Jump to content

Okay, NOW Have We Seen The Most Wildly Unrealistic Thing Ever on GoT???


Cron

Recommended Posts

50 minutes ago, Illiterati said:

I think a good solution would have been for Bran to have a Raven sent to Dragonstone.

Not great, but better than what they did,  Then we might have had Dany being conflicted over whether to believe these crazy ass Stark northerners or maybe it's a trap....and then decides fuck it, I'll go North and see all this shit for myself.

Much better than the KL blacksmith being the fastest and running to Eastwatch to send a raven. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Cas Stark said:

Not great, but better than what they did,  Then we might have had Dany being conflicted over whether to believe these crazy ass Stark northerners or maybe it's a trap....and then decides fuck it, I'll go North and see all this shit for myself.

Much better than the KL blacksmith being the fastest and running to Eastwatch to send a raven. 

Actually, even better, which I've mentioned before, is if Dany had stalked them up there secretly, wanted to see for herself what all this whitewalker commotion was about.  That would put her on scene with no need for confusion of timing.  She can come off as a control freak, so this action would have fit her character.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Illiterati said:

Actually, even better, which I've mentioned before, is if Dany had stalked them up there secretly, wanted to see for herself what all this whitewalker commotion was about.  That would put her on scene with no need for confusion of timing.  She can come off as a control freak, so this action would have fit her character.

That could have worked too.  We could have seen her and drogon land somewhere on the tundra and she can give a look like: nuthin up here boo.  And then drogon could hear something and they take off again and find the Suicide Squad.  All of it is a little contrived because we're working backwards from 'everyone gets saved' and the fact that all the remaining main/secondary characters going North together to get a wight for a woman that everyone is Westeros knows will backstab them...is already a bad storyline.  Having Tyrion sanction the stupidity only compounds it's awfulness.

But, that random internet posters have come up with several scenarios that are at least marginally better is not something that puts the showrunners in a very good light.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Lord Okra said:

Jorah brings the wights dying up to Jon and Jon says.......maybe that WW made those wights that died.  This works....it was explained in the show.  WW dies....the wights he had turned died with him.......one wasn't made by him so it survived for capture.

It was covered by dialog in the show.

That doesn't really cover the problem. They just so happen to encounter a group that has one odd zombie out? And that's a zombie they happen not to put down before Jon shatters the White? 

Unless the Night King deliberately set it up that way because he knew dragons were coming, it's awfully convenient. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 8/20/2017 at 10:30 PM, Cron said:

You think you've seen teleporting?  

You think you've seen jetpacking?

Don't make me laugh.

706 just upped the ante to a whole new level, never even imagined before, I think.

While Jon & Company are confronting the Army of the Dead, Gendry is sent to run back to Eastwatch, where a raven is sent to Dany on Dragonstone, then Dany hops on a dragon, and flies all the way back and makes it in time to save the expedition to capture a wight???

Face it, friends.  Reasonable continuity in terms of travel through time and space is out the window.

Completely out the window.

Ship chains for

Spoiler

dragon

was the biggest plot hole for me. Makes me wonder if the Night King has a ship somewhere... 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Lord Okra said:

 

They wouldn't freeze to death in 24-48 hours wearing what they were wearing.  5+ days then I'd agree......there'd be a good chance of them freezing to death.

Remember, the show requires them not only not to freeze to death, but to be healthy enough to fight an entire Army of the Dead for a good while before Dany can save them. And, in Jon's case, further to be tackled into the freezing water and still make it all the way back to Eastwatch harbor before he gets medical attention. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On ‎22‎/‎08‎/‎2017 at 7:19 PM, Darkstream said:

Give me a break! I really don't understand this insistence on defending d&d, and trying to blame others for their incompetence. 

They [d&d] are untalented, juvenile writers, that don't give two f**ks about writing an intelligent and cohesive story. That's all there is to it.

Because it's not their tale.  Although I do blame them for not following the source material available to them.  If they had done a more faithful adaptation of TWOW and ADOS then the show would have almost certainly been better.  With such wonderful source material available to them why did they have to go and do their own thing?!  Oh hang on a minute......

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Ser Gareth said:

Because it's not their tale.  Although I do blame them for not following the source material available to them.  If they had done a more faithful adaptation of TWOW and ADOS then the show would have almost certainly been better.  With such wonderful source material available to them why did they have to go and do their own thing?!  Oh hang on a minute......

This is beating a dead horse.  You can't possibly believe that there are no writers out there on planet earth who given the outline that GRRM gave them could not have come up with something better than what the show has been the last 2 seasons.  Therefore, the show sucks now because the showrunners suck.  It's possible that the story itself and the end will also really suck, but we don't know that yet, so GRRM can't be blamed for the end sucking.  It may or not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, Being Daenerys Targaryen said:

Oh yeah... That chain? Then Where did he get it? Where was that chain? Hardhome?

Quite possibly.  The chains could be anchor chains.  And again because there is no clock and date on the screen, combined with it's well known a lot of scenes are out of chronological order, it's possible that the scene took place days or weeks after the Dragon was felled.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Cas Stark said:

This is beating a dead horse.  You can't possibly believe that there are no writers out there on planet earth who given the outline that GRRM gave them could not have come up with something better than what the show has been the last 2 seasons.  Therefore, the show sucks now because the showrunners suck.  It's possible that the story itself and the end will also really suck, but we don't know that yet, so GRRM can't be blamed for the end sucking.  It may or not.

I am not saying that D&D have done a grand job.  My beef is with the people who slam them at every opportunity and refuse to accept that GRRM is as much, if not more, to blame.  He let HBO down on his end of the bargain.  If the show has gone off the rails from its earlier days its because in its earlier days it had quality source material to draw from and the assumption when they purchased the rights was that they'd have quality source material all the way through.

As for the ending, it's going to be the same.  D&D have already made that clear.  The final outcome will be 90% the same although some of the supporting cast may differ (e.g. I doubt Bronn will be there in the books at the end, but he may well be in the show).

All of the above said, given the quality of ADWD and the preview TWOW chapters there is no guarantee that being faithful to the source material would have produced anything better than what we have.  The books were never high art, but the last one was an abomination and the preview chapters don't improve on it.  It may be best for all concerned if the show becomes the canon and ASOIAF in book form simply fades away.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Meera of Tarth said:

Well, I have to say that this would not be a good idea, since one of the dragons had already died bc of the NK's javelin's abilities. And I thnk the other dragons would not want to go.

Well, even if the dragons were afraid (which I question),  Dany did not have to go all the way back to where Viserion died.

Current estimates are that Viserion died somewhere around 200 to 250 miles  or more away from Eastwatch. (Yes, that's correct.  This would mean Gendry ran about 8 to 10 marathons, back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back, in sub-zero temperatures, with no hat, in an unspecified time frame, but which was maybe only a few hours.  Thus, Gendry would have to have been running somewhere around 100 miles per hour, I would say.  Other estimates hold the raven would have to have flown to Dragonstone at about 250 miles per hour, and that Dany and the dragons would have to have flown back somewhere around 500 miles per hour.  Yes, the cruising speed of a jet airliner.  While she was sitting on Drogon's back.  Exposed to the cold, with a windchill of, quite possibly,, hundreds of degrees below zero. Without a hat.)

So, anyway, 200 to 250 miles would have been a LOT of ground for Dany to cover searching for Jon, without going anywhere near where Viserion died.

(Of course, I'm sorry to say, the whole thing is preposterous, but that's the information we are being given, as I strongly understand it.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Widowmaker 811 said:

Just wait until episode 7.  I have this bad feeling that show will set the record for lack of continuity ever on TV.  

Yikes I hope not.

i'm hoping the season will end really strong, so we will have that good experience to carry us through to 2019.   Or 2020. Or whatever. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, Ser Gareth said:

Because it's not their tale.  Although I do blame them for not following the source material available to them.  If they had done a more faithful adaptation of TWOW and ADOS then the show would have almost certainly been better.  With such wonderful source material available to them why did they have to go and do their own thing?!  Oh hang on a minute......

You can count me as one of the people who see both D&D and GRRM as partly at fault for why the quality of the show has dropped off in recent seasons.  But being sarcastic about D&D not being able to follow the source material for TWOW and ADOS faithfully because these books are not finished is disregarding the fact that they were already deviating quite a bit from the source material from books 4 and 5.

Even if you want to argue that it is best for them to have removed fAegon and UnCat from the show, there are clear instances where plots in the book are markedly better than the nearly exact plots in the show.  For instance, Book Arya's first FM assignment in Braavos was remarkably done in the books, in which she is given an ugly girl face and tasked with giving the gift of death to a snakey ship merchant/insurance salesmen type.  I won't spoil it but the way she kills him is a clever and well done scene.  This was cut altogether in the show, so we as the audience don't learn how resourceful discrete she is in giving 'the gift'.  

Furthermore, they cut her wolf dreams and all implications that she can warg.  Warging a cat was basically how she got out of being blind in the book.  In the show, she was blinded as a punishment for killing Meryn Trant. In the book this is just part of the training to hone her skills - not a punishment, and discretely warging a cat to see while she was blind was basically a believable explanation that GRRM gave readers to account for her super-fast acceptance and advancement in the faceless men (she tricked them using a hidden Stark power she didn't even really understand).  Show Arya's training in Braavos basically boils down to her being beat with a stick and tortured by the waif and somehow through all of this she becomes the world's finest assassin.  

And by cutting her wolf dreams we lost a lot of her connection and identity as a stark, with this only being represented in her time in Braavos by her keeping Needle.  In the book Arya manages to become 'No One' while still retaining her Stark identity and her connection to her direwolf.  In the show, she has become 'No One' but is being portrayed as a godless killing machine who has really lost a lot of her Stark identity and lost her connection to Nymeria.  These are unnecessary changes that could have been adapted verbatim from the book in the same number of scenes, or perhaps just a few more.  

And it is totally ignoring the most blatant issue many people have with her time in Braavos in the show, which is that after becoming this super good assassin and knowing full well the FM are going to be after her for leaving, she still lets her guard down and nearly gets killed by the Waif.  This scene was so poorly received that it spurred a number of fan theories to try to explain that what happened was more than meets-the-eye, after which the director had to go on record saying nope, "she was just being an idiot' http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/game-of-thrones-season-6-director-confirms-arya-was-just-being-an-idiot-in-braavos-scenes-a7082976.html

And that is just one small segment of Arya's storyline, and Arya is just one character of a dozen or more characters in this show that could have been adapted more closely to source material that is already published.  Jaime's arc in particular was butchered in the show compared to where he is at as a character by Book 4.  The Sansa/Littlefinger/Vale storyline was poorly done and required the invention of a cartoon character villain in Ramsey Bolton, and was so off track from the Bolton/Winterfell material in the books that I am still wondering where this is all leading to a full season after Winterfell has been reclaimed by the Starks.

I know GRRM is partly at fault, as I stated above, but D&D took some serious creative license with the show by season 4 and really messed up a lot of character development and character storylines.  These characters all may end up where they need to be in the long run, which for the show is fine i guess, but your remark about this not being their tale is just not true.  By season 7, over half of what we have seen is largely of their own making using characters and a world and a rough outline developed by GRRM.  It is little more than poorly done Fan Fiction dialogue with a huge CGI budget.

One final divergence that still pisses me off involves the Hound's character.  Not that I don't love his character in the show - he is probably my favorite at this point to be honest.  But when he resurfaces in the Riverlands after fleeing Kings Landing, we find with him a 'Brother Ray' played by Ian McShane.  Brother Ray is based off of Book Septon Meribald, who is famous for giving one of the best monologues in the entire series in my opinion.  The show adapted this monologue in the episode 'The Broken Man' which was named after the premise of this speech, which in book form was the following:

“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?”

“More or less,” Brienne answered.

Septon Meribald disagreed. “More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.

“Then they get a taste of battle.

“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.

“They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.

“If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world…

“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them…but he should pity them as well.”

When Meribald was finished a profound silence fell upon their little band. Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of pussywillows, and farther off the faint cry of a loon. She could hear Dog panting softly as he loped along beside the septon and his donkey, tongue lolling from his mouth. The quiet stretched and stretched, until finally she said, “How old were you when they marched you off to war?”

“Why, no older than your boy,” Meribald replied. “Too young for such, in truth, but my brothers were all going, and I would not be left behind. Willam said I could be his squire, though Will was no knight, only a potboy armed with a kitchen knife he’d stolen from the inn. He died upon the Stepstones, and never struck a blow. It was fever did for him, and for my brother Robin. Owen died from a mace that split his head apart, and his friend Jon Pox was hanged for rape.”

“The War of the Ninepenny Kings?” asked Hyle Hunt.

“So they called it, though I never saw a king, nor earned a penny. It was a war, though. That it was.”

 

Now the Show Version - - - 

 

RAY: I was a soldier once. All my superiors thought I was brave. I wasn’t. I mean, I never ran from a fight. Only because I was afraid my friends would see I was afraid. That’s all I was, a coward. We followed orders no matter the orders. Burn that village. Fine, I’m your arsonist. Steal that farmer’s crops. Good, I’m your thief. Kill those young lads so they won’t take up arms against us. I’m your murderer. I remember once a woman screaming at us, calling us animals as we dragged her son from their hut. But we weren’t animals. Animals are true to their nature and we had betrayed ours. I cut that young boy’s throat myself as his mother screamed and my friends held her back. That night...I felt such shame. Shame was so heavy on me, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep.  All I could do was stare into that dark sky and listen to that mother screaming her son’s name. I’ll hear her screaming the rest of my life.  Now, I know I can never bring that lad back. All I can do with time I’ve got left is bring a little goodness into the world. That’s all any of us can do, isn’t it? Never too late to stop robbing people, to stop killing people. Start helping people. (Stares at the Hound)  It’s never too late to come back.
 

The drop-off in quality from book monologue to show monologue is immense and there is no reason for it.  GRRM literally wrote the scene for them.  They even named the damn episode 'The Broken Man' but failed to use the term in Brother Ray's speech.  I'm sorry but this is one of a hundred such instances where the book dialogue is more impactful than the show dialogue.  Septon Meribald's speech talks of the human cost of war, the human experience of it, the futility of it.  It is an embodiment of "THE WHEEL" that we keep hearing needs to be broken by Dany.  Ray's speech just tells Sandor "hey dude, I also did bad things once but if you do good things now it helps you live with it"  You can't tell me Ian McShane couldn't have delivered the book monologue.  Dude is an Actor.  And then to add insult to injury, the f'ing guy gets killed like a minute later.  

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Ser Gareth said:

Because it's not their tale.  Although I do blame them for not following the source material available to them.  If they had done a more faithful adaptation of TWOW and ADOS then the show would have almost certainly been better.  With such wonderful source material available to them why did they have to go and do their own thing?!  Oh hang on a minute......

Oh good, so you agree that even though they are professional writers, getting paid a lot of money to write a story, they are unable to do so competently unless someone else actually writes it for them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

Well those wights sure seemed to try and nap their brother back, several times. Wights have feelings and cameradery. Imagine all the bro-talk they had for years. Oh, and they don't mind the women aren't alive :D

Hey, that's actually an interesting issue.  Where were all the wight women??

I didn't see any.  Or did I miss them??

We saw some at Hardhome (certainly, the Night King resurrected some at the end, including the mother of those two kids, I believe)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Angel Eyes said:

Ship chains for

  Reveal hidden contents

dragon

was the biggest plot hole for me. Makes me wonder if the Night King has a ship somewhere... 

Great point.

And frankly, I'm not even sure those were any kind of normal ship chains (although someone with experience in such maters might easily correct me)  Those chains were HUGE.  I don't think they were ordinary anchor chains (but, again, maybe I'm wrong)

On a related note, did you wonder HOW they got the chains tied to or around the dragon, when the Army of the Dead apparently can't or won't go in water (which we've now seen twice, once at Hardhome and once Beyond the Wall)?

If somebody's got a theory on that, I'd love to hear it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Ser Gareth said:

I am not saying that D&D have done a grand job.  My beef is with the people who slam them at every opportunity and refuse to accept that GRRM is as much, if not more, to blame.  He let HBO down on his end of the bargain.  If the show has gone off the rails from its earlier days its because in its earlier days it had quality source material to draw from and the assumption when they purchased the rights was that they'd have quality source material all the way through.

As for the ending, it's going to be the same.  D&D have already made that clear.  The final outcome will be 90% the same although some of the supporting cast may differ (e.g. I doubt Bronn will be there in the books at the end, but he may well be in the show).

All of the above said, given the quality of ADWD and the preview TWOW chapters there is no guarantee that being faithful to the source material would have produced anything better than what we have.  The books were never high art, but the last one was an abomination and the preview chapters don't improve on it.  It may be best for all concerned if the show becomes the canon and ASOIAF in book form simply fades away.

Hear! Hear!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

48 minutes ago, Yoren Luck said:

You can count me as one of the people who see both D&D and GRRM as partly at fault for why the quality of the show has dropped off in recent seasons.  But being sarcastic about D&D not being able to follow the source material for TWOW and ADOS faithfully because these books are not finished is disregarding the fact that they were already deviating quite a bit from the source material from books 4 and 5.

Even if you want to argue that it is best for them to have removed fAegon and UnCat from the show, there are clear instances where plots in the book are markedly better than the nearly exact plots in the show.  For instance, Book Arya's first FM assignment in Braavos was remarkably done in the books, in which she is given an ugly girl face and tasked with giving the gift of death to a snakey ship merchant/insurance salesmen type.  I won't spoil it but the way she kills him is a clever and well done scene.  This was cut altogether in the show, so we as the audience don't learn how resourceful discrete she is in giving 'the gift'.  

Furthermore, they cut her wolf dreams and all implications that she can warg.  Warging a cat was basically how she got out of being blind in the book.  In the show, she was blinded as a punishment for killing Meryn Trant. In the book this is just part of the training to hone her skills - not a punishment, and discretely warging a cat to see while she was blind was basically a believable explanation that GRRM gave readers to account for her super-fast acceptance and advancement in the faceless men (she tricked them using a hidden Stark power she didn't even really understand).  Show Arya's training in Braavos basically boils down to her being beat with a stick and tortured by the waif and somehow through all of this she becomes the world's finest assassin.  

And by cutting her wolf dreams we lost a lot of her connection and identity as a stark, with this only being represented in her time in Braavos by her keeping Needle.  In the book Arya manages to become 'No One' while still retaining her Stark identity and her connection to her direwolf.  In the show, she has become 'No One' but is being portrayed as a godless killing machine who has really lost a lot of her Stark identity and lost her connection to Nymeria.  These are unnecessary changes that could have been adapted verbatim from the book in the same number of scenes, or perhaps just a few more.  

And it is totally ignoring the most blatant issue many people have with her time in Braavos in the show, which is that after becoming this super good assassin and knowing full well the FM are going to be after her for leaving, she still lets her guard down and nearly gets killed by the Waif.  This scene was so poorly received that it spurred a number of fan theories to try to explain that what happened was more than meets-the-eye, after which the director had to go on record saying nope, "she was just being an idiot' http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/game-of-thrones-season-6-director-confirms-arya-was-just-being-an-idiot-in-braavos-scenes-a7082976.html

And that is just one small segment of Arya's storyline, and Arya is just one character of a dozen or more characters in this show that could have been adapted more closely to source material that is already published.  Jaime's arc in particular was butchered in the show compared to where he is at as a character by Book 4.  The Sansa/Littlefinger/Vale storyline was poorly done and required the invention of a cartoon character villain in Ramsey Bolton, and was so off track from the Bolton/Winterfell material in the books that I am still wondering where this is all leading to a full season after Winterfell has been reclaimed by the Starks.

I know GRRM is partly at fault, as I stated above, but D&D took some serious creative license with the show by season 4 and really messed up a lot of character development and character storylines.  These characters all may end up where they need to be in the long run, which for the show is fine i guess, but your remark about this not being their tale is just not true.  By season 7, over half of what we have seen is largely of their own making using characters and a world and a rough outline developed by GRRM.  It is little more than poorly done Fan Fiction dialogue with a huge CGI budget.

One final divergence that still pisses me off involves the Hound's character.  Not that I don't love his character in the show - he is probably my favorite at this point to be honest.  But when he resurfaces in the Riverlands after fleeing Kings Landing, we find with him a 'Brother Ray' played by Ian McShane.  Brother Ray is based off of Book Septon Meribald, who is famous for giving one of the best monologues in the entire series in my opinion.  The show adapted this monologue in the episode 'The Broken Man' which was named after the premise of this speech, which in book form was the following:

“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?”

“More or less,” Brienne answered.

Septon Meribald disagreed. “More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.

“Then they get a taste of battle.

“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.

“They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.

“If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world…

“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them…but he should pity them as well.”

When Meribald was finished a profound silence fell upon their little band. Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of pussywillows, and farther off the faint cry of a loon. She could hear Dog panting softly as he loped along beside the septon and his donkey, tongue lolling from his mouth. The quiet stretched and stretched, until finally she said, “How old were you when they marched you off to war?”

“Why, no older than your boy,” Meribald replied. “Too young for such, in truth, but my brothers were all going, and I would not be left behind. Willam said I could be his squire, though Will was no knight, only a potboy armed with a kitchen knife he’d stolen from the inn. He died upon the Stepstones, and never struck a blow. It was fever did for him, and for my brother Robin. Owen died from a mace that split his head apart, and his friend Jon Pox was hanged for rape.”

“The War of the Ninepenny Kings?” asked Hyle Hunt.

“So they called it, though I never saw a king, nor earned a penny. It was a war, though. That it was.”

 

Now the Show Version - - - 

 

RAY: I was a soldier once. All my superiors thought I was brave. I wasn’t. I mean, I never ran from a fight. Only because I was afraid my friends would see I was afraid. That’s all I was, a coward. We followed orders no matter the orders. Burn that village. Fine, I’m your arsonist. Steal that farmer’s crops. Good, I’m your thief. Kill those young lads so they won’t take up arms against us. I’m your murderer. I remember once a woman screaming at us, calling us animals as we dragged her son from their hut. But we weren’t animals. Animals are true to their nature and we had betrayed ours. I cut that young boy’s throat myself as his mother screamed and my friends held her back. That night...I felt such shame. Shame was so heavy on me, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep.  All I could do was stare into that dark sky and listen to that mother screaming her son’s name. I’ll hear her screaming the rest of my life.  Now, I know I can never bring that lad back. All I can do with time I’ve got left is bring a little goodness into the world. That’s all any of us can do, isn’t it? Never too late to stop robbing people, to stop killing people. Start helping people. (Stares at the Hound)  It’s never too late to come back.
 

The drop-off in quality from book monologue to show monologue is immense and there is no reason for it.  GRRM literally wrote the scene for them.  They even named the damn episode 'The Broken Man' but failed to use the term in Brother Ray's speech.  I'm sorry but this is one of a hundred such instances where the book dialogue is more impactful than the show dialogue.  Septon Meribald's speech talks of the human cost of war, the human experience of it, the futility of it.  It is an embodiment of "THE WHEEL" that we keep hearing needs to be broken by Dany.  Ray's speech just tells Sandor "hey dude, I also did bad things once but if you do good things now it helps you live with it"  You can't tell me Ian McShane couldn't have delivered the book monologue.  Dude is an Actor.  And then to add insult to injury, the f'ing guy gets killed like a minute later.  

 

 

 

This is the episode forum and only the show stuff is relevant to episodes.

The books are the books and the show is the show.

The show is based on the books but not bound to the books.  They change stuff so dragging in the books to criticize the show is just wrong.

It amounts to saying the show is bad because they didn't follow the books.  That's a book reader only issue.  The show is outstanding as a stand alone tv series.  It just is.  It will go down as a top 100 all time show, no doubt about it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Ser Gareth said:

Because it's not their tale.  Although I do blame them for not following the source material available to them.  If they had done a more faithful adaptation of TWOW and ADOS then the show would have almost certainly been better.  With such wonderful source material available to them why did they have to go and do their own thing?!  Oh hang on a minute......

You do know that they are really not that far "ahead" in the books, right? I mean, they are doing part of Arianne's AFFC chapters, Rolland Storm, Val and the free folk, Euron (barely) in the Aeron chapters, and more, and even Cersei being pregnant had been discussed in the book forums for a while because she *could* be in the books. The only thing that may be ahead is Arya and Dany (because they pressed Fast Forward on her last season). Sansa, not even the same so can't tell. But Dany is mostly Aegon in ADWD after he lands so far this season... except when she is Val and the free folk. The wight hunt (:lmao:) is the only real "new" thing. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...