Mad queen

Spoilers! Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, up through the end of the final season of Game of Thrones.

This is probably the longest post I will ever write. It's about 2600 words. You've been warned. And no, elephants definitely would not have helped.

Consistency is one of the most difficult elements to achieve in a long-running television series, especially when the source material isn't complete, and unfortunately I do think the showrunners of GoT have missed the mark in season 8. So much of this season was on the surface, without really digging deep into any of the characters' motivations or reasons for what they're doing. It reminded me of my childhood, when my parents would ask me why I did certain things, and I would answer, "I don't know."

So, let's talk about Cersei. I think this season really diminished everything that I love about her: her brilliant mind, her uncompromising aggression, her ability to always have one more card up her sleeve. 8x04 showed her in control, the physical geography of her position in the last scene echoing what some viewers thought would be the outcome of the following battle, but besides putting Missandei in chains before killing her, Cersei didn't have much of a hand in the circumstances leading to that meeting. Her boy toy Euron Greyjoy was the one who downed Dany's second dragon, and we didn't even get to see Cersei drinking wine in the Red Keep while he did it. One could be forgiven for thinking that her lack of action is due to Jaime's departure in 7x07, if one were cynical and if one found the showrunners difficult to trust with complex female characters.

In terms of the Battle for the Dawn, it's not surprising that King's Landing was entirely absent from episodes 2 and 3, but in the context of the season as a whole, that absence feels huge. Maybe we were meant to be surprised by the number of scorpions they'd been able to build; maybe we were meant to go into 8x05 a little worried about Dany, but another episode or two would have helped with the emotional positionality.

Nowhere does Cersei seem weaker than in her death. Why have Jaime sleep with Brienne (fan service if I've ever seen it) if he was always going to go back to his sister? Why have her more concerned about an unborn child than about her throne being usurped, when she was ready to commit suicide at the Battle of the Blackwater if she and her son lost? I fail to understand why Cersei just stood there as King's Landing burned, and I refuse to believe that her apathy toward her people trumped any kind of plan she could have been thinking up while all those scorpions were being built. Of Tywin's children, Cersei has always been the most ruthless and outwardly manipulative, traits that would have served her extremely well in this battle if the writers had chosen to have her use them.

There's also the valonqar prophecy, which can be explained in a number of ways, as can most of the plot of this season -- but I'm exhausted and done trying to explain shitty and underdeveloped plot points. Just kidding, I'm not. Maggy the Frog's prophecy is as follows:

Cersei: When will I wed the prince?

Maggy: Never. You will wed the king.

Cersei: I will be queen, though?

Maggy: Aye, queen you shall be, until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all you hold dear.

Cersei: Will the king and I have children?

Maggy: Oh, aye. Six-and-ten for him, and three for you. Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds. And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.

Cersei interpreted this to mean that Tyrion would strangle her. This, among other things, ultimately led him to pledge himself to Daenerys. Tyrion then betrayed Dany by freeing Jaime and sending him to Cersei, but the twins were too slow (and Dany had cracked). By the time they made it down to the crypts, the exit was blocked, trapping them -- some might say suffocating. Dany was clearly the younger, more beautiful queen, as Cersei must have guessed, and I'm not going to try to make sense of the "when your tears have drowned you" bit. Some fans love the mental gymnastics of trying to figure out what all these prophecies mean, and I guess that's part of why the writers have done this.

Perhaps Cersei didn't realize quite how powerful dragon fire is. (Drogon melting the Iron Throne felt unnecessary; how does a dragon even know what that is? We've been given no insight into how dragons' minds work.) And this brings us to Daenerys.

After 8x05, I started rereading "A Game of Thrones," and what stuck out to me was the stark contrast in the level of detail between this book and what I remember of the first season of the show. (Time to rewatch!) We see child Dany from the inside, her insecurities, the extent to which she is controlled by her brother. And I think that if we had seen more of this in the show, we might have seen her madness coming more than some of us did. Which is not to say I didn't see it coming, because I did, and if you didn't, go back and rewatch her burn Mirri Maz Duur in season 1, burn Pyat Pree in season 2, burn Astapor in season 3, crucify the Masters of Yunkai in season 4, burn the slave owners of Meereen in season 5, burn Vaes Dothrak in season 6, burn the loot train and the Tarlys in season 7, and burn Varys in season 8. (In fact, the one time she wasn't so eager to burn everything also happened to be the battle she only fought to get Jon Snow on her side. Reduced visibility, fine, but the dragons did fuck-all that battle besides temporarily distracting the Night King.) Watch her speak to the 13 outside the gates of Qarth (and, later, inside the city) mere months after losing her husband and son: her panic, yes, but beneath that her absolute conviction that she is divine, that her dragons must make her invincible. Until she came to Westeros, she had never lost. It had never occurred to her that she might not be beloved by all. She couldn't take criticism and she sure as hell could never handle defeat.

Go back and watch all the times she's been talked out of doing exactly this shit by advisors who are now dead (Barristan Selmy, Jorah Mormont, Varys again). Go back and revisit the history of the Targaryen family, the incest for generations, Cersei's season 2 (?) statement “Every time a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin,” Viserys' entire personality. From what little we see of Rhaegar, we can't tell how well adjusted he was, but I'm betting that the truth about his marriage to Lyanna lies somewhere in between the stories we've been given. Yes, they loved each other; yes, he also probably kidnapped her, because Targaryens always get what they want. (Through Bran, we saw their wedding, but none of the circumstances leading up to it.) And, finally, Dany made her choice by saying that if the people of King's Landing were true to her, they would revolt. Every time she liberated anyone in Essos, they were always immediately grateful to her, and she came to expect that reaction. Anyone who did not immediately pledge themself to her was an enemy and must die -- painfully. She wanted to break the wheel, she didn't want to be queen of the ashes, but really what she wanted was to be queen of a people who were as unquestioningly devoted to her as her dragons were, and that would never have happened.

Dany has said, "When my dragons are grown we will take back what was stolen from me. We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground. . . . I will take what is mine through fire and blood." And yet we're surprised that she did exactly that.

Potentially unpopular opinion: we only liked Dany because she was the underdog and because the people she was killing either were objectively worse than her or had hurt her in some way (and we hate to see white women hurt). We watched her walk out of not one but two burning fires, and we said to ourselves, okay, there's something special about her. Maybe she won't go mad. But it was only ever a maybe. Listen to Viserys threatening her, asking "Do you want to awaken the dragon?"; listen to Jorah tell her, "You must show the Dothraki your strength before they will accept you as their leader"; listen to everything her advisers tell her, every threat her enemies make, every threat she makes to them. Most great leaders are a little crazy, but she always had more than her share of moments where even her closest advisers have been shocked (and in some cases scared).

Watching Dany give Hitler-esque speeches in 8x06 was unsettling, and I almost wish she lived and killed Tyrion and Jon. After she died, Grey Worm's loyalty became pettiness, the squabbles of the lords weren't rooted in any kind of fear, and as much as I do believe the story of Bran the Broken will unite the people, I really don't think he cares all that much about the day-to-day chores of running a kingdom. Dany would have been overinvolved, and I guess that's just as bad, but I can't really see this peace lasting longer than the lives of the three living trueborn Starks.

When presented with the idea that the direction the writers took with Dany in 8x05 and 8x06 was sexist, I had to think about it for a while. I read several opinion articles, many contradictory. I mentally catalogued all the fantasy novels I've read (which is a lot, because it's my favourite genre along with sci-fi). Men are not characterized as mad in the same way as women are; often, fantasy tropes lean heavily on misogyny and get away with it because the worlds they occur in are remarkably similar to our medieval period. Given that A Song of Ice and Fire (and, therefore, Game of Thrones) is set in such a world, no one is expecting Dany to be a 21st-century fifth-wave feminist, and maybe her madness was always inevitable, but it still does feel tired, overdone, and a little forced.

I keep going back to George R. R. Martin signing off on this ending. I can well believe that he intended to write Dany going mad all along, and that infuriates me. He set up a fantasy world where the morally good characters don't always survive. It drew me in. I thought, this is a writer who isn't afraid to be different; how wrong I was. If I wanted a mad scene, I would watch Lucia di Lammermoor. (Natalie Dessay, anyone?)

This season has felt suspiciously as though it's prioritizing shock value over actual character development. Of course, this happens all the time, but I'm still allowed to be disappointed when it happens this time. Case in point: none of us were prepared for Arya to kill the Night King. She began season 7 as an emotionless assassin, then went home, where the writers spent several episodes trying to get us to believe that she and Sansa were working against each other (seriously? no matter their personal feelings, the pack sticks together) before turning Littlefinger's death into a spectacle where Sansa does the talking before her sellsword steps in to finish the job. This season, we were so greedy to see her and Gendry together that we ignored everything else she was doing, which in all honesty hasn't been much. The weapon he made for her turned out to be just shy of useless, her library scene reminded me of Five from The Umbrella Academy (now there's a crossover!), and I really, really wanted to see her die killing the Night King. Not because she deserved it, but because she didn't, and this show has gotten too soft and scared of killing fan favourites. In 8x05, she was all but useless, a nice parallel with the end of season 1 (after she watches Ned die). And after scaring Sansa with her knapsack of faces in season 7, she didn't use a single one in season 8.

Let's talk about that scene with Gendry in 8x04. I've gone back and forth on this a lot, but honestly? She's told him she's not a lady, multiple times. She doesn't owe him anything. He's drunk, yes, high on adrenaline, yes, but that manifests itself in the way he proposes, not the way he feels, and they are two fundamentally different people with fundamentally different experiences and life goals. I don't want Gendrya to be endgame, because I don't like seeing women compress themselves into something palatable for men, and I don't trust men to write an ending for them that changes Gendry instead of Arya.

I'm not even going to get into the Prince That Was Promised/Azor Ahai stuff, but I'm not convinced that the showrunners know what they're doing with that. Also, again, more episodes would have been nice.

They tied up all the loose ends. I won't fault them for that. I will fault them for the way they tied them up. Dany should have lived. Since when is Jon Snow smarter than her? Since when would she fail to predict him killing her? She should have lived and burned all of them. As I said above, part of the attraction of GoT was Ned's death, Robb and Talisa and Catelyn's deaths, all the other good and just and loyal characters whose goodness and justice and loyalty blinded them to the machinations and manipulations of less good and just and loyal characters. Cersei being outsmarted by Dany, I can stomach. (Eventually.) Dany being outsmarted by Jon is disappointing.

But she died, and somehow the lords of Westeros picked a new king in five minutes, after almost 8 seasons of bickering and war over the Iron Throne (which is melted now, but the concept still exists). King's Landing post 8x05 should have been its own season. Actually, seasons 7 and 8 should have been three or four full-length, ten-episode seasons (and the episodes should have been an hour each). There. I fixed it. Hire me, HBO.

Loose ends:

Jon riding beyond the Wall with the Wildlings was a nice parallel to the opening of the first episode, but it felt like they were trying too hard to make it match.

In 8x04, Sansa expressed gratitude for having been sexually assaulted. What man told her that's the reason she's strong? She's strong because she let part of herself die, because that's what growing up is.

How did Dany only have about 30 Unsullied in the last scene of 8x04, wipe out the entirety of King's Landing (and presumably some of her own, including some Unsullied) in 8x05, and have hundreds of Unsullied standing in front of her in 8x06? Also, didn't basically all the Dothraki die in 8x03?

Yes, Missandei only had one possession after all of her years serving Dany, and it was a fucking collar.

Cersei and Jaime really did look like they could have been in a womb when Tyrion found their bodies in 8x06. Closure? Symmetry? Too easy?

What diseases is Arya going to bring to whatever indigenous people she finds across the western sea?

And now our watch is ended.