Regarding Cersei's power in King's Landing - I was surprised that there wasn't a peasant revolt after she blew up the Sept. You've got this radicalised city and the pillar of their religion is blown up, yet nobody has an issue with it? Bollocks to that. But obviously as soon as Season 6 ended with Dany coming with three dragons, a massive army of Unsullied and an alliance with Dorne and the Iron Fleet you knew Cersei was already fecked so I bet it was a conscious effort to just enable Cheat Mode for Cersei to balance the scales. So we ended up with zero revolt in King's Landing, characters making dumb decisions to lose fights against Cersei and ultimately a story where things just happened because the writers needed them to happen.I had an idea back before season 8 of a rough storyline I would’ve liked to see play out. Key high level points were:
dany/jon meet Cersei to persuade her to come north to fight the WW. Cersei says she will help them and sends Jaime with them ahead of her army (which is still mustering).
cersei betrays the northern alliance, leaving them to fight the WW alone. Even Jaime wasn’t aware of her plan, and he dies alongside a bunch of other characters fighting the WW (thus redemption arc complete). Maybe she tells Jaime her plan at the last minute and he chooses to side with the north, maybe he just doesn’t know until he realises she has betrayed him, either way works for me.
the northerners manage to beat the NK but at great cost. They lose most of their army and probably a second dragon.
cersei marches up with her army and destroys the remnants of the northern army. She takes Winterfell and the remaining forces flee north, ultimately beyond the wall.
at this point I am less certain in what happens, but basically I think the northerners are so utterly desperate that they have to resort to something really dire - akin to when the Children of the Forest created the WWs originally. Maybe they use Jon to create a new NK (Bran knows how to do this from his visions. Maybe they have to sacrifice the last dragon in some way shape or form, which tips Dany over the edge into madness. Alternately, she is preggers with Jon's child, but dies in childbirth after going mad because of Jon becoming the NK.
Either way, they manage to do something along those lines to create something powerful enough to destroy Cersei’s army and retake the south, with Jon/new NK using the last remnants of his humanity to agree to return north of the wall. A bittersweet ending.
only thing I am missing (I’m sure I had an idea for how to fit this in, but I’ve forgotten) was I really wanted to see Dany and Jon fall out, and end up fighting each other atop their respective dragons - this would’ve been a great mirror of the original “Dance of Dragons” from ages before.
And what was the payoff? Nothing. Cersei did feck all in Season 8. That character should have died under the conditions she was under in Season 7. But Cersei needs to be in the adverts. Blerg. Eat the Rich.
Instead of Cersei losing her kingdom, Dany becoming distracted by events up North, finally getting to King's Landing and, I dunno, finding out that the peasants have taken the city in the power vacuum that's been left there - Breaking the Wheel, as it were - and Dany being seen as just another invader which makes her flip her dish (assuming that has to happen), we got what we got.
Well, poop to that I say. Poop.
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