[Spoilers] Rant and Rave without Reprecussions - Season 6 Edition

[Tijgy]

Not sure if the link works, but an deleted scene from ASOIAF with Lem

[LazyBazooka]

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/727885999573962753/kyLVol1l_400x400.jpg

"Is mutilating another girl's face and stabbing your boyfriends feminist?"

[Tijgy]

For people who do not want to risk their health : http://www.fandomfollowing.com/notwatch-game-thrones-6x08-recap/

[WinterPool Stark]

2 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

They're already doing this since the start of S6 imo. A lot of it are attempts to gross out viewers, more and more. Imo, they're already trolling and laughing at people who still love and defend the show.

It's standard 180 degree approach:

• flatter people (author), make people value something (audience)
• then gradually deconstruct it with a pile of insults and shameless grotesquerie that gets higher and higher

A lot of people unfortunately go in cog-diss over the last step, keep searching for meaning and value, and d$d will have the last laugh on GOT even on the audience that remained faithful for as long as possible, leaving them feeling slimed over having ever invested so much time, feeling and hopes in them.

They're not just saying: George's books are stupid and our critics are stupid. They're also very strongly messagingin now - "all ye faithful ones, you're even bigger fools... you've all been had"

Here's a blog article on 180 ° MO: http://180rule.com/psychopaths-girardian-theory-the-180-rule/

Important Note: I'm just pointing the 180 MO, not commenting on d$d's personalities by posting that link.

Wow! That blog read like a review of the show.... Bloody hell

[Le Cygne]

1 hour ago, LazyBazooka said:

So all we get out of UnGregor on the show is him ripping a sparrow's head off? Which we don't even see properly?

Laaaaaame.

Shame Nun ahead... They will probably show that.

[Le Cygne]

31 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Is there any chance the Blackfish isn't dead?

It was one of Larry's men who said they found him... I bet he is dead.

[The Prince of Porne]

20 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

It was one of Larry's men who said they found him... I bet he is dead.

Yes... looks like he got the Stannis/Shaggydog treatment.

[sweetsunray]

40 minutes ago, WinterPool Stark said:

Wow! That blog read like a review of the show.... Bloody hell

The owner of the blog, Skylar, once also wrote a blog article there regarding the deep hatred for Skyler in Breaking Bad for trying to interfere with her husband's work, and how Skyler became the scapegoat in many viewers' eyes in favor of her husband, who shows plenty of psychopathic tendencies. In many ways Sansa, the Starks, the Tullys were and are being scapegoated similarly in GOT. While d$d do not necessarily succeed in making the viewers hate the Starks, they most certainly have them being devalued and discarded by everyone in-world, and they overall managed to make many viewers hate Sansa.

The big difference is that show-runners and writers themselves did not attempt to scapegoat Skyler in Breaking Bad, nor defend her husband; just as much as the writers of Black Sails are not attempting to scapegoat Eleanor in Black Sails. It happens almost organically on a social level with viewers who sympathize with the badass and hate the person - especially when it's a woman - who tries to stop what basically is severe abuse. But d$d write the show very much to try and push the audience in one way and force scapegoating (and that is bad writing). In that sense, it's a relief to see how the majority of viewers still empathize mostly with the Starks.  

[The Klobbinator]

55 minutes ago, Tijgy said:

Not sure if the link works, but an deleted scene from ASOIAF with Lem

Thank you so much, needed me some real Lem.

[Tijgy]

2 minutes ago, The Klobbinator said:

Thank you so much, needed me some real Lem.

You have to thank the actor for this 

[Firefae]

1 hour ago, Tijgy said:

Not sure if the link works, but an deleted scene from ASOIAF with Lem

Wow, awesome. I would have loved to see this. Not the fake 'Lem' we got in the show.

[Cas Stark]

40 minutes ago, sweetsunray said:

The owner of the blog, Skylar, once also wrote a blog article there regarding the deep hatred for Skyler in Breaking Bad for trying to interfere with her husband's work, and how Skyler became the scapegoat in many viewers' eyes in favor of her husband, who shows plenty of psychopathic tendencies. In many ways Sansa, the Starks, the Tullys were and are being scapegoated similarly in GOT. While d$d do not necessarily succeed in making the viewers hate the Starks, they most certainly have them being devalued and discarded by everyone in-world, and they overall managed to make many viewers hate Sansa.

The big difference is that show-runners and writers themselves did not attempt to scapegoat Skyler in Breaking Bad, nor defend her husband; just as much as the writers of Black Sails are not attempting to scapegoat Eleanor in Black Sails. It happens almost organically on a social level with viewers who sympathize with the badass and hate the person - especially when it's a woman - who tries to stop what basically is severe abuse. But d$d write the show very much to try and push the audience in one way and force scapegoating (and that is bad writing). In that sense, it's a relief to see how the majority of viewers still empathize mostly with the Starks.  

Skylar wasn't very sympathetic a lot of the time.  She bosses around her husband constantly before he goes Heinsenberg. She acts out her frustration by having an affair and ruining the guy's literal life.  She helps steal the car wash from someone whose only crime was seeing Walter White for the POS that he always was underneath.  She tells Walt to kill Jesse.  Her lawyer gives her good advice that she ignores to preserve her own reputation.

Disliking Skylar doesn't mean you are excusing Walt for his myriad crimes and constant feeding of his personal ego once he let the id out of the bottle.  

So, I don't see the parallel.  Sky was never written as stupid, like the Starks are, she was never written in a way to prop up Walter, like the Starks prop up the Lannisters and the Boltons.

[Meg Mormont]

7 hours ago, bemused said:

Well, I got through that, somehow.. I wouldn't have thought I  could be so perturbed while being so bored.

First, let's just dispense with the Arya business.. her whole Braavos arc has been pretty senseless, but at least (and at last!) when she blew out the candle at the end of Ep.7, we could safely project that she'd have the upper hand in a confrontation with the waif in darkness. (And it was confirmed in Ep 8 .. umm.. eventually.)

But after being warned by  unJaqen that one way or another, a face would be added to the wall, I had assumed Arya was actively drawing out the waif when she wandered about so conspicuously, and that she must have been wearing a fake blood bladder under her jerkin.. But No! She really was that dumb. She really was slashed and stabbed multiple times - including having the knife twisted in her gut, and bleeding copiously at every strike. Miraculously, she managed to walk away. Happily, her new actress friend is very skilled at patching just such life threatening wounds (miracle upon miracle) - having had lots of practice skewering, then mending a long list of cheating lovers. (Why repair the  cads, I'd like to know ?) ... A short time later (possibly even the next day) , Arya is able to put on an incredible display of parkour to escape the waif, who has tracked her down, and killed the actress.

Ah! Another day in the streets of Braavos, dodging a pair of would-be faceless men trying to finish each other off as inconspicuously as possible. (It's what they're famed for.) This must be business as usual in Braavos judging by the way everyone just went about picking up their oranges and what-not, ignoring the young person lying there gasping after leaping down from god knows how high to crash land and tumbling down a long flight of stone stairs.

After Arya mounts the waif face on the wall unJaqen gives her to understand her training is complete, but is cool with her leaving, possibly to start up a home enterprise.. Probably he wants a bit of peace and quiet, alone there in the gloom.

Thank goodness that misery is over with.

As for the rest: 

The Hound: .. meh... chicken joke (ho hum).. the shoe (boot) fits, so looks like he'll wear it and join up ... ready to mosey northward (?) with Lady Dondarrion and Thoros.

Brienne and Jaime: .. Sword travesty! Jaime told you you'd be protecting Sansa with a remake of Ned's own sword. WTF, woman!  .. Brienne's trip south is as useless and senseless as her trip north , only serving to lose her and Pod their horses,  and any funds they may have had in Jaime's camp, but proves they must have transporters, not jet packs, since they carried nothing into RR. I don't suppose they'll be in the rowboat for long, unless she has a secret mission to track down Gendry.
 Predictably, no visible death for Blackfish .. And Jaime hasn't asked to see the body - he's too preoccupied by thoughts of getting back to Cersei (but he does wave bye-bye to Brienne).

Tyrion fails to make the obligatory cock joke at the joke fest in Meereen. No worries, Bronn happily supplies the deficiency across the narrow sea..  Tyrion has definitely lost it. He's far from the strategist he once was. Grey worm is just telling him it's another fine mess he's gotten them into when they hear the thumping and scrabbling of a dragon landing on the roof and Dany arrives to save the day .. We can tell at a glance that she's not only fire-proof, but wind-proof as well.

Cersei's choice of violence is pretty anti-climactic ... only one boring decapitation.. I think Ser Robert's execution of the urinating drunk was more dramatic.  Lancel lives another day and Qyburn hints at wildfire stockpiles ..

I was pretty numb throughout. Mainly, my eyes are very tired from rolling.

'Night, all.

And my face and stomach muscles are tired from laughing! You made my day! AWESOME post, so funny and yet so true...

[sweetsunray]

1 hour ago, Cas Stark said:

Skylar wasn't very sympathetic a lot of the time.  She bosses around her husband constantly before he goes Heinsenberg. She acts out her frustration by having an affair and ruining the guy's literal life.  She helps steal the car wash from someone whose only crime was seeing Walter White for the POS that he always was underneath.  She tells Walt to kill Jesse.  Her lawyer gives her good advice that she ignores to preserve her own reputation.

Disliking Skylar doesn't mean you are excusing Walt for his myriad crimes and constant feeding of his personal ego once he let the id out of the bottle.  

So, I don't see the parallel.  Sky was never written as stupid, like the Starks are, she was never written in a way to prop up Walter, like the Starks prop up the Lannisters and the Boltons.

I was not talking about "dislike", nor saying the scapegoats are "white as a lilly". "Scapegoating" is a process that involves an irrational hatred in which the scapegoat must be eviscerated, destroyed completely.

I can't directly comment on Skylar of BB since I never watched that show except for an episode here or there. But I do find it interesting you mention "bossing around". I do observe that when a woman does that to a man in a story, it often creates a "sympathy for the man, hatred for the woman" in that portrayal, even if that man is say abusive for example. That aside, since it would lead me to go off topic. What I do know is that at the time, I saw many comments of the blackest, irrational hatred for Skylar and calls for evisceration of her.

Something similar happened or is happening for the Eleanor character in Black Sails after S3, with people even defending Charles Vane for murdering and torturing her father. And in the show she is by the way hated by many characters for having been bossy (when she deposed a captain for gang raping a whore). Personally, I did not like Eleanor much until S3, despite the fact that I loved Charles Vane for the S2 finale.

But scapegoating isn't about "disliking" someone. It's visceral, irrational hatred, with emphasis on irrational. These scapegoated characters (Skyler, Eleanor, Sansa, Catelyn, Starks) aren't exactly good people, nor do they need to be. They are scapegoated, while other characters do far worse and yet are admired for it.

Take for instance Sansa. She is not exactly likable in the first book, but the wrongs she did do not begin to compare with the wrongs characters like say Tyrion does, let alone Tywin and monstrous characters. More, she did them at the age of 11. And yet the hatred for Sansa, a child girl, can be visceral. The same goes for Catelyn.

The weird thing is (and here's where the comparison comes in): the writers of Breaking Bad and Black Sails never intended for the characters that were scapegoated by a vocal and significant section of the audience to be scapegoated. The writers of Black Sails talk about Eleanor in interviews for S4 in a way that's clear they like her, has grown on them, and do defend her S3x09 decision with - "Charles Vane did murder her father. What did you expect?". In comparative contrast, d$d have written the Starks in such a way and have talked about Ned in a way the writers have more than a "dislike" for the Starks. And despite their efforts (Wamsay Sue, St Tyrion, etc), at least the audience still hopes for a Stark restoration - although they did succeed it seems in smearcampaigning Ned Stark, and Robb. 

[jbent87]

1 hour ago, She-Wolf of Winterfell said:

Wow, awesome. I would have loved to see this. Not the fake 'Lem' we got in the show.

this guy is awesome for doing that. What a beast. 

[Prince of the North]

16 hours ago, BlueNightzx said:

they rushed too fast, run out of content, realized their own writing(dorne arc) was terrible, turned back in time to squeeze ,material from the books, and made a huge fuck*ng mess

Thank you for stating this!  I've been railing about it for quite awhile now and I feel it can't be stressed enough.  I still wonder how all those who criticize AFfC/ADwD honestly feel about the show going back and including so much of their material after approaching things as if they were basically going to skip them almost entirely?  

7 hours ago, lostcause said:

Right, so I actually liked Riverrun for a large part. Way closer to the books than I thought they would handle that one. And NCW got to show some acting range here! Loved the scene between Edmure and Jaime.

 

That said, this is the rant thread so here goes:

- Did not like killing the Blackfish offscreen. Felt like they just didn't have the time to do the coreography for that scene.

- The chase scene between the Waif and Arya; while it wasn't a horrible chase scene, it just made no sense for one of the faceless to resort to that sort of thing. She could just stalk Arya and re-ambush her instead of high profile chasing through market squares.

- Mereen was boring. Nothing new there. Hopefully with Varys away from Tyrion he can go back to a bit of his old self. I'd love to see the Spider reclaim his little birds and show the Kings Landing crowd how to do cloak and dagger in style.

 

Yep.  The Faceless Men would never have a running battle through the streets of Braavos in broad daylight.

7 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

Really, what is this show now? A commentary on the books apparently. It's not just a mangled rehash, but well they do a 180 degrees and then in some gross manner. They basically shit, piss and fuck up book scenes, constantly, and no those aren't tWoW scenes, but aFfC and aDwD scenes.

[Snipped a lot of great stuff for length]

META-META: D&D start the epsisode by warnign us they're going to "fuck" RL plot arc of aFfC and aDwD "up the ass", "butcher it with an axe", and end it with a "piss on that", with "that" = a river running (RR) and LS.

They can do symbolism. They did read hte books. They're smart enough to deconstruct the scenes. But all they do with their energy and effort and OURS is write a big meta-"fuck you". Pure troll-fic.

ETA: I don't want a show to be a meta-commentary on its source. I fucking want a story!

 

Yes!  Excellent post!  I've had this feeling for some time now but it was hard to put my finger on it exactly or to really articulate what I am feeling.  And this is it!  Meta-commentary via troll-fic!

5 hours ago, The Knight in Motley said:

Problem is, I think they want us to think that this was all Arya's 'plan'.  She obviously did mean to lure the waif there, but I sincerely hope her plan didn't involve letting the waif get the drop on her, because that's some serious pre-cog shit that she new the Waif would go for the gut, unless Arya secretly knows she's a Highlander and a gut stab with a twist to tear up intestines can easily be healed with Soup and Tape.

Its bullshit writing when characters act off knowledge of what is going to happen, just to make it look like they were prepared for everything.  Its also a huge assumption that the waif never had blind-fighting training either.  In fact the waif getting beat badly by Jaquen while blind would go somewhat towards explaining her zeal in bashing in Arya's blind face.

But no.  Occam's Script says Arya heals a disembowlment with soup and then kicks the terminator's ass.

HA!  Yes, I actually had the thought during the ridiculous chase scenes that "Wow!  It's the 'Waif-inator'!"  And, of course, I completely agree about the ridiculousness of Arya pretty much shrugging off multiple six-inch deep abdominal stab wounds!  It's literally like the Black Knight from Monte Python and the Holy Grail - "It's just a flesh wound!"

3 hours ago, The Prince of Porne said:

[Snipped a lot of great stuff for length]

Yep.  Instead of sitting down with the copious source material and the author and planning out the whole series from the beginning, trimming this and that, combining this and that, etc., as competent writers would have, they've simply made it up as they went along.  And it certainly shows!  Also, I think they've not only been making many changes from season to season but it very much seems as if they make changes from episode to episode.  It's no wonder things like internal consistency and logic fell by the wayside long ago.

[Dragnipur]

At this rate im starting to think the others invasion and subsequent battle will be off screen. 

[Prince of the North]

11 minutes ago, Dragnipur said:

At this rate im starting to think the others invasion and subsequent battle will be off screen. 

Nah!  That shit doesn't even matter! /s 

[williamwire]

3 hours ago, Tijgy said:

Not sure if the link works, but an deleted scene from ASOIAF with Lem

Uh oh, someone read the books. No wonder he had to die.

[GhostNymeria]

My first reaction after watching this episode was that Wind of winter can't come soon enough. 

D&D have been writing them selfs in to corner, which they have for a long time now, but this episode really took the prize for me. The biggest problem they have, apart from being bad writers, is that in earlier seasons they at least tried to follow the books, and they included "minor" characters like the Blackfish and the Brotherhood (btw, I'm not saying they don't have a purpose in the books). Now they've changed the story so much that they don't know what to do with all these characters (count in the direwolfs here as well). When they change one thing (like not including LS), then consequently they have to change a bunch of other stuff as well for the story to make sense. Like the Brotherhood plot, Lem and his 2 goons going on a murderspree and getting hanged by Beric was cheap and stupid. Just so D&D could have a replacement plot for LS.