I know I'm late to the party on this topic, but I've had some time to digest Daenerys's "Mad Queen" moment in The Bells and why it doesn't really work. There's basically three big issues with it. Actually #1 is the main issue, and #2 and #3 just amplify it.
1) The lack of a trigger.
A good plot twist needs to have motivation and logic behind it. When a character suddenly does something "because they're crazy now," that isn't a satisfying motivation. When Daenerys hears the bells ringing and has basically won the battle, there is nothing in that moment to trigger her into sudden genocide.
Now in retrospect, we can point to some of the recent traumas she just went through as events that likely caused her madness (losing Jorah, watching Missandei be murdered in front of her, learning about Jon's parentage and it making her paranoid, finding out Varys was betraying her and having to execute him). Yes, all of those things are traumatic, but the story doesn't pick one. If immediately after seeing Missandei be murdered, Daenerys had a knee-jerk reaction and went on a rampage, this would have felt more like a trigger, as the thing that pushed her over the edge.
What we get instead is Daenerys suddenly deciding to be genocidal without a clear reason or motivation, other than when the plot needed it to happen. And again, no logic behind it. If she had just killed Jon and ended his claim to the throne altogether, there would have been logic there. If she had just gone after Cersei directly, there would have been logic. But why go out of your way to slaughter as many innocent people as possible, and give Cersei more time to escape?
You might say "We all do irrational things some times or fly off the handle."
Yes, I've done irrational things. I've sometimes done outright stupid things with no logic behind them. But that doesn't lead to good storytelling.
You might also say "Her going crazy was foreshadowed earlier. Just look at such-and-such scenes...."
If you have to explain how something was foreshadowed, then it wasn't foreshadowed.
2) Emphasis on shock value.
The show runners realized "Audiences always like it when we have surprise massacres. The Red Wedding was popular, Cersei blowing up the sept of Bailor was popular. Let's really outdo ourselves and go out with the worst genocide of all!"
But audiences can tell when something feels hollow. For all the psychotic and sadistic things that Ramsay Bolton ever did, there was always logic behind them. As much of an atrocity as Shireen's death was, we still understood Stannis's motivation and what led him to that moment. What Daenerys does in this scene is the single worst atrocity ever committed in the entire series, and it feels like a scene engineered to just be shocking and nothing more.
The entire scene feels like it was intended to satisfy the audiences' bloodlust rather than because of genuine story reasons.
3) It goes on for too darn long.
I think if this genocide had just been one efficient scene, audiences might have been more accepting of it.
But instead, the destruction of King's Landing ends up lasting the entire second half of the episode. You have something close to 35 minutes' worth of just destruction and people suffering on the ground level. The sequence is hitting you over the head with the feeling "This worse than every single battle we've ever shown on the series before. This is complete Hell on Earth." It's so long and overbearing that almost everyone walks away from that episode feeling exhausted. Even if there were moments in the chaos that they liked, the entire thing comes off feeling overwhelming and gratuitous.
Overall, if you're going to have a big twist near the end of an epic story, if it doesn't have proper motivation behind it, it can ruin the entire saga.
Submitted February 19, 2020 at 10:27PM by CalvinValjean https://ift.tt/2HD7RQj
No comments:
Post a Comment