This season finale was worse than GOT's series finale. Or worse than a lot of S8 tbh. For all that I hate season 8 there were parts of it that I liked. There were some cool shots. Drogon taking flight behind Daenerys. The eery calmness of Varys burning. Some of the music and production.

I don't think I liked a single thing about this episode. It didn't move the story forward in any way shape or form. Rhaenyra and Daemon meet? Cool, here's 40 seconds of that, that's it. Instead let's have endless meangingless shots of sheapstealer and Rhaena. Lohar was so insanely stupid. Not only because that storyline has no relevance to the season as a whole but because the casting makes no sense at all. The character is canonically male but they cast a trans female? I would have no opposition to casting a trans male, I don't think its transphobic at all to say that this casting decision makes no sense at all. It's just as egregious as Eddie Redmayne in the Danish Girl I think. Even worse than that is the fact that they chose to start this E plotline, which is probably going to be 95% comedy now. In the fucking season finale??? Does Ryan Condal not understand how a show's pacing should work at all?

Everything with Alicent and Haelana was dogwater. I agree that they have absolutely ruined the point of Alicent's character - they take a character who effectively maneuvered her family to take the fucking iron throne and turn into this? "All I want is to walk and breathe"? What the actual fuck? That rant she gave about how she's been wronged/used by her husband, father, son and lover was so, so backwards and just asinine. She shrugs off all her growth and all her motivation of the last 10 years on the men in her life to instead only aim to walk and breathe? What the actual fuck. She's ok with a son for a son now? Bitch did you forget about Blood and Cheese?? What happened to the Alicent from s1 who want's Lucerys's eye?The women in this show are all wronged in some way and are searching for their true calling which leads to the least violence and bloodshed - Rhaneyra, Haelana and Alicent. Whereas the men are either dumb/bloodthirsty or lost and eventually swear themself to a woman. The whole point of the Fire and Blood is that men and women are all equally capable of the same violence and depravity. This show is so black and white, so backwards and borderline anti-feminist.

They absolutely massacred Daemon as a character with the vision shit. Sunfyre being dead and no Baelon is a really dumb change for all the reasons @Fatality mentioned. This show does not understand what the word pacing means. This was effectively a season full of filler episodes - do they even understand the purpose of a season finale?

I was really excited for this show. The whole pitch was that its based on a finished work, that they had all the plotlines ready to adapt. And they were really good plotlines. But this is an abomination. Worse than s8 because at least s8 was freewheeling due to grrm's laziness, what excuse do these guys have?

Someone on reddit described this season as "All the characters do episode after episode is dither around dragonstone, kings landing, and harrenhal complaining about having to fight the war they started" and yeah that's pretty fucking accurate. Idk if I'm gonna be watching s3 because I genuinely struggled to get through this episode.

 

What a waste of a season.

 

House of the Dragging Their Fuckin' Feet

 

Rhaena taking the place of Nettles is mid af.

 

Damn that finale was completely underwhelming.

To be honest I don't see the point of nearly half of this season.

I still don't quite get the Master of Whisperer's character. So far he's been the snake in the ears of the greens but we haven't seen him effectively utilize the information he has against these people.

Harrenhall felt like a waste of time. Was the implication that the Rivermen were willing to fight Rhaenera if Daemon didn't take the knee?

We didn't even get a good look of the last dragon and we spent a good chunk of the season finale on finding it.

Seems like all the budget went to the dragons because the ships looked like garbage. Also we spent a heck of alot of time in that little port

 

I am also confused. Wasn't Oscar Tully's whole point "Yeah, fuck Daemon, but we gotta side with Rhaenyra so I guess we'll tolerate him"? How did that evolve to "They are sworn to me and will only kneel to Rhaenyra if I do first"?

 

S1 was dynamic. In a way, it was like 2 short seasons in one. The first half was the early years of Viserys' reign and Rhaenyra and Alicent's relationship changing from friends to frenemies. The second half was the build up to civil war.

I have mixed feelings about S2. On one hand, it does seem like those 8 episodes could have been 4 or 5 and the back half of the season could have been the civil war really beginning to heat up. On the other hand, I think this drawn out, introspective, meandering presentation of events might have been a sort of overcorrection on the part of showrunners who no doubt have thought about the tail end of GOT and why people didn't like it when making this show.

One of the biggest complaints about GOT seasons 7 and 8 was that events were rushed, armies were teleporting around the continent and nothing was given time to play out in full. I can only speculate, but I think maybe season 2 of HOTD was in part written to avoid those mistakes, only they ended up stretching things out too much and the wrong things on top of that.

I don't think an entire season of Daemon's ghostly visions was necessary. Honestly, Daemon went from an engaging character in season 1 to a complete snooze fest in season 2. Matt Smith had nothing to work with except that last scene in the finale. Tbh, most of the characters give the impression that they did fuck all the entire season and watching on HBO's release schedule only exacerbates this. More and more I think that binging is the only sensible way to watch modern premium shows. Wait for the whole thing to be out and then skip the Harfoot Sea Snake drydock scenes.

 

I think if you cut Alicent and Baela the finale could have been decent. As it is, it's just baffling. There are a few very strong scenes. I especially like Ulf and Jace's little rivalry, and Daemon's scenes, even if they could have cut about an hour of Harrenhal before getting there. The little glimpse of Robert Baratheon was fun. I also loved Criston Cole's little depressing speech. And Tyland's little misadventure. The ending montage was also quite strong.

I sort of like where Rhaenyra's character has ended up, but I don't see why she shouldn't have had that attitude from the start of the season.

At the end of the day, I think that we got a lot of unnecessary but very well shot, well acted scenes, with good moment to moment writing and very inconsistent plotting overall. I enjoyed most of the second season, and I'm going to watch the third, but it's hardly faithful to the book even when accounting for the unreliable narrator, and has to be enjoyed as a piece of well made but flawed fanfiction.

 

I think they are legitimately trying to write strong female characters, but their conception of strength is so incredibly divorced from reality that it ends up being more extreme than actual anti-feminists. It's basically what you get combining all the worst attributes described by A Servant When He Reigneth and The Female of the Species with absolutely none of the redeeming qualities of the second. Given that the latter was literally written as an argument for why women shouldn't be allow to vote, this really doesn't say anything good about the writers.

 

GRRM seems very unhappy with the way the show's been going, to the point he started outright bitching at it on his not-blog, which is something that isn't really done in the business. He also started spoiling some plot points from season 3, then deleted the blog post 2 hours after posting - but, you know, wayback machine exists so it's out there in the aether.

In any case, I wouldn't expect greatness out of whatever future holds for HotD. Which is odd, given that all it really needed was a good adaptation, unlike GoT where authors had to make stuff up themselves due to the source simply not existing.

 

I was expecting GRRM to be disappointed, but he really went all out on the show.

 

https://archive.md/https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/09/04/beware-the-butterflies/

 

Quoting my post from the time of the penultimate episode of season 1, this definitely feels like vindication. Would rather have a good TV show though.

I'm actually trying to make myself be excited for a Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, because it's by far my favorite story in the ASOIAF universe and it honestly should be pretty hard to fuck up (until they run out of source material of course). I think that's why it's important that George is doing this now, as a bit of a wake up call to HBO to knock off their bullshit and stop strangling the golden goose with his legacy alongside it - there clearly is still an audience for this universe but the drop in ratings for season 2 suggest this isn't the direction the series should be going.

I think HBO saw some of the conversations online about Game of Thrones being a misogynistic show (which there are good arguments for between some of the adaptation choices like having Cersei and Sansa both be raped on screen in scenes not from the book) and got worried that they were alienating their female audience. This led to the decision to bring in writers like Sarah Hess (alongside removing what made Game of Thrones famous - titillating sex scenes), with her strong background for this fantasy genre in writing shows such as 'House' and 'Orange is the New Black' plus her refusal to watch the show she was writing a spin off for. It doesn't seem that she was the origin of the decision to make Rhaenyra and Allicent's relationship the centerpiece of this civil war show, but she certainly seems to have been a strong driving force behind it as judging by infamous quotes of hers.

Unfortunately, that approach just does not work at all with the universe they're trying to depict here. It is funny though and I've seen it commented multiple times that George RR Martin, an old childless man, is seemingly better able to understand and convey the mentality of a mother and woman than an actual woman and mother of two. I still cannot believe they had Allicent do a season 8 Jaime and go "actually I never cared about my sons" - what a weird fucking show.

 

That godwaful scene where Alicent described the last 10 years of her life as her father, husband and sons having wronged her and only wanting to walk and breathe now pretty much ended any interest I had in this show. You somehow reduce all the growth and actions you've taken over the last decade to men acting upon you and shirk off all the thousands of lives you have put at risk, including those of your family (who you seemingly don't give af about anymore) all so you can just "walk and breathe"? I think the writers genuinely have to have kinda personal issues to write a character that sadistic, I'm sorry. Especially when she spent so much of S2 defending her usefulness and claiming House Tyrell's larger victories as her own (oh I can rule! I did for years! Yes, me I antagonized Rhaenyra for years, refused her marriage suggestion between her kids and did all kinds of psycho shit to keep my kids on the throne! I own all that!). Jk that was all the men in my life.

All of a sudden she's the victim? The person who essentially started an entire war because she thought her BFF was too slutty? Now she wants to just walk and breathe and float in ponds? Yeah I'm done with this show.

On the other hand maybe the writers are geniuses because they have accurately captured how self obsessed, deluded and downright psychotic feudal monarchs was <shrug>