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SPOILERS: Rant and Rave


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2 minutes ago, Lollygag said:

The Others hate iron so there's some speculation about the Starks having some connection to the Others. There must always be a Stark in Winterfell might be part of that. Winter is Coming sounds like a perpetual warning of the Others coming. There's that weird meat locker in the Wall (ADWD Jon II I think) where things last longer than typical freezing, everything is held in place by iron hooks and it has an iron door unlike the other wood doors which seems to imply that Bran the Builder built the Wall with Other magic. 

At this point, I'm thinking that the Long Night ended with a deal rather than defeat. Not sure any of this will matter to the show though.  

So where did the Night's King and his wights get the iron chains they needed to pull Viserion out of the lake?

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23 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I agree with you on two things: Cersei Lannister is an A list character (but the plot you had her in with Aegon is about as C list as it gets) and Jon is an unsatisfying, boring character on the show (though he's also pretty boring and unsatisfying in the books too). As for whether his resurrection will be better handled in the books... we'll see. Killing him off was a dumb faux cliffhanger to begin with.

Davos has been a POV character since A Clash of Kings. He's not in the "main character" tier, but he's certainly more major in both books and show than Aegon, Jon Connington, Euron, and even Melisandre. He's a character in the books and show that people are invested in; it makes complete sense to devote time to him in the last episode before all hell breaks loose.

I know you think I'm an idiot, but our difference in opinion really comes to this: ASoiAF, for all of its virtues, has become a bloated mess of characters and plotlines in the past two books. There's a ton of good in those books, but the story in the books has become too complex for its own (and GRRM's, given how long he now needs to figure all this out) good. The show has its flaws for sure, and has made mistakes in getting to this endpoint, but cutting through much of the fluff in AFFC and ADWD, the Jon Conningtons and Aegons and meandering travelogues and Tattered Princes and Ariannes and Euron showing up out of nowhere as an over-the-top comic book villain, has been one of the wisest things the show-writers have done.  All this would have been even more of a mess in a TV show than it is in a book series. 

All right, for real this time, show-enjoyer out. If you'd like to talk more, I'll be in the episode discussion thread .

If a character is A-list, then why would a plot that they would be heavily involved in be C-list

Aegon is a character who was talked about in the first novel and then foreshadowed heavily (i.e. prophesized) in the climax of the second novel.

Surely Davos has much more important things to do than working a soup kitchen.

 

At the end of the day, I think you have a reductive way at looking at a story. To you, you seem to think that if a character doesn't appear in the first book of a series, then then that character is automatically unimportant.

When the next book comes out, you'll see....

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1 minute ago, Jabar of House Titan said:

So where did the Night's King and his wights get the iron chains they needed to pull Viserion out of the lake?

I'm discussing the books here. The poster was asking where the iron sword thing comes from. 

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I wasn't impressed by the episode maybe because I had high expectations and was let down (as always) I understand what they were trying to make, they were trying to make us get attached to the characters so we could mourn when they die. but that wasn't the case for me it felt like lazy writing and a filler episode. do they even know there's only like 4 episodes left

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13 hours ago, Oursisthechicken said:

Edit: Theon found LF's lost jetpack and managed to get to WF faster than the NK

:D I wonder if Theon gave Jaime a "wazzup, man?" when he blew past him on his way to WF?:rolleyes:

7 hours ago, the Greenleif Stark said:

Sick of all the crap I'm seeing saying that the dead Starks in the crypts are gonna come back as wights with everyone trapped down there.....like wtf do these people think the point of the iron swords are? I'll give em the few who's swords were taken by Bran and company all those years ago but that was like 2 swords, so maybe 2 Starks get Wighted................I wouldn't put it past Dumb & Dumber though to completely ignore the iron swords and have all the Starks come back but that would just be terrible story telling

Um, yeah, I can't speak for anyone else but, if this refers to me, it was just a question I had.  I certainly don't know if it could happen or not but it is something that, logically, should really be addressed somehow (but who am I kidding?!)  If we do ever see any more books, I hope it's addressed there.

1 hour ago, Jabar of House Titan said:

So where did the Night's King and his wights get the iron chains they needed to pull Viserion out of the lake?

Hmm, just where did those giant chains come from?! :idea:

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2 hours ago, Jabar of House Titan said:

Well, if we had Victarion in the show, there would be no need for Euron to act like Victarion. Euron could be Euron.

Damphair is already in the show but he has such a minor role you wouldn't think he is. But Damphair is basically the Ironborn Melisandre except Damphair:

  1. pretty much fails at everything
  2. has no real magical powers
  3. popular with the Ironborn smallfolk

#3 is pretty important seeing as the show has completely forgotten about the smallfolk when their was a heavy focus on the smallfolk in the first four seasons. Damphair also acts as an enemy, a gatekeeper and a boon for the stories of Asha/Yara and Victarion. Like, for example....with all of the time we spent on political plots and showing not telling, Yara is going to take back the Iron Islands offscreen. Keep in mind, that the Iron Islanders actually VOTED for Euron to be their king. There should be some resistance but...nope. D&D are ignoring their own established show-canon. Victarion and Aeron would help with that.

A huge detailed political plot with Arianne and Aegon adds life to the King's Landing set. You notice how quiet it was in the Red Keep in the first episode of the season. If you're having the show revolve around two sets in the final season and one of those two sets is practically empty and devoid of any drama, mystery or action then....your final season is woefully lopsided with half of it being wasted. Tell me: how many characters with lines are present in King's Landing?

A detailed political plot with Arianne and Aegon would also give Cersei something to do. Seeing as Cersei has done nothing of note (smirking maliciously, speaking softly, getting pregnant and sitting around is not anything of note) since the season 6 finale, that would have been welcome. She had no enemies in King's Landing or in the surrounding areas which doesn't make any narrative or thematic sense in the show, much less the books.

The Starks have a reputation for being 3x as noble and just as Cersei Lannister yet they have seemingly endless issues with their bannermen.

And who says that Arianne, Aegon and Euron are not endgame.

  • Characters have been talking about Arianne and her father since the first book; matter of fact, if you are speaking strictly in terms of what's on paper, Arianne is more important than Oberyn and the Sand Snakes.
  • Aegon was talked about in the first book (Arya overheard some of Varys' conversations) and got some serious foreshadowing in the House of Undying chapter (a Daenerys chapter mind you) that came to fruition in the fifth book when Tyrion crosses paths with him--and we should all know at this point that if Tyrion knows about a character, place or a situation, then that character/place/situation is important.
  • Euron has been talked about since the second book and, with each passing book, he gets an upgrade that pushes him more and more to the forefront which causes more and more characters to think and talk about him.

That's the problem. Those smarter, more logical plots for the characters who are endgame came from places, events and other characters that are not endgame. I'm not say adapt everything because everything will be important but the Faceless Men story in Braavos was shortened and simplified so much that Arya's arc suffered and that Arya the character feels a bit hollow. Why would the Faceless Men let her go when they are so protective of their secrets?

You'd think that why they just let her go could've been explained better had they taken their time and threw in a couple of "extraneous" threads to fill out the story. The Faceless Men have strong ties to the Iron Bank (huge considering that the realm is in a bunch of debt) and the Sealord (the ruler of Braavos) and the Sealord himself has strong ties to Daenerys as he had apparently had let the Targaryens stay there. There's a lot of stuff there to work with if they wanted to...especially since Arya overheard conversations in the first season about the Iron Bank and the Targaryens. But they didn't and Arya felt completely bizarre in season 7.

Samwell travelled thousands of miles to get to Oldtown in season 6 only to spend most of his onscreen time at the Citadel being a janitor? And then he inexplicably is able to cure greyscale and then he just magically finds what he needs to prove Jon's identity. Then he leaves? How did he grow from that?

 

Why are they in the business of screenwriting if they CAN NOT PLOT OUT or WRITE THEIR OWN STORIES. GRRM had easily given them not only over half of the story but he had also gave them the answers to secrets and mysteries yet to be revealed and he had given them the (tentative) ending.

Connecting the dots in a sensible way should not have been that hard.

Like I said earlier, this was a lot more than what J.K. Rowling gave the writers/directors/actors/producers when the Harry Potter films were being made. And many scenes and a few of the films were better than the actual books.

 

:agree:

I know I'm not adding any value here quoting the whole post again, and not saying anything new myself, but really wanted to say I couldn't agree more.

Sorry for the waste of real estate :laugh:

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Yeah, I think we all recognize that it became more of a challenge to write the show when the books ran out.  But although that made things more difficult, it didn't make things impossible, it also didn't make things so bad that make a failure inevitable.

D&D didn't just fail to write a story that was up for GRRM's standard, that would have been very difficult. They failed to meet the medicore standard of writing a passable story.   I mean the show went from being possibly the best fantasy story even filmed surpassing LOTR's film trilogy to Michael Bay Transformers level crap. If they are this bad at writing they should have checked their egos and hired real writers and just stuck to being show runners.

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, Jabar of House Titan said:

Well, if we had Victarion in the show, there would be no need for Euron to act like Victarion. Euron could be Euron.

Damphair is already in the show but he has such a minor role you wouldn't think he is. But Damphair is basically the Ironborn Melisandre except Damphair:

  1. pretty much fails at everything
  2. has no real magical powers
  3. popular with the Ironborn smallfolk

#3 is pretty important seeing as the show has completely forgotten about the smallfolk when their was a heavy focus on the smallfolk in the first four seasons. Damphair also acts as an enemy, a gatekeeper and a boon for the stories of Asha/Yara and Victarion. Like, for example....with all of the time we spent on political plots and showing not telling, Yara is going to take back the Iron Islands offscreen. Keep in mind, that the Iron Islanders actually VOTED for Euron to be their king. There should be some resistance but...nope. D&D are ignoring their own established show-canon. Victarion and Aeron would help with that.

A huge detailed political plot with Arianne and Aegon adds life to the King's Landing set. You notice how quiet it was in the Red Keep in the first episode of the season. If you're having the show revolve around two sets in the final season and one of those two sets is practically empty and devoid of any drama, mystery or action then....your final season is woefully lopsided with half of it being wasted. Tell me: how many characters with lines are present in King's Landing?

A detailed political plot with Arianne and Aegon would also give Cersei something to do. Seeing as Cersei has done nothing of note (smirking maliciously, speaking softly, getting pregnant and sitting around is not anything of note) since the season 6 finale, that would have been welcome. She had no enemies in King's Landing or in the surrounding areas which doesn't make any narrative or thematic sense in the show, much less the books.

The Starks have a reputation for being 3x as noble and just as Cersei Lannister yet they have seemingly endless issues with their bannermen.

And who says that Arianne, Aegon and Euron are not endgame.

  • Characters have been talking about Arianne and her father since the first book; matter of fact, if you are speaking strictly in terms of what's on paper, Arianne is more important than Oberyn and the Sand Snakes.
  • Aegon was talked about in the first book (Arya overheard some of Varys' conversations) and got some serious foreshadowing in the House of Undying chapter (a Daenerys chapter mind you) that came to fruition in the fifth book when Tyrion crosses paths with him--and we should all know at this point that if Tyrion knows about a character, place or a situation, then that character/place/situation is important.
  • Euron has been talked about since the second book and, with each passing book, he gets an upgrade that pushes him more and more to the forefront which causes more and more characters to think and talk about him.

That's the problem. Those smarter, more logical plots for the characters who are endgame came from places, events and other characters that are not endgame. I'm not say adapt everything because everything will be important but the Faceless Men story in Braavos was shortened and simplified so much that Arya's arc suffered and that Arya the character feels a bit hollow. Why would the Faceless Men let her go when they are so protective of their secrets?

You'd think that why they just let her go could've been explained better had they taken their time and threw in a couple of "extraneous" threads to fill out the story. The Faceless Men have strong ties to the Iron Bank (huge considering that the realm is in a bunch of debt) and the Sealord (the ruler of Braavos) and the Sealord himself has strong ties to Daenerys as he had apparently had let the Targaryens stay there. There's a lot of stuff there to work with if they wanted to...especially since Arya overheard conversations in the first season about the Iron Bank and the Targaryens. But they didn't and Arya felt completely bizarre in season 7.

Samwell travelled thousands of miles to get to Oldtown in season 6 only to spend most of his onscreen time at the Citadel being a janitor? And then he inexplicably is able to cure greyscale and then he just magically finds what he needs to prove Jon's identity. Then he leaves? How did he grow from that?

 

Why are they in the business of screenwriting if they CAN NOT PLOT OUT or WRITE THEIR OWN STORIES. GRRM had easily given them not only over half of the story but he had also gave them the answers to secrets and mysteries yet to be revealed and he had given them the (tentative) ending.

Connecting the dots in a sensible way should not have been that hard.

Like I said earlier, this was a lot more than what J.K. Rowling gave the writers/directors/actors/producers when the Harry Potter films were being made. And many scenes and a few of the films were better than the actual books.

 

I think we will have to agree to disagree.  I hate book Euron, and don't think Vic adds anything to the mix, so Euron has the navy instead of Vic, big deal.  Damphair is filler in the books, sure, he's interesting, but he's filler, and he doesn't need to be in the show, and yes, I know he had a cameo, LOL.  More screen time for Balon Greyjoy would have been a better choice than adding in the secondary filler Greyjoys.

If Arianne and Aegon are going to eventually fail, then they don't really belong in the show unless the earlier seasons included them from the beginning, throwing in a huge secondary plot in the 5th season would have been terrible.  Just because the show had done a terrible job with Cersei w/out Aegon, doesn't mean there weren't other choices, like keeping the Tyrells alive for another season.  But, I adamantly don't think the show needed to add the author's filler.

I thought the show should have done something very similar with the FM as what they did with Arya and Tywin in season 2, she should have had her meetings and trainings with the kindly man, instead of the dumb waif, this kind of a set up could have given more background on Essos, the FM.  For my money, they wasted Tom and Maise's rapport when they brought him back and did nothing w/him.

I'm not sure how much detail George gave them on the path forward, given how bad the show has been since it left the books, that suggests to me, not enough detail.

 

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7 minutes ago, The Scabbard Of the Morning said:

Yeah, I think we all recognize that it became more of a challenge to write the show when the books ran out.  But although that made things more difficult, it didn't make things impossible, it also didn't make things so bad that make a failure inevitable.

D&D didn't just fail to write a story that was up for GRRM's standard, that would have been very difficult. They failed to meet the medicore standard of writing a passable story.   I mean the show went from being possibly the best fantasy story even filmed surpassing LOTR's film trilogy to Michael Bay Transformers level crap. If they are this bad at writing they should have checked their egos and hired real writers and just stuck to being show runners.

 

 

 

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a helluva drug!

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1 minute ago, The Scabbard Of the Morning said:

Yeah, I think we all recognize that it became more of a challenge to write the show when the books ran out.  But although that made things more difficult, it to didn't make things impossible, it also didn't make things so bad that make a failure inevitable.

Exactly. The “running out of material” line is a very poor excuse for what the show has turned into. First, because there’s loads of published material they could have used but decided not to. Second, even when they decided to skip things for whatever reason - they didn’t like it, it wasn’t relevant to the “endgame”, they had to cut stuff (the only valid one imo), they should have been able to write a coherent story w/ actual properly developed characters. They didn’t, and that’s on them and no one else.  

1 minute ago, The Scabbard Of the Morning said:

D&D didn't just fail to write a story that was up for GRRM's standard, that would have been very difficult. They failed to meet the medicore standard of writing a passable story.   

This x 10,000.

1 minute ago, The Scabbard Of the Morning said:

I mean the show went from being possibly the best fantasy story even filmed surpassing LOTR's film trilogy to Michael Bay Transformers level crap. If they are this bad at writing they should have checked their egos and hired real writers and just stuck to being show runners.

LOL Transformers! But yup, spot on. 

And I’ve been saying the same thing for years, they should have stuck to running the show and hired a proper team of writers who can actually... well, write. 

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13 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

I'm not sure how much detail George gave them on the path forward, given how bad the show has been since it left the books, that suggests to me, not enough detail.

IMO it shouldn’t really matter how much detail Martin gave them or not. They had what they wanted to use from the published material, and they had the key plot points for the ending. If they were competent writers, they would have been able to connect it all w/o many hiccups. The problem isn’t what they have or didn’t have from Martin, but the fact that they can’t write their way out of an open paper bag. 

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1 minute ago, kissdbyfire said:

IMO it shouldn’t really matter how much detail Martin gave them or not. They had what they wanted to use from the published material, and they had the key plot points for the ending. If they were competent writers, they would have been able to connect it all w/o many hiccups. The problem isn’t what they have or didn’t have from Martin, but the fact that they can’t write their way out of an open paper bag. 

But we know it does matter, we have the evidence already, we have the first 4 seasons, which ranged from excellent to very good to pretty good, when they had the books as the guide, and then we have the show from season 5, when they ran out of book story, so don't know where or how the characters get to the end, all they know is the end and maybe a couple 'wow' big events, and we see that the show  has been really stupid, and has gotten stupider as they even ran out of Dance and Feast material.  

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8 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

But we know it does matter, we have the evidence already, we have the first 4 seasons, which ranged from excellent to very good to pretty good, when they had the books as the guide, and then we have the show from season 5, when they ran out of book story, so don't know where or how the characters get to the end, all they know is the end and maybe a couple 'wow' big events, and we see that the show  has been really stupid, and has gotten stupider as they even ran out of Dance and Feast material.  

Oh I totally agree that that’s what has happened. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear... I was trying to make the point that it shouldn’t matter. Not when you have the foundation - s 1 — 4 b 1 — 5 - and know the endgame for the main characters. Well, I shouldn’t matter for good writers, and I mean “good”, not even genius level of awesomeness here. Which clearly isn’t the case. 

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8 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

But we know it does matter, we have the evidence already, we have the first 4 seasons, which ranged from excellent to very good to pretty good, when they had the books as the guide, and then we have the show from season 5, when they ran out of book story, so don't know where or how the characters get to the end, all they know is the end and maybe a couple 'wow' big events, and we see that the show  has been really stupid, and has gotten stupider as they even ran out of Dance and Feast material.  

Now, hold on here.  The show runners themselves have publicly stated that the entire reason they wanted to do the show was to show the Red Wedding.  Once that happened, they had fulfilled their personal purpose for doing the show, but they were still locked into contract to complete the "story."  Apparently nothing in the contract said they had to complete it well.

It wouldn't be nearly so gut-wrenching how utterly dreck the show turned if not for the fact the Ds also stated time and again that they were qualified writers, and George was more of an historian that happened to be able to write a story.  So when they get their turn to write the story, what do they do?  Gut the characters, destroy the plot, make absolutely no sense whatsoever, and actively insult the viewers by having anything of importance happen off-screen, then talking about it in their self-congratulatory behind the episode segments.  If you watch any other shows behind the episodes and then watch one of theirs, you can see how little they care.  Other shows the creators talk about characters and motivations and sometimes even how happy they are with the way the actors are taking their lines and running with them.  The very few I've managed to stomach from the Ds have been replete with them patting themselves on the back for developing some plot they didn't bother to actually put in the show, but man are they ever clever for coming up with it.

All of that is by choice.  If they could write, maybe they should have shown us they could write.  It didn't need to stay at George RR Martin levels, but surely any competent writing team could do better than what we've seen here.  And if the current team can't, and they're the show runners?  They're not really qualified to do either job well.  All of which again is on them.

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Only really scanned this thread, but Jesus, people like a moan, eh? 

I've never understood why that is though, because if it were me and a series / film or whatever was pissing me off that much I'd just simply stop watching it, not go on a message-board picking holes in it, life's too short.

Personally I thought it was one of the best non-action episodes of the entire series, with Arya seducing Gendry, the fire scene and Brienne getting knighted by Jaime the obvious standouts. 10/10

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1 minute ago, State Trooper said:

Only really scanned this thread, but Jesus, people like a moan, eh? 

I've never understood why that is though, because if it were me and a series / film or whatever was pissing me off that much I'd just simply stop watching it, not go on a message-board picking holes in it, life's too short.

Personally I thought it was one of the best non-action episodes of the entire series, with Arya seducing Gendry, the fire scene and Brienne getting knighted by Jaime the obvious standouts. 10/10

Clearly you don't understand human behavior. You think the Red Letter Media Star Wars videos is watched by millions because why?

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Guys, there was nothing any good in that show that came from these two hacks. All the dialogues, scenery, and setup that was good and convincing came from George. You can be completely incompetent but if you are framed by such good material then you cannot ruin much when you make minor changes or condense something.

However, even in the good scenes back in season 1 the quality of their writing never stood out.

But if you leave hacks basically just with notes and outlines and expect them to come up with good dialogues, scenery, characters, and plots all by themselves you get what we got in this show.

This is never more evident than, say, in the completely nonsensical Qarth plot in season 2 which is most definitely just as bad as everything we get now. Not to mention this entire Talisa travesty.

The pity about all that is that this is obviously material that could have become a true and lasting landmark of in fantasy television. As it stands now we can be more than certain that the re-watch potential of that nonsense drops to about zero in the next decade or so. The only think that keeps people interested in the thing is to find out how it is going to end. But that's not going to last.

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14 hours ago, Mystical said:

They feel the need to tweet that Arya is legal (from a US standpoint) for consensual sex but it was fine to rape underage Sansa. Seriously?

This is a perplexing statement. First of all, Sansa was married. So the viewer knows at least in that world she's reached the age of consent. 

Secondly, I think you know the issue is that the Arya scene was more explicit. They didn't show much, but they did show some. With Sansa it was more abstract. 

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17 minutes ago, The Scabbard Of the Morning said:

Clearly you don't understand human behavior. You think the Red Letter Media Star Wars videos is watched by millions because why?

Of course I understand "human "behaviour," but as I said, I just don't see the point in all the bitching and moaning.

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