Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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> Dany destroying all of King's Landing, but instead of a culmination of increasingly morally grey choices as she takes the throne from a loved leader, she's murdering civilians who don't even like Cersei because a bunch of dudes kept saying she was crazy (or something).

From, like, season 1 on Dany is established to be explosively vindictive, especially to perceived betrayal by those who are either personally trusted or whom she feels owe her duty, as well as desperate for (and violence tempered only by) receiving love on both an individual and mass level.

And those factors are directly the source of the violence she turns to in S8E5. The direct lead up has been decidedly unsubtle and started before S8. It wasn't a culmination of increasingly morally gray choices, it was a simple continuation of a pattern of behavior that's been constant the whole show combined with a pattern of increasing erosion of the factors that were previously established as mitigators combined with an increasing accumulation of factors previously established as triggers.

That it was headed for something like this has been evident for some time, that it was likely to erupt at the particular time it did against the particular target was clear in S8E4 with Missandei’s killing even before they laid on more triggers in the part of S8E5 preceding the break.

I stopped following GoT since S05E04 or around that so i did not see nor do i understand what's all this noise; but from the writing lessons i took years ago i learned that foreshadowing is NOT character development. If you use foreshadowing, especially if it's not subtle, you still have to "earn" your twist (see: Frodo if front of Mt Doom, Gollum).

You can only foreshadow and drop hints about a character changes if you do those change away from the action (the protagonist that will change is away from the limited narrator), or if the spectator do not know the character that well (he is one of the antagonist).

Let's compare to other "masterpieces" with a lot of public love. Does the character change feel as justified as Darth Vader's one in Return of the Jedi? Or even as Severus Rogue (Harry potter) change? Those change are not really well written imho (a bit too rushed for the 1rst one, a bit forced for the second, but that's only my opinion). If the character change in GOT is not at least on this level, i would understand why people are disapointed.

The error GoT have done for me is from way back. The first few seasons used realistic plot, few plothole, believable and clever characters, pretty realistic choices and political stuff. My suspension of credulity bar was set pretty low. Season 4 was weird regarding time and distance, but still mostly believable (and the dialogs were really good too). But S05 broke my suspension of credulity almost every 10 minutes and that made the show a bit boring (imo).

That's the issue for GoT: they did set the bar too high at first, then couldn't reach the same level again.

The thing is Dany doesn't have a character change, just a change of location, available power, and other circumstances. She has a consistent pattern of “This is how she acts in in this kind for circumstance”. And then those triggering circumstances recur in a different time and place and when she has vastly more power. And she acts exactly the same way she always has.

In fact, I'd argue that a distinguishing feature of GOT as a series (and ASOIAF, the book series) is that there is remarkably little character development in the narrative, and even further that a major theme of the narrative itself is that binary positive and negative character assessments tend to be made on the basis of circumstances when the same character in other circumstances would be assessed very differently, and that changes of circumstances are easily (and dangerously) mistaken for changes of character.

Dany has shown a pattern of burning her enemies. Her enemies. Those that betray her, enemies in the field who don't bend the knee. Yet every time the thought of killing innocents comes up, she's gone extremely out of her way to avoid it. She kept her dragons locked up for years because they killed a single child.

There was plenty of development to have her destroy the Red Keep, and the horrifying thing would've been that she did so even though Cersei had filled it with innocent people. There was plenty of development to have her destroy the Lannister soldiers in the streets, leaving 0 quarter to the surrendering army.

There was no development to have her burn every inch of King's Landing and destroy all the people who lived there. There was no motive (Cersei pissed her off, but none of those people even liked Cersei), there was no benefit (none of those people would've cared who the Monarch was), there was no development leading to her personality cracking (your advisers deciding you're crazy and your nephew not kissing you right now just isn't enough to make you commit genocide).

That the ending the book is shooting for, almost certainly. D&D didn't earn it. Since they didn't earn it, they'd have been better off going with something else.

> Dany has shown a pattern of burning her enemies. Her enemies. Those that betray her, enemies in the field who don't bend the knee.

And people who by situation of birth are in a group whose way of of life conflicts with her moral preferences, even if they've never personally wronged her or owed her a duty of allegiance, c.f., Astapor.

> Yet every time the thought of killing innocents comes up, she's gone extremely out of her way to avoid it.

To the extent that’s even arguably true—at least, after Mirri Maz Duur in S1 (the negative results of which are the impetus for the one Stark example of Dany’s character development)—it was directly tied to a belief that she was loved (either personally or as a leader by the masses or, most often, both) and that acting otherwise would undermine that—a factor which very much was not at play in the attack on King's Landing.

And she's made very clear since very early on (though it's clear her practical expectation that this duty would be fulfilled has evolved over time) that she feels the masses of Westeros (and therefore those of King's Landing) do owe her a duty of loyalty that they betray by obedience to anyone else. It also made clear that her relative restraint was due to the restraining influence of a particular set of advisers and allies, all of whom were either dead or seen as betrayers (the latter—and in one case also the former as a direct result—in a couple key cases in part largely because their confidence in their ability to continue to restrain her impulses was slipping for reasons clearly shown in the narrative) by the time of the attack on King's Landing.

You can rationalize this all you want, it felt out of character and rushed to most people.

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