#game of thrones finale

[livingfandomly]

Sometimes when I’m watching HotD I’m hit by the magnitude of everything Daenerys did ALL ALONE and I’m back to being pissed off at GoT…

[thisonetimeinmeridian]

Honestly? Still kinda ticked Gendrya didn't end up together and that all the surviving Stark children were BY THEMSELVES at the end of the series even the whole point of their story was their love for their family and wanting to find their way back to eachother

[godofstory]

I'm suffering through this season

it's like watching season 8 of GoT all over again

episode five is🤢🤢🤢

[glassheartstonesoul]

I just watched the GOT finale and I’ve got a lot of opinions but one thing I hated that I don’t see talked about enough is the direction the writers took sansa in I love that she’s queen of the north but her apprehension with daenerys was smart and justified yes at times it seemed like she was determined to hate dany but overall sansa was right so who cares the thing that makes me mad tho is that originally sansa’s reasons for disliking dany were out of concern for the north she didn’t have an ulterior motive (despite many characters thinking she did although I personally believe she didn’t) but later when bran became king sansa was insistent on keeping the north independent because “the north can’t bend the knee to anyone anymore” when in reality the north would be happy to bend the knee to one of their own to a stark !!! it made it seem like sansa’s motivations for keeping the north independent were actually born out of her own thirst for power when I feel like sansa isn’t power hungry or at least not that power hungry sure she wanted to be lady of winterfell which she should be and deserves to be but to go as far as making yourself the queen ??? i’m just pissed that they made her look power hungry instead of an intelligent and now grown up woman ready to accept her duty as lady of winterfell which she should’ve been !!!!!!!

[the-wanderer]

I know Season 8 (and Season 7 somewhat) of Game of Thrones is widely hated, as it surpassed the books it was based on and failed to deliver, but we did get some good moments, such as -

• Arya wiping out House Frey - Tell them The North Remembers. Tell them Winter came for House Frey

* Samwell Tarly healing Jorah Mormont of greyscale

* Arya sees Nymeria again

* The poetic justice of Cersei killing Tyene in front of Ellaria Sand in the same way she had Myrcella killed

* Tell Cersei, I want her to know it was me - Olenna Tyrell

* House Stark reunion

* Arya trains with Brienne

* The Battle of the Goldroad

* The Exposure and Death of Littlefinger

* The Lone Wolf Dies, but the Pack Survives line

* I enjoyed Daenerys and Jon's relationship (at least before she went mad and he killed her)

* Jon riding a dragon

* Talking about Jon and Daenerys - 'You gave up your crown to save your people. Would she do the same...'

* Knighting Brienne

* Sam giving his family sword to Jorah

* Sandor saving Arya in King's Landing. Showing her that revenge will be the death of her, but she has a chance to leave and live.

* The Hound Vs The Mountain (Cleangebowl) {that's what we mean by it doesn't have to be a happy ending, as long as it's satisfying and true to the characters}

* Destroying the Iron Throne

[theatresteph]

I’ve been seriously disappointed in my favourite shows over the years, and I feel like a big reason for that is because the writers try to pull off a tragic ending without understanding what a tragedy truly is.

TL;DR: the endings of GoT and The 100 weren’t tragedies, they were character massacres.

The reason that people loved Shakespeare’s tragedies when they were first performed is the same reason people still love them today. Why Romeo and Juliet is particularly beloved and remembered as the Shakespearean tragedy. It’s the same reason the Greek tragedies have been told over and over for centuries, have been studied by countless scholars and performers.

This is the basic definition of a tragedy, as written by Britannica:

But it’s far more than simply a character enduring sorrowful events. It’s the character enduring the events with a sense of hope or purpose.

It’s easy to create suffering in fiction, creating conflict is the basis for a narrative arc.

The hard part is balancing the suffering with hope, creating circumstances and decisions that push the character away from their desired goal, forcing them to either adapt or break.

A hero’s journey typically ends with the character adapting and self-actualising so that they find their internal needs, which often allows them to gain their external wants in turn. Hero’s journeys often have happy endings, but a hero can have a tragic ending if the writing has sowed the seeds for their tragedy throughout the plot.

R&J is such a great tragedy because the heroes are both victims of their circumstances, and active characters with flaws that leave them vulnerable to poor decisions. They are lovestruck teenagers trapped in a society where their families hold power over them and having any kind of relationship will get them killed, and their own naïveté prevents them from seeing too far outside the bubble of their love, from comprehending the many ways their plans could go awry and get themselves or others hurt.

A tragedy feels like a perfect storm; just the right balance of circumstances and choices to create something heartbreaking.

I feel like The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a great modern tragedy because Coriolanus Snow has all the makings of a hero yet has a limited amount of empathy, and his circumstances and the decisions he and the people around him make chips away at that empathy until he chooses to give up empathy entirely, to become the cold and chilling President Snow we know and hate from The Hunger Games. The audience feels the very moment he becomes the villain, and that journey is tragic.

Now that we’ve established what a tragedy is, let’s talk about what it very much isn’t.

It isn’t the characters suffering over and over again with very few moments of joy only to eventually die or end up alone for stupid reasons that don’t follow the natural arc of the story.

It isn’t showing the audience that there’s more to life than survival only to have the characters kill each other for stupid reasons and be judged by a higher power that has no empathy for their circumstances.

It isn’t taking the time to get the audience to understand the complex emotional and practical reasons why the characters make heartbreaking choices only for a deux ex machina to decide their fates for them.

It isn’t making the audience root for the characters for good reason only to turn around and say that they were secretly becoming evil/crazy the whole time when none of their actions in previous seasons supported that.

As I said before, tragedy is a perfect storm; it’s created from the beginning, it’s planned and executed by the writer so that the ending makes sense and feels appropriate. The writer sows the seeds of the characters’ downfalls so that the circumstances and decisions fall perfectly into place to create an ending that breaks your heart yet feels inevitable.

That’s the most important part; the inevitability. It has to feel as though any other ending would be impossible because it would be in complete defiance of who the characters are and the circumstances of the plot.

That’s why I will never take the TV endings to Game of Thrones and The 100 seriously. There are so many ways that the characters’ actions were contradictory to who they were. The writers had them making choices that didn’t make sense within the circumstances of the plot or within their own established identities.

The fundamental difference between good writing and bad writing is consistency. You can have a character make a bad choice if it’s consistent with their character, if it feels like something they would do. You can have a sad, depressing ending if you have already established the plot as being inherently sad and depressing.

The moment you lose the consistency is the moment you lose believability. And claiming your story was a tragedy all along won’t fix that if you didn’t write it as a tragedy to begin with.

I’m sick and tired of these terrible endings masquerading as tragedies. These writers wouldn’t know tragedy if it stabbed them in the back.

[cynicalclassicist]

You can kind of tell that a lot of the actors weren't happy with how it progressed. The ending was just an utter mess. The characters were... WTF?

The Game of Thrones cast at the last script reading

[loserinchrist-amen]

Jon didn't stab Daenerys just to be exiled and replaced by a cripple who probably smokes Highgarden's best weed at least once every two episodes

[prettydeeryess]

RIP Robb Stark, you would've loved to see a stark army crossing the twins 😔😔😔

[ldynyx]

Must be the House of the Dragon premier that is winding me up so bad. Haven't even watched it, and I'm already preparing for the worst.

All of this knowing that this is a tragedy, and everything will end badly, I still know someone will tear it to shreds in the worst possible way, take a shovel, and dig to hell.

Remember, even tragedy (for those who appreciate and have a taste for it), if well written, will make you want to thank the author for tearing your heart out and stomping on it.

[…]

“The finale combines the rejection of a radical change with an old anti-feminist motif at work in Wagner. […] In contrast to male ambition, a woman wants power in order to promote her own narrow family interests or, even worse, her personal caprice, incapable as she is of perceiving the universal dimension of state politics.

The same femininity which, within the close circle of family life, is the power of protective love, turns into obscene frenzy when displayed at the level of public and state affairs. Recall the lowest point in the dialogue of Game of Thrones when Daenerys tells Jon that if he cannot love her as a queen then fear should reign – the embarrassing, vulgar motif of a sexually unsatisfied woman who explodes into destructive fury.”

[…]

“Daenerys as the Mad Queen is strictly a male fantasy, so the critics were right when they pointed out that her descent into madness was psychologically not justified. The view of Daenerys with mad-furious expression flying on a dragon and burning houses and people expresses patriarchal ideology with its fear of a strong political woman.”

[…]

“Consequently, Jon kills out of love (saving the cursed woman from herself, as the old male-chauvinist formula says) the only social agent in the series who really fought for something new, for a new world that would put an end to old injustices.

So justice prevailed – but what kind of justice? The new king is Bran: crippled, all-knowing, who wants nothing – with the evocation of the insipid wisdom that the best rulers are those who do not want power. A dismissive laughter that ensues when one of the new elite proposes a more democratic selection of the king tells it all.”

[…]

Very interesting analysis, I recommend reading it.

[livingfandomly]

Imagine the gravity of the events of HotD if we knew that it was all so Dany could end up on the throne?? Alllll the dominoes, centuries of history, ending with Daenerys fucking Targaryen on the throne. It would make HotD sooooo much more crucial instead of… pointless.

[aemond]

“if he’s as bad as they say, then i guess i’m cursed (looking into his eye, i think he’s already hurt)”

[godofstory]

the problem with GoT and HotD started when they shortened the season lengths from 10 episodes to 8 and 7 and ... as long as we don't have the epic episode 9s and awesome endings of episode 10s then the rest of the season is just a big trailer for the next season

[fanfictionroxs]

The world calls you 'breakbones', but the first word your son thinks of to describe his father, is 'gentle'.

Harwin Strong the man that you are. Best father in Westeros!

[the-wanderer]

after city surrendered if Daenerys had just destroyed Red Keep and Cersei with it we might have forgiven her, but can't get why she went around burning and destroying the entire city of King's Landing