i understand what youre saying but i dont really see most of the story beats you mentioned as "accidents" that were written to try to deny culpability. alicent very much did answer to her own ambition when she chose to interpret a dying viserys' mumbling about aegon as a foolproof endorsement of her son's eligibility, even if she was anxiously hand-wringing over it. damen also did set out to enact the "son for a son" thing by sending blood and cheese, and he wasnt particularly disturbed by the fact that a baby was caught in the crossfire instead of aemond. and another thing i wanted to add is the whole situation of jake locking rhaneyra in her room. in my opinion they are setting up her ultimate fall from grace by strengthening the causes of future paranoia, the first proverbial back-breaking straw being her well intentioned son still following the misogyny society has ingrained in him.
i think they write the characters to have more emotional struggles specifically because they want to juxtapose the actual atrocities they commit, aka rhaenyra thinking its a noble irony to raise an army of bastards while burning dozens of civilians alive in the process. my viewpoint is that they want to show it doesnt matter how good your intentions are, or how devastating you find your own actions. they are still done. you have committed horrible acts. no matter how sympathetic they characters may seem, they are still the warmongering nobles raymund fossoway was spitting on.
yeah i'm not denying that they are still bad people in the show. just badly written bad people.
i think i just have a lot of respect for grrm as a writer and it does offend me when other writers really think they can make drastic changes to his work and say they improved his story
lol I wasn't asking in bad faith. i just wanted to know your specific problems with the show sorry
There's a lot that i dislike. The main thing is that it makes so many unnecessary changes to the source material that seem to show disrespect and even distaste towards the story as GRRM intended it. The explanation people who never even read F&B often give is that "the Dance is just a bare bones outline in the book" which is NOT accurate at all and even if it were true, it does make the show runners' changes an improvement upon the original story beats.
For ex: in NO WAY shape or form does F&B's "lack of detail" make the complete erasure of Nettles reasonable. And based on the most recent episode I don't consider show!Rhaena to be even a shadow of Nettles beyond sharing the same dragon. "Nettles isn't that important because she's not a Targaryen" <- exactly why Nettles existed in the original story + how she challenged Targ/Valyrian supremacy and how she was discriminated against for it by our very own Rhaenyra...
I find this entire situation so reminiscent of GOT from seasons 5-6 where they started taking liberties (cutting Stoneheart, cutting Young Griff + JonCon, cutting Arianne) where people would defend the decisions by calling these things bloat and then later complaining that GOT became bad because it "ran out of books" ??? It's the same shit happening here. They don't adapt the Dance as it is outlined, they remove many things, and then say well the book was too vague for us to adapt it as it was so we had to add all this random shit.
The show also thinks it's being profound by removing agency from its biggest players for no reason. It's become a joke now that everything in HOTD happens by accident but it's beyond parody atp. Aemond kills Luke by accident (this is probably the only one I liked honestly LOL), Alicent names Aegon king by misinterpreting Viserys' words rather than acting on her own ambitions and beliefs about succession, Daemon gets baby Jaehaerys killed by accident in a hit on Aemond rather than literally trying to get payback against Aegon for the murder of Rhaenyra's son, and now the entire mess of the Gullet.
The Gullet really upset me for many reasons. One of the questions ASOIAF readers have always asked wrt the Dance is why Rhaenyra never fought in any real battles (excluding fall of KL) while Aegon did and what it says about her character. The reality is, neither Rhaenyra nor Aegon should be fighting in the battles realistically, as they are too strategically important and the stakes are too high. Look at what happened to Aegon in a dragon battle (both book and show). Rhaenyra is smart to not want to fight herself, and selfish for instead sending her teenage son Jace to fight for her. She is not a warrior, although she wants to embody Visenya, wearing her braids and dressing in armor. It's a contradiction in her character and it says something about her. What's more, Rhaenyra is not as physically able in the book as she is in the show. She should be injured from her VERY traumatic miscarriage. It's also worth mentioning that Rhaenyra is fat in the book, in contrast to the athletic show Rhaenyra. You can ask yourself why they would choose to make Rhaenyra skinny. Would she have been more unlikable to general audiences if she got fat? GOD FORBID!!!!!!!!!!!
All of this is to say, Rhaenyra in the book does not fight in the Gullet of her own volition. Instead, the show thinks it's being profound by making Rhaenyra subject to the will of her son Jace, not unlike the disturbing scene between Alicent and Aemond (a lot to be said about this). Jace takes a great deal of initiative in the books, from the idea of the dragonseeds (which the show gave to Rhaenyra... lol) to fighting in the Gullet to protect his youngest brothers Aegon and Viserys (2 very important characters... completely cut from the battle???) who he was trying to take to shelter in Pentos away from the war. And then show!Jace dies partly due to Rhaena acting completely insane (no amount of hunger or lack of sleep/oxygen/what have you will make someone delirious enough to do what she did idgaf) and essentially for nothing as he has no brothers to die in defense of. And the show does this because they think this is the way to demonstrate the bleakness of war -- to make a young man full of potential die a pointless death partly at the hands of his own neglected cousin that accomplishes nothing all in pursuit of his mother's birthright -- how sad. It is bleak and it is pathetic how Jace dies in the book, but it's the purpose behind his actions that makes it noble and tragic. He didn't die in a harebrained battle in defiance of his mother whom he loved, but to protect his brothers on his mother's behalf, and dying in the process due to his lack of experience in warfare. Men's lives have meanings, not their deaths, and all that.
And the thing is, the Dance is legit one of my least favorite parts of ASOIAF history because it is not really that well written and it is obvious GRRM was floundering to find a way to kill off all the dragons in a year. I did not care for any Dance characters when I read it. When HOTD first came out and made some changes (Alicent and Rhaenyra's childhood together, Alicent's more explicit grooming by her father from teenage years to become queen, the knife fight between Alicent and Rhaenyra, Helaena being a dreamer) I was actually all for it. I thought these were good additions to the background of the Dance while still setting up well for the future. It is when they made changes like Alicent flip-flopping on Rhaenyra before ultimately deciding on Aegon based on a misunderstanding in the tail end of s1 that I realized this show was losing the plot.
I can kind of go on forever about every change I dislike in the show but I've already yapped a lot more than I ever do on tumblr saur I will leave it at that but if you wanna ask more that's fine too gg
Feel like the only toxic dark romantasy ship in asoiaf is Davos x Stannis because Davos let that man cut his fingers off as discipline and romanticizes it. And Stannis LITERALLY IMPRISONED HIM IN A DUNGEON and then was like just kidding,,,, my love,,,,,, you are the only True Soul Who Understands Me and Holds Me Accountable. Also like Lowborn Special Thief x Mean Cruel Rigid Not Chill King is so classic booktok no?
the genre of asoiaf fans that are like. ew who wants to read about Tyrion/Theon/insert other complex well crafted we’ve spent multiple books following. IM obsessed with some random Targaryen who appears for two pages in fire and blood and is characterized as being brave outgoing and generally likable before dying tragically young. Girl who cares about Prince Visaegerion…
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