I just got Blood and Fire in the mail so I’ll look forward to reading your view of it.
I think regarding childbirth, the show runners were fairly locked in by the plot points they had to hit from GRRM’s book. I think they did a pretty good job with what they had, but narratively I think it would have worked better without Laena’s childbirth scene, which felt the most contrived and unrealistic and contributed to a feeling of childbirth disaster overkill. I think bookending it beginning with Aemma’s helplessness in succumbing to death by the hands of the maesters and losing the baby boy, followed by ending with Rhaenyra’s refusal to let anyone touch her as she brought forth her own stillborn daughter would have been even more poignant and powerful without the Laena scene. And I like that there was a healthy birth scene thrown in the middle. All three of those birth scenes felt real to me; I have no idea if it’s true, but it felt like all of them were directed by women whereas Laena’s birth/death scene felt like it was not.
Ah, I like that point: bookending the season with births and maternal agency.
My view, too, is that there was one too many disastrous births. Like, we get it. We know lots of children and women die in childbirth, but seeing it portrayed pretty graphically three times was probably too much.
I do think Rhaenyra's first birthing scene got everything right.
It's probably best to avoid the Inside the Episode at the end of each episode, but some of the things the writer of the birth scenes has said there are pretty...odd. For example, she said that Laena "wouldn't go out like that" which is why she didn't want Laena to die in childbirth. Which implies that it's a weakness to die in childbirth, I guess?
Probably for the best! It often feels like the people making this show don't understand what they're making, but I'm mostly satisfied with the results!
It isn't a change from the book per se to have Lucerys's death be an accident, since the book is deliberately incomplete and Aemond's intentions are never known. But it's portrayed as a more deliberate act in the book, and I think changing that was the best change they did--this entire season, everyone's been throwing rocks down the mountainside while claiming they don't want an avalanche. But eventually the ground was going to give way, and having it break via a stupid childish fight was about the most thematic way it could. Aemond is entirely too clever to deliberately kill Lucerys--he knows doing so will be war--but he's arrogant and cruel enough to think he can get away with terrifying his nephew. And you can build back a chain of events, all seemingly inconsequential, that led to this moment.
I've seen some complaints that the show is "removing agency" from characters, but I think it's unfounded. Characters might not always be making the "big" decisions, but their small decisions always make the big one inevitable. Aemond didn't choose to kill Lucerys, but he chose to chase him, he chose to frighten him and his dragon. And before: Viserys chose not to punish Lucerys at all for maiming Aemond, Lucerys and Aemond both chose to escalate the fight that ended in Aemond's eye being lost, the adults chose to pass their bad blood onto their children, and on and on. A change at any point could have averted the whole thing.
Absolutely. I think what the show does extremely well at demonstrating is that problems rarely stem from one choice. Rather, it's the thousands of small choices we make over years that become the avalanche of ruin.
So many different choices could have been made to heal the relationship between Lucerys and Aemond, but the first thing Rhaenyra did was move her family away. It's an obvious choice that probably most of us would have made in the same circumstance, but it allowed this wound to fester for years.
Even with Viserys - it's not really one thing that he did that led to the civil war, but thousands of things he didn't do over the course of decades.
Rather than not having agency, I think it just shows how relationships can shackle us and how all the choices we make over a lifetime can trap us into patterns of life that we may not be thrilled about.
I just got Blood and Fire in the mail so I’ll look forward to reading your view of it.
I think regarding childbirth, the show runners were fairly locked in by the plot points they had to hit from GRRM’s book. I think they did a pretty good job with what they had, but narratively I think it would have worked better without Laena’s childbirth scene, which felt the most contrived and unrealistic and contributed to a feeling of childbirth disaster overkill. I think bookending it beginning with Aemma’s helplessness in succumbing to death by the hands of the maesters and losing the baby boy, followed by ending with Rhaenyra’s refusal to let anyone touch her as she brought forth her own stillborn daughter would have been even more poignant and powerful without the Laena scene. And I like that there was a healthy birth scene thrown in the middle. All three of those birth scenes felt real to me; I have no idea if it’s true, but it felt like all of them were directed by women whereas Laena’s birth/death scene felt like it was not.
Ah, I like that point: bookending the season with births and maternal agency.
My view, too, is that there was one too many disastrous births. Like, we get it. We know lots of children and women die in childbirth, but seeing it portrayed pretty graphically three times was probably too much.
I do think Rhaenyra's first birthing scene got everything right.
It's probably best to avoid the Inside the Episode at the end of each episode, but some of the things the writer of the birth scenes has said there are pretty...odd. For example, she said that Laena "wouldn't go out like that" which is why she didn't want Laena to die in childbirth. Which implies that it's a weakness to die in childbirth, I guess?
Yeah I don’t watch those inside the episode segments. They generally detract rather than add to the experience of watching the show for me.
Probably for the best! It often feels like the people making this show don't understand what they're making, but I'm mostly satisfied with the results!
It isn't a change from the book per se to have Lucerys's death be an accident, since the book is deliberately incomplete and Aemond's intentions are never known. But it's portrayed as a more deliberate act in the book, and I think changing that was the best change they did--this entire season, everyone's been throwing rocks down the mountainside while claiming they don't want an avalanche. But eventually the ground was going to give way, and having it break via a stupid childish fight was about the most thematic way it could. Aemond is entirely too clever to deliberately kill Lucerys--he knows doing so will be war--but he's arrogant and cruel enough to think he can get away with terrifying his nephew. And you can build back a chain of events, all seemingly inconsequential, that led to this moment.
I've seen some complaints that the show is "removing agency" from characters, but I think it's unfounded. Characters might not always be making the "big" decisions, but their small decisions always make the big one inevitable. Aemond didn't choose to kill Lucerys, but he chose to chase him, he chose to frighten him and his dragon. And before: Viserys chose not to punish Lucerys at all for maiming Aemond, Lucerys and Aemond both chose to escalate the fight that ended in Aemond's eye being lost, the adults chose to pass their bad blood onto their children, and on and on. A change at any point could have averted the whole thing.
Absolutely. I think what the show does extremely well at demonstrating is that problems rarely stem from one choice. Rather, it's the thousands of small choices we make over years that become the avalanche of ruin.
So many different choices could have been made to heal the relationship between Lucerys and Aemond, but the first thing Rhaenyra did was move her family away. It's an obvious choice that probably most of us would have made in the same circumstance, but it allowed this wound to fester for years.
Even with Viserys - it's not really one thing that he did that led to the civil war, but thousands of things he didn't do over the course of decades.
Rather than not having agency, I think it just shows how relationships can shackle us and how all the choices we make over a lifetime can trap us into patterns of life that we may not be thrilled about.