Thanks for writing this, I feel saner now. I was yelling at my tv at times over how bad the writing was.
There’s also a weird gender angle to it all. The women in S2 are virtually all pacifistic and have no dark side to them. It’s not just Rhaenyra and Alicent: Baela is also horrified by the thought of striking King’s Landing when innocents could die and Mysaria is constantly talking about how much the lives of the small folk matter. Meanwhile, the men are constantly raging for war.
The show runners seem to have eschewed the idea of compelling and complex female characters like Daenerys and Cersei for simplistic female characters with 21st century humanitarian morals.
This post is awesome and I totally agree. Me and my girlfriend thought the season was average to good-ish overall but we hated the last episode. And I think your point #3 is the most heartbreaking part - Game of Thrones was always compelling because there were compelling morally gray characters like Jon Snow, Daenerys and Jaime who had to make tough calls with no clear answer morally.
I remember reading a theory, can’t remember where, that streaming era shows are shifting towards more action and more good guys and bad guys, because people are streaming and also playing on their laptop or their phone during the show, so it has to be dumbed down. I didn’t really believe this theory at first but it turns out some of my family do consume TV this way. Maybe the morally grey character won’t exist in TV anymore - even on HBO for fuck’s sake. That’s really sad.
Honestly this might be a hot take but I don’t really mind anime villain Aemond - he has a great soft spoken but menacing presence and watching Vhagar slowly take off over like 30 seconds feels really menacing too.
The last Alicent and Rhaenyra scene is just so not believable. I don’t know the book plotline but the show is never gonna convince me that Alicent will actually give up her son to die in Season 3. So the scene feels like a waste of our time. My conspiracy theory is that the execs are afraid to do a story about two bloodthirsty women leaders considering there were already Daenerys and Cersei in Season 8. So they’re trying to make Alicent and Rhaenyra more peaceful and also lifting up the Harrenhal witch lady and the Daemon’s concubine lady to have a bigger positive role.
I broadly agree, although with some caveats. I think the "holding pattern" problem is only really an issue if you don't enjoy the scenes. Compare this season to GoT season 2, which is popularly regarded as part of the series' golden age. There's not really *that* much happening for most of it outside of character interactions (e.g. Arya and Tywin), but those interactions are exactly what made the series so compelling. Compare it to the last season of GoT when tons of stuff was happening and I think the principle becomes clear.
I personally enjoyed Daemon tripping balls, so those bits didn't feel like nothing was happening. On the other hand, I found Rhaenyra moping around Dragonstone to kind of drag.
Of course there was the Battle of the Blackwater in GoT S2 which compares fairly similarly to HotD's battle this season in episode 4. Perhaps some of the problem was the timing: it felt like S2 of GoT was leading up to the battle at the end of the season so that it finished on a high note. Compare it to HotD where the battle happened in the middle of the season, so it just sort of languished for another 4 episodes. Perhaps if there was another big battle for episode 9 (instead of just ending at 8 episodes) it would have been received better. The showrunners said they could only do 8 episodes because they essentially ran out of money: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/08/07/the-house-of-the-dragon-finale-was-like-that-because-of-budget-reasons/
It's been a while since I watched the early seasons of Game of Thrones, so it's possible I have rose-colored glasses for it. But my memory is that it's actually very rare for it to show big battles - the whole first season doesn't have any, IIRC - but that lots of things still happen. Characters talking in a room does not constitute a holding pattern; it's only a holding pattern if the same scenes repeat with minimal progress. I loved the first seasons of Game of Thrones because they were less focused on the giant battles and more on palace intrigue. They boiled down to character interactions in which relationships changed, characters developed, people were betrayed, and, sure, sometimes someone got got. You don't need a big army for things to change.
There's certainly a question of personal preference here, as you may feel like Daemon's Harrenhall scenes progress the character, while I find them repetitive. But I think many people are pissed about Season 2 of HotD, where they were not about Season 2 of GoT, because they found that not enough changed.
I thought the season was fine honestly. A bit too slow. A bit too repetitive (especially Daemon tripping got old quickly). Didn’t mind the finale either except for that one truly terrible actress.
I agree that there has been some simplification of the characters but not in a way that I find necessary inconsistent or illogical. Regarding Alicent’s behavior in the last episode one interpretation is not that she’s altruistically concerned with the realm but that her being rejected by both her sons means she just wants to resign in the least bloody way. Now that they, grown up, selfish (and broken) don’t return her love and don’t grant her any influence she’s no longer invested in winning the crown for them (at least not in this moment). I don’t think it’s coming out of nowhere at least. I find the flattening of Rhaenyra worse though, but other characters like Aegon instead got more nuanced.
Thanks for writing this, I feel saner now. I was yelling at my tv at times over how bad the writing was.
There’s also a weird gender angle to it all. The women in S2 are virtually all pacifistic and have no dark side to them. It’s not just Rhaenyra and Alicent: Baela is also horrified by the thought of striking King’s Landing when innocents could die and Mysaria is constantly talking about how much the lives of the small folk matter. Meanwhile, the men are constantly raging for war.
The show runners seem to have eschewed the idea of compelling and complex female characters like Daenerys and Cersei for simplistic female characters with 21st century humanitarian morals.
This post is awesome and I totally agree. Me and my girlfriend thought the season was average to good-ish overall but we hated the last episode. And I think your point #3 is the most heartbreaking part - Game of Thrones was always compelling because there were compelling morally gray characters like Jon Snow, Daenerys and Jaime who had to make tough calls with no clear answer morally.
I remember reading a theory, can’t remember where, that streaming era shows are shifting towards more action and more good guys and bad guys, because people are streaming and also playing on their laptop or their phone during the show, so it has to be dumbed down. I didn’t really believe this theory at first but it turns out some of my family do consume TV this way. Maybe the morally grey character won’t exist in TV anymore - even on HBO for fuck’s sake. That’s really sad.
Honestly this might be a hot take but I don’t really mind anime villain Aemond - he has a great soft spoken but menacing presence and watching Vhagar slowly take off over like 30 seconds feels really menacing too.
The last Alicent and Rhaenyra scene is just so not believable. I don’t know the book plotline but the show is never gonna convince me that Alicent will actually give up her son to die in Season 3. So the scene feels like a waste of our time. My conspiracy theory is that the execs are afraid to do a story about two bloodthirsty women leaders considering there were already Daenerys and Cersei in Season 8. So they’re trying to make Alicent and Rhaenyra more peaceful and also lifting up the Harrenhal witch lady and the Daemon’s concubine lady to have a bigger positive role.
I broadly agree, although with some caveats. I think the "holding pattern" problem is only really an issue if you don't enjoy the scenes. Compare this season to GoT season 2, which is popularly regarded as part of the series' golden age. There's not really *that* much happening for most of it outside of character interactions (e.g. Arya and Tywin), but those interactions are exactly what made the series so compelling. Compare it to the last season of GoT when tons of stuff was happening and I think the principle becomes clear.
I personally enjoyed Daemon tripping balls, so those bits didn't feel like nothing was happening. On the other hand, I found Rhaenyra moping around Dragonstone to kind of drag.
Of course there was the Battle of the Blackwater in GoT S2 which compares fairly similarly to HotD's battle this season in episode 4. Perhaps some of the problem was the timing: it felt like S2 of GoT was leading up to the battle at the end of the season so that it finished on a high note. Compare it to HotD where the battle happened in the middle of the season, so it just sort of languished for another 4 episodes. Perhaps if there was another big battle for episode 9 (instead of just ending at 8 episodes) it would have been received better. The showrunners said they could only do 8 episodes because they essentially ran out of money: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/08/07/the-house-of-the-dragon-finale-was-like-that-because-of-budget-reasons/
It's been a while since I watched the early seasons of Game of Thrones, so it's possible I have rose-colored glasses for it. But my memory is that it's actually very rare for it to show big battles - the whole first season doesn't have any, IIRC - but that lots of things still happen. Characters talking in a room does not constitute a holding pattern; it's only a holding pattern if the same scenes repeat with minimal progress. I loved the first seasons of Game of Thrones because they were less focused on the giant battles and more on palace intrigue. They boiled down to character interactions in which relationships changed, characters developed, people were betrayed, and, sure, sometimes someone got got. You don't need a big army for things to change.
There's certainly a question of personal preference here, as you may feel like Daemon's Harrenhall scenes progress the character, while I find them repetitive. But I think many people are pissed about Season 2 of HotD, where they were not about Season 2 of GoT, because they found that not enough changed.
I thought the season was fine honestly. A bit too slow. A bit too repetitive (especially Daemon tripping got old quickly). Didn’t mind the finale either except for that one truly terrible actress.
I agree that there has been some simplification of the characters but not in a way that I find necessary inconsistent or illogical. Regarding Alicent’s behavior in the last episode one interpretation is not that she’s altruistically concerned with the realm but that her being rejected by both her sons means she just wants to resign in the least bloody way. Now that they, grown up, selfish (and broken) don’t return her love and don’t grant her any influence she’s no longer invested in winning the crown for them (at least not in this moment). I don’t think it’s coming out of nowhere at least. I find the flattening of Rhaenyra worse though, but other characters like Aegon instead got more nuanced.