Over 10,000 angry fans want HBO to remake the final season of 'Game of Thrones'
A petition asking HBO to remake the final season of Game of Thrones has already garnered ten thousand signatures after the penultimate episode's shocking denouement. Fans were unhappy with Daenerys Targaryen's character arc, as she descended into full Mad Queen mode, ignoring the surrender bells of King's Landing, and burning everything in her path, including innocent women and children.
Her actions sealed the fate of some of the show's central characters - including Cersei, Jaime, the Mountain, the Hound, Qyburn - oh, and she incinerated the Master of Whisperers (aka Varys) earlier in the episode.
Fans were up in arms about the twist:
The Change.org petition, which is titled Remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with Competent Writers, assert that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been unfaithful to the character arcs seen in George R. R. Martin's books.
Though Martin's work provided a foundation for much of the series, Benioff and Weiss ran out of books as the show drew to a close. This meant that they had to build the show's remaining plot points on notes provided by the author, rather than on completed novels.
And people weren't happy about it. "This isn’t subverting expectation, it’s just really bad television," wrote one person on the Change.org petition, while another corroborated "I understand it’s GOT but don’t trash 8 yrs of character building for what they think will shock and awe us. It sucks."
The showrunners, however, defended the choice to unleash Bad Dany in an interview with Entertainment Tonight.
Benioff told the publication that this version of Dany had been in the works since season 1. "Even when you look back to season one, when Khal Drogo gives the golden crown to Viserys and her reaction to watching her brother's head melted off, he was a terrible brother—so I don't think anyone out there was crying when Viserys died—but there is something chilling about the way Dany has responded to the death of her enemies," he said.
He also explained that Daenerys only snapped because she had lost so much: "If circumstances had been different, I don't think this side of Dany ever would have come out. If Cersei hadn't betrayed her, if Cersei hadn't executed Missandei, if Jon hadn't told her the truth [about his identity and his having a better claim to the Throne]—if all these things had happened in any different way, then I don't think we'd be seeing this side of Daenerys Targaryen."
Watch the preview for episode six of Game of Thrones
"And she's very much alone. And that's a dangerous thing for someone who's got so much power, to feel that isolated. So at the very time when she needs guidance and those kind of close friendships the most, everyone's gone," Benioff continued.
Explaining that Dany still has a conscience, Weiss chimed in: "I think that when she says, 'Let it be fear,' she's resigning herself to the fact that she may have to get things done in a way that isn't pleasant, and she may have to get things done in a way that is horrible to lots of people."
"I don't think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did," he added. "And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It's in that moment on the walls of King's Landing, when she's looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal."