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]

10 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I doubt if anyone would have applauded the Battle of Blackwater, if we couldn't actually see what was happening.

Blackwater you could see and more importantly, someone who knew how to write, and how to write for the screen, wrote it (although they fouled it up in a few places by adding their own scenes).

They are so cocky for people so bad at something. What did Mark Twain say? "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

[Ghostlydragon]

7 hours ago, Le Cygne said:

Blackwater you could see and more importantly, someone who knew how to write, and how to write for the screen, wrote it (although they fouled it up in a few places by adding their own scenes).

They are so cocky for people so bad at something. What did Mark Twain say? "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

Was the prostitute with Bronn and Bronn believing he could kill the Hound not by GRRM?

[$erPounce]

Well, it is known that D&D have changed a lot of GRRM's scripts. So, it's quite possible that D&D influenced these scenes.

For example, George wanted to introduce Jeyne Poole in S1E8 and later in S4E2, but it was scrapped.

In "The Lion and The Rose" he even wanted to introduce Penny, Arys Oakheart and Osmund Kettleblack. None of them were seen in the final result.

George R. R. Martin also used POV perspectives in the GOT scripts, where you watch the scenes through someone's eyes. Imagine that: We look through the eyes of "Reek" and digest a rat. Then we realise it's a broken Theon trapped in the Dreadfort.

Most of those POV perspectives have been removed. One of the few POV-scenes that remained were those of Summer. It's a shame that GOT pretty much only uses a third-person perspective, you lose a lot of the ASOIAF experience by removing the POV perspective.

In the end, I can perfectly understand why George no longer wanted to work with D&D for the scripts. They made so many changes to the scripts (while GRRM is the author of the books on which the series is "based" and also has more experience in the film industry than the showrunners)... 

Also, it was more or less clear by then that D&D simply wanted to make too many changes to the source material. They were also not planning to adapt A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. They broke their promise to be faithful to the books. As GRRM, I would not find any reason to continue the collaboration.

[Le Cygne]

3 hours ago, Ghostlydragon said:

Was the prostitute with Bronn and Bronn believing he could kill the Hound not by GRRM?

Yep, Benioff/Weiss wrote the absurd scene glorifying their self-insert, Bronn (Tyrion and Bronn are their boys). The full frontal female nudity demand was by an "executive producer" (Benioff and Weiss are executive producers who kept demanding more female nudity on many other occasions, so BINGO).

They also wrote the Cersei as Earth Mother with Tommen scene (AS IF, even in their own later scenes, she drove him to suicide, then didn't give a damn when he jumped out a window). Which is a shame because GRRM had her acting like Cersei for the first and only time in his scenes. Basically anywhere the episode fell flat, that was Benioff/Weiss.

[Ran]

The executive producer in the anecdote from Neil Marshall was Frank Doelger, not Benioff or Weiss.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Le Cygne said:

Yep, Benioff/Weiss wrote the absurd scene glorifying their self-insert, Bronn (Tyrion and Bronn are their boys). The full frontal female nudity demand was by an "executive producer" (Benioff and Weiss are executive producers who kept demanding more female nudity on many other occasions, so BINGO).

They also wrote the Cersei as Earth Mother with Tommen scene (AS IF, even in their own later scenes, she drove him to suicide, then didn't give a damn when he jumped out a window). Which is a shame because GRRM had her acting like Cersei for the first and only time in his scenes. Basically anywhere the episode fell flat, that was Benioff/Weiss.

I liked that scene a great deal - but as so often, even when Benioff & Weiss produced something decent, they would then go on to completely contradict it.  So, once they established that Cersei cared deeply for Tommen, his suicide ought to have been devastating for her - making her call into question her own actions. She descends from her chambers, triumphant after destroying her enemies, only to receive the shattering news that she's driven her son to suicide.   Instead she called him a traitor to Jaime.

One of the many banes of the series was abrupt and unexplained shifts in character.

Shae goes from loving Tyrion and Sansa to framing them for Joffrey's murder.  Doreah goes from having an almost romantic relationship with Dany to betraying her.  Ellaria goes from sympathetic paramour to child murderer.  Cersei goes from loving mother of Tommen to complete indifference to his suicide.  Arya goes from making friends with people from all backgrounds to obnoxious xenophobe.  None of these changes is explained;  as usual, we are left to fill in the plot holes.

[Le Cygne]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

The executive producer in the anecdote from Neil Marshall was Frank Doelger, not Benioff or Weiss.

I'll take your word for it. We know Benioff/Weiss wrote the scene, and asked for it in other scenes (there are their own statements as well as statements by the cast in various interviews).

[Ran]

2 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

I'll take your word for it. We know Benioff/Weiss wrote the scene, and asked for it in other scenes (there are their own statements as well as statements by the cast in various interviews).

Neil Marshall's account of it, which is our sole source of this, made it plain that the executive producer was not one of the "creatives" -- he referred to how the "others" talked about making art, etc., but he wanted nudity in that scene.

[Le Cygne]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

I liked that scene a great deal - but as so often, even when Benioff & Weiss produced something decent, they would then go on to completely contradict it.  So, once they established that Cersei cared deeply for Tommen, his suicide ought to have been devastating for her - making her call into question her own actions. She descends from her chambers, triumphant after destroying her enemies, only to receive the shattering news that she's driven her son to suicide.   Instead she called him a traitor to Jaime.

One of the many banes of the series was abrupt and unexplained shifts in character.

Shae goes from loving Tyrion and Sansa to framing them for Joffrey's murder.  Doreah goes from having an almost romantic relationship with Dany to betraying her.  Ellaria goes from sympathetic paramour to child murderer.  Cersei goes from loving mother of Tommen to complete indifference to his suicide.  Arya goes from making friends with people from all backgrounds to obnoxious xenophobe.  None of these changes is explained;  as usual, we are left to fill in the plot holes.

In my opinion, the scene really had no place in Blackwater, however. A big part of writing well is to choose what to include and what not to include, and I think what they added did not belong.

They have no conception of how to put together a story well, and their additions were discordant. I don't think they thought of characters in psychological terms, and badly botched Cersei.

[Le Cygne]

3 minutes ago, Ran said:

Neil Marshall's account of it, which is our sole source of this, made it plain that the executive producer was not one of the "creatives" -- he referred to how the "others" talked about making art, etc., but he wanted nudity in that scene.

If that's the sole source, then I go back to my original guess. Of the two, I'd guess it was Benioff.

[Ran]

Just now, Le Cygne said:

If that's the sole source, then I go back to my original guess. Of the two, I'd guess it was Benioff.

I have no idea why the fact that Marshall said the executive producer on hand referred to the other executive producers as wanting to make art leads you to believe that Benioff was somehow referring to Weiss and Doelger, of all people. Doelger was executive producer on Rome, a show that definitely did the whole nudity-and-sex thing quite a bit.

It was Doelger. He was HBO's guy they put in to show D&D the ropes and who also knew the "It's not porn, it's HBO" mantra. Sex and nudity largely disappears after S5, I'm told, which also happens to be the final season in which he was involved.

[Le Cygne]

Well, because I think the art remark was a joke (see below). And other quotes suggest it may have been him as well, because it was coming from him in other cases.

Entertainment Weekly’s Editor-at-Large James Hibberd recently released an oral history of Game of Thrones titled Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series. Hibberd writes that in the early days of the series, showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff didn’t know how to handle nudity on set.

Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo) remembers Benioff being unprofessional during one of his nude scenes. Momoa says he was wearing an intimacy pouch, which covers genitals during a sex scene. But Benioff was telling him to take it off, so Momoa put it in his hand.

“That was because David had been like, ‘Momoa, just take it off!’ You know, giving me s***. ‘Sacrifice! Do it for your art!’ I’m just like, ‘F*** you, bro. My wife would be pissed. That’s for one lady only, man,'” Momoa recalled.

He added that after he ripped it off, he kept it in his hand. Then Momoa gave Benioff a “big hug and a handshake.” The actor says he told Benioff, “Hey, now you have a little bit of me on you, buddy.”

https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/game-of-thrones-how-1-unforgettable-scene-was-very-different-than-other-stars-experience-with-nudity-on-set.html/

[Ran]

Marshall didn't treat it as a joke. In fact, revisiting it, this executive producer was distinguishing themselves from everyone else in the production as being of the "serious drama" persuasion, while he represented the "pervs". There's no way that Benioff or Weiss would characterize themselves this way as the showrunners.

That quote from Hibberd's book shows something rather different since the nudity in question wasn't actually ever intended to be shown on the screen, but rather this idea of being "true to the art". The full Marshall quote makes it plain that the executive producer in question started by encouraging it to be full frontal, and then made it plain when Marshall resisted that it was an order, not a request, and that it was to satisfy the "perverts" in the audience rather than for artistic reasons.

Seriously, it's Doelger. Benioff and Weiss made what fuck ups that they made, but I don't think we need to add on stuff that other people did as well.

[Le Cygne]

3 hours ago, SeanF said:

I liked that scene a great deal - but as so often, even when Benioff & Weiss produced something decent, they would then go on to completely contradict it.  So, once they established that Cersei cared deeply for Tommen, his suicide ought to have been devastating for her - making her call into question her own actions. She descends from her chambers, triumphant after destroying her enemies, only to receive the shattering news that she's driven her son to suicide.   Instead she called him a traitor to Jaime.

One of the many banes of the series was abrupt and unexplained shifts in character.

Shae goes from loving Tyrion and Sansa to framing them for Joffrey's murder.  Doreah goes from having an almost romantic relationship with Dany to betraying her.  Ellaria goes from sympathetic paramour to child murderer.  Cersei goes from loving mother of Tommen to complete indifference to his suicide.  Arya goes from making friends with people from all backgrounds to obnoxious xenophobe.  None of these changes is explained;  as usual, we are left to fill in the plot holes.

Also thinking some more about this... rant part 2... They had not properly done the bold.

That would require time and space of its own to be established properly, to give the relationship time to breathe. You can't just drop it on a busy episode like this, and have it actually mean something.

The first thing they do is often an abrupt unexplained shift, too.

• Shae "loves" Tyrion. (WHY?) = abrupt unexplained shift
• Then she doesn't. (WHY?) = abrupt unexplained shift

It's cheating. I don't want to give them that a scene all by itself might be good, because a scene is NEVER all by itself! The hard work is making it part of the whole, and they don't bother with that.

[Count Balerion]

by the last season, there are barely any characters anymore. it's pandering actors for emmys. "these performances, these faces."

[Le Cygne]

Carice on the nudity (there are a bunch more looking back articles we already posted). Mel, along with Dany and Missandei, were their go to naked women in the later seasons.

"When the Me Too movement started, that's when it started sinking in for me," van Houten told Insider. "And it did sort of change my perspective on my whole career, not just 'Game of Thrones.'"

"In retrospect, I thought, 'Why did that scene have to be nude? Why was that normal?' I did question things and it was not so much that I was blaming anyone, but that's just how we evolved, and just how the movement affected me.

"I became very aware of the male gaze..."

Van Houten says this change of thought process is "me confronting my own feeling of 'that's what the audience wants' and not feeling confident to say, 'Wait a minute, why would I have to do that?' It's just our conditioned behaviour as females, and not thinking about what that means."

https://www.insider.com/carice-van-houten-me-too-nude-scenes-game-of-thrones-2020-5

[Le Cygne]

So how it's really done:

"You can't build that skyscraper unless you've got the architectural blueprints to begin with."

Another good look at how they did it:

‘I am looking for authenticity and characters, for writers who don’t cheat.’ To reach the bravura scenes that everyone likes to write, many shows force the characters to do something completely implausible or seriously stupid. It is almost a convention. But this he won’t accept. ‘I like seeing that writers work that much harder to get there properly.

‘Characters all act in recognisable human ways. We are all experts - you don’t have to be a writer to be an expert in humanity. We all have  a good BS detector, so we can see when this person would not do that. I always say, “Work that much harder, even for popcorn movies, to make the characters behave as human beings would, and it pays such dividends.”’

They have round about eight people in the room, and Gilligan is enchanted by the process of working collectively with really clever people who contribute equally to the script. ‘It’s like a sequestered jury that never ends,’ he said. ‘ We are sitting around a table and talking ad nauseam right down to the most minute granular detail - what the characters are saying, what they want, what they are wearing, what the weather looks like. We are always seeing it in visual terms as well, we want the show to be visual storytelling. 

https://www.screenhub.com.au/news-article/features/television/david-tiley/what-did-vince-gilligan-do-that-made-breaking-bad-so-good-254163

[Angel Eyes]

So question about The Long Night: why put all your civilians in a crypt, where there's a shitton of dead bodies for the Night King to raise? This apparently crossed nobody's minds since the Night King raises more than fresh corpses (read: the zombie kids at Hardhome).

Even Peter Dinklage shows annoyance at the characters' stupidity.

[SeanF]

9 hours ago, Angel Eyes said:

So question about The Long Night: why put all your civilians in a crypt, where there's a shitton of dead bodies for the Night King to raise? This apparently crossed nobody's minds since the Night King raises more than fresh corpses (read: the zombie kids at Hardhome).

Even Peter Dinklage shows annoyance at the characters' stupidity.

Why keep civilians at Winterfell at all?  Surely, they should be evacuted Southwards.   In fact, why fight at Winterfell?  The Neck would be the obvious choke point at which to confront the army of the Dead. Why send light cavalry charging at the Dead, straight after you've said you can't fight them in the open?  Why position your artillery outside of the walls?

[Le Cygne]

I know very little about warfare, but it reminded me of the first day of the battle of the Somme. They just kept going out and getting slaughtered. But there was no underlying reason on the show for this.

WWI will always tell the psychology of WHY they kept sending people to die. The show didn't bother. The Westeros fighters were not portrayed as stiff upper lip, or fool headed prior to this. Or even after.

They never actually bothered to explain (a la the story structure Vince Gilligan was talking about above) why this was happening.

They just threw stuff at the screen to fill time, but since no one could actually see the keys rattling, the audience was only distracted by how stupid it was. It was filler until Arya Ninja Turtle did her thing.

The only relevant action in the entire episode was the end of the Night King, and that was over in a moment, and stupid, too.