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!

[Angel Eyes]

4 hours ago, Le Cygne said:

The show said morality is stupid, they had the Stark kids mocking their own father, who basically ran on the morality platform.

 

Well, don't the books say the same thing?

[Angel Eyes]

27 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Erhm, no. Littlefinger doesn’t see Sansa as a daughter, he only tells her that; huge difference. In reality, he sees her as Cat 2.0, and he will try his best to have a different outcome w/ Sansa than he did w/ Cat. 

And they will most definitely be in conflict, and fingers crossed, she either kills the disgusting creep herself or plays a major part in his demise. 

She should have been the one to cut his throat in the show. And nobody say anything about Arya being more practiced with it because she's not; she's only killed three people in this method, most of her kills are stabbings.

[teej6]

29 minutes ago, Angel Eyes said:

Well, don't the books say the same thing?

I don’t think the books/ author is stating or implying morality (or good morals) is stupid. That is a very simply reading of the text and that’s what D&D got terribly wrong. Through Ned’s character, GRRM is implying naiveté and trusting others to abide by a moral code that you hold is stupid. Ned’s failure was not being able to recognize the extent of guile and depravity in others. In addition, GRRM is stating that leaders will be faced with tough choices and will sometimes have to be ruthless in their decision making (that is why good men do not always make good leaders). In the case of Ned, had he listened to Renly and separated Cersei from her children, he may have come out the winner but the act was too ruthless for him and he underestimated the lengths Cersei would go to stay in power.

And IIRC, nowhere in the books, do any of the Stark children or Jon Snow mock Ned’s morals. Perhaps Arya is upset and angry but I don’t remember her mocking Ned. 

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Angel Eyes said:

Well, don't the books say the same thing?

No, I don't think so.  Good deeds may doom you, but ultimately, what goes around comes around.  Do evil and evil will eventually be done to you and yours.  Ned's honour got him killed, but on the other hand, there are thousands of men in the North who are fiercely loyal to his memory and to his House, because of his honour.  Whereas no one much mourned Tywin Lannister or will mourn Littlefinger.

Even in the case of Ned, it's surely better to die knowing you did the right thing, in trying to save children, than to die with the deaths of children on your conscience.

[lancerman]

2 hours ago, Angel Eyes said:

Well, don't the books say the same thing?

Yep the books 100% spell out that Ned acted completely naively and the whole point was that in this realistic world, acting that stupidly honorable gets you killed. Same with Robb Stark. 
 

The smart and savvy make the right moves and end up winning. The emotional screw up. Robb the tactician was great. Robb the honorable man got himself killed. Tywin the general basically won the war. Tywin the vindictive father got himself killed. 

[lancerman]

2 hours ago, Angel Eyes said:

She should have been the one to cut his throat in the show. And nobody say anything about Arya being more practiced with it because she's not; she's only killed three people in this method, most of her kills are stabbings.

Sansa is last. If she was the one with the knife, LF would have stabbed her with it and tried to run away 

[Le Cygne]

Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone dies sooner or later. But how you live matters. And that's what makes a good story. Ned was not perfect, but he loved his children, and they loved him.

He was a beacon to them, he's what kept them going.

Just saw this movie again recently, he's talking about honor. He defended his friend, an innocent man. And he had to give something up, something big. But he gained something, too.

And that is what I think GRRM is saying below (from the Dreamsongs intro):

Casablanca put it most succinctly, "It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die." William Faulkner said much the same thing while accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, when he spoke of "the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephmeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and self-sacrifice."

[teej6]

14 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

Just saw this movie again recently, he's talking about honor. He defended his friend, an innocent man. And he had to give something up, something big. But he gained something, too.

 

Henry Fonda was perfect as Tom Joad.

[SeanF]

42 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone dies sooner or later. But how you live matters. And that's what makes a good story. Ned was not perfect, but he loved his children, and they loved him.

He was a beacon to them, he's what kept them going.

Just saw this movie again recently, he's talking about honor. He defended his friend, an innocent man. And he had to give something up, something big. But he gained something, too.

And that is what I think GRRM is saying below (from the Dreamsongs intro):

Casablanca put it most succinctly, "It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die." William Faulkner said much the same thing while accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, when he spoke of "the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephmeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and self-sacrifice."

One of the most heroic characters in the series was a very minor one, Lord Chelstead, one of Aerys' lickespittles.  But, in the last hours of his life, he achieved greatness, by defying a king who wanted to burn thousands of innocents.  And he failed.   Aerys killed him horribly.   And he succeeded, by proving that defeat is no refutation. 

[SeanF]

11 hours ago, teej6 said:

I don’t think the books/ author is stating or implying morality (or good morals) is stupid. That is a very simply reading of the text and that’s what D&D got terribly wrong. Through Ned’s character, GRRM is implying naiveté and trusting others to abide by a moral code that you hold is stupid. Ned’s failure was not being able to recognize the extent of guile and depravity in others. In addition, GRRM is stating that leaders will be faced with tough choices and will sometimes have to be ruthless in their decision making (that is why good men do not always make good leaders). In the case of Ned, had he listened to Renly and separated Cersei from her children, he may have come out the winner but the act was too ruthless for him and he underestimated the lengths Cersei would go to stay in power.

And IIRC, nowhere in the books, do any of the Stark children or Jon Snow mock Ned’s morals. Perhaps Arya is upset and angry but I don’t remember her mocking Ned. 

D & D's story was nihilistic.  Love is pointless, trying to do good makes you worse than people who are evil, and to win, you have to be deceitful and underhand like the Lannisters.

[teej6]

19 minutes ago, SeanF said:

D & D's story was nihilistic.  Love is pointless, trying to do good makes you worse than people who are evil, and to win, you have to be deceitful and underhand like the Lannisters.

Totally agree. D&D’s story (prolly their general view of the real world) was nihilistic — any virtue or good deed does not matter in the end. In fact, it only dooms the person. You can only win through corruption and deceit. Sandra who in their story is supposed to be LF 2.0 (although Book!LF would disown Sandra in a millisecond) gets WF. 

[Le Cygne]

Just read this review again, he didn't miss much in terms of what they did wrong, here's some, there's more:

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.

Being cruel to be kind here: There was always at least one thing wrong with Game of Thrones. Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) went to Dorne. Brienne (Gwendolyn Christie) spent a season staring patiently at a window. There was that time when Dany’s whole thing was “My dragons!” and I think you had to really love pyramids to ever fully groove on her days in Meereen. Nobody could ever make the Red God happen. Season 7 reunited Arya and Sansa, by then two of the most famous TV characters of the decade… and teased a goofy fake-out about maybe one of them killing the other. In season 8, Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), the longtime antagonist whose whole Disney Princess Plotting Incest Homicide Coups iconography practically invented this series, got to dispassionately bang a pirate Viking before staring patiently out a window. And then she died in her lover’s arms, reads her plot summary, an oddly clichéd ending for a character who was anything but...

Left to their own devices, they eventually gave in in to some of the worst instincts of fan fiction, like that time they threw a bunch of characters together for a dull trip beyond the wall to pick up a zombie corpse. I believe strongly that the best instinct of the books and the series was the urge to subvert your narrative expectations — but by the time the show staged #CleganeBowl as a showdown out of a Mortal Kombat movie, it felt like Twitter’s trending topics deserved a co-writing credit...

As for those queens… well, Cersei didn’t have anything to do this season, which strikes me as the one complete failure of imagination. The final two episodes of Game of Thrones gave plenty of real estate to, like, Tyrion’s love for his brother Jaime, or Tyrion’s fraternal bond with Jon. Anyone approaching Game of Thrones from a gender-studies perspective would have a field day with this finale. The last words Tyrion said to Jon were about pissing of the edge of the world, a “callback” that sounded like an invitation to cross some streams. And the last properly heard spoken conversation ever in Game of Thrones was a joke about a brothel! The broseph mentality shined through in this last season, all the more obvious after a couple years that strove hard to build the female characters into major roles. Tyrion could cry majestically over his fallen brother, but Dany would react to Missandei’s death with a cuckoo makeup job. This last season couldn’t get Arya and Cersei into the same room — but it had time for Euron and Jaime to fight over Cersei, or for Tyrion to bond with Jon over how much they both loved the ker-azy gal they had to kill.

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

[Nowy Tends]

46 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

[…] by promoting her into a Very Important Administrative Role […]

ah ah good one 

[Nagini's Neville]

deleted

[SeanF]

22 hours ago, Nagini's Neville said:

“Sometimes he sees Sansa and she’s the daughter he never had,” Martin says. “The daughter that he might have had with Cat…But at other times, he detaches himself from that and he’s less Petyr and more Littlefinger and she’s just another piece in the game of thrones…Yet, other times, she’s not Cat’s daughter, she’s young Cat. She’s his teenage fantasies returned again.” 

https://comicbook.com/blog/2014/05/19/game-of-thrones-george-r-r-martin-explains-littlefingers-relationship-with-sansa-stark/

to me, that's a pretty good recipe for a conflict/disaster.

Feel like most 13 year old girls would have problem with having to regularly make out with a guy, who also demands of them so see him as their father 

Oh, his treatment of Sansa is grotesque.

[SeanF]

Was there a bad argument or trope that was not utilised by D & D?

Killing your partner is romantic (Tyrion/Shae, Jon/Daenerys)

Beauty is dangerous (Dany, Cersei, Margaery, Shae, Melisandre)

Sex slaves enjoy their work (Volantis)

Gay men are promiscuous (Loras/ Olly)

Madness is hereditary and mental illness is evil (Dany again)

Women in power are problematic (Dany, Cersei, Olenna, Yara, Margaery, Ellaria) 

Ambition is bad, and power should go to those who are born to it (Bran, Sansa)

People who perpetrate injustice are less to be feared than people who fight it (Ghiscari slavers, and rapist Khals)

 

 

 

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[SeanF]

15 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

I made these highlight clips from the audio recording of the Austin Film Fest panel with Benioff & Weiss the last week of October 2019.  This is the interview that finally broke Benioff & Weiss: the backlash went viral, spread to major media, Forbes & Esquire were reporting on it, and then two days later, even Star Wars seized on the opportunity to publicly announce they were dropping Benioff & Weiss from writing their new movies.  

Austin Film Fest filed a Copyright Strike against my channel over this - not just a takedown, but automatically yanking them offline, and shutting my channel down.  Undeterred, I filed a counter-claim.  Had they won, my channel would have remained shut down for 3 months.  I just WON the copyright dispute - that this counts as "Faire Use" reporting - so my channel, and the clips, were restored after only 3 weeks.  I'm still upset they tried to silence criticism like that.  

I made four highlight montage clips, covering:

• Benioff & Weiss spent a full hour basically bragging about how unqualified they were to run a TV show...at a writers' conference.  This wasn't SDCC, but an audience of professional writers, who did NOT think this was amusing.  I made a montage of them admitting they don't have writing degrees and know nothing about running a TV show....and "wow, it was like the world's most expensive film school to us!"...to set up the big Q&A section question, where a woman directly confronted them "why didn't you hire any female or non-white professional writers?" and their utterly botched response was "because we knew we were best for it".
• Benioff & Weiss bluntly admit that they didn't understand the characters, they just "wrote the actors" to show them off.  The moderator realized how absurd and embarrassing this was and restated the question several times, desperately trying to nudge them into describing their "writing process"...but they couldn't take the hint, and didn't really have "a writing process", so they just went into more detail, explicitly stating "we just wrote the actors, we learned so much from them".  ("We reconceived the role to make it worthy of the actors' talents"; "We changed the story to show off These Performances, These Faces")
• Benioff & Weiss laughing about how they didn't come to night shoots for the Long Night battle in Season 8, chuckling at how miserable their production team was...intercut with video interviews of crewmembers breaking down in tears over the strain and being separated from their families.
•  A quick montage:  at AFF, faced with a difficult question, Benioff and Weiss stay totally silent, each pointing to the other to answer it, before Benioff outright explains "I've found that if I stay silent long enough, other people will answer questions for me".....intercut with examples of this, such as the cringe-worthy post-Season 8 Emmys press Q&A, where when asked direct, big writing questions, D&D just silently turn around and look at the cast, waiting for them to respond.  

This WAS "the interview that finally broke Benioff and Weiss".  

Austin Film Fest tried to hide these clips from you.  They do serious damage against D&D's aura of legitimacy.  If you've been waiting since the Sansa rape for public opinion to finally turn against them, THIS was the moment when any lingering attempts to defend Season 8 were abandoned.  The live-tweet report on this went viral.  The clips themselves are worse:

 

@Ran - Please report on this.  After Austin Film Fest found the clips I made focusing on the controversial quotes from this panel, they went around making copyright takedowns to all other audio recordings of the panel posted online; thus the ORIGINAL recording posted to SoundCloud back in October no longer exists, ALL other YouTube postings of the panel are gone.  ---- Because I was determined enough to stick through the copyright counter-claim process, undaunted by their threats of legal action, my Fair Use claim prevailed....meaning my video clips are now literally the ONLY surviving recording of "the panel that finally broke Benioff & Weiss".

It's even worse than the live-tweet reports made them seem, and a Westeros.org formal news post on this would help erase what little claim to legitimacy D&D have left, and help restore our dignity.  For god's sake it's two dudebro frat boys spending a full hour laughing about how they got the job through a combination of Old Boys Networks, Nepotism, and outright lying about their credentials ("It was a bit of a con job"), openly boasting they don't know how to run a TV show....only to finally have them attacked for this in the audience Q&A and the media.  It felt like the adults had come back into the room and were scolding them.  All the humiliation we've suffered all these years.  

@Lord Varys

Anyone else who thinks that clips of the Austin Film Fest debacle that finally shamed Benioff & Weiss are something that should get a formal news post, please voice your thoughts here.

Or if not, I'm interested in anyone's personal thoughts on the clips, please share here.

Congratulations on a well-earned victory.

[Nowy Tends]

9 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Congratulations on a well-earned victory.

+1 

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah