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Before I go on, I have to do my standard warning for those of you who have not yet seen this (or some of the more recent episodes, to boot), but intend to. So, if you have not yet seen the most recent episodes, please stop reading at this point.
*** SPOILERS****** SPOILERS****** SPOILERS***
Okay, you have been warned. If you are still reading by this point, then you either have already seen the episodes, or for one reason or another, do not mind the spoilers to come. Just don't say that you were not warned!
So, there has been a lot of reaction regarding that last GoT episode, when King's Landing gets completely destroyed by Daenerys and her dragon after the bell signaling surrender had been rung. We had seen the entire Iron Fleet wiped out, and most of the key outer defenses completely breeched. We had seen the army allow their swords to fall to the ground. We had already seen Cersei close her eyes in resignation and disgust.
Yet, there was Daenerys, looking as haggard as we had ever seen her, looking entirely unlike what we might have expected her to look like after she had finally achieved the one thing that she had wanted throughout her life more than anything else. And really, we can already say that she was the conquering queen. But her first act, for all intents and purposes, as the unofficially newly crowned queen is to completely devastate the city and kills what sure appeared to be a majority of the residents living there: her newest subjects.
Clearly, she had taken the whole "ruling through fear" thing very, very seriously.
Fittingly, that close-up of Daenerys that we saw, just before she began what amounted to war crimes, was the last close-up that we saw of her. The writers specifically wanted us to get a view, and a feel, from the ground, where those who live in the city just taken over by this new queen - the daughter of the Mad King, you will remember - just seemingly goes from street to street, making a point to destroy and set fire to as much of the city as possible. We see the ramifications of that decision, as people run and flee, but there is no escape. They are now trapped within the very city walls that had previously kept them safe. Daenerys burns the city and it's residents. She destroys the Red Keep, and everything below it.
In other words, it was a seeming senseless slaughter.
The reactions were instant and mixed, although mostly, most people seemed to have a negative reaction to it. Some reacted with humor. my personal favorite was this one (see the link to internet reacting to GoT down below, where I got this from):
Mohanad Elshieky ✔ @MohanadElshieky Did Dick Cheney write this episode of Game of Thrones? 219 10:29 PM - May 12, 2019
Now, that was funny!
Most people, however, were not at all amused by the episode. Remember that to this point, Daenerys had been considered one of the heroes of the show. Some people had named their daughters after this fictional character. And sure enough, many viewers reacted with complete surprise at this seeming complete turn from this particular character, and with this obvious bit of ruthlessness coming at the very moment when she had finally seemed to achieve her greatest moment of triumph. I even saw one woman posting an article about how women on the show were built up, only to be basically destroyed later. That is not even really true, as a number of prominent women on the show are still very much alive and very sane, even heroic. We still have Arya, Sansa, and Brienne, for example. Besides, most of the men endured much the same fate. After all, one way or another, most of the characters on the show were killed off. It is what the show is most famous for. So, I am not sure that I agree with the notion that women, specifically, on the show are built up only to have the rug pulled out from them in the end. At least not any more than the men.
That said, however, there was plenty to discuss, and not least of which was Daenerys' apparent fall into insanity. After all, if this were real, her actions would clearly have constituted what we would define as war crimes. It was completely unnecessary. After all, the city had surrendered already, they had rung the bell, and the army had dropped their sword. The battle was over. Daenerys had already won.
But the war crime part of it actually dominated the episode, and people wondered what they were watching. Many seemed to be horrified by the episode, and some people even went so far in their reactions as to suggest that this episode had ruined the entire season for them.
To me, that is going too far. While I do feel that this season feels a bit rushed - quite a bit rushed, truth be told - I hardly think that this episode ruins it. In fact, truth be told, I personally thought that this episode was brilliant. And if it upset people...well, it should have. That, I suspect, was the point.
Because let's face it: we all saw hope in Daenerys. We all liked her, and hoped that her side would win. Everyone wanted to see how Cersei would die, right? That was the big discussion prior to that last episode. She was the Queen of Evil, and we wanted Daenerys to be her downfall, which she was.
Still, this felt like a bit too much for some, but I think it was actually very well done. After all, we are living in mad times, and if we are being honest, I think that the tongue in cheek comment about Dick Cheney writing the episode had more than a little to do with the hypocrisy in people's reactions. Because while many people (myself included) liked Daenerys, the fact of the matter is that she always showed an absolutist, rigid approach to power. People needed to "bend the knee" and recognize her as their ruler, no matter who they are. And she was showing signs of a mental meltdown, and increasingly so, as this season wore on.
This was not without precedent. There had been incidents in medieval history (and GoT is supposed to happen in a world similar to our medieval world), as some scholars noted (this bit taken from Charlie Hall's Polygon.com article, see link below):
Paul B. Sturtevant, Ph.D. and the editor-in-chief of The Public Medievalist, says the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, the climax of the First Crusade, sprang instantly to mind as Dany took flight over King’s Landing. But, so too did a lesser-known episode from early Christian history called the Albigensian Crusade. Under the reign of Pope Innocent III, a Catholic force attacked the European city of Béziers. The killing was so indiscriminate, and the destruction so wanton, that it’s said one of the Crusaders coined the phrase “Kill them all! God will know his own.” That phrasing would eventually be modernized into “Kill ’em all, and let God sort ’em out.”
Sturtevant, however, feels that this episode reminded him of a much more recent incident in history, one that one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, actually lived through and wrote about: the bombing of Dresden by Allied forces late in 1945. If you are not familiar with it, Dresden was completely destroyed on the night of February 12-13, 1945, just months before Nazi Germany would unconditionally surrender, and by which time it was clear that the war was going very, very badly for Hitler and the Nazis. Dresden had been saved from much of the destruction that had befallen other cities, because, as Vonnegut explained, it had been considered an "open city." That meant that it had no military value whatsoever, and so it had been left alone. They had heard bombing raid warnings before, but had learned to mostly ignore them for the false alarms that they inevitable had been, to that point. But all of that changed in mid-February of 1945, when the warning sounded, but this time, was followed not only by an actual attack, but by one of the deadliest overnight slaughters in human history. Sturtevant explains:
“The bombing of Dresden was during World War II, and it was when the Allies used incendiary devices ... and killed everyone in the city. Not through the explosive power of one nuclear bomb, but through progressive strikes that were meant to burn the city to ash and everyone in it.”
“This [episode of Game of Thrones] feels very modern to me, because we are currently living in the age of the machine-gun. We are currently living in the age of the mass killing, the age where one person can kill 500 people with a single weapon without ever seeing their faces. Where we can drop bombs on people from above and from afar and never have to hear their screams. And that is one of the uniquely horrifying things about our current advanced technological age, and it has nothing to do with the Middle Ages.”
Indeed, these kinds of horrors have happened, even though many people seem reluctant to acknowledge or learn about them. And paradoxically, it just might be this very reluctance that, perhaps, allows them to happen in the first place. Our modern society rarely seems to come to terms with horrors or war crimes that have been committed, unless they point the finger of blame at the other guys. Only Germany, which was completely and totally defeated and which lay in ruins after the surrender in May of 1945, was kind of forced to own up to the war crimes and crimes against humanity that had been committed by the Nazis. Otherwise, the Japanese historically went to considerable lengths to deny, or at least not to acknowledge, their war crimes. And the Allied nations never took responsibility for their war crimes, including the overnight firebombing of Dresden, the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or indeed, the numerous other firebombings that took place in World War II. The United States had a difficult time acknowledging the horrors of American military excesses in Vietnam, from My Lai to the systematic napalm destruction of huge parts of Vietnam, as well as the literally millions of Vietnamese who were killed. Nor have we acknowledged our role in the estimated half a million to a million Iraqis who died during the combined wars and invasions and economic sanctions that the United States led, from the early nineties until much more recent times.
This inability to acknowledge these horrors are perhaps part of the reason why we have warhawks in office again, tirelessly arguing their justifications for a new war, this time on Iran. Venezuela has also been regarded as a possible target of American military intervention. For a country that officially considers itself a peace-loving country, according to many, we sure seem to love going to war.
We should know better. And, in fact, I personally suspect that we actually do know better. Most of us know, on some level, that we are using some of those deadly weapons that we invest so much money on. I remember arguing with a conservative who supported Bush and Cheney and the impending (I actually called it inevitable) invasion of Iraq in the months leading up to the actual invasion. This guy was telling me that Saddam Hussein had built up an enormous arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, and so he clearly intended to use it. I reminded him that the United States had a far bigger, and far deadlier, arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, and employing his logic, we too would seek to use it. After all, the Bush administration was pining for the invasion of Iraq, even though we were already engaged in a war in Afghanistan.
So, my suspicion is that this episode made many viewers feel uncomfortable, because it challenged their notions of who they systematically regarded as heroic. We are so used to that being the story line, the "good guys" and the "bad guys," that we kind of lose sight of the fact that the world is not really like that. There are usually many more shades of gray. And the scholars in that article by Charlie Hall were actually more annoyed with how the one major black character left in the show was the one who picked up his weapon, when everyone else had basically stopped fighting, and then instigated a slaughter. This, they felt, reinforced certain historical stereotypes about slaves being freed from their chains, and then unleashing mindless violence.
Perhaps that upset the viewers. But most of them, it seemed, were upset by the petite, blonde woman, who was seen as a hero on GoT consistently, leading up to this particular episode, when all of that changed.
Yes, the warning signs about Daenerys were there. And let's face it: we in our modern society have elected leaders who turned out to be very bad news. I am not only talking about Hitler, although he would be the clearest example of a democratically elected, and at one time, hugely popular leader who turned out to be very bad news. We elected the leaders who got us into Vietnam, after all. We also elected the leaders who led us into invade Iraq. Both of those wars, by the way, were popular among Americans in the beginning, and only began to get less popular as the wars began to not go so well.
So, my guess is that people were upset that they had, if you will, supported Daenerys, only to find out that, once in power, she might actually be a monster, perhaps worse than Cersei ever was. And in this day and age, when we Americans have elected a man who muses about wiping entire nations off the map, seeing the kinds of impact that this has on the people on the ground might be more than a little uncomfortable. The notion of an entire city being largely defenseless, and being completely destroyed from a fiery attack from above might just hit a little too close to home with what we ourselves seem to do far too often.
Here are the links to several articles on the reactions to the latest GoT episode, and which got me on this topic to begin with:
Scholars weigh in on the inconsistencies of Daenerys’ Game of Thrones vengeance 84 The ‘battle’ of King’s Landing challenged expectations in more ways than one By Charlie Hall@Charlie_L_Hall May 14, 2019, 12:25pm EDT
Game of Thrones season 8: The internet reacts to the absolute madness of episode 5 Things got pretty crazy in there folks. BY MARK SERRELS MAY 13, 2019
Twitter Hated the Penultimate Episode of Game of Thrones image BY ESTELLE TANG MAY 13, 2019
https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a27451870/game-of-thrones-bad-episode-best-twitter-reactions/
Viewers Were Really Unhappy with Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 5 The showrunners are getting a lot of heat on Twitter. image BY ERICA GONZALES MAY 13 2019
It Is Now Clear Having Two Short ‘Game Of Thrones’ Final Seasons Was A Mistake Paul Tassi Paul Tassi Senior Contributor
May 14, 2019, 08:05am It Is Now Clear Having Two Short ‘Game Of Thrones’ Final Seasons Was A Mistake Paul Tassi Paul Tassi Senior Contributor
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