For a while now I’ve been rewatching both final battle in Avengers Endgame and Battle for the Dawn in Game of Thrones. Usually Game of Thrones is the top of my favorites, and certainly precedes Avengers by far. But this time after watching Endgame and ‘The Long Night’ GoT episode it was different. So different in fact that it made me sad and disappointed. Almost like if someone robbed my of getting satisfaction I’ve been waiting for. And I waited long.

Each battle was meant to be pinnacle of entertainment and while one worked perfectly the other did not. I spent a lot of time thinking why did that happen and in conclusion I decided to break down each battle and look at it from different points of view.  So below you’ll find comparison of this two marking events. Enjoy!

Tactics

Now when it comes to battle this is the basics. And these battles are extremely different when it comes to tactics, so it may be unfair to compare them. Nevertheless I will do it anyway just to explain why in Avengers case it worked and in GoT it did not.

When it comes to Avengers it’s really hard to talk about tactics. The total war scenario was not expected by any character in the movie – except for Dr. Strange perhaps, but he was kind of dead. During whole plot the characters were experimenting, and betting on different solutions to solve ‘Thanos snap crisis’. And it’s hard to blame them that they were not equipped and organized for repelling Thanoses full forces on the ground.

Hell, we even got that one moment, one great scene when Captain America – first ever avenger is facing the war host alone. While in that deciding moment reinforcements came from nothing. Literally from nothing as they were just brought back to life by Hulk’s snap. We can assume that Avengers army were teleported within minutes after being reanimated. The creators even pointed that out, when Spiderman greets Iron Man, with this quote:

”And I must have passed out because I woke up and you were gone. But Doctor Strange was there, right? He was like: it’s been five years, they need us. Let’s go!”.

The only person that had a clue about what was going on was Strange as be foreseen that this will happen and I suspect that his primary concern was to gather everyone on the battlefield as soon as possible. There is also a quote from him asking Wong “Is that  everyone?” (This quote served also another cool purpose – I suspect It was meant for the fans as if the creators wanted to say: ‘ Yes this this is everyone from Marvel cinematics in one scene. The moment you’ve been waiting for.’).

So in summary in this battle we had our heros scrambled for fight at literally last moment, and there was no time to even consider any pre battle tactics.

In case of GoT this was totally different. Our heroes knew the enemy was coming. They had basic information about what number will they face, what additional powers the white walkers held. Including that ‘unexpected storm’. There is I believe even a quote somewhere in the series ‘The real enemy won’t wage out the storm – it brings the storm’. So yep, they had a pretty good clue what they were facing. Not even mentioning Bran who could just take over some crows for a quick recon mission.

They had a lot of time to prepare, months even. John Snow managed to get to Dragonstone, spend some time there, visit King’s Landing, get back to Dragonstone, and then travel back North. Considering he was horse riding, this must have took some time. During this time what did good people of the north did? Absolutely nothing… They started digging up trenches right after Daenerys arrived, and let’s be clear.. To dig a hole in the ground and pack it with wooden sticks you don’t need a professional armies. By the time Jon arrived they should have two or three lines of trenches all of them with trap bridges for evacuation purposes. Yes, I also don’t think that Grey Worm is the only engineer in Westeros capable of creating such a clever mechanism…

Another thing that bothered me was that when their armies did arrive at Winterfell the leaders did absolutely nothing. And the knew they were outnumbered. They should have spend all the time creating strategies not lurking around the crypts. All they did was was to put their forces before the trench. Now I am not a strategist but I suspect I would have done a better job than military elite of Westeros. Any of the fans would have.

Why did they deploy the cavalry right away? No one even seen enemy army when they did this. So what? They just said: “ Ride north, Night King’s army should be somewhere there’. Imagine for a minute that Dothraki miss the undead army and ride for 20 minutes just to find out there was nothing there. It was a miracle that they had any light during this charge, because Melisandre showed up. I gather that if that miracle didn’t happen, they would just rush into the night and kill each other in complete darkness. As they did not have torches with them.

Why did the trebuchets were in front of the lines behind the cavalry? The machines that could’ve damaged hundreds of walkers were completely overrun and useless after shooting once. Where was the twist in the battle? I’ve got impression that instead of using one’s wits we just got hack and slash battle. And when you think of it – than that is the prerogative of human kind – its usage of intelligence. And on opposite side there were just mindless zombies and few dudes who controlled them.

Where was the hidden ambush for the walkers?

I suspect that creators did two mistakes regarding battle tactics. One – they wanted to make it look like fight impossible to win so much, so they took all natural advantages from our heroes, and leave this advantages with the dead. Which was a failure, because with Game of Thrones we always expect, the unexpected. And we know that characters are both intelligent and strong. So dumbing them down had opposite effect. Instead of worrying about the outcome of the battle we kept thinking “Why, WHY did you not have thought of this!?”

The second and the major mistake – red flag for me when it comes to entertainment – the creators thought that viewers were stupid enough to buy this. Well we are not.

Motivation

In Avengers Endgame motivation for battle was purely awesome. There are some many reasons these characters have, to go into the batlle i actually have to make a list out of it or I’ll get lost myself in its complexity:

Revenge

Previous battle have been lost, and the effect of this loss was so big, that probably  – if you put anyone from space into this army they would have someone or something they would have to avenge. Revenge is one of the best selling motives in culture at large and it works here perfectly. Even with the name of the franchise.

Fear

Everyone on the battlefield had a clue how important that is, all the soldiers or warriors knew what are the consequences of defeat, because they suffered it already. To deepen this motivation there was a pre battle moment when Thanos casually informs that if wiping half of the population will not work like he wants it to – than he’ll just destroy everything and create it all over again. As if our heroes would need more reasons to fight.. To our heroes this battle was a giant bet – one in 14 millions to be exact. It was stressed in the movie at every point that this is the only chance. There is a quote from the Arrow regarding black widows sacrifice “She sacrificed life for that goddamn stone, she bet her life on it!”. When you think of it like that the fear of failure is self explanatory.

Hate

Most of the main characters had personal reasons to hate Thanos. We can gather that every soldier had lost someone close, family or friend because of Thanos snap. Main characters from the series were also seriously hit with loss, Iron Man lost his young protegee, as he always felt responsible for Peter Parker. Arrow lost his family, Black Widow and Thor the Belly suffered serious depression. Thanos basically killed any friends Rocked had, wiping out Guardians of the Galaxy totally. The embodiment of that hate was Scarlet Witch scene, when she faces of Thanos on the Battlefield saying: “You took everything from me”. This moment summed up how the characters were emotionally invested in matter of killing Thanos. They wanted to do it, not just because it was right but because of their personal feelings. And that is so much better than just standard old “save the world’ thing.

Justice

The obvious motivation of any superhero – to do the right thing. So I’m not gonna get deep about it.

Unity

When reinforcements arrive on the battlefield we have a cool moment of people looking around, searching for their friends and admiring all the troops that have come to fight Thanos. And as they attack we see all of them together charging down to reach Thanos army. You could almost feel at this time that all these characters were connected despite where they came from. Now I imagine that if You were in the middle of the battle and saw unknown people fighting by your side. I’m pretty sure you would feel upheld and happy.

In comparison to above, battle motivation in GOT seemed just bleak. There was no personal reasons, there were in fact very little emotions regarding the dead. Hell most of the people didn’t ever saw them. The fear was exploited in many tasty layers but there was no moment when main characters would overcome the fear in any heroic, genuine way.

The unity part of plot was completely twisted by two episodes before. We than saw characters clashing with one another and they struggled not to kill each other. It was especially sad because we waited a long time for this characters to get together. And all they did was provide us with encounters that was emotionally dry – especially in Arya’s case. Now I understand that most of the characters went through a lot of changes around the years and the creators wanted to show their colder and logical side, but it just didn’t work well in a climactic moment like that. We should have seen various emotion display, not just cold looks.

Now when it comes to personal motivation it was simple. They tried to survive, that’s all. There was no hate, no need for justice or revenge. This as a major motive is not all that bad. But a huge chunk of it was missing because the show decided not to break down what the characters had to lose.

It was never specifically stated for any major characters that they were afraid of this battle. Most of them acted as if they didn’t give two shits about what will happen to them. I know that most of them were war veterans but come on.. not everyday you get to live through zombie apocalypse. Most of them acted much like Bran – meaning that spent most of the time staring at each other and coldly talking about non relevant things. The cratotrs failed to state how much this battle meant to this people. And that was a huge mistake.

Dynamics

In this case GOT battle also lost to the Avengers. The episode was very long, the battle itself was approximately long so the dynamics played a very important part in the plot.

What was the hardest thing for me to watch, is that it was plainly stated by the creators that this battle was impossible to win.  You may say that it is a good realistic thing to show – and maybe it is. But it largely disrupts dynamics. Every battle need ups and downs to keep us in suspense. And in the case of GOT we didn’t get the ups. because of this our endurance – the suspense was stretched beyond breaking point. To put it plainly we stopped caring about the characters, which is natural considering that we instinctively didn’t want to attach our hopes to characters that were to die.

Also when it comes to technicals the battle from my point of view was to chaotic. The clash of zombie armies against the living was a great breaking point but after that there was just slaughter and despair. I think that creators made a valid point here that this is how battle would look. Running and killing in chaos basically. But there was no glimpse of life inside it, no heroizm, no bravery, none of the things we know and love when it comes to epic battles. The only quiet part was Arya sneaking through the library and it was really nicely done. But overall they could have done it better, even focused on capturing the sense of despair.

This was very different when it came to Avengers. The battle could been easily break down into pieces, that matched each other and gave opportunity for every Marvel character to show off even just for little while. We have the “Halo” part when character recognize the enemy as well as some of their friends on the battlefield. Next we have the “sztaphette” with the glove, next we have the shootings part, the destroying of the ship, and final female sztaphette with the glowe, before the battle is concluded. Each is a logical conclusion of the other, and it gives characters the chance to show their contribution to the win. It does not have a deeper meaning, but it also i dynamical enough not to tire you out.

Expectations

This weighed heavily on this article as my expectations for GoT final boss fight were huge. I knew and valued this show and and knew that I could expect the best content possible and television. And I was disappointed.

On the other hand When it comes to Marvel I have something called “Marvell level” of expectations. Meaning I know it won’t be to brainy but the visual effects will be great and jokes might be good. And I wasn’t disappointed.

And that was perhaps the greatest difference between battles. I had different expectations between the battles – very high for GOT – middle to low – for Marvel. And in one case my expectations was met while in the other they did not.