While I do feel Danni’s character development this season is really rushed, Ive always felt this its final destination. Shes always been a conqueror, not a just and wise ruler of the people. Always needing one of her beloved and trusted advisors talk her down. Remove those that she trusts and loves, leave her surrounded by those that feel neither for her, and what are you left with?
Really though this season should have been two separate seasons. One being the Living vs the Dead, and the last being the Battle for the Throne. Its a shame its so rushed
And for those of you that still dont think this was always Danni’s final destination, I leave you with this
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Yeah, I agree that this is pretty clearly her final destination. The issue is that we got there via a wormhole in space-time, rather than an actual journey. If we'd had an actual journey for her, one that really showed the change in her character, we'd get a lot more development, stretching all the way back to Meereen. I mean, Dany
locked up her children because one of them burned a child to death, about which she felt deeply responsible and guilty. She didn't torch the citizens indiscriminately when the Sons of the Harpy were running around murdering folks. She didn't burn Vaes Dothrak to the ground and slaughter its citizens for allowing her to be treated so poorly by the Khals. There wasn't, like, one Khal or ex-Khaleesi who was nice to her that she refused to forgive and killed.
If you're going to sell Dany torching the city -- the entire city, including thousands of citizens who suffered under Cersei's rule and likely longed to be free of it themselves -- you need to do a LOT more to sell her paranoia, her frustration, her anger, and her insanity. You need to show her facade cracking, her sense of self-sacrifice in trying to do everything possible for the people she's fighting for, and them repeatedly rejecting her and -- more importantly -- plotting against her. It's not enough for them JUST to say "Nah, we prefer Jon, but hey thanks for helping kill the Night's King." You have to show them either
actually plotting to overthrow her or harm her, or show her
firmly believing that as part of an increasing descent into paranoia. And the weird thing is that all of that has to happen
after the battle against the White Walkers/Others, as well as before to some extent. You need to demonstrate how that battle starts a more precipitous turn towards lunacy mixed with rage, and it has to be about more than just "Boo hoo I'm lonely" or "wah, Jon rejected me" or "wah, everyone rejected me."
But the real problem, as I see it, is that the show itself leaned
hard into the notion of Dany as heroine. And although it visited misfortune on her, it spent so much time building her up as a liberator, a protector of the innocent, a defender of life itself that seeing her turn to the path of "It is my DESTINY, it is my RIGHT, and anyone who doesn't respect that will BURN" just comes across as narrative whiplash. She's not Harvey Dent in the Dark Knight, although the show is using the whole "Targaeryan coin-flip" thing in much the same way that Two-Face would. Dent was portrayed as a good man who went insane as a result of the physical toll visited upon him which left
half his face burnt off. But Dent also didn't have countless hours of build-up about what a fantastic guy he was, to the point where "Harvey" become a popular boy's name for babies in 2008 or whatever.
The fact that Dany's strength, determination, and triumph were all played entirely straight, and the worst you could say about her is "She isn't a great ruler and needs people around her to temper her," only further highlights how slaughtering thousands of people
after the city surrendered just comes out of left field and feels like railroading rather than organic character development.
You see the same thing with Jon. He's, like,
forced to be "lawful stupid." There's no reason he shouldn't have learned his lesson by now or learned to be at least a little more circumspect in his decisionmaking. And likewise, there's no reason why Jon and Dany couldn't have married other than Jon's own ick factor at boning his aunt, even though the Targaeryan dynasty was fundamentally built on incest and arguably was a source of their ability to control dragons. Even a loveless political marriage between them would've been smarter than what we see on the show, and it's all down to the show literally
telling you "Nope. That won't work because of reasons." Dany would run roughshod over Jon, so he wouldn't temper her. Why? Because the show said so, that's all.
It's just damn sloppy work and sheer laziness.
Yup. This. All of it. You have to work a hell of a lot harder to accomplish the end that the show has moved towards, and they just....haven't done that.
I've seen this in other long-running shows. I may have mentioned it in this thread, but How I Met Your Mother suffered similarly from craptastic handling of character arcs, and narrative whiplash, all while justifying it by saying "But this is where we were always going, and what we always intended, so too bad. This is how it ends."
Given how the show built up Dany as a hero, I actually think they should've ended the show with her being a hero. It would've been uninspired, sure, but it would've played out more effectively than the ending we're gonna get, and that's entirely because
the heroic ending was actually earned.