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I remember a scene in Season 5 where Arya is in the "sanctuary" (for lack of a better word) of the House of Black and White and asks Jaqen where the Many-Faced God is. She says, "I see the Drowned god. I see the Stranger. Which one is the Many-Faced God?" And Jaqen says something along the lines of "There is only one god. A girl knows his name."
So maybe the followers of the MFG believe something along the lines of all the gods being different interpretations of one god, and all religions simply different ways to worship it. Of course, this is also what the followers of the Seven believe as well -- the Father, Mother, Smith, Maiden, Crone, Warrior, and Stranger are all just different incarnations of one being.
>we, the readers and viewers, never get to learn if there are Gods at all.<
Now, I see it completely differently. I've always viewed it as all the various faiths are presented as being "real" and their gods "having power." Yes, R'hllor has the power to resurrect the dead. But so does the drowned god. The many-faced god enables its followers to take on the appearance and personality of other people (this is more clear in the books -- putting on a face allows Arya to take on some of the memories of the original person). The Old Gods have those Holy Hand Grenades and the weir-net, and you'll notice that there are wargs only in places where they are worshiped. And one could probably say it was the power of the Great Stallion that actually enabled Dany to birth the dragons.
And one could make the argument that, while Arya called upon the many-faced god to take down the Freys, their deaths was the righteous judgment of the Seven (recall the farmer telling Arya and the Hound that WF would burn in seven hells for the Red Wedding).
(by the way, I hope you read this as academic debate and not as trolling arguments. I'm enjoying this thread as much as you are.)
>There was never the slightest hint that [Littlefinger] had some connection to the Faceless Men>
In Season 1, the small council suggests hiring a Faceless Assassin to kill Dany, and Littlefinger comments on how pricey they were. And in Season 7, he is shown handing a coin of Braavos to an unidentified young woman. This goes nowhere, but there is a theory that she was a faceless person.
Also, there is an additional theory that suggests that Jaqen was in the black cells because Littlefinger hired him to kill Ned -- it's conjecture, but the way the YouTube video lays it out makes sense.
Now, personally, I don't think he would have gone to the Faceless Assassins for his own safety because he always felt he was smarter than everyone around him and would see a threat coming, so why would he need a Faceless Assassin? (Also, I think that if anyone other than Bran, Sam, Howland Reed, and Lyanna's handmaiden knew about Jon's true parentage, it would have been Varys, not Littlefinger, because the people who knew seem more like Varys' type of informant than Littlefinger's. But that's just me.)
No, that was a guesstimate on my part. I based it off how far we know Kings Landing is to Castle Black (3000 miles) and how long it takes people to travel between Winterfell and Castle Black.
Actually, come to think about it, it may even be more than 2500 miles. That would make it 500 miles from Winterfell to Castle Black, and at the same rate of speed (5 miles an hour, 10 hours a day), it would take 10 days to go that distance by horse, and it seems like characters move more quickly than that.
I do agree with these points, but my main beef is not that the season ended the way it did, but that it rushed itself to get there. I'm in the process of rewatching the show from the beginning, and I just saw the episode where Talisa tells Robb that she's pregnant. In the "Inside the Episode" afterwards, D&D talk about how these quiet scenes between characters are just as critical to the advancement of the plot as the big action sequences (if not more so), because of what we learn about the characters and their relationships with each other. That was one of the reasons why - in my opinion, you are free to disagree - the best episode of Season 8 was #2. It was full of all those scenes.
But with the exception of S8E2, the last two seasons cut out a lot of those quiet moments, and the result is an ending that didn't seem to match how the plot or characters had been developed up to that point.
Case in point: Arya changing her mind about Cersei. On horseback, it would probably take about 6-8 weeks to travel from Winterfell to Kings Landing (2500 mile distance, at 5 mph - a fast walk for a horse - and approximately 10 hours of travel a day). And at no point are we ever shown anything during those 6-8 weeks that shows her and the Hound talking about how dangerous revenge can be. Instead, the show waits until they were both in the middle of the Red Keep to have one conversation that changes her mind just like that. Arya has wanted Cersei dead since Lady and Ned were killed. For her to just say, "Ok," and turn around and leave the way she does fails her character. It's not that she changes her mind. It's that it only takes 30 seconds of "You don't want to end up like me, do you?" to get her to do it.
The "Seven Kingdoms" refers to the seven sovereign entities at the time of Aegon's Conquest: the North, the Vale, the Westerlands, the Iron Islands, the Stormlands, the Reach, and Dorne. At that time, the Riverlands were part of the Iron Islands, and the Crownlands were claimed by the Stormlands. Eventually, the Riverlands separated from the Iron Islands, but the Crownlands never became their own entity -- they're no longer claimed by the Stormlands, but remain under direct control of the current monarch (they really are the "Crown's lands").
So, officially, the Six Kingdoms are the Vale, the Westerlands, the Iron Islands, the Stormlands, the Reach, and Dorne. Although, given the amount of prominence and authority that the lord of Riverrun currently has, the Riverlands could replace the North and make it the Seven Kingdoms again.
Yeah, except this never really flew with me, because this is never actually explained. We assume that it happened, given Sansa's subsequent union with Ramsay, but how it actually happens is a little confusing to me. Sansa and Tyrion had a legally binding marriage, so when she arrives at the Aerie, they are still officially married, whether said relationship had been consummated or not.
I may be seeing too much into the technical or legal details here, but the idea that the marriage is annulled just by Sansa marrying Ramsay before the Old Gods (when she had married Tyrion before the Seven) doesn't make sense to me. I would think that either Sansa or Tyrion would have had to have formally requested an annulment from somebody really official (like the High Septon, or someone of that ilk). And given that both of them are on the run, how would that have happened?
But I'm a Sansrion girl. I had kinda hoped that the two of them would get back together at the end.
I don't actually believe it either, but the idea that how history has been told to subsequent generations may or may not be accurate has been a running theme throughout the show, so if it ever turns out that the writers did do it intentionally (not that I think they did), it would actually make sense.
Chaos is a ladder and all that.
He wasn't blatantly sadistic like Joffrey or Ramsey, but that doesn't make him any less of a villain. In fact, I think it makes him MORE of a villain, because he's so calculating and careful. When you first see him, you don't realize just how horrible a person he is -- we just don't like him because at that point in the story, we're rooting against the Lannisters.
And then you get to know him more, and you start to see the man who ordered the rape and murder of Elia Martel and her children. Who orders the burning of the Riverlands and orchestrates the Red Wedding and who knows Tyrion was innocent of Joffrey's murder but sentences him to die anyway. He's so Machiavellian and efficient in everything he does, but because of all the times he puts Joffrey and Cersei into their places, you don't necessarily see that he's a psychopath until you're totally drawn into trusting that he knows what's good for the realm. That's how good of a villain he is.
And Dance played him SO WELL.
The "1000 ships and 2 good hands" was an awesome line. I had such high hopes for him after that scene. Hopes that were never realized...
Ramsey had a great death scene too. Iwan Rheon and Sophie Turner were fantastic.
But I had been waiting for Tywin's death from the very first episode of season 1 -- ever since Tyrion told Jon that Tywin considered him a bastard. And Tywin was just so much MORE as a character. His death scene is probably one of the most satisfying ones in the whole series for me.
Killing people in battle doesn't count. Starving civilians during a siege doesn't count. Deliberately killing civilians or other noncombatants, or executing foot soldiers after they surrender and have been disarmed is more ambiguous.
What was done at Treblinka was a war crime. A lot of what was done in Leningrad was not.
But I do agree that many of the Northerners were just as guilty.
Ramsey was horrible, but I got tired of him after a while. By the time Sansa kills him, I was hoping he would die not because he was a sadistic sociopath, but because it had gotten to the point that I would just sigh whenever I saw him on screen.
If Dany's arc had been better developed, it would probably be her, but as it is, I'm going with Tywin. The dude rides a horse into the throne room and has it take a dump RIGHT THERE. He was intelligent AND a psychopath. Plus, he has an awesome death scene.
Melisandre and the High Sparrow are also up there.
Also: he has the best death scene.
There was always going to be fallout, because with a cultural phenomenon this big, there will always be people who will be disappointed in the ending. There were probably people, way back in the '80's annoyed with how Star Wars ended, and there were people fifteen years ago who didn't like the way Harry Potter ended. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
What I think a lot of people are grumbling about the most is not how the show ENDED, per se, but how it go there. Point A is fine. Point B is fine. But the line in between goes wonky in parts. Part of the reason why I think the final two books have not been written yet is because I don't think George himself has quite figured out how to get from where he is to where he wants to be in the end.
I don't want to be a gatekeeper in regards to who is a true fan and who is not, but when I hear people saying, "Scene X does it for me. I'm not watching this anymore," then I think they're missing the point. This story, whether the books or the show, has caused viewers to think and feel. Martin and D&D made us CARE about the story and the characters. When something good happens to one of them, we're happy with them. When something horrible happens to one of them, we grieve with them. When Arya was attacked in Braavos, we were scared for her. When Viserion was taken down by the Night King, we grieved with Dany. When Shireen was sacrificed, we raged at Stannis. WE CARED. And in that respect, Martin (and D&D) have done their job well.
What's interesting about the complaining is that a lot of the big things that happened in the final 2 episodes weren't on the show's writers. GRRM told D&D how the story would end -- just not the route it would take to get there.
So Dany going mad, Jon killing Dany and going back north, Bran becoming king, Sansa becoming Queen in the North, Arya going west, Tyrion becoming Bran's Hand? That's all GRRM. Now there are some major issues (read: plot holes, mcguffins, and lack of character development) with how the characters ARRIVED at those points, and we can yell at the writers all we want about them. But the endings themselves? Nope. That's on Martin. And the dude did say that the ending would be bittersweet.
But how would they have known the blood was hers? They have DNA testing down at the Kings Landing crime lab? The city had just been torched, and the Red Keep virtually destroyed. How would they have known that the blood was Dany's and not from some random government flunky who had happened to be in the throne room when the building was torched?
I like your idea of Grey Worm walking in. But I love the whole moment with Drogon too, so I'm not sure how those two moments would have played out.
But here's the other thing. Jon always was, right from the very beginning, the rightful heir to the throne. Him killing Dany would have made perfect political sense to the major lords and ladies of Westeros, if they had known. And judging by how many little scrolls are shown next to Varys in the previous episode, I'm guessing more people than just the Starks and the Reeds know by this point. If they weren't going to at least OFFER the throne to Jon, then revealing his parentage simply becomes a mcguffin. (And don't tell me it was to make sure Dany went mad. There were many other things the show could have done to get her to that point.)
I really would have liked to have seen Howland Reed in this episode. The dude is a Northern lord sworn to the Starks. WHERE HAS HE BEEN ALL THIS TIME? It would have been so easy to bring back an older looking Thomas Brodie-Sangster and put him on the dais in the dragon pit.
Yeah, I didn't understand this. How did they know? There were no witnesses, and Drogon flew off with the body and the murder weapon. I know that Jon knows nothing, but surely not even he would be so naive as to just walk up to Grey Worm and confess.
Grey Worm: I wonder where the Queen is.
(blank stares from everyone nearby)
Jon: I killed her.
(more blank stares from everyone)
Grey Worm: Why?
Jon: (mumbles something about being the shield that guards the realms of men).
Grey Worm: Where did you put the body?
Jon: Drogon flew off with it.
Grey Worm: And where is Drogon?
Jon: No idea
Grey Worm: Uh huh. Riiiight.
Yeah, that interchange would have been weird.
Well, Jon clearly felt horrible about it about hanging Olly, so...
But seriously, can we get a great big "FORESHADOWING IS NOT THE SAME AS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT" from the English composition 101 professors in the back?
And for the record, I don't have a problem with Dany going mad, or Jon killing her and going back North to be with the Wildlings, or Sansa becoming Queen of the North, or Tyrion becoming Hand for Bran. I don't have a problem with either of the last two episodes IN AND OF THEMSELVES. (And I think petitioning for a rewrite is going a bit far.) BUT, I do have some issues with how the show rushed through things to GET to those final two episodes. They cut six hours of exposition and character development out of the series. And it shows.
YES.
My favorite individual theme is Drogon's. But I find myself playing the opening credits in my head all the time.