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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!


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23 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

PJ's reviews, together w/ blacknerdproblens were absolutely amazing and perfectly spot on! :lol:

I still say 'Gay of Thrones' did the best nicknames overall. But for people roasting the show, PJ is up there and of course the fandom itself sometimes. Good grief, the nicknames for 'Bran' since S7 can probably fill an entire book.

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14 hours ago, SeanF said:

Revisiting this issue.  

I think the sack of Kings Landing by Dany's and Jon's soldiers makes sense, in a medieval world.  These are people who have been fighting for months, faced the army of the Dead, and have taken the city by storm.  The city's commander promised to fight alongside them, before betraying them.  She then refused to surrender when called upon to do so, instead, publicly executing a prominent prisoner.  In addition, the Northmen have the deaths of Ned Stark and his men to avenge, the treatment of Sansa to avenge, and the Red Wedding to avenge (almost every Northern soldier  will have lost someone they knew).  If a city fails to surrender, the victorious army will go on the rampage, once it's taken, and these are men with a lot of scores to settle.  That's entirely in accordance with the laws of war.  That said, while a sack will involve killing, a massacre of the entire population is rarely on the cards, unless there's some religious motivation.

Daenerys burning the Red Keep to the ground makes sense as well, in terms of the narrative.  She has spoken of it several times, and she too, would be full of anger at Missandei's death, and keen for revenge on Cersei.

What makes no sense at all, as @The Dragon Demandshas demonstrated, is that Daenerys should turn aside from the Red Keep to wantonly incinerate women and children.  It's not part of her character (as established in the first 71 episodes of the show) and it's not what we see her intending to do when she takes off on Drogon;  nor is it what she said she was going to do beforehand. 

It could perhaps have been made explicable, if she had had a complete mental breakdown;  or if there were a botched surrender;  or, if the Lannisters had embedded themselves among the civilians, leaving her the choice between retreat from the city, or burning her enemies - but  D & D chose the worst and lamest explanation - turning her into a mad Nazi intent on conquering the world, and then via Tyrion, retconning her anti-slavery campaign as evil.

All of this.

Also how they showed her insta-madness slash insta-Nazi slash insta-Satan slash hysterical female turn was both insulting and stupid, as usual.

Suddenly her hair and makeup is badly done. She forgot her lipstick! She must be MAD! And yet... she still would have had a hair and makeup person.

So madness = not looking pretty. Some gaping fool wouldn't kiss her, so she let herself go! She's nothing without a man (except she always was something).

Good thing Tyrion was around to mansplain.

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On 7/12/2020 at 6:02 PM, Corvinus85 said:

 

I liked how Preston Jacobs, in his roleplay reviews, often referred to some of the characters by the actors' names. It wasn't Jon Snow, but simply Kit Harrington. Or not Dany, but Emilia Clarke. And of course, the Bran9000. :P

 

And Wolverine. Even though I barely got the reference, it's still funny.

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On 7/12/2020 at 6:02 PM, Corvinus85 said:

I liked how Preston Jacobs, in his roleplay reviews, often referred to some of the characters by the actors' names. It wasn't Jon Snow, but simply Kit Harrington. Or not Dany, but Emilia Clarke. And of course, the Bran9000. :P

Also The Most Moral Man In The Universe (Tyrion). And Pointlessbowl.

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56 minutes ago, Mystical said:

I still say 'Gay of Thrones' did the best nicknames overall. But for people roasting the show, PJ is up there and of course the fandom itself sometimes.

Have you read any of blacknerd’s reviews? If not, you should. They’re so spot on and so hilariously written, definitely worth it. 

56 minutes ago, Mystical said:

Good grief, the nicknames for 'Bran' since S7 can probably fill an entire book.

True! :lol:

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Speaking of the dumb as fuck Pointlessbowl... another scene that was utterly stupid, pointless, and soooooo OOC (I know, there’s a shit ton of those) was Brienne the Brute killing Satannis... :bang: :bang: :bang:

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1 hour ago, kissdbyfire said:

Speaking of the dumb as fuck Pointlessbowl... another scene that was utterly stupid, pointless, and soooooo OOC (I know, there’s a shit ton of those) was Brienne the Brute killing Satannis... :bang: :bang: :bang:

Since this occurred at the tail end of Season 5, it was just another drop in the bucket at that point, but I would have to agree.

In fact, Brienne the Brute is the character who best illustrated to me how much I used to project the books onto the show. I had been rewatching the show to look for the signs that began to pile up in Season 4, and noticed how unlike her book counterpart she truly was from the beginning. We see Brienne of Tarth for perhaps one minute total over the course of the series. On the show, she was almost always the Brute: a stoic warrior woman with no age-borne innocence and little empathy who clearly despised traditional femininity and other women, who treated Pod very poorly, who was overly eager to kill, and who was obsessed with vengeance with little regard for loyalty or honor; in other words, the exact opposite of Brienne. Some of her scenes with Cat and some of her earlier ones with Jaime could well have been Book!Brienne, but they were inherently ruined by the context of those scenes or else fell short due to how poorly those characters were adapted.

It is a shame, because Ms. Gwendoline Christie is -- of course -- wonderful and talented. She is beautiful much as Mr. Peter Dinklage is handsome, as opposed to the characters they play as they physically are in the books, and I think the showrunners were charmed and rewrote the characters according to this and to their existing biases. Saint Tyrion was an obvious product, but the blackwashing of Brienne probably occurred accidentally. Messrs. Benioff and Weiss view the world through a fundamentally sexist lens, and I think they genuinely thought they were writing an empowered woman the audience should be rooting for, because to them, women are strong either by being masculine stone-cold killers or by being femme fatales.

ETA: To be clear, Book!Brienne is a wonderfully written character and a wonderful person who is strong in the real way. D&D "fixed" this by making Show!Brienne Empowered ™ in their own fashion, stoicism and misogyny included for free, which is why her necessarily being blackwashed seems more accidental to me.

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15 hours ago, Le Cygne said:

All of this.

Also how they showed her insta-madness slash insta-Nazi slash insta-Satan slash hysterical female turn was both insulting and stupid, as usual.

Suddenly her hair and makeup is badly done. She forgot her lipstick! She must be MAD! And yet... she still would have had a hair and makeup person.

So madness = not looking pretty. Some gaping fool wouldn't kiss her, so she let herself go! She's nothing without a man (except she always was something).

Good thing Tyrion was around to mansplain.

And in the right hands (ha!) it could all have been very sad and very dramatic.  You could have had Grey Worm, Jon, Yohn Royce and Davos first starting a fight, believing the surrender to be sham, or meeting fiercer resistance than anticipated, but then desperately trying and failing to restrain the army as it went on the rampage. You could have had Daenerys reacting with horror to the fact that what she intended to be a surgical strike against Cersei triggered a chain reaction of wildfire explosions across the city.  In turn, that generates worthwhile arguments about the extent to which commanders are responsible to for the behaviour of their men, or for deaths that result from their actions, even if not intended.

Not the least of my criticisms of D & D is that despite the level of violence in the series, they actually had no real knowledge of  warfare, or what it means to take a city by storm , or how to write a battle scene (the best battle scene was the one written by George Martin).  The idea that an army would stand down once it heard bells ringing is for the birds (not to mention, it contradicted "I've never known bells mean surrender.").  All they had to do was to hire someone like Bernard Cornwell to advise them;  after all, he's advised Martin about writing battle scenes.

Edit:  Even hiring people is unnecessary, according to Mercedes Lackey.  There are any number of well-informed amateurs of medieval warfare who will give you this information for free on YouTube and other media.  E-mail them and they'll give you detailed responses.

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7 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

Speaking of the dumb as fuck Pointlessbowl... another scene that was utterly stupid, pointless, and soooooo OOC (I know, there’s a shit ton of those) was Brienne the Brute killing Satannis... :bang: :bang: :bang:

They blatantly vilified Stannis by having him burn his daughter, straight after Ramsay and his twenty good men managed to defeat his entire army.

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10 hours ago, Count Balerion said:

And: When Bran said "I have to GOOOOO now", did he perhaps just mean the loo?

Tyrion "doesn't like liberation theology". The worst was when he explained that when Dany killed the slavers, that should have clued us in that she's BAD.

Well, you can see why no one wanted to touch Confederate.  It would have been the two stooges' version of Birth of a Nation.

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5 hours ago, SeanF said:

Well, you can see why no one wanted to touch Confederate.  It would have been the two stooges' version of Birth of a Nation.

Although I don't approve of 'cancel culture' or the twitterati mob, there is no question that the two showrunners would have been cancelled already if Confederate had ever seen the light of day, and that would have been a silver lining in an otherwise dismal cultural moment. 

 

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27 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Although I don't approve of 'cancel culture' or the twitterati mob, there is no question that the two showrunners would have been cancelled already if Confederate had ever seen the light of day, and that would have been a silver lining in an otherwise dismal cultural moment. 

 

In the right hands, it has the potential to be interesting, like The Man in the High Castle, or the novels of Harry Turtledove.  But, not in D & D's hands.

 

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2 minutes ago, SeanF said:

In the right hands, it has the potential to be interesting, like The Man in the High Castle, or the novels of Harry Turtledove.  But, not in D & D's hands.

 

Even in the best of hands it would have been a very difficult needle to thread, especially now, but certainly D&D, with their love of gratuitous sex and violence, lack of nuance, lack of planning skills, wobbly moral framework, lack of writing skills it would have been an epic cluster***

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So ... Abraham Lincoln would be the badguy? Not that I think D&D are deliberately white supremacist. More like completely clueless. But that Dany's freeing the slaves is retconned into being a sign of latent evil AND they wanted to produce CONFEDERATE is an ... interesting coincidence.

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32 minutes ago, Count Balerion said:

Not that I think D&D are deliberately white supremacist.

I don't think Messrs. Benioff and Weiss are "deliberately" bigoted, whatever form that might entail. Certainly, they aren't foaming at the mouth in rage that women and people of color are increasingly entering different circles of society, or anything like that. However, they have an inherently bigoted worldview, and it shows in what they write and how they explain what they write. The sheer sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and so forth in Game of Thrones is virtually all the result of adaptational changes and original writing.

A case could be made that Mr. Martin might not handle race perfectly, especially considering how he does a great job with Dorne yet does not offer a single native Essosi PoV, but he otherwise masterfully writes characters and plots to egalitarian ends. In A Song of Ice and Fire, he consciously rejects the sort of sexism/racism/classism/ableism/etc. Game of Thrones seems to happily endorse -- at the very least, the audience should understand what is wrong with the picture he depicts and summarily dismiss it. (Unfortunately, many readers do not, hence the pro-slaver, anti-femininity, anti-smallfolk, and similar arguments that are disturbingly common in the fandom.)

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