#ah and matt smith voice sounds much nicer when he sings

[harrowscore]

sooooo, yesterday i watched hotd s1 finale. here are my (semi-coherent) thoughts:

i've had one (1) day to simmer down my instinctive "wtf??" reaction and ponder on some writing choices - actually, two notable writing choices. first, this is no got s8 levels of disaster, but i'd already noticed a couple of red flags in ep9 and so i was - i am - guarded, though my emotional investment is nowhere near as high as my peak asoiaf/got era. i'm way more detached, and if i came off as pissed in some prev posts it was more of a general 🤷🤷 feeling concerning old disappointments in correlated or different media. (having said that, the larys/alicent feet thing is atrocious.)

i see they're still going strong with the childbirth from hell saga - i've already written about it in an older post, and i quite liked it, however gory and heartbreaking it was.

i don't buy the daemyra choking (not in a kinky way) scene. there's nowhere near enough build up for that. yes, daemon killed his first wife (which btw wasn't in the book) but they hated each other and she wasn't a targ. from d. pov's that's quite an important detail. (not that i’m excusing it, you know.) i don't even buy that "he's grieving that's why he acts (more) irrationally and with 0 impulse control (than usual)" because while he's ready for war and legitimately angry at the thought of his brother being murdered (tho viserys had been rotting away for years, last time they saw each other he could barely stand/talk, it was only a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months at best before he died, they should have been prepared for this & the greens response) he doesn't act that out of control. let's be honest here: daemyra was always problematic and people shouting ~grooming! weren't completely wrong, but the writers also sold it as High Romance. the Stupid Fangirls weren't that blinded by their silly girly brains: d&r were framed as being genuinely in love despite the painfully obvious problematic elements. (& the incest is the least problematic thing here, since this is westeros and they're targs.) i think one of the directors even compared their love to what she feels for her own husband. so no, we weren't dreaming it up, they just couldn't find a balance between Toxic Incest Couple & Soulmates Being Soulmates, and obv they had to put a ~Bad Man is Very Bad, Girlies, Don't Try At Home~ bs Morality Play that seems so damn popular in this day and age. mind you, we all knew shit was going to hit the fan with nettles' appearance (i'm still worried about her portrayal, she's just a young girl and daemon is so much older than her, and i have no idea how they’re going to develop/frame their relationship) but somehow i had not foreseen him being physically abusive to his wife (who just gave birth to their stillborn daughter and lost her father btw). i was expecting him to lash out but... not like this. after their (fabulous ngl) wedding i haven't been much invested in daemyra anyway (i thought their decades long budding romance was much more appealing) but despite what i said above, one thing d/r fans were wrong about was expecting that hbo could actually make a medieval fantasy wuthering heights 2.0 and deliver lmao. no mainstream media would do that, not in the current ~think of the girls!!! climate. this is like believing that the star wars sequels were a gothic female-gazey romance that featured rey's sexual awakening + happy ending with the local parricidal ex darksider - the romance was there, don't get me wrong, but no hollywood-made pop culture piece of media could ever deliver. we also know d/r history from f&b, it's not all sunshine and rainbows... tho it's not comparable to jaime&cersei either. this is no valonqar situation - if and when that happens in asoiaf, motives and characters can't be compared only because d. and jaime share a love for poor impulse control and incest; the framing for their ~love affair and the choking act is also radically different. this feels like a punishment for the girls who tend to romanticize daemon and his feelings for his niece, as a "sharp reminder" of who he is and what is capable of (and that women, even dragon queens who are more than mere consorts and childbearers, can be victimized and have shitty husbands ig). except that however awful and poor little meow meow he may be, he didn't do any of this marital abuse bs in the book as far as we know. which brings me to:

i have a small problem with the people who say "f&b is no real account of the dance, these characters can't be written as ooc because we basically don't know them! it's all headcanons and bias!". theoretically i agree: there are at least 3 different versions of any major event, and what intrigued me the most about this show was the premise of Unreliable Narrator Extraordinaire. which path would these writers follow? because logically one should also say: "is this what really happened in the dance?" like, aren't these people (hired by hbo, paid a shitton of money, apparently asoiaf fans themselves) also writing down their own interpretations? unless grrm himself is behind everything (foot fetish and wife-choking included) who are these people to say this is what actually happened? they didn't create the characters and the plot etc., we're seeing them through their eyes and bias as well. why are the Poor Naive Girls who romanticized the Bad Dark Prince (aka they knew he was a big asshole but didn't think he had it in him to actually assault the woman he loves) the ones to be so awfully biased and affected by media illiteracy, to the point i’ve already seen the usual crowd online gloating over it like “ha ha the bitches had it coming”? one could say this is just another version of the dance... which would actually be more compelling imo. this also brings me to:

grandma vhagar being nostalgic of her war crimes era and gnam gnam lucerys to the oblivion. i have... very mixed feelings about this. i agree that making aemond more than an evil cackling anime villain is a good choice but idk about this tbh. idk how they could have spin it differently either tho, so i give up. people say "at least he doesn't actively seek war out so he doesn't look like an idiot" except he looks like an even bigger idiot because no one in their right mind would chase down their four-and-ten nephew and his dragon (said to be “five times smaller” than vhagar) through the sky while they're riding a huge ass fucking beast that could dwarf a mountain and actually fought in the conquest just to pick out his eye, and not expect it to horribly escalate. like, if you make two dragons face each other (especially if one of them is as powerful and ancient as vhagar is) what do you think is going to happen? realistically, i mean? maybe aemond didn't want to go that far but omg he should have foreseen this from a mile. like, sweetie maybe you didn't study your history and lore so well. and for the "he's just a teenager he doesn't know what he's doing" crowd: in a short span of time this ~poor baby~ is going to burn down the riverlands, hundreds of people will die. the incident that sparks the dance being an actual accident, tho... lmao sorry but that sounds like a joke. like, no matter how you spin it, if you like or love or hate it, it still robs the character of his agency, and therefore the story of poignancy. and i'm not even 100% sold on ~the dragons randomly eating people alive even when their riders strictly forbid them too~ because yeah, i can see that, a dragon is no slave and of course they're not mindless beasts but actually quite intelligent etc. but on the other hand i for one can't wait for drogon to fire up kl of his own free will - maybe he'll just hate that fugly city, who knows - so that ~dany (aka an actual 16 year old victim of rape and abuse who liberated thousands of slaves in a continent she was exiled to as an infant) is going to burn children alive and be put down like a mad bitch because that's somehow comparable to lotr shire chapter!!1~ disk horse can finally die its miserable death.

so, yeah, mixed feelings about these two (2) plot points, particularly the ~daemon is physically abusive now~ thing. also dk about whitewashing the blacks anymore, rhaenys killed a fuck ton of civilians in ep9 for no conceivable reason (something that in the books and in peaceful times only the worst of the worst are willing to do, no matter how much these elite assholes don’t care about the smallfolk) and now daemon is even more evil than he was in the book. aegon ii may be... well, aegon ii, but with aemond being somehow more humane and whatever they're doing to alicent the blacks are the ones that actually wreak more havoc - and i’m not even touching the blood and cheese thing. at least aemond's fuck-up kinslaying was accidental lol. jokes aside i overall liked this ep more than i did ep9 and while it’s not bad bad... no mistake, this is no high television either. i’ve seen what great tv can do (it’s exceptionally rare tho, more than people think) and this doesn’t look like it except for some acting choices + scenes.