The Dragon Demands

They read the wiki, yet they come up with "Gendry Rivers"?!

My current mental state is the climactic scene from "Der Untergang" where Hitler Is Informed that Steiner was unable to make his last-ditch counter-attack, thus Berlin - and the war - truly are lost.

Naath has Butterfly Fever! Where the hell is Nymeria! (oh cool we saw a telescope for the first time) …..a constellation map? Did they use a real life one? Or did Elio's fever dream of an in-universe constellation chart finally bear fruit?

*I* Came up with the name "Battle of the Goldroad"! Because "Loot Train Attack" was idiotic! https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/The_Iron_Throne?diff=410669&oldid=410559 They read the damned Wiki?!

This was our great hope: that the final season of Game of Thrones would be so bad that General audiences would stop defending it. maybe now they’ll stop making excuses for the Sansa rape, Stannis death, and tv Dorne. and going on to Stat Wars? Which has more of a “fans news and analysis infrastructure” than we ever did? They bit off more than they can chew. Star Wars fandom will devour them.

I wonder what the heck they're going to do for Season 8's "Histories & Lore" animated featurettes....or if they'll even do them at all this season. As the TV show got wildly divergent, I've noticed that the animated featurettes were often the one thing book fans looked forward to - a chance to see some visual representation of background stuff from World of Ice and Fire, etc. (Also, Benioff and Weiss don't write them - since Season 2 / 2012, they were all by Dave Hill, who researches it well). Every year I try to speculate on what they'll make, or should make. They've already covered a lot of stuff, and Season 8 itself....barely covered any worldbuilding info. In past seasons you could kind of guess, like "oh, they're setting up the Golden Company and showed the Dragonpit, we'll see animated motion comics on this this year". Now, I have no idea. What were things you think they SHOULD or WILL make for Season 8's batch? Only ones I can think of are: Naath, the Summer Isles, and Sothoryos ("Lands of the Summer Sea") - actually going over World of Ice and Fire info on these regions (they never did in past seasons) House Mormont (short, but fun/relevant) ….Jenny of Oldstones? (the song was nice but had nothing to do with the scene) Problem is that they have ALREADY covered everything about the White Walkers in prior TV seasons! What more is there to add? And that applies to nearly everything. The other option was "make animated featurettes setting up potential prequels"....but they kind of already did that too. Based on GRRM's comments I'm reasonably sure two of the ideas in contention were Targaryen Conquest and Dance of the Dragons - BOTH of which they already made super-sized special animated videos for (20 minutes on the Dance in Season 5, and then 40 minutes on the Conquest for Season 7). AND they've covered the Long Night already! Since Season 1! So I wonder if we'll even get animated videos this year....it felt like they just plain weren't trying. Ironic given how much work went into physically filming each episode, the writing just felt like they were rushing through....only to then spend months filming it all? Some have suggested to me that they might just make longer animated videos on various different prequel eras, sort of covered elsewhere but just more extensive. "First Blackfyre Rebellion"? WEll…..they sort of already did that, mixed among other ones. Another possibility suggested to me is that they won't connect it to TV show at all, but just straightup make, say, a 60 minute special on the Jaehaerys and Alysanne material from Fire & Blood - sort of linking the Conquest and Dance animated videos, so you sort of put all three together and get a two hour "movie" of "Fire & Blood". That might be fun.

The last 20 minutes were just vanity shots of Maisie Williams’ emotive face

I don’t think any of this will happen in the books

The Kimmel interview from last week: Watch his hands. HIs face is all fake smiles ("Littlefinger's eyes don't smile when his mouth does" - Sansa), and he's saying all of these boastful, "Confident!" things....while nervously playing with his fingers. Constantly. Once you see it, you can never unsee it. He does it pervasively, always has in interviews - nervous that he'll face actual criticism.

TyyyyA thought occurred to me.... I was reading a show-apologist news post that was quoting off TV-only dialogue as if it was great wisdom from Benioff and Weiss... ...and what struck me is that they quoted off "Try smiling with your lips closed". I honestly couldn't remember it, so I looked it up: Theon says it to the daughter of the ship's captain (of the Myraham) he has sex with in Season 2. I looked it up in the books as well - it's a TV only line (in the books he only thinks she has a stupid smile in his inner monologue). This might be coincidence, but it set off a lot of red flags for me. .....I'm going to articulate this in future videos, and I don't want to start an argument about it on these forums so I will limit myself to things Benioff himself has openly admitted: The conclusion of all of my background research on Benioff (well, one conclusion, future videos) is that he is NOT some sort of drunken wreck - showing up to every interview and convention panel loudly announcing he's been drinking. It's all an act. A performance. And I mean, he admits it. That video clip I posted of him bluntly describing how he got the job: admitting that he was unqualified, but chuckling that he just puffed out his chest confidently to bluff Martin into thinking he knows how "TV production" works. There is a video of this. And really...that's his life. He isn't really trained in screenwriting, cinematography, he's bad a at long-form story structure (by his own admission!).....but he just "acts really confident" to fake his way into people thinking he knows what he's talking about. I am stunned this managed to fool so many sheep for so long. So you see, the "David Benioff" that we see in interview videos is a fictional character, a stage persona that he plays. And his behavior comes off as outlandish and insulting...because he's bad at it. He's trying too hard. And I sort of think (based on his comments in the DVD commentary for 25th Hour) that he's trying to imitate his father...a Wall Street banker type. He rants about how he both loathes them and wants to be them. That..."bro club", "alpha male", "locker room culture" thing. The idea being that a braggart Wall Street type tries to display their confidence through..."toxic masculinity". I know that word gets thrown around a lot....but the idea of intentionally acting...slovenly, rude, to display your dominance/confidence. Misogyny is part of that I guess. But...well, again, his statements: there's this scene in 25th Hour where there's this Wall Street power dealer who he describes in the commentary as "this is me as I want to be". And he's...eating rice with his bare fingers. When a fork is readily at hand, as another charater points out. It's just so over-the-rop ridiculous: Benioff IS NOT a swaggering, confident, "alpha male" dudebro....he desperately tries to be one, using his STILTED imitation of that whole...act. Performance. My point is when you get down to it, all Benioff ever fixates on are the surface-level things you'd see in some crappy self-help book about acting confident in a job interview. Just ALL THE TIME, to bluff his way through situations. Glib, superficial...."charm" in the sense of that toxic masculinity thing: he's trying to act like a slovenly braggart so people will think, "wow, look how confident he is! He must know what he's doing!" - but he never was a slovenly braggart, inherently. He's not very good at the act either. So just little things like that eat away at my mind: going back and seeing EVEN IN SEASON TWO, little bits where Benioff was...reshaping the story in his own image. Little things about body posture like...embarrassing someone else by saying "Smile with your lips closed, you poser"..... ...whether Benioff smiles or not does not go one way or the other to convincing me that, objectively, he either has a screenwriting degree or he doesn't. It's all just...superficial body posture tips with him. (Benioff himself always smiles with his lips closed, pursed...I used to think he was smirking....but, and he has explained this...it's actually because he has such awfully crooked teeth, and is deeply self-conscious about it) The worst part for me, the outrage, is how he isn't actually that good at the whole "confident body posture" routine. For years, since the earliest videos I can find of him, like 2008... he nervously plays with his fingers during interviews. He has stage fright (he has admitted this in other videos, fine). He does it so much that once pointed out, you can never un-see it again. It's a nervous tick and he does it more as he gets more nervous (because he doesn't really know what he's doing). You might not have seen this that much because...HBO has the sense to crop their behind the scenes videos into only headshots. To hide this. But...well, just last week, rewatch the interview he gave on Jimmy Kimmel. And just...pay attention to his hands. He does it so much that if he was your child out in public, you would chastise him for fidgeting. This is a guy who thinks he's "clever" for shutting someone else down by saying "Try smile with your lips closed"....to which I would coldly respond "Keep nervously playing with your fingers, it announces to me how terrified you really are". ....I know that was a weird Rant, but I JUST looked that up, and realized the line about smiling wasn't from the books at all.

Is anyone from the anti-Benioff and Weiss Ranters crowd physically able to attend convention events in the New York City area? If there is a GRRM appearance or a book rollout.

Wiki notes for episode 8.4 are mostly up - work on progress https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Starks

Benioff and Weiss doing something outlandishly crazy with the end of the White Walker storyline - time travel, teleportation, whatever - would have been better than what they did: nothing. Addicted Tv fans can put a positive spin on anything - in “something”. But it is more difficult to defend “nothing” - they just plain abandoned it.

Borenstein was also “busy” writing The Terror last year, but they didn’t drop prequels then

Why before episode 8.4, and not during the premiere? Could episode 8.4 contain setup for other prequels?