Jump to content

Rant & Rave Season 8 [Spoilers]: When you are cool like a cucumber, as evil as the mother of madness, but never as perfect as the pet!


The Fattest Leech

Recommended Posts

4 hours ago, Ser Arthur Hightower said:

That would be too difficult and unnecessary. As much as I dislike so many elements of the past 3 seasons, the issues with past seasons in no way prevented a decent ending with somewhat competent writing. I feel that a lot of people are giving the writers a bit of a free pass by effectively saying; "S8 is really flawed, but they wrote themselves into a corner with previous seasons, so they can't really do any better than this". They still had plenty of ability to finish the White Walker threat, resolve the conflict over the Iron Throne, and give individual characters decent endings, and they had 2 years to do it, but they didn't. They could have, if they had done it right and thought things through, made it all worthwhile and even redeemed the bad parts of the show, and they couldn't even give us that.

Case in point; I am personally of the belief that a Breaking bad Season 5, and honestly a decent chunk of the preceding seasons, was done kinda badly and was quite bland. However I think that the way they wrap things up in the last episode was really good and made the whole show feel worth it to me.

Word from GRRM and D&D is that this is at least some approximation (and likely a poor approximation) of the book ending for the major characters, so it's not about any good ending, but making a particular ending work. GRRM's ~ending~ is jackknifing viewers because D&D are Frankensteining the endings of what the book characters will become onto the mess that's the show characters plot devices. 

To make GRRM's endings work, or at least some version of them, we'd need to go back and redo previous seasons for set up and development or ditch GRRM's endings altogether for ones which suit D&D's "characters", most of which are unrecognizable from GRRM's characters as of AFFC/ADWD. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Is it correct to say this season has been more divisive amongst book readers or hardcore fans of the show? Because it seems to me, the general audience that just watches the show for pure entertainment is satisfied. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Mordor said:

Is it correct to say this season has been more divisive amongst book readers or hardcore fans of the show? Because it seems to me, the general audience that just watches the show for pure entertainment is satisfied. 

Not sure. The consensus among TV critics I've read is negative, and the ratings on sites like IMdB have hit record lows, which all point to TV-only audiences being very disappointed too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm seeing a lot of Facebook posts from show-only fans who are genuinely confused by what is happening to the characters, mainly angry that Dany is being side-lined to make Jon king. Again, they've been fed this narrative of "female empowerment" of burning your enemies and being lauded for it, and are now completely confused that Dany is now "evil".  Had D&D told this in a more nuanced way, these viewers should have seen this coming in some form or another. But nuance has no place in this show, because it would undermine the "OMG Shock!" moments the showrunners love. :tantrum:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Lollygag said:

Word from GRRM and D&D is that this is at least some approximation (and likely a poor approximation) of the book ending for the major characters, so it's not about any good ending, but making a particular ending work. GRRM's ~ending~ is jackknifing viewers because D&D are Frankensteining the endings of what the book characters will become onto the mess that's the show characters plot devices. 

To make GRRM's endings work, or at least some version of them, we'd need to go back and redo previous seasons for set up and development or ditch GRRM's endings altogether for ones which suit D&D's "characters", most of which are unrecognizable from GRRM's characters as of AFFC/ADWD. 

I'm in total agreement, which is why they should have come up with a different ending which makes sense for the show. Even if they had a full length season 8, they didn't have time to do Mad Queen Dany justice. Honestly I'm really puzzled why they wouldn't build this up properly starting from at least Season 7. But the only example of her doing anything bad at all last season was burning the Tarly's. But that wasn't mad, just very harsh, and probably something 75% of political figures would do (people that didn't kneel to Joffrey after the Blackwater were executed). I guess they thought that Jonerys wouldn't work if she was cruel and unstable last season.

If they had changed the ending, then announced after the final episode "so this isn't actually the ending Martin gave us, but we decided to change it, because with all the other things that have happened so far, this makes way more sense", then I can't see too many people being unhappy, book readers especially, since the book ending isn't given away at all.

But nope, they couldn't do that because they know that any ending they came up with would suck, so they used (at least partially) Martin's. But that also sucks because their middle sucks and doesn't fit with it. If only they could get more competent writers...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

57 minutes ago, Ser Arthur Hightower said:

I'm in total agreement, which is why they should have come up with a different ending which makes sense for the show. Even if they had a full length season 8, they didn't have time to do Mad Queen Dany justice. Honestly I'm really puzzled why they wouldn't build this up properly starting from at least Season 7. But the only example of her doing anything bad at all last season was burning the Tarly's. But that wasn't mad, just very harsh, and probably something 75% of political figures would do (people that didn't kneel to Joffrey after the Blackwater were executed). I guess they thought that Jonerys wouldn't work if she was cruel and unstable last season. 

If they had changed the ending, then announced after the final episode "so this isn't actually the ending Martin gave us, but we decided to change it, because with all the other things that have happened so far, this makes way more sense", then I can't see too many people being unhappy, book readers especially, since the book ending isn't given away at all.

But nope, they couldn't do that because they know that any ending they came up with would suck, so they used (at least partially) Martin's. But that also sucks because their middle sucks and doesn't fit with it. If only they could get more competent writers... 

What I find hard to believe is that they are suposed to know the end for years. If they wanted to end the story that way they could have been building the story in that direction...

The biggest problem of this season is that it doesn t fit with the narrative they have build so far. Things are too rushed and forced to make sense… To me it feels like they decided to end the show this way this year…

I just can t believe that they paned s7 knowing they would do this in s8...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Ser Quork said:

I'm seeing a lot of Facebook posts from show-only fans who are genuinely confused by what is happening to the characters, mainly angry that Dany is being side-lined to make Jon king. Again, they've been fed this narrative of "female empowerment" of burning your enemies and being lauded for it, and are now completely confused that Dany is now "evil".  Had D&D told this in a more nuanced way, these viewers should have seen this coming in some form or another. But nuance has no place in this show, because it would undermine the "OMG Shock!" moments the showrunners love. :tantrum:

And then jon will be sidelined for robot bran…

How can people not be confused? The characters just don t make sense anymore… When we don t even know why jon pushes danny away after saying he loves her what can be said about this season? We should guess what happens behind the scenes so that what we see makes sense?

ps almost 300k people have signed this

https://www.change.org/p/hbo-remake-game-of-thrones-season-8-with-competent-writers

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's likely not even Dany who burns the city, but Jon Connington. These characters are all so swapped up and memed out, this is all quite meaningless. The showrunners called it a "spirit of the books" ending, which says it all, given they have no clue what that is.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, divica said:

And then jon will be sidelined for robot bran…

How can people not be confused? The characters just don t make sense anymore… When we don t even know why jon pushes danny away after saying he loves her what can be said about this season? We should guess what happens behind the scenes so that what we see makes sense?

ps almost 300k people have signed this

https://www.change.org/p/hbo-remake-game-of-thrones-season-8-with-competent-writers

If it's true, it's such a total ass-pull.

35 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

It's likely not even Dany who burns the city, but Jon Connington. These characters are all so swapped up and memed out, this is all quite meaningless. The showrunners called it a "spirit of the books" ending, which says it all, given they have no clue what that is.

Totally.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Weiss, on how he and Benioff came up with how it ends:

It wasn’t like something where five years ago one of us said, “I think this has to happen and I know this is right.” [The final season storyline was] something that gradually unfolded with neither of us wanting to plant a flag in the ground right out of the gate. Because what if you’re wrong? What if there’s a better idea out there and you planted a flag on the second- or third-best idea? So it was always more a “What if…” conversation than an “I think that…” So by the time we got to the place where we were outlining we already knew most of the big things.

https://ew.com/tv/2019/04/09/game-of-thrones-season-8-showrunners-interview/

And here's the illustration:

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, divica said:

And then jon will be sidelined for robot bran…

Hasn't he been sidelined all Season? Seriously, is Jon even in this Season? He does nothing every episode. Oh no wait, he's Dany's puppy that keeps rejecting her in private but faithfully follows her in public. And Bran is already sidelined.

So sidelined Jon will be sidelined by sidelined Bran. Oh goodie.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Ser Quork said:

I'm seeing a lot of Facebook posts from show-only fans who are genuinely confused by what is happening to the characters, mainly angry that Dany is being side-lined to make Jon king. Again, they've been fed this narrative of "female empowerment" of burning your enemies and being lauded for it, and are now completely confused that Dany is now "evil".  Had D&D told this in a more nuanced way, these viewers should have seen this coming in some form or another. But nuance has no place in this show, because it would undermine the "OMG Shock!" moments the showrunners love. :tantrum:

 Unfortunately, they wanted a good show, but needed the bad pussy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You know, even with where they were there were some really simple ways they could have made mad Danny more acceptable than what we got.  Keep CGI Child #2 until this last episode (skipping over Euron being the absolute shure-shot one episode and then being totally incompetent the next), have one of the scorpions take it out this last episode and the commoners cheer uproariously.  That would at least give us SOME plausible reason for Danny to turn on them.  Bonus points if Jon had been riding and got taken out as well.

But no.  Pure, straight up, "I got what I want?  Kewl.  BUH BYE!"  And Kings Landing Flambe for thirty minutes.  What a crap plot and complete character destroyer.

One of the reasons the Ds didn't have time to bother writing an actual story for the show is because they're busy doing garbage like this:

Yeah, that's one of the Ds sitting with a bunch of rock stars and the guy that wrote the theme from the show, playing custom shop Fender guitars with house sigils from the show on them.  Those guitars start at $25,000 and go up from there.  Wonder how much of that filters directly into the Ds coffers?

As bad as this season has turned out, the mere taint of watching that video is enough to make me consider doing a purge on some of my music collection, and I've been following some of these guys since the early eighties.  Why Scott Ian?  WHY?  You're better than this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I thought I had posted this here in the General Season thread, but it seems I didn't.  I thought some might be interested in Joe and Jacob's take on story line, characterization, and future employment?  LOL 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, Lady Fevre Dream said:

I thought I had posted this here in the General Season thread, but it seems I didn't.  I thought some might be interested in Joe and Jacob's take on story line, characterization, and future employment?  LOL 

 

Oh, that is priceless. :lol:  The truth will out. And these truths are self-evident.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Lady Fevre Dream said:

Haha, I bet there is one of these 'I forgot....blah blah blah' for almost every occurrence on this damn show. 

 

AHAHAHA

How is it possible that the scripts got approved to be filmed? Nobody cares about accuracy? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm really looking forward to the NDA's running out when the season ends.  The actors have already had more than a few little snark moments here or there, and some that have been off the show a while have come right out and said what shit it was to work for those assholes.  Stannis's actor for one had several very revealing things to say about them.

Maybe if they are just as noisy as the fandom about what a shit-show it was behind the scenes it'll start to have an affect on their careers going forward?  I hate to wish ill on anyone, but I'd really like to see them pursuing work they're qualified to do.  And it's very clear that writing, producing and directing screen plays isn't it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

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

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...