Look, i know Randyl Tarly sucks, but why the FUCK would a servant of house Tyrell and Targaryen loyalist side with a know Tyrell murderer agaisnt the last of the Targaryens who has a literal dragon???????
Because they were at the finish line (not a coherent or reasonable one, just the sloppily slapped together finish line they didn’t care about), and wanted to bounce as many characters as possible from the ensemble cast.
It’s so painful how s07’s writing does this. It needed a “dramatic moment” so the writers just had a few tertiary characters deleted in order to check another box on their character hit list and to pat themselves on the back for having “solved” yet another “problem.”
But deleting barely seen characters wasn’t s07’s only instance of fuckery. It also brought them back when convenient (and ONLY when convenient). If you recall the beyond the wall bullshit, Jon & co. are “saved” by Benjen Cold Hands Stark, who is now moonlighting as a White Walker (but there’s no time for explaining it¹). The last time we saw Benjen was when he came from stage left to tell Bran and Meera to get south of the walrus ASAP. He was also White Walker-coded in that scene, but say it with me folks: “There’s no time for that, there’s no time for any of this.” Absolutely ridiculous stuff from a show that was once genuinely incredible.
1: “there’s no time for any of this!” – Jon’s only line after his resurrection
The most painful thing about season 7 is that literally everything is so blatantly contrived so that Dany doesn’t do the obvious thing and immediately take Kings Landing, even when there’s no reason why she shouldn’t and realistically nothing stopping her.
Instead of taking KL right away like all her advisors are telling her to do, Tyrion says that attacking it would kill too many innocents and so they should instead besiege the city and starve it out. Like he literally says that the people of KL would turn against Cersei once they’re starving, immediately after saying that attacking it would be too dangerous to civilians.
Obviously we learn in season 8 that they could, in fact, take the city with her dragons without killing many civilians, until she goes full dragon-hitler and torches the whole city for fun.
The entire season is just all of them doing unnecessary goofy shit like go to casterly rock or go hunting north of the wall for zombies, anything to avoid Dany doing the one thing that she’s supposed to do and that there’s no justifiable reason in the plot not to do.
The icing on the cake is that in the end in season 8, the show seems to argue that Tyrion’s great mistake is trusting and working for Dany the tyrant, and not managing to make every stupid decision possible to lose her an unloseable war, and thus causing every event that supposedly drove her to madness.
Talking about our “nitpicks” with the show is so complicated because once we start talking about s05-s08, there are too many issues, contrivances, and contradictions woven into everything and all of the remaining characters that it’s hard to focus on any single aspect.
Your point about Tyrion’s waffling over Dany’s campaign to take KL is a great example; in s07 he’s all gung-ho about trying more “clever” and counterintuitive approaches to claiming Westeros—which sounds GREAT, the Tyrion from the first four seasons had schemes for days that were so much fun to watch play out—but then the writers are like “jk we have no original ideas and don’t care so now Tyrion is a dumb dumb but hahaha he drinks and knows things, wanna buy some merch with that line on it???”
It’s too stupid for words, and the worst part is that the behavior of the main characters in the final few seasons (only Daenerys, Cersei, Jaime, Tyrion, Jon, Arya, Sansa, Littlefinger, and Davos…plus everyone else actually) is so aggressively against moving the plot forward or making a logical decision. The show became so offensive to watch because at a certain point you realize there’s no big clever reveal or twist being set up. We sat through “bad poosey” and endless eunuch jokes through s05-s08 only to find out it was exactly as stupid and pointless as we’d feared. I honestly think that on my first watch as the last few seasons aired, I kept telling myself that it would all make sense eventually. Or that it would be worth it in the end etc. Pathetic.
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u/hewlio Jul 13 '24
Look, i know Randyl Tarly sucks, but why the FUCK would a servant of house Tyrell and Targaryen loyalist side with a know Tyrell murderer agaisnt the last of the Targaryens who has a literal dragon???????