Clone Wars did a great job portraying Anakin's gradual slide. There was nuance and plenty of exposure of the good parts of his character. His friendship with Obi-Wan was in evidence. His relationship with Padme was believable.
The fact that post-pubescent prequel-Anakin was ever trusted by anyone is at best evidence of how the dark side clouds perception.
In the prequels, from EPII he continuously felt like someone who should clearly be a Sith being shoehorned into being a Jedi. His friendship with Obi-Wan existed in name only, and his "romance" with Padme was in fact not a better romance than Twilight. (And that's saying something.)
OG fans waited decades to see Vader's backstory, and what we got was about the least rewarding most hamfisted and uninteresting portrayal of that backstory that could have been achieved. Decades of fan appetite regarding that backstory, possibly the only time such a thing has been maintained in the history of cinema, or likely will be again, and Lucas gave us Jar-Jar, cringe dialog, limp acting, and endless CGI.
D&D royally fucked up with GoT, but using the prequels to shine a light on that reads like something from The Onion.
The whole point of it is that whatever you described...
It's only a matter of degree though, at best. The three movies OP refers to were absolute shit in their own way. OP could have done a like to like comparison with Clone Wars and GoT and had a meme that made much more sense.
Meanwhile, I think there's a credible argument that the prequels (you do know what I'm describing, right?) are not in the slightest better than the last season of GoT (if we ignore their contribution to the meme-o-sphere), making OP fairly weak, and in an almost Onion-like way.
Danerys going crazy should have been set up YEARS in advance. She spends the first 7 seasons doing everything she can to avoid needless suffering and talking about how she’s going to “break the wheel.”
Then, over the course of only 3-4 episodes in Season 8, D & D flip her switch from “good” to “evil” like the Krusty the Clown doll and she slaughters an entire city. This is not “character growth.” This contradicts everything we’ve been shown about her character.
If they were extremely accomplished at one thing, it was throwing away almost a decade worth of character and story development for basically every surviving character in the show, which is honestly impressive
Honestly a huge amount of people overlooked the red flags with Danerys, because reasons. The final flip to full on crazy was poorly done, but there was a history of violent and cruel outbursts.
I think the difference is those are portrayed in a way where you’re still supposed to be rooting for her. Every one of those people, as brutally as they were killed, were monumental assholes. And instead of letting the viewer grapple with the fact that they’re on the side of a sadistic monster torturing someone to death, to explore the dangers of prioritizing vengeance over justice, the story just moves on. There’s a lot they could have done to bring the consequences of Dany’s shortsighted rage into perspective, really give the viewer several moments of “yeah, I see why she did it in the heat of the moment, but damn, that’s fucked up”. Then, her subsequent heel turn would feel like the logical conclusion of her arc.
Then just give her time to be the main antagonist for a bit. What’s the point of spending a series long arc setting up a powerful villain if she’s not actually given any screentime as the villain?
True but each of those times her violent outburst felt grounded. Character A does a very bad thing to Danerys, and she reacts. It made sense to her character. Kings landing didn’t, because the people of Kings Landing cheered her arrival. Cersci was not popular and about to fall anyway, Danerys could have had what she wanted, Westeros and the love of the people.
To make her turn work Cersci needed to fall before Danerys got to Westeros and someone likable is on the Iron throne. Now the people want to hold onto their new monarch who saved them from Cersci or have Cersci turn likable. She had a rough start but through experience becomes a good leader only to have Denarys dethrone her. Something other than RING THE BELLS.
It only feels grounded because you get her pov and the other side is obviously bad (according to her), so they totally deserved it. She showed up to several cities, murdered the fuck out of them, took what she wanted and left. Yes the turn to full on evil was handled poorly, but all the signs were there before hand. Tyrion’s speech after the fact said as much.
The probable crazy switch for Dany in the books is fAegon. She’s all busy in Mereen, meanwhile fAegon is out there taking Westeros from Cersei and fixing stuff.
When she finally gets her shit together and goes to Westeros along with the Iron Fleet and Mr. Cthullu, the liberator card doesn’t work because no one needs to be liberated so she goes nuts. All the pride, violence and idolatry in her arc makes sense.
In the show she was just replacing Cersei. No one likes Cersei, she’d still be a liberator. We’d need Jon unseating Cersei while trying to unite Westeros before Dany arrived for it to make sense. All we got as a trigger was a scene where she was sad because the members of the patriarchal society she just arrived in with three giant fire lizards don’t want to drink with her.
I love how Game Of Thrones ended like 3 years ago and the internet is still processing our collective trauma from how objectively terrible season 8 was.
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