#because aeris as his savior has a lot of power over him and he sees that as normal. which is a problem

[ahamkara-apologist]

Hmm hmm debating making Crow's fear-infatuation with Aeris into a genuine short-term crush post-SOTH that Aeris knows about and is uncomfortable with, not only bc it would be a very good harsh lesson for himself given the fact that he is Not In A Good Place right after he escaped but also bc Aeris himself doesn't have enough problems so I gotta slap him with the aroace axe of 'I wish I could be this for you but I cannot' as well as 'I don't know if it's because I can't feel as other's do and I worry if there's fundamentally something wrong with me' autistic aro experience on top of it. Crow grows out of it eventually ofc and in the long run Aeris as YW can't exactly linger on himself for long but it would be an interesting take to spin on the whole concept since Crow/YW pairings are so common in fandom (for good reason)

[aboveallarescuer]

Transcripts of D&D’s Inside the Episode segments talking about Dany

This is a post with transcripts of all the Inside the Episode videos where show!Dany’s character and storyline are discussed by D&D.

We’ve already had enough of these two hacks, I know, but:

I still think discussions about the show can be productive, especially when similarities and differences between the book characters and show characters are explored. Comparing and contrasting book!Dany with show!Dany certainly brings to light interesting aspects that I may not have considered otherwise and enriches my understanding and appreciation of both of them (especially the former) in a similar way that comparing and contrasting book!Dany with book!Jon, book!Cersei and all the other book characters does.

I had already written transcripts of most of these Inside the Episode features for a while to comment on them in my books vs show reviews. However, since I’m no longer sure if I have enough energy and motivation to continue writing the reviews, I decided to finish writing the transcripts that were missing and to post them already. Maybe this can help people find more evidence that show!Dany’s ending was retconned at the last minute (which is what I firmly believe was the case).

Anyway, y’all know the drill... Expect a lot of mischaracterizations, inconsistencies, double standards, sexist remarks and implications and so on. Never accept what they say uncritically.

1.1: Winter is Coming

BENIOFF: Daenerys Targaryen, her nickname is Dany, basically went into exile from her homeland when she was so small she doesn't even remember it. She is the youngest child of the Mad King, Aerys Targaryen.

WEISS: She's never known her father, she's never known her family, she's never known her homeland, the only thing she's ever known has been her brother. She's been raised by her brother Viserys and Viserys has had his eyes on one thing and one thing only, and that is on regaining the throne that was taken from his father.

BENIOFF: She's had no stability in her life, the only constant has been this brother Viserys, so even though he is a cruel and sadistic older brother and even though he is really quite abusive to her, it's all she knows and she's been forced to - if not trust him, at least to follow his wishes, because not doing so would just lead to more abuse.

TIM VAN PATTEN: Like a lot of characters in the show, she is looking for an identity and a larger purpose in life. I think there's something deep inside her that's asleep, that's there, that she acknowledges and you see her start to acknowledge it, certainly, when she's thrown in with a Dothraki and she's presented with the dragon eggs. You could see this thought process starting, but there is something larger out there that I'm supposed to be a part of. I think she's on board for going back to the kingdom and to finding out about her culture and to having a home.

1.3: Lord Snow

BENIOFF: One of Dany's characteristics that comes to be incredibly important as the story progresses is her hatred of slavery, and I think part of the reason why she has great sympathy for the slaves is that she's grown up in a situation where she's had no power, she's basically been forced to follow the whims of her brother her entire life. Dany has a great deal of sympathy for those who are in difficult circumstances, for those who are the weak and the oppressed, and I think it comes to be one of the most compelling things about her as a character.

WEISS: She's been propriety for all intents and purposes, she's been her brother's slave and so I think she has an affinity for those people and she can actually look at these people and start to think about what their lives likely feel, the empathy with them that is natural to somebody who's sort of a slave herself and I think that she really kind of starts to realize that being somebody ese's property is no good and starts to show the beginnings of the impulse towards freedom that end up playing a much bigger role in her life and in the lives of the people around her as her story progresses.

1.4: Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things

WEISS: Daenerys lashes out at her brother - it's just something that's been building up inside her probably for years and years as long as she remembers.

BENIOFF: She comes to realize that he is a fool, he thinks he's going to go back and reconquer the Seven Kingdoms, he can't conquer anything, he can't even beat her in the fight. She comes to believe that she's heir to the Iron Throne, she sees within herself the power that she wasn't even aware existed.

1.6: A Golden Crown

WEISS: Daenerys comes into the Dothraki horde as an outsider and a lot of her story up to this point has been her finding her place in that world.

DANIEL MINAHAN: Eating this stallion's heart becomes a symbol that she's actually carrying the person who's gonna be the savior of that Dothraki people.

WEISS: This is really the place where, in front of the tribe, she becomes one of them. She disconnects from her brother and her brother sees that and that, in turn, pushes him over the edge. Any importance and love or respect that she draws from these people is respect that he's not gonna be getting, so he's alone.

BENIOFF: After he threatens her unborn child and puts the sword point on her pregnant belly, from that point on, he's dead to her, I mean, quite literally dead to her.

WEISS: When Viserys gets his golden crown, you can see in her face that it doesn't mean anything to her.

BENIOFF: She doesn't look like a little girl anymore.

 1.9: Baelor

BENIOFF: Dany's high point with the horde is probably when she eats the stallion's heart and they're really behind their queen and then she starts doing things that they frown upon. For instance, when Drogo gets sick, people start to blame her, because she had this sorceress treat him and, you know, blood magic is very magic against the Dothraki code.

WEISS: Magic is pushed to the periphery of this world and, literally, it's way across the narrow sea in the east and it's way north of the Wall and also, it's very peripheral to people's daily lives. This isn't a world where a wizard shows up with a big pointy hat and a staff and creates all sorts of magical displays. This is a world that is more like our own world in terms of the role that the supernatural has in it, but Mirri is a source of actual magic.

1.10: Fire and Blood

BENIOFF: Mirri Maz Duur is a priestess of the lamb people and she sees a chance to get revenge, not only to avenge her people, but also to prevent this guy from doing it again to other people. From her point of view, it's completely just what she does.

WEISS: She has a pretty good point... I mean, these people did come in, completely rape, pillage and murder her entire village.

BENIOFF: Of course, from Daenerys's point of view, this woman betrayed her. She put her trust in this woman after showing her kindness and now the woman has turned around and betrayed that kindness and, again, it's a theme throughout the story that no good deed goes unpunished.

WEISS: We have people doing terrible things to people that you love and yet, if you were in their shoes and you knew what they know, you would probably do the same thing. Everybody is doing what they're doing for reasons that are grounded in the real human psychology and not in the fact that they're wearing a white hat or that they're wearing the black hat. Daenerys has an understanding that she has to give herself over to something larger than herself without knowing exactly what's going to happen, but she knows that, when she walks into that pyre, she's not going to burn up. Never in her mind is it an act of suicide, even though, in the minds of everybody around her, that's, of course, what it looks like.

BENIOFF: It's the crucial climax and Daenerys is standing there in the pyre and she's become the mother of dragons and the woman you would follow to the ends of the world because that's what those remaining followers are going to do.

WEISS: Dragons in this world are the ultimate source of power and, in a world where authority is directly derived from power, they're the ultimate source of authority and the people who had dragons were the people who shaped the world.

BENIOFF: Dragons are magical, but they're also supposed to be, in this world, real creatures and so, we're looking at bats and pterodactyls and other kind of great flying creatures like that for inspiration and always wanting them to look real, we don't want them to just look like magical creatures that have just popped up.

WEISS: If they survive to maturity and they grow to the size of school buses or however large they end up getting, as their mother, she becomes a very different person than the frightened little girl we saw being sold off to a barbarian in the first episode.

2.6: The Old Gods and the New

WEISS: This whole season is really the season where Dany learns the lesson of self-reliance, she's never, it's a very painful lesson for her to learn, I mean, she's lost all her people, she's lost her husband, she's lost her bloodriders. The temptation for her has always been to lean on someone else, a man of one kind or another. So, I think for her, what she's learning in this episode, especially, is that she can't trust in other people, ultimately, she ends up in a place where she needs to do things for herself and she needs to do things that nobody in the world could possibly do, except her.

BENIOFF: Dany is so defined by her dragons, they're so much a part of her identity at this point, they define her so much that when they're taken from her, it's almost like she reverts to the pre-dragon Daenerys, you know, everyone is a bit defined by who they were when they were an adolescent, you know, no matter how old you get, no matter how powerful you get, and Daenerys was a scared, timid, abused adolescent and I think when her dragons are taken for her, all those feelings, all those memories and emotions are triggered and come back and all the confidence that she's won over the last several months, it's as if that just evaporates and she's back to being a really frightened little girl.

2.10: Valar Morghulis

BENIOFF: I think there's a real, fairly radical change in Daenerys that happens over the course of the last couple episodes of the season, which is... For most of this season, she's been looking for help from others, you know, and asking for help and, by the end of the season, she realizes that she has to do it herself, she's got to help herself and that she's, she can't ask others to give her power, she's got to take it and that she can't rely on anyone else, really. You know, Daenerys Targaryen is not in a position where she can inherit the Iron Throne, the only way she's going to take the Iron Throne and take back the Seven Kingdoms is to conquer them and she's starting to learn what that means, I don't think she really knew before, even when she's asking Khal Drogo to conquer them for her, I don't think she really knew what that meant and she's starting to and it's gonna mean warfare, it's gonna mean slaughter, it's gonna mean a lot of people dying because that's, you know, the only way to conquer anything is through destruction and, I think by the end of the second season, you're seeing her really start to come into her own as the Mother of Dragons and the last of the Targaryens.

3.1: Valar Dohaeris

BENIOFF: For a great leader who is doing something unpopular for a certain segment, whether it's the Warlocks or the slave masters or whatnot, she's creating a lot of enemies, and powerful enemies, and those people are going to try to stop her regardless of how powerful she becomes, and it's something she's actually, in a weird way, used to, because she grew up running from assassins with her brother, you know, from the time, from the earliest time she can remember, she was being spirited from one city to another one step ahead of Robert Baratheon and the assassins, because there were so many people who wanted to destroy the Targaryen family and make King Robert happy and now there are thousands out there for all sorts of different reasons because she's made even more enemies, but, I think in her mind this is just the price you pay for being Daenerys Targaryen, for being the last of the Targaryens, and it's not going to stop her.

Anatomy of a Scene: Daenerys Meets the Unsullied

WEISS: Dany spent the first two seasons of the show leaning on men - her brother, Drogo, Jorah Mormont, Xaro Xhoan Daxos. She came out of season two realizing that the only person that she can completely trust is herself.

BENIOFF: Dany has her lovable side, but she is also ruthless, and she is also fiercely ambitious. What she wants, more than anything, is to return home and to reclaim her birthright.

CLARKE: She needs the manpower to go back and conquer the Iron Throne and to be able to right the wrongs that she sees going on around her.

MINAHAN: She's been brought to Astapor, where she's reluctantly going to meet with slave traders. Her quest in this is to build an army without taking slaves.

Comments from Charlie Somers (location manager) and Christina Moore (supervising art director) that don't have anything to do with the storyline

BENIOFF: The Unsullied were kidnapped as babies from their home countries and brought to Astapor and trained in the ways of the spear and castrated.

EMMANUEL: They won't do anything without the command to do so first.

Comment from Tommy Dunne (weapons master) that doesn't have anything to do with the storyline

CLARKE: She's being introduced to the Unsullied by Kraznys, the slave master in control of them.

EMMANUEL: Kraznys is being quite insulting to Daenerys. And Missandei very cleverly smoothes out her translation, just her initiative doing that shows her intelligence.

CLARKE: Dany sees a lot of herself in her and can kind of see that it's a young girl who's capable of much more than the position she's in. She's his No 1 slave. If you were in the UN, she would be the translator for everyone.

WEISS: Kraznys speaks a version of Valyrian that's been bastardized and mixed with other local languages.

Comment from Majella Hurley (dialect coach) that doesn't have anything to do with the storyline

CLARKE: She's struggling with the moral aspect of the way that these cities are run. And it's something she's been grappling with because they are an army of slaves, which she fundamentally has moral issues with due to the fact that she herself was a slave.

WEISS: The only way she can make the world a better place is to become the biggest slaveowner in the world.

BENIOFF: She's put into a difficult position, and she's got her advisors whispering in her ears.

GLEN: Jorah encourages her to get over her moral scrupules, with taking an army that were duty-bound to follow whatever leader it was, and that could change in an instant.

BENIOFF: Idealism is wonderful, but it's not gonna happen if you're idealistic, you gotta be a realist. She feels like she has this almost divine mission and nothing is gonna prevent her from achieving it.

WEISS: What she wants to do isn't just conquest for the sake of conquest, but it's really conquest for the sake of making the world a better place, and she's a revolutionary in that sense.

BENIOFF: For Daenerys to win, ultimately, she's gonna have to be just as ruthless as the others, and maybe even moreso.

3.3: Walk of Punishment

BENIOFF: Dany has her lovable side, but she is also ruthless, and she is also fiercely ambitious and, funnily, like a Littlefinger style ambition where she's trying to climb this, you know, the social ladder. It's almost like a Joan of Arc kind of ambition where she feels like she has this almost divine mission and nothing's going to prevent her from achieving it, and that might mean sacrificing those who are closest to her.

WEISS: Giving away one of the dragons seems like a completely insane thing to do, especially the biggest one. I mean, we know that, historically, the biggest dragons were those bigger than school buses and they were weapons of mass destruction and able to lay cities to waste in minutes, and no matter how big or effective your army of 8,000 soldiers is. Taking even a small city is going to be a kind of a dangerous prospect for them, and the idea that she's going to give away what they see is her real future for a chance at a small army now seems insane to them.

3.4: And Now His Watch is Ended

WEISS: We never really got this, a sense of her capacity for cruelty. She's surrounded by people who are terrible people, but haven't done anything to her personally, and it's interesting to me that, as the sphere of her empathy widens, the sphere of her cruelty widens as well.

BENIOFF: I think she becomes harder to dismiss, you know, for a long time people have been saying, even if she was alive, you know, really, the only threat she poses is her name, she's a Targaryen, great, but she's a little girl in the edge of the world, so she's starting to knock on people's doors a little bit.

WEISS: All at once she becomes a major force to be reckoned with, she spent a lot of time kind of banging her fists on the doors and declaring that she was owed the Iron Throne by right, but now she's stepped in her own as a conqueror.

BENIOFF: Dany is becoming more and more viable as a threat, you know, both, you know, in attaining an army and because she's the mother of these three dragons who are only gonna get more and more fearsome.

3.7: The Bear and the Maiden Fair

WEISS: Daenerys is coming into her own in a powerful way in the season. She's always been very negatively predisposed towards slavery because she knows what it feels like to be property, I mean, she was a very fancy slave for all intents and purposes, she was somebody who was sold to another man, taken against her will and I think that her feelings about slavery have started to really inform her reasons for wanting the Iron Throne, it's finally started to occur to her that, if I want to take on this responsibility, it's almost - it's incumbent upon me to do something with it, and she sees this great wrong, probably the greatest possible wrong surrounding her, and she's decided that she's not just going to take back the Iron Throne because it's her right, she's gonna take back the Iron Throne because she is the person to make the world a better place than it is. She is going to not just take it, she's gonna use it for something greater than herself.

 3.10: Mhysa

BENIOFF: We see her get an army in episode four, and here in the finale you see her get her people, really, because she's got, she has her Dothraki followers that don't number very many, and she's got the people she's freed from the other cities, but now she is, it's not just - it's something even more, something almost even more religious about it than just a queen, I mean, she's the mother of these people.

WEISS: And it creates a whole new dynamic between her and the people that she's fighting for that she's gonna have to deal with in the future.

BENIOFF: The way they treat her, the way they lift her up and she is...  something that has its... A revelation from a prophecy and that glorious destiny is coming true.

WEISS: Here it seemed like it was really important to let us know just how many people were counting on her to see the full extent of, mostly, the full extent of her army and the tens of thousands of people who flooded out of these gates to pay tribute to her. And then, keeping the dragons in play because they're always such an important part of her identity, we just want to tie all of that together in one great shot.

4.5: First of His Name

WEISS: This scene shows Dany learning a lesson that all revolutionaries learn at one point or another, which is that conquering in many ways is a whole lot easier than ruling.

BENIOFF: This is the pivotal moment for Daenerys because, for so long, her sole goal was getting back to Westeros, conquering Westeros and sitting on the Iron Throne and becoming the queen that she believes she has every right to be, now she has the opportunity.

WEISS: She is driven by a kind of a deep empathy, a much deeper empathy than probably anybody else in the show. It's something that makes her as charismatic as she is to people, because they get a sense of that sincerity of it. Her empathy allows her to look at the people of Westeros and say, why the hell would they follow me if I haven't proven myself through my actions to be somebody worth following, why would they let me rule if I hadn't proven myself to be somebody who has ruled well somewhere else?

4.7: Mockingbird

WEISS: In season one, Dany's sexuality was central to her transformation from basically a piece of propriety into a full-fledged human being and with Drogo the first thing that she took charge of was the only thing that was available to her at the time, which was her own body, and she came into her own as an adult, really, amongst the Dothraki, who were not shy about their bodies in any way. That Dany is not really cut out to be a virgin queen and Daario is a bad boy who seems like a good idea to her at this moment, and she takes her prerogatives as a powerful person as powerful people sometimes do, and yet he's made himself more than available. She didn't ever expect Jorah to find out, she loves Jorah in her own way, she makes it very clear to him that he's far more important to her means, far more to her than a person like Daario ever could, just not in the way that Jorah might like.

BENIOFF: He's been in love with Dany from pretty much her wedding day and now he sees this young upstart, who just entered her life relatively recently, come into his world and sweep her off her feet. I think he's both incredibly jealous and also a little bit angry at Dany that she would fall for a man who he considers so unworthy of her.

4.8: The Mountain and the Viper

WEISS: It's hard to keep a thing like that covered up forever, especially when your enemies are so invested in putting a wedge between you, I mean, they are a good team, they compliment each other nicely in lots of ways that are really troublesome to the Lannisters especially, so it shouldn't be a surprise, I think it's just one of those things that, in hindsight, he probably should've told her a long time ago, and it's more the fact that he kept it from her than the fact that he did it, which seals his fate. I think, from Dany's perspective, this is the most earth-shattering thing that could possibly happen to her. He's her rock and her anchor, the way in which he stops her from flying off into potentially dangerous directions, and when someone that important to you, that central to you, is shown to be not just a liar, but when their entire relationship to you is shown to be based upon a lie, I think it poisons every corner of her world with doubt and mistrust. From his perspective, he may have started as an informer, but she is his whole reason for being, at this point, I mean, he's completely given up on his desire to return to Westeros in any way except by her side. His home now is wherever she happens to be, so this is really like being expelled from the Garden for him, this is the worst thing that could happen to either of them. For her, it's her child; when Viserys put her child in danger and pointed the sword at her stomach, you saw some switch flipping her, you saw something change and she watched him die without blinking an eye, even though he was her family and the other family she had ever known, and when she realizes that Jorah was also responsible for putting that child in danger, I think that's what closes the door on him forever.

4.10: The Children

WEISS: Ruling is about maintaining order and creating an environment for your people that is safe and her dragons, which were such an asset for scaring the shit out of everybody and making people throw down their shores and run in the other direction when she would come knocking as a conqueror, they're becoming a liability that she can't afford anymore. It's one thing to be killing people's goats and you can pay off a goat herder for his goats, you can't pay off a goat herder for his children. So, she realizes that she has to put the interests of her people ahead of her dragons, who are the only real children she's ever going to have.

5.2: The House of Black and White

BENIOFF: There always seemed to be this sense of "manifest destiny" with Dany and that she was going to take what was hers with fire and blood, and she has, but there's a difference between taking and keeping and there's a difference between conquering and ruling and she's finding out that the latter is much more complicated. It's impossible to rule over a city as large as Meereen without infuriating certain people.

WEISS: Dany is trying her very best to do the right thing, to be a good ruler, and sometimes, within the context of this world, being a good ruler means doing things like executing Mossador, it's about laying down a justice that's blind and impartial and applying it evenly to everybody, former master or former slave.

BENIOFF: And, in this case, with Mossador, it's very complicated for her because she has a great deal of affection for this young man who was a slave until she came and that's the reason he was selected to represent the free people on her council and he's been a strong ally of hers and yet he disobeyed her and so, from her mind, she's making a very hard-headed but fair decision, and in the minds of the freedmen and freedwomen watching this execution, she's turning on them and she's executing one of her children, one of the people who called her a mhysa.

WEISS: When she steps up and actually does that, of course, she finds that she doesn't win any friends for her blind justice and her commitment to the law that she alienates her supporters and the people who hated her hate her as much as they did before, so it's one of those things where doing the right thing doesn't have any immediate rewards associated with it, it just leads to a riot that almost gets her head caved in with a bunch of rocks.

5.6: Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken

(Dany doesn't appear in this episode; D&D discuss events from episode 5.5 here.)

BENIOFF: Looking at Dany in Meereen, she's facing a real tricky dilemma so far in that she's trying to create stability in the city where she's a foreigner, she's an outside power who's coming with a foreign army and she seizes power and about half the city hates her, so the way she's trying to stem the civil war is in part by police action and in part by marrying the head of an ancient family and creating an alliance with those old families and actually trying to bring them onto her side by marrying Hizdahr.

WEISS: She doesn't like Hizdahr, she doesn't trust Hizdahr, but she has enough wisdom to understand that she's not going to get this done by smashing heads alone, she's going to need to create ties to this world that she wants to be a part of and to rule, and she understands that marriage is the way to do that.

5.7: The Gift

BENIOFF: I think Dany is still not quite at that cynical level yet, she still believes that there's a higher purpose that she's there for, it's not just about power, it's about using that power to make humanity better.

WEISS: If somebody is telling you that one of those horrible things that's all the more horrible because you suspect that it's true, and she's an idealist who desperately wants to believe that that's not the case, but, in their relationship, Daario is one of the only people - the only person around her now - who tells her all the things she doesn't want to hear.

BENIOFF: So she's not yet convinced that she needs to be a butcher. At the same time, she realizes that, the longer the season goes on, that she has to be ruthless sometimes in order to maintain security, in order to keep herself in power, so that means some bastards are going to get sacrificed to her dragons, then so be it.

5.8: Hardhome

WEISS: Over the course of their conversation, the similarities in their experiences start to come to the fore, maybe the similarities in their worldview start to come to the fore.

BENIOFF: Tyrion has a lot of empathy for another orphan out there who had another terrible father, y'know, it certainly links that bond them. He realizes maybe Varys was right about her that she's the last chance for Westeros and this is someone who could cross the Narrow Sea and not only bring me back into power, because Tyrion still has his own ambitions, but create a better world for the people over there because, depite everything, despite his occasional cynicism and his lack of sentimentality, Tyrion is one of the few players in this game who believes that it's possible to make things a little bit better for people.

WEISS: Dany talks a good game and she's very charismatic and she's a very impressive young woman, but he's heard lots of people say lots of pretty words over the course of his life and he's seen how those plans go awry when they meet with reality. Like revolutionaries in our own world, she has every intention to change things, even if that means knocking everything down to do it.

5.9: The Dance of Dragons

BENIOFF: Even before we put it in the paper, I remember reading this scene in the book and saying "holy shit" and actually I remember emailing George right after I read the scene, even before I finished the book just after reading the scene and saying: "that's one of the best scenes in any of your books and I have no idea how we're going to do it". This seems like a big scene for a feature movie, let alone a TV show.

WEISS: It's one of the most powerful and seamless allusions we've ever created on the show; we've never had anything remotely like this before.

BENIOFF: Dany could stop this at any moment, as Tyrion says at the moment when it looks like Jorah is going to die, and she can, she's the queen, she can stop anything, right, and she doesn't, because, even if she is the queen, she is, as she says earlier, if I don't keep my word, why would anyone trust me? And she's exiled him from the city twice now, he's come back twice, so, from her perspective, she's not gonna step in and protect him, I mean, he's not worthy of her protection; but, at the same time, as tough as she is, she's watching this man that she's had great affection for for so long and it looks like she might lose him, it looks like he really might die, so there's just this witches' brew of conflicting emotions in Dany's head and Jorah, I think, is really hoping for her to stop and you know, at certain points, like, look what I'm willing to do to get back to you.

WEISS: The look he gives her in that moment, you can just feel how intensely it just digs into her and how it says volumes to her across that dusty arena without ever speaking a word.

WEISS: [the Sons' attack on the arena] It's one of my favorite moments in the scene and the season and in this series, that moment where she realizes this is over and she resigns herself to that faith.

BENIOFF: This isn't the way she saw it happening, it's not the way she wants it to end, but if it's going to happen, she doesn't want to die screaming, she doesn't to die in terror, she wants to have a moment of peace before it's over and then, at that moment, when all seems lost, Drogon comes. There seems to be a connection between them, it's been talked about before on the show and in the books, there's this very deep connection between the Targaryens and their dragons, and certainly that's true with Dany and Drogon, it's more than just a pet of hers, they are in a real sense for her her adopted children and so this is just evidence of Drogon's ability to sense when his mother is in great peril. Jorah has this conversation with Tyrion halfway through the season where he says, I used to be cynical like you, but then I saw this girl step out of the fire with three baby dragons and, if you've ever heard baby dragons singing, it's hard to be cynical after that, and it's the same thing happening here for Tyrion, it's hard to be cynical after watching this young queen fly off on a dragon and it's very hard not to believe that she really is the chosen one.

WEISS: I think at that point it's pretty hard for Tyrion to keep a grip on his cynicism. His expression watching her fly away completely captured what we wanted to capture in the moment, which is he's never seen a girl like this before.

5.10: Mother’s Mercy

WEISS: Daenerys is stuck on this beautiful, but isolated, plateau without any food and a dragon that mostly wants to sleep and get better, so she's got to find her on way, which is fine, except she encounters a group of people she probably didn't expect to encounter again anytime soon. When she sees the Dothraki, she knows what that means, and her relationship with Drogo was one thing, but Drogo is gone and she knows, in a way, that he was sort of an anomaly. She drops the ring because she's smart; that ring is the breadcrumb that's gonna point in the direction that she's being taken and somebody down the line hopefully who means her less harm than the Dothraki will notice.

6.1: The Red Woman

WEISS: Tyrion is very much in the situation along with Varys where they're sitting on a volatile powder keg of a society.

BENIOFF: The enemies of Daenerys see a city ripe to be overthrown and it's going to test Tyrion's political skills, his diplomatic skills, all of his experience.

WEISS: He's optimistic in a strange way for him, he's not generally an optimistic person, but I think he feels inspired for the first time and he feels equal to the challenge that's facing him when it comes to Meereen.

6.3: Oathbreaker

WEISS: I think when Dany returns to Vaes Dothrak it's obviously with a certain sense of dread, because she knows that these widows of the former khals are not likely to welcome her with open arms, it's not like a "long-lost sister, where have you been?", it's "here's a funny-looking, white-haired girl who has put herself on a record as thinking she's all that" and stringing a bunch of highfalutin titles after her name. But the High Priestess of the Dosh Khaleen is not coming at it from the perspective of somebody who's looking to punish this young person with inflated ideas of her own greatness, I think she remembers what it was like to think that a glorious destiny awaited her and to find out that that wasn't the case. I think the High Priestess has a certain amount of empathy with Dany's position, which you see in the way that she relates to her, which is stern, but not quite as awful as anybody might have expected it to be.

6.4: Book of the Stranger

BENIOFF: The historical examples that we looked to in writing these scenes was, oddly, that was Abraham Lincoln, because Lincoln was trying desperately to stave off a civil war between the North and the South and he wasn't ready to get rid of slavery quite as quickly as people think. I mean, he was trying to talk to the southerners and work out some kind of compromise at first and, you know, with Tyrion it's, as he says to Grey Worm and Missandei, slavery is an evil, war is an evil, and I can't have both at once, so what's the solution here? The whole point of diplomacy is compromise. He's proposed compromise, which he thinks of as a good idea, is incredibly offensive to Missandei and Grey Worm, who were slaves and, you know, from their point of view, you don't make a compromise with slavers because that's making a deal with the devil, so they're entering into these negotiations with slavers with deep skepticism, but Daenerys did choose this man to advise her, so if he's saying there's a chance, they're willing to try it, but with great suspicions.

BENIOFF: One of the things that was interesting for us was, you know, seeing how Dany can be strong when she is not in a position of power, you know, all the khals of all the gathered khalasars were within the temple of the Dosh Khaleen and Dany, an unarmed little woman, killed them all, by herself. You know, she didn't have a dragon flying and doing it, it was all Dany.

WEISS: The end of episode 604 definitely meant consciously to echo the end of episode 110. It's Dany stepping out of a flame to great effect; this time it was just on a much, much larger scale.

BENIOFF: Rebirth is clearly a theme this season, whether it's Jon Snow or Dany emerging again from the fires. When she did it the first time, only, you know, a few score people witnessed this miracle of Daenerys Targaryen emerging unscathed from the flames. Now it's the Dothraki as a people who witnessed this.

WEISS: The act of stepping out of that burning temple, in which all the Dothraki power structure had just perished, pretty much makes her the queen of the Dothraki in one fell swoop.

BENIOFF: And, of course, it's hard not to be impressed when you see her emerging from the fires unscathed. It's like a god being reborn, and that's why they all bow to her.

6.6: Blood of my Blood

BENIOFF: Daenerys talks about the dragons being her children and that the dragons are the only children she'll have. Of her three children, she's always been closest to Drogon, and they clearly have some kind of connection that goes beyond words and she just senses that he's out there in the scene. One of our favorite moments from season one was watching Khal Drogo deliver a speech to his gathered khalasar. That speech lingered in Daenerys's mind and she's echoing almost the exact same language when she's talking to the Dothraki now. So she's basically telling them the promise that one of the great khals had made years before and saying now's the time to live up to that promise and to fulfill it. It's something that's been set up for quite a long time and now we're seeing it come to pass.

6.9: Battle of the Bastards

WEISS: Daenerys, when she comes back to that situation, she has no idea what to expect, she doesn't know what's happened in Meereen. In a way, you feel for Tyrion because she left him with a terrible situation; the city was under siege from within and without and he really did, for so long, an excellent job of making things better there and, unfortunately, what she comes back to find is exactly what she would have expected to find when she left, and the fact that she has a city at all still is due to him.

BENIOFF: I think Dany's been becoming a Targaryen ever since the end of season one.

WEISS: She's not her father and she's not insane and she's not a sadist, but there's a Targaryen ruthlessness that comes with even the good Targaryens.

BENIOFF: If you're one of the lords of Westeros or one of her potential opponents in the wars to come and you get word of what happened here in Meereen, you have to be pretty nervous because this is an unprecedented threat, you got a woman who's somehow formed an alliance where she's got a Dothraki horde, a legion of Unsullied, she's got the mercenary army of the Second Sons and she's got three dragons who are now pretty close to full-grown, so if she can make it all the way across the Narrow Sea and get to Westeros, who's gonna stand in her way?

6.10: The Winds of Winter

WEISS: Tyrion had a very steep slope to climb to win Dany's trust. His family played an integral part in nearly exterminating her family, but, at this point, especially given the hand he was dealt with Meereen after she left, he's earned her trust. One of the few people in this world at this point who's willing to speak the truth to her face.

BENIOFF: Mainly, he's proven himself to be very loyal, you know, she's gone for most of the season, but he didn't abandon her, he didn't go off looking for the next person to rule him, he was clearly trying to serve her interest while she was gone. Dany's not gonna do anything she doesn't want to do, she's not gonna take anyone's advice if it seems against her interests and so, when he recommends that she cut ties with Daario, she does it because she thinks he's right. The truth is, Tyrion's logic makes a lot of sense to her, you know, he's not gonna be a help for her when she gets to Westeros, she comes over there unencumbered and, as a queen without a king, that could be really useful in the future. You know, Tyrion has become a very capable adviser in a relatively short time, she clearly respects his intelligence and she now respects his loyalty. I think, especially given that she knows where they're heading, they're going back to Westeros, most of the people on her team have never been there, but Tyrion spent his whole life there, served as Hand of the King before, defended King's Landing during an attack, he knows these families, the ruling family, better than anyone, he certainly knows Cersei better than anyone, so, as long as she can trust him, which she does, he's the perfect adviser for her in this war for Westeros. He's the perfect Hand to the Queen and that's why she names him such.

WEISS: That shot of Dany's fleet with all of her newly arrayed allies making its way out of the Slaver's Bay towards the Narrow Sea and home, it's probably the biggest thing that's happened on the show thus far, it's the thing we've been waiting for since the pilot episode of the first season. The person she is now is very, very different from the person she was then. It hasn't been a smooth road, feels like she has earned it at this point.

BENIOFF: It's the shot that we're gonna leave everyone with.

WEISS: It was a real thrill to see her on the bow of that ship, with Tyrion by her side heading west. The ruthlessness that comes with even the good Targaryens, I mean, these are the people who came over from across the narrow sea and conquered the known world. It'll be very interesting to see how that plays out going forward.

7.1: Dragonstone

BENIOFF: For [Cersei] now at this point, it's about survival, and the way to survive is to defeat her enemy. She will do whatever she has to do to win, she'll blow up the sept if that will allow her to win, even if that means killing hundreds, probably thousands of innocent people. She's capable of anything, unlike Dany, who is constrained a little bit by her morality and her fear of hurting innocents. For those of us who have been with the story from the beginning and really followed Dany's journey, coming home is such a massive, game-changer on so many levels, and we just wanted to see that.

WEISS: There is so much weight on that arrival that we felt that a bunch of dialogue was completely unnecessary, it would only step on the emotion of the moment.

BENIOFF: Everyone is giving her a little bit of distance; Tyrion, who is usually the most loquacious of people, he's not talking because he wants her to experience it and, at one point, Grey Worm is about to walk up alongside Dany to guard her and Missandei holds him back because she wants Dany to experience it on her own. And then she has that time and she's ready to begin.

7.2: Stormborn

WEISS: I don't think they're that many situations in film or television where you see four women sitting around a table discussing power and strategy and war. We didn't really plan it that way, but once it landed on that we knew that these things had to be discussed, we knew the plan to take Casterly Rock had to be put out there. I think it's a scene that, had it been the exact same information, situation being put forward by a bunch of old grizzled guys with gray beards, it would have been a lot less interesting to have it be Emilia at one end of the table and Diana at the other end of the table. To me, that just is such a breath of fresh air, and made writing it a lot more fun. The end, after all has been said and done, then Olenna sits her down and tells her to ignore all of that.

Show!Olenna: You're a dragon. Be a dragon.

WEISS: When Diana tells you to do that you start to... go outside the scene and wonder if that applies to every aspect of your life and not just the scene you happen to be shooting.

7.3: The Queen’s Justice

WEISS: The spine of the episode is about their meeting. It was an exciting, thrilling thing to watch happening even as we were shooting it. Once we realized that we're kind of getting a charge out of just seeing this happen on a set, which is a notoriously boring place, we had a sense that it would carry over to the finished version of the scene.

BENIOFF: That audience chamber was built by Aegon Targaryen to intimidate anyone who came there.

WEISS: He doesn't have much insight into what she's gone through. So, I think he sees a rich girl with a fancy name sitting in a big chair with a fancy dress on, proclaiming herself the queen of the world. So, I don't think he's looking upon her with as much respect as she has come to take as her due.

BENIOFF: He's a very strong-willed person. He didn't come down there to bend the knee. He didn't come down there to join her in her fight against Cersei. None of that matters at this point, though. All that matters is... fighting the dead.

WEISS: She looks at him, and she thinks this is some unwashed barbarian from the North and a bastard. His name is Jon Snow, yet he's calling himself king. If she knew what he'd seen, she'd be looking very, very differently... at what he's telling her, but at this moment in time, she only sees somebody who's trying to carve up her piece of her kingdom for himself. And if what this guy is saying is true, then it really is an issue, and she has... her own very serious issues to deal with in the shape of the woman who's now sitting on the throne.

7.4: The Spoils of War

BENIOFF: There's tension on two sides. One is the political, where Jon Snow has his own very specific purpose here on Dragonstone, and that's to get the Dragonglass and, if possible, to convince Dany to fight with him. And Dany has her own very specific purpose, which is to get Jon to bend the knee. There's conflict, and it's conflict between powerful people. And then to make it all even more complicated, they're starting to be attracted to each other. And so much of it is not from dialogue or anything we wrote, it's just the two of them in a small space standing near each other, and us just watching that and feeling the heat of that.

WEISS: She had a nicely triumphant return to Dragonstone, which nobody contested or got in the way of. From that point on, she's lost two of her principle allies, she's lost a lot of her fleet. She's in a position where if she doesn't step up soon and come up with a big win for her side, she's gonna lose this fight before it even begins. I think she really feels the pressure of her situation more than she ever has before. This is the fight she's been waiting for her whole life.

BENIOFF: I think there are several stories interplaying here. Part of it is that Dany's finally cutting loose. The whole first part of the season, she's been frustrated. In following Tyrion's counsel, she's been fighting with one hand behind her back, and so she hasn't really unleashed the Dothraki horde. She hasn't really set the dragons into combat yet.

WEISS: With the loot train battle, one of the things that's most exciting about it for us... This is the first time we've ever had two sets of main characters on opposite sides of the battlefield. And it's impossible to really want any one of them to win, and impossible to want any one of them to lose.

WEISS: This dragon flies up. That makes it a totally different situation. It's almost like, "What if somebody had an F-16 that they brought to a medieval battle?" You start to scrap the history of it a bit, and just think about how would those things interact with each other in a way that's exciting and believable to the extent that dragons are believable?

BENIOFF: Qyburn realized that the dragons were vulnerable. They might be fearsome beasts, but they are mortal and they can be hurt, and they can be killed. We see the scorpion come into play, manned by Bronn. And we see Drogon wounded. Things turn out okay for them, but I think it also changes the calculation a little bit, because now they know these weapons are on the board. This ongoing war with Cersei is entering into a dangerous territory.

WEISS: Jaime's charge at Daenerys is a hard thing to top for me in that sequence, only because when you have a principle character trying to murder another principle character, that doesn't happen all that often.

7.5: Eastwatch

BENIOFF: One of the things that Dany has found immensely frustrating in the beginnings of this war against Cersei is that she is being asked to fight on a certain moral standard and... Cersei isn't. Because of that, Cersei has an advantage over her. The more ruthless opponent will often win. I wouldn't say she's acting like the Mad King because it's rational. She's given them a choice and they choose not to bend the knee to her and she accepts that choice and she does exactly what she told them she would do. And from her standpoint, she's not acting insane in any way. She's just being tough, which is what she needs to be to win. That's one perspective. Tyrion has a different perspective and hopefully people watching will have their own and they'll decide for themselves whether they think what she did was just or immoral.

7.6: Beyond the Wall

BENIOFF: At a certain point, they're just fighting for their survival. Once they retreat all the way to the middle of the lake, there's nowhere farther to run. She's always been willing to risk her life to do what she thinks is right. And in terms of going North to rescue them, a number of people up there have different claims on her heart. And Jorah's been by her side from the beginning, and he saved her life so many times, I think she would feel as if it was a betrayal if she didn't at least try to save him. And then of course, there's Jon Snow. You definitely get the sense that he's become quite important to her in a pretty short amount of time. He sees that they're all gonna die if the dragon doesn't take off. The rational decision at that point is, "You guys go to safety, and I'll try to keep them off you as long as I can." He's the guy who jumps on the grenade to save the rest of the platoon. That's always been Jon.

WEISS: I think that when she sees him return on the back of Coldhand's horse, that's a big moment for her in terms of the way she feels about him.

BENIOFF: I don't think either one of them really knew exactly how powerful their feelings were towards each other until these moments. Just the notion of falling for someone, that involves weakness. It's not something a queen does. But she feels that happening, and he feels it happening for her. I think both of them are on, kinda, unfamiliar ground. And especially because it's with an equal. It's kind of hard for her at that point, I think not to look at this guy, and realize this is not like the other boys.

WEISS: What was fun about the sequence, you know, awful way to us is that up until the end, it's very close to one of those battles where all the good guys get out the other side, and, more or less, scot-free. But we knew that killing the dragon was gonna have a tremendous emotional impact, 'cause over the seasons and seasons of the show it's really been emphasized what they are to Dany. We knew that the Night King would see and seize this opportunity. I'd like to think that when the dragon dies, that it's kind of a one-two punch, 'cause on the one hand, you've just seen the horror of one of these three amazing beings like this in the world going under the water and not coming up again, and processing that. Then you're processing something that's even worse, which is when it comes back out from under the water again, and we see in the last shot of the episode, what it becomes.

7.7: The Dragon and the Wolf

BENIOFF: Jon's not Jon Sand. He's actually, as Bran finally overhears from Lyanna, Aegon Targaryen. And that means he's the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. That changes everything.

WEISS: I would say the challenge with this sequence was finding a way to present information that at least a good portion of the audience already had in a way that was dramatic and exciting, also had a new element to it. Part of the answer as to how to go about doing that was in the montage, inter-cut nature of it. It was about making it clear that this was almost like an information bomb that Jon was heading towards.

Show!Bran: Robert's rebellion was built on a lie.

WEISS: The only way to really emphasize that was to tie those two worlds together cinematically, and to have Bran actually narrating these facts over the footage of Jon and of Dany.

Show!Bran: He's the heir to the Iron Throne.

WEISS: Just as we're seeing these two people come together, we're hearing the information that will inevitably, if not tear them apart, at least cause real problems in their relationship. And she's his aunt.

BENIOFF: It complicates everything on a political level, on a personal level, and it just makes everything that could have been so neat and kind of perfect for Jon and Dany, and it really muddies the waters.

Show!Bran: We need to tell him.

BENIOFF: We tried to contrast the various season endings so that they don't feel too similar. So last season we had a pretty triumphant ending with Dany finally sailing west towards Westeros. This one is definitely much more horrific.

8.1: Winterfell

BENIOFF: It's a whole new procession, and so instead of Robert arriving with Queen Cersei and Jamie Lannister and The Hound, it's Daenerys coming with Jon Snow. I don't think the North is the most welcoming place to outsiders. Dany's smart. She senses that distrust, and she's... gonna make the best of a bad situation, but that doesn't mean that she likes it or she's happy.

WEISS: When you're doing something good for people, and you get met with what Sansa gives her when they meet in the courtyard, it's understandable that she would be upset.

WEISS: I think that if Tyrion were to have shown up on his own to Winterfell, he would've gotten a much different reception from Sansa than he did coming as the Hand of the Queen, Daenerys Targaryen.

BENIOFF: No one's ever ridden a dragon except for Dany. Only Targaryens can ride dragons, and that should be a sign for Jon. Jon's not always the quickest on the uptake, but eventually gets there.

WEISS: We wanted to kind of re-anchor their relationship. It seemed important for it to involve the dragons, since the dragons play such an important role.

BENIOFF: It's a major thing for her when she sees they have some kind of connection to him, they allow him to be around them. And when he flies up with her and shows her where he used to hunt as a kid, I think she falls even farther in love with him.

WEISS: Seeing Jon and Dany on the dragons together, it's a Jon and Dany moment, but it also seeds in the idea that these creatures will accept Jon Snow as one of their riders.

BENIOFF: One of the challenges, but also one of the exciting things about this episode, this whole season, is bringing together characters who have never met. Sam has long been one of the more important characters in the story. But he's never seen Queen Daenerys, and yet they're connected by various threads. The obvious one, which we know from the beginning of the scene, is Jorah. Sam saved him, and so Jorah owes him this great debt. What none of them realize until midway through this scene is that they have another, horrible connection.

WEISS: There are all these things that you know about those characters that the other characters don't know. And some of them are very important. Dany murdered Samwell's father and brother.

BENIOFF: That's a really complicated thing for Sam because he had a really fraught relationship with his father. Yet Sam's older brother was not a bad person, and died, really, quite bravely, standing by his father's side.

WEISS: John Bradley did an excellent job. The difference between the way he takes the news of his father's death and the way he takes the news of his brother's death, it was a subtle thing that he does with very few words. It's the kind of thing that he could find out in a number of different ways, but it seemed like a very ineffective preamble and way into that later moment.

WEISS: The fact that Jon's real parents were who Jon's real parents were is not news to us at this point, but what we don't know is the way that Jon is going to take this. How's the explosion gonna look?

BENIOFF: Sam, as a brother of the Night's Watch, and Jon are more brothers than Bran and Jon ever really were. He knows it's gonna hurt Jon and it's going to shatter his whole worldview. For all they know, the Army of the Dead could attack the next day, and someone has to tell Jon before that.

WEISS: He's being told something that he both knows is true and can't handle. So he tries to throw things in front of it to prevent him from having to deal with the-- the truth of what he's being told. The thing he throws in front of it here is the fact that it means his father was lying to him his whole life. The truth that Samwell tells Jon is probably the most incendiary fact in the entire world of the show. We chose to play the whole thing on Jon's face because, as great a job as John Bradley is doing presenting this information, he's really just presenting information we know already.

8.2: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

WEISS: When Jaime shows up to Winterfell, it's very difficult for almost anybody to know how to feel about it. On the one hand, Dany looks at him as the person who murdered her father, and even if she has come to terms with who her father was and what her father really was, it probably doesn't entirely erase the sting of her father's murderer showing up on her doorstep.

BENIOFF: Tyrion has made a number of mistakes now, and Dany's really at the end of her patience. Because she has a lot of fondness and respect for Tyrion, but many of his plans have really gone awry. And now Jaime Lannister's here, but not with the Lannister army. Tyrion can't really fight back because he knows she's right. I mean, he really did make a grievous mistake. If Tyrion has a flaw, he's a very clever man, but sometimes clever people overestimate their own cleverness.

BENIOFF: Dany comes to Sansa with a bit of an olive branch, trying to find a way inside that kind of cool exterior that Sansa presents. And one commonality between them is they both love Jon. Dany's his lover and Sansa's his sister. It's very much coming at it from the point of view of a monarch trying to make peace with her subject, and Sansa's not quite willing to accept Dany as her monarch yet. She's suspicious of people for a reason. She's had too many hard experiences not to be suspicious of people. And she sees Dany as possibly a tyrant, as somebody who has a lot of power and is seeking to get even more.

8.3: The Long Night

WEISS: We wanted our characters to feel, like, that this-- maybe this is all gonna work out, maybe things are all gonna be okay. We've seen how devastating a Dothraki charge can be just with their regular swords, and now when they're galloping into combat with, uh, flaming arakhs, it's-- it's-- Uh... What could possibly stand against that?

BENIOFF: What they see is just the end of the Dothraki, essentially.

WEISS: They have a plan, and it's important to wait for the Night King to reveal himself, and then have two dragons against one dragon, and a really good chance of-- of defeating him. One thing that they couldn't have foreseen was Dany's reaction to seeing the Dothraki decimated. Jon is the person who wants to stick to the plan, but the Dothraki are not Jon's; they're not loyal to Jon, they're loyal to Dany, and I think that Dany can't bring herself to just watch them die, and so the plan starts to fall apart the second she gets on her dragon, so he does too, and then we take it from there.

BENIOFF: We knew this episode was gonna be almost entirely battle, and that can get really boring really quickly. You can watch it for a certain number of minutes before the effect starts to dampen. Part of it was making sure that we really stayed focused on the characters, and so whether it's Arya's storyline, or Sansa and Tyrion down the crypt, or Jon Snow and Dany up on the dragons. Kinda like all these separate little battles within the... within the greater battle.

BENIOFF: I mean, we talked about various endings for Jorah for a long time, but, you know, you think about Jorah, from the very first time we met him, he was with Dany, and from that time, he's been mostly by her side. Part of Jorah's tragedy is that he was in love with a woman who couldn't love him back, but he's accepted that for quite a long time, at the same time he was going to fight for her as long as he could and as well as he could.

WEISS: There'd never been a moment where she more needed someone to fight to protect her than this moment. And if he could've chosen a way to die, this is how he would've chosen to die. So, it was something we thought would be powerful to give him.

8.4: The Last of the Starks

WEISS: Dany kind of structures the feast scene, in a way. I mean, she's really the person whose emotions and choices are guiding the scene.

BENIOFF: And things start to shift a little bit when Daenerys calls for Gendry and-- and names him the new Lord of Storm's End.

WEISS: It's almost like, as the queen, she's giving people... permission to-- to celebrate what they've done.

BENIOFF:  Things start to relax a little bit, and these people did survive and they-- they won, and they emerged victorious. And so what started as a very funereal scene gradually starts to shift into more of a party atmosphere as people get drunker and drunker. That shift does not happen with Daenerys; she's scarred by the events that just took place, but she's also very much thinking about... what Jon Snow told her, and she's really shaken when she sees everyone celebrating with him, and talking about what a mad man and what a king he is for getting on a dragon.

WEISS:  He has love and respect from these people that, even with the gesture that she just made, she can't ever equal.

BENIOFF: She realizes that his true identity is a real threat to her if it comes out. So, she's in a fairly dark place and while other people are starting to try to celebrate their survival and their victory, Dany's not in a celebratory mood.

WEISS: After the feast, she comes to talk to him and... with the intention of-- of... of making this all work out, and of bringing things back to the way they were before.

BENIOFF: There's a moment when they're kissing, and-- and it seems like things are kind of getting back to where they were, but... it's almost as if he remembers all of a sudden what she really is. It's tense for him. For her, she grew up hearing all these stories about how their ancestors who were related to each other were also lovers, and it doesn't seem that strange to her.  For him, it is a strange thing.

WEISS: Once Dany introduces the idea that everything can be as it was if... Jon... keeps this secret buttoned down and tells no one, she's introducing a conflict that plays forward.

BENIOFF:  From his standpoint, he's already declared his loyalty to her. He's promised her and he's a man of his word. But he's also, you know, a family man, and so, the idea that he wouldn't tell Sansa and Arya about his true identity, it just seems very wrong to him.

BENIOFF: He thinks he can have it both ways; that he can tell Arya and Sansa the truth about who he really is, and he can maintain his loyalty to Dany and everyone's gonna learn to live together.

WEISS: One thing everybody who... comes into contact with this information seems to understand is how incendiary the information is. Sansa's left with a very difficult decision, 'cause she promises Jon that she won't tell anyone, and yet when she's sitting up there on that wall with Tyrion, she knows... what will happen if she gives Tyrion this information. She's a student of Littlefinger, and she knows how information travels, and she can think many steps ahead into the game, the way Littlefinger did, and know that if she tells Tyrion, it's almost impossible for Tyrion not to tell Varys, and if you tell-- I think these are all things that have been occurring to Sansa between the time we see her get that information and the time she passes the message on.

BENIOFF: Part of the story here is that while we've been concentrating on Winterfell and the fight against the army of the dead, Dany's other enemies have not been just sitting still; they've been planning for-- for the final battle. We saw in season seven that Qyburn had invented this giant dragon-killing scorpion and it didn't quite work. Qyburn went back to the drawing board and he made even larger, more powerful scorpions. Dozens of them are now lining the walls of King's Landing, and dozens more are mounted on the decks of the Iron Fleet. While Dany kind of forgot about the Iron fleet and Euron's forces, they certainly haven't forgotten about her, and they're just waiting for her to come back. By this point, they would have gotten news that her army's emerged victorious and were gonna head south, and so they're just waiting in ambush for her return.

WEISS: In some ways, the most important thing that happens... to Daenerys in four, is the death of her second dragon. Now she's got one dragon, and that dragon presumably is just as vulnerable... as Rhaegal was. So, there's this-- the mourning of a child, which is very real to her, and then their best friend is taken. Dany knows that once Cersei has Missandei that she's not going to see Missandei alive again.

BENIOFF: This is a moment for Cersei where she has a chance to... maybe to flee and get away if she surrenders, but that's-- I think anyone who knows Cersei knows she's not gonna make that choice. Her feeling is, "If I give up the throne, I'm dead, and so, my only chance now is to win." And that's what she says to Ned Stark in season one. Dany is this young queen coming to try to usurp her, and Cersei's not gonna give up the throne that easily. She's captured an enemy, and this is how Cersei deals with enemies. Tyrion's perspective is-- is, you know, while we have these various wars for supremacy and everything, let's not forget about the people who are gonna suffer the most from it. He can envision what will happen to King's Landing if these two armies clash and dragons are involved, and it's an obvious catastrophe. She feels like the odds are actually pretty good on-- on-- for her at this point, and she's willing to roll the dice. I think for Cersei, the only good prisoner is a dead prisoner.

WEISS: She's really back... where she was... at the very beginning. Emotionally, she's alone in the world, and she can't really trust anybody.

BENIOFF: People have underestimated Dany's strength many times before, and-- and... no one's really done very well underestimating her strengths.

WEISS: Unlike them, she's extremely powerful, and unlike them, she's filled with a rage that's aimed at one person specifically.

BENIOFF: I think what's probably echoing in Dany's head in those final moments would be Missandei's final words. Dracarys is clearly meant for Dany. Missandei knows that her life is over, and she is saying, you know, "Light them up."

8.5: The Bells

BENIOFF: Dany's an incredibly strong person, she's also someone who has had really close friendships and close advisors for her entire run of the show. You look at these people who have been closest to her for such a long time, and almost of them have either turned on her or died, and she's very much alone. And that's a dangerous thing for someone who's got so much power, to feel that isolated. So at the very time when she needs guidance and those kind of close friendships and advice the most, everyone's gone.

WEISS: I think that Varys knew that it was unlikely that he would survive the attempt to overthrow Dany in favor of Jon. And he also knew that he ethically, in his mind, had no choice but to... try to do that anyway. I think that Tyrion is saying goodbye to his best friend in the world outside of his brother. And the amount of guilt that he feels over being the cause for his best friend's imminent death, it's hard to really get your head around.

BENIOFF: Jon Snow is someone that she's fallen in love with. And as far as she's concerned, by this point, Jon has betrayed her by telling people about his true identity, and also the fact he's unable to return her affections at this point.

WEISS: I think that when she says, "Let it be fear," she's resigning herself to the fact that she may have to get things done in a way that isn't pleasant. And she may have to get things done in a way that is horrible for lots of people.

BENIOFF: She chose violence. A Targaryen choosing violence is a pretty terrifying thing.

BENIOFF: Even when you look back to season one, when Khal Drogo gives the golden crown to Viserys, and her reaction of watching her brother's head melted off ...and he was a terrible brother, you know, so I don't think anyone out there was-- was crying when Viserys died, but... there is something kind of chilling about the way that Dany has responded to the death of her enemies. And if circumstances had been different, I don't think this side of Dany ever would've come out. If Cersei hadn't betrayed her, if Cersei hadn't executed Missandei, if Jon hadn't told her the truth. Like, if all of these things had happened in any different way, then I don't think we'd be seeing this side of Daenerys Targaryen.

WEISS: I don't think she decided ahead of time that she was... going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It's in that moment, on the walls of King's Landing, where she's looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to-- to make this personal. We wanted her to be just death from above, as seen from the perspective of the people who are on the business end of that dragon. In most large stories like this, it seems like there's a tendency to focus on the heroic figures and not pay much attention to the people who may be suffering the repercussions of the decisions made by those heroic people, and we-- we really wanted to keep our perspective and our-- our sympathies on the ground at this moment 'cause those are the people who are really paying the price for the decisions that she's making.

WEISS: I think that Jon is also in a kind of denial. At first, the siege is a war, soldiers killing soldiers. That's what war is. I think Jon is someone who's always been a very good soldier, who has never enjoyed being a soldier. He's been trained as a fighter from the time he was a little boy, and he's quite good at it, he's quite good at leading men into battle, and he also hates it. I think, for him, it all starts out seeming like it's gonna work out, and then it turns into a nightmare.

WEISS: When she takes off and starts burning the city, the Unsullied on the ground and the Northmen on the ground, take that as their cue that it's a moral free-for-all. The good guys are behaving like the bad guys, and the bad guys in this shot are the ones who are doing all of these horrific things around him, who are his own men. The moral lines that he's drawn, for himself, in his own life, can't be maintained for everyone in all situations.

WEISS: Feels like you needed a perspective to carry you through this horror. Like you need a Virgil to take you through the hell that Dany's building.

BENIOFF: The reason we decided to follow Arya out of King's Landing and to see the fall of King's Landing through her eyes is... something that we talked about with an earlier episode. You just care a lot more when you're with a character that you care about. So if we saw a lot of extras running around on fire and buildings falling apart, it might've been visually interesting, but it wouldn't have had much of an emotional impact. But when you're there on the ground with Arya, who's one of the people we care the most about, then everything takes on that much more of an edge.

WEISS: We knew that the Hound would be convincing her to part ways with him and to not go to her death. And once she decides she needs to get out of the city, well, she's in-- she's in the worst possible place you can be. So she's gotta get from that central point all the way outside the walls of the city. It's the longest, hardest journey anybody has to make in the entire episode.

8.6: The Iron Throne

WEISS: Dany has been above it all, literally, throughout this entire battle, she's fought the whole thing from the air, so, when she's in the plaza, all she's seeing is her own army's triumph in the city that she came to conquer for all the best reasons, and I think the idea of spreading her brand of revolution around the entire world is a very attractive idea to her at this moment in her mind, it's a very ethical idea because she's not seeing the cost the way Jon and the way Tyrion have seen the cost.

BENIOFF: What's interesting about it is that she's been making similar kinds of speeches for a long time and we've always been rooting for her and this is kind of a natural outcome of that philosophy and that willingness to go forth and conquer all your enemies and it's just not quite as fun anymore. 

WEISS: I think the final scene between Jon and Daenerys is something we came up with sometime, in the midst of the third season of the show? The broad strokes of it anyway. But there was a tremendous amount of pressure to get it right because we know this is not a scene that is giving people what they want.

BENIOFF: We got there and were like, oh my God this is gonna be so emotional and then it was realizing that we actually had to do so much work to get all those shots that we needed.

WEISS: There’s this discussion through the whole show of whether or not Daenerys is like her father, who was insane. Throughout the whole conversation they have, she maintains, like, a reasonable approach to the thing that she’s done and there are only a few places where something peaks out that tells him what’s really coming.

WEISS: The big question in people’s minds seem to be who’s going to end up on the Iron Throne. One of the things we decided about the same time we decided what would happen in the scene is that the throne would not survive, that the thing that everybody wanted, the thing that caused everybody to be so horrible to each other to everybody else over the course of the past eight seasons was going to melt away. The dragon flying away with Dany’s lifeless body, that’s the climax of the show.

[theoneforgameofthrones]

Daenerys Targareyan: The Path Towards Madness.

Okay let's begin.

Intro: I read book 1. And then, I binge watched seasons 1-6 after season 6 finale. By that time, I knew all the major theories like L+R=J, dark!dany, targ!tyrion etc.

So, I was paying extra attention and these are some of the obvious moments where I felt they showed Dany's mad side show. Some points, you may find valid. Some points you may find silly and over-reaching. In any case, this is what *I* felt.

Feel free to have discussions. Appreciate positive critisism. However, just yelling/abusing will not be tolerated.

1. Lack of Empathy

Her obvious lack of empathy when her brother was killed.

I did not expect her to save him. I did not expect her to mourn him. I did not even expect her to cry for him. I did, however, expect a reaction, any sort of reaction, when someone close (despite him being an abusive asshole) dies that suddenly and that violently.

2. Her facial expression during Drogo's speech.

"I will kill the men in iron suits and tear down their stone houses! I will rape their women, take their children as slaves and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak!"

3. During her Breaker of Chains phase, she conviniently seemed to forget that she used to practice not only slavery, but also pillaging while she was with her khalesar.

Master Illeryoi owned slaves. Her brother owned slaves. She was gifted slaves to teach her how to please the Khal.

Her husband was a war-lord and her khalesar constantly raided and pillaged villages. They killed men. They raped women. Remaining alive women were taken as sex slaves and later sold. That was their way of life. She saved Mirri Maz Duur and several other women from the fate of gang rape and murder but they were still dragged along side the khalasar as slaves. In books, the reason MMD was not sold was so that she can assist Dany during childbirth.

4. The burning of Mirri Maz Duur (MMD)

This is going to make sense to a lot of people. But confuse the fuck out of many. But let's see.

In colonized countries, we have a term called "Savior's Complex". It is where a colonizer raids a country, steal its riches, impose extreme taxing, destory most of its heritage and then expect praise for bringing something (could be education, technology, architecture).

Dany takes the complex another step above. She not only expects gratitude from an enslaved MMD while dragging her along with her khalesar with sole purpose of assistance with childbirth, she also expects her to save the life of her husband. The war-lord whose khalesar raided her home, pillaged her village, killed her countrymen, raped/killed her countrywomen, dragged remaining alive women along with the khalesar to be sold later. Despite all this, Dany expects gratitude from MMD for her life. This flawed logic however is thrown back in her face.

"So, tell me again exactly what it was that you saved?"

"Your life."

"Why don't you take a look at your Khal? Then you will see exactly what life is worth, when all the rest has gone."

This is an old age tale of revenge. Khal raided her village. She took revenge on them for destroying her temple. Dany burned her for it.

What completely bamboozled me in this fandom was how much people hated MMD for what she did while completely making Dany the victim in this scenario while forgetting that MMD was the orginal victim who was not only an enslaved prisoner of war, but also gang-raped victim of her khalesar's doing.

5. Ser Barriston's words.

Ser Barriston in Mereen, tells her to treat injustice with mercy. She replies that she will treat injustice with justice.

Another quote by Ser Barriston: "He gave people the people the justice he thought they deserved."

Justice and what people in power percieve as justice is often very different.

6. Daenerys' justice for the crucified slave children

She did that by choosing 163 random Great Masters and crucifying them to avenge the 163 slave children. This seems like justice. But is it, really? They never recieved trial. They were never proven guilty. Like Hizdahr Loraq said, some of the masters were not in favor of crucifying children and tried very hard to stop it. Who knows how many other good masters she crucified?

This is a direct parallel to Ser Barriston's words about Mad King Aerys: "He gave people the people the justice he thought they deserved."

7. She stopped slavery only when it benefitted her.

Some of you, while reading point 6, may have thought, "They were SLAVERS! So what?!".

Well, while choosing 163 masters, Dany decided that all Masters are her enemies. She decided that all of them deserved punishment. She decided that they were guilty just for engaging in slavery while conviniently forgetting that if that were the case, she should be the one in the first cross.

8. She burnt Great Masters without even investigating who were behind the Sons of Harpy's attack.

After Ser Barriston's death, we again get to see more of her twisted sense of justice. By her own words, "Who is innocent? Maybe all of you are, maybe none of you are. Maybe, I should let the dragons decide."

It is not supposed to be called justice if you punish (and a cruel punishment, at that) without even caring whether they are innocent or not.

9. "You are a conquerer. Not a ruler."

Time and time again Dany proves this to be true. She conquered Yunkai and left immeidetely. The slavers took back the city in no time. She closed off the fighting pits and refused to open them despite being told that participants will be free men who enter willingly. This is where ruling comes in. Any place she conquered and freed, she failed to put something else to keep up the economy. She collapsed the economy so bad that slaves were selling themselves again.

10. Wrongful imprisonment.

Dany finds that Drogon has harmed children. The correct response is to either train or punish the dragons. She, however, imprisons the two dragons who werent at fault while Drogon ran free. Does that mean she is not responsible for whatever terror or death Drogon caused to wherever he flew off to? What exactly does imprisoning Rhaegar and Viseryion get her?

What kind of justice is it where the accused is free while the innocent get prisoned for association. Again, feeds into the twisted justice train.

11. Twisted Justice. Hipocrisy. Again.

While many men were fed to dragons, Hizdahr Loraq was imporisoned. He begged for mercy in terror.She also decides that she will show her respect for Meereen by marrying a member of one of its great families. For a woman who was forced into marriage and "sold like a broodmare", she sure didn't feel any moral dilemma in making a terrifed man betroth her. His death though, proved that he was not at all involved with Sons of Harpy and he was imprisoned for nothing.

12. Burning POW's

Burning Tarly's (father and son) was a direct paralell to her father burning Ned's father and brother alive. You cannot hide behind "It was a war. She gave them a choice." No matter what defenses one can attempt to give her, killing (forget burning) POW is a war crime. So is forcing prisoners against their own side of war.

13. Defending cruelty in path of justice

She killed Tarly's and defended that decision, by saying that was necessary.

When Hizdahr asks her how many men will have died to achieve her goal, she says "They would have died for a greater cause." She is talking about destroying cities and sure, that must be for a greater purpose.

When Tyrion reminds her that about what her father planned to do when she said she wnated to burn Mereen to the ground.. her response was "This is different,". How, exactly?

"The easiest way to defend cruelty is to say that it is part of the destiny."

14. The insinct to burn down cities.

By s8e01, she has wanted to burn down cities thrice. Meereen - once. King's Landing - twice. Both times, she had to be talked out of it by her advisors. The fact that her first instinct when her plans were failing was to burn down cities. Direct parallel to Aerys wanting to destroy king's landing because he thought there were traitors everywhere. The fact is that a person can surrond themselves with good counsel. But it is not necessary that the counsel is always heeded. Which is what happened to Aerys. He was going incresingly mad for months and his counsel members hid the fact from the outside world because they thought they could control the madness. We all know what happened in the end.

Since s7, Dany has been becoming increasingly paranoid about Tyrion's loyalty and increasingly more frustrated with every loss. How long before she decides not to listen to them anymore?

15. The entire collonialist/white savior imagary presented in Essos.

It is amazing how most of the fandom either ignores it or is just unaware of it.

Though this point doesnt parallel anything to the show, i just found it extremely cringy. I am sure members of most colonized countries would. I cant even beging to describe how cringy that mysha scene was.

16. The typical white priviledge mentality.

She wants to inherit her ancestor's throne and power. But she doesnt want to repent for her ansestor's sins and betrayal.

17. Wrong sense of entitlement

She truly believes that she is entitled to the North's fealty. She asks Jon Snow not to judge her based on her ancestors and in the same breath asks him to hold up the vows of his ancestors.

But, whatever vow the Starks made to the Targareans was broken the moment Aerys decided to burn the Starks. The fealty was made on promise of protection. Technically, any member of the houses that Aerys burnt, is no longer accountable to the vow.

Still, she expects everyone to uphold their fealty but refusing to accpet that her father broke that fealty when he decided to burn the vassels (whom he promised to protect) alive.

18. Savior Complex

Some parts of Dany reminds me of how missionaries work.

"Will your God punish me for not praying to him if I did not know about him?"

"No."

"Then why did you tell me about him?"

I believe one thing about Daenerys Targareyan. That she truly wants to help people. That she truly wants to save people. But her problem is, she wants to be the one to save people. She doesnt seem to understand that some people dont require saving.

She talks about freeing the world of tyrants and in the same breath refuses to give North the independence that they demand in solidarity. How is that not the definition of tyranny?

This is Westeros. I am not expecting a democracy and free elections. If she wants to be a conquerer, then she can be one. If she wants to bring to bring together the 7k, she can. What she cannot do is talk about destiny, talk about a wheel, talk about breaking the wheel, and and then do the exact same thing her ansestors did years go by spinning the wheel so that she is on top.

19. She was smiling when she saw that her dragons terrified people of Winterfell.

20. "They eat whatever they want"

Is that really the correct way to respond to people are already scared/cowering over the arrival of dragons? To people who have never seen such beasts before? Did she forget that few seasons ago "whatever they want" that Drogon ate were children?

21. Jaime's trial

She made Jaime stand trial and was heavily leaning towards punish him despite the fact that she knew what her father had planned and what Jaime Lannister had done. She openly spoke in favor of the Mad King in front of Northern Lords. When Tyrion intervened, she publically breated him and questioned his loyalty. Further adds to the Mad King's paranoia and unwillingness to listen to counsel.

22. Jaime Lannister

Not only has he tried to kill her, he has also questioned her intentions twice. The only living person who knows about Mad King more than anyone is perhaps Jaime Lannister. When he questions Tyrion, "Is she really different? Are you sure?" in a sceptical tone. If he doesnt trust her or thinks she had the Targ madness, then I am willing to bet that she probably does.

23. Her decling human connections

the show seems adament in making her seem alone. Like a stranger in her own home land. In an episode full of emotional reconnections, tenderness, friendships and relationships, she is shown all alone. In later episodes, she is incresingly shown alientated: Theon coming to fight for the starks despite being her bannerman, death of the Jorah, Tyrion's withdrawal.

24. jorah was her mercy.

She had shown jorah mercy despite his betrayal. She cared for him and most importantly, completely trusted and listened to him. When she felt no remorse about berating Tyrion and strongarming Sansa, jorah urges her to forgive tyrion and to try and make amends with LAdy of Winterfell. And, she listened to him. He is the only advisor she fully trusts and listens to without having to worry about wavering loyalties. And jorah's death is going to be the acorn in Ice Age that started the avalanche.

<<2 episodes left. will add more after next one airs.>>

This is not to say that she was an evil character. She was a good person with good intentions and bad execution with a twisted sense of justice and destiny. But, the journey to hell is paved with good intensions. Dany was a character who had the potential to be great. But she was always headed to doom. She is a good person whose downfall will be due to pride, ambition and obsession with destiny. She will chose her fate with a sound mind but a flawed personality. Her story will not be heroic, but tragic. Not because of what she was, but because of how she could have been.

[nutellaninja0001]

The brilliance of Daenerys character really comes together when you realize Dark Dany already happened in season 7 episode 5 “Eastwatch” and yet the biased view fans have of her created an illusion that she is still the hero they saw in season 1.

This is how remarkable and rare the chance GoT has to turn D into a full fledged antagonist to the viewer right under our noses is.

It’s not just the battle of Field Of Fire 2.0 itself that showed exactly what Daenerys has always been but just how far in her own justifications she has become. She is no longer the woman who looks to her advisors and questions her own decisions. At this point every thing she does is deemed nesscery in her mind. No matter how dark they become. And we’ve already seen just how dangerous and tragic this mindset can become.

It’s not bad enough that the battle was shot from the POV of characters like Jaime, Bronn, and Tyrion. Or how Jaime’s ptsd was triggered. Or the way Tyrion prays his brother isn’t burned before his very eyes. You also have the scene after the battle that left me feeling sick to my stomach and just disturbed for Tyrion.

I know this entire sequence has been talked to death by fans who did it a lot better than me but because I’m on this rewatch I had to talk about it because the theory of dark Dany coming in season 8 makes the choices and direction of season 7 so much better.

The opener of this is Tyrion seeing the aftermath of the battle. There’s somber music playing in the background as he walks around what’s left of the army. It’s smoke, fire, blood and ash. A truly devastating scene for Tyrion as he now realizes what he’s truly brought to the realm. This isn’t how he imagined “freedom” and “liberation” to look like. The true consequences of dragons being alive in the world again and his queen who unleashed them.

We have never seen this type of POV from Daenerys’s battles. In nearly every opposer she has met they have been someone the writers painted as the villain. They wanted them hated and they wanted us to root for D. They cast her actions as justifiable but we finally get the side of the people Daenerys is facing for the first time in the series.

These men weren’t slave masters, they didn’t plot to take her dragons, and they’re not fighting for slavery. This time those enemies have names and faces we recognize and because of this, the things Daenerys has always done don’t exactly look like the heroic deeds we thought they used to be.

Really watch as the camera follows a broken and beaten Tarly/Lannister army being lead by the Dothraki to Daenerys and Drogon.

These men don’t look like the cocky or arrogant masters Daenerys has burned before. They look defeated and scared. The camera pans up to Drogon as Daenerys walks to stand in front. I don’t know much about camera work but from a classic trope style Daenerys visually looks like the intimating villain we’ve seen so many times after their victory.

She’s brought nothing but death and fire to these men. They have never seen what we have seen and all she is to them is a foreign invader who just murdered thousands with her dragons. Because there are no former slaves around shouting Mysha, after conquering something or killing someone. When it’s stripped away we see it for what these actions really are. Tyranny.

Daenerys begins to give a speech but even that has vibes of Darth Vader asking the hero to join the dark side. It’s not uplifting like her speech to the Unsullied in season 3 or her speech to the slaves in Astapor. She gives vague promises like “leaving the world a better place” and “destroying a wheel” but does not see she has only contradicted her words with her actions and is still pushing herself as the hero here.

Note something very, VERY important about what happens next. Only less than a handful of soldiers bend after her speech. The rest still stand tell and ultimately do not want her as their queen or leader.

It’s only when Drogon spits out a mighty roar that the soldiers cower in fear and kneel. THAT is not a choice. THAT is a not a Queen for the people. THAT is a tyrant. Daenerys is no longer the woman come to liberate the people. She’s come to subjugate these people and is using fear to do it.

And things get even worse from here.

Randyll and Dickon are among the few remaining men who still stand against Drogon. These enemies, they have names, we have scenes with them, connections. Sure, Randyll isn’t winning any man of the year awards but he’s not some nameless slave master. When he tells Daenerys he won’t bend, he isn’t dripping with evil, vile insults. He simply does what he believes is right and what he says about Daenerys isn’t an exaggeration. Everything he says about her is true and in any other show/movie, these men would be seen as the “heros” for standing up against this conquer.

But it’s not over yet. Dickon stands up from the back and says she will have to kill him too. Immediately, Randyll tells him to shut his mouth and get back. He doesn’t want his son to die. Not like this. Tyrion tries to talk him into bending and you can hear the desperation in his voice. Even Randyll nods to Dickon to listen. But he doesn’t.

Again, Tyrion tries to plead with Daenerys about this and tells her to hold Dickon as a prisoner.

“I meant what I said. I’m not here to put men in chains. If that becomes an option many will take it. I gave them a choice. They made it.”

Daenerys is aware that if imprisonment becomes an option they will take it. So, as an alternative, she gives them a “choice” to justify her reasoning for murder because they won’t bend the knee. This isn’t a “choice” and Daenerys is no different from the slave masters who gave people the choice of obey or die. THIS IS NOT A HERO PEOPLE! Earlier this season we had Missandei tell Jon she serves her queen because she wants to serve her queen. But this scene is only proving the exact opposite of what Daenerys has become.

And just look at Tyrion’s face when Daenerys interrupts him with the clarification she is not going to behead anyone. He looks back at Drogon and starts to go into panic mode of trying to convince her not to do this. He knows this is wrong. Both politically and morally this is wrong. This isn’t a hero. This is a direct call back to remind us of what Aerys did to Brandon and Rickard Stark. Funny enough, Dickon is mistaken as “Rickard” earlier that season by Jaime. They want us to remember this pair of father and son that died by the hands of a mad Targaryen.

Have we ever seen Daenerys enemies painted in such a clear sympathetic light before? Never. They show as Randyll reaches out for his son’s arm and they are both ready to face their death. A particularly long, drawn out, and painful one.

Watch this scene. Watch it again. And tell me that this entire sequence looks like that of a savior to you.

The burning. How Tyrion cannot even bear to look at it and must turn his stare downcast. The terrified and horrified cowering of the soldiers. And the blank, cold, and eerily calm manner of Daenerys. This means absolutely NOTHING to her. She feels NOTHING. No remorse, no second guessing.

Scream all day and all night that Daenerys is still the hero. Tell me she isn’t her father. Tell me she’s the answer to save the realm. But this scene was the first real taste of Dark Dany that even those around her, like Tyrion and Varys, are left shaken and horrified. If this action was entirely justified they would have structured this scene a whole lot different and Tyrion would not have been as troubled by it.

This is why her eventual turn to the dark side is so powerful. Even after all of this, fans debated for months that she was justified and still very much the hero. It’s amazing how our biases for characters can veil our view of them even when it’s clear in our faces of who they have become and not who they were when we met them. How even those who are clearly seen as wrong to us now, were once hailed as a revolutionary and a capable leader to the people. It’s an impactful message to send and I truly hope we see it come in season 8.

But hey, she’s not wrong right?

Yeah. She’s totally not gotten to the point of justifying murder because it was necessary. Isn’t that what Stannis did when he burned Shireen? Told himself it is necessary?

[bellamyblinkingrapidly]

Wow Dany stans really can’t step back for two seconds to realize the lessons GRRM wanted them to learn from supporting a tyrant all these years & honestly this is what scares me about society & people in general...

Context matters. But it does not justify her actions. And sure there’s a lot of other characters who have done shitty things & have their own reasons. But their actions aren’t justified either.

The main difference is that the Starks have a code. They follow this code (for the most part) in killing people, and believe in a justice that isn’t just their own. And if they act outside this, they don’t try to pass it off as some new revolutionary way of thinking that is somehow just because they want it to be. Dany instead believes in herself. If she thinks something is just, it is. She creates her own justice and doesn’t own up to what’s wrong. And that’s not okay.

She may have done a better job of this early on, but more and more throughout the series she’s gone away from following advice, adhering to moral standards, and trying to appease others. She more and more does what she wants when she wants to. She adopts this sense of entitlement & fire and blood mantra where everything she does is okay bc she is BORN to rule on the Iron Throne. And that’s just a completely misled and wrong way of thinking that I don’t think anyone on the show has truly shared besides Viserys, Khal Drogo (and maybe other khals) & Aerys. Like Varys said when you start believing in your own destiny that’s super dangerous. She buys into herself as a savior & that clouds her judgment. It’s not that Dany was never moral or never understood this. It’s that she CHOSE to go down the path of creating and believing in her own justice. And that is a dark path that leads to tyranny. There are consequences for that.

But make no mistake, she always had the makings of a tyrant. She was always leading up to this. She could have made different choices and gone down a lighter path & maybe because of all her life experience and trauma that was too hard for her. But that still doesn’t justify choosing the dark path. It gives us empathy but it doesn’t make it okay. That is super important to understand. She committed genocide. Flat out. On purpose when she didn’t need to. And you know what? she thought about doing it like 3x. Before she ever did.

I know this is gonna lead to BUT WHAT ABT SANSA WHEN SHE DID THE THING— or when the Starks did this—

Yeah Sansa feeding Ramsey to his hounds alive. Pretty cruel. Context makes sense. Is it morally justifiable? No. The penalty for treason is death. But it shouldn’t have been like that. It was wrong. It felt right but it wasn’t. Why was there no consequence? Well Jon knew what she’d been through and it was a war-time transition. Still not justified. This darkness she displayed though was brought up, I think, in her talk of giving away the ancestral homes of the traitorous families. To which Jon showed mercy and contradicted her, bringing back a sense of morality and code — something she later acknowledged was good.

Sansa holding a trial for Littlefinger in front of the entire court and having Arya execute him as an extension of herself? well that’s different than most of what Dany did. He got a trial. Bran KNEW what he did exactly. And the penalty for treason & murder is death. He betrayed her and her father and her mother. He murdered Aunt Lysa.

Ned executing a deserter from the Night’s Watch was hard for him. It was also just. Deserters are killed.

Jon killing the men who betrayed him. They literally held a coup and killed the lord commander of the Nights Watch. Also different. He literally came back to life and is the best witness ever. So like we didn’t see a trial... but do we need one? We KNOW. They all KNOW. They might’ve even had one. He’s Lord Commander and he passed the sentence himself. The punishment for their crimes Is death. That’s just according to their code. But He also killed a boy. Which obviously in our time wouldn’t be okay at all. It haunts him. We see that. He’s devastated that he’s had to do that.

Dany is also haunted when her dragon kills a little girl. She remembers the name and fears what her dragons can do. She even locks them up for a time... onLy to let them out again and embrace what they are. In the books she even forget the girls name signifying it’s no longer important to her. That’s similar to the sentiment she offers Sansa “what do dragons eat anyway — whatever they want.” That’s freaking forbidding af. When the dragons fly overhead, Dany literally smirks like a proud mom when people scream and scramble in fear of them.

Jon has literally admitted he never liked killing - he doesn’t like what he’s good at.

Also pls don’t bring up war to compare the terrible deeds Jon has done versus Dany. Yeah Jon killed people in an army to take back Winterfell. That’s battle and it’s different. He also tried to fight Ramsey one on one to spare bloodshed.

Jon killed wildlings. He killed Qhorin Halfhand. He did that to infiltrate the wildlings and for the betterment of the Night’s Watch and the entire realm. He also didn’t kill Ygritte (bc he didn’t see how she was guilty/evil) which got his brothers killed, and he wanted to kill Crastor (a perpetual incestual rapist and abuser) which would have also gotten his brothers killed. He made decisions based on his code - guarding the realms of men and stuff.

Arya’s list of revenge kills isn’t just either. It feels that way but it’s also just her creating her own justice instead of letting the code and laws do that for her. It feels good in the moment, but as she learns from the Hound it actually turns you into an ugly person with an ugly and doomed life. We aren’t met to watch Aryas journey and conclude that her revenge is okay. Similarly to Daenerys arc, we are meant to realize oh we’ve been rooting for something unfulfilling for her & she could live a much more healthy and normal life if she would turn away from this behavior. We can understand her actions because of context and even root for them at times, but it doesn’t justify them morally. Killing without a trial is still killing even if they’re a killer. Feeding someone’s sons to him is still so fucking cruel. Most importantly though she doesn’t justify her actions. She is okay with committing them, for sure, but she doesn’t try to tell others that she was right. She doesn’t try to pass off her cruelty for mercy or for justice.

Dany’s problem is she justifies her immoral choices as JUST. She tries to pass them off as right. Where some other characters (the more honorable and noble ones) would admit their wrongdoings.

But it’s pretty baffling how much y’all can’t just admit you were wrong to support her... the entire lesson you were supposed to learn is this is how tyrants rise to power. Slowly, deliberately, by doing things that seem good at the time. She sucked me in too & I believed in her until I rewatched the series 5x and saw her for what she is. I truly believe if you didn’t see it coming you’re either delusional or a casual watcher. I don’t actually know how you could be paying attention really well and be shocked. It’s very obvious she was going to go mad. It’s very obvious she was going to choose violence. It’s very obvious she was going to adopt the “fire and blood” motto. Like rewatching a couple times it hits you straight in the face.

This season was incredibly obvious as well and gave a lot of insight into her mind and descent to madness - everything was rushed this season and yet we spent so much time with her. Get the fuck over it and pay more attention next time. Because you have to vote and shit for real so you should be scared.

[likemesomesalads]

I know I keep reblogging ask games from you from my GW2 blog and I always feel guilty about not asking you one of them. I just don't know anything about your characters, but I want to. Might I indulge you to tell me about the lovelies?

This will be a Long one since I have many of them and not all of them is fully flushed out, but here I go!

First up my main: Thoernen:

He is a thief, literally, his occupation in his first 8 years was a thief. He ran away from his Wyld Hunt in fear of death and for years he tried to avoid any contact with undead or other dragon minions (not always successfully but always letting others solve the problems). Alas, in the end, he got baited into joining the Vigil and from there as a vigil soldier he worked against Zhaitan, eventually (following the personal story) forming the Pact with Trahearne and becoming the Commander.  After defeating Zhaitan he got a bit more confident in his work so continued to be the Pact Commander, forming a brotherly bond with Trahearne. Which made it really hard for him once he had to kill him in HoT. In the jungle, he also lost sight in his left eye and got several scars which made him look as miserable as he felt. Also in Maguuma, he saved an ex-mordrem, Dau who later ends up being his dear heart.  Personality wise as a sapling he is cheerful and keeps up the sight of that even after he runs away from the Grove and becomes Soundless, though as he fulfills his Wyld Hunt he gets more serious and broken even, especially after All or Nothing. He can’t take Aurene’s Death and steps off as Commander. he also loses his left arm because it was hit by a blast of Kralky’s and started to turn him branded, which he cuts off himself, not having anyone around. After he retired he and Dau moves back to the Grove to try and live peacefully.Aevelyhn:A helpful, tiny sylvari roaming Tyria and helping where she can. She doesn’t have a specific Wyld Hunt, rather she follows what she was in her Dream, which was helping others. She is often found in Divinity’s Reach, with her friend, Jaquline Du Ciel. She enjoys shopping for pretty dresses, dancing and practicing her elemental magic in her free time.Ainlon:A necromancer who awoken from the Dream with the face of Trahearne in his mind. He took it as a sign that he had to help him so after a few months of training himself, while Trahearne was in Orr and he waited for his return, Ain joined the Firstborn. It was a rocky learning curve to get used to living in Orr but he and Trahearne had a really good mentor-student, then a sort of brotherly relationship. He has a boyfriend, Quinlan back int he Grove who he always love to return to.Quinlan:Ainlon’s boyfriend and a gardener in the Grove. Mildly jealous of Trahearne being able to spend so much time with Ainlon, but knows Ain loves him and he trusts him.Sheara Swiftpaw:The leader of a Warband and member of the ash legion. Very skillful ranger has a pet stalker called Jul and loves hunting trips. She is very tomboyish and not very friendly, however, she does indeed have friends. A norn, called Rhaevee and an asura, Eaxxy.Eaxxy:Crewe leader in the college of dynamics. She loves to come up with new ideas which she usually forgets about as soon as she has the next, so her lab is full of half-finished projects and ideas. however, if she indeed finishes something than it’s the best it can be. She is rather sarcastic and loud. Has an unlikely friendship with Sheara and Rhaevee. Rhaevee:A journeywoman, who loves to travel and collect strange animals as pets. Has a big family with seven younger brothers. She is the only girl in the family which made her the protective big sister. She loves her family very much. They own a pub up in Shiverpeeks and make their own beer as well. Besides collecting animals she also loves to collect recipes from all across Tyria (and later Elona) and shares them with her mother who then tries to make them in the pub and home as well. She follows the Spirit of Raven yet her companion is a white wolf, called Morrigan. She saved Morrigen when he was a pup and his pack was slain by Sons of Svanir. She was led to the pup by a white raven. She is loud and strong, a true norn woman.Jaquline Du Ciel:A second born child in a noble family. She aspires to be a Shining blade member, currently a recruit, to be able to spend more time with her all-time crush so that she can live up to her idol, Countess Anise. Her best friend is Aevelyhn whom she loves to invite to tea and chat about the happenings in Tyria. She is a big lesbian and she does not hide this fact.Aeris Moonsong:Priory researcher and hobby gardener. She lives in Queensdale, near Divinity’s Reach and loves researching ancient artifacts. She also loves gardening but deadly scared of spiders.Cayde:Nightmare Courtier, Duke of Peonies or more commonly known as Dog of Faolain. He and his pod twin, Soléine were lured in a trap pretty much right after their awakening, by Inquest asuras. They both were curious and naive and paid the price for it. They were separated and experimented on. From the painful, torturous experiments Cayde turned to Nightmare and Faolain was there to welcome him. He has quite murderous tendencies and anger issues, resulting in him murdering many other courtiers and captives, for which Faolain had to assign a special ‘sapling sitter’ beside Cayde who can keep him in control. He is obsessively trying to turn her sister to Nightmare and kidnaps her from her loving home. Despite all of his flaws he has a boyfriend, @ascalonianpicnic‘s Aselif who he loves dearly and for whom he would do anything.Soléine:Cayde’s pod twin. She suffered the experimentations as well but was strong enough not to turn to nightmare, barely. She was saved by a group of soldiers, including Canach, who was the only one who could convince her to leave with them and the only one she actually sees as her savior. After she is rescued, she clings to him closely and they grow to love one another. She saves a half-dead fern hound in the human city and decides to take it home and heal him. and since then Isonos is by her side and she finds a passion for healing animals, learns more and becomes a vet.  At the time when Canach is in Maguuma Cayde kidnaps her ( or more like commissions @mystery-salad‘s Aezlin to do it for him) and tortures her, trying to turn her. That nightmare ends when the Court falls apart and she can escape, having again zero trusts in people and clinging to Canach just as she did in the beginning. She is shy and soft and loves animals and Canach.Lusus Naturae: They are Cayde’s 'sapling sitter’. Their pod was taken from the tree by the Inquest working with the fresh Nightmare Court in 1307. The name of the project and the one they ended up having was: Lusus Naturae (aka. Freak of Nature).  Their pod was just freshly sprouted so it had a lot of growing to do. Since they were severed from the Tree at such a young state they have no connection at all to the Dream, to the Pale tree or to other sylvari. It also caused them to take much longer to bloom. It took 16 years for them to be ready and when they were born, due to the lack of connection to the Dream, had the mentality of a newborn. The Inquest rectified the problem with connecting their brain to a computer and uploading the needed data which had them very confused for a while. (The implant which they used to do that is still embedded in the back of his neck.) After they were deemed to be a somewhat successful experiment, not counting that it took them way too long to awaken, and another series of tests, in which they tested their capabilities and discovered their fast regenerating abilities (tested for limb loss, high blood loss and many more which caused their Nociceptors to  shut down, thus they are unable to feel pain.), the Court took them over and they worked for them ever since. First, they worked under a Duke who was a Mesmer and learned from them (eventually broadening their abilities and learning Chronomancy by themselves), but a few years later they were assigned to keep another Duke, Cayde in control for his murderous tendencies. They work with him ever since.Tristrham:A revenant who is not at all proud of his abilities. He got his revenant powers by letting his guildmates die in the Mists when they accidentally found a way there. He actually had to kill one of them himself to be able to escape. (He killed more but didn’t want to think about it and we don’t talk about it. They basically were killing each other due to illusions.) Since he is out of there and once he got used to the voices in his head he went on about in the world, working as a mercenary, ending up in the Heart of Maguuma, where he was fighting to not give in to the voice of Mordremoth. He pulled it off for quite a while and giving in practically just before he died, so he has a short mordrem past, of which he doesn’t remember nor he wants to. After the jungle, he took a little break, trying to relax and heal but eventually ended up joining the Pact and is there ever since.Xeneviev:A spy in the Grove for the Nightmare Court. He joined the court because he has a HUGE crush on (again) @mystery-salad‘s Aezlin and he didn’t have much of a love for his supposed to be purpose either. In the Dream, he saw himself in nothing more than endless fields and mud and he really wasn’t about that. He hated it to the core so it wasn’t hard for him to throw that away for something more intriguing. He loves fashion, Aezlin, doing his job right, Aezlin, designing outfits, Aezlin, looking good and, you guessed it, Aezlin.Dau:His full name is Daulion but he doesn’t like that, so just Dau. He was in an abusive relationship with a courtier, named Alvanil and it took him years to be able to run away. But as soon as he did Mordremoth awakened and he was too weak to not give in, so he became a mordrem. He doesn’t have a lot of memories from that time but he still fears that he’ll turn mordrem again even after the dragon’s defeat. Thoernen saved him in the jungle after he successfully killed the jungle dragon and he fell for him at first sight. He joined the Pact and started to follow around the Commander, lending him a lot of emotional support in the desert, during PoF and they slowly formed mutual feelings and got together. Alvanil:Dau’s cruel, abusive Courtier ex-boyfriend. He loves to make others suffer, especially if they are weaker than him. Not many characteristics, only that he is an asshole. Gotta work on him more.Saberlily:Naive little sapling turned to Nightmare by Gavin, who is her mentor now. She kept her cheeriness even in Nightmare as she thinks there is nothing wrong with how the Court thinks. They want to free the sylvari and anyway, other sylvari do bad things too for no apparent reason. She loves sharp and shiny things. Has a very weird obsession with sharp weapons.Asteracéa:A soundless sylvari courtesan, living in Divinity’s Reach. He had to use his body as payment once he was stuck up in the mountains with no money or anything. (Not like he really had to have to but that was the first thought he had and it worked.) He ended up there by hiding from the Nightmare Court in a caravan. Ever since then he hasn’t returned to Caledon Forest and is a greedy, but highly requested courtesan. He loves to be fancy and even figured out a way to change the color of his body without much hassle. Has a roommate I am yet to name but he loves to hang out with him in his free time. He also obviously very much likes his job and the activities coming with it.Philix:A sweet, furry teenager, raised by two lesbian salads in Lion’s Arch. Works on the docks and as a part-time tour guide. Loves to get in trouble out of work and flirts a lot around. A true teenager.This two is not yet up in my character list, because I am lazy but:Endellion:You can call him En, Endy or Lion. Anything goes with him. He is a hairdresser/foliage dresser?  He loves his job a lot and doesn’t just excel at sylvari foliages he is great with hair or fur too. Residential in the Grove or  Mabon Market from time to time. A cheerful sunshine salad.Dhealaichte:He is Trahearne but not really. He is his reincarnation. Looks and sounds alike has his memories as well, but not his abilities. He bloomed a few years after the defeat of Mordremoth with the name Trahearne but he decided to change when he had enough of being compared to his previous life. He has no memory of his Dream this time though so he doesn’t have a Wyld Hunt.  Once Dheal was full of everyone wanting him to be someone he isn’t he left to discover Tyra for himself and then stayed in Lion’s Arch for a while, working and eventually learning to be a doctor. As the elonian refugees’ numbers grew he decided to go to Elona and help there, so as of now he is in Amnoon doing his best to help people.

[moonlitgleek]

Rhaegar is born a girl. What changes?

What doesn’t?!

The two obvious changes that immediately jump at me are Steffon And Cassana Baratheon’s drowning, and Robert’s Rebellion. If Rhaegar is a girl, Steffon and Cassana do not go to Volantis in search for a bride for the crown prince, and thus do not go down with the Windproud in Shipbreaker Bay, neither does Lyanna Stark get snatched leading to the Starks’ murder and sparking the rebellion. But there is a lot of changes beyond that.

On the magical front, Rhaegara would be far less prone to think of herself as the savior figure in the prophecy, since everyone was looking for a male prince. While this does not mean she would be any less interested in the prophecy, at least she would not live her entire life with the expectation of this grand destiny or feeling personally responsible for it; she would not get herself all twisted up in the burden of being the only one who could save the world, which could make any political actions on her part more rational and prudent. That’s not to say she’d necessarily think that the prophecy has nothing to do with her - after all, she exists because of the prophecy and as an attempt to acquire the prophesied savior, and the circumstances of her birth match the “born amidst salt and smoke” part too well for her not to make the connection. While this is one of the signs that is supposed to herald the Prince that Was Promised, in the absence of any specific qualification to identify the other two heads (at least as far as we know), the princess might take the similarities between her own birth and the prophecy as a sign that she is one of the three heads of the dragon. More so, perhaps, if she harbors any negative feelings about herself for not being this promised prophetic figure that her parents married specifically to produce and that her family paid a hefty blood price to aid in a tragedy that marked her own birth, only for their efforts to result in a princess who is decidedly not the person that they all sacrificed so much to acquire. That might lead her to cling even more to the idea that she does have a part to play in the prophecy, and that those sacrifices were not for nothing.

On the political front, the nature of the relationship between Aerys and Rhaegara would probably change. While I do not imagine the princess would be any less dissatisfied with her father’s growing instability than her male counterpart (or any less invested in preparing for the Long Night which would require royal authority to help bolster the Night’s Watch), Rhaegara stands little chance of being the target of her father’s paranoia and contempt in this scenario as her gender would make her significantly less threatening to his throne. With the damaging historical example of Rhaenyra’s short queenship and what it meant for the Targaryen succession working against her, the princess would have a hard time finding any substantial body of support that could counterbalance her father’s, or establishing anything resembling the court her male counterpart kept. Oh she’d definitely win hearts with her beauty and courtesy, and she’d have nobles vying for her hand and her favor, but not the support that would enable her to do something as drastic as overthrowing her father, especially as she’d be battling precedents of royal succession and the popular patriarchal view of how one queen’s misrule was a decisive affirmation that women should not have the throne. No one would look at Rhaegara as an appropriate replacement for her father, which makes the possibility of her posing any danger to Aerys’ throne very minimal indeed.

On a wider scale, Rhaegara being the king’s only surviving child for 17 years means that the Targaryen dynasty would be in serious trouble with no male male-line heir to continue the dynasty after Aerys, which makes the dynasty look quitevulnerable to the nobles, not least of all the Southron Ambitions bloc. While Rhaella’s many pregnancies might sustain the hope that the queen would produce a healthy male heir, the repeated losses the queen suffered would cause many to worry about the succession in the absence of a clear heir. Never in its near 300 years on the throne has the Targaryen dynasty faced a situation where the succession was between a woman or a male descendant of a woman. In the event of the king’s death, not only would the realm almost certainly face a succession crisis prompting a Great Council to convene, but the question of succession could see the royal succession adjusted once more as the “iron precedent” of the Great Council of 101 gets overturned by necessity. No longer would it be said that the throne can not pass to a woman or a male descendant of a woman. With the future of the dynasty on the line and with the political ramifications of not producing a male heir in mind, the pressure on Rhaella to produce a healthy male heir would be astronomical. I would not be surprised one bit if some voices advocated for Aerys to put her aside and take another, probably proven fertile, wife. 

That situation works really well for the Baratheons, though, as Steffon Baratheon would become quite the powerful lord, and extremely important to both the crown and the Southron Ambitions bloc; he’d be an ace to whoever allies with him. While that might lead to the SA betrothals to happen a little earlier as Rickard Stark and Jon Arryn move to cement their alliance before Robert, the most valuable marital prize in the land at the time, could get betrothed to another, it’s how that new influential position could affect the relationship between Aerys and Steffon that interests me. Steffon enjoyed an amiable relationship with Aerys in canon (at least it appeared so on the surface, though admittedly we do not know all that much about Steffon’s personality, how involved he was in the SA bloc, or what his view of his cousin was). But while we don’t really know where Steffon stood, we know that Aerys trusted him enough to entrust him with the search for a bride for Rhaegar in OTL, and it’s even speculated that Steffon and Cassana tried to produce a girl (who turned out to be Renly) for the crown prince to marry. If that relationship remains the same in this au, it’s a given that Robert would be betrothed to Rhaegara: not only does he have Valyrian blood and would make a more traditional match for the Targaryen princess as her cousin, but that betrothal would be a smart dynastic match as it consolidates Targaryen power by binding the two competing claims to the throne in a show of unity between the two Targaryen-blooded factions, lest anyone think the crown weakened by the lack of a male heir (prior to Viserys’ birth) and open to conspiracies and schemes, or susceptible to yet another civil war.

But I find it possible that Steffon might find himself the new target of Aerys’ paranoia in light of how much more powerful he’d be in this scenario. Looking at canon, it does not seem like Aerys’ suspicion of Rhaegar or Tywin was precipitated by any particular action from either. It was more a matter of them overshadowing Aerys and earning growing prestige and esteem in court. Which means that Steffon could fall victim to the same paranoia that caused Aerys to deliberately sabotage his heir and alienate his Hand so openly in OTL. It’s worth noting, however, that Steffon would still have a much better shot at avoiding Aerys’ paranoia in this scenario than canon Rhaegar or Tywin did considering his distance from court. His residence at Storm’s End means he would not be in close proximity to Aerys for the king to start obsessing over how much power his cousin has or how the nobles at court perceive him. But it’s not a sure thing, especially if Steffon’s presence in court grows as the probable heir presumptive.

Steffon wouldn’t even need to do anything for Aerys to start distrusting him. After 17 years with a daughter as the king’s only surviving child, I would not be surprised if those dissatisfied with Aerys’ reign flocked to Steffon as an alternative possibility for a better and saner monarch in the same way they flocked to Rhaegar in OTL, though it’s unknown how receptive Steffon would be to them. But as the years pass, some might start seeing Steffon as the de-facto heir to the throne, and with his connections to the Starks and the Arryns, it might be his cousin, rather than his son, whom Aerys would fear usurpation by. Indeed, Steffon would make for a very attractive prospective king: he has a very strong claim to the throne as the closest male heir to the Targaryen king; he has (at least) two healthy male heirs which secures the succession in a way that would make him more appealing than Aerys, or even baby Viserys after he is born; he grew up in court and has strong relationships within the Red Keep including a friendship with the Hand Tywin Lannister; he has strong allies in the Arryns and the Starks (and later, the Tullys) based on his heir’s fostering in the Vale. And if Steffon’s presence in court increases in this au, he’d have a front row seat to Aerys’ rapid deterioration, and might start capitalizing on his existing connections, just in case.

But regardless of what Steffon and Aerys’ relationship would look like, the Baratheons would still be a much appealing prize to the Southron Ambitions bloc, especially as the years pass with no surviving crown prince in sight and they figure it’s unlikely that the royal couple would produce one. Of course, if Aerys starts distrusting Steffon, the king could start looking too closely at the SA bloc, and might even try to stop their betrothals to prevent Steffon from gaining a substantial power bloc, same as he did with Rhaegar in OTL.In the same vein, his requirements for his daughter’s bridegroom would be vastly different from canon as he’d look for the most advantageous marriage he could make for her to bolster the power of the Targaryens against the Baratheons. I wonder if he’d even consider officially recognizing her as the Princess of Dragonstone prior to Viserys birth, in an attempt to circumvent any attempt to put Steffon on the throne, though this would not be a sound political move because it would bear too much of a resemblance to Rhaenyra and would bring the Dance to mind which really would not help the princess’ bid for the throne, which ultimately defeats Aerys’ purpose.

I’m afraid I can not really expand on this au more than this, otherwise I’ll just twist myself up in endless possibilities (trust me, I tried. You do not want to make me start going about the prospective power blocs during the Defiance of Duskendale, and what each faction might have hoped to gain. Somehow I ended up talking about the Great Council of 233, which was how I knew I needed to stop here.) I’ll say, though, that the political landscape in the face of Aerys’ rapid deterioration means that something is bound to happen sooner or later even without Robert’s Rebellion - whether that something is Aerys committing another form of catastrophic political blunder and sparking an uprising, or someone finally making a move and calling a Great Council to set the throne to right - either of which could easily lead to the Targaryens losing the throne to the Baratheons, because Viserys was as mad as Aerys and showing signs of it even in childhood according to Barristan Selmy, and because even if Rhaegara already has a son when any of that goes down, the kid would still have a bad track record with a mad grandfather and a mad uncle, not to mention he’d be a child going against a man grown who has heirs and quite the power bloc at his back. So the Baratheons still stand a rather good chance of gaining the throne in this scenario. It’s only that Rickard and Brandon do not die, Ned and Cat do not wed and neither do Jon Arryn and Lysa, our current generation of Starklings does not get born, Jon Snow does not exist, and the world would have to make do with only two heads of the dragon, probably without actual dragons.

[summerseachild]

Summersea’s GoT Season 5 2019 Rewatch

We’ve reached the season that made me rage-quit a show that had once been my absolute favorite back in May of 2015! That means I’ve seen about half of these once four years ago. So... here we go. 

5x01

1. WHY is Maggy the Frog sexy?

2. WHY is there no mention of the valonqar? Were they already planning Bran? Did they not think we could handle a word in another language? WHAT?

3. That scene with Jaime and Cersei at Tywin’s body hurts but SHE KIND OF HAS A POINT ABOUT JAIME KIND OF ACCIDENTALLY BEING A TEENY BIT RESPONSIBLE THO (on the other hand how could he have knoooooown Tyrion was going to KILL DAD?)

4. So... Varys is an immigrant who cares more about Westeros than most people born there, yes?

5. That poor Unsullied JUST WANTED TO CUDDLE

6. Missandei being to shy to say something to the tune of “whatever it is you can do I’d like to do it with you” to Grey Worm is... impossibly sweet.

7. HOW DID ALLISER LIVE THROUGH THAT? Slynt living is also not fair. What a waste of space.

8. Stannis’ offer to the wildlings is fair... underestimating how unlikely Mance is to kneel, but fair.

9. Brienne is MEAN to Pod here! I guess the losing Arya thing broke her a bit.

10. UGH SANSA RODE RIGHT BY THEM

11. Lancel’s actor BEEFED UP WOW

12. Margaery trying to watch out for her brother... what a good sister.

13. Daario 2 has a cute butt

14. Remember when Drogon got loose and Dany was worried that there was an ENTIRE DRAGON JUST FLYING AROUND SOMEWHERE?

15. Mance Rayder was a good person who cares about the Wildlings. All of them.

16. Jon putting that arrow into Mance’s heart while he was burning endeared Jon to me quite a lot.

5x02

1. Braavos is SO PRETTY! And the house of Black and White... so simple and stark. I love the architecture.

2. SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE FUCKING NIGHT?? Oh wait Podrick knows what Sansa looks like! What a sweet and useful boy.

3. Jeez Brienne intense much? Don’t frighten the girl.

4. “Why don’t you stay?  It’s dangerous on the road” is Littlefinger speak for “I am going to kill you in your sleep” and BRIENNE KNOWS IT.

5. So I wonder who in Dorne thought it was a good idea to send Myrcella’s necklace.

6. Jeez Cersei what do you want from Jaime? You wouldn’t LET HIM be a father to the kids.

7. Jaime offering to GO GET HER... and with Bronn! LANNISTER AND BRONN ROAD TRIP PART 2 HERE WE COME.

8. Today the part of Elia I will be played Doran and the part of Arianne will be played by Elia. it’s very confusing.

9. Doran’s casting is still SO GOOD.

10. ELIA DO NOT MAKE CERSEI RIGHT ABOUT HER LINE “EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD THEY HURT LITTLE GIRLS” 

11. I remember so little of Dany’s story from this part... Mossador seems cool but is he secretly loyal to the sons of the Harpy??? I remember something about her being ambushed? (I was right about the ambush, wrong about Mossador he was always loyal to Dany in his way.)

12. Barristan dropping some truth about the Mad King = GOOD

13. Varys being like DRINK LESS TYRION

14. Qyburn is more useful than ten Pycelles.

15. AND FUCK YOU TOO UNCLE KEVAN

16. Shireen teaching Gilly to read is SO CUTE. And... Greyscale can be cured? The spread arrested? I thought Shireen just had a very slow moving case. How is she CURED?

17. Lyanna’s response to Stannis... your favs could never

18. His face when Stannis asks Jon if he wants to be legitimized is like ????

19. No one likes you Janos sit down

20. Sam’s speech for Jon... what impeccable delivery. Making them laugh at Slynt, making them remember how badass Jon is... smart boy.

21. Good to see you again Jaqen-no-one!

22. Why so PUBLIC with Mossador’s execution? What kind of idiocy is this READ THE ROOM DANY. And execute him QUIETLY as your advisers probably told you was a good idea.

23. Drogon’s like “wow this roof looks nice oh hai mom”

5x03

1. That interior of the house of black and white with the pool and all of the gods... so cool and creepy

2. HOW OLD IS TOMMEN ANYWAY?? What a sweet kid though.

3. The Queen off continues... and Margaery shoots herself in the foot. That was CERSEI TRYING TO BE NICE FOR HER SON’S SAKE. And you can SEE the moment Cersei’s like FUCK THIS IT’S WAR

4. OMG pooR traumatized Theon and EW flayed men

5. RIDE THE OTHER WAY SANSA

6. Littlefinger has clearly not met Ramsay fucking Snow. Otherwise nothing he says to Sansa here makes sense.

7. At least they had the decency to admit that Brienne had been nasty to Pod and have them actually start to develop a sweet friendship. And Brienne tells him the story of the ball and Renly :(

8. I like that we’re getting some Jon and Davos interaction. So much good hearted gruffness in one place!

9. Sansa’s arrival at Winterfell just... no

10. TAKE LORD JANOS OUTSIDE YES THIS WAS SO LONG COMING

11. Ok that scene with the high septon and the prostitutes in the costumes of the Seven was kind of hysterical

12. Stay away from the high sparrow Cersei my love...

13. Wow, Jonathan Pryce, how did they get you for this? You’re better than this nonsense but getting to see you and Lena in a scene together is a gift.

14. Ok I jumped at Gregor rattling around on the table

15. So... Littlefinger hadn’t heard much about Ramsay, and the bastard is on his best behavior when LF comes to Winterfell. That answers some questions

16. Holy crap Tyrion is a child playing with the windows that roll up and down.

17. We get to see Volantis???? Coooool!

18. What is a red priestess doing preaching that Dany is the savior? Do they each have their own pet theories about who AA is?

19. Tyrion is terribly good at getting kidnapped.

5x04: Jaime and Bronn go to Dorne and there are some people pretending to be the Sand Snakes

1. The theme of this ep so far is “Lannister brothers on ships”

2. Jorah stealing the boat and throwing silver on the poor dude 😂

3. I... think I might not have seen this episode because I have NO MEMORY of that scene where Jaime tells Bronn he’s going to kill Tyrion if he ever sees him again. My heart.💔 (I found my tumblr archive form May of 2015, and I definitely HAD seen it. I think my brain just protected me from remembering this because it hurt too much. 

4. I want a million reaction gifs of Qyburn being done or clearly having Thoughts Not Expressed

5. Do you know WHY the Faith Militant was disbanded Cersei my love? Cersei who is the mother of three of her brother’s children? BECAUSE THE FAITH HAD ISSUES WITH THE ALL THE TARGARYEN INCEST. What in ALL SEVEN HELLS possessed you to rearm them that kind of power?

6. I still HATE that the show makes the Faith SO MUCH MORE HOMOPHOBIC than it is in the books.

7. I’m going full on Lannister here because me reaction to Margaery bursting in on Tommen was BACK OFF, TYRELL.

8. LEAVE. TOMMEN. THE FUCK. ALONE. (Sparrows, Tyrells, EVERYONE.)

9. Jon writing to the Boltons for men even though he HATES THEM says a lot about him.

10. Mel just does a whole lot of sex magic doesn’t she...

11. I LOVE that we get a scene between just Stannis and Shireen where it’s obvious he loves her. And it makes me hate what happens later even more.

12. Sansa honoring Lyanna in the crypts is sweet. And LITTLEFINGER is the one who tells her the story of Lyanna and Rhaegar at Harrenhal?

13. Also how is Littlefinger assuming Sansa SURVIVES Stannis taking Winterfell from the Boltons?

14. EW HE KISSES HER AGAIN GROSS GROSS GROSS

15. I DEFINITELY HAVE NOT SEEN THIS. (Narrator’s voice: But she had)  I would have remembered Jaime saying he wanted to die in the arms of the woman he loves. (Narrator’s voice: But she didn’t, which didn’t bother her as much as it might have. It was like getting to see shippy scenes for the first time all over again.) 

16. THAT ONE SHOULD BE SLOW ENOUGH 😂 ILU BRONN

17. Jaime being obsessed with not starting a war makes sense because he ALREADY DID IT ONCE AND THIS TIME DAD IS DEAD.

18. And on the other hand Elia wanting to START A WAR I AM SO ANGRY

19. Obarra getting tell the story about the spear is cool though

20. BUT WHERE IS ARIANNE? STILL ANGRY.

21. Poor not drunk as he would like to be Tyrion. He’s quick though with recognizing Jorah.

22. I’m trying to imagine younger Barristan protecting his idiot prince who liked singing in public and it’s kind of fun

23. Well this is clearly a trap. Also that many unsullied should have been able to WIPE THE FLOOR with those sons of the Harpy even in close quarters.

24. Barristan Selmy: WHAT A BADASS. He’ll be missed.

5x05: And now my watch was ended because D and D did something awful in the next episode. 

As I mentioned before, after I rewatched the whole season, I went back to my archive and found the last post where I talked about watching GoT when it aired first run, and it was about this episode. I just read it again for the first time and MY FEELINGS HAVE NOT CHANGED on many points. 

1. Letting Viserion and Rhaegar eat that Meereenese noble is something Aerys would have done and doesn’t make them love her any more likely to behave.

2. So... who is writing Maester Aemon about Dany?

3. Jon Snow, Breaker of Chains? I like that he frees Tormund and gives him reasons to follow him but lets the choice be his.

4. Grammar stickler Stannis is always good for a laugh.

5. Wait wait... Brienne was close enough to Winterfell to SEE IT OUT THE WINDOW??? What in all Seven Hells?

6. We needed a scene of Myranda and Ramsay talking about Sansa like I needed a dagger in the eye

7. Ok ok cool parallel of Sansa standing at the base of the tower looking a lot like Cat.

8. Holy shit did Sansa not know Theon was there before Myranda showed her???

9. Ramsay playing mind games with Theon making him think he’s going to hurt him... yikes

10. And forcing the two of them to interact in ways that he could control and make awful was... kind of smart

11. No Walda should not be telling people she’s pregnant... but how could she know that Ramsay was a danger to her unborn child? She seems a trusting sort.

12. Sam insisting that Gilly knows valuable things too is... so pure

13. This rewatch is turning me into a rampant Missandei/ Grey Worm shipper and I like it.

14. Dany’s outfit when she goes to see Hizdar in prison looks very Star Wars to me.

15. Jorah and Tyrion sailing through the Doom is still the DUMBEST shit.

16. The old city looks neat though. And that’s a fun poem.

17. AND A WHOLE ENTIRE DRAGON (are dragons homing pigeons?)

18. Tyrion’s face when he sees that dragon is still so great

19. STONE ZOMBIES ARE CREEPY and now Jorah has greyscale.

5x06: I want to just watch this episode and get it out of the way and at the exact same moment I NEVER WANT TO WATCH IT EVER. It’s Schroedinger’s Episode.

I know this is the episode with THAT SCENE. The reason that I finally stopped watching. Let’s just assume I’m going to be angry but also probably very affected by performances and extremely upset.

1. In the House Of Black and White, a curious child adores an open door....

2. Arya doesn’t hate the Hound. That she still does is a lie she tells to herself, and I THINK THAT’S INTERESTING. 

3. Well of course Jorah wouldn’t know about his dad’s death... :(

4. holy shit Arya making up lies on the spot to comfort that sick little girl before helping her KILL HERSELF

5. That is some SERIOUS MAGIC SHIT GOING ON with all those faces. That scene is exactly as creepy as it needs to be

6. Tyrion has some points about Dany having Targaryen crazy in her dna and how she hasn’t spent a day in Westeros...

7. Well... Tyrion found some people who think his cock is as magical as he does. To bad they want to sell it unattached.

8. Cersei is working out of Tywin’s office. Love it.

9. Wow Petyr... that’s a play for power. He gets the North, he gets Sansa...

10. Trystane Martell is SO CUTE. And I miss Aimee as Myrcella.

11. I LIKE TO IMPROVISE?? Like Indy??? Jfc Jaime

12. Wtf even was all that nonsense in the water gardens other than some cool fight choreography. (Have I mentioned how pretty the Water Gardens are? SO PRETTY.) 

13. The parallels between Cersei and Olenna and Tywin and Olenna in that office.... right down to the Lannister writing to make Olenna wait... fascinating.

14. Cersei did NOT expect the Sparrows to trot out Olyvar. Did she? She genuinely seemed surprised when he walked into the room.

15. Olenna thinks it’s Cersei’s fault anyway and that’s what matters.

16. Sansa’s dress is pretty and the Weirwood is pretty and everything else is awful and there was NO NEED FOR THAT SCENE. It didn’t tell us ANYTHING NEW ABOUT RAMSAY and what he’s capable of or shed any new light on Sansa or Theon it’s just gratuitous rape and psychological torture porn and it’s just gross.

5x07

1. Maester Aemon holding little Sam is the most precious thing. He will be missed. “Egg I dreamed I was old” 😢

2. Oof. That first scene in this ep between Sansa and Theon is ROUGH. She is so desperate and he is so brainwashed and the fact that she can be furious at him one moment and reminding him who he is the next... my heart was not meant to take this.

3. Is this scene supposed to mirror Sansa and Joffrey on the wall? IT IS only with more sophisticated mind games.

4. WHY ARE YOU POKING HIM ABOUT WALDA’S BABY SANSA DO YOU WANT ALL OF YOU TO DIE

5. Stannis being like THIS IS OUT LAST CHANCE TO MARCH SOUTH AND NOT BE STUCK AT THE WALL. But... don’t people bop up there all the time after this? D and D probs forgot. 

6. So... Ghost has just decided he likes Sam and Gilly? He has good taste in people.

7. Dany is with Daario for a LONG time. I hadn’t realized how drawn out their thing was.

8. I AM A QUEEN NOT A BUTCHER no Dany you’re a bbq-er. Sigh. 

9. Tommen being helpless breaks my heart a bit. And that scene between him and Cersei is... devastating.

10. Myrcella is Sansa part 2... pretty and naive and at the mercy of the adults around her

11. what is the point of sand snake boobs here

12. How did I not know that Jorah ended up in the fighting pits?

13. Tyrion is a gift indeed.

14. Fucking puritans I cannot stand them (ask me about how I cursed Oliver Cromwell’s name in England a lot.)

15. I cannot wait to see Cersei keep her promise to that Septa. I do not think that was what I was supposed to take away from Cersei getting thrown in that cell but I’m over here like PAY THAT DEBT MY BEAUTIFUL GOLDEN QUEEN 👑

5x08

1. Tyrion’s intro to Dany about why he’s valuable makes me so angry. Not because I think it’s badly written, but because Tyrion tells her true things that she apparently didn’t internalize about devotion and wisdom.

2. Poor scaly Jorah... tossed out of Meereen.

3. Religious people who try to starve and torture confessions out of those they think have sinned need to DIE IN A FIRE. I am so done with the Faith.

4. Arya “Lanna” selling oysters is cool and all but now I want oysters.

5. Qyburn is a darling atheist and Cersei’s best ally in that place.

6. I HATE SANSA TELLING THEON SHE WOULD DO TO HIM WHAT RAMSAY DID I don’t care that she doesn’t know the extent of what Ramsay did to him it makes her look cruel and the VIEWERS KNOW and UGH GROSS 

7. Holy shit Sansa didn’t know Bran and Rickon were alive.

8. Theon insisting he’s Reek 💔💔💔

9. Tyrion and Dany’s interactions have got my attention. I’m cautiously here for them.

10. Do we know how things are going over in Slaver’s Bay by the end? Does anyone care?

11. Yes but Dany THE WHEEL HAS A PURPOSE. What do you propose to replace it with?

12. The question Olly brings up of “why ally with the people who slaughtered peaceful farmers? What keeps them from killing people on our side of the wall?” Is a good one, and I wish we’d gotten to see Jon argue sensibly for his solution more.

13. Wow did Tormund just kill Rattleshirt?

14. The leaders of the free folk are an interesting group. What is the woman’s name I wonder? Also I hate spiders but WHY DID WE NOT GET ICE SPIDERS.

15. Tormund gets it and likes Jon. It’s kind of sweet.

16. So... I’m calling that cool wildling leader woman isn’t going to last the episode. Ladies without names don’t get to bond with their kids that much if they’re going to live. <--It’s an awful burden being right all the time. 

17. Shit these wights are a lot more active than the old ones

18. Jon and the Night’s watch and the wildlings fighting alongside each other to give people time 👍

19. VALYRIAN STEEL BITCHES

20. Of course she died because women are soft hearted and can’t deal with zombie kids.

21. Jon and the night king having an epic stare off before he raised the dead was kind of cool tho. Also I think Wun Wun the giant is nine kinds of awesome.

5x09: In which I am probably about to lose all respect I ever had for Stannis Baratheon.

1. So I forgot about Ramsay and thought Mel was lighting fires with her mind 🔥

2. Did... Alliser just give Jon a complement? A backhanded one?

3. Omg Stannis is GETTING DAVOS OUT OF THE WAY for what he plans to do YOU BASTARD YOU KNEW DAVOS WOULD STOP YOU.

4. Ok Show Ellaria pouring out wine rather than drinking with a Lannister is fun but NOT HER.

5. Also wherever they filmed that scene with Doran is SO BEAUTIFUL.

6. Meryn Trant is ON HER LIST AND RIGHT THERE

7. And he’s a fucking pedophile ew. Kill him good, Arya.

8. A girl thinks she just lied to Jaqen without him noticing.

9. You know who’s responsible for Oberyn’s death? OBERYN who volunteered and THE MOUNTAIN who killed him. Not Jaime or Tywin or ANYONE BUT THOSE TWO and anyone who actually saw it happen should KNOW THAT, ELLARIA

10. FEEL BAD WHEN SHIREEN ASKS TO HELP, STANNIS. that’s right feel bad

11. I can’t believe NONE OF THEM in that Baratheon army stopped Mel from BURNING A CHILD. Bystander effect?

12. Too little too late Selyse.

13. As of right now, he loses any moral superiority he ever had and I can’t wait to see Brienne shish kabob him

14. Jorah what is the PURPOSE of getting yourself in front of her at the pits?? (Dany’s dragon collar is badass tho)

15. And all of a sudden sons of the Harpy, who were apparently hiding those masks like guy fawkes masks at a protest...

16. TYRION SAVED MISSANDEI YES GOOD also that shot of Dany taking Missandei’s hand gave me feelings

17. LEAVE MY MOM ALONE AND ALSO I AM HUNGRY: Drogon pretty much

18. Ok DANY FLYING OFF WAS COOL.

5x10 I have SO MUCH WINE READY

1. The armchair theologian in me has questions about the reality of the lord of light given the timing of the snow melting enough that Stannis can movie his army. (My wife thinks Mel did some serious blood magic in this case that may or may not have involved any actual divine intervention)

2. FEEL BAD STANNIS YOU MADE CHOICES

3. I would feel worse for Selyse if she hadn’t been horrid to Shireen every single other second.

4. Yay they figured the Valyrian steel swords work. Sam is smart.

5. Jon’s “congrats on the sex, friend” face is priceless

6. Wow the sellswords took ALL THE HORSES. This means Stannis Baratheon, claimant to the throne, is WALKING.

7. YES SANSA PICK THAT LOCK

8. Wow that’s gonna be a masacre. Yikes. I’d call Stannis brave for standing and fighting but he probs knew he had no chance of surrender with the Boltons.

9. UGH SHE LIT THE CANDLE AND BRIENNE ISN’T THERE TO SEE IT

10. I don’t know what Brienne is going to say when she kills Stannis but I would like to suggest “Renly Baratheon sends his regards”

11. Ok that was much more honorable.

12. Me to Ramsay: 🎶 “You’re going to get eaten by dogs AND I’M NOT SORRY.” 🎶 (my sis in law snorted from the other room at that)

13. No one told me Theon kills Myranda for Sansa yes good

14. THEY FLEW

15. Arya killing Meryn Trant is a special kind of horrifying I’m just bloodthirsty enough to cheer for.

16. Wait wait she just STOLE A FACE? It works for her without any permission?

17. Oh ok I see that wasn’t creepy at all.

18. ...and Ellaria just literally gave Myrcella the kiss of death what

19. THE BAD PUSSY LINE GAVE MY WIFE A HEADACHE I AM NOT KIDDING

20. Jaime trying to be dad and bonding with Myrcella (or trying to) is SO CUTE and the look on his face when she says SHE IS GLAD HE’S HER DAD AND SHE HUGS HIM KILL ME NOW

21. I can hear book Ellaria screaming from here. And I just killed about half a glass of wine for Myrcella.

22. Of course Tyrion speaks Valyrian that’s darling

23. The meeting of the “Find Dany Committee” is fascinating. Daario is kind of in control here??? But what he suggests makes sense???

24. What an adorable triumvirate of Tyrion, Missandei, and Grey Worm!

25. VARYS! Hiiiii! Tyrion is going to need you I have a feeling.

26. Aww look at Drogon’s little dragon nest poor wounded thing.

27. Now... was this Khalasar just passing by? Did they see the dragon and come to see what was up?

28. SAY CONFESS ONE MORE TIME BITCH

29. A girl lies well. Good one Cersei.

30. AND HAIR GROWS BACK. (She doesn’t get to say it here but I was screaming it internally) I kind of can’t wait for her to wildfire the lot of them. The Faith and the high sparrow and all of the self righteous assholes can go fuck themselves

31. SOMEONE GIVE HER A CLOAK

32. THANK YOU QYBURN. When the necromancer is the most welcome sight ever... things have taken an odd turn (seriously though the genuine care he seems to have for her is touching???)

33. DOES DAVOS KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO SHIREEN Must not because Mel would be dead right now

34. Happy Ides of Winter Jon

35. Congrats dudes you killed a kid (ok fine a man) that was better than all of you

36. Glasses of wine consumed: Two BIG ones.