SPOILERS: Rant and Rave

[State Trooper]

1 minute ago, State Trooper said:

 

 

[The Scabbard Of the Morning]

Yeah, people watch it because it's popular thing to do.  It's like big cultural phenomenon like Dallas back in the day, people were crazy about it, but nobody cares about it 10 years laters and it will be forgotten.

[The Scabbard Of the Morning]

 

1 minute ago, State Trooper said:

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

The point is that people need to vent when the are invested in something and it ends up disapointing them. It's human nature.

[Gogossos]

9 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

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.

I just lost a chunk of my comment where I bring the same Qarth and Talisa examples as evidence that problems started way back in season 2. They simply had no chance with the Feast and Dance material, let alone the last 2 seasons without a safety net.

[darmody]

1 hour ago, kissdbyfire said:

they would have been able to connect it all w/o many hiccups. 

Or at least without the hiccups of your average t.v. show. Even the great ones have them. But in certain ways Game of Thrones is often dumber than primetime soap operas like Empire. Which are written for the oos and ahs of Big Moments and throw out a lot of nonsense, pitched at people with IQs as low as 75. But at least they are plotted out into hour-long bites which give you the illusion of order and structure. 

Game of Thrones, on the other hand, often just forgets stuff. And though they have benchmarks to hit, other times the show feels lost. The Wight Hunt, for instance, literally felt like it was made up as they were writing, then handed in 30 minutes later. 

Or they write themselves into a hole and press the Danny Lights Something on Fire Button. 

[Lord Varys]

5 minutes ago, Gogossos said:

I just lost a chunk of my comment where I bring the same Qarth and Talisa examples as evidence that problems started way back in season 2. They simply had no chance with the Feast and Dance material, let alone the last 2 seasons without a safety net.

Even things people really liked back then - like the Varys-Littlefinger conversation - wasn't really good writing considering that it presented these characters in a way they would never interact. Whatever they would talk about behind the scenes would be much more subtle and have nothing to do with veiled threats that are recognizable as veiled threats.

But back then we were also really all jumping to fill in the blanks, wanting to believe these people had some 'special insights' or a 'deeper understanding' of the story because they were adapting it using non-POV characters.

The Viserys-Doreah scene springs to mind, too. This is pretty good because Harry Lloyd really understood the character and played him very well, actually positively influencing the faithfulness of the source material, but it is not really good writing. 

4 minutes ago, darmody said:

Or at least without the hiccups of your average t.v. show. Even the great ones have them. But in certain ways Game of Thrones is often dumber than primetime soap operas like Empire. Which are written for the oos and ahs of Big Moments and throw out a lot of nonsense, pitched at people with IQs as low as 75. But at least they are plotted out into hour-long bites which give you the illusion of order and structure. 

Game of Thrones, on the other hand, often just forgets stuff. And though they have benchmarks to hit, other times the show feels lost. The Wight Hunt, for instance, literally felt like it was made up as they were writing, then handed in 30 minutes later. 

It is pretty much a complete disgrace now, something with no substance at all. They only reference themselves now, expecting to the scenes to be carried by the faces and the fact that they all did a lot of meaningful stuff in the past. It is sort of like a retirement home full of demented people exchanging anecdotes about their youth.

And there are no longer even the remnants of characters there. It is just types and clichés. The badass hero, the comic relief, the Xena-warrior, etc.

[darmody]

1 hour 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.

 

 

 

Post-season 4 they faced many, many difficulties, foremost among them hating Stannis for no reason. So the show fell back on characters (chiefly Tyrion) babbling endlessly; long, dialogue-free action sequences; and the dark world of genital merchantry. 

[Larger than Average Finger]

20 hours ago, Red Dragon10 said:

Wouldn't the fire still help with the wights, though? 

And are there not several Thousand of them for every WW?

[Larger than Average Finger]

13 minutes ago, darmody said:

Post-season 4 they faced many, many difficulties, foremost among them hating Stannis for no reason. So the show fell back on characters (chiefly Tyrion) babbling endlessly; long, dialogue-free action sequences; and the dark world of genital merchantry. 

Given its looking like it will take 10 years for George to publish another chapter to this story, and that he may never finish it, its hard for me to condemn these 2 for what they have done in it.

[Lord Varys]

7 minutes ago, Larger than Average Finger said:

Given its looking like it will take 10 years for George to publish another chapter to this story, and that he may never finish it, its hard for me to condemn these 2 for what they have done in it.

So you don't care who finishes a story - and in what quality - but just that it is finished? Fan fiction could do the trick then, too.

[Rippounet]

Just watched it, and wow, is it depressing to see how low the show has fallen.

Yeah, D&D were never good, but there were still some decent moments now and then, mainly thanks to the characters written by Martin, the actors who managed to bring them to life, and the quality of the visuals. Once in a while it still worked somehow.

But now that the characters are in completely uncharted territory (i.e. not in scenes from the books) the writing is so terrible that no actor and no visual can compensate for this mess. It's obvious those two episodes are just a prologue to a big fight but the story itself is utterly worthless at this point. It's hard to even care for the characters anymore because most of them have been turned into parodies of themselves.

What saddens me the most is that the few fan theories I read here and there are sometimes interesting but I know that the writers are uncapable of any subtlety. It's obvious they wrote these scenes to get rid of the whole thing. Now it's all about waiting for the few final plot twists that will have been given to them by Martin many years ago. Because all in all it is just SO BAD. The knighting of Brienne was one of the few things that actually felt like ASoIaF, pretty much everything else felt like a fan fiction with an insane budget.

 

[Larger than Average Finger]

Just now, Lord Varys said:

So you don't care who finishes a story - and in what quality - but just that it is finished? Fan fiction could do the trick then, too.

Not at all, but I do want to see it finished.  I hope deeply that Martin is up to that task, but its looking like its very possible that he is not.

These guys don't get to wait 10 or 20 years to go forward, and I give them credit for what they do, rather than try to compare it to something I hope someone else does.

[kissdbyfire]

45 minutes ago, darmody said:

Game of Thrones, on the other hand, often just forgets stuff

Do they forget stuff? Or is it a case of just not giving two fucks because they know, especially after s3, that the audience doesn’t really care about silly things like themes or character development? That the audience is more than happy to hand-wave stuff, as long as there are enough OMG moments... How many times over the years have we heard that plot hole X would be explained, or that some idiotic detail would be super duper relevant further down the line, and it never happened, not once. They started creating their inane fanfic as early as s1, but timidly at first. Series 2 and 3 were already filled w/ silly changes and inventions; I didn’t really like either, but it was still an enjoyable tv show for the most part. But not even the worse moments from previous series come anywhere near the level of atrociously bad the show reached in s5. And it never recovered in 6 or 7, nor will it now. 

ETA:

and this, too, so very much.

“Post-season 4 they faced many, many difficulties, foremost among them hating Stannis for no reason. So the show fell back on characters (chiefly Tyrion) babbling endlessly; long, dialogue-free action sequences; and the dark world of genital merchantry.”

[Lord Varys]

2 minutes ago, Larger than Average Finger said:

Not at all, but I do want to see it finished.  I hope deeply that Martin is up to that task, but its looking like its very possible that he is not.

These guys don't get to wait 10 or 20 years to go forward, and I give them credit for what they do, rather than try to compare it to something I hope someone else does.

Oh, sure, no issue with continuing the show after it had been started. That was clear. The problem is just that these morons were never up to the task. I mean, they couldn't even properly adapt their own stories the way they do it. They seem to be deliberately trying to destroy the story the way they are doing it. They don't use dialogue, they want the actors do be themselves and do whatever they can do best with their faces. This is an utter disgrace.

I have no issue with a rushed ending that tries its best to do justice to the book, nor do I have any issue with a completely changed ending for good reason which sort follows the books 'in spirit'. But we are truly light years away from that.

[Squall]

I do wonder how D&D managed to stay on the team. Are 95% of people happy with them and the others just "pesky book fanatics" that always whine?

GRRM is also no reference for series length. He recently exclaimed he wanted it to go on for up to ten seasons. The man just doesn't know to trim all the dead end subplots and subsubplots. I'm glad we're away from the endless descriptions of banquets he liked to do. The Frey pie one was at least a memorable and... different take on it, but sometimes GRRM likes to go in circles to add pages.

[Nightwish]

23 minutes ago, Larger than Average Finger said:

Given its looking like it will take 10 years for George to publish another chapter to this story, and that he may never finish it, its hard for me to condemn these 2 for what they have done in it.

I was watching series 4 tonight and it wasn’t that bad. It still had long scenes and dialogues, mostly based on the original material, even with twists,  so I get your point. If the author had managed to finish the story or at least a bigger part of it, the show wouldn’t have degraded so much. Now all the scenes seem shorter and shrinked. Hardly enough lines to cover a topic. 

 

[kissdbyfire]

3 minutes ago, Nightwish said:

I was watching series 4 tonight and it wasn’t that bad. It still had long scenes and dialogues, mostly based on the original material, even with twists,  so I get your point. If the author had managed to finish the story or at least a bigger part of it, the show wouldn’t have degraded so much. Now all the scenes seem shorter and shrinked. Hardly enough lines to cover a topic. 

 

I couldn’t possibly disagree more, especially w/ the bolded. The problem w/ the show isn’t the lack of material for the Ds to use, but rather that they are bad writers. A good writer, or a team of good writers, could have done a lot w/ what they had, that being all the published material + what Martin told them. 

[Ser Drewy]

2 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

I couldn’t possibly disagree more, especially w/ the bolded. The problem w/ the show isn’t the lack of material for the Ds to use, but rather that they are bad writers. A good writer, or a team of good writers, could have done a lot w/ what they had, that being all the published material + what Martin told them. 

I mean, there was bad writing when they had the books. The show might have cohered better, but I expect many of the same problems would have arisen even if Martin had gotten TWOW out on time. And, keep in mind, we know he strongly suggested to them to keep stuff like Stoneheart and te Tyrell brothers, but they chose to ignore him. 

[Cas Stark]

8 minutes ago, Nightwish said:

I was watching series 4 tonight and it wasn’t that bad. It still had long scenes and dialogues, mostly based on the original material, even with twists,  so I get your point. If the author had managed to finish the story or at least a bigger part of it, the show wouldn’t have degraded so much. Now all the scenes seem shorter and shrinked. Hardly enough lines to cover a topic. 

 

I agree.  While the showrunners are definitely a living embodiment of falling up, they show was good when they had the books to use as a guide, yes, they still did some dumb things, but overall, they stuck to Martin's main story, his characters...if he had finished Winds in 2014 and gotten Spring out in 2017 or 2018...I think the show would have maintained itself at a much higher level.  They are either too busy or too arrogant to spend the time that is needed on the scripts.  Even this year, where they had almost two years, the writing is slightly improved, but not by much.  I thought ep. 1 and ep. 2 especially, were decent.  But, compare the 'eve of battle' Blackwater episode, where everyone is doing much the same thing...but we see all kinds of character revealing moments.  This time, we got a lot of cliches, and some good moments, but nothing compared to Blackwater.

[Nightwish]

1 minute ago, kissdbyfire said:

I couldn’t possibly disagree more, especially w/ the bolded. The problem w/ the show isn’t the lack of material for the Ds to use, but rather that they are bad writers. A good writer, or a team of good writers, could have done a lot w/ what they had, that being all the published material + what Martin told them. 

As I said the first 4 seasons at least for me were far more decent since there was a base material they could use. But you can put the blame on Ds and their writing team. Since it’s them doing GOT, apparently they need the base material. In fact the worst they are as writers, the more they need it.