S05.E09: The Dance Of Dragons

[Drogo]

Wrong episode thread, Freckledbruh.  Was the "Toldyouso" that important?

[Freckledbruh]

Wrong episode thread, Freckledbruh.  Was the "Toldyouso" that important?

Why yes, yes it was.

[gwhh]

I wonder where those bad guys got all those golden masks from?  Did they have them all ready for some other purpose, or where they made just for the guerrilla war they were fighting?

[CletusMusashi]

They obviously weren't bought on ebay. There's a metalworker in town who was quite busy making those things. I think as soon as the Harpies started being a thing, they should have had a few guards check the shops.If you find a guy making harpy masks, you interrogate him to find out who was buying. The situation would never have gotten to the point that it did if Tyrion and/or Varys had been there to give advice earlier. At best, you find the Harpies themselves. At worst, you convince the smiths that making more of those masks is not a good idea. Then what are the SotH gonna do? Sit around trying to make scary costumes out of cereal boxes or something?

[Hecate7]

They obviously weren't bought on ebay. There's a metalworker in town who was quite busy making those things. I think as soon as the Harpies started being a thing, they should have had a few guards check the shops.If you find a guy making harpy masks, you interrogate him to find out who was buying. The situation would never have gotten to the point that it did if Tyrion and/or Varys had been there to give advice earlier. At best, you find the Harpies themselves. At worst, you convince the smiths that making more of those masks is not a good idea. Then what are the SotH gonna do? Sit around trying to make scary costumes out of cereal boxes or something?

 

You do realize that every city with a harpy on a tower--Astapor, Qarth, Mereen, Yunkai, etc....probably has had those gold masks for the harpy's priestly army for  probably longer than they've had harpies up on those towers? It's not like they had to rush to the forge to make those--they've most likely been handed down in families for generations. I doubt anybody ever buys one per se, and if they do, they buy them from the Temple.

 

I'm sure if anybody wanted to look in Hizdar Zo Loraq's closet, they'd find at least one, and probably a whole set. When people are masked like that, they often turn out to be prominent citizens doing an office that's anonymous for religious or legal reasons. In this case, religious--it's an ancient tradition for these guys to be masked. You don't just crank out a few hundred gold masks overnight.

[CletusMusashi]

I do not realize that, because unlike the sparrows, the harpies are being shown as a secret terrorist organization.

Why did they need masks before? To scare the slaves, which they owned, and could simply hit with a whip?

The closest real world equivalent to the Harpies has seemed, to me, to be the Ku Klux Klan, who only arose after emancipation. More expensive sheets, obviously, but similar problem with the new way of life.

I did not even realize that there was a harpy religion. All I know is that it's a popular symbol in Essos. Does that mean that Westeros has stag churches and dire wolf churches? It might, I suppose. But if so, the show hasn't been very clear.

Now that I actually think about them, the priests of Slaver's Bay have been interesting inconspicuous. All I really know about their religion is that there is apparently somebody in town who can perform wedding ceremonies. But he could just be a sea captain.

[Hecate7]

I do not realize that, because unlike the sparrows, the harpies are being shown as a secret terrorist organization.

Why did they need masks before? To scare the slaves, which they owned, and could simply hit with a whip?

The closest real world equivalent to the Harpies has seemed, to me, to be the Ku Klux Klan, who only arose after emancipation. More expensive sheets, obviously, but similar problem with the new way of life.

I did not even realize that there was a harpy religion. All I know is that it's a popular symbol in Essos. Does that mean that Westeros has stag churches and dire wolf churches? It might, I suppose. But if so, the show hasn't been very clear.

Now that I actually think about them, the priests of Slaver's Bay have been interesting inconspicuous. All I really know about their religion is that there is apparently somebody in town who can perform wedding ceremonies. But he could just be a sea captain.

 

Every major city in Slaver's Bay has a Harpy atop a tower. Nobody put on a Harpy mask and killed anybody, until White Rat toppled the Harpy from atop the tower in Mereen. So although slavery might be tangentially related, it's not about slavery. It's about something else.

 

Since there is no one family in charge of every city, I would wager that the Harpy is more akin to the Seven-Pointed Star than say, the Baratheon family symbol. Danaerys made a very foolish mistake. She's been throwing that red and black dragon flag up there where the Harpy goes--much like putting the hammer and sickle up where there used to be a cross or a Madonna.

 

Once that Harpy came crashing down, Sons of the Harpy appeared everywhere. There couldn't possibly be enough goldsmiths to crank out that many golden masks at once, or enough loose gold in the wake of the abolition of slavery for people to feel secure making solid gold masks. I think the masks probably existed, like I said, from the time of the creation of those statues atop every tower. When a winged figure is sitting on every tower, it's a good idea to research what she is, and what she means to people, before you just cast her down. Given the staggering numbers of Harpy guys, I'd say these boys are coming in from other towns, too, such as Yunkai and Astapor.

 

A better strategy for Danaerys than ripping down that Harpy, would have been to research what if any benevolent aspects or legends she had, and then fulfill a few of those, and associate herself with the most positive and benevolent qualities of that deity, rather than trying to go toe to toe with an ancient Goddess at a time when magic has come back to the world. Maybe a winglike golden mantle would have been a step in the right direction.

Edited June 17, 2015 by Hecate7

[Elkins]

Coffee? Did somebody say coffee?!

You have deduced my weakness, candall!
 

Re Selyse: 
I'm not a ghoul, but I've watched the last 20 minutes of this episode several times and I just can't quite understand Selyse.  First she's all "pip pip, we need this to happen," then she has a change of heart. . .and yet she's not exactly in mother tiger mode, tearing tooth and nail through the crowd to save her cub.  It only takes a couple of soldiers plucking at her before she wilts to the ground.

I read all of her pip-pipping as a desperate (and ultimately futile) attempt to convince herself that what they were doing was good and right and necessary. She kind of got more and more desperate as she went on, until she was almost babbling. I thought that she was addressing her statements to Stannis because she was absolutely desperate to hear some agreement from him, some reassurance that indeed, they were doing the right thing. But, you know. Stannis. Reassuring others isn't exactly his bailiwick.

 

I agree with you, though, that they didn't quite succeed in making it work. What I suspect they were trying for was a situation where the viewer would first be surprised by her behaviour, and then remember all of her scenes over the course of the season ("You have no idea what people will do," terrified glances at Mel, etc.) to come to the abrupt realization that all that time she was actually dreading this very thing coming to pass. In other words, I think they did try to mislead the viewer with a lot of her earlier character beats, but in the hopes of later achieving a sudden surprising "scales fall from our eyes" moment.

 

Alas, however, it was quite obviously unsuccessful. I haven't seen a single "Oh, of course! THAT's why she was acting so weird around Shireen all season!" response to this episode. Instead, I've seen a ton of "Well, THAT came out of nowhere, huh?" responses. So yeah, while I think I see what they were going for, it didn't quite work. The clues they were dropping weren't obvious enough, even in retrospect, to overcome viewer conceptions of Selyse as a crazed fanatic harbouring a pure and uncomplicated hatred of her daughter.

 

(BTW, am I the only one who finds herself frequently changing her American spelling to British spelling on this site, just to appease the built-in spell-checker? I had no idea I'd been so well socialized to feel shame when confronted with red underlining!)

 

---------

 

About the significance of the harpy, I was imagining it very much the same way that Hecate was, although now that I think about it, there's no real evidence one way or the other. It does bother me a lot, though, that we've never seen any evidence of Dany so much as inquiring as to the symbolic significance of the Harpy to the people she has conquered. No one erects a golden statue of that size on the top of the highest building in their city-state  just, y'know, because.

 

Then, that ties into my ambivalence about the Meereen plotline in general. I'm never quite sure whether we're meant to recognize Dany as a clueless (if superficially well-meaning, as after all, slavery is indeed a Bad Thing) foreigner exerting hegemonic force on a conquered people to suppress their native culture, or whether we're supposed to read her liberationist crusade in a far less cynical light.  The ambivalent reading is the one that comes most naturally to me, but there have often been times -- and indeed, it does seem to be the Essos plotlines where this usually happens -- where Martin suddenly starts playing it straight with some incredibly dubious and antiquated pulp genre tropes. Those are generally the times when I badly misread him, so I have learned to be wary.

 

 

[ElDosEquis]

 Then what are the SotH gonna do? Sit around trying to make scary costumes out of cereal boxes or something?

The cardboard from a 24 pack of cokes is a better option if they have large heads.

[The Companion]

On 6/7/2015 at 11:27 PM, Daisy said:

 

(sigh). everyone who I like dies. 

 

I think this is the slogan for the show.

 

On 6/8/2015 at 0:12 AM, CletusMusashi said:

I just wish Mereen's crowd security was better at noticing people walking in with bigass metal Harpy face masks. I mean, it's not like these people had backpacks or heavy winter clothing or anything. I did notice one maskless woman with a big bulky skirt getting fried by Drogon. Hopefully she was one of the mask smugglers.

I mean, everyone and their cousin has like 5 weapons on their person. I can't imagine crowd security would be a particularly popular job in Mereen. :)

On 6/8/2015 at 1:09 AM, Pete Martell said:

 

This is one of the reasons these scenes didn't work for me. I never got the impression that Selyse cared much at all about Shireen. She was closer to the fetuses of her unborn sons. She saw Shireen as willful and a burden and wanted to beat her. It just feels like a cliche that she would object. The same old "a mother's love" that tends to be wheeled out for female characters (Catelyn, Cersei, et al).

I got the impression that Sylese struggled with her daughter because she felt like she was a living breathing reminder of her failure to produce a healthy boy heir. She also seemed to struggle with Sylese because she wasn't on the Lord of Light train. That being said, we saw very little interaction between Stannis and Shireen, and the burden was entirely on Sylese to raise Shireen. When Stannis visited Sylese and asked to see Shireen, she acted as if it was an incredibly rare request. In the end, it was Sylese who took care of Shireen's physical and emotional needs on a day to day basis, and the burden of parenting appears to have fallen entirely on her. I would never describe Sylese as a good mom. She clearly had a lot of terrible things going on. However, I don't find it inconsistent that she loved her daughter in the end, even if she never liked her.

I guess I owe Sylese a bit of an apology. I have been waiting for that woman to burn her child up for several seasons now. In the end, it was Stannis who was willing to watch his daughter burn. That being said, I shouldn't have been surprised. Stannis does not care about that child one bit. He barely looked at her, he barely visited her in the tower, and his proof that he loved her was that he didn't let her die as a baby (though he clearly abandoned her once she survived and wasn't the perfect heir he wanted). I don't have much to add other than that. The scene was horrific and hurt me to my soul. I could barely watch it (just as I could barely watch the slaughter of all of Robert's kids a few seasons ago). Some little part of me wanted the dragonscale to give Shireen immunity to flames, and to have her ultimately rescued by Dany. It would have been nice to see that poor girl fly away on a dragon. Alas, Shireen has been subjected to doom anvils since her introduction. It wasn't likely that she was going to survive.

Dany may not have to break the wheel at this rate. There is going to be nobody left. The Baratheons just lost the sole remaining heir (not including the king and his sister who I am categorizing as Lannisters now that the news seems to be common knowledge). Dany is the last of her family (so far as we know) and it was hinted that she may be infertile. The Lannisters are dropping like flies, and the hope for a new heir is locked up. The Starks are scatted to the winds (though they are looking substantially better than they were a few seasons ago). The last son of the Greyjoys has lost his ability to produce heirs. Things are not looking good for the noble families.

I don't have much to add to the Dragon scene. It was everything we have been waiting for, and it gave me something to cheer for in an otherwise depressing episode. 

I do think Cersei is a little crazy to insist that Myrcella be returned to King's Landing, and I worry her daughter will pay the price. People keep getting murdered in KL. Even if she believes her brother was the murderer, it is clear that the King's Guard cannot protect anyone in the castle. She knows the Lannisters are targets, and it would make a lot more sense to do a well-being check and/or take steps to keep her daughter safe in a place very far away from the political intrigue and craziness that is going down in King's Landing. Perhaps it is just another example of her inability to see the forest through the trees. We keep being told that she is a good mother, and that she loves her kids, (I suppose she is when compared to Stannis). However, she seems to want her kids to rely only on her, and remain entirely co-dependent. She doesn't care what they want, she doesn't want to foster their independence and watch them grow into adults, she doesn't want them to succeed, she wants someone to give her unconditional love without competition. To me, that isn't love. She loves herself, and she is no better than Tywin in that sense. At least Tywin worried about THE GOOD OF THE FAMILY. Cersei worries about the good of Cersei.