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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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37 minutes ago, Nowy Tends said:

these guys were convinced that everything they touched or imagined was pure gold.

This. And the sad truth is, D&D actually have the Bizarro Midas Touch, where everything they touch turns to shite. 

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8 minutes ago, TheNecromancerofMirkwood said:

In all honesty, yes. I think they bought into the drooling idiot narrative that what made A Song of Ice and Fire (and thus, Game of Thrones) unique was it subverted expectations, when it did no such thing. Nothing Martin did (relatively speaking) was not already done by Tolkien and people before him. Sure, the typical "high fantasy" schlock authors that came after The Lord of the Rings was published missed the point entirely and so people began to associate the kind of schlocky stuff with stuff Tolkien........like the hero going all mano-a-mano with The Dark Lord (funny, I think the last time Sauron went toe-to-toe with someone was against Huan the Hound and Lúthien Tinúviel, and they beat his ass, even if it left them weakened to do so. And that was all the way in the First Age). 

I think D & D took the wrong idea from the work of people like George Lucas (who himself fell into the same trap) of thinking the spectacle was more important than the story, when you don't have to sacrifice the latter for the former if you're even remotely competent. Or (also in the case of Lucas) you don't have people that tell you "NO!" (as the case of his ex-wife Marcia Lucas, who saved Star Wars in the editing room, and his friend Gary Kurtz who walked away during the preproduction phase of Return of the Jedi).

LOTR did indeed subvert expectations.  The world was saved not by force of arms, but by an act of pity on the part of Bilbo, 80 years previously. The Ring was destroyed, not used.  The "Chosen One" ultimately failed at his task,  sank into depression, and left everything he cared for behind. And, yet, the ending is about as perfect as it could be, not just thanks to Tolkien, but also his editor (it would have been spoiled if Tolkien had published his Epilogue).

The things is, there are now about 50,000 fantasy books for sale online.  Everything has been done.  Every trope has been subverted.  Everything has been done before.  "Subverting expectations" is a phrase that should be chucked in the bin.

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4 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

This. And the sad truth is, D&D actually have the Bizarro Midas Touch, where everything they touch turns to shite. 

That's a like a sketch of spitting image, where Robert Maxwell turns everything he touches to shit.

He touches himself, looks in the mirror, and says "no change there".

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3 hours ago, Nowy Tends said:

That's precisely the point. I believe they didn't take 5 mn of reflection on the whole picture. Like Preston Jacobs (I think) said, these guys were convinced that everything they touched or imagined was pure gold.

Rewatch Cogman reading the script of the Long Night in the lecture room, in the documentary. They ALL, writers and actors, react as if the finger of God has touched them...

Exactly.

Cogman was hilariously taking himself oh so seriously there. Just as he was with his smug and self-satisfied how dare you criticize me jive in season 5, as if he speaks for Sansa when he ripped her guts out and wore her on his hand like a puppet.

(Just to add, I didn't watch the documentary, just saw a clip. That was enough.)

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1 hour ago, SeanF said:

The more I think of this show, the more I wonder what D & D were thinking (if they were thinking).

Did they really think that "subverting expectations" (Jon stabbing Daenerys, Arya killing the Night King, Jaime's redemption arc going nowhere, Daenerys turning into Old Yeller, Bran becoming King) would get them critical acclaim?   They must surely have known that fans of Daenerys (always the most popular character in the show) would loathe it, but did they think that fans of the other characters would love it?  Fans of Jon (the second most popular character) were just as unhappy to see him transformed from hero to treacherous hypocrite.  Nobody cared about Bran, because he had been so unimportant to the story and was just weird.  Nobody cared about Tyrion by this point, as he bore no relation to his book counterpart.  People who had liked the Starks hated seeing them transformed into the Lannisters.

Fanservice endings for Bronn and Sam were small beer.  They thought they were giving fanservice endings to the Starks, but people disliked what the Starks had become.  They thought people would see the Northerners as brave and feisty, while we saw them as selfish xenophobes.  They thought that Jon running Daenerys through the heart was tragic and romantic, and that we'd feel his pain (we feel his pain  the same way we feel the pain of Athos for hanging his wife from a tree in the Musketeers);  they thought we'd laugh indulgently with Bronn and Tyrion as they joked about brothels, but the joke had worn very thin by then.

 

Yes, I think so.  The show's plot points had started to get wobbly even before it became a huge hit, but the wobbles were generally smallish and unimportant in the grand scheme of things, so it was overlooked in the swooning over the acting, the fantasy elements+realism and a good story.  As these plot holes got more and more frequent the show covered them up with good individual segments+elaborate battle/CGI sequences, and this worked.  It worked and worked and worked, even though the show got worse and worse from season 5 onward.  It continued to get critical praise and only started winning awards after it had peaked.   So, since what they did, cover up lazy plotting and bad writing with special effects and Big Moments, worked like a charm for several seasons, it is absolutely believable they expected the super big moments and super big battles would carry them over at the end.

As far as subverting expectations, since they are hacks, they only had a superficial take on that.  Subverting expectations still  has to be done in the context of whatever you're doing, whatever is happening in the story, it has to be believable, but in the hands of the showrunners it simply became a TWIST!  Arya will kill the NK, no one will see that coming!  And so on.  

They must have just been in denial over Dany's  hairpin turn from hero to villain though in believing that the audience that had been rooting for her since ep. 1 season 1 was going to stomach the completely stupid and random way they had her act and the even more ridiculously stupid way they had her die.  And, yes, they also did ruin their second favorite character by turning Jon into someone so dumb that even the critics mocked him.

**ETA their move in the last two seasons to abandon any realism whatsoever and refuse to write dialogue, so you have people together who either don't speak at all or don't speak about what they reasonably would speak about, is kind of inexplicable, except on the basis of they knew they had lost the plot so rather than compound all their errors they just left things open ended because no one talked about anything of importance.

 

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3 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Yes, I think so.  The show's plot points had started to get wobbly even before it became a huge hit, but the wobbles were generally smallish and unimportant in the grand scheme of things, so it was overlooked in the swooning over the acting, the fantasy elements+realism and a good story.  As these plot holes got more and more frequent the show covered them up with good individual segments+elaborate battle/CGI sequences, and this worked.  It worked and worked and worked, even though the show got worse and worse from season 5 onward.  It continued to get critical praise and only started winning awards after it had peaked.   So, since what they did, cover up lazy plotting and bad writing with special effects and Big Moments, worked like a charm for several seasons, it is absolutely believable they expected the super big moments and super big battles would carry them over at the end.

As far as subverting expectations, since they are hacks, they only had a superficial take on that.  Subverting expectations still  has to be done in the context of whatever you're doing, whatever is happening in the story, it has to be believable, but in the hands of the showrunners it simply became a TWIST!  Arya will kill the NK, no one will see that coming!  And so on.  

They must have just been in denial over Dany's  hairpin turn from hero to villain though in believing that the audience that had been rooting for her since ep. 1 season 1 was going to stomach the completely stupid and random way they had her act and the even more ridiculously stupid way they had her die.  And, yes, they also did ruin their second favorite character by turning Jon into someone so dumb that even the critics mocked him.

 

The thing is, they could have portrayed  Daenerys credibly as an antagonist to the Starks  (given the potential disputes with Jon over the succession, or over Northern independence. )  A credible antagonist doesn't have to be Satan or Hitler or Old Yeller.   Jon for example, could have made his own bid for the Iron Throne.  Or they could have shown her being increasingly brutalised by war - actually making good on her threat to burn Yunkai to the ground and to crucify its slavemasters in Season 6 and torching towns and villages in Westeros that remained loyal to Cersei in Season 7 (all quite believable for a medieval war leader);  or (as I have suggested upthread) have her fight Tommen and Myrcella for the Iron Throne in Season 7.  

But what they wanted was, as you say, a twist, turning her into Her Satanic Majesty in the final episode, and then having Jon kill her in a thoroughly squalid manner.  But, when everything is a twist, nothing makes sense.   

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16 minutes ago, SeanF said:

The thing is, they could have portrayed  Daenerys credibly as an antagonist to the Starks  (given the potential disputes with Jon over the succession, or over Northern independence. )  A credible antagonist doesn't have to be Satan or Hitler or Old Yeller.   Jon for example, could have made his own bid for the Iron Throne.  Or they could have shown her being increasingly brutalised by war - actually making good on her threat to burn Yunkai to the ground and to crucify its slavemasters in Season 6 and torching towns and villages in Westeros that remained loyal to Cersei in Season 7 (all quite believable for a medieval war leader);  or (as I have suggested upthread) have her fight Tommen and Myrcella for the Iron Throne in Season 7.  

But what they wanted was, as you say, a twist, turning her into Her Satanic Majesty in the final episode, and then having Jon kill her in a thoroughly squalid manner.  But, when everything is a twist, nothing makes sense.   

They needed more time.  I never thought the Stark stuff really worked, so I wouldn't want to go that direction, ETA and because I don't think Book Dany will every go that far North, so that whole Northerns are assholes was  just dumb.   But, a few more episodes where we see her depression that Westeros isn't thrilled to see her, where we see more cruelty/lack of savy in how she handles prisoners, her estrangement from Jon, and perhaps even some scenes where she might have some semi credible basis to decide that Westerosi small folk=slaves, therefore whatever I do to the aristos is fine...  They would still need an actual reason why she would choose to burn KL down, because none of what I just wrote is sufficient for that.  But, perhaps delve more into her idea that the people of KL are 'guilty' for failing to support her and throw off Cersei.

As far as Jon and Dany and that stabbing, I got nothing.  I can't see any way that Jon killing her in even a remotely similar context, of trading on her trust to get close to her, fail to try and reason with her, and then give up and kill  her,  even w a 10 ep season, even with a better treatment of her turn to tyrant would not be trite and totally suck.   While I believe she will be a villain in the books, as I have said, I cannot imagine that GRRM version of Jon and Dany will some dipshit Romeo and Julietish stupidity and would almost have to be very different from every angle to work.

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10 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

They needed more time.  I never thought the Stark stuff really worked, so I wouldn't want to go that direction, ETA and because I don't think Book Dany will every go that far North, so that whole Northerns are assholes was  just dumb.   But, a few more episodes where we see her depression that Westeros isn't thrilled to see her, where we see more cruelty/lack of savy in how she handles prisoners, her estrangement from Jon, and perhaps even some scenes where she might have some semi credible basis to decide that Westerosi small folk=slaves, therefore whatever I do to the aristos is fine...  They would still need an actual reason why she would choose to burn KL down, because none of what I just wrote is sufficient for that.  But, perhaps delve more into her idea that the people of KL are 'guilty' for failing to support her and throw off Cersei.

As far as Jon and Dany and that stabbing, I got nothing.  I can't see any way that Jon killing her in even a remotely similar context, of trading on her trust to get close to her, fail to try and reason with her, and then give up and kill  her,  even w a 10 ep season, even with a better treatment of her turn to tyrant would not be trite and totally suck.   While I believe she will be a villain in the books, as I have said, I cannot imagine that GRRM version of Jon and Dany will some dipshit Romeo and Julietish stupidity and would almost have to be very different from every angle to work.

I'd have just given her a hard fight for Kings Landing.  Her soldiers are bogged down in vicious street-fighting, which they might lose, so she pulls them back and unleashes dragon fire.  That leaves the decision to kill thousands of innocents as being a deliberate and conscious one on her part, but gives her a credible reason for it. 

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2 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I'd have just given her a hard fight for Kings Landing.  Her soldiers are bogged down in vicious street-fighting, which they might lose, so she pulls them back and unleashes dragon fire.  That leaves the decision to kill thousands of innocents as being a deliberate and conscious one on her part, but gives her a credible reason for it. 

Yeah, that is certainly much better than what they did, but then, the show's mistakes on Dany in Westeros started when everyone inexplicably agreed that she and her full armada and 3 dragons and unsullied and Dothraki should not simply roll up to KL and say: surrender Dorothy and be done with it.  Instead, they hung out at Dragonstone for reasons. So, they screwed up the order of how things would happen, rather than making everyone dumb as fuck, have the armada battle w/Euron happen earlier, she was going to go to KL with her full force but was attacked, something like that.  That and their need to keep Cersei as a credible threat caused a cascade effect where everything the characters did from then on was stupid, obviously stupid and false.  So the ground the show built the last round of conflicts on was always quicksand.

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2 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Yeah, that is certainly much better than what they did, but then, the show's mistakes on Dany in Westeros started when everyone inexplicably agreed that she and her full armada and 3 dragons and unsullied and Dothraki should not simply roll up to KL and say: surrender Dorothy and be done with it.  Instead, they hung out at Dragonstone for reasons. So, they screwed up the order of how things would happen, rather than making everyone dumb as fuck, have the armada battle w/Euron happen earlier, she was going to go to KL with her full force but was attacked, something like that.  That and their need to keep Cersei as a credible threat caused a cascade effect where everything the characters did from then on was stupid, obviously stupid and false.  So the ground the show built the last round of conflicts on was always quicksand.

That was the worst of all.  A sensible military leader would either have flattened the Red Keep (which is located separately from the city) or else turned up and offered the defenders a pardon if they handed Cersei over in chains.

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2 minutes ago, SeanF said:

That was the worst of all.  A sensible military leader would either have flattened the Red Keep (which is located separately from the city) or else turned up and offered the defenders a pardon if they handed Cersei over in chains.

And we are back to why I have said they needed more GRRM input to provide some type of sequence of actions that made any sense.  I get from a TV/momentum standpoint, they wanted the armada sailing visual and then her landing on Dragonstone.  Okay fine.  But then, something logical  has to happen that will sap her of power, and the way the show did this was terrible, and then, compounding their error they have her willing to kiss Cersei's ass and losing a dragon to prove to a known backstabber that the known most selfish woman in Westeros and a backstabber... that she needed to put aside her backstabbing ways and selfishness, which even Hot Pie could have told her was not ever going to happen.  Um, what?  And even in the show's context, um, they already destroyed the Tyrell army and Tyrion is telling everyone that Cersei cannot possibly win..even though he had previously felt it was super important to have Cersei on their side, so it is just all  nonsense.  And on and on it goes. 

My God, how in the hell is Dinklage still winning awards??????

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On another note I tried rewatching some of the later seasons in preparation for finally getting rid of cable, and the show simply proved too annoying for me to get through an entire episode w/out my eyes rolling out of my head or hitting the ff button.

As a totally meaningless example of annoyance.  When Arya meets Hot Pie at the inn, why is she eating like a savage?  The fuck was that about?  She hasn't been starving.  Why is she slurping and licking her fingers like somebody from fleabottom?  I was so annoyed but this weird decision that I was taken entirely out of the scene.  And of course, instead of a touching reunion, we got a weird, off kilter scene where she is borderline rude to Hot Pie even if I could ignore the slurping and gross way she's eating.  Why?  Why?  

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I don't have the patience to watch any DVD commentary, I think I stopped watching their Inside the Episode stuff either in season 6 because it became too unhinged from book characterization and nonsensical reasoning for what was happening. 

I am more sure than ever that they will never create another hit show.  

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4 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

This. And the sad truth is, D&D actually have the Bizarro Midas Touch, where everything they touch turns to shite. 

And then back to gold: tons of money made, critical acclaim, a devoted fanbase (up to until it hardly matters anymore). 

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18 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

And of course, instead of a touching reunion, we got a weird, off kilter scene where she is borderline rude to Hot Pie even if I could ignore the slurping and gross way she's eating.  Why?  Why?  

I think as The Dragon Demands says, they're stupid. I think he's hit the nail on the head with that observation.

The worst scene in the later episodes for me was the LACK of reaction to Jon revealing his parentage to his cousins Sansa and Arya. All we got to see was their facial expressions for a moment before they even learn the truth. Literally, a moment many fans waited for because of the emotional impact it would have had and it was flushed down the toilet because "reasons". (Speaking personally, it was only slightly less underwhelming than what those hacks Jackson, Walsh and Boyens did in robbing Éowyn of her crowning moment of glory in her exchange with The Witch-King of Angmar just before he shatters her arm and she beheads him. The damn Rankin-Bass cartoon did the scene better, and that was made for broadcast Tv in 1980!)

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I think just reading what we are expressing here (and viewers elsewhere), the really shocking thing is the lack of emotional maturity on the part of the showrunners/writers. There's a lack of basic kindness and compassion from their viewpoint as storytellers.

Honor is stupid and gets you killed is coming from them. All the worst attitudes toward men and women are coming from them. Sure, there are nasty characters in the books, but as storytellers, they have the controlling voice of how the narrative is presented, what it all means.

Their self insert, Tyrion, has the best penis, while Jon, the one they envy, has the smallest. And they make all the women honor Tyrion (aka themselves). They make women put down women and call that badass. They make women choose to breed for family killers and call that smart.

And they use the word love so horribly. Jon, the murderer and betrayer who put her down like a dog, "loves" Dany. Littlefinger, the destroyer of her entire world, "loves" Sansa. Real love is disrespected and cast aside, retconned out of existence by nullifying events.

The shock is that anyone let them tell a story to a global audience, and never said wait, this is all wrong. There are so many others more worthy to tell these stories.

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11 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

I think just reading what we are expressing here (and viewers elsewhere), the really shocking thing is the lack of emotional maturity on the part of the showrunners/writers. There's a lack of basic kindness and compassion from their viewpoint as storytellers.

Honor is stupid and gets you killed is coming from them. All the worst attitudes toward men and women are coming from them. Sure, there are nasty characters in the books, but as storytellers, they have the controlling voice of how the narrative is presented, what it all means.

Their self insert, Tyrion, has the best penis, while Jon, the one they envy, has the smallest. And they make all the women honor Tyrion (aka themselves). They make women put down women and call that badass. They make women choose to breed for family killers and call that smart.

And they use the word love so horribly. Jon, the murderer and betrayer who put her down like a dog, "loves" Dany. Littlefinger, the destroyer of her entire world, "loves" Sansa. Real love is disrespected and cast aside, retconned out of existence by nullifying events.

The shock is that anyone let them tell a story to a global audience, and never said wait, this is all wrong. There are so many others more worthy to tell these stories.

All of that.  Our being expected to feel Jon's pain, after running a knife through his lover's heart, or Tyrion's pain, after wringing his lover's neck, is part of the same literary tradition as being expected to feel Athos' pain after he hanged his wife from a tree, in The Three Musketeers.  And D & D think the final season will be viewed in a better light in the future!?  Yes, Western societies are really getting more sympathetic towards the man pain felt by those who kill their lovers!

And, they kinda forgot that what made Robb, Ned, and Catelyn so attractive as characters was their code of honour, even if it got them killed.  They tried to do the right thing, even when it cost them.  Whereas in Season 8, they had the remaining Starks operating by the same code of ethics as Tony Soprano.  And, that's why so many people who had been rooting for the Starks ended up detesting them.

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