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!

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[SeanF]

5 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

The UNIVERSAL reaction I've seen from book readers who watched through Season 8 just to criticize it, I mean people who hated it since Season 5 but kept watching so it wouldn't escape criticism....particularly the reaction from those who saw it in mixed company with TV-only fanboys and fangirls who stilled loved it....

the UNIVERSAL reaction that's been described to me is that when Arya killed the Night King, they burst out laughing uncontrollably.  Because they knew, as we did, that this was Benioff and Weiss revealing even to the remaining fanboys that they're idiots, that everyone who told us to put up with the Sansa rape, TV-Dorne, that NO, Battle of the Bastards was not a god-damned triumph it was filled with plot holes....no, they weren't even getting the end to the White Walker storyline.  We knew they'd shot themselves in the foot.  We were laughing AT all of their supporters - richly deserved humiliation.  

And I mean it's stunning just how widespread and uniform this reaction was.  Uncontrollable laughter and joy - when the TV only fans were just in a stunned haze.  Oh god, it lifts my spirits just thinking about that night!

 

 

Book fans like me were still hoping that D & D had enough self-respect to try and pull off a good ending.

Le Cygne is right to liken it to a Ponzi scheme, where you’ve sunk so much into it that you still hope for the best, until it all comes tumbling down, and you think “how was I duped into this?”

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, The Dragon Demands said:

...."well they invented a Sansa rape, but maybe they'll suddenly get better again in Season 8 to at least pull off the White Walker subplot well?"

I understand though: I was in denial throughout Season 5.  Fascinating: I genuinely believed, or half-suspected, that they'd later reveal this was all a twisting scheme to dupe the Boltons that somehow made sense:  again, Season 6 is actually when I utterly turned on the show, because there was no payoff to the Sansa rape, it was incoherent, but they acted as if it WAS (Sansa didn't DO anything to defeat Ramsay, though even if she did it would be simplistic).  That's the moment I realized "this isn't just the normal corporate rushing and condensing, something weird is going on here" - then checked the Blu-ray commentaries no one ever did, and realized "dear god they're just pandering lead actors for Emmy awards in meaty scenes".  

But even I did this for over a year.  But I'm cursed with memory.  It was strange how other people tended to...forget bad subplots after a year.  Like how bad the Season 7 Littlefinger in Winterfell plot was; it's amazing to me that people went into Season 8 still thinking it would be amazing.

But hey, we're smart book-reading types, so we're not quite as susceptible to media hype - not as much at least.  That media frenzy over "OMG the final GoT season!"....was bigger than anything HBO itself could have done.  I mean they encouraged it, but all the media hype industry drove it to fever pitch beyond even their control.

I saw the same thing when Battlestar Galactica's final Season (4.5) came out, even though the show had long since stopped being particularly good at that point, and had long breaks between seasons.  And to be honest, that was their god-damned strategy:  "the final season!" carries blind hype with it.  Heroes didn't do that and just trailed off into obscurity.  The showrunner wanted Battlestar Galactica to just keep going - he kept kicking the can down the road, "moving the goalposts" so he didn't have to think of an ending.  In retrospect I think it was brinkmanship:  he either wanted to be canceled immediately to call himself a martyr (while not having to come up with an ending)....OR, keep getting renewed for "another two seasons" every year so he didn't have to actually plan out an ending (he kept rambling "it can run for SEVEN seasons!").   ---- This culminated in high profile negotiations with the network after the third season, by which point the show was ruined and it was clear he was making shit up, and he publicly said he was engaged in daring negotiations with the mean network to make sure the show got another two seasons, or got canceled.

His nightmare scenario happened: they gave him exactly one, full final season to end the show.  This forced his hand to actually try to think up "an ending" and it wasn't very good.  But the point is....I think the network realized, after seeing season 3, that if they had another season that bad, NO ONE would return for a fifth season.  They realized it was..."losing momentum".

I call it the "sweet spot" - when a hit show goes bad, it still gets carried by its own hype for a while: the trick is that you have to go into "the final season!" RIGHT BEFORE the point when mainstream news sites are openly criticizing it.  When the fans are grumbling at low quality but the media hasn't quite turned on it yet.  Heroes didn't do this, it dragged on so long that even the media turned on it.  

Interesting comparison of that kind of blind hype for a final season that I've seen.  

But we kind of forget....Season 7 was so poorly received when it came out, that had Season 8 NOT been "the final season" I don't think it would have been hyped like that.  Even the writers themselves...I think it was Dave Hill....vaguely, grudgingly said in response to all the "teleporting" that..."uh, we're rushing through this season to get to the amazing ending". - It didn't even need to be a GOOD lie, the media latched on to that and repeated it endlessly until it just became "common knowledge".

I don't think most people realize that an ending is built on what came before it.  I even made a warning video right before Season 8 pointing out "so much of the middle of this story was awful that it physically CANNOT rebound to make a coherent whole.  Even if season 8 is amazing on its own merits, this won't be like Breaking Bad - seen as basically a really long movie you can rewatch and examine the structure".

That being said, while I'm annoyed at people who only turned on the show after season 8 and act like season 8 was the only problem....Season 8 WAS the worst season, even relative to the others. Even I was shocked at how sloppy it was. 

And based on the behind the scenes videos....the Last Watch documentary.....multiple people, independently, remark that Season 8 was "different"; a whole other category of pressure was on them, as D&D became obsessed with making it "bigger" - I mean, physically.  They couldn't write a good ending so they emotionally compensated by ordering ridiculously large scale production, to live in denial - yeah, walking around in these massive sets they built for Season 8, it SEEMED like the next Lord of the Rings ending.  

But the point when "production was falling apart", truly falling apart to the point it was obvious to their staff, that was Season 8 - that's the point when even Deborah Riley turned against them.  Season 8 truly was a breaking point for them that even Season 5 hadn't been.

Season 7 was bad, in general, but what I did not expect was they would double down on all the things that made it bad for Season 8.

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Ghostlydragon]

I was completely the same. I absolutely hated s5 but really believed things would be better in s6 - i.e. That what happened in s5 would lead to being fixed in s6.

But I was wrong. And when people were using the same excuses I made in s5 for s6 problems such as Arya was really Jacquen in disguise when she was marching around Braavos when it made no sense for her not to be hiding (like she did in the previous episode FFS) I realised how deluded I had been in s5.

I think the Arya plot was the moment I realised the show was done. Nothing would fix it, not without a new team in charge and that was never going to happen.

[Cas Stark]

Maybe there is an alternative universe out there where after season 5, instead of criticizing only the rape itself, the audience and critics had flamed the show for its nonsensical, insane plots....there might have been a shake-up where a script doctor(s) was added to the show or they threw some more money at GRRM to get him involved in the storylines again....and the show would have rebounded in season 6, at least somewhat.  

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

 

yeah

[Count Balerion]

i didn't think season 8 would be *good*. i figured it would stupid and have plot holes and bizarre character shifts galore ... but i didn't predict how bad it would be. azor aharya and evil dany put an end to that!

[Count Balerion]

not much dirt in latest FCKAD chapter. joffrey sincerely apologised in season 2 (???).  joffrey's  wedding feast is compared to the Last Supper (!!!!!).  Dead birds are a metaphor for the show (i'm not making that up!).  they wanted to do dwarf fight w/ live pigs, but it became obvious even to them that that wouldn't work. during down time, benioff played epic  Candy Crush battles on his phone (?). "don't hassle the joff" t-shirts (if i heard that aright).

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, Count Balerion said:

i didn't think season 8 would be *good*. i figured it would stupid and have plot holes and bizarre character shifts galore ... but i didn't predict how bad it would be. azor aharya and evil dany put an end to that!

But what's the problem with Arya killing the Lich King thing? Somebody had to do it, and it is not that the series would have been better if Jon had done that, considering no Lich King character is going to feature in the books, and we won't get some kind of stupidly organized last stand at Winterfell.

This thing didn't make the show bad. I mean, you have to be obsessed with what you think will be the book story to care about such a trivial detail.

I mean, a good ending doesn't make something good that is bad, just as a bad ending does not (necessarily) ruin a novel or a movie or a series. The weaknesses/silliness of GoT wouldn't have gone away if the show had done things differently in the last season. It wouldn't have been as bad as it turned out to be, but it would have still been bad.

[SeanF]

2 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

But what's the problem with Arya killing the Lich King thing? Somebody had to do it, and it is not that the series would have been better if Jon had done that, considering no Lich King character is going to feature in the books, and we won't get some kind of stupidly organized last stand at Winterfell.

This thing didn't make the show bad. I mean, you have to be obsessed with what you think will be the book story to care about such a trivial detail.

I mean, a good ending doesn't make something good that is bad, just as a bad ending does not (necessarily) ruin a novel or a movie or a series. The weaknesses/silliness of GoT wouldn't have gone away if the show had done things differently in the last season. It wouldn't have been as bad as it turned out to be, but it would have still been bad.

A good ending can at least leave people thinking that what they read/saw was actually better than it was.  And a bad one can really destroy what went before.

But, yes, I think I was prone to a lot of wishful thinking about this.

[Lord Varys]

14 minutes ago, SeanF said:

A good ending can at least leave people thinking that what they read/saw was actually better than it was.  And a bad one can really destroy what went before.

Yes, up to a point that's true. Although I'd say that a shitty ending can only ruin an average story ... something that's well-written, directed, etc. is marred by a bad ending, but you can still point to the good elements. But if you just point to certain elements in the last season of GoT you really don't do the crappiness of the show justice. I mean, just as glaringly stupid things as the wight hunt would then be ignored.

And a big problem with GoT is certainly how they did their shitty show/ending, not necessarily what they did.

But then, I don't find the Arya thing particularly bad, to be honest, considering the show wasn't adapting ASoIaF with all the prophecy and savior stuff ... but even if they did, the important thing is not who or what the hero is, but what they do.

For ASoIaF a guy with dagger or sword killing the big bad is just stupid, but for GoT that's exactly what we would suspect. And since the show made it clear since season 1 that they give a rat's ass about George's foreshadowing and prophecies, what to expect in the end would be some kind of cheap twist. That's what they consistently did throughout the entire series. They even made cheap twists out of George's good twists - like the Red Wedding, which wasn't a cheap twist in the books but carefully built-up and calculated surprise. The reader knows/expect something is going to happen - not the scale of it or that it goes down as it does, but nobody expects the Freys to just behave as nothing happened.

Whereas the show always tries to turn things into complete and unexpected twists.

[Ghostlydragon]

7 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Annoying how this Cogman news has led to discussion of "well, he was the best writer on the show, he wrote that great second episode of Season 8"

 

and it's....that total disconnect people have, that "yeah, but he's also a guy who blindly supported Benioff and Weiss and isn't really a great writer when left to his own material, even those 'good' episodes still had problems"

Admittedly....Cogman isn't an egomaniac like Benioff is:  Benioff is egotistical and unskilled, Cogman merely unskilled.  Thus Cogman doesn't have a driving need to "add 70 live horses" as it were.  

So yeah, Cogman is a better writer, but as NK Jemisin said: "why didn't we get...the best?"

Why settle for Bryan Cogman when there are literally dozens of more talented staff writers who are regulars attached to each of these studios?  

What's Bryan Cogman's "achievement"? "I didn't actively try to add rape scenes"?  That's damning him with faint praise.  

(sigh)

People on my own channel community page who SAW the clips of him rambling on "I don't need to write dialogue, it's just the faces!" - people who have seen the clips actually recognize what Cogman is.  But so many still buy in to the myth that he was "one of us" or "our man on the inside".

Bryan Cogman played us all for fools.  He wasn't silently suffering through this the way Deborah Riley or Miguel Sapochnik were; watching all his behind the scenes clips, he is PROUD of their writing decisions.  

So that's what leaves me depressed now, REALLY moping around:  not that Cogman fails upwards, but that even now, after everything that happened....people STILL cling to the belief that he was a brilliant writer who knew what he was doing.  He was a PRESENTABLE writer, with good source material!

At least it looks like Season 1 of that Amazon Lord of the Rings show he worked on is going to bomb, after Tom Shippey left.  

Ah yes. The person who is so good at writing but didn't write one scene showing Jon dealing with who his parents are. No doubts. No asking for proof. No anger at being lied to for around 20 years. Just him telling Danaerys that he knows it's true. Oh and revealing that info at the worst possible time.

Yeah this guy really is the best writer eva

[SeanF]

On 11/27/2020 at 9:45 AM, Le Cygne said:

Ha ha ha, not even gonna read any more of Cogman's tone deaf and self-serving nonsense.

After cutting the book story of how Sansa becomes a woman on her own terms, he actually gave a rapist a line saying that rape made her a woman, and never even let her say, I made me a woman. Cogman owns the "romance dies" storyline.

He took away her voice, except to make her praise his boy, St. Tyrion (who they made her prop up, along with Ramsay, Theon, and Littlefinger). Instead of celebrating her choice to reject him, as in the books, they took her choices away.

They made a woman all about what someone else did to her body. And they never let her make a choice. They bent over backwards to let Tommen and Pod embrace sexuality, but never Sansa. They never gave her that dignity and respect.

They blamed her for what they did to her, and none more vocally than Cogman, who said she was a hardened woman making a choice, and would just have to deal with it. She was a child to them until they made use of her body to prop up men.

They were basically following a Sansa hater's playbook. They only revisted her story with Sandor, with whom she has a detailed Beauty and the Beast story in the books that's central to her identity as a woman, to thank them for cutting her story.

In one of the worst moments on television, they made her thank a sex trafficker and rapist for making her a woman. And once again, everyone objected. Where was Cogman then? Defending the show, as usual. There is no defense.

They took away her story and made her a prop in I Spit on Ramsay's Grave (their take on a movie many critics dub the worst ever made). She was their puppet. Then they made her thank them for doing this to her. They are disgusting.

Cogman kept giving her Jeyne's lines in his episodes, making her prop up Theon all the way through season 8, and in doing so, he was serving himself. He continued to justify his mistakes, mocking anyone who dared object, as so many did.

He never listened. He even laughably defended making her rude, not even realizing courtesy armor was her thing. The nanny's husband made no effort to understand her, nor the many who objected. It was always about him, and it still is to this day.

(added the link)

It's worse on reflection.  She isn't just thanking her rapist, she's thanking her torturer.  Remember Sansa's discussion with Littlefinger in Molestown, about Ramsay's "cutting" her and how he didn't harm her face, because he needed her face, but he hurt her elsewhere.

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah