The Dragon Demands

Your post was amazing. this part sums up that aspect well but the underlying cause of that much cognitive dissonance - for that many YEARS - baffles me most of all at least we can take solace that, even for the general audience, the hype bubble burst after season eight and they finally turned on it. this also means people are less willing to defend all earlier seasons ( fewer people willingly defend the season five Sansa rape as if you’re making a personal attack against them)

We won’t forget them. The internet is written in ink not pencil.

Actually it was a reasonably large scale survey some statistics grad student did. and just, observationally - you do see a lot of people who liked Battle of the Bastards people don’t have a long memory

I suppose much of this comes back to "why was Season 6 so well received even though it didn't fix the core problems with the show, storylines that were bad at the beginning stayed bad"(Dorne, North, etc. and even Arya got bad). It was, objectively, a better season than five was....not saying much....and it was "back heavy" - the ending was reasonably solid - well, compared to how season 7 was really bad at the end (imagine if say, randomly killing off the Martells happened at the end of season 6 instead of the beginning.) I'm still fascinated by that relatively large scale poll someone conducted last year, in which book and TV fans generally gave the same rankings to TV seasons (one and three at the top, five at the bottom)…..but book fans only ranked season 6 higher than season 5 (often below season 4)…..while TV only fans ranked it as like, a close second to season 1. Other seasons broadly fell into the same ranking spectrum for both, give or take. Daenerys storyline finally being in motion? I'm stunned at the stupidity of people who really got won over by the Battle of the Bastards....many WERE NOT, many did complain about all the plot holes in it, but so many just plain got won over by the spectacle. And of course "wow, Sansa is Strong for Killing Ramsay! This makes up for the rape!" --- 1- No, she didn't "defeat" him, other characters did, I was gaping at the absurdity of this. They think if Sophie Turner is making a stern "power face" that's Sansa being powerful - this is not theory but fact, I mean they rant about how Strong she is due to her Face in the commentary.....2 - Even if she did "defeat" him, which she didn't....that's utterly lowest common denominator "let's make the bad guy rape a female character then see him beat up" ugh.

David Benioff at Austin Film Fest panel: "The great thing is, if I stay silent long enough, other people will answer questions for me"

So in summary: why weren't D&D criticized in Seasons 5 to 7 as much as they were for the Austin Film Fest panel in October 2019? Even the PBS Idaho November 2016 video interview, which said largely the same things? 1 - D&D were smart enough to avoid "real" interviews since Season 4 started. PBS Idaho was the only real audio-visual interview in all that time. Time.com pre-season 7 one of the few text-based ones not actively screening out weird stuff they'd say (not by EW, which was their mouthpiece)? D&D had the "low cunning" to avoid interviews after poorly received seasons. They even had the wherewithal to avoid SDCC weeks before. What a massive blunder it was, even relative to their prior stupidity, to give the same flippant remarks after season 8 instead of after season 6. They have no filter. We should be surprised they were able to keep their incompetence a secret as long as they did. 2 - PBS Idaho (and Time 2017) happened after Season 6, which casual viewers liked on a shallow level (combined with using up the last few bits of good book stuff, such as the Hodor reveal) - it gave the APPEARANCE of recovery. Major polls confirm a sharp discrepancy between how book fans rank Season 6 very low, while TV only fans actually rank it among the top seasons alongside seasons 1 and 3. In short, people weren't willing to scrutinize Benioff and Weiss then. They might have if they said the same stuff right after Season 5, the Sansa rape etc. - they had the "low cunning" to only give public interviews when they were being praised, and to retreat for a year at a time after badly received seasons. 3 - "Brain drain" after most book fans stopped reporting on them after season 5, in disgust. Without that "conservative ballast", the remaining fanatics didn't WANT to scrutinize them ( it took something as bad as season 8 to shock people out of that level of denial they were willing to embrace ) HOWEVER...and it feels good to say this...that "Brain Drain" DID NOT last! Season 5 generated a lot of criticism - the older fandom didn't pack up right away, it took a few months. So Season 6 and its aftermath, we were starting over "cold", without the support network to report on plot holes or wacky things the hack writers said. But by Season 7, two things: 1 - enough critics, all over the internet, on youtube, everywhere, gradually did recover from the "brain drain" that hit after season five, and 2 - it simply wasn't as good of a season as six, but with increasingly big problems in it. We DID recover, gradually, incrementally, we've been rebuilding. Maybe not fully, but getting stronger. the Season 6 post-season was probably our lowest ebb. Season 6 a lot of people were willing to take as proof that it "got better" when it really didn't...and Season 7....started strong, but had to deal with the issue of barely a week into it or so, we got that bizarre "Confederate" announcement....that was THE first point that D&D were getting seriously criticized, from overreach. "The post season 6 pre-Confederate world" of Summer 2016 through Spring 2017.....that was a hard time. The D&D fanatics felt triumphant - but where are they now?! 4 - Simple "information overload" - the break between seasons 6 and 7 had so many Game of Thrones related news posts, from set reports to just the shit ton volume of posts about the celebrity actors, that it was easy to lose focus on "dear god, the first big interview D&D have done in two years". Post-Season 8, Austin panel happened in vacuum....to an audience that was finally disillusioned with them.

What baffles me is why the media finally reported on this incident, but not many others by D&D just as bad since season 5. The ONLY other live-interview Benioff and Weiss ever gave between Seasons 3 and 8, that was a REAL interview, with just them and no cast members to hide behind....was the PBS Idaho Writer's Conference Interview from 2016, post-Season 6. I'm still baffled why that didn't gain as much traction in the media, draw as much criticism, as the Austin Film Fest panel from October 2019. They say EXACTLY the same offensive things in it. Idaho was even a video, Austin just a live-tweet. Was it..."too obscure"? Austin was also obscure. What changed? I think it was more than one thing. Maybe it's just that until season 8, many casual viewers....as the saying goes, "thought they were speaking figuratively, not literally" when they bluntly admitted how little skill or training they actually had. It reminds me of the Jimmy Kimmel interview a few days after episode 8.3 aired.....while I wouldn't call it a "real, full, longform interview" (it's only 10 minutes not a full hour)….there's nonetheless an awkward tone, an "elephant in the room", when Jimmy asks things like "that couldn't really be the Night King's death, could it?" ( people didn't really like it, instead of praising it, to the point that they would ask D&D to their face "this isn't real, right?" )…..I mean most of the Kimmel interview they're in "bullshitting mode", reciting funny stories they have before...but this time, Kimmel makes a joke AT THEIR EXPENSE that "Wow, HBO sure had a lot of unfounded faith you guys to keep making Game of Thrones even after the first pilot failed and you demonstrated that you're really unqualified. That massive, ridiculous faith in you guys!" And Weiss tried to play it off with the usual self-deprecation, only to dig himself in deeper; trying to "own it" by responding "Some would call it Foolish Faith" (but this only made him look worse) I don't know if people were willing to "scrutinize" them even by season 6. so long as they had the "perception" of being a good show - I stress "perception" (Battle of the Bastards was a bunch of awful plot holes, but superficially "felt" good) ….Similarly, the pre-Season 7 interview they did with Time was deeply offensive, even though a text magazine interview..... I think the problem was that people didn't WANT to "scrutinize" them. It was easier to just go along with the pre-packaged...narrative, or myth, that D&D built up around themselves, the hype that "we're amazing geniuses". ….another factor is "information overload". It was easy for people to overlook interviews in the post-Season 6 to pre-Season 7 time period (Idaho video plus Time text)….Time was even a prominent one....but....24 hours news cycle. At the time, we were deluged with "hype reporting" - news sites that treated "D&D interview" with EQUAL MEASURE to "Maisie Williams babbles for 10 minutes about how amazing the last season was" or "Kit Harington talks for 5 minutes about how amazing next season is going to be, without saying anything of substance about it" So yeah.....it was easy for people who didn't WANT to know, to get distracted by other things. But since Season 8.....nothing. There's been total silence since the original reactions died down by....June or July? Definitely July. So August, September, even earlier into July just....total silence. Cast members not willing to talk about it, so there's no "buzz" about it, or for a new season.... …..you could hear the proverbial pin drop. And suddenly D&D go and make an awful public appearance like this. They couldn't have picked a worse time.

Benioff & Weiss Discuss Skipping Night Shoots for Season 8 at Austin Film Fest panel 2019

Clip: Benioff & Weiss At Austin Film Fest 2019 Admit They Rewrote Game of Thrones Characters Just to Show Off Their Favorite Actors

I’m interested in what specifically stood out to you. Also I’ve been meaning to ask: you call yourself “the swan” in French: what is your physical location?

12 minute montage clip of the Austin Film Festival panel from October 2019, in which Benioff and Weiss flippantly admit their total lack of writing qualifications - only to then be confronted about the lack of female or nonwhite writers -TRAINED writers - on Game of Thrones.

I'm not sure what to think: they never actually used the phrase "subverting expectations". We're just re-hashing arguments we had in Season 5 for Stannis, Sansa, and Ellaria: WE think they're "unpredictable twists made for shock value"...because we're rational. What's horrifying is when you listen to the Blu-ray commentaries and interviews, and...they truly do not comprehend that these things are simply incoherent. We overthought it. Because they're stupider than we are. Like someone trying to predict Book-Cersei's "strategy", and concluding that she's "stunningly out-thinking us by doing the unexpected, on purpose".....when the reality is that she does random, unexpected things....because she's an impulsive narcissist who does things at whim, with no thought to the repercussions.

Watch these clips. Watch, and hate.

Despite their claims that “it was inspired by Kurasawa’s Ran!” It doesn’t even look like that movie:

It wasn't even a bad idea on paper: pointing out "we didn't fix any of the problems that led to the fall of the Old Republic in the first place; a handful of wealthy planets and corporations, particularly those in war profiteering, continue to dominate the rest". the problem was that it just dragged on, and on, and on well beyond that. It's a scene that should have been as long as they were in Kijimi or something in TROS....not...what the hell was it, 20 minutes?!