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]

15 minutes ago, SeanF said:

You can watch series like Devil's Crown, or I Claudius, made with a fraction of D & D's budget in the 1970's, and see just how superior these are - written by people who understood characterisation and plotting - and who had done the research into the periods they were depicting.  

The budget of GoT was shiny objects to keep the audience from looking too deeply. It was all very flash in the pan.

They said so themselves, BIGGER AND BETTER special effects! The show was a circus. All the histrionics. All the cheap shock. Play that music louder! Maybe they won't notice the elephant (aka the source material) has been abused. They'll fill in the gaps in the program with the hype! Use the actors as carnival barkers. Come one come all.

And then in the end, the lights come up and everyone sees all the loose strings and all the mess, and knows they've been cheated.

[Lord Varys]

19 hours ago, SeanF said:

It's not my ideal ending, but at least Dany keeps her integrity, this way.  It could simply be about conflicting politics, not cat-fighting. Dany  takes the view that the Seven Kingdoms will disintegrate if she gives the North independence (Dorne, the Vale, etc, will demand it too).  Sansa is adamant that the North must go its own way.  She may have considerable respect and admiration for Daenerys (and actually thanks her for what she did in the War for the Dawn).  She doesn't snipe at her at Winterfell, but their political ambitions cannot be reconciled.

This entire conflict makes no sense. If Daenerys loves Jon, she is not going to kill any of his cousins no matter how they behave. Not to mention that their opinion on the matter of 'Northern independence' is utterly irrelevant in a setting where Jon Snow is the King in the North. Torrhen Stark also bent the knee to Aegon the Conqueror without first asking his cousins for permission. Bran, Sansa, Arya are all political nonentities which are easily swept aside. King Jon can always strip them of all the lands and honors they might hold. And if they commit treason for some reason then there are other ways to punish them than execution. This is even more a ridiculous dichotomy/artificial nonsense conflict as Randyll Tarly's insistence to be burned alive. No realistically written character would behave in this manner.

As a conflict this never made any sense in the show, and it will *never* be part of the storyline in the books. The entire independence nonsense is going to end when the good guys band together to fight the Others. Especially for the Northmen, for rather obvious reasons. They will suffer the most when the Wall is going to fall, and they will all be grateful for whatever help they get after that.

I'd honestly be surprised if there were many Northmen left after the Long Night is over. Most of them are likely going to become wights. There would be no potential left there to continue the independence nonsense - nor would whoever ends up in charge of the North want to do the rebuilding stuff alone.

[Mystical]

3 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Not to mention that their opinion on the matter of 'Northern independence' is utterly irrelevant in a setting where Jon Snow is the King in the North. Torrhen Stark also bent the knee to Aegon the Conqueror without first asking his cousins for permission. Bran, Sansa, Arya are all political nonentities which are easily swept aside. King Jon can always strip them of all the lands and honors they might hold.

Except that Torrhen inherited the title from a long list of previous Stark Kings. Jon didn't inherit anything, he was literally voted into office. If this was still done in the old ways, then Sansa (as the trueborn) would have been Queen who then would have stepped aside for Bran (or Jon would need to abdicate to him as Bran is trueborn) unless he abdicated. IMO there is a difference between inherited position and being voted into one. By being voted into office Jon relies much more on the goodwill of the voters who expect him to see that he keeps their wishes in mind and sees them through. Otherwise nothing stops them from voting someone else into the position.

The problem here is D&D making the show modern. Jon would never have been declared King with other legitimate Lords around and trueborn Starks sitting right there. Unless it's good old patriarchy and they don't want a woman, in which case the Lords would have chosen a monarch among themselves or if they chose Jon (because it always has to be a Stark) demand he legitimize himself as a Stark as his first act as King. So none of the rules of GRRM's world existed anymore, people can just chose their King by popular vote or majority vote or whatever.

What's also often forgotten by people is that Jon abdicated in 7x06 at which point he was no longer King. But he did that without the ok from his voters and apparently against their wishes (northern independence being the reason why they elected a King). And since the North now apparently functions this way (after all the voters wanted to replace Jon with Sansa in S7 and apparently that wouldn't have been a problem otherwise it wouldn't have been mentioned), Dany can't just become the ruler of the North. It needs to be done by vote. No one in the North voted for Dany (heck they didn't even get asked to vote) so of course to them, Dany is not their monarch.

[SeanF]

11 minutes ago, Mystical said:

Except that Torrhen inherited the title from a long list of previous Stark Kings. Jon didn't inherit anything, he was literally voted into office. If this was still done in the old ways, then Sansa (as the trueborn) would have been Queen who then would have stepped aside for Bran (or Jon would need to abdicate to him as Bran is trueborn) unless he abdicated. IMO there is a difference between inherited position and being voted into one. By being voted into office Jon relies much more on the goodwill of the voters who expect him to see that he keeps their wishes in mind and sees them through. Otherwise nothing stops them from voting someone else into the position.

The problem here is D&D making the show modern. Jon would never have been declared King with other legitimate Lords around and trueborn Starks sitting right there. Unless it's good old patriarchy and they don't want a woman, in which case the Lords would have chosen a monarch among themselves or if they chose Jon (because it always has to be a Stark) demand he legitimize himself as a Stark as his first act as King. So none of the rules of GRRM's world existed anymore, people can just chose their King by popular vote or majority vote or whatever.

What's also often forgotten by people is that Jon abdicated in 7x06 at which point he was no longer King. But he did that without the ok from his voters and apparently against their wishes (northern independence being the reason why they elected a King). And since the North now apparently functions this way (after all the voters wanted to replace Jon with Sansa in S7 and apparently that wouldn't have been a problem otherwise it wouldn't have been mentioned), Dany can't just become the ruler of the North. It needs to be done by vote. No one in the North voted for Dany (heck they didn't even get asked to vote) so of course to them, Dany is not their monarch.

Trying to rationalise the politics of Seasons 7 or 8 is impossible, I think.  I don't know if the North is an hereditary monarchy, or has become an elective monarchy. Jon's completely needless decision to abdicate in favour of Daenerys queered the pitch for everybody. I think that Daenerys ought to have realised that neither she, nor her soldiers, were welcome in the North, and marched back South.  The Northerners were quite confident that they could beat the Night King on their own.

[Lord Varys]

55 minutes ago, Mystical said:

Except that Torrhen inherited the title from a long list of previous Stark Kings. Jon didn't inherit anything, he was literally voted into office. If this was still done in the old ways, then Sansa (as the trueborn) would have been Queen who then would have stepped aside for Bran (or Jon would need to abdicate to him as Bran is trueborn) unless he abdicated. IMO there is a difference between inherited position and being voted into one. By being voted into office Jon relies much more on the goodwill of the voters who expect him to see that he keeps their wishes in mind and sees them through. Otherwise nothing stops them from voting someone else into the position.

You are trying to make sense of shit that's lacking internal consistency. Or perhaps you try to fill blanks with your own ideas as fans are prone to do.

My point was that this nonsensical stuff is not going to happen in the books. And there are no artificial differences between kings who were proclaimed and kings who inherited their crowns - Robb and Renly, who both own their crowns to their followers, exert exactly the same kind of authority and power over their subjects than Joffrey or Stannis or Balon. In fact, one can even make a case that Robb Stark was the most absolute of those rulers since he is the one making the most solitary decisions and decrees - in the end, the only person whose counsel he sought and whose advise he followed was he himself.

Also, the idea that crowned or proclaimed kings just abdicate when a person with a (possibly) better claim shows up is also not based on anything at all. We have no idea what would have happened if, say. Viserys II would have succeeded Aegon II and Aegon III would have shown up only a couple of years later. Vice versa, we have no idea if Sansa or Rickon Stark would ever back down if they were crowned monarchs or installed as lords while they still don't know that Brandon Stark is still alive. If you take a position and go through a ritual that makes you king it is up to you to give it up if you want to ... or not. Wyman Manderly, for instance, knows that Brandon Stark is still alive but he doesn't look for him nor does he intend to make him his new liege lord - he wants Rickon Stark.

55 minutes ago, Mystical said:

The problem here is D&D making the show modern. Jon would never have been declared King with other legitimate Lords around and trueborn Starks sitting right there. Unless it's good old patriarchy and they don't want a woman, in which case the Lords would have chosen a monarch among themselves or if they chose Jon (because it always has to be a Stark) demand he legitimize himself as a Stark as his first act as King. So none of the rules of GRRM's world existed anymore, people can just chose their King by popular vote or majority vote or whatever.

I see no issue there with Jon Snow coming before Sansa in the books - after all, evidence is there that King Robb may have legitimized Jon Snow as Jon Stark in his last will and declared him heir while explicitly disinheriting Sansa Lannister. And as a legitimized son of Eddard Stark Jon comes before all his siblings since he is the eldest Stark around. The North never had a female ruler, so they would never accepting a girl in her minority as their ruler - Sansa Stark could only rule in her own right from her sixteenth nameday onwards. This fact alone makes it impossible for any of this shitty show nonsense being a plot in the books. Sansa Stark could not even rule in her own right even if somebody considered her worthy enough to rule.

In the show setting it makes no sense, of course, that anyone would give a fig about those treacherous Northmen who remained Bolton loyalists till the end (and were thus supporting the Iron Throne against 'Northern independence'), especially since it were Sansa's Vale allies who crushed Ramsay, not Jon Snow and his pitiful army. In such a scenario might would make Sansa Stark the Queen in the North/Lady of Winterfell, not Jon Snow. Because her Vale allies would crush all resistance to the idea of her ruling the North.

In the books we won't get Jon Snow and Sansa bickering about who is in charge of the North, nor will we get a North which is going to fret about independence nonsense in the middle of winter with no provisions and the Others knocking at their door. That would be insane.

55 minutes ago, Mystical said:

What's also often forgotten by people is that Jon abdicated in 7x06 at which point he was no longer King. But he did that without the ok from his voters and apparently against their wishes (northern independence being the reason why they elected a King). And since the North now apparently functions this way (after all the voters wanted to replace Jon with Sansa in S7 and apparently that wouldn't have been a problem otherwise it wouldn't have been mentioned), Dany can't just become the ruler of the North. It needs to be done by vote. No one in the North voted for Dany (heck they didn't even get asked to vote) so of course to them, Dany is not their monarch.

That is a nonsensical argument. Kingship is not controlled by or dependent on some background extras in this world. Once you are made king you are king, and then you can do with your kingship what you want to do with it. If I'm your king and I decide to give that up and swear allegiance to another then you either follow me in this ... or you are a rebel and a traitor and the enemy of me and my new overlord. There is a reason why Roose Bolton had to murder Robb Stark - he could not just go there and demand that Robb accept his defeat and bend the knee to Joffrey because that was the king's own decision, not Roose's.

In that sense, Daenerys definitely became the Queen in the North once Jon Snow bent the knee to her. The way to deal with dissenters would be to hang them all. There are sufficient trees for that in the North, I'm sure.

And back when Jon was made king Northern independence wasn't the thing behind that - it was the fact that they defeated the Boltons and everybody else were their enemies as far as they knew.

Overall, it is utter nonsense to create tension between two groups whose issues are easily and obviously resolved by marriage ... which would be easily done since they love each other, anyway. This isn't a story we are going to get in the books.

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, The Dragon Demands said:

What amazes me most about the handful of reactions to "one year since the finale"...is how many of the websites & reviewers who were in too deep to the hype.... don't really seem to consider that this might not be the book ending.

By which I mean...not even the ones arguing "the books must end like this! it's just a little rushed!" - that level of denial is understandable

 

I mean the ones who never even bring up source material.  I guess for them....the TV show is all there ever was.|

I often get despondent thinking about how little impact WE have had to correct this but...I guess Winds of Winter will be a huge wakeup call, to just how different it actually was.

But that's what frightens me most: they don't even ask these questions.  Not even...not even the people who blindly LIKED it, such as the quislings at WatchersOntheWall and so forth.

I mean people who hated the TV show's ending, but...don't even seem to consider that there's an ongoing book series, which may be drastically different.  The question never occurs to them. That frightens me.  Also shames them, for how far "TV analysis" has fallen.

Well, I'd say that the problem within the book fandom is that some people liked certain aspects of the show in principle and they don't feel uncomfortable pointing to the show when it suits their ends.

And that is a tendency that started within the book fandom itself back when the show was first announced and made and we were watching the first season and many of us really liked those additional scenes which 'shed more light' on non-POV characters. Many people fantasized that the show runners were doing stuff like that because they had 'special information from George' and knew how the story was to unfold.

Of course, that didn't really work within in season 1, and certainly no longer made sense with season 2, but many people continued to assume stuff like that.

And for people not liking AFfC/ADwD the show not focusing on/cutting certain characters and plots in the show was seen as 'confirmation' that said characters/plots 'weren't really important'.

The idea that these people never really gave a shit or tried to create coherent characters and plots didn't really cross the minds of many people back then. It still doesn't seem to be understood by everybody since people actually pretend there is an 'internal show logic/consistency' when in fact the show showed multiple times that they don't care about that at all.

I mean, even here are quite a few people who only realized how things fell apart at the very end - and personal disappointment about certain endings may have played a role there, too.

But you are a guy from the TV fandom to a point. What is your impression - how important are the books to the people whose first love was the show? Of course there are many here on the boards who found and started to love the books when they first watched the show - but how big is that number in comparison to the overall GoT fan community?

If this is a reasonably small number then it makes sense that the matter is mostly treated as TV phenomenon and not a book series - because that's the impression the world at large would have of GoT.

And then there is the fact that those books are pretty complex and you have to want to dig in and speculate how things are going to go, etc.

Here on the boards we have reached the sort of unspoken consensus that pointing to the show doesn't really work as 'prediction' for future plot developments (although there are individual limits as to how far that goes). I'd say no sane person is going to say there will be 'a wight hunt plot' in the books, for instance).

TWoW is likely going to set a new tone for the discussion since it will show how far removed the show was from the books by season 5. And one can expect a further change in discussion insofar as references to the TV show would be even more ridiculous than they are now. I'd also expect the reviewers of TWoW to point how much the show plot sucked in relation to the book plot - even (or rather: especially) if the ending of ASoIaF is nowhere near in sight on the final page of TWoW.

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Mystical]

4 hours ago, SeanF said:

Trying to rationalise the politics of Seasons 7 or 8 is impossible, I think.  I don't know if the North is an hereditary monarchy, or has become an elective monarchy. Jon's completely needless decision to abdicate in favour of Daenerys queered the pitch for everybody.

And then he lied about it which is what gave Dany the worst PR when arriving north. He lied to the Lords about having to give up his crown in exchange for her help. Either D&D totally forgot that part from S7 or they deliberately left it out for their crappy 'evil Dany' story.

4 hours ago, SeanF said:

I think that Daenerys ought to have realised that neither she, nor her soldiers, were welcome in the North, and marched back South.  The Northerners were quite confident that they could beat the Night King on their own.

Wall's down because of her and her team's dumbass plan. You don't leave other people to clean up your mess. And the Northerners probably wouldn't have needed her anyway. One 'Stark' played bait for the main guy and another Stark got teleported in from above him and delivered the killing blow. Actually the whole thing probably needed only 2 people. Come to think of it, we were all wondering what 'Bran' was doing warging birds which seemed pointless. They probably picked Arya up and dropped her onto the NK, so you really only needed 2 people lol.

[Lord Varys]

6 minutes ago, Mystical said:

And then he lied about it which is what gave Dany the worst PR when arriving north. He lied to the Lords about having to give up his crown in exchange for her help. Either D&D forgot that part from S7 or they did it deliberately.

Not that I can offer much of substance on such matters, having watched the shit show just once years ago, but I'd expect that this might be a reflection of the show changing the plot in the middle of the race, so to speak, from the Tyrion jealousy and Cersei the Mad Queen angle (Tyrion may have been the one they originally wanted to murder Daenerys because she loved Jon Snow as hinted at by Tyrion's ugly stare at the end of season 7 in the boat sex scene, just as they dropped the Cersei miscarriage plot which clearly was to set up her role as Mad Queen who, in that scenario, may have actually have been killed by Jaime).

Up to season 8 there is no indication the North values its 'independence' more than its survival. In fact, unless I'm mistaken Sansa was still bitching about and scheming against 'King Jon' in season 7, thinking she would do a better job at ruling, etc.

Even within the shitty framework of the show Sansa should have been glad that Jon getting out of the way by becoming Dany's consort since that would mean the actual power in the North would fall in her hands - the idea that she would give a damn about a title and formal independence is also show nonsense. The Lords of Winterfell were always semi-independent throughout the Targaryen and Baratheon reign. The bigger problem for Sansa's ambitions in a consistent setting was Jon being King in the North, not them all being subject to some distant queen in KL.

But all that should effectively disappear once you deal with a supernatural enemy destroying mankind ... unless you want your characters behave like lobotimized stooges from a pulp magazine.

22 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

I know.  I was one of those fools, who thought exactly that.

How naïve we were. How blind.

Well, George himself fueled such ideas since he told us early on there would be such scenes. And to be sure, in a faithful adaptation this would have been a great way to shed more light on less developed characters like Renly. And there are some scenes that aren't that bad in this regard in season 1. The second Varys-Littlefinger scene, for instance (the first is stupid) or the scene with Jaime and Tywin in the camp. And the scenes with Jorah and Viserys is really great, too - although it was actually Harry Lloyd's doing to explore Viserys some more since he really read his stuff, understood the character, and pushed them to explore him some more.

22 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Like many, I held on to false hope after Season 5, but Season SIX is when I turned on the show - when I realized they didn't really have "a plan" or coherent actions at all, even internally (Cogman's jovial voice ranting about how much agency Sansa has now, culmination of her rape subplot....when no, she doesn't do a damn thing in Season 6, even though you promised, and seem to genuinely believe she's "doing something" by making stern stares at other characters).  

Well, I was done with the thing after the whole 'the Lannisters are broke' thing - and I think that was season 4, no? Them cutting Mace's older sons was also something I really struggled with, but that was back in season 3, I think. And those Harryhausen skeletons also show up at the end of season 4, I think, no?

I don't remember much about season 5, aside from the fact that the dialogues started to be atrocious there. In the end this wasn't even fun anymore. I mean, there are people who have the compulsion to watch a show to the very end but that's not that strong with me. If GoT hadn't been an ASoIaF adaptation I guess I would have stopped after season 5. Because it just sucked on a quality level. And the final seasons are barely watchable with essentially no plot, no dialogue (and what you get being bad).

22 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

What amazes me is how many people didn't realize that even after Season 7's antics.

I don't know how many really thought it was great after that. Here most people didn't, I assume, but overall it may have been different.

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Cas Stark]

2 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

I know.  I was one of those fools, who thought exactly that.

How naïve we were. How blind.

Were we wrong to be that trusting?  To trust that a major network like HBO wouldn't hand the reins over to Benioff, literally based on no other reason than that his father was a friend of the head of the network at the time?  We expect some levels of "Old Boys Network", but for god's sake this is the kind of nepotism that topples empires.

Snipped...

Why do you blame HBO when  it was GRRM who wanted the Dans to do the show?

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Lord Varys]

3 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

The "Lannisters ran out of gold" thing was Season 4, as were the Harryhausen skeletons.  

….to be honest, I genuinely freaked out from 2014 to 2015 due to the removal of the Tysha reveal.  Part of me wanted to hold onto the belief that "they're saving Tysha and Lady Stoneheart for next year". 

Honestly, I've no detailed memory of the Tywin-Tyrion thing. I recall that Shae attacked Tyrion first and he sort of killed her in self-defense, and I remember that Tywin-Tyrion went much longer than it did in the books, but I remember that I found it odd, too, that the Tysha thing was missing. They had her in the plot, and while it made sense to change stuff around Shae due to the changed character, there was really no reason to not change the Tyrion-Tywin stuff from any artistic point of view.

But frankly, season 4 had a lot of shitty stuff up to that point - wasn't that the thing with the expedition to Craster's, brothel Oberyn, Margaery not knowing that Olenna would murder Joffrey, that weirdo Tyrion monologue about some retard cousin of his which I think was utterly shitty and useless talk, Lord Stokeworth, Arya knocking at the door of the Vale and nobody giving a damn, Tywin being told about the twincest, the badly done Oberyn-Gregor duel, and a couple of other things. There were some not-so-bad-scenes in that season I guess, but I don't recall any. But then, it has been years since I last watched any of that.

3 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

"No, the Lannisters running out of gold makes sense!".....No, it doesn't. You're not building an argument for why this makes sense citing points of fact, you're just repeating "it makes sense" until you bludgeon us into submission.

Well, that was some kind of hilarious weirdo moment for me. I think I laughed out loud for about 2-3 minutes, literally pissing myself (although it wasn't *that bad* ;-)) and somehow that pushed my mental switch on the show. Afterwards I couldn't take it seriously anymore.

I also recall doing a rewatch of season 2 years after first watching it (although idea when exactly) and being actually shocked about how worse, repetitive and stupid the entire Qarth storyline was. That is literally the same kind of talk over and over again. I'm a selfmade man, selfmade man, selfmade man who pretends to be rich - which is then later used for Tywin, too.

3 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Yeah as you say...…….I did read the books first, and I'm deeply confused at what the hell TV-only viewers thought of the Sansa rape.  That was a real watershed moment, turning point.  Didn't...didn't they hear, even just by OSMOSSIS, by reading reviews, that "this doesn't happen at all in the books"?

I guess we have all friends who watched the show but didn't bother reading the books - some of them I know had their own issues with the show, but didn't really care much about those book diversions. After all, they don't really know what they are missing and how much the show story ruins the characters, etc.

 

Really like my mother's anger, though - she is pissed that anyone would allow the show people to continue the story while the books are not finished yet. And she does have a point there ;-).

 

 

[SeanF]

5 hours ago, Mystical said:

And then he lied about it which is what gave Dany the worst PR when arriving north. He lied to the Lords about having to give up his crown in exchange for her help. Either D&D totally forgot that part from S7 or they deliberately left it out for their crappy 'evil Dany' story.

Wall's down because of her and her team's dumbass plan. You don't leave other people to clean up your mess. And the Northerners probably wouldn't have needed her anyway. One 'Stark' played bait for the main guy and another Stark got teleported in from above him and delivered the killing blow. Actually the whole thing probably needed only 2 people. Come to think of it, we were all wondering what 'Bran' was doing warging birds which seemed pointless. They probably picked Arya up and dropped her onto the NK, so you really only needed 2 people lol.

That's it.  All the North needed was Arya springing out of a tree on the Night King.

[SeanF]

What we won't get in the books (obviously) is Porne, Sansa's rape, Arya exterminating House Frey and becoming a ninja, the wight hunt, the secret annulment, the Night King, Cersei remaining in charge of Kings Landing to the end, fireproof Dany, Stannis being evil, Tyrion being a saint, Jon being a jellyfish who runs away from responsibility, the Battle of the Bastards, the Vale knights riding to the rescue, Euron being a horny pirate, Varys backing (and then turning on) Daenerys, Dany's forces being destroyed due to insane military strategies, Jaime going back to Cersei, or the climax of the story being the fight for Kings Landing.

What we will get is fAegon, Arianne, Jon Connington, Lady Stoneheart, Marwyn, Sansa in the Vale, and the War for the Dawn being the climax of the series.  So, it's hard to see how we can have the same endgame.  The butterfly wings have become dragon wings by now.

[SeanF]

8 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

What amazes me most about the handful of reactions to "one year since the finale"...is how many of the websites & reviewers who were in too deep to the hype.... don't really seem to consider that this might not be the book ending.

By which I mean...not even the ones arguing "the books must end like this! it's just a little rushed!" - that level of denial is understandable

 

I mean the ones who never even bring up source material.  I guess for them....the TV show is all there ever was.|

I often get despondent thinking about how little impact WE have had to correct this but...I guess Winds of Winter will be a huge wakeup call, to just how different it actually was.

But that's what frightens me most: they don't even ask these questions.  Not even...not even the people who blindly LIKED it, such as the quislings at WatchersOntheWall and so forth.

I mean people who hated the TV show's ending, but...don't even seem to consider that there's an ongoing book series, which may be drastically different.  The question never occurs to them. That frightens me.  Also shames them, for how far "TV analysis" has fallen.

 

I guess...I guess if you watched up UNTIL Season 8 still believing in blind hype, you didn't have any "critical thinking" skills....not since Season 5.  These aren't people prone to self-reflection.  So should we be surprised, that their response to just how bad Season 8 was....has been sputtering confusion?  No attempts at "analysis" of why it failed?  That's what makes them who they are; anyone capable of that kind of reflection would have left already.  "Wow, Season 8 Bad!".....not even articulating WHAT was so bad that Benioff & Weiss did, the pattern of what they were doing (awards baiting the actors)…..these are people who blame THE FICTIONAL STORY.  "Wow, that's a bad ending!" "You mean....the writers MADE a bad ending.  This story doesn't 'exist" in 3 dimensional real-time space"

We have to rebuild from this.  To take our dignity back from them.

Well, I think the reputation of show has dropped drastically, among the fandom, and not just those who came to it via the books.

I think the last episode I really enjoyed was Episode 10, Season 6.  I think there were three scenes from Season 7 which I enjoyed;  Cersei's final confrontation with Ellaria, Olenna's final confrontation with Jaime, and the Field of Fire.  The rest of the time I was mostly scratching my head, or rolling my eyes. The wight hunt was meant to be the climax of the whole season, but I found it too silly for words. 

Season 8.  Well, there were good scenes, but often totally divorced from, and contradicting, what was previously established, making it all very confusing.  In, and of itself, the Sack and burning of Kings Landing was very impressive - had it ever been established that this was likely to happen.  The burning of the Red Keep yes, that was established as going to happen;  the Sack on the ground was very likely to have happened - imagine how many Northern soldiers would have had friends and family who died at the Red Wedding, and would be burning to avenge Ned Stark.  But strafing random civilians for shit & giggles was just a piece of shlock.  If it was going to be included, Dany ought to have decreed a massacre at Kings Landing beforehand, like Genghis Khan (and might well have got considerable support for the idea from bitter Northerners). But, it would still have been way out of character.  Perhaps it could have worked if it were the Northerners who were demanding cruel revenge on Kings Landing.

[Mystical]

10 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

In fact, unless I'm mistaken Sansa was still bitching about and scheming against 'King Jon' in season 7, thinking she would do a better job at ruling, etc.

There was no need to scheme. The Lords had buyer's remorse and wanted to make her Queen in S7.

10 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

The bigger problem for Sansa's ambitions in a consistent setting was Jon being King in the North, not them all being subject to some distant queen in KL.

What ambitions? People constantly mention them but I don't remember those ambitions in the show. Was that somewhere in the script but not on screen? First thing she does when Bran comes back is telling him he's Lord of Winterfell. And there was nothing in Sophie's acting that showed Sansa having any misgivings about that. And she turned down the Lords when they wanted to make her Queen. If there was supposed to be some grand ambition on Sansa's part it was definitely not in the finished product, at least not for me.

4 hours ago, SeanF said:

What we won't get in the books (obviously) is Porne, Sansa's rape, Arya exterminating House Frey and becoming a ninja, the wight hunt, the secret annulment, the Night King, Cersei remaining in charge of Kings Landing to the end, fireproof Dany, Stannis being evil, Tyrion being a saint, Jon being a jellyfish who runs away from responsibility, the Battle of the Bastards, the Vale knights riding to the rescue, Euron being a horny pirate, Varys backing (and then turning on) Daenerys, Dany's forces being destroyed due to insane military strategies, Jaime going back to Cersei, or the climax of the story being the fight for Kings Landing.

I'm not so sure about the bold part. Her rape plot armor has worked so far (much like Tyrion's and Arya's miraculous fight surviving armor, Dany's armor etc.) but I wouldn't put it past GRRM. She was already constantly sexually assaulted throughout the story and then on a daily basis by LF. Me thinks GRRM is either doing it to ease people into it by slowly making it worse or lulling people into complacency so they get used to it as part of her story and then springs an escalation on the reader. But the rest of the things you mentioned, definitely won't happen.

[Nowy Tends]

On 5/18/2020 at 10:07 PM, SeanF said:

The brilliant way that Dumb & Dumber "subverted expectations" was to make the Nazis people of colour.

And the Waffen-SS eunuchs…