Rant & Rave without repercussion S 5 continued [book spoilers]

[TepidHands]

Am I the only one who can't help but think of anti reading D&D Snark to go with pictures and tweets like this:

 

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/585855887484575744/photo/1

http://gameoflaughs.com/i-should-have-read-the-books/

[Le Cygne]

What a joke, not falling for that. The question was about a specific storyline. He dodges answering that by saying no one cares about someone they don't know, which is bullshit. It's his job to show us those stories.

Lots of people cared about the young girl they trotted out to make Meryn Trant look super duper evil by raping her. She was on screen for maybe a minute, and they didn't even try to make her matter, but she did.

And readers despise Littlefinger for what he did to Jeyne. If you bother to write a story, people will respond. If you resort to cheap tricks, they will respond, too, but not to the story.

[Prince of the North]

 

 

“It’s like a two-tiered system,” he noted. “If a superhero knocks over a building and there are 5,000 people in the building that we can presume are now dead, does it matter? Because they’re not people we know. But if one dog we like gets run over by a car, it’s the worst thing we’ve we’ve ever seen. I totally understand where that visceral reaction comes from. I have that same reaction. There’s also something shitty about that. So instead of saying, ‘How could you do this to somebody you know and care about?’ maybe when it’s happening to somebody we don’t know so well, maybe then it should hit us all a bit harder.” 

 

 

 

Well according to Dan Weiss, they're trying to teach us a moral lesson (iin this instance, with Stannis torching his heir):

 

Uh, Dan, it's FICTION. All we know about is what you're so damned eager to show us, which has been child-burning and rape and betrayal. 

 

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/06/07/game-thrones-Shireen

HA!  Thanks for supplying the above quote.  That's comedy gold right there!

 

What a joke, not falling for that. The question was about a specific storyline. He dodges answering that by saying no one cares about someone they don't know, which is bullshit. It's his job to show us those stories.

Lots of people cared about the young girl they trotted out to make Meryn Trant look super duper evil by raping her. She was on screen for maybe a minute, and they didn't even try to make her matter, but she did.

And readers despise Littlefinger for what he did to Jeyne. If you bother to write a story, people will respond. If you resort to cheap tricks, they will respond, too, but not to the story.

It's comedy gold because, as TepidHands and Le Cygne are getting at here, the audience will care about whoever and whatever the storyteller wants them to care about.  Also, it completely flies in the face of not wanting to include Brienne's travels in the Riverlands in the show, of thinking that all of that was sooooo boring.  That was basically the whole point of Brienne's story in AFfC!  It was precisely to show us all those people "we don't care about" and to make us care about them!  

 

Great, now my brain hurts again!   :tantrum:

[Shuvuuia]

uhm, so we should feel bad for caring for Shireen (and did they miss that it wasn't just her burning people were complaining about, but also Stannis's characterisation and ridiculous circumstances that lead to the burning) but they've put Snasa in Jeyne's place because they wanted a familiar face there, not someone unknown. Or did they think that viewers won't care for Jeyne, so they had to put Sansa there, soooo it was all our fault? 

[TheCasualObserver]

I hate that they raised the question of Stannis' downfall being linked to saving the world. It's ludicrous because they never actually seriously addressed that issue. Stannis doesn't burn Shireen to save the world, he does it to maintain his campaign against the Boltons. Benioff also mentioned that this was the logical end point for his "ambition".

 

Nobody views Stannis' decisions as being morally defensible and the show runners never intended it to be. The only real focus of that question (is the death of a child worth the survival of the world?) was in the Behind the Episode immediately following the show, because they sure as hell didn't put it in the story itself.

[Primalsplit]

 

 

LOL!  Get hype! 

Ser Gendry of Hollow Hill, bounty hunter, maker of swords, looks like a king and fights a bastard!  Watch him sweep the outlaws and bandits of the Riverlands right into the Trident! He fights with the sword and hammer!  Ser Gendry, making the Riverlands safe for maidens and other gentle folk!  Ser Gendry, a true knight!

You forgot the part about parallels with Odysseus.

 

The show taught me:

Gendry - Odysseus

Stannis - Agamemnon

Jon Snow - Julius Caesar

Olly - Et Tu Brutus

Margaery - Anne Natalie Boleyn

Jaime - Prince Charming from Shrek

[LongRider]

 

 

You forgot the part about parallels with Odysseus.

 

The show taught me:

Gendry - Odysseus

Stannis - Agamemnon

Jon Snow - Julius Caesar

Olly - Et Tu Brutus

Margaery - Anne Natalie Boleyn

Jaime - Prince Charming from Shrek

 

Hound -Shrek

[TheCasualObserver]

 

 

You forgot the part about parallels with Odysseus.

 

The show taught me:

Gendry - Odysseus

Stannis - Agamemnon

Jon Snow - Julius Caesar

Olly - Et Tu Brutus

Margaery - Anne Natalie Boleyn

Jaime - Prince Charming from Shrek

 

Gendry is like Odysseus in the sense that he has pissed around in a boat for years.

[Le Cygne]

Hound -Shrek

Stranger - Donkey
Sansa - Fiona

http://kasiawoe.tumblr.com/post/54165576362/my-hand-slipped-forgive-the-shrek-quotes-but-god

[JeffreyB]

I can't believe some of these people are sniffy about Martin's talent and yet the "talent" HBO chose to lead this trainwreck of a show are responsible for the whole Dorne storyline, as well as Noddin' Olly, Ros the Prostitute Spy, Shireenbecue, MissWorm, Talisa the Sassy Medic, Sansa Bolton, Olyvar the Whoryvar, Cannibal Thenns  ... Where's the quality in that list? 

So much screentime wasted. Another D&D apologist argument : "10 hours isn't enough to tell the whole story, and it's impossible to produce more each year, so cuts have to be made. These books are impossible to adapt !" Well, maybe if the whole 10 hours were used to tell the actual story instead of having half of it wasted on crappy invented / butchered material, they wouldn't need more time.
I would also add 2 more things to that list :

-Battle at the Fist of the First Men. Now this is how I imagine the writer room after s2 : Nice cliffhanger, guys. Now let's follow-up with the action. There's definitely good stuff in there. Oh, wait, we need to use our effects budget on [insert pointless CGI-heavy season 3 scene here]. Yeah, let's just have a black screen and one or two dudes shouting in the background. Should do the trick, right ?

-The whole Return to Craster's/Karl Tanner plotline. We could have had Coldhands instead of this garbage, but no, they HAD to have another near-miss with Bran and Jon.

Not that long ago I re-watched the Wolverine:Origins movie or whatever it's called, the one written by one of our beloved showrunners. Let's just say AsoiaF isn't the only franchise that "creatively made sense"

[kissdbyfire]

So much screentime wasted. Another D&D apologist argument : "10 hours isn't enough to tell the whole story, and it's impossible to produce more each year, so cuts have to be made. These books are impossible to adapt !" Well, maybe if the whole 10 hours were used to tell the actual story instead of having half of it wasted on crappy invented / butchered material, they wouldn't need more time.
I would also add 2 more things to that list :

-Battle at the Fist of the First Men. Now this is how I imagine the writer room after s2 : Nice cliffhanger, guys. Now let's follow-up with the action. There's definitely good stuff in there. Oh, wait, we need to use our effects budget on [insert pointless CGI-heavy season 3 scene here]. Yeah, let's just have a black screen and one or two dudes shouting in the background. Should do the trick, right ?

-The whole Return to Craster's/Karl Tanner plotline. We could have had Coldhands instead of this garbage, but no, they HAD to have another near-miss with Bran and Jon.

Not that long ago I re-watched the Wolverine:Origins movie or whatever it's called, the one written by one of our beloved showrunners. Let's just say AsoiaF isn't the only franchise that "creatively made sense"

 

Instead, we had Ghost in a stupid wooden cage, because creatively it made sense for a huge direwolf to just take it. And the best of all, the one thing GoT excels at: another rape fest as background scenery, and Meera's almost rape. :ack:

[Primalsplit]

Stranger - Donkey
Sansa - Fiona

http://kasiawoe.tumblr.com/post/54165576362/my-hand-slipped-forgive-the-shrek-quotes-but-god

:drool:

 

Ok I admit my list had begun as something serious and ended as comedic. I mean, people were drawing parallels between Agamemnon and Stannis because of daughter sacrifice. And they were serious! So an Odysseus analogy only seems fair.

[Le Cygne]

It's comedy gold because, as TepidHands and Le Cygne are getting at here, the audience will care about whoever and whatever the storyteller wants them to care about.  Also, it completely flies in the face of not wanting to include Brienne's travels in the Riverlands in the show, of thinking that all of that was sooooo boring.  That was basically the whole point of Brienne's story in AFfC!  It was precisely to show us all those people "we don't care about" and to make us care about them!  

Exactly. Like Arya, upon hearing about the Mountain and his men raping a girl, named Chiswyk for a Jaqen kill. She didn't see it happen, she didn't even kill him herself, but you could feel Arya's quiet anger coming off the pages, and that mattered.

That told us a lot about the lives of the smallfolk, and Arya. Tywin, too, he is the one who set his men upon the smallfolk. The show wiped that out, and made him her kindly grandpa. Maisie could have done a fine job with the book scene.

It's all in the telling, you let your main characters show how the minor characters matter. If we had heard about what Littlefinger and Ramsay did to Jeyne offscreen, through Sansa hearing about it, which will likely be the way it plays out in the books, how much more powerful than what they did.

[Primalsplit]

It is interesting after probably over 10 threads with 50-60 pages, we can still find something wrong with the show. I mean. Let's just stand in silence for a minute. Hats off to D&D&B. They are truly the masters of butchery.

[Le Cygne]

Oh, and the excuse that they wanted to give the Sansa actress more to do, after gutting the character, just no. They found extra Arya things for Arya to do in season 4, while cutting and rushing past Sansa's story.

The cheap shock things, like crying and bending over to be broken, and psycho killing with blood and gore all over the place, that's a dime a dozen. Instead of Theon's man pain that wasn't even a turning point...

We could see SANSA's face as she learned what Littlefinger did to her friend. The guilt for what she might have done differently. The horror of what her friend endured. The quiet anger. That would have been a memorable scene.

[TheCasualObserver]

 

So much screentime wasted. Another D&D apologist argument : "10 hours isn't enough to tell the whole story, and it's impossible to produce more each year, so cuts have to be made. These books are impossible to adapt !" Well, maybe if the whole 10 hours were used to tell the actual story instead of having half of it wasted on crappy invented / butchered material, they wouldn't need more time.
I would also add 2 more things to that list :

-Battle at the Fist of the First Men. Now this is how I imagine the writer room after s2 : Nice cliffhanger, guys. Now let's follow-up with the action. There's definitely good stuff in there. Oh, wait, we need to use our effects budget on [insert pointless CGI-heavy season 3 scene here]. Yeah, let's just have a black screen and one or two dudes shouting in the background. Should do the trick, right ?

-The whole Return to Craster's/Karl Tanner plotline. We could have had Coldhands instead of this garbage, but no, they HAD to have another near-miss with Bran and Jon.

Not that long ago I re-watched the Wolverine:Origins movie or whatever it's called, the one written by one of our beloved showrunners. Let's just say AsoiaF isn't the only franchise that "creatively made sense"

Benioff wrote Wolverine: Origins! I didn't believe you at first so I had to look it up. Jesus Christ.

 

I'm just perusing his wikipedia page now. He wrote 25th hour as well which was actually quite good.

 

And he was paid 2.5 million for the Troy script, which doesn't seem possible.

 

 

Change of subject: who else was weirderd out by the climax of Arya's story this year? As one of the few elements that I didn't outright hate, Arya's storyline stood out. But then Meryn Trants death was bizarrely horrific to look at. It went on for ages and we were "treated" to his moans of pain and anguish for minutes at once. It doesn't work as a subversion of a revenge trope (the target of the vengeance was a human being too) because they spent all his other scenes this season showcasing how repellent an individual he is. If Arya doesn't kill him here he just carries on abusing young girls, and he cannot be brought to justice because there are no police in westeros and as a knight of the kingsguard he is protected from due process. So Arya has no choice in the matter.

 

So why make it so excruitating to watch? It wasn't cathartic violence (seeing a bad guy get what he deserves) and it wasn't a situation that warranted clemency, so what the hell were we meant to think when watching that scene?

[TepidHands]

It is interesting after probably over 10 threads with 50-60 pages, we can still find something wrong with the show. I mean. Let's just stand in silence for a minute. Hats off to D&D&B. They are truly the masters of butchery.

They are the gifts that keep on giving.

 

Benioff, from another crappy EW article, on Cersei's WoS:

 

Cersei is a much trickier character she’s got more fury in her than Jaime. She’s a complicated woman. But I never saw her as a villain so much as somebody who’s just neurotically protective of her children and somebody who’s been just so abused in her relationships with men—whether it’s her father or her husband. She’s someone who’s furious at the role she’s forced to play and has a lot of anger.

 

He never saw her as a villain? "We have a wolf" didn't strike you as being particularly villainous, to humiliate her husband, irritate his choice as Hand and devastate her own son's fiance, not to mention killing an animal that had nothing to do with the "attack" on her son? That didn't PROTECT her child. That was done out of pure villainy. She schemed with her cousin to have her husband be so drunk he'd get killed by a boar, and then had a celebratory dinner. She captured Ros in season 2 and had her tortured and beaten and threatened to kill her, and sent Mandon Moore to kill Tyrion.

 

But in the show, because the showrunners never SAW her as a villain, she never really became one after that villainy Seasons1 and 2. Instead, they transferred the villlain mantle to Joffrey: He ordered the killings of his ersatz father's bastards. He tortured prostitutes. He was cruel to Tyrion and Sansa. 

 

Instead they write Cersei as some kind of protofeminist striver, an underdog trying to scrap her way into power, other than what we learned she was in the books: a woman who hated other women, is paranoid to the point of psychosis, and, as Tyrion said, "takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance."  She controls men through sex; women, if they're not sycophantic flatterers, wind up on Qyburn's table. 

 

Because Benioff says "we never saw her as a villain," they never saw the rotten but fascinating core of her character. They turned her into Carol the Relatable Tiger Mom. That's not storytelling. That's some kind of weird HBO-financed hagiography. 

[kissdbyfire]

^^ Oh, FFS! We don't even have to look back on previous seasons. Remember when some guys bring her a dwarf's head, it's the wrong head. Someone (can't remember who) makes a move or talks about punishing the guys, and she says something along the lines of, 'No, [don't punish them] mistakes will be made. I don't want to discourage others.'

Yeah, a real swell person, isn't she?

[kissdbyfire]

Benioff wrote Wolverine: Origins! I didn't believe you at first so I had to look it up. Jesus Christ.
 
I'm just perusing his wikipedia page now. He wrote 25th hour as well which was actually quite good.
 
And he was paid 2.5 million for the Troy script, which doesn't seem possible.
 
 
Change of subject: who else was weirderd out by the climax of Arya's story this year? As one of the few elements that I didn't outright hate, Arya's storyline stood out. But then Meryn Trants death was bizarrely horrific to look at. It went on for ages and we were "treated" to his moans of pain and anguish for minutes at once. It doesn't work as a subversion of a revenge trope (the target of the vengeance was a human being too) because they spent all his other scenes this season showcasing how repellent an individual he is. If Arya doesn't kill him here he just carries on abusing young girls, and he cannot be brought to justice because there are no police in westeros and as a knight of the kingsguard he is protected from due process. So Arya has no choice in the matter.
 
So why make it so excruitating to watch? It wasn't cathartic violence (seeing a bad guy get what he deserves) and it wasn't a situation that warranted clemency, so what the hell were we meant to think when watching that scene?

They really, really want to make certain characters' actions justifiable, and Arya is one of those characters. Now, why was the killing of Trant so over the top horrendous? Because the showrunners are COMPLETELY tone deaf.

[Mister Stoneheart]

They are the gifts that keep on giving.

 

 

.......

 

Because Benioff says "we never saw her as a villain," they never saw the rotten but fascinating core of her character. They turned her into Carol the Relatable Tiger Mom. That's not storytelling. That's some kind of weird HBO-financed hagiography. 

 

Absolutely, 100% agree.  It's like they look up some quick cliffnotes on 'feminism' and 'strong female characters', cherry pick the best ones they can remember, and roll with it.

 

Cersei IS villainous.  She's witchy.  She's bitchy.  She's also quite amusing, in a car wreck kind of way.  Book Cersei is fascinating.  Show Cersei is Tiger Mom, acted beautifully by Lena Headey.  It's like D&D are too afraid to show women who can be rotten?  They just really don't get female characters.

 

Don't even get me started on the Catelyn white-washing and line appropriation.