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!

[Count Balerion]

the weird thing being that reportedly he was at first put out that they weren't doing book-euron. so where'd the rock star thing come from? blessed if i know.

[Count Balerion]

FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON, CHAPTER 26. MEGA SEASON 7 CHAPTER. PART 4

"Things that used to take 1 season took 1 episode" (NCW)

it's "urgency from within the story that drove the pace, rather than any external decision" [nonsense].

you can sit at home and do the "math" for how long it takes to get from point A to point B, "and whatever it was, yeah, that's what it was". [this is too deep for me]

oh, there were 73 fire burns [for the whole season?], a record. also an industry record for the number of stuntsmen kept on fire, 20 stuntsmen. [if i'm understanding my notes properly. i think i can get screenshot.]

"because of our attacking animals, we had the liberty to expand on that."

they put flame retardant on the stuntsmen and made sure they were all covered. but ppl on fire are "focussed on not dying." the wight in season 1 rana round waving his arms when on fire.

[Count Balerion]

[Count Balerion]

oh phooey. let me try again.

[Count Balerion]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/775530013348200448/826199780555358219/unknown.png?width=647&height=300

[Crixus]

On 4/1/2021 at 3:47 PM, SeanF said:

Urine's plot.  Dany in Qarth.  Porne.  "Play with her arse."  "I'm going to fuck the tits off this one."  Arya's fight with the waif.  The wight hunt.  The secret annulment and remarriage giving Jon an indisputable right to the Iron Throne, which everyone subsequently ignores.  Tyrion's "first they came for the slave traders, and I did nothing...." speech.  Dany's Nuremberg rally, after sacking Kings Landing.  Sansa and Arya coming to the point of murdering each other, until Sansa remembers that LF is untrustworthy. Dany "kinda forgetting" the Iron Fleet. The military tactics of the Long Night.  The vilification of Stannis.  Jaime trashing his backstory, by revealing he cared nothing for the inhabitants of Kings Landing, and returning to Cersei.  Jaime's rape of Cersei.  The repeated cock jokes and eunuch jokes.  Bran's becoming king because he has "the best story".  Arya becoming a sadist.  Ramsay and his "twenty good men."

Great list. I'll add: Cersei's constant smug, fixed look that seemed to indicate she was in a permanent wine-induced stupor - a real shame as LH was pretty fucking good in the earlier seasons when she was allowed to play an actual, multi-dimensional character. Talisa - all of it. The crap depiction of Renly and Loras (one-dimensional from the start). Saint Tyrion. Compare Tyrion at his trial with Tyrion in S5 onwards.... it's shocking. The way they ruined Jaime. The entire battle with the Others, special mention for Jon screaming at undead Viserion.... err. I could go on but I'll spare everyone!

It's a shame as nearly all the actors were pretty good. 

[Le Cygne]

Benioff was so jealous of Jaime. But despite all they did, the audience still liked him.

They really don't think things through at all. The whole Lannisters Are Everything bit is what got him into the incest mess, so he wouldn't attack or kill them.

The audience just ignored the repeated character assassinations, because he wouldn't have done it. Then many said they made him throw his life away.

"The real Jaime Lannister isn't the good looking, charming rogue. The real Jaime is a monster, he's a beast, and [killing] is what he loves to do."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxJSAmS8Wvg

"You are right to be disturbed by it. I think it was a brutal scene... It felt to us when we were writing it like this is something the character was going to do at that moment. And it was a horrible thing to do."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfvVluNxujc

The "we felt like it was what the character would do" excuse is right up there with "we did what was best for the show" in their top 10 the dog ate my homework excuses for bad writing.

[Crixus]

1 hour ago, Le Cygne said:

The real Jaime Lannister isn't the good looking, charming rogue. The real Jaime is a monster, he's a beast, and [killing] is what he loves to do."

What a hilariously inaccurate interpretation of an amazing character. I think it's to NCW's credit that he still managed to do a great portrayal, even till the crap end with the cringeworthy line about how he didn't care about people. 

One of the best things about ASOIAF is that no one is a monster, except perhaps for Ramsay. Talk about missing one of the fundamental points of the entire series.

 

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Crixus said:

What a hilariously inaccurate interpretation of an amazing character. I think it's to NCW's credit that he still managed to do a great portrayal, even till the crap end with the cringeworthy line about how he didn't care about people. 

One of the best things about ASOIAF is that no one is a monster, except perhaps for Ramsay. Talk about missing one of the fundamental points of the entire series.

 

The awesome Lannisters, in their eyes, were Tywin, Tyrion and Cersei.  Jaime was just a dumb lunk who swung a sword.

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Lord Varys]

How do you know how bad GoT is?

I just binged 'Cobra Kai', and I honestly got annoyed about the GoT geek talk they had in there, especially the part where they referenced show-only stuff like the Battle of the Bastards.

Also - random thought: I realized I forgot how Kevan Lannister died in the show. Don't tell me, I'm glad things are really fading away now.

[Angel Eyes]

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

How do you know how bad GoT is?

I just binged 'Cobra Kai', and I honestly got annoyed about the GoT geek talk they had in there, especially the part where they referenced show-only stuff like the Battle of the Bastards.

Also - random thought: I realized I forgot how Kevan Lannister died in the show. Don't tell me, I'm glad things are really fading away now.

It seemed the show forgot pretty easily since Cersei suffered no repercussions from the Westerlands for having him blown up.

[Lord Varys]

2 minutes ago, Angel Eyes said:

It seemed the show forgot pretty easily since Cersei suffered no repercussions from the Westerlands for having him blown up.

Kevan was also blown up? You weren't supposed to tell me this!

[Angel Eyes]

6 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Random thoughts on character accents which I'm going to follow up on with a video eventually:

The absolute worst accents in Game of Thrones were:

• Jorah Mormont
• Samwell Tarly
• Roose & Ramsay Bolton
• Littlefinger
• Davos (optional)

I don't define "worst" by accent PERFORMANCE, but by accent CHOICE.

Whether or not Richard Madden, Rose Leslie, or Kit Harington could convincingly portray Northern England accents which it isn't their natural accent is irrelevant to me. Or whether Peter Dinklage & Nicolaj Coster-Waldau could convincingly portray southern England accents (I think they did a decent job). This is about baffling, active "choices" they made:

Jorah Mormont - ....why does a man from Bear Island,, an isolated isle north of "the North"....speak with a refined southern England accent?  Moreover, his FATHER, Jeor Mormont, doesn't even talk the same way! His father talks with a Northern accent! (Not even the actor's natural accent, he's Scottish).  This isn't even Iain Glen's natural accent either - he just uses it all the time in public interviews. He's got this Scottish accent but he hides it by adopting this really upper class accent all the time. Not that this is a bad thing (I mean, Patrick Stewart has a heavy Yorkshire accent in private but you'd never know it because he adopted an RP accent early in his career and stuck with it). A lot of this has to do with classism in Britain about Received Pronunciation. YES, Iain Glen's adopted RP accent is a beautiful speaking voice, don't get me wrong but....the incongruence, the mismatch, that he doesn't even sound like his own father in Season 1?

Samwell Tarly - ...Why does he have a Northern accent?  Samwell is from the SOUTH!  The deep south, he's from the Reach! AND an aristocrat! The actor John Bradley already has a Northern accent so they didn't bother to have him adopt a southern accent (RP).  All the more silly because when we later see his family in Season 6, NONE OF THEM have the same accent that he does! They talk like southerners! Using RP!  If anything, Samwell is bookish and educated - shouldn't he talk with a refined accent? (Granted, he talks with a very FORMAL Northern accent, but it's still Northern)

Roose & Ramsay Bolton - The Roose actor has an amazing, chilling voice....but privately I must admit that his posh, deep RP accent doesn't actually match a Northern lord. Though maybe it adds to have "off" and vampire-like he is in the books. As for Ramsay, the actor is actually Welsh, but even in his natural speaking voice he doesn't have a very strong Welsh accent but tries to keep it closer to standard southern English. When he plays Ramsay he does it with sort of a sneer that changes his voice. They don't exactly sound like "Northerners", though then again maybe you could argue it makes sense that they're such oddballs that you need to set them apart - Ramsay's accent doesn't ultimately seem "Welsh" so much as unique and idiosyncratic.  Roose & Ramsay aren't actually a big complaint but more of a grin from me.

Littlefinger - As pointed out elsewhere, David Benioff FELL IN LOVE with this actor and openly admitted he changed him from being an outwardly gregarious con man....to a moustache-twirling villain, a caricature. In Benioff's words, "he's so beguiling!"....it's like a bad parody. So in Season 1, he started out with a more or less southern England RP accent - given that the actor is Irish. As the seasons progressed, they INTENTIONALLY had him push the Irish accent more and more, so that by Season 5 he blatantly doesn't talk the same.  At the time, I thought this was a CONSCIOUS choice, to show that Littlefinger is really this minor lord from the Vale - to show that in private he's really a hick and not nearly as refined as he wants to be.  That would have been a great idea...but I think that's just us applying more thought to it than they did.  The reality is I think they just plain liked his Irish accent more because they thought it was sinister....so they *changed course midstream*.  I wouldn't even mind quite as much if they had Littlefinger doing this since Season 1.   But dear god...you had an actor SHIFT ACCENT years into an ongoing show?!  It's the inconsistency that's ridiculous more than what they chose.

Davos Seaworth - It's optional if you consider this "bad" because there's some in-universe fanon explanations we could assign to it. Davos in the show speaks with a "Geordie" accent - a very specific accent from the very northeast corner of England, on the border with Scotland. There are actually subdivisions of accents within "the North" of England; Manchester, Yorkshire, Liverpool, etc. Geordie is in the very North-east. Why would a man who grew up in the slums of King's Landing, the capital city in the south...speak with a very unique Northern accent? Granted, it's a unique variant of "Northern" so he doesn't actually "sound like the Starks do" (they use more of a general  Yorkshire mix)....but as many have pointed out, Davos sounds nothing like how they portray lower class people in King's Landing (i.e. Gendry) - who basically just use Estuary or Cockney (lower class derivations of RP, but how people in London talk).  ----Even more bizarre....this isn't Liam Cunningham's natural speaking voice. He's from south Dublin!  He chose to adopt a Geordie accent.  Why? Because he thought it sounded working class? Well it is, but not SOUTHERN working class. ---- THEN AGAIN...we could gloss over this with the fanon explanation, which I fully agree with. that...well....sailors tend to pick up unique accents due to all the contact they have with people from other regions, and foreigners. Sailor jargon. yes, Davos has spent a lot of time abroad. Even his SON (remember him?! Season 2?) doesn't talk like that (probably more to show the class difference that Davos grew up a commoner but his son didn't). But okay, sailors tend to have odd accents.

Conclusion:

I give a pass for Davos, and even for the Boltons, as it sort of makes sense that they'd have unique accents.

But the choices they made even in SEASON ONE for Jorah Mormont and Samwell Tarly just plain don't make a lot of sense.  Of these Jorah is the worst, because his own father appears in Season 1 and doesn't even sound like him!  MAAAYBE you could make the argument that he's spent so much time in exile that his accent changed. Maybe. Samwell?  Well he doesn't have a HEAVY Northern accent, tries to speak formally, but the contrast is clear when we see his family in Season 6.

I guess Littlefinger is the least excusable because...you can't just shift the accent a character speaks with in the MIDDLE of a project!  Yeah WE came up with the fanon explanation that this is how he talks in private because he's a minor lord from the Vale, but the SHOWRUNNERS THEMSELVES or the actor have to give that explanation in order to you know, get credit for it?

I've been looking over this for an upcoming video because I'm researching actors for House of the Dragon and their natural accents.

Matt Smith is sort of an educated midlands accent not that different from a standard London/southern accent, though he's demonstrated he can do RP very well in The Crown (aristocrats in King's Landing talk in Received Pronunciation accent).

....Emma D'Arcy's natural accent is actually Glosster (Gloucester), that is, West Country, and I can't find a single clip of Emma performing in Received Pronunciation (Maisie Williams is also from the West Country, but perhaps due to being a child actor she has only a bare hint of a West Country accent - she uses her natural accent for Arya; the younger Stark children didn't adopt Northern accents, in-universe because I guess that's not how Catelyn Tully talks).  

Olivia Cooke....actually has a very heavy working-class Manchester accent, from Northern England. She's deeply embarrassed about it and apologizes for it in multiple interviews. She said there's such a classist bias against her accent in England that it was easier for her career to move to the United States and adopt an American accent for roles. That said she's VERY good at several accents, from American to Irish to Estuary (common southern England)....though she said she finds performing in RP to be very difficult, she has done it in a few roles (I have clips from the Lighthouse Golem of her doing RP).

In the light of the “sailor picking up accents”, Euron could fall under that because he has a very strange-sounding accent, likely for the same reasons. 

Plus, if you want to be thrown for a loop by accents, look no further than the Baratheon brothers. All were born and raised in the Stormlands, right? So is there any particular reason as to why Robert sounds like he’s from Sheffield and Stannis and Renly from London? Stannis has an odd mix of RP and Cockney in his voice.

[Crixus]

Not sure why accents in a fictional world need to stack up vs Britain? I mean, I loathe the show but this seems an odd bone to pick... sure, most of the cast had various sorts of British accents but I don't think they were trying to relate Westeros to corresponding UK territory, or were they? 

[Count Balerion]

FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON, CHAPTER 26. MEGA SEASON 7 CHAPTER. PART 5. Mostly wight hunt.

"we made a choice to just get on w/ it."

wight hunt was at the "epicentre of the pacing debate".

they got up a northern irish quarry to look like iceland.

they had fake ice and paper snow, but the set was still cold.

"had the actors circle up for a cinematic MAGNIFICENT SEVEN shot."

ppl coughed up fake snow.

the wight hunt solved the problem how to get the WW over the Wall. they were "trying to figure out what pieces we already had on board w/out involving new Deus ex machina pieces." [1. is viserion not a Deus ex machina? 2. azor aharya/maisie sue is a Deus ex machina if anything is.]

how did they get a dragon north of the Wall in the first place? alysanne had troubly getting her dragon over the Wall, indeed i think she couldn't get it over at all.]

"if the NK captured a dragon it would boost his formidability." [only to have it fizzle out from arya's puppy power.]

viserion "serves the forces of death".

[Lady Fevre Dream]

Ah, has anyone, everyone seen the:  #IronAnniversary promotion from HBO, GOT, on the tenth anniversary of the start of the show?  Here's the trailer put out.  Firstly, I couldn't help but be annoyed at the St. Tyrion:  Good Story opening, as it just instantly reminded me of the 'awful closing episodes,' but also.............watching just the trailer made me realize something.  The show seems to be one thing when it started and a totally different thing when it ended.  The trailer made me see, in so many respects, at least two different shows.  That middle part could be a third show as well.  Sadly, I really don't want to watch any of it. 

 

[Lady Fevre Dream]

And, LOL, it seems they are adding marathons, too.  #MaraThrone RME 

 

Yesterday, I noticed tweets trying to sell the #IronAnniversary to get views on HBO Max, I guess. 

Now #MaraThrone is moving it to actual HBO channel viewing this weekend.

I have HBO and OnDemand, etc etc., and still, sadly, I don't really want to watch it. 

[Le Cygne]

18 hours ago, Count Balerion said:

FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON, CHAPTER 26. MEGA SEASON 7 CHAPTER. PART 5. Mostly wight hunt.

"we made a choice to just get on w/ it."

wight hunt was at the "epicentre of the pacing debate".

they got up a northern irish quarry to look like iceland.

they had fake ice and paper snow, but the set was still cold.

"had the actors circle up for a cinematic MAGNIFICENT SEVEN shot."

ppl coughed up fake snow.

the wight hunt solved the problem how to get the WW over the Wall. they were "trying to figure out what pieces we already had on board w/out involving new Deus ex machina pieces." [1. is viserion not a Deus ex machina? 2. azor aharya/maisie sue is a Deus ex machina if anything is.]

how did they get a dragon north of the Wall in the first place? alysanne had troubly getting her dragon over the Wall, indeed i think she couldn't get it over at all.]

"if the NK captured a dragon it would boost his formidability." [only to have it fizzle out from arya's puppy power.]

viserion "serves the forces of death".

It's all funny but especially the bold. Still laughing at that. They do love to badly copy movies in ways that show just how really bad they are at 1) understanding the movies and 2) writing anything original on their own.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Lady Fevre Dream said:

And, LOL, it seems they are adding marathons, too.  #MaraThrone RME 

 

Yesterday, I noticed tweets trying to sell the #IronAnniversary to get views on HBO Max, I guess. 

Now #MaraThrone is moving it to actual HBO channel viewing this weekend.

I have HBO and OnDemand, etc etc., and still, sadly, I don't really want to watch it. 

They make me want to defecate.