I read this and it gave me goosebumps.
Fuck.
Up till now, I didn't really know how to feel, but now I do.
Everything could have been better than what we got. Even this, as little sense as it makes, is far superior to canon.
Why? Cause it is actually doing something emotionally, which isn't just "Teleporting Quasimodo stabs endboss in the dick in the most anticlimactic way ever". It has a payoff for a character's personal story. Arya killing the Night King does not feel like a logical point in her story.
It's not even just that Arya gets the kill and nothing hints at her being even vaguely linked to the Azor Ahai legend, it's that the scene is so poorly done, it is painful to think about it. S7 saw entire armies and fleets teleport all over Westeros to be whereever they need to be, in order to do whatever they need to do. Now we have Arya doing the same.
Arya comes out of nowhere, no fucking clue how she got there, past a couple hundred zombies and then kills the BBEG with such a lackluster move.
Episode 4 might as well be Cersei on her throne, Qyburn reading a raven message to her that Winterfell was attacked by zombies yesterday, and suddenly an arm comes up from behind the throne, grabs Cersei, drags her down and she gets stabbed in the throat. Cut to Arya standing over her body. Last 2 Episodes are Benioff and Weiss pointing at the camera making "wanking" motions with their hands and laughing.
It's a huge letdown to say the least.
Arya can be Azor Ahai, that's not the point, it's that for one thing, nothing in the show even hints at that (aside from Melisandre getting interested in Arya for no reason for like 5 minutes before she leaves) and for the other, narratively speaking Jon Snow is in a much more deserving position to fulfill the prophecy. So what, is Arya now going to be the Queen of the 7 Kingdoms, too?
Jon Snow was brought back from the dead, he did a shitton of stuff to move the Night King plot forward and then he's not the one to get the kill? That's bullshit from a purely narrative POV. And what does he do in this battle? A whole lot of nothing, followed by a little dance with the Night King's pet and then the battle is over. There's a couple scenes where Jon runs past Sam and others that clearly need help, but he knows that killing the Night King is a bigger priority, so he runs past. There's no payoff to that, now.
If the moral of the story would have been that Jon had to sacrifice a few friends to make it to the NK, it would have mirrored the whole "Stab my girl in the breast to make Lightbringer" in a way that Azor Ahai has to sacrifice something to succeed.
It is a waste through and through.
7 Seasons of buildup. The masterfully done 2nd Episode to set the tone... and then this?
I'm so fucking done.
Remind me who said it... I remember it being said I just want to know.
I think it was the "prophecy" of some old woman when Dany married Khal Drogo, based on some legend of the Dothraki. And she sort of fulfilled it when she "gave birth" to 3 Dragons.
1. If the plan was to lure the night king to the weirwood forest, why did they only have five ironborn archers defending? What was the trap?
2. Why did the evilest of all evil of the show kill less important characters than one treacherous wedding?
3. Why the fuck is the show so stupid with hiding in the crypt?
4. Who places siege engines and infantry outside the perimeter?
1) The big idea was to use the dragons on the Night King. Turns out their "can melt fucking castles" fire is no match for a bit of white pride.
2) Cause plotarmor is now a thing.
3) Frankly, hiding in the crypt is not that stupid. From a narrative POV, making the NK be able to raise random dead, even if they have been dead for decades or hundreds of years, is fucking stupid beyond believe. It feels so wrong to think that random Stark ancestors now killed a shitton of people in the crypts. It almost feels like that aspect of the show got violated. It's really fucking stupid and makes no sense.
4) Absolute morons. The same that don't man the walls the moment they retreat inside the castle. Might have helped if they had given a reason why the army is outside. Something like "We can't put so many people inside the castle, they are way too many" or "Staying inside with a regular siege would be the best strategy, but this is the army of the dead and they advance no matter what, so we have to fight them before the walls and whittle down as many as possible before they reach the wall."
But I am so beyond giving a fuck that I will not even attempt to come up with an excuse why they would choose the silly option of staying outside. The show does not give us a reason for that and it's stupid.
