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]

4 minutes ago, SeanF said:

But that is what D & D think of as "love".  Like stabbing your girlfriend through the heart, or choking her with her own necklace.

Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that, too. Look what you made me do! Nothing says love like murder. And then they had Jon think in the script, if only he could have more time with her.

When the scripts saw the light of day so that they were shown for the frauds they are, the Emmys hid them. The good ole boys look after their own, it's all about the money.

[Le Cygne]

On 6/22/2020 at 12:38 AM, The Dragon Demands said:

No.  It's not about twists.  They never talk about "story" of any kind in the commentaries.  Have you listened to the commentaries? It's just them ranting about "amazing emotive faces by the actors with no dialogue" over and over again.

This made me laugh, because it's true. I can't listen to them anymore, you are brave to do so. But this is just what they sounded like when I did. So smug in their privileged cluelessness.

They would always advertise they did things no good writers would ever do, not realizing they were damning themselves. Like the no dialogue thing, when conversations are what the audience wanted (and needed) to see.

Lazy and inept. And boasting about it. And picking up awards. That's them all over.

Basically their go-to trick consisted of putting a character into a situation they would never be in, then doing a close-up as the actor emotes (or the actor they were bodyswapped in to make emote).

A main character MUST be bodyswapped in to prop up Theon and Ramsay at the cost of her own story. Lots of women as sexual assault background scenery or happy hookers, propping up male characters.

Again and again, they'd have the characters do things they and no human being for that matter would ever do. It was all actors emoting, the whole damn show became that. And it became all about THE SHOT.

They went on and on about the shot of Sandra hungry like a dog when the hungry dogs ate Ramsay. They actually wrote this about a female character for the Emmy's, in their pitch for best script.

They made Dany "her Satanic majesty" with the shot of a dragon behind her, or was it Hitler with the shot of the banners and crowd, or was it Jesus with the shot of her murderer holding her like the Pieta (as they said in the script).

And so their self-insert Tyrion blathers on and on about murdering Dany like she was a prop, because that's what they made her. It was all about THE SHOT. Wow, look at that actor emote! No words are necessary! Nicely shutting her up.

They didn't even let her have dying words.

Oh and speaking of women as props, in the final Tyrion and Bronn scene, prostitutes were just talked about. It was always all about the men, anyway. Way to dismiss traumatized peasants, as a parting joke.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Le Cygne said:

This made me laugh, because it's true. I can't listen to them anymore, you are brave to do so. But this is just what they sounded like when I did. So smug in their privileged cluelessness.

They would always advertise they did things no good writers would ever do, not realizing they were damning themselves. Like the no dialogue thing, when conversations are what the audience wanted (and needed) to see.

Lazy and inept. And boasting about it. And picking up awards. That's them all over.

Basically their go-to trick consisted of putting a character into a situation they would never be in, then doing a close-up as the actor emotes (or the actor they were bodyswapped in to make emote).

A main character MUST be bodyswapped in to prop up Theon and Ramsay at the cost of her own story. Lots of women as sexual assault background scenery or happy hookers, propping up male characters.

Again and again, they'd have the characters do things they and no human being for that matter would ever do. It was all actors emoting, the whole damn show became that. And it became all about THE SHOT.

They went on and on about the shot of Sandra hungry like a dog when the hungry dogs ate Ramsay. They actually wrote this about a female character for the Emmy's, in their pitch for best script.

They made Dany "her Satanic majesty" with the shot of a dragon behind her, or was it Hitler with the shot of the banners and crowd, or was it Jesus with the shot of her murderer holding her like the Pieta (as they said in the script).

And so their self-insert Tyrion blathers on and on about murdering Dany like she was a prop, because that's what they made her. It was all about THE SHOT. Wow, look at that actor emote! No words are necessary! Nicely shutting her up.

They didn't even let her have dying words.

Oh and speaking of women as props, in the final Tyrion and Bronn scene, prostitutes were just talked about. It was always all about the men, anyway. Way to dismiss traumatized peasants, as a parting joke.

In my head canon, the pair were gelded by agents of Grey Worm and Yara, when they next visited a brothel.

[Le Cygne]

Just ran across this, from last year...

Martin added that watching the recent GoT final season was a bit of a strange experience given the different version he’s still writing. “The whole last three years have been strange since the show got ahead of the books,” he says. “Yes, I told [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] a number of things years ago. And some of them they did do. But at the same time, it’s different. I have very fixed ideas in my head as I’m writing The Winds of Winter and beyond that in terms of where things are going. It’s like two alternate realities existing side by side. I have to double down and do my version of it which is what I’ve been doing.”

https://ew.com/tv/2019/07/15/george-rr-martin-game-thrones-fan-reactions/

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Angel Eyes]

On 6/23/2020 at 7:48 AM, Le Cygne said:

This made me laugh, because it's true. I can't listen to them anymore, you are brave to do so. But this is just what they sounded like when I did. So smug in their privileged cluelessness.

They would always advertise they did things no good writers would ever do, not realizing they were damning themselves. Like the no dialogue thing, when conversations are what the audience wanted (and needed) to see.

Lazy and inept. And boasting about it. And picking up awards. That's them all over.

Basically their go-to trick consisted of putting a character into a situation they would never be in, then doing a close-up as the actor emotes (or the actor they were bodyswapped in to make emote).

A main character MUST be bodyswapped in to prop up Theon and Ramsay at the cost of her own story. Lots of women as sexual assault background scenery or happy hookers, propping up male characters.

Again and again, they'd have the characters do things they and no human being for that matter would ever do. It was all actors emoting, the whole damn show became that. And it became all about THE SHOT.

They went on and on about the shot of Sandra hungry like a dog when the hungry dogs ate Ramsay. They actually wrote this about a female character for the Emmy's, in their pitch for best script.

They made Dany "her Satanic majesty" with the shot of a dragon behind her, or was it Hitler with the shot of the banners and crowd, or was it Jesus with the shot of her murderer holding her like the Pieta (as they said in the script).

And so their self-insert Tyrion blathers on and on about murdering Dany like she was a prop, because that's what they made her. It was all about THE SHOT. Wow, look at that actor emote! No words are necessary! Nicely shutting her up.

They didn't even let her have dying words.

Oh and speaking of women as props, in the final Tyrion and Bronn scene, prostitutes were just talked about. It was always all about the men, anyway. Way to dismiss traumatized peasants, as a parting joke.

Well, perhaps with Bronn, it serves to show that some things don’t change; Bronn is the new Littlefinger.

 

”And it’s hard to say”

”Just how some things never change”

”And it’s hard to find any strength to draw the line”

”Oooh, I’m just burnin’, doin’ the Neutron Dance”

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Le Cygne]

I thought this was interesting in terms of what went wrong with GoT. The showrunner for Better Call Saul, talking about how not to do it:

We really try to be disciplined about not forcing things to happen... You may have an image, like that one I talked about earlier, like doing a Midnight Run episode, I think the original idea was Mike and Jimmy get handcuffed or anklecuffed together, and have to get through the desert. And this was an idea we had before we shot a frame of season 1, because we have these two amazing actors, they are like peanut butter and chocolate, they're just great together. We could have put a card up in season 1, OK, episode 7, season 1, these two guys get stuck in the desert. But if you try to force that to happen, if you try to say well, maybe he's not ready to do this, but we'll go just ahead and do it anyway, as soon as you start making those compromises, that's when these characters stop making sense. And that's when you can feel the hands of the author moving people around like chess pieces...

This is good, too. With GoT, the focus was on the razzle dazzle, not the story. And it wasn't even very razzle or dazzle, more like drizzle and fizzle.

Everyone's focus is not on the razzle dazzle or making themselves look good, it's about telling the story... If you keep the focus on the story, then everything else comes in the train behind it.

[Ghostlydragon]

3 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

I thought this was interesting in terms of what went wrong with GoT. The showrunner for Better Call Saul, talking about how not to do it:

We really try to be disciplined about not forcing things to happen... We have these two amazing actors, they are like peanut butter and chocolate, they're just great together. We could have put a card up, OK, episode 7, season 1, these two guys get stuck in the desert. But if you try to force that to happen, if you try to say well, maybe he's not ready to do this, but we'll go just ahead and do it anyway, as soon as you start making those compromises, that's when these characters stop making sense. And that's when you can feel the hands of the author moving people around like chess pieces.

 

And once again the people in charge of BB and BCS show how it's done. Ironic that D&D were obsessed with GoT being the next BB but don't listen to any of their lessons.

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Bear Claw]

7 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Operation: Dragon's Wrath has been initiated.

This behind the scenes documentary took about a year to research:  not only obtaining the filming script for episode 8.5 "The Bells" from the Writer's Guild of America archives, but by watching and scrutinizing EVERY behind-the-scenes video on the Blu-ray set, and EVERY Blu-ray commentary track, no matter how obscure.  That's why it took so long.  I left no stone unturned.

It comes down to 3 points:

• 1 - the filming script essentially describes King's Landing being consumed by a Wildfire chain reaction, not carpet bombing by Daenerys
• 2 - the filming script itself is ridiculously short & vague in terms of what she's actually doing, barely a paragraph of information.  Always saying she's shooting "soldiers intermingled with civilians" but never "massacring crowds of only civilians".  Matching up with the relic dialogue they were setting up in episode 4, only to then abandon, of "Cersei is using human shields" etc.  The script is so vague, you begin to suspect it was deliberately vague, to hide it from the actors.
• 3 - They actively hid what was really happening from Emilia Clarke - and instructed her not to look at the storyboards.  All she had to go on was a short, vague script.  In videos HBO tried to hide by de-listing them, Emilia Clarke outright contradicts the showrunners, saying "Daenerys is not insane", and other contradictory things (it sounds like she thought Daenerys would fly straight to Cersei at the Red Keep).  Essentially, it seems like Emilia Clarke in these videos is describing an episode that doesn't exist....because yes, she actually saw an alternate, earlier version of the script.  Leading to the obvious question:  why go through all the trouble of hiding it from Emilia Clarke and lying to her...if it happens in the books, and they could have just told her that?  Well, because it isn't the book ending.  They were afraid she'd pull a Mark Hamill and start complaining ahead of time that they had disagreements...or flat out go to GRRM about it, ask "is this the book ending?" and then raise a commotion in the press.

Benioff & Weiss have of course doubled-down hard that "of course this is the REAL ending, we've been planning it since Season 3!" (the meeting with Martin to discuss future book outlines happened in December 2012 in the break between writing Seasons 3 and 4).  We already suspected that Season 8 wasn't even what they intended to do when they were making Season 7 (abandoned Cersei miscarriage storyline confirmed by Lena Headey).  But it turns out, this isn't even the "final version" they intended when they STARTED making Season 8 - this isn't what Emilia Clarke even saw at the infamous table read in October 2017.   They rewrote Season 8 to make Daenerys, not Cersei, "the Mad Queen".....in the middle of filming it.

We can get bogged down in semantics over "what is the 'Real' ending?  Season 8 was 'real', it had physical substance, it's what they made, isn't it?"

The excuses of delusional cult members and Quislings.  First, yes, the fact that they changed it in the middle of Season 8 itself, it wasn't even in the original filming script version, proves it's not the book ending.  Second....how many MILLIONS of TV-only viewers, with no exposure to the books, are also deeply upset and feel this isn't what they were setting up in all prior seasons?  For all we know, each season branched off with a new idea for the ending they kept revising.  For all we know, they came up with a non-book Daenerys ending after the GRRM meeting, from Seasons 4 through 7...but THEN changed it to this, yet another alternate version, for Season 8 itself.  

It's a retcon.  None of this was being set up or planned in prior seasons.  Even ignoring the books, it's "not the real ending" in the sense of "it's not the real ending we were building towards, even in the immediately preceding season".  

As this is a book fansite, book fandom will probably benefit from having proof that this dumpster fire isn't the book ending. 

For that matter, HBO's upcoming multiple PREQUEL TV SHOWS, starring the Targaryen dynasty, will also benefit from having proof that *Targaryens are not inherently insane*, as Benioff and Weiss tried to claim.   

At the end of season 6, I recall watching the Inside the Episode, and the show runners were implying that a childless Cersei was dangerous:

Terrifying Cersei

From what they were saying, it does seem like Cersei was going to do some very horrible/crazy things.

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Angel Eyes]

22 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

A short preview of Part 2:

I'm "thinking out loud" with this post to revise my draft:  the numbering of the "3 remaining questions" I had is a bit off (I'm folding the original second question into the 3rd, and promoting "Question Zero" up to 1 )

• Whose idea was it for Emilia Clarke not to look at the storyboards, hers or the showrunners?

Without doubt, their idea.  There are behind the scenes videos of them repeating these talking points at her ("Dany is above everything and doesn't see the destruction!"). They also have a well-established pattern of micro-managing all the cast members - things like overruling Lena Headey when she felt Cersei should cry when Tommen dies.  So what, suddenly this was THE one time they let a cast member overrule them? And refused to see the notes they had for what the character was thinking and doing?

For that matter....Clarke horrifically explains in the Blu-ray commentary how she found out what it really looks like:  at the LIVE PREMIERE event, in May 2019.  With a large crowd of fans.  She was in a stunned silence the whole night after that.  So, even if this was some sort of idea to get an "authentic performance"....why the hell wouldn't Clarke have ASKED at any point in the TEN MONTHS after filming wrapped but before the premiere?  No, it was the showrunners' idea.

• Did the showrunners self-consciously make the change after the table read, or was the table read a fake script?

Now we come to a branching point:  was the filming script in October 2017 itself a lie?  A fake?  Did Benioff and Weiss "always know" this was the ending? and just did a huge fake-out on the cast, because they were determined to get this amazing performance out of Clarke? (telling Clarke that Daenerys's actions aren't so bad, so she gives an authentic "delusional" performance).

Well if they made a change after the table read, that's bad for them, that's defeat - admitting it wasn't "planned for years".  So let's consider the other branch of possibilities to the point of exhaustion.

And let me turn back to point 1 again:  On top of all that....the script clearly has parts that aren't in the final episode, like the wildfire chain reaction.  So either those are a later change (bad), or, that was a fake-out to manipulate Clarke with limited information.  And....what, you're saying that Clarke...BY PURE COINCIDENCE, that she SIMULTANEOUSLY came up with the idea, independently from them, that "I really shouldn't see the storyboards of what the destruction of the city is actually going to look like"?   That they had a script with fake parts to "coach" her performance...and she just so happened to independently come up with the idea not to check their storyboards?  That's silly.  With no doubt, this was their idea.  

• If the ending we saw was indeed "always planned" and the table read script was an intentional fake, was it to get an accurate performance out of Clarke, or to hide from her that it isn't the book ending?

 

I think they didn't tell her...because it doesn't happen in the books, and they didn't want her to ask questions.  What if she went to GRRM?

The hypothetical defense is "we wanted her to give an accurate performance as a deluded person who honestly believes in what she's doing"...

….which doesn't really make much sense under scrutiny.  

For starters, why didn't they bother to tell Clarke AFTER her performance was over?  For TEN FULL MONTHS?!  This is deeply suspicious.  If it was to get a good performance out of her, shouldn't they have told her right afterwards?

Clarke even directly confronts them at the end of the commentary, fake-innocently asking them, "when did you first know this was the ending?" and they said "we came up with it in on set in Season 3".

She saw the original filming script, she knows that's not the same.  

Now their laughing response was "well, we didn't want you to know!"....which...MIGHT include the broader idea of "we even gave you a fake script at the table read and actively hid this from you to get a great performance" ---- a defense Benioff and Weiss themselves have NEVER admitted to.  

Remember back in Season 2 when we were all making up elaborate theories and explanations of how Benioff and Weiss did bizarre things? ("Don't worry, this is all for a fake-out later!")  yeah....that never materialized...

So even confronting them on the Blu-ray, they don't fully admit in words something like "we gave you fake scripts and told you not to look at the storyboards"....instead, they try to convince her it was HER idea not to read them, never admit that the original scripts don't loo like this.  

Nor does this match up with OTHER inter-related evidence.  "it was all to get a great performance out of Clarke" - what, even the relic dialogue in episode 4 about human shields?  Which has no impact on the final battle?  or the CONFIRMED Cersei miscarriage storyline in Season 7 which Lena Headey admitted was filmed but cut?

So it's...theoretically possible, that this was all a misguided, elaborate attempt to push Clarke into a great deluded performance by hiding information from her.  The second possibility is that they hid it from her all along, even in the table read script, because it doesn't happen in the books (and the third branching possibility is that it's even a change they made AFTER the table read, the version I personally believe).  

But best case scenario....they went through all this trouble to hide it from her....then horrifically "kinda forgot" to tell her?  That's...that's the best defense?  And even this doesn't account for all the other corroborating evidence that it was a coverup.  

I’m not really surprised at them hiding it from Emilia. The production of Season 8 was famously cagey, with the actors being fed their lines via earpieces and having the actors for Jaqen H’Ghar, The Waif, and The Night King walk around set. Is it that much of a stretch that they’d hide what was going on for the sake of minimizing leaks?

[Mystical]

Then what were they reading at the table read? Jon killing Dany was in the scripts when they did the read through as we have the video evidence for that. If at that point it was hidden from Emilia what Dany would do, then what was the reason given in the script for Jon killing Dany? No reason at all? Wouldn't both Emilia and Kit be asking questions then?

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[TargBastard0]

7 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

In the original script it appears they're upset about how many people she accidentally killed in the crossfiire

I saw your youtube videos and they are impressive. DnD for sure changed lots of stuff in the last possible moment. However the main stroke i.e that Jon will eventually murder Daenerys does seem to be a solid idea, just the path there was wrong.

What i mean is - this probably comes out of GRRM  himself, those 2 dickheads cannot possibly destroy their money maker for no reason. They were just incompetent and could not build the story in a believable manner so we can actually accept this scene.

And with the Winds of Winter getting less likely to come out(not to mention the almost impossible ADOS) im sad again

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Le Cygne]

21 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

"the main stroke" is so broad as to be meaningless.  

"Jon kills Daenerys at some point" - so said thousands of readers since 2000 who put two and two together about the Azor Ahai prophecy.  Who knows if this is even remotely like the context.

Agree. "Broad stroke" is meaningless. It's never been defined, and it's been contradicted even in it's "broadest" meaning by both author and showrunners many times.

I can't see GRRM, who loves surprises, telegraphing that this legend of old times is going to be played out in the current story in the end. YAWN.

It's backwards, it's sexist, and it's so cynical, it wipes out Jon's entire story, which began from his birth as a story of hope, however mistaken everyone may have been.

I doubt Jon kills Dany, but if he does, it's curtains for Jon.

The Jon of the books is not going to be able to live with himself as a kinslayer (show either but by the end he was a piece of cardboard, like the rest of them).

Nor will GRRM paint this as a good thing, as the show did: Look what you made me do. Now I'll go frolic with my dog in the wilderness, where I've always been happiest anyway.

So if this one thing, what happens to person B, is the same (person A kills her), then this other equally significant thing, what happens to person A after he does this thing, is different.

Add it all up and it's so different, it's not even worth pulling out the "maybe this will sort of be the same but in an entirely different way" instances. It's just a big mess to even go there.