#dragonestone

My Dragonestone castle in progress...

The beauty of a lot of these characters is their humanity. Their humanity makes them compelling. Their humanity makes them tragic. Elevating Daenerys to an irreproachable savior and demoting Stannis to a brainwashed zealot is not only a disservice to both characters, it’s a disservice to the narrative overall. 

Amidst the dragons and the white walkers and the cheap, almost-silly “gotcha” moments (Arya single-handedly killing all of House Frey, Dany somehow telepathically dominating her dragons and burning an entire fleet, the Knights of the Vale showing up entirely unanticipated by everyone but Sansa), we’ve lost the realism and the imperfection that made ASoIaF so enthralling. 

What really irks me, I guess, is that there is a very real possibility that GRRM will never finish the series in book form. That this - a mass-appeal-focused, high-budget fan fiction - will go on to be THE canonical end to the series. That we won’t know what Book!Jaime and Book!Theon and Book!Sansa actually become, in the end. 

It just makes me sad that a series that I fell in love with, one with the perfect alchemical balance of darkness and hope, of cynicism and levity, of horror and beauty, is being distilled into an Ice Zombie Versus Dragon Battle Royale with Black-and-White Heroes and Villains So You Know Exactly When to Stand Up and Cheer.  I honestly hope I’m wrong. Maybe GRRM will finish the series and it will line up exactly with the show. Maybe I am just another salty Stannis fan that felt cheated out of a satisfying narrative arc to one of my favorite characters. Maybe D&D have a secret plan that will satisfy book fans and show fans alike. 

Ah, the Emmy Award winning piece of television is back for its penultimate season and the first episode of what was promised to be a season of “go, go, go” felt like an hour of “snore, snore, snore”. It wasn’t egregiously offensive anywhere to get hyped up on the anger, but they didn’t lean heavy into their big set piece key moments so we weren’t treated with the laughably bad either. (Other than Euron.) It was just boring bad. Which is probably the worst kind because it doesn’t elicit strong emotions one way or the other.