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dragonstone to the wall in a day?


dantares83

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16 minutes ago, Yoren Luck said:

I've never watched 24 but I agree that TV shows seem to be written for an audience with A.D.D.  Almost all interactions between characters are 30 seconds or less.  Game of Thrones is particularly susceptible to this because of the huge story being told and the huge cast of characters.  Presumably interactions are short because there are so many characters to fit into each episode and because the show runners don't want to bother showing characters discussing information with each other that the audience has already received from one of them in a previous scene from that character.  

So what you get is two characters sharing a 30 second dialogue per scene, regardless as to whether they just saw each other or haven't seen each other in three years.  This season this has felt even more egregious since we have so many reunions taking place.  Sansa and Arya have had maybe 3 scenes together, have barely discussed anything that has happened to them or their family or winterfell or the world in general since they last saw each other, and are already either embroiled in a new conflict with each other or secretly working together to trap Baelish.  Who can tell because they haven't spoken to each other on screen about literally anything

the scene with Arya and Brienne in the previous episode starts with Arya saying something like "its been a while since I've trained"... then two or three lines, a minute of sword play, and training is over.  Arya puts in a one liner about her being 'no one' and then bounces.  who needs to practice when you are the perfect killing machine i guess

This past episode Sam has a scene with the maesters at that table.  Sam says a few lines when he overhears them talking about Bran.  Archmaester says a few lines.  Sam leaves in a huff.  Archmaester never bothers to ask in any scene with Sam how he knows Bran, how he knows this army of the dead is real, what the night's watch is doing about it and why winterfell is suddenly worried also about it.  We are just supposed to assume all of this dialogue has happened off screen.  and then, to add insult to the scene, we find out after Sam leaves that the Archmaester knew his dad and bro just got roasted and didn't tell him because 'reasons'.  That scene could have been much longer, with the Maesters grilling Sam about his experiences north of the wall, complementing him on curing greyscale, and then consoling him about his family loss.  instead it was probably two minutes and ended by giving us nothing but a slightly better context for sam ultimately deciding to leave the citadel.  it still could have ended with the same result in a longer scene, with the maesters saying they want more information first and sam leaving frustrated.  At least then it would have felt like an actual human interaction.  

that's just one example off the top of my head from this past episode, but really every scene these days could use more dialogue between characters.  But apparently people don't want longer scenes with more dialogue when most of what is being said is known to the viewer, even if it feels completely unnatural to have scenes without that sort of conversation/context.  I'm already dreading the inevitable reunion between Arya and Jon when they hug, talk for 6 lines about being no one and being a brooding reluctant king and then move onto the next scene without mentioning absolutely anything of substance that has happened to them as people in the past few years.  I know we don't need to hear it again because we've experienced it through them firsthand, but it makes the characters feel wooden when they don't interact with each other in ways that normal people would interact when they haven't seen each other in a while.  

I also am sick of the ways the show runners like to end dialogue between characters that absolutely should be longer and has no reason not to be longer, but is cut short by some contrived interruption.  Jon pets a dragon for 3 minutes, Dany says something creepy about her considering her dragons her children (which sounds like a cat lady thing to say unless you assume Jon learned of how she hatched them and raised them off screen), dany finally gets around to asking him if hes undead...and in walks fucking jorah mormont to stall that dialogue for another episode because 30 seconds of interaction between two characters is all you get. 

Sam and Gilly had the same treatment this episode.  Gilly (who is virtually useless as a character at this point and maybe always was) is actually about to say something useful...and then Sam snaps about the Maester life sucking and 52,000 shits and then goes to steal a bunch of scrolls and books in the dark, because you know, Sam and Gilly arent allowed to speak to each other for longer than 30 seconds on screen at a time and we need to tune in next week to see the stunning conclusion of that thing Gilly was talking about before Sam decided to uproot his family on a whim (or at least is seemed like it since, you know, he had never mentioned his considering leaving the citadel to anyone, including the woman he is living with).

I thought this would get better as more characters came together this season but instead it's gotten worse.  They have so many opportunities to delve into these characters and explore their interactions with each other but refuse to do so because of self-imposed time constraints on the series and this notion that viewers don't want dialogue.  

 

 

 

Whoa... calm the fudge down, professor. We're not here for an autobiography on masochism and how you're one for watching a show you evidently dislike.

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For the record, criticizing the show does not mean you don't like watching it, otherwise why watch it at all. But you can definitely feel like it's going in the wrong direction or that odd choices that you disagree with are being made, and voicing that opinion does not mean you're somehow not entitled to watch the show.

We're all fans here, some more gushing and some more vitriolic than others, but still.

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7 hours ago, Mikkel said:

You're like a broken record mate.

No-one is bothered that GoT doesn't run in real time. It's the way it's done, with nothing at all happening while people are supposedly travelling, with the dreaded Army of the Dead apparently just waiting around while the other characters spend what should be months or even years travelling around. Maybe they similar things in earlier seasons, too, but they turned it up to, not just eleven but thirteen and a half this season.

Maybe it is necessary because they already decided to cut this season short (I wonder who made that decision), but be that as it may, the result is something that feels incredibly rushed.

Thank you Ser. I understand they can't show traveling all the time and nobody wants to see this, but the amount of ground that has already been covered this season, would imply months possibly even more than a year has gone by since Dany left for Westeros last Season, soooo what has been happening everywhere? This argument that "it took a few weeks or months but they just didn't show it" doesn't work if they don't show anything changing at all, that's what makes it look like they are teleporting everywhere.

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1 hour ago, Yoren Luck said:

This past episode Sam has a scene with the maesters at that table.  Sam says a few lines when he overhears them talking about Bran.  Archmaester says a few lines.  Sam leaves in a huff.  Archmaester never bothers to ask in any scene with Sam how he knows Bran, how he knows this army of the dead is real, what the night's watch is doing about it and why winterfell is suddenly worried also about it.  We are just supposed to assume all of this dialogue has happened off screen.  and then, to add insult to the scene, we find out after Sam leaves that the Archmaester knew his dad and bro just got roasted and didn't tell him because 'reasons'.  That scene could have been much longer, with the Maesters grilling Sam about his experiences north of the wall, complementing him on curing greyscale, and then consoling him about his family loss.  instead it was probably two minutes and ended by giving us nothing but a slightly better context for sam ultimately deciding to leave the citadel.  it still could have ended with the same result in a longer scene, with the maesters saying they want more information first and sam leaving frustrated.  At least then it would have felt like an actual human interaction. 

 

 

Ähm, they talked about Bran. Sam told them, that he knew him, that he met Bran and that he traveld north. He asked the maesters, how a crippled boy knows the same things he trys to explain them. (or something in that way).

So this scene was mutch more than "it could be a trap from the dragon queen".

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On 8/14/2017 at 10:07 PM, nymeria_2321 said:

Well 1 they weren't riding they were using a boat. And When are people going to get over this travel/time stuff on this show. There's only 7 episodes this season, would you like to spend an hour watching them on a boat? 

No, I would have liked them to plan for it, and paced better throughout, rather than justify cramming at the end.

The issue isn't that they don't show all the travelogues. It's not that they skip over the journey times. It's that the timelines don't match up.

For these travel times to actually exist in universe, just not shown, other characters would have to literally be standing around doing nothing for days and weeks. Sense of urgency communicated between characters is completely at odds with how long they are supposedly waiting between different scenes.

The other (lesser) issue is that the incredible rate at which travel time passes now is jarringly at odds with the previous seasons. It generally feels like poor planning and subsequent cramming.

 

An example of how to improve this would have been to have Jon start the wight hunt before going south to Dragonstone in the first place. He didn't really do a lot there, and it would have made just as much sense as a plot line for convincing Dany as for convincing Cersie. Sure you'd need a creative way to rearrange certain characters, but it would have made much more sense if Jon was out doing that, while all the battles between the Targs and Lannisters were going on, not after. Davos could have still been an emissary to Dragonstone and gotten started on the glass mining, since he doesn't seem to be going North of the Wall anyway.

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The main issue with caring less and less about travelling imho is that the show is breaking it's own rules with it.

Previosly, it was super important and had huge consequences that Robb simply had to cross a certian bridge with his army, Dany was stuck in Essos for 6 Seasons because she couldn't figure out a way to get to Westeros, Stannis sacrificed his daughter because his troops were stuck in the snowy north, It took Arya and the Hound an entire season to ride from the Riverlands to the Vale and we saw, how perilous this journey can be, etc.

Then suddenly, none of these issues exist anymore. Armies just pop up where they need to be, armadas get built offscreen, Arya travels from Braavos to WF alone without any trouble.

If people just effortlessly travelled everywhere in the world from the start of the series, ignoring the logistical issues one would reasonably expect in a medieval setting, I think, way more viewers could just accept it. But making it a huge plot point on one occasion and completely disregarding it on another, however it's convenient to move the plot along, it breaks the suspension of disbelief.

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1 hour ago, Yoren Luck said:

Presumably interactions are short because there are so many characters to fit into each episode and because the show runners don't want to bother showing characters discussing information with each other that the audience has already received from one of them in a previous scene from that character.  

So what you get is two characters sharing a 30 second dialogue per scene, regardless as to whether they just saw each other or haven't seen each other in three years.  This season this has felt even more egregious since we have so many reunions taking place.

... 

I thought this would get better as more characters came together this season but instead it's gotten worse.  They have so many opportunities to delve into these characters and explore their interactions with each other but refuse to do so because of self-imposed time constraints on the series and this notion that viewers don't want dialogue.  

I hadn't really put this into words before, but yes, exactly! The abbreviated interactions are making the show feel like an extended "previously on" scene, where they whittle the last episode down to the bare minimum to convey what happened.

In some of the later seasons of Lost, they would have an hour long previously on episode before the premiere to catch viewers up on the entirety of the series. What's funny is that an hour of Game of Thrones these days covers more time than an hour recap of seasons 1-3 of Lost.

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I have no problem with the show having Jon in Dragonstone one scene at the Wall the next, providing nothing worth showing happens during his journey, which I presume is the case.

The main issue lies in how that timescale works for the rest of the characters. How long are we going to say that journey would have taken? Weeks, definitely. A month, certainly. Months, maybe. That's more time that Littlefinger has just been lurking around Winterfell. More time for the Northerners to have been led by Sansa. More time for Sansa and Arya to bicker. Arya seems the restless type, would she be happy enough sitting around Winterfell as long as she has been?

What has Daenerys done in that time? She could well have been in Dragonstone half a year, maybe more, by now. Has she really stayed still since she, Drogon and the Dothraki attacked the Lannister and Tarly army? I presume she has as they are seeking an armistice, but what has she been doing to pass the time in between? And Cersei, if she is pregnant, surely by the next time we see her, she should have a bump.

If in the next episode, the show can find away to satisfy us there has been no reason for anything else to have happened in Westeros for the time it took Jon to get from Dragonstone to the Wall, there shouldn't be a problem. If in the next episode, it looks like no time has passed at Winterfell, Dragonstone or King's Landing at all, then there is definitely a continuity problem.

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Part of the reason people assume, and complain about, ridiculously implausible travel times that aren't stated anywhere is that when the travel times are stated, they usually are ridiculously implausible.

For example, we know for a fact that Jaime went from King's Landing to Casterly Rock to Highgarden to King's Landing in under 14 days, including the time to empty out CR, win the siege of HG, loot the Tyrell lands, and transport all that gold and food. That's flat-out impossible, even by the most conservative geography assumptions.

And it's not just the show—GRRM frequently seems to forget he made Westeros the size of South America rather than the size of Britain.

Still, I don't get why people are complaining 7 seasons in, especially about one of the few scenes that we don't actually know for sure involved impossible travel times.

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8 hours ago, ShadowKitteh said:

The film The Martian doesn't all take place within the running time of the film. It covers years. 

Yes, we know. You know how we know that? Because the movie repeatedly displays a little number, which tells us how many days passed between scenes. Because by the end, we see Mark Watney having aged, and considerably lost weight.

GoT fails miserably as showing the passage of time. Reasons why it fails have already been given by other people here, so I won't repeat.  

10 minutes ago, falcotron said:

Still, I don't get why people are complaining 7 seasons in, especially about one of the few scenes that we don't actually know for sure involved impossible travel times.

People have been complaining about this since season 2, when Littlefinger started showing up in different places.

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7 minutes ago, falcotron said:

Still, I don't get why people are complaining 7 seasons in, especially about one of the few scenes that we don't actually know for sure involved impossible travel times.

Because more and more, everything in the show is being cast in the light of the most impossible travel time of them all: The Army of the Dead's endless march on the Wall.

It's being used more and more as a catalyst for urgency, yet apparently incredible time span can pass while people and armies teleport all over Westeros and back without the Army of the Dead getting anywhere. An army that doesn't need to sleep, rest, or food to boot.

They've been politely on pause while everybody else gets perfectly ready and all other wars get kindly wrapped up. They're being used as both an immanent threat AND a stall for time, which is jarringly at odds. And many of us fear that after seven years of hype, the final apocalyptic confrontation will underwhelm as it gets pushed further and further into a bookend of the series.

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The show's problem is that there are now multiple instances of totally implausible travel that happen in every episode if not multiple times in each episode.  Giant armies are traveling huge distances and still showing up to surprise the other side.  You can get away with that every so often, because it's fiction.  But when you start doing it all the time, where in every confrontation the other side shows up in the nick of time out of nowhere, then you are cheapening your story.  And obviosuly, the more often you have characters traveling the length of the country and back and back, the more people will notice it.

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On 8/14/2017 at 8:33 AM, dantares83 said:

this show is joking right?

You should watch The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.  You'd love it.

 Also, try out Hacksaw Ridge.  During the span of the movie he went from his home in Virginia to Okinawa in less than an hour.  Absolutely ridiculous, right?  And it was in the 1940s...even our fastest plane back then would have only gotten him to maybe St. Louis in that span of time!

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38 minutes ago, DarkBastard said:

You should watch The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.  You'd love it.

 Also, try out Hacksaw Ridge.  During the span of the movie he went from his home in Virginia to Okinawa in less than an hour.  Absolutely ridiculous, right?  And it was in the 1940s...even our fastest plane back then would have only gotten him to maybe St. Louis in that span of time!

If you'd bothered to read the rest of this thread, you have seen that reasonable grievances are mentioned about this. 

Also funny that you mention Hacksaw Ridge.

Spoiler

The film does screw up the timeline, and it contradicts Doss's motivation of wanting to serve, because it is the right thing to do, and everyone else in his town served. The movies starts with him wounded at Okinawa, and then backtracks a year earlier, when he is at home, which is clearly mentioned in the film. But battle of Okinawa took place in 1945, just a few months before the end of the war. So why did Doss wait so long to enlist? Well, in real life he didn't, as he joined the service in 1942.

 

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I must have missed the words "One day later...". Why would you assume that only one day is meant to have passed? Why not just use your imagination and assume that the necessary amount of time has passed... Instead of looking for reasons to complain. It's a bit unreasonable, to say the least, to think that this TV show should document the entirety of each long journey, of which there are many. Are you also pissed off that you don't get to see more characters having poos and wees? Are you outraged that the characters on this TV show apparently don't have a digestive system?

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1 hour ago, Corvinus said:

If you'd bothered to read the rest of this thread, you have seen that reasonable grievances are mentioned about this. 

Also funny that you mention Hacksaw Ridge.

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The film does screw up the timeline, and it contradicts Doss's motivation of wanting to serve, because it is the right thing to do, and everyone else in his town served. The movies starts with him wounded at Okinawa, and then backtracks a year earlier, when he is at home, which is clearly mentioned in the film. But battle of Okinawa took place in 1945, just a few months before the end of the war. So why did Doss wait so long to enlist? Well, in real life he didn't, as he joined the service in 1942.

 

I didn't see any of what I cited earlier in the thread. If you don't like my jokes you could have simply said "I don't like your jokes"...or simply ignored it like I do when I don't like someone's jokes.

Not sure where the Hacksaw Ridge reference you posted came from, I also did not see that in this thread.  But I am getting old, maybe I missed it.

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22 minutes ago, DarkBastard said:

I didn't see any of what I cited earlier in the thread. If you don't like my jokes you could have simply said "I don't like your jokes"...or simply ignored it like I do when I don't like someone's jokes.

Not sure where the Hacksaw Ridge reference you posted came from, I also did not see that in this thread.  But I am getting old, maybe I missed it.

My point was that Hacksaw Ridge is not a good example, because the film tells the viewer exactly how much time passed between Virginia and Okinawa - 1 year. And ultimately the film fails a bit at that, as I mention in the spoilers, but it's not that important, as the film is about a different kind of journey. 

On the other hand, in GoT, we see warfare from the pov characters that are involved in making strategic decisions, we see battles, troop movements etc., yet with details glossed over, because the show has decided that only the final destination is important, and the journey is not. And that is poor writing.

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