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sundin13 on 06 May 2019
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NightlyPoe said:
sundin13 said:

I don't know, like last episode Dany made it pretty darn clear that her idea on how to settle this conflict is to kill thousands of innocent people and destroy King's Landing (which at this point, seems to be a fairly likely result next episode). After being reminded that she is planning to kill the people she came here to save she says something to the effect of "I will sit on the throne by any means necessary".

I feel like that is a pretty hard turn into "not a good person"-land. Yes, she has shown signs of cruelty in the past and that is why I am kind of on the fence about this. She has been brutal to her enemies, but it was always in service of a greater justice. I feel like they rushed too quickly through those middle points where she starts crossing further into the grey and just went from her dipping her toes into the water of "This seems kind of iffy" to "Lets just kill the innocents!". To me, she seems like she is undergoing a complete psychological collapse extremely quickly and in my opinion, without sufficient cause.

It just feels convenient which echoes a lot of other things that have happened this season.

Out of curiosity, what's the other option?  Just leave Cersei be as long as she's got useful idiots to use as hostages?  Granted, there's a good chance Arya feeds her Euron some morning before slitting her throat, but as far as Dany goes, she only knows military options.  Cersei could sit behind her walls forever, conspiring to keep Dany from power and using her army to deliver military defeats since Dany apparently forgot to employ a tactician.  Not to mention the hardships Cersei would employ to make Dany look bad and just to deliver punishment to the world for her pain.

Tyrion's alternative of starving them out (which, I'd point out, would still cause suffering), presumably is built around being able to maintain a blockade.  Hard to see how they have the ability to do that with the dragons neutralized and an obviously inferior navy.  And if a city is being constantly re-supplied, a siege is just a bunch of armed dudes impotently sitting outside the gates.

Fact is, Dany is in a corner.  She had the luxury at the beginning of last season to play a game with Cersei.  She lost.  Then she lost most of her army up north.  Luckily, some of the magical army re-spawned, but they specifically said that they are only at parity with Cersei now.  And that was before she lost another dragon, what's left of her navy, and whoever drowned or died.

Like it or not, sacking King's Landing is the only viable option left at this point, and even that's problematic to pull off.  The other option is to give up and leave the realm to the tender mercies of Cersei.

Well, I personally think that the writers wrote themselves into a corner. We need to remember that this is fiction and the story didn't have to be here. Part of being a good writer is setting up situations which allow your characters to act. I personally think that a lot of very poor decisions were made over the last few episodes writing-wise which created this situation.

That said, the key here is similar to the Night King. If you cut of the head, the body too will fall. As such, I would have liked to see a small infiltration type siege used in tandem with the overall siege. Use a small team of people (possibly headed by Arya and maybe utilizing Varys' information gathering skills) to enter the castle then use that to a) destroy the big crossbows; and b) inform Euron that the baby isn't his. Once the crossbows are taken out, the true siege can actually begin with the element of surprise throwing off Cersei's forces. In the confusion, the infiltration team could get closer to Cersei, eventually killing her. Then, use Arya to replace her in order to bring everything to a peaceful conclusion.

At the very least, entertain an idea more sophisticated than "Hulk smash".