Rewatched last 15 minutes of episode, definitely leaning Drogon now. Unfortunately can't discuss with wagering group, we are all Australians and people are delayed in watching the show for work etc...

For reference, here are all the characters we listed and who had died (in red) up until the end of episode 4, with the winning bids on the right, and initial bids (to start the pot) on the left. The total on bids was a shade under $8500, so I threw in the extra money to make it $8500 flat.

$850 to kill Cersei (Drogon)
$850 for first death (Edd)
$425 for first words (Tyrion)
$425 for last words
$850 for last death
$850 for final ruler
$4250 shared equally among all characters to die

The same guy owns Drogon, Edd and Tyrion, what a luckbox



My characters are Gilly, Jaime and Jon Snow

If Jon Snow can win the throne, get the last words in while murdering Gilly might get me in front.

Kinda funny that both Jaime and the Mountain were harder to kill than the night king.

I think it would have been cool if, right after executing Varys, Dany said "Tyrion has betrayed his queen and I sentence him to death also." Could have been an awesome wtf moment as Jon Snow watched his queen burn Tyrion alive. I'm just not sure why the writers have kept Tyrion alive this long, he serves no real plot purpose. I guess it's just fan service because people like him.

Completely agree.

People will argue "needed Tyrion to save Jaime and get that plot going" which is crap because 1) Jaime already knows of that secret exit (I think based on S4) and 2) He didn't need to be captured by the Unsullied anyway, he easily could have gotten around them somehow with his super magical teleportation powers everyone has.

Pretty decent episode honestly, best of the series. Dany's heel turn was too extreme and I ****ing loathe what they did with Jaime, but it looked great, very visceral, was paced well. I'm done with being mad about the hack writing so I don't really care that Dany's heel turn was botched. At least it's the intended plot.

Agree that how powerful Drogon was is out of line with previous episodes, but that's a problem with the previous episodes, not this one. This one was completely in line with how powerful dragons are, this was the correct take.

I liked that we got something out of Cersei other than smirking megavillain, she's supposed to be a human character.

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this was mystifying. i liked the clegane fight

The thing about Dany, by the way, is that if we ditch fantasy tropes and look at her with clear eyes we're supposed to be skeptical of her from the beginning. She is basically the US in Vietnam (where GRRM was a conscientious objector) or Iraq, just being like "Bad things are happening in this place! I, Daenerys will swoop in and save everyone and people will love me! You know, because I'm the Rightful Queen!". She's Boromir in LOTR basically, she wants to put on the Ring and use it to help people, but as LOTR warns, that desire for power is corrupting in itself.

Book stuff about Dany's heel turn (no show spoilers):



Unfortunately the show chose to portray her as a straight up hero until the latest possible moment, which makes her arc a bit hard to swallow.

Best of the series! Did you watch the whole series? Red wedding.

Who on earth would bet on Dany killing someone when Drogon is in the pool? It's like betting 999 on Price is Right when someone else has already bet 1000.

I completely disagree with this. People may have incorrectly interpreted that way, but she has been saying things like "the dragons will determine who is innocent" forever

it looks like you just buy the character then get all possible payouts from them, and she obviously has big equity for dying, ending up on the throne, or speaking

Yes. Her fetish for executing people by burning them alive, just because she can, is a bit of a warning sign too.

In retrospect, E4 and the first half of this ep are actually just a meditation on how to resolve the competing claims to the throne, but Tyrion and Jon are both suffering from Ned-Starkitis about the real stakes are. Varys very clearly sees that Dany can't hold the throne without resorting to extreme brutality. Tyrion is the audience POV character who naively believes that there is some alternative path just because Dany is one of the the Good Guys. The alternative path is Dany and Jon marrying, but everyone understands that isn't really practical. Right before the battle, Dany explicitly tells Jon that she will have to rule by fear because he won't marry her.

The clear message is that Dany rationally needs to have the capture of KL be an object lesson for opponents of her regime. Her scene when the bells ring is not her trying to suppress her madness and thirst for vengeance, it's her pumping herself up to kill a bunch of innocent people to further her political aims. The massacre is definitely surprising in the moment, but in retrospect there's no real other way it could have gone.

A good E6 would have Arya try and fail to kill Dany, Dany executes Jon in retaliation, then Sansa bends the knee. The end.

She correctly realized that the people of Westeros have no love for her. She can only rule by fear. She wants to rule at any cost. She did that.

In British English "series" commonly means "season". This is the "eighth series". We say "show" to mean the totality. I usually self-translate to American English, but missed this one. Relatedly, "NBA finals" in British English means what you mean by "NBA playoffs". I always mess that up.

It's been a bit subtle, I think. It's hard for me to know because I'm familiar with the books, where the hints are somewhat less subtle. In particular that stuff about wanting to "break the wheel" is a show invention. In the books she's coming to Westeros to RULE the place, not spark some kind of hippy revolution. She's the Rightful Queen coming to drag the usurper out back and shoot them, that's very clear. (But Benevolently and For The People of course, that's if you believe her own myth-making about herself).

You aren't betting purely on killing Cersei, thats one of a few different prizes, as laid out in the post.

You get money for dying first, dying last, dying at all (a lot less) saying the first words, last words and ruling, and Dany obv has had decent equity for those before the series started, although ran bad so far and looks unlikely to get enough money to break even.

So far approx 16 characters have died. $4250/16= $265 per death. As more die, the value of a "share" of the deathpool is reduced. If 20 characters total die it would be $215 each for example.

Assuming 20 die total, any character that dies and cost less than $215 is a winner, everyone else would be a net loser unless they won one of the other prizes.

At the time, everyone thought Drogon was a lol overpay at the time since he can't speak and it was always going to be Jaime/Tyrion/Arya that killed Cersei instead of Dany/Drogon, but as it worked out good for that guy who paid for him.

Calcutta's explained here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcutta_auction

Treating the dragons as characters is retarted. Dany killed cersei.

I read it more as she went bat**** crazy all of a sudden. She could have ruled by fear without destroying the entire city and burning everyone alive. They had rung the bells, dropped their weapons, and effectively surrendered. She could have rounded up the soldiers and executed them all if she just wanted to instill fear in her subjects. The fact that she suddenly started killing all the women and children for no reason, after she had already won, was supposed to show that she has the streak of insanity common to her ancestors.

Treating the dragons as characters is retarted. Dany killed cersei. And joffrey killed ned.

Even if she takes the city, she realizes Jon is a real threat to her for the throne, his secret will be impossible to contain. The people love Jon, she doesn't have that. I think in her mind the only way to secure the throne for herself long term was to instill fear into the people. The people will probably think twice about an uprising to put Jon in the throne over her when they are terrified of her cause they know she has a dragon and is willing to burn cities full of people to the ground.

Yeah a lot of people are defending a slightly better version of the show where power-mad Dany kills innocent people to assure victory, but in the actual show she had ALREADY WON and knew she had already won because of the bell.

She didn't kill any civilians during the actual battle, she only started the slaughter after the bell!

The guy has a very complicated payout structure and under the payout structure treating them as characters makes sense since they have death equity.

Even the cast hated this season by the reactions here. I think we all thought they were joking at first but looking back at these interviews now it's clear as day they were disappointed by the writing and it's probably a big reason why D&D aren't set to do the prequel.

"We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground" - Dany

"I will take what is mine with fire and blood" - Dany

It's always been clear that Dany preferred just nuking KL with dragons and that it was only Tyrion and Varys holding her back from doing it and trying to convince her that taking it peacefully would cement her reign. The character development for her is that she has concluded that she actually can't build a secure reign on any basis except terror, which is why she needs to burn KL even if they're not giving her an excuse.

The episode would be much worse if the Lannister armies didn't surrender and KL was destroyed during the battle.

Daeny killed Cersei

This was certainly possible had Jon sided with Dany, but I don't see how this credibly plays out now - he withdrew from the city, and sacking King's Landing was clearly not part of the deal for her to be Queen. And he formally rejected her which tipped her over the edge. I don't see how she lets him close to her now.

Much more likely Arya kills Greyworm if she's going the faceless route. There has to be some reason he has been kept alive as he's a fairly minor character and could have been dispatched in 3-4 spots already. They are obviously keeping him around for some bigger purpose than a 30s clip of him kicking ass in last night's episode.