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!

[Le Cygne]

On 12/21/2020 at 11:22 PM, The Dragon Demands said:

"We never read online reviews"

"When Battle of the Bastards aired, we spent all night clicking refresh on the episode's IMDB page to see if it got a higher rank than Breaking Bad's Ozymandias" (even though the ranking is transient)

These guys are very, very vain. Hungry for praise. More than is typical for even normal TV producers.  The entire thing is an extension of their vanity. And yeah who doesn't like a positive comment. It's not so much what they say but the way they say it - just how eager for praise they are.

 

On 12/21/2020 at 9:05 PM, Count Balerion said:

but now, here's the bad stuff: D&D did not film alternaten endings for the show, b/c it would "waste time and money". come again? haven't you been doing that all show long? weiss says they used to get a pleasure jolt every time they clicked on a positive comment,  which they would do "like coke-addled monkeys". and one chap managed to blarney his way onto the set, where he took pictures -- which he later posted as part of a "blistering critique" where he explained what he would have done better. (it probably *was* better, too.)

 

Such a baby boy thing to say and do. HBO should have minded the boys, instead of acting like another Goldman Sachs daddy. Benioff was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.

They said they didn't know what they were doing.

They said themes are for 8th graders. One said when called on all the gratuitous female nudity, well, my wife is "showing her tits" too! They said the motivating factor for the battle was bigger is better!

They went with the memes because they didn't get the joke when they were poring over social media. They screwed over the characters they hated by copying the the hate threads they read.

More, more more! Throw lots of noise and money at the screen, and no one will notice none of it makes any sense (until the end, when the Ponzi scheme is up and everyone looks at their empty hands).

Creatively it made sense to us because we wanted it to happen.

So what they were doing while obsessing over meaningless social media ratings was seeing if they pulled off the scam. They managed to do so for a while, with a lot of help.

(Just checked, their finale is sitting at a 4.0 now, despite no doubt lots of spamming the site with high ratings to offset all the 1/10 reviews. The show that lived by social media died by it.)

[Count Balerion]

yah, it got kinda forgotten rather fast!

[ThotKiller]

This gotta be one of the funniest rant of season 8

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Count Balerion]

the best bit is the guy laughing.

my favourite season 8 reactions are preston jacobs and mauler. lindsay ellis is good too. DRAGON LADY BAD.

[Ser Drewy]

I looked up D.B Weiss' first novel Lucky Wander Boy recently. Some of the reviews have a pretty striking similarity to GOT: 

Quote

This book starts with a ton of promise - sort of a non-sci-fi Ready Player One. And for a while, it's pretty good. The female characters aren't great, but the protagonist and his journey are likable enough. But the last third of this book, and especially the ending, goes completely off the rails, squandering that early promise. There's some good stuff here, but the unresolved plot lines and that disaster of an ending left a really bad taste in my mouth. It's a quick read, but not worth your time. (less)

 

[Ser Drewy]

11 hours ago, ThotKiller said:

This gotta be one of the funniest rant of season 8

I guess B&W figured if they threw in enough spectacle they could get away with reducing the Others to one bloated episode. In truth, the magical plot lines were always pretty lacking in the show and I always felt they seemed underdeveloped/underwritten. Still no one had failed to heap praise on them for spectacle before, at least until the Wight Hunt, and there they just dismissed the criticisms outright it seems. So I guess they figured that was an anomaly, perhaps. But it's remarkable watching professional writers quite literally undermine the entire premise/central themes of the show. 

[The Bard of Banefort]

7 hours ago, Ser Drewy said:

I guess B&W figured if they threw in enough spectacle they could get away with reducing the Others to one bloated episode. In truth, the magical plot lines were always pretty lacking in the show and I always felt they seemed underdeveloped/underwritten. Still no one had failed to heap praise on them for spectacle before, at least until the Wight Hunt, and there they just dismissed the criticisms outright it seems. So I guess they figured that was an anomaly, perhaps. But it's remarkable watching professional writers quite literally undermine the entire premise/central themes of the show. 

One remarkable thing about D&D is how badly they've always handled criticism. Even when critics tried to give them credit for "fixing" Sansa's story in season 6, they insisted that this was the plan from the beginning. Nothing better illustrates this pettiness to me than that awful scene in Braavos that mocked the "pearl-clutchers" who were upset about the RamSan rape (many of whom were sexual assault survivors themselves), which the director apparently cut because he thought it was such a ridiculous scene.

[Count Balerion]

they weren't really professional writers. they had no training whatsoever. at least the D-chaps didn't. Cogman had acting experience i think, but no writing. the show was "the world's most expensive film school".

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Nowy Tends]

52 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

they're so hungry for fame they can't stop, and are going on to other major public projects like a $200 million Netflix scifi project.

It seems like the "Three Body Problem" project has a problem:  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/china-producer-on-netflixs-three-body-problem-poisoned-in-alleged-murder-plot

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[SeanF]

6 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Well presumably the simplistic "Sansa gets raped, only to be stronger in Season 6" was being planned when they started it in Season 5.  On a generic level. Failed on the specific level (she doesn't actually do anything of substance, but they act like she did, and apparently did intend it as that).

But yeah the utter pettiness of that Braavos scene mocking their rape critics.  It was in a deleted scene, and I wonder if someone pleaded with them not to include it because it was deeply offensive (no one ever checks the blu rays or deleted scenes).  

The point that does boggle my mind, is that in the on screen version, they do have the actress in Braavos "playing" Cersei....argue with their head writer that Cersei should cry when her son (Joffrey) dies. Because ARYA argued that she should, right?  Only for the arrogant head of the production to shut her down.

Now keep in mind, we see stuff filtered through the interpretation of actors and directors, but sometimes Benioff makes awful jokes that then get filtered into something else by sane people.  If you've ever actually seen him talk about what the "themes" of 25th Hour are, they're kind of weird, but the movie version is filtered through Spike Lee and actors who didn't pick up on this; they focused on the human drama of "what if I go to prison for years away from my family?" while Benioff said it was "I'm worried about getting caught all the time, so I'm worried about going to prison and being raped. Very specifically a phobia of being raped in prison. This is why the climax of the novel is the main character begging his friends to beat up his face so badly that he won't be pretty anymore and no one will want to rape him in prison".

it....it goes on like that...and it's the failure of the media for not researching this guy more. These were public interviews!
 

Well, we found out in the Season 8 Blu-ray commentary that Lena Headey got into a prolonged fight with D&D, urging that Cersei should cry when her son TOMMEN dies, but they shot her down, instead insisting on this silently..."emoting" Cersei (THESE FACES!) - they wanted that 'stern concentrating/emoting face" more than they wanted to see her giving a genuine crying performance.  

....so the Season 5 scene.....of Arya telling the "Cersei" play-within-a-play actress "shouldn't Cersei be crying when her son dies?"....is referring to something Benioff and Weiss were arguing about with the ACTUAL Cersei actress, Lena Headey.  

And you wonder....WAS this a case of Bryan Cogman or whoever putting in a self-referential criticism?  Because we used to project our rescue fantasies onto the cast and crew, "wow that must be a slight against D&D".....but the reality is that they're sheep, and it's just that D&D are so tone deaf that they frequently admit to self-incriminating things.

I saw so many news sites trying to pass that off back in the middle of the show: "D&D are humble and self-deprecating"....even saying that about the Austin Film Fest panel recording.  No, these aren't "self-deprecating" remarks...they're....alternatively, so tone-deaf, and unaware of their own privilege, that they blurt out things like they're jokes: "Haha we barely came to set during the grueling 60 day night shoots!"....

 

.....but so much of D&D's public appearances are.....performances.....that it's hard to sort out.  Out of touch egoists living in a cult like bubble....trying to make self-deprecating jokes, only to MAKE LIGHT of all the suffering they inflicted.

Imagine if like....Kim Jon Un said on TV in a sheepish , coy voice, "well, I guess I'm not getting a 'World's Nicest Boss' Coffee Cup on my birthday, am I?".....and this was a genuine attempt at appearing "relatable". They're just that out of touch.

I'm ranting.  But....it's like the Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon book:  this isn't an admission of guilt, they truly do not know how incriminating it sounds.  So the "Braavos actor-Cersei complaining she should cry when her son dies".....we have no idea if that was a criticism someone snuck in, or if it really was Benioff making a terrible joke at the expense of the cast.  

Like all the increasingly petty jokes about Jon Snow, until large numbers of people began to wonder if Benioff was...genuinely resentful that the lead actor on the show was more popular than he, a writer behind the scenes who stopped making frequent public appearances.  I don't know.

(sigh)

A lot more videos after Christmas guys.  I won't be busy visiting relatives between now and New Year's Eve like in a normal non-pandemic year.

The worst part of all of this to me isn't even that they "got away with it" - legally.  It's that they "got away with it" in the sense that mainstream news sites NEVER report on all this petty stuff Benioff and Weiss actually did, or the incompetence bordering on dangerous neglect for  safety.  That's why Austin Film Fest panel was so fun; when even Esquire and Forbes were reporting on them bragging about their incompetence like a pair of duebro fratboys - this isn't NEW they're like this all the time!

Take solace in the fact that where smarter men would take the money and run, they're so hungry for fame they can't stop, and are going on to other major public projects like a $200 million Netflix scifi project.

The Austin Film Festival was their Gerald Ratner moment.  Ratner made money selling cheap jewellery, and bragged that it lasted about as long as an M & S sandwich, at a business conference.  That went down like a cup of cold sick.

[The Dragon Demands]

 

yeah

[The Bard of Banefort]

23 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Well presumably the simplistic "Sansa gets raped, only to be stronger in Season 6" was being planned when they started it in Season 5.  On a generic level. Failed on the specific level (she doesn't actually do anything of substance, but they act like she did, and apparently did intend it as that).

But yeah the utter pettiness of that Braavos scene mocking their rape critics.  It was in a deleted scene, and I wonder if someone pleaded with them not to include it because it was deeply offensive (no one ever checks the blu rays or deleted scenes).  

The point that does boggle my mind, is that in the on screen version, they do have the actress in Braavos "playing" Cersei....argue with their head writer that Cersei should cry when her son (Joffrey) dies. Because ARYA argued that she should, right?  Only for the arrogant head of the production to shut her down.

Now keep in mind, we see stuff filtered through the interpretation of actors and directors, but sometimes Benioff makes awful jokes that then get filtered into something else by sane people.  If you've ever actually seen him talk about what the "themes" of 25th Hour are, they're kind of weird, but the movie version is filtered through Spike Lee and actors who didn't pick up on this; they focused on the human drama of "what if I go to prison for years away from my family?" while Benioff said it was "I'm worried about getting caught all the time, so I'm worried about going to prison and being raped. Very specifically a phobia of being raped in prison. This is why the climax of the novel is the main character begging his friends to beat up his face so badly that he won't be pretty anymore and no one will want to rape him in prison".

it....it goes on like that...and it's the failure of the media for not researching this guy more. These were public interviews!
 

Well, we found out in the Season 8 Blu-ray commentary that Lena Headey got into a prolonged fight with D&D, urging that Cersei should cry when her son TOMMEN dies, but they shot her down, instead insisting on this silently..."emoting" Cersei (THESE FACES!) - they wanted that 'stern concentrating/emoting face" more than they wanted to see her giving a genuine crying performance.  

....so the Season 5 scene.....of Arya telling the "Cersei" play-within-a-play actress "shouldn't Cersei be crying when her son dies?"....is referring to something Benioff and Weiss were arguing about with the ACTUAL Cersei actress, Lena Headey.  

And you wonder....WAS this a case of Bryan Cogman or whoever putting in a self-referential criticism?  Because we used to project our rescue fantasies onto the cast and crew, "wow that must be a slight against D&D".....but the reality is that they're sheep, and it's just that D&D are so tone deaf that they frequently admit to self-incriminating things.

I saw so many news sites trying to pass that off back in the middle of the show: "D&D are humble and self-deprecating"....even saying that about the Austin Film Fest panel recording.  No, these aren't "self-deprecating" remarks...they're....alternatively, so tone-deaf, and unaware of their own privilege, that they blurt out things like they're jokes: "Haha we barely came to set during the grueling 60 day night shoots!"....

 

.....but so much of D&D's public appearances are.....performances.....that it's hard to sort out.  Out of touch egoists living in a cult like bubble....trying to make self-deprecating jokes, only to MAKE LIGHT of all the suffering they inflicted.

Imagine if like....Kim Jon Un said on TV in a sheepish , coy voice, "well, I guess I'm not getting a 'World's Nicest Boss' Coffee Cup on my birthday, am I?".....and this was a genuine attempt at appearing "relatable". They're just that out of touch.

I'm ranting.  But....it's like the Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon book:  this isn't an admission of guilt, they truly do not know how incriminating it sounds.  So the "Braavos actor-Cersei complaining she should cry when her son dies".....we have no idea if that was a criticism someone snuck in, or if it really was Benioff making a terrible joke at the expense of the cast.  

Like all the increasingly petty jokes about Jon Snow, until large numbers of people began to wonder if Benioff was...genuinely resentful that the lead actor on the show was more popular than he, a writer behind the scenes who stopped making frequent public appearances.  I don't know.

(sigh)

A lot more videos after Christmas guys.  I won't be busy visiting relatives between now and New Year's Eve like in a normal non-pandemic year.

The worst part of all of this to me isn't even that they "got away with it" - legally.  It's that they "got away with it" in the sense that mainstream news sites NEVER report on all this petty stuff Benioff and Weiss actually did, or the incompetence bordering on dangerous neglect for  safety.  That's why Austin Film Fest panel was so fun; when even Esquire and Forbes were reporting on them bragging about their incompetence like a pair of duebro fratboys - this isn't NEW they're like this all the time!

Take solace in the fact that where smarter men would take the money and run, they're so hungry for fame they can't stop, and are going on to other major public projects like a $200 million Netflix scifi project.

I always wondered if the Hound's line in Season 7 about how he "hates gingers" was supposed to be D&D's way of making fun of the SanSan shippers. (There are a lot of people who don't like SanSan for pretty understandable reasons, such as the age difference, but I do think that some people dislike it because it's something that seems to appeal primarily to women, and if girls like something then it must be stupid. D&D strike me as the type of guys who would fall into the second camp, even if unconsciously).

[Rhodan]

On 12/24/2020 at 1:13 AM, The Dragon Demands said:

Where were these people in 2015 when the Sansa rape and TV Dorne happened?

Like it or not, there are some people, who probably found schlocky entertainment in that. I haven´t seen season 8, but I got that it was so much broken, almost nobody could be entertained anymore.  

[Mystical]

18 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

I always wondered if the Hound's line in Season 7 about how he "hates gingers" was supposed to be D&D's way of making fun of the SanSan shippers. (There are a lot of people who don't like SanSan for pretty understandable reasons, such as the age difference, but I do think that some people dislike it because it's something that seems to appeal primarily to women, and if girls like something then it must be stupid. D&D strike me as the type of guys who would fall into the second camp, even if unconsciously).

I don't see why it would only appeal to women/girls. SanSan is pretty much the male nerd fantasy. The less than attractive (older) guy gets the uber-beauty. I see the same appeal for some in Sansa/Tyrion. Hell since D&D are all about punishing the pretty girly girls, I'm actually more surprised they didn't go for SanSan. It sounds like their wet dream to have the feminine beauty end up with one of her ugly looking abusers. Of course they would have had to actually put more of their book interactions into the show (show!Hound was not abusive to Sansa) and that would have interfered in their plan to have as little Sansa on screen as possible since she's useless to them as a character.

But there are plenty of women who pray to all the Gods that exist on Planetos that Sansa's romantic endgame (if she really has to have one urgh) is not one of her abusers.

[SeanF]

31 minutes ago, Mystical said:

I don't see why it would only appeal to women/girls. SanSan is pretty much the male nerd fantasy. The less than attractive (older) guy gets the uber-beauty. I see the same appeal for some in Sansa/Tyrion. Hell since D&D are all about punishing the pretty girly girls, I'm actually more surprised they didn't go for SanSan. It sounds like their wet dream to have the feminine beauty end up with one of her ugly looking abusers. Of course they would have had to actually put more of their book interactions into the show (show!Hound was not abusive to Sansa) and that would have interfered in their plan to have as little Sansa on screen as possible since she's useless to them as a character.

But there are plenty of women who pray to all the Gods that exist on Planetos that Sansa's romantic endgame (if she really has to have one urgh) is not one of her abusers.

I’m surprised they didn’t end up with Sansa asking Tyrion’s forgiveness for rejecting him on their wedding night, and their renewing their marriage.

[Mystical]

4 hours ago, SeanF said:

I’m surprised they didn’t end up with Sansa asking Tyrion’s forgiveness for rejecting him on their wedding night, and their renewing their marriage.

Maybe they didn't see the need for her begging his forgiveness after they basically had her sing his non-rapey praises right before Ramsey went to pound town the first time. That was her punishment for not spreading her legs for Saint Tyrion. So an apology from her to Tyrion would be a giant step down in terms of dramatic effect. A lame apology after all the raping, slicing and dicing? Come on.

They probably regretted having killed off Rickon so Sansa wasn't free to marry Tyrion (a Stark had to be in the North at the end) again. After all, Sansa was talking all wistfully with Tyrion about their marriage in the crypts. Wonder if that was their *wink wink nudge nudge* that if they hadn't made some of the decisions that they did, these two crazy kids would be together in the end.

[The Bard of Banefort]

7 hours ago, Mystical said:

I don't see why it would only appeal to women/girls. SanSan is pretty much the male nerd fantasy. The less than attractive (older) guy gets the uber-beauty. I see the same appeal for some in Sansa/Tyrion. Hell since D&D are all about punishing the pretty girly girls, I'm actually more surprised they didn't go for SanSan. It sounds like their wet dream to have the feminine beauty end up with one of her ugly looking abusers. Of course they would have had to actually put more of their book interactions into the show (show!Hound was not abusive to Sansa) and that would have interfered in their plan to have as little Sansa on screen as possible since she's useless to them as a character.

But there are plenty of women who pray to all the Gods that exist on Planetos that Sansa's romantic endgame (if she really has to have one urgh) is not one of her abusers.

In my experience, most of the SanSan shippers that I've seen, especially the ones who writes fics and do fanart, are women. I once saw someone (who I otherwise liked) deride it as a "little girl fantasy" because it involves a beautiful young woman who's desired by an alpha male type. So I do think some of the backlash (again, not all) comes down to a sort of unconscious misogyny. 

The fact that the Hound is big and strong and a good fighter kind of prevents him from being the perfect self-insert. In that case, St. Tyrion reigns supreme.