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SPOILERS: Rant and Rave


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5 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

It is the only story we have up to this point. And that makes it certainly very important. But this series is unfinished. If we pretend the guys adapting actually know or care about the full story and try to adapt that then their adaptation choices should (and would, if they were actually thinking this through) reflect the fact that they know what's important overall.

A lot of the stuff in the first three books just doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't serve the main story of the actual main characters - which are basically the Stark children with POVs, Tyrion, Jon, and Dany.

But their enemies and antagonists aren't Tywin, Renly, Balon, etc., they have to deal with other people.

I mean, most chapters of the main characters in the first couple of the books could be cut - like Bran doing nothing the entire day, or Arya getting nowhere in the Riverlands. This literally led nowhere. Bran, Arya, and Sansa's own stories more or less only began in AFfC and ADwD. Prior to that they were just windows into other stories - Robb's, events at court, events in the Riverlands, etc. They had no goals or intentions of their own aside from 'wanting to get back home', 'wanting their parents back', and 'wanting to get back to their parents'.

The story told in the first books are the stories of other people - most of which are dead now. So what was the worth of those stories to those main characters?

Sure, there is stuff there that would be needed. But a lot of it could be cut, especially revolving around the characters who are going to die long before the finale even approaches.

But my point actually is that insisting that new characters that are introduced later are filler rather than those characters who died earlier and were never main characters to begin with is pretty odd.

There are some stories that stretch throughout the entire series - Dany's and Jon's, for instance. But others were rather short. If you have limited time you should focus on introducing characters that last until the ending rather than wasting time with characters you know you will kill. Character growth and the like can be accomplished in other ways, too.

The whole point is to have a realm woefully unprepared for the horrors they're about to fsce in the Others. The futility of war, the price paid by the common people, death, destruction, starvation and hopelessness. This is what Feast was all about. And even then, the nobility is STIL at each other's throats instead of seeing the fate that awaits them all.

Now imagine you have Robert Baratheon on the throne when the threat became clear. Say what you will about Robert, but he wasn't a terrible king even if he didn't actually want the job. Once Ned explained the situation, he would have marched north, warhammer in hand, with the kingdom behind him, and been grateful to have something to do. He would have faced that threat head on. He would have found a way to ally with Mance and the wildlings. And as a united realm they would have sttod their ground. 

In other words, a completely different story.

But just to remind everyone, this was originally supposed to be a trilogy, not the monster it's become.

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On 4/22/2019 at 8:58 AM, Jabar of House Titan said:

I think that Show Jon is a composite character of Book Jon and fAegon.

It doesn't mean that fAegon is real or fake. It just means that instead of having another (supposedly) Targaryen male running around to threaten Daenerys' claim in these final seasons, they thought that having just one Targaryen male to threaten her claim was better.

I don't think Jon's name will be Aegon in the books. Rhaegar has always struck me as a very considerate, very intentional person and Lyanna is not a birdbrain. If anything, they will think that they had a girl and will try to name Jon Visenya only....SURPRISE!!! You're having a boy!

On top of that, I'm not quite sure that Lyanna will know what we know about what's happened on King's Landing and Dragonstone by the time she gives birth. News does travel very slowly back then and the Tower of Joy was purposely built in a very secluded area to begin with.

I hope his name in the books is Aemon.

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I think Jon's name really could be Aegon in the books. Rhaegar seemed to think the prince that was promised was Aegon the Conqueror reborn, and that's the reason why there needed to be three heads. He named his first son Aegon and his daughter Rhaenys, he probably wanted another daughter to name Visenya.

Now either Rhaegar thought when Elia couldn't have another child that the son he named Aegon wasn't the prince that was promised since there wasn't three heads, or the fact that Lyanna had a boy meant his first son wasn't the prince that was promised. Regardless I think he may have named him Aegon for that reason alone. 

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Just now, bloodsteel bitterraven said:

They only have a one year difference.  Sophie was born in 1996 and Maisie in 1997.

I was talking about the characters, not the actresses. 

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2 hours 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. 

Most any competent t.v. writer could do better than them with the material. But it's no coincidence the quality of the show went way down when they started running out of book material. 

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18 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Sure. The entire War of the Five Kings was just pointless filler. People were killing each other for no good reasons when they should actually have prepared for the Others.

A properly shortened adaptation should certainly include a variation of the Red Wedding for shock value and all. But there is no need to build up so many characters who then just die. Tywin, Ned, Cat, Robb, Lysa, Mormont, Aemon, Robert, Viserys, etc. could all be merged or, in part, even cut.

The important part of a story is not really the first act, especially when it slows down the story by wasting time with characters like Renly and Balon, etc.

The real story is just beginning right now. It is true that we might not get it completely, but it makes no sense to insist the stuff we have is the true story or reflect what the later parts of the actual story is going to be about.

I assume you are calling the War of the Five King pointless filler sarcastically as a way of pointing of flawed arguments. If you are, thank you.

For those who aren't convinced, let's look at it from a 5-act Shakespearean structure.

Act 1 of the story is exposition, worldbuilding, background and introductions galore. Take Romeo and Juliet. In act 1, we meet Romeo and Juliet separately along with their supporting cast and we are introduced the world where their families have a longstanding blood feud that is beginning to turn the city that they live into a warzone.

The real story of any story begins with the second act and gets really interesting in the third act. For example, Romeo and Juliet meet at a party held by Juliet's family, Romeo is discovered by one other person, the two fall in love anyways and get married in secret in act 2. When we get to act 3, Juliet gets betrothed to another man, people start dying and abandoning the two main characters en masse and Romeo is exiled.

Mercutio is a main character but he is also a plot device that puts wind beneath the wings of the frenetic act 4 and climactic act 5.

I am of the school of learning where act 3 -- being the point of no return that it is -- basically defines what kind of story you are writing/reading/watching/hearing. Be it tragedy, horror, comedy, romance, adventure.

If you want to tell your friends what a story is about and get them interested without spoiling them, tell them about Act 2. If you don't care about spoiling your friends but you still want them to be interested and know what's going on in said story, tell them about Act 3.

Contrary to popular belief, we just finished act 3 and have only just begun act 4 in GRRM's 5-act story.

So, even if you don't believe that, Balon dies and Euron becomes king offscreen in A Storm of Swords. Catelyn and Tyrion even spend quite a lot of time thinking what it could mean for them and theirs. A Feast for Crows just shows exactly what happened from the Ironborn point-of-view. 

Oberyn Martell and the Dornish thunder their way onto the scene after (or was it right before?) the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords. Tyrion (and to a lesser extent, Jaime) spends a lot of time around Oberyn hearing about Oberyn's family, Dornish culture and their ties to the Targaryen dynasty. A depressed Sansa is deeply moved and inspired by the spicy, confident, alluring spirit of the Dornishwomen she meets...a spirit she may come to emulate once she returns to Winterfell. A Feast for Crows shows the natural consequences of what happens to Oberyn in King's Landing. The Dornish -- who previously didn't care about anyone or anything north of the Red Mountains -- now want to go to war and get involved in politics.

These are huge developments. And they all happen at towards the end of the third book.

To say that they are not important....smh

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22 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

It all would have been avoided if GRRM kept his word and finished his books ahead of the show.  That is the proverbial bottom line.  The showrunners are not talented enough to do it without his books, then there wouldn't be any more guessing, or crackpot theories.  It would have unfolded as it was supposed to, instead of the author, 8 years and counting with no book out and the show a random mishmash of fanfic, GRRM bullet points and the showrunners own sophomoric sensibilities.  

HBO knows better than to listen to an author's promises and count on continued standards of quality after Charlaine Harris and True Blood.

Even if everything goes ideally, regular output and consistent quality can't be counted on like they're assembly line items. If this was so important, HBO should have delayed production until GRRM was further along. They knew about the AFFC/ADWD split and the 5 year gap problem when they signed on. They also saw how unlikely it looked that the story could be wrapped up in only 2 more books. 

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52 minutes ago, darmody said:

Most any competent t.v. writer could do better than them with the material. But it's no coincidence the quality of the show went way down when they started running out of book material. 

They didn’t run out of material. GRRM supposedly gave them some pretty heafty notes in the story years ago, and that is in addition to the two million (+whatever) words they already had or were developed. They had plenty of material. The issue is what they chose to keep, cut, and manipulate. Not planning far enough into the the story as a whole has left them with huge plot holes. Cutting or merging key characters and plot arc also screwed things up. The showrunners decided what stayed and what went out like yesterday’s news. 

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1 minute ago, Lollygag said:

HBO knows better than to listen to an author's promises and count on continued standards of quality after Charlaine Harris and True Blood.

Even if everything goes ideally, regular output and consistent quality can't be counted on like they're assembly line items. If this was so important, HBO should have delayed production until GRRM was further along. They knew about the AFFC/ADWD split and the 5 year gap problem when they signed on. They also saw how unlikely it looked that the story could be wrapped up in only 2 more books. 

They 'signed on' in 2007, I'm sure they never expected that Dance wouldn't be out until 2011, or that it would be a bloated book that doesn't move the plot forward very much.  Really, there is no reason in 2007 not to think that if the show was a hit, the author would easily finish the series in plenty of time.  It has been 12 years.  

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2 minutes ago, The Fattest Leech said:

They didn’t run out of material. GRRM supposedly gave them some pretty heafty notes in the story years ago, and that is in addition to the two million (+whatever) words they already had or were developed. They had planet of material. The issue is what they chose to keep, cut, and manipulate. Not planning far enough into the the story as a whole has left them with huge plot holes. Cutting or merging key characters and plot arc also screwed thins up. The showrunners decided what stayed and what went out like yesterday’s news. 

They ran out of book material, as I said. Printed material bound together in novels and sold in bookstores.

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1 minute ago, The Fattest Leech said:

They didn’t run out of material. GRRM supposedly gave them some pretty heafty notes in the story years ago, and that is in addition to the two million (+whatever) words they already had or were developed. They had planet of material. The issue is what they chose to keep, cut, and manipulate. Not planning far enough into the the story as a whole has left them with huge plot holes. Cutting or merging key characters and plot arc also screwed thins up. The showrunners decided what stayed and what went out like yesterday’s news. 

How GRRM talked in a recent interview, they didn't have a sit down on what was going on after the books until the show writers were done with the previously published material. Meaning the show writers screwed themselves over majorly by cutting out large chunks of the story and important characters.

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Just now, darmody said:

They ran out of book material, as I said. Printed material bound together in novels and sold in bookstores.

They went off book by the end of season 3. They didn’t know Samwell was a POV. They had their eye in a few select prizes. They didn’t run out of book material. 

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Just now, darmody said:

They ran out of book material, as I said. Printed material bound together in novels and sold in bookstores.

Nope.

They had plenty of book material to adapt. And with the notes that they jotted down during discussions with GRRM, they had enough to finish the story.

Instead they chose to ignore humongous swathes of book material that they didn't like and speed through the book material that they did like only to find out...whoops, we really needed that information.

Like what was the point of having Samwell Tarly spend an entire season travelling thousands of miles only for him to wash dishes, empty chamberpots, obscurely talk about the end of the world with a rando Archmaester, steal unnamed, irrelevant books from the Citadel, travel thousands of miles once again but this time offscreen in two episodes and trade notes with Bran...

Speaking of which, if Bran is the encyclopedia and almanac of human history, why didn't he know that Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen were married. He already knew Jon Snow was their son. Why wouldn't he dig a little deeper for an explanation or a way to make sense if it was that shocking to him.

Plot hole, anyone?

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6 minutes ago, The Fattest Leech said:

They went off book by the end of season 3. They didn’t know Samwell was a POV. They had their eye in a few select prizes. They didn’t run out of book material. 

Are you serious?!

How can you read the books and not know Samwell was a POV? He's a POV in two of them and a pretty damn important POV at that.

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11 minutes ago, Jabar of House Titan said:

I assume you are calling the War of the Five King pointless filler sarcastically as a way of pointing of flawed arguments. If you are, thank you.

Sure, but there is also a real underlying truth under that hyperbole above insofar as a proper adaptation of the entire series could indeed have cut or greatly reduced the importance of things from the first three books that made it into the show simply because the overall roles of those characters are rather small.

I don't want anything to be cut, and of course the finished books are great in their own right, but if I were to adapt the books I'd rather cut, say, a lot from the first two books than, say, Aegon or Arianne if I had to cut things. I'd also use my knowledge of the overall story to streamline things so that crucial plot lines and characters are, perhaps, hinted or introduced earlier than they are in the books so things fit better together.

Wasting time with and create additional scenes for characters who are not main characters and will die soon is not a good way to do it.

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35 minutes ago, Lollygag said:

I was talking about the characters, not the actresses. 

Oh I see.

 

Anyway, I have to mention this.  Did anyone else feel that Arya forced herself on Gendry?  I didn't get the impression that Gendry wanted to do it.  Am I the only one who felt that way watching that scene?

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2 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Sure, but there is also a real underlying truth under that hyperbole above insofar as a proper adaptation of the entire series could indeed have cut or greatly reduced the importance of things from the first three books that made it into the show simply because the overall roles of those characters are rather small.

I don't want anything to be cut, and of course the finished books are great in their own right, but if I were to adapt the books I'd rather cut, say, a lot from the first two books than, say, Aegon or Arianne if I had to cut things. I'd also use my knowledge of the overall story to streamline things so that crucial plot lines and characters are, perhaps, hinted or introduced earlier than they are in the books so things fit better together.

Wasting time with and create additional scenes for characters who are not main characters and will die soon is not a good way to do it.

If you would cut Robb Stark and the Red Wedding in favor of Aegon and Arianne it's a good thing that no one asked you to do an adaptation, LOL.

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