Killing Dany would hardly be “violent revenge”. That’s pretty silly. If she’s going to do shit like this, she needs to go, and in a world of monarchies, there’s really only one way for the monarch to go.
You can’t use the judicial system in most monarchies (certainly not ones of this type), because monarchs are in charge of and above the judicial system. So it has to be assassination/killing, however approved.
Re: Mereen et al, I’m just not sure that’s reasonable, because even if we had ten episodes, and GRRM himself was writing them, I don’t think we’d have seen all that. Filming Mereen would be a significant addition to what already has to be the biggest-budget TV show ever made, and for what would be at most a handful of scenes, which would really only serve to set up a potential sequel? It’s hard to see how that would be worth it.
Bran I will be surprised if we don’t see more of. The Children can get fucked, they’re a total irrelevance, but Bran I will be shocked if we don’t see in E6, and he may well be pivotal.
Bronn I dunno, I’d be happy if we just saw him drunk and mad in a tavern somewhere, or get kilt. Again I would be surprised if he doesn’t get at least one scene. People will scream bloody murder if he doesn’t get 15 minutes and actually get Highgarden of course, so I expect people will be “outraged” whatever happens.
Tormund is dead in the books, so they can at least do whatever they want with him. There definitely won’t be any teasers, though, because there were five GoT spin-off shows in production (and the Brian Helgeland one could totally have been Tormund Nights, as you wish), but even the one that’s definitely casting and going into production is a very long way from shooting, and the fates of the other four are unclear (one is definitely out, but GRRM said three of them were still being considered, last month). I suspect the only way we might see him is if he comes back to Winterfell to bother Brienne - because I do think we’ll see Sansa, Brienne, et al. No way the show ends without them getting involved.
I feel like people saying stuff like this totally ignored her very clear explanatory line earlier in the episode, where she stated that she couldn’t rely on love, so would have to rule through fear.
As I pointed out, allowing a smooth surrender and letting everyone live would not cause the requisite kind of fear (particularly not is people realized Jon was Aegon, and that cat was out of the bag, though it’s unclear if Dany knows how far out). Dany never agreed to the bell stuff, and she knew what it meant for her. Ironically, if the fighting had been worse, and many more people killed in it, she probably wouldn’t have felt she needed to burn the city, because her point would have been made.
This isn’t “Anakin snaps”, this is a combination of factors, which Skalpadda outlined quite well:
-
She needs to strike fear into the whole of the Seven Kingdoms if she’s going to rule it.
-
She’s come to gradually prefer violence to peace, and only refrained from great violence because of her now-untrustworthy and disloyal-seeming or outright dead advisors, in the past (whether this is well-conveyed in the show is arguable, but in the books it’s obvious even by where we’re up to).
-
She’s also really pissed off and friendless.
You could add in that, as discussed at length in E4, she drinks her own Koolaid. As I said, I’m re-reading book 1 myself. Dany starts drinking her own Koolaid all the way back there. She’s not totally convinced, but she’s well on the way to thinking she genuinely has a destiny, all the way back in the original Game of Thrones book.