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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

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Just finished the last episode. Oh my, fine to get that out of my system. It's so sad, actually, that what started as a really good TV show and story back in season 1, was to degenerate into this nonsensical mess. It's sad, because I feel as if humanity could have gotten this great work of art, but ended up with a useless piece of garbage. As if Michelangelo had painted just a quarter of the roof of the Sistine Chapel, and then had decided just to smear his own puke all over the roof, including the part of the roof he had already painted. I grieve for what could have been. And I have long ago given up hope that we will ever get the book version of the story, so well, that's that. Good riddance, GOT. Thank you for all the wasted time.

It actually got worse with each season after S 1, but of course, the fall in quality became dramatic as soon as the show overtook the books, that is, from the last episodes of season 5 actually (And of course, the Dorne plot was absolute rubbish from start to finish). And then worse and worse with each season therafter. There was no hope of a decent finale, of course, because the groundwork laid in seasons 6, 7 and the first 5 episodes of this season was so weak. But then, D & D managed to outdo themselves by how ridiculous the last episode was, at least from after Dany was killed. Their incompetence as writers really shines through in such situations, when they are to write a story about how the aftermath of such a massive incident plays out. They really have no clue how to handle and how to present such a dramatic and complicated situation.

The "Grand Council" meeting, which became kind of the event the whole series built up to, just seemed like kind of a farce, and had absolutely zero believability. One after one agree to make Bran the king of the 7 kingdoms because Tyrion, in chains, tells them to. But then Sansa asks that the North be independent, and that's fine, according to Bran. And the rest of the lords think that is no problem - we still want to be a united kingdom (as if the others kingdoms had not been independent before Aegons' conquest too, as much as the North had been, and it's not as if nobody cares to remember that Yara actually secured the Ironborns' independence back in S 6, least of all herself). And we still want A NORTHERN NOBLE, that is, from the newly independent North, to be our king. Let the Starks have their independence, and let us invite one of them to rule us as well! It's like, WHAT??? What kind of a plot and what kind of a power play was this?

I guess the only reasonable interpretation of this whole mess is that the theme of the whole story (or of the last 3 to 4 seasons) is THAT EVERY MAJOR CHARACTER IS EXTREMELY STUPID, and therefore consistently acts in nonsensical ways.

And don't get me started on the "make-up" of the "Great Council" (was Sam there because he somehow had become Grand Maester, but just hadn't gotten his Maester clothes yet, or as Lord Tarly - and if he had become Lord Tarley, why was he suddenly Grand Maester the following episode?). And why were all the Stark siblings allowed a seat and a vote (seemingly), did this apply to the other noble houses as well? Was it kind of, like, any nobleman (and woman) in Westeros could actually attend this and vote, and this bunch were all the nobles that were left or who cared to attend?

And then that Jon had to be sentenced to serve in a non-existent Night's Watch to appease the Unsullied's wrath, and then the Unsullied were going to leave Westeros anyway (because Missandei had told beatiful stories about Naath to GW, so he of course has to bring all his brothers in arms on a dangerous voyage to an unknown land instead of taking the offer of land and lordships in Westeros. But I pity the poor people of Naath who is soon going to have this army descending on them...).

And the Dothraki conviniently just ceased to exist again. Or did they accompany the Unsullied to Naath? And if so, why? Well, I guess the people of Naath has much to look forward to.

And so on, and so on. Almost no single piece of the story told in the last episode made any sense. But I guess it doesn't matter because it all built up to having Bronn and Sam together on the small council, with Bronn arguing with Sam about whether to use public money on the rebuilding of the brothels. HAHAHAHA, it's so funny, Bronn has become master of coin and wants to use public money on subsidizing businesses where women can eke out a living selling their bodies to men. HAHAHAHA, oh Bronn, you're the best, you crack me up. So great that the whole series, who many have hailed for supposedly portraying strong women,  built up to that epic moment.

And so on, and so on. There is so much which could be said, but when all is said and done, the sad conclusion is that what could have been a great work of art (based on S 1 and the source material) ended up as worthless soap opera garbage.

But whatever. We still have Shakespeare, Tolkien, Eurypides. The Wire, Sopranos, The Americans. Great stories by great writers! Something you never were, and probably never will be, D and D. Thank you and goodbye!

 
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At last our watch has ended.

So my wife insisted we stay up and watch the last episode even though we usually watch episodes the next evening.  Her reason?  "I want this over  with."

Fair enough.

I found myself constantly looking at the timer on the episode clock, because that seemed to be more interesting than what was happening on screen.  So thirty two minutes in and mostly what had happened was looking at the destruction of Kings Landing.  Well, except for some babble speechification thing.  Oh, and Tyrion walking into the room the building collapsed on in the previous episode and finding a small smattering of bricks laying over his brother and sister.  Whatever.

Then another thirty two minutes for Jon and Tyrion to discuss how stupid the show's become by reviewing things out of context to frame arguments that could have been made by actually having the show do a story, but they decided was better as "epic" dialog that was ridiculous.  Or something.  Whatever.  And Jon repeats, over and over, the only part of the script he was able to use as dialog, "she's my queen."  Just 'cause.  Yeah.

And he gets to use it one last time as he hugs her then aerate's her abdomen.  Yeah, great dialog, fuckwads.

And once again the CGI beast does the best acting of the episode outside of Tyrion's eyebrows.

Magically everyone in the seven realms of any import at all knows to show up at Dragonstone at just the right time without any rhyme or reason.  Tyrion's "trial."  What the fuck ever.  I mean, seriously, starts with  Greyworm making a face like he needs a diaper change while saying Tyrion needs to STFU because he needs to STFU then Tyrion declaring Bran king and everyone instantly agreeing except for "UNCLE!  SIT!"  YAY!  What the fuck ever.  And since Tyrion's on trial, he'll be hand of Bran The Broken!  Why the fuck they didn't just call him the Boneless while winking at the camera and giving up any pretense of originality they think they have left.

And fuck you Sansa just gets to DECLARE the North seceding from the union with no one else suggesting the same for their realm.  FUCK YOU LOGIC!  FUCK YOU REALITY!  FUCK YOU CONSEQUENCE!

Small council of fools and idiots because reasons.  Fuck you, trusting Bronn as master of coin.  Really?  Who in their right mind would do that?  Not the Tyrion of any but this last season, that's for damn sure.  Good lord, so stupid.

Oh, and Brann's already doing what most of the Kings had done and skipping his small council meetings.  Go king!

When the hell did Sam have time to become Grand Maester in between knocking up his girl and writing the longest book of all time.  Nice fancy letting on that book too, dickheads.  Looks like it's right off the shelf at Barne's & Nobel.  Eat a dick.

Brienne's book scene may have felt a little more genuine had she written, "pumps and dumps like a champ, then runs off to bang his sister."  Fuck you show.

Jon to the Wall, which is magically already rebuilt with a nice sturdy gate on it.  And he pets Ghost, because fan-fuzzies "dawwwwwww" that should have happened when they were together at Winterfell but fuck you because fuck you.

And Arya goes Christopher Columbusing her way off across the ocean with fresh sewn black sails with Direwolves on them.  WOO!  Killer assassin training at work on the high seas.  Can't wait for that spinoff!  NOT!

God damn.  Seriously.  We waited eight seasons for this?

My wife heard the Ds said they wanted everybody to be debating that last episode like everybody debated the last episode of Breaking Bad.  Like, was that an A or an A+.  She said the only debate is going to be was it an F or an incomplete.  Because they may have turned in the paper, but they wrote in answers to multiple choice questions that made it seem like they didn't even read the question, and they skipped over the essay portion because writing is just way too god damn hard.

Full credit, she knows how to eviscerate someone when necessary.

I had said I really wanted to see the books complete because the story HAS to be better than this.  I already knew I'm not watching anymore HBO fronted Game of Thrones related content.  No way they can be trusted.  But this has left a bad enough taste in my mouth my planned re-reading of what we already have and hoping for the completion of the books has really been curtailed.  Hopefully that passes because I did enjoy what I had read thus far.  I'm just not sure I can wipe the memory of how horrible the show ending was.

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This isn't what we signed up for. 

When "Game of Thrones" premiered eight years ago, it was instantly clear that the series was something different. It was a story that broke the conventions of the fantasy genre, not one that was a slave to them...

But that's not the show that aired its finale Sunday night. In the final episode, "The Iron Throne," the show was unrecognizable. It was hacky; it was cliched. Every character left standing received a saccharine coda. Closure is one thing, but pandering is entirely another...

"Iron Throne" is an episode that will go down as one of the most controversial series finales of all time... It didn't gracefully swerve into another lane, it careened off a cliff. And looking back at the series will never be the same. 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2019/05/19/game-of-thrones-recap-series-finale-season-8-episode-6-the-iron-throne-jon-dany-arya-sansa-bran/3704539002/

Here's another:

Game of Thrones loved the Starks in the end — a bit of a twist, really, since it couldn’t always figure out what to do with them. Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright) spent long years hiking north, before returning to Winterfell with his emotion chip removed. Arya (Maisie Williams) sold her cockles — “Oysters, clams, and cockles!!!” — on a semester abroad where she learned a very awesome shape-changing power the final season forgot about. Sansa (Sophie Turner) followed Dany into forced marriage — a miserable wound the series would try healing by promoting her into a Very Important Administrative Role that also pushed her to the narrative sidelines.

https://ew.com/tv-reviews/2019/05/20/game-of-thrones-finale-series-review/

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48 minutes ago, Dragons Are Real said:

 

So my wife insisted we stay up and watch the last episode even though we usually watch episodes the next evening.  Her reason?  "I want this over  with."

 

A friend told me something similar. "I'll watch only because I want to be free!". Makes you wonder how many people are just watching due to inertia rather than because they're enjoying it.

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1 hour ago, Dragons Are Real said:

Dragonstone

The meeting was at the dragonpit in King's landing , not Dragonstone. 

 

1 hour ago, Dragons Are Real said:

magically already rebuilt

Only Eastwatch was destroyed , Jon was at Castle Black . So pretty much the entire wall and the castles was functioning , so no need to rebuild anything. 

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4 minutes ago, LordImp said:

The meeting was at the dragonpit in King's landing , not Dragonstone. 

 

Only Eastwatch was destroyed , Jon was at Castle Black . So pretty much the entire wall and the castles was functioning , so no need to rebuild anything. 

Right, sorry.  Guess I had trouble paying attention to what was happening because everything was moving so fast and making so little sense.

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After watching Dany fight tooth and nail for the weak and innocent throughout the series run (even showing off her affinity for somewhat alarming vengeance in just straight-up burning her enemies), her transition from the Mother of Dragons to the Queen of the Ashes happened so quick it felt like we had whiplash; it also didn't feel earned, nor did the sudden distrust of Dany by her advisers and other characters after they championed her for seasons...

The show has replaced all of Cersei's defining characteristics—ruthless convictions and cunning gameplay—with the fact that she's a mother. They didn't help matters by keeping her framed in a tower window all season, flanked by characters straight out of a late-in-the-episode Saturday Night Live sketch: a mute monster (The Mountain), a mad scientist (Qyburn) and the steampunk pirate paramour whose name must not be mentioned. When you look back, Cersei really didn't do anything all season; making her a passive bystander in her own life...

But the biggest issue came in episode two, when Sansa's rape, which caused possibly the show's biggest controversy when it aired in 2015, was brought up again during her reunion with the Hound. Jessica Chastain, Turner's Dark Phoenix co-star, took to Twitter after the episode aired to slam the scene which Sansa inferred the horrors she has endured over the course of the series, including the Ramsay Bolton assault, had turned her into a stronger person. "Rape is not a tool to make a character stronger. A woman doesn't need to be victimized in order to become a butterfly," Chastain tweeted. "The #littlebird was always a Phoenix. Her prevailing strength is solely because of her. And her alone."...

The criticism of the way the female characters storylines are playing out on screen could very well be because of the lack of female voices behind the scenes. Benioff and Weiss have written a majority of the series' episodes, with the list of directors is equally as small and mostly male... Maybe if Espenson or Taylor came back around they could've noted it's not a good look to say that the two powerful women who actually want the Iron Throne are just too damn emotionally unstable to rule, and that a white man who didn't want power truly deserved to be king, with another white dude who didn't want the position ultimately becoming king in the end.

https://www.eonline.com/news/1042391/why-game-of-thrones-final-season-was-always-destined-to-disappoint

Here's another article that addresses this, too:

"Game of Thrones" had a woman problem. And it always will.

This isn't anything new. Against a backdrop of gratuitous female nudity and frequent rape scenes, "Thrones" has always struggled to fully define the women who play its game. It's had trouble with the men, too (character consistency is one of the writers' biggest weaknesses), after the final episode of the TV juggernaut, its mistreatment of the women who once made the series great will be remembered as its original sin.

The last two episode of "Thrones" were a particular insult to some of its most beloved female characters. The remaining women (and those recently departed) have been ill-served by a mad dash to the finish line with little regard how to get there. Now that the smoke has cleared on the series, one of the many mixed morals of "Thrones" is that women are just too darn crazy. Groundbreaking, I know.

In this final season, "Thrones" has wasted Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), once its most engaging villain, giving her little screen time and an anticlimactic death. It also featured Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) expressing gratitude for enduring rape and torture; the death of Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), its only woman of color; turned Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) into a sappy rom-com character more concerned with her lover's destiny than her own; and Daenerys Targaryen's (Emilia Clarke) hurried transformation into a "mad queen," as the woman who once freed thousands of slaves became a murderer of countless innocents because her best friend died, her boyfriend/nephew rejected her and she's angry no one loves her. And when it came time for Dany to meet her fate, it was as anticlimactic as Cersei's death, and shedied while begging Jon (Kit Harington) to take her back.

https://news.yahoo.com/sadly-apos-game-thrones-apos-133431672.html

Adding another, too:

In "The Bells," there were moments that could have contained emotional resonance, but that potential was overshadowed by decisions that Benioff and Weiss set up and executed with little or no foresight or thoughtfulness. At this point, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the Game of Thrones creative team thought spectacle would make up for the lack of well-honed concluding character moments. As impressive as the visuals in "The Bells" were, they were ultimately hollow: The explosions served mostly as a reminder that Game of Thrones likes to kill people in large numbers when it runs out of ideas.

Landing like enormous chunks of masonry were so many adolescent, superficial takes on what could have been meaty themes. If it was saying anything, "The Bells" appeared to be stating that cycles of oppression and abuse can't be undone. Rulers are always self-serving and driven by greed and paranoia. Most people can't see beyond their own self-interest. The little people will always get crushed. Douchebros like Euron Greyjoy will always wear leather pants. 

So much money spent, so much time spent, all for a show that never knew how to write its women consistently well and that had immature conceptions of how to end their tales. The best-executed major plot turns are moving and tragic because they feel surprising and yet inevitable. Given the right kind of in-depth character development, we could have wept for the choices Daenerys, Brienne, Sansa or Cersei made. I grind my teeth when I think about what this show turned out to be versus what it could have been. At its best, its characters have given us moving and wonderfully complex moments, but "The Bells" was Game of Thrones at its worst, and it did untold damage to the show as a whole. It's going to be hard to think of the show without feeling nauseated by what it did — especially to its women — in the home stretch. 

And now that Benioff and Weiss are done dumping on one pop-culture touchstone, I feel even more depressed about the fact that they've been tapped to work within the Star Wars universe. The writing staff of Game of Thrones was almost exclusively male and white, as were the ranks of the show's directors. This lack of inclusion has contributed to eight seasons of writing for women — especially women of color — that was problematic, to say the very least. The writers and directors of the Star Wars franchise — and the showrunners it has hired for TV — are almost all white and male as well. As in Westeros, as in Hollywood: The cycle repeats itself.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/critics-notebook-end-game-thrones-finds-a-way-make-woman-problem-worse-1210104

(added more reviews)

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Lol to Sansa telling Edmure to sit down. I still dont understand why Sansa gets a higher voice or more power than anyone else sitting in that council. Like why is everyone listening to her?

 

And Lol to Bran playing the long-con, the very long-con to make himself King.  He knew what Dany would do the whole time apparently and let it happen so that he could be king? So how is he any better than Show-Dany? WTF is wrong with these people?

And someone please give me ANY ANY ANY ANY ANY reason that Jon was brought back from the dead or RLJ? give me any fucking reason!!!!!

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53 minutes ago, Suzanna Stormborn said:

And someone please give me ANY ANY ANY ANY ANY reason that Jon was brought back from the dead or RLJ? give me any fucking reason!!!!!

I imagine it was so that he could get close to Danaerys, come into her confidence but still not be a raging Mother of Dragons!!!-fanatic, and so drive that dagger into her heart. And also to make their relations and Jon's murder of Danaerys more impactful than if someone who was more distanced from her did it.

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1 hour ago, Lion of the West said:

I imagine it was so that he could get close to Danaerys, come into her confidence but still not be a raging Mother of Dragons!!!-fanatic, and so drive that dagger into her heart. And also to make their relations and Jon's murder of Danaerys more impactful than if someone who was more distanced from her did it.

yes but that means that the Song of Ice and Fire, the Prince that was Promised is only around to help Dany's story make sense?

That's what I'm getting at, what a poor state of events for the Jon Snow character.

I'm sorry D&D did this to you Jon and Dany.

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55 minutes ago, Suzanna Stormborn said:

yes but that means that the Song of Ice and Fire, the Prince that was Promised is only around to help Dany's story make sense?

That's what I'm getting at, what a poor state of events for the Jon Snow character.

I'm sorry D&D did this to you Jon and Dany.

He had to kill Daenerys, who in two episodes, went from Saviour of the World to She Wolf of the SS.

All I can say about this season as a whole is "It hurts us, it hurts us".

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You know, the most depressing part of this whole debacle?  The books, and early seasons, have some really powerful story telling and themes.  Actions, no matter how well intended, have consequences.  Interactions, however brief, are remembered and can either come back to bite you, or help build you up somewhere down the line.

Then we have what the show has done in the last couple seasons, which sadly means even actions and potential set up early in the series end up wasted and forgotten.  AT this point, nothing has consequences, nothing matters, and nobody remembers shit even scene to scene.

And then people that enjoy passively sucking up whatever garbage is thrown in front of them accuse those of us that pay attention of being mad because our favorite characters didn't get the ending we wanted or predicted.  Um, no.  I'm upset that the endings they got made no sense whatsoever.  Point to point to point with no connections, no consequences, no relevance, and in some cases blatant spitting on what came before just because.

Bleh.  What a shit-show.

So, am I the only one wondering about the ridiculous setups for spinoffs and whether the actors would ever come back to work for the hacks if things fall into/out of place properly?  Like if Arya's Pirates of Darkwater spinoff comes along, will Maise actually come back for it?  If Jon's King of the North North adventures in Dragon Sitting spinoff gets a greenlight a few years down the road, would Kit dare come back for it?  Sam's Being a Maester with a cute Sidepiece spinoff . . . wait, that won't happen.  We sorta liked Sam for about five minutes there at one point.

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9 minutes ago, Leticia Stark said:

The sweet part was always about the Starks, and as a Stark fan I'm happy, but I can't help and feel bad about Dany and Jaime and Jon.

Jon didn't die but he was literally a glorified extra and If he died in the end nothing would change.

The Prince that was Pointless.

 

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