Game of Thrones fans are pretty pissed about how season 8 is shaping up, especially for Daenerys and Cersei. So many people are now calling for a remake of the whole shebang without David Benioff and D. B. Weiss and “with competent writers” instead. Spoilers for GoT season 8, episode 5, “The Bells,” lie ahead. Tread carefully. Even though Game of Thrones aired days ago, people are still seething via Twitter memes about how the show did our faves dirty—especially Dany, who is the Mad Queen now, I guess. And after eight years of being invested in her fate, that’s not really sitting well with the fans. A new Change.org petition is circulating from a Night King–loving fan named Dylan D, calling for HBO to remake the entire season “with competent writers” instead of Thrones showrunners (and future Star Wars bosses) David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, and as of Friday morning, it has nearly a million supporters. “David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have proven themselves to be woefully incompetent writers when they have no source material (i.e., the books) to fall back on,” Dylan’s call to action reads. “This series deserves a final season that makes sense. Subvert my expectations and make it happen, HBO!” This thing’s been up for less than a week and it’s already gotten 800,000+ signatures from equally annoyed fans. Change.org This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. Okay, so I get the impulse to be like, “Scrap the whole thing and try again,” but there are a few reasons this is straight-up not going to happen (sorry, angry fans 😞). (1) HBO would have to shell out an actual fortune to redo it, including the massive cast salaries. Lena Headey, for example, made $48,000 per minute she was onscreen—that’s not something HBO is bound to repeat lightly. (2) Even if they redid it, it still wouldn’t satisfy everyone. Actor Pilou Asbæk (who plays Euron Greyjoy) said as much to The Wrap, saying, “I would be very, very surprised if we end up with a happy ending next week. I know how it’s gonna end, so I’m not gonna say a word. But Dan and David have delivered for seven seasons admirable content and I would say they have delivered extremely well again this season. But again, you can’t please everyone.” (3) Even with all the backlash, “The Bells” set records as the most-watched episode in Game of Thrones history. Sooooo, HBO’s probably psyched about that, all things considered. Anyway, if you’re still reeling from Dany’s abrupt character turn and want to lend your name to the cause, here’s the link to the petition. Do what you will. Alexandra Whittaker News and Pop Culture Director Alexandra Whittaker oversees all of Cosmo's news and entertainment digital coverage— follow her on Instagram here. As the lead of two teams, Alexandra manages stellar writers and editors who deliver your daily dose of celebrity, TV, movie, book, general entertainment and pop culture news. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io<doc-sep>Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones, season 8, episode 3, “The Long Night.” As Game of Thrones moves into the second half of its final season, we’re in the endgame — not just for the remaining contenders for the Iron Throne, but also for the behind-the-scenes string-pullers with their own grandiose plans for the fate of Westeros. Littlefinger’s cunning, Varys’ spy networks, Tyrion’s battle strategies, and Melisandre’s prophecies and fire magic have all been involved in manipulating and shaping the kingdom’s current chaos. But the show has not been friendly to any of its masterminds. In the season 8 premiere, Varys, Tyrion, and Davos Seaworth watch Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen from a distance, musing over their suitability as a marriage alliance. “You overestimate our influence,” Varys says. “Jon and Daenerys don’t want to listen to lonely old men.” Tyrion protests, “Our queen respects the wisdom of age.” Varys quips back, “Of course she does. Respect is how the young keep us at a distance so that we don’t remind them of an unpleasant truth… that nothing lasts.” Varys isn’t wrong about his own diminished social influence. In the past three seasons of Game of Thrones, as the show has diverged from George R.R. Martin’s sourcebooks, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have relegated all of the advisers, sages, and prophets to the side, treating them as dusty old relics. The former schemers and pundits have laid out epic plans, but then they’ve consistently been sidelined and outsmarted by characters who are supposed to be less witty and observant, less influential and careful, or less crafty. First, there’s Varys, whose purported goal was to improve the lives of common people and do what’s best for the realm. He served the Mad King, crossed over to help Robert Baratheon and spy on Dany when she was a young girl, and finally declared his true allegiance to her as a just queen. He’s an extremely resilient man, with a network of child spies. But by season 8, Varys has ceased to have any hand in driving the plot. He’s barely even present. He’s taken a back seat to Daenerys, who does what she wants regardless of his counsel. He also loses the major kills he commits in the books, murdering Pycelle and Kevan Lannister to protect Tyrion. In the show, Qyburn kills Pycelle, and Cersei Lannister kills Kevan as part of her Sept of Baelor wildfire attack. It’s a cleaner version of the story, but it undermines Varys’ ruthlessness and commitment to his cause. Part of this can be explained by the showrunners’ emphasis and focus on more physically active, traditional heroes like Jon Snow and Arya Stark. We’re running out of episodes, so if Varys has any elaborate plots left, they could only be addressed in a spinoff, a sequel, or, better yet, George R.R. Martin’s unfinished books. Varys gets no lines during Jaime’s trial, although court manipulation is one of his specialties, and he just barely survives by the skin of his teeth in the crypts. (Somehow neither he nor Tyrion anticipates that the crypts aren’t safe against an opponent who raises the dead!) Over and over throughout the last few seasons, we’ve seen this pattern repeat: the showrunners keep their prophets and geniuses dull and unaware to make it easier to spring surprises on the audience. That’s why the Night King can survive fire, defying the story’s established rules for the undead. It’s not because of some secret history; it’s because surprises make for startling entertainment. This isn’t a huge grievance, but it’s worth mourning, for a moment, the metaphorical death of George R.R. Martin’s smarter characters. Martin has said in interviews and on his LiveJournal that Tyrion is his favorite character and that he takes great pleasure in crafting dialogue for him, but it takes time. After season 5, the showrunners had to improvise their own glib lines for Tyrion, which leads straight into him making familiar gibes at Varys for not having balls. What’s worse, Tyrion consistently underestimates his sister Cersei and falls for her lies. He gives Daenerys awful advice that betrays her allies and the story that she rightly ignores. He spends all of season 7 consistently failing and moping, perpetually helpless and on the sidelines as terrible things happen. His failing wits and charm aside, the utter failure of his former military acumen is the narrative blunder that feels most out of character. Fans have taken issue with Tyrion’s advice to Daenerys not to march on King’s Landing or at least lure out Cersei’s forces in season 7 in a battle that would have avoided civilian casualties. His decisions might not make strategic sense, but they’ve helped the showrunners delay the epic battles until Game of Thrones’ final season, keeping Cersei alive to increase tension. They just came at the cost of Tyrion’s logic and common sense. Then there’s Melisandre who was totally underwhelming in fulfilling her final prophecy. She told Varys in season 7 that they’ll both die in Westeros, and in season 8’s massive battle in “The Long Night,” she tells Davos not to bother killing her because she’ll be dead by dawn. Both lines imply she’ll have some sort of epic death, and that the prophecy of the Prince that Was Promised, aka Azor Ahai, will be complete. That isn’t exactly what goes down. In season 8, the Azor Ahai prophecy basically falls apart. According to prophecy, there should be a hero “born again amidst smoke and salt” who wakes “dragons out of stone.” The description sounds like it could apply to Jon or Daenerys, but Melisandre and Beric, who are both servants of the Lord of Light, give up their lives in order to keep Arya alive to slay the Night King. Her parting words to Arya are more or less, “Hey, you killed some blue eyes, just like I said you would.” So maybe Azor Ahai doesn’t matter so much? In the season 6 finale, Melisandre tells Jon Snow, “I’ve been ready to die for many years. If the Lord was done with me, so be it, but he’s not.” Yet, without looking for a clear sign that the lord was done with her, without resolving Westeros’ ongoing battles, without explicitly fulfilling the terms of her prophecies or explaining what’s going on, without even mentioning where she went for two seasons, Melisandre voluntarily ends her life by walking off into the distance and disintegrating into dust. The highly unsatisfying conclusion to her storyline indicates that either Melisandre and other Red Priestesses of the Lord of Light were all wrong, or that the showrunners are just chucking out this piece of Game of Thrones lore in favor of focusing on more popular characters. Melisandre’s seemingly random, anticlimactic death isn’t the first time the show has disposed of someone with the long game in mind. Petyr Baelish, better known as Littlefinger, was also poorly served by the writers over the course of seasons 5 through 7 before he met his untimely demise, which hasn’t happened in the books yet. A lot of it has to do with plot choices. Sansa didn’t have much to do in the later books, besides hanging around the Vale, so the showrunners gave her Jeyne Poole’s storyline, with Littlefinger arranging for her to marry sadistic murderer Ramsay Bolton. We’re missing the 4D chess and complex strategies This adaptation choice unfortunately made Littlefinger look stupid. Apparently, he didn’t have any idea what sort of a person Ramsay was or that he was putting Sansa in the hands of a bloodthirsty rapist. He eventually admits to Sansa that he made a mistake, but it’s hard to swallow, given Ramsay’s outsized behavior and how clever and aware Littlefinger is supposed to be. In the books, Littlefinger instead offers to marry Sansa off to his heir, Ser Harrold Hardyng, who’s a mild jerk. But he’s no human-hunting, victim-flaying Ramsay Bolton, and he’s under Littlefinger’s control. We also know less about Littlefinger’s end goals in the books, and the added sense of mystery means he might have a pivotal role in the endgame.<doc-sep>Redditors from the /r/Freefolk subreddit, angry at how Game of Thrones’ final season has played out, briefly succeeded is getting a picture of its showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff to rank for the search term “bad writers.” Both Metro and Business Insider were able to verify the success of the campaign, although searching for the same term now returns images from these news articles rather than from the Reddit post itself. Google bombing describes the process of tricking Google’s algorithms into associating a search term with a typically unrelated topic. Sometimes it’s search results, and other times it’s images. There are numerous examples of these campaigns over the years, but my favorite has to be the Wikipedia entry Google briefly surfaced for the search term “Define an English Person.” “Dumb and Dumber” was also attempted “Bad writers” isn’t the only term that the /r/Freefolk subreddit has tried to get associated with images of Weiss and Benioff. Other posts have also tried to pin images of them to the search terms “Dickheads” and “Dumb and Dumber.” Despite these posts technically getting more upvotes, something about “Bad Writers” seems to have struck gold with Google’s algorithms. Whether it’s the breakneck pace of the show’s plot, the big dumb decisions its smartest characters now seem to be making at every turn, or the way the script is now treating its female characters, everyone seems to have their own issues with the way Game of Thrones’ final season has progressed. But with one final episode to go, there’s still time for Weiss and Benioff to turn things around… right guys?<doc-sep>
SPOILER ALERT Game of Thrones writers have explained the latest plot arc in the penultimate episode of the hit television show as viewers around the world prepare for the final episode to be aired next week. The fifth episode of Season Eight was one of the darkest of the series, with Danaerys Targaryen finally descending on King’s Landing and waging full blown war against Cersei Lannister. However Danaerys’ early dominance of the battle took a dark turn when, her enemies cowed and surrendering, she chose instead to burn the city with her dragon. In the process, she slaughtered countless innocent lives and reduced King’s Landing — and the Red Keep — to rubble. Game of Thrones fans unhappy with the latest plot development and character arc took to social media but the writers behind the show explained it was always headed this way in an ‘Inside the Episode’ video posted to YouTube. “Dany is an incredibly strong person — she’s also someone that has had really close friendships and close advisers for her entire run of the show,” executive producer and writer David Benioff said. “If you look at those people who had been closest to her for such a long time, almost all of them have either turned on her and died. She’s very much alone and that’s a dangerous thing for someone who’s got so much power. At the very time when she needs guidance and those kind of close friendships and advice the most — everyone’s gone.” Executive producer and writer D.B. Weiss referred to the moment when Danaerys chose to be held in fear rather than love by the people of Westeros. “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,” Weiss said. “She may have to get things done in a way that is horrible to lots of people.” Benioff explained that Danaerys chose violence and “a Targaryen choosing violence is a pretty terrible thing”. “Even when you look back to Season One, when Khal Drogo gives the golden crown to Viserys and her reaction at watching her brother’s head get melted — and he was a terrible brother, so I don’t think anyone out there was crying when Viserys died —but there is something kind of chilling about the way that Dany has responded to the death of her enemies,” he said. “If circumstances had been different I don’t think this side of Dany would have ever come out. If Cersei hadn’t betrayed her, if Cersei hadn’t executed Missandei, if Jon hadn’t told her the truth, if all these things had happened in a different way then I don’t think we’d be seeing this side of Danaerys Targaryen,” Benioff said. As for torching the people and buildings of King’s Landing, Weiss believes the move was not premeditated. “I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did,” he said. “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, I think where she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.” The final episode of Game of Thrones airs on Monday, May 20.