Queen twist, they shouldn't have done it as insultingly as they did.
The last three episodes were about the rapid decline of Daenerys's mental state. So why didn't they show us Daenerys's mental state? They didn't even show her face while King's Landing burned. The writers said this was done on purpose because they wanted to focus on the experience of the victims on the ground. So they spent half a d*mn episode showing us burnt, mangled bodies. And that would have been OK had they used the following episode debriefing us on her mental state. But, no, they opened the finale by giving even more screen time to all those burnt, mangled bodies. And they gave plenty of screen time to men talking about Daenerys's mental state. But she's a point-of-view character, FFS -- show us her mental state by consulting HER point of view!
After her death, Daenerys gets revived by a Red Priestess. Her mind now being clear after the destruction of the Iron Throne, she realizes what she has done, and chooses to send herself into exile and never interact with humanity again. Before she heads east of Essos to find a remote island, the Red Priestess tells her she will interact with humanity again -- specifically, a visitor will come to her island, to whom she must give the dagger Jon stabbed her with. She settles on a volcanic island, where she gives birth to a dragon fathered by Jon. In the ending montage, we see her waiting on the island East of Essos with the dagger. And then Arya sailing West of Westeros.
I'd prefer a rewrite of Season 8.
I agree it will be on her terms this time. It has to be. I could see her and Tyrion choosing to renew their marriage vows.
"I said he couldn't be lord of anything...but I didn't say I couldn't be king of anything!"
He is apparently a master manipulator.
It appears there were actually three individuals who fulfilled the prophecy: Arya, Daenerys and Jon.
Arya first drove a dagger into water (the Night King, ice), but the world was still in danger. Then Daenerys killed a lion (Cersei), but the world was still in danger. So Jon forged the new Lightbringer by stabbing it into the heart of his beloved who had been possessed by a violent disease. When Jon killed her, the disease died with her; this freed her soul (Drogon) to destroy the source of the disease (the Iron Throne) forever.
Sequel idea: the dagger is still in Daenerys's heart. Drogon is flying her body east of Essos. And Arya is sailing west of Westeros. It seems they will meet, and Arya could be the one to wield that dagger.
Sequel idea: maybe a Red Priestess revives Daenerys who, realizing she has killed half a million people, chooses to send herself into permanent exile, settling on a remote volcanic island where she gives birth to a dragon child fathered by Jon. Through this child, Jon and Daenerys become the ancestors to a new race of dragons. When Arya visits the dragon roost island, the dragons recognize her as their kin. Daenerys gives her the dagger, and one of the dragons accompanies her on her adventures.
There is probably a continent previously unknown to the people of Westeros and Essos. Colonial powers will try to seize that continent for themselves to exploit its natural resources and enslave its people, but Arya, using the new Lightbringer, will stop them.
Season 8 was badly written. I think we can all agree on that.
Crazy/mad is not the same thing as unscrupulousness. Scheming and exploitation require cold, deliberate, calculating, rational thought. Crazy/mad is the loss of rational thought. Burning innocents at King's Landing was "crazy" and "mad" because it made absolutely no sense for her to do so. She had absolutely nothing to gain from it. Had it truly been the deliberate climax of a lifetime of plotting and scheming, she would never have made such an absurd move.
And as for acting...I used to be an actress and an aspiring opera singer. This right here is the single most important principal of acting: with every line you speak, every stage direction you follow, you must understand your character's motive for doing so. You don't have to know how her story ends, but you do have to know everything about her and inside her that led her to the moment you're portraying her in, including things the audience never sees. As theater people often put it, you have to know what she ate for breakfast that morning.
You don't just mime someone else's behavior on the outside. You become that person on the inside. So if Daenerys had Machiavellian motives throughout her whole arc, and had simply lied when she talked about liberating cities and breaking the wheel, and had deliberately played such a clever game that she fooled Tyrion and Varys, two of the brightest characters in the entire series, Emilia Clarke would definitely have known that.
Go back and watch the earlier seasons. And more importantly, listen to interviews with Emilia Clarke. As an actress, it was her job to understand, better than any of us, what made her character tick. If her character had a motive, then even if that motive was supposed to be hidden from the viewers and other characters, the actress had to know what that motive was.
So if Dany was secretly running a Machiavellian con job for 8 whole seasons, and only pretending to liberate enslaved people so she could exploit their free labor, then why wasn't Emilia Clarke made aware of that? Heck, why did D&D describe her as one of the most empathetic characters in the show? Why did they describe her as something of a "Joan of Arc"?
It sounds like you knew a toxic, abusive, duplicitous, downright horrible person in real life whom Daenerys reminds you of. Good art makes us project our own reality into fictional characters, but it doesn't mean your interpretation of Daenerys is the definitive one or that those of us who saw her differently were "fooled".
It was Emilia Clarke's job as an actress to understand her character's internal state better than any of us. As her interviews during and after the show make it clear, she understood Daenerys to have been genuine in her desire to make the world better and to avoid becoming her father, but to have lost her battle with genetics after a long series of traumatic events wore her down.
This season should have ended with the Battle of Winterfell. Daenerys's descent into madness should have happened over an additional season.
I can picture Dany being resurrected by a Red Priest or Priestess. I think with the Iron Throne gone, her Targaryen madness would also be gone. When asked death was like and whether she "saw the darkness", she would answer that it wasn't like going into the darkness, but like having the darkness lifted from her.
She would give birth to a dragon-child by Jon and settle on a remote island to raise a new race of dragons. Arya's adventures might lead her to this island. Because the dragons would be Arya's cousins, they would probably take to her. Daenerys would probably give her the sword that Jon stabbed her with (which is apparently Lightbringer now), and Arya would later use it to protect the native cultures West of Westeros from Cortez- and Columbus-like villains.
People were saying Sansa should sit on the Iron Throne (back when they assumed the Iron Throne would still exist at the end), but I never thought that made sense. Sansa, for good reason, probably wanted nothing to do with King's Landing ever again. She was a Northern patriot.
Maybe, but it's difficult to say that a person is the things they do once a psychotic disorder kicks in and takes control of the things they do.
I think that was the meaning of the fireproof silver horse at the end of "The Bells": her "true" self having departed from her, standing in contrast to the Targaryen madness that drove what was left of her. After Jon killed her, Drogon, being an extension of her, finished the work her "true" self set out to do by destroying the Iron Throne for good. Later, Tyrion acknowledged that electing leaders rather than leaving the people at the mercy of their horrible sons was something her "true" self would have wanted. This is reinforced by the title of the soundtrack piece that plays when Bran is elected king: "Breaking the Wheel", a reference to the work of her "true" self having been completed at least.
Context matters.
She crucified slaveholders because she believed they had been responsible for crucifying over 100 children. Yes, she later found out that some of those men did not in fact crucify those children. So what? Should she have rewarded them for clearing the lowest bar a human being can possibly clear?
She did attempt to make amends by marrying the son of one of those men, but the former slaveholders attempted to reinstate slavery, anyway, no matter what she did to appease them. Because, at the end of the day, they were all slaveholders. They were all horrific. As Missandei and Greyworm tried to warn them, and as Daenerys, Sir Barristan, Tyrion and others had to learn the hard way, showing any kind of consideration to people who thought it was OK to own human beings was pointless.
Rhaegar might have killed his own father like Jon killed Dany. As king, Rhaegar would have been able to provide his younger siblings with a stable, healthy upbringing in a loving family, which might have prevented the onset of their mental health issues. Daenerys might have married Robb Stark to further cement the alliance between Houses Targaryen and Stark.
The first is Dany. The second is what was left of Dany after a brain disease set in.
I view her as more of a tragedy than a monster.
The dragons were always metaphorical extensions of her mental state. When she saw how dangerous they could be, she put them in chains and locked them in the dark to prevent them from killing any more civilians. The tragic irony was, the harder she tried to control them, the harder they became to control.
She was terrified of becoming her brother and her father, and fought hard to keep that from happening, but eventually she just couldn't fight anymore, and needed somebody to step in and finish that fight for her.
Drogon was part of her, and he knew Jon did the right thing.