‘The Bells’ is the fifth and penultimate episode of the eighth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 72nd overall. It was written by D&D and aired on May 12, 2019. ‘The Bells’ features the final battle for control of the Iron Throne, with Dany’s forces commencing their assault on Cersei’s forces at King’s Landing.
Quite apart from D&D’s big mistake of compacting the plots that were left unfinished in a couple of episodes, fans also erred big by misjudging the last two episodes of the show. Although it would’ve required more seasons for proper execution, it makes sense for Dany to burn King’s Landing in this penultimate episode. See Yezenirl’s video ‘Foreshadowing is not Character Development: The Rationalization of Tyranny’.
Instead of commenting on the bad messages from ‘The Bells’, I prefer to talk about one of the bad messages from the next episode, the finale.
Even at the show’s most interesting moment, Tyrion’s speech, the writers managed to insert a feminist message: Sansa’s little sermon that left her as Queen of the North! As Yezenirl observed in an interview, that is cheating on the profound message of that moment.
Incidentally, on the 19th of this month I’ll post a transcript of Yezenirl’s video on why Bran’s coronation was precisely where Martin’s story was headed.
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While Game of Thrones has been the great cinematic hit of this century, in the previous century it was the 1959 movie Ben-Hur. As Messala told Sextus, ‘You ask how to fight an idea! Well, I’ll tell you how: With another idea!’ In the movie there’s emphasis in Messala’s voice where I used italics above (‘fight!’). Christian nationalists are like Sextus who wanted to fight the Jewish Zealots and at the same time felt the words of John the Baptist were ‘quite profound’. Unlike them, I believe that only the transvaluation saves.
If the transvaluation of values does take place among whites, they’ll see the Roman Messala as the good guy and the Jew Ben-Hur as the bad guy. Sextus had cautioned Messala, noting that the Jews were drunk with religion and smashed the statues of the Roman gods and their emperor. Messala was determined to follow Emperor Tiberius’ orders to make Judea into a more obedient and disciplined province, and he decided to hunt down the rebels and destroy the new idea of Christianity.
Christian nationalists cling to the apocryphal story that their religion conquered the empire by peaceful means. In actual history the Jews, other Semites and white traitors triumphed and most of the statues and temples were smashed throughout the empire after Constantine and his successors.
In my next post I’ll translate some passages of my 11th book. In a couple of weeks I won’t add many entries to allow the new visitor to digest the point of view of this site through what I’ll say tomorrow using the finale of Game of Thrones.