I won’t mince words: I’m very unhappy with tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones, “The Dance of Dragons.” It’s not that it was a bad episode. Quite the contrary. It was thrilling and tragic and intense.
It was also one of the most disturbing, baffling and unnecessary departures from the books we’ve seen yet—and wholly inconsistent with one of the most powerful moments of the season.
All I can say, to HBO and to the showrunners, is good grief what a monstrosity of a writing decision. What a horrible, no-good, very bad, infuriating way to ruin Stannis as a character and to twist the events of these stories beyond recognition in such a grotesque manner. It’s one thing to get rid of Jeyne Poole and place Sansa in her plight instead—at least it furthers the story of Sansa and saves a bit character from a horrible fate.
But killing off Shireen this way absolutely decimates Stannis as a character (the show already ruined Barristan Selmy, and now it’s ruined Stannis, too.) It renders his passionate, moving speech to his daughter meaningless. It makes him not so much a hard-to-like good guy struggling against the villains, but a villain himself and one of the worst we’ve seen. Even the ever-deplorable Cersei would never stoop so low. Even Roose Bolton treats his horrible, sadistic son better than this.
It’s also a bait-and-switch. We finally see Stannis’s softer side, we finally warm a bit to his character, and then he kills his daughter. It’s terrible storytelling. Surprisingly bad.
Before the entire internet floods me with comments about how the show’s writers admitted that Shireen’s death was GRRM’s idea in the first place—yeah, I know that they’ve said this. It doesn’t mean that it will play out the same in the books. Nor do the books include scenes with Stannis telling his daughter how he saved her life, admitting his deep love for her. In retrospect, that’s nothing short of a dirty trick at this point. A very shoddy way to treat viewers. Hopefully, if this does happen in the books, it happens in a very different way. Otherwise, Martin (along with HBO) will bear responsibility for the destruction of one of his best characters.
Erik Kain, Forbes (via stannisbaratheon)