Gambit
Desperately wants to be a Muppet
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2004
- Messages
- 31,036
Well got that wrong.
Sorry for the wall of text.
I should clarify that season 8 is my second least favourite season of them all (7 is my least favourite). There were issues with pacing (especially in The Last of the Starks), there were problems with a lack of detail that would have made a difference come the end, and I think it could have benefited from being at least 1/2 episodes longer. But I love the show and I loved the final season, so loving something means I can acknowledge its flaws and still take a great deal from it. I feel like I should make it clear that I do have a level of positive bias towards it, mostly because of everything it did for me when I started watching it back in 2015.
But regardless, I think what they did really took guts. It was really bold to decide to go down that route and stick to it. Before the season aired, my preferred ending, as it were, was for the Night King to take Winterfell, to be defeated at King's Landing, and for Cersei to somehow be taken down in the chaos, leaving Jon and/or Daenerys to either take the throne or hand it down to someone else. Looking back, I'm glad I had no say in how things went, because my version of the ending was far too simplistic, far too conventional, and actually betrayed everything the show (and books) originally wanted to explore.
Forgetting the books for a second, the show was always questioning the true nature of power and the human cost of lusting after it. How do people behave when they have power? Do they use it for good or evil? Does it consume them completely? What tactics do they use to hold onto it? If they don't have power, how do they go about seizing it? Are they ever willing to give it up if doing so is for the greater good? Can you rule the land and "break the wheel" at the same time? Can you weigh up your personal demons against your responsibility to be an honourable human? And so on and so forth.
I think the way the show ended considered those questions again after season 7 essentially ignored them (which is why it's my least favourite season). How did Daenerys behave when she finally had ultimate power? Did she use it for good or evil? Did it consume her completely? Could she rule Westeros and "break the wheel" at the same time? Did her personal demons stand up to scrutiny when her responsibility was to be a good person? You get what I mean. Remembering the books for a second, GRRM said that ASOIAF was supposed to be an analysis of "the human heart in conflict with itself".
With that in mind, Daenerys was just a flawed person like any other in this story, as capable of slipping into authoritarian mode as she was capable of slipping into liberal mode, and vice versa. The moment she burned King's Landing to the ground was just one of her many displays of authoritarianism, it just so happened to be her final major act and thus defined her legacy. Trying to read her story as a familiar "progression", as though her arc told the story of someone who went from being a compassionate ruler to someone capable of such villainy in the blink of an eye, wasn't how I took her story in the end.
There's a reason why the description of most Targaryens' nature is constantly related to a coin toss in that popular Westerosi saying - it (and by extension, Dany) can land on any side at any moment because of a range of factors. Ruling and breaking the wheel don't go hand in hand with fairness. The closer she got to seizing the Iron Throne, and the more her ruling Westeros became a possibility, the more paranoid she became about losing it. She made enemies of potential allies and her advisers, she stopped seeing common people and started seeing disloyal subjects. And then she was all alone, on top of that dragon with the world in her hands, hearing the people she wished to rule crying out in fear rather than celebration. How did she wield that power?
There were little details I wish they'd kept in, like the scene they cut from the finale where Bran allows a beetle to walk over his hand and away to safety. In that moment he has ultimate power and chooses not to wield it, he just lets the world carry on as it would have anyway. It's a neat little way of showing that he has no interest in starting a dynasty or controlling the continent with an iron fist, and it also calls back to that scene where Tyrion wonders why his cousin mercilessly smashes beetles when they pose him no harm.
There was loads of other stuff too - how they essentially used Jon to deconstruct the tropes of the "prodigal son" in fantasy storytelling, how they used Jaime to show that characters don't get redemption arcs just because we want them to - but I thought the main beats of the story were all completely dead on and brought the show back around to focusing on what it originally wanted to explore. I think it could have done with a little more breathing room - for example, I think rushing straight into the battle for the Iron Throne immediately after ending the Long Night was a lot for the audience to handle - but it told the story it needed to.
We're currently in an age of politics, especially in America (crucially where D&D are from), where people are looking for lone figures to make huge changes to long-standing systems that will either consume them or break them. It doesn't matter if that's lefties voting for Bernie Sanders, the white underclass voting for Trump, liberals voting for Hilary, nothing will change how those people want it to. Dany's ending is "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" told in the most brutal fashion. It's nihilistic and cruel but I think it was necessary.
I could go on and on and on and on about the final season and explain in even greater detail all the little things I love about it, but I'll just leave you with a line Tyrion says in The Last of the Starks that should explain why the Night King was easier to kill than human greed and the lust for power: "We may have defeated them, but we still have us to contend with."
They're just bad writers who managed to blahg their way through a meeting enough with an old man to be handed the keys to one of the greatest epic fantasies of our lifetime. They have nothing of note to give themselves other than soap opera trash and knob jokes.What they did took guts, but not in a good way. Their reasons for doing things were fcked up. 'surprise, we got ya, expectations subverted' - even if it didnt make sense.
The biggest issue the last season had looking back is how actions had no consequences. But thats all been covered in the almost 1k pages here.
Also D&D wanted to write and have a show with their slavery fanfaction didnt they? The more you read about these two, the worse it gets
They're just bad writers who managed to blahg their way through a meeting enough with an old man to be handed the keys to one of the greatest epic fantasies of our lifetime. They have nothing of note to give themselves other than soap opera trash and knob jokes.
It's really a simple as; once the source material was gone they had nothing. Absolutely nothing, to lean on.
To be honest I think the first 4 seasons were fantastic in spite of them. Save for a couple of moments that we know they wrote they butchered the story and made changes that took the show way off track. The things they get praised for are so watered down compared to the books that I've been amazed because I'm reading them for the first time and shocked at how foolish I was to think these guys had had a difficult time trying to turn novel into TV.Which is the most bizarre thing. once you get to that point, why not outsource / hire people to do a job, where you can still take credit if its a roaring success, or shift blame if its a failure.
No doubt, they did a fantastic job for the first 4 seasons. 5 was iffy, but wasnt bad (well Dorne was) but then 6 was a whole loada fun. Then it just went down and kept going down. The whole thing doesnt make sense.
Complete garbage. One of the worst final seasons of any seasons everit was shit
I can't believe people are still talking about this. It could have been the greatest tv show of all time but it got so bad in the end thats its lowest depths was below even that of the Walking Dead. The fact that history will probably see the Walking Dead as a better show says it all. The final 2 seasons were genuinely Batwoman level trash.
The final seasons were dumb as feck, but come on now let's not lose your mind completely here
The more these two open their mouth, the more convinced I am that ‘they guessed Jon’s mother right’ was utter bollocks from GRRM. He saw the potential in the format and latitudes offered by HBO and decided to wing it, especially when he himself got to be heavily involved in the writing process.
I think Lindsay Ellis did the best, most thorough and even handed dissection of whatever this turned into. Mercilessly free of points relating to battle formations and succinctly dismissive of the most rabid defenders of the show (@robinamicrowave).
What I mean to say that is that quite a lot of fans made the mistake of projecting themselves onto Daenerys, saw her journey as an example of how to enact progressive politics, and subsequently took it as a personal insult when their woke hero turned out to be capable of genocide after all.
She burnt down a city with a million people in it. How is that not genocide?
She burnt down a city with a million people in it. How is that not genocide?
How do I make the same mistakes as Dany's stans when I defend D&D?It is. But the issue isnt that she did it, but how it got to the point. I mean you talk about 'fans making the mistake' but then you go and do the same thing to defend D&D
How do I make the same mistakes as Dany's stans when I defend D&D?
I don't think it's hypocritical of me to enjoy every era of the show, is it? I definitely prefer seasons 1-4 than 5-8 (although I prefer season 6 over season 2), and I think it's a shame that D&D didn't have books to adapt all along, but TV shows are constantly in flux and in the balance for a number of different reasons and I count myself very lucky that we were given any sort of end, let alone one I enjoyed as much as I did. As I've implied, I don't think D&D helped themselves by making the decision to shorten the last two seasons so significantly, and I've openly stated numerous times on here that I don't think the final season was a shining example of how to finish a TV show. But I think they managed to bring the story to an end that (to me at least) made sense, kept in touch with the original themes and messages of the story, and was consistently entertaining and exciting. I think, once they ran out of books to adapt, the show dropped from being a consistently 9/10 show to being an 8/10 show that had real bummer episodes on occasion (haven't ever liked 'No One', 'Eastwatch', 'Beyond the Wall' or 'Winterfell' that much), but I only defend D&D because I sympathise with their situation. I think it would have been very easy to give Jon and Daenerys the Aragorn and Arwen ending and send everyone home happy - it was the ending I wanted and expected until they gave me their ending, which I much prefer to mine.You project yourself on to D&D and echo the thoughts that people just didn't want to understand maybe?
I mean, I personally still don't get how you can do all those in depth write ups of the early seasons, then forget all that and completely change your tune with the last season as if it's suddenly satisfying.
Oh and btw, you shouldn't tar everybody with the brush you made up yourself. Not everyone had a story in mind and were disappointed with how it ended like that, it was more of what the show became over all. And if you were true to yourself and your writing, I'd have expected you to at least be in the boat of questioning that.
they gave me their ending, which I much prefer to mine.
My ending involved Jon being killed by the Night King in the throne room as Dany, who had just burned Cersei and The Mountain alive just after he had won her trial by combat for her and made Jon turn against her for it, lies dying only for Jon to rise up as he's been resurrected by Bran (who died previously at the hand of the Night King) and he tells Jon in a vision that shows Rhaegar singing to a pregnant Lyanna by the fire that the Night King wanted him (Bran) dead because he was the physical host of the entity known as the Three Eyed Raven which grew more powerful with each new member until Bran, who has now allowed the 3ER to reach a power so great that he can transcend time and space to make changes to the world, and that all legends of Gods are really just about one person - Bran. And then Jon pulls the dragonglass from the Night King and crawls to Dany's side as she dies, but the Night King starts to move towards them as his form turns human again and with Dany's dying breath she calls out Dracarys and the Night King looks up to see Drogon towering above him and burns him to ash. Jon feels destroyed because he doubted Dany and gives up his throne because he wants nothing to do with war anymore and is sick of others trying to tell him what he must do.it was the ending I wanted and expected until they gave me their ending, which I much prefer to mine.
Nah, the issue was that it was being written by two idiots that by their own admission did not understand anything about what they were adapting. Two idiots that let the actors define how they wrote the characters, actors many of whom started off as children and grew up to be not very good actors at all. It was a shit storm that all came to a head with a disastrous final season.they needed another season really
I wonder was the issue time and money?
anyone could see that a story with such a broad range of stories across a huge land after seasons of twists and turns with characters developed would need to play out a little more naturally
to me it just felt like they abandoned character traits, stories in a mad rush to get done
Basically.Nah, the issue was that it was being written by two idiots that by their own admission did not understand anything about what they were adapting. Two idiots that let the actors define how they wrote the characters, actors many of whom started off as children and grew up to be not very good actors at all. It was a shit storm that all came to a head with a disastrous final season.
The battle formations are part of the lack of care and craft. Not so much the lack of historical accuracy or tactics, but on a higher level that they completely lacked any story consistency and rendered the actual battles somewhat moot when an army can be routed just to get a cool looking shot only to show up again in the very next episode like nothing happened.Basically.
The battle formation criticisms and debates about TV production ergonomics are tiresome distractions.
If something is jarringly written and carelessly put together then it might have something to do with the shoddy workmanship, and it might not have anything to do with Skipio Africanus favouring the spearman flank, or who forgot to reorder the office stationary, or a death threat some berk wrote on twitter. Jeeze.
Nah. I never liked Daenerys as a character, and her transformation was more a case of absolutely awful writing rather than a betrayal of the emotional attachment of fans.I'm really appreciative of what Lindsay Ellis usually does. She's a great YouTuber with a really keen eye. But I think her behaviour after the final season, and her analysis of it, was unusual. She's usually shuts down people who personally attack creators and harass cast members, but she advocated that sort of behaviour when it came to Game of Thrones and D&D. Her analysis of Daenerys' ending is completely fair enough, it's just her point of view and that's fine, but I think the problem Lindsay struggles with when it comes to how it all ended for Dany is similar to the problem quite a lot of the audience had when digesting the last three episodes. What I mean to say that is that quite a lot of fans made the mistake of projecting themselves onto Daenerys, saw her journey as an example of how to enact progressive politics, and subsequently took it as a personal insult when their woke hero turned out to be capable of genocide after all.
I guess this is why I don't have that big a problem with Daenerys' ending - I didn't see it as a transformation, I saw it as a tragic but inevitable culmination of her story. Before the season (hell, before The Long Night) I didn't anticipate the writers going down that path at all but once they had done it recontextualised a lot of concerning events from her past for me, made me realise that I'd been reading her story all wrong (same goes for Jon and Jaime), and made me even more pleased that I had nothing to do with the ending.Nah. I never liked Daenerys as a character, and her transformation was more a case of absolutely awful writing rather than a betrayal of the emotional attachment of fans.
They single handedly stopped this from being one of my GOAT shows. Sometimes I watch reruns and think whats the point?April 14. Just wanted to pop in and say that D&D are clueless cnuts and the biggest con artists in the business.
Just to be clear, is the major gripe the way the story was told or how the ending pieces were?
I don't think I can complain with where everyone landed up, but I agree it was terribly rushed and told in a shitty way.
It was far too rushed. Danaerys goes from saviour to Mad Queen in about 3 minutes of screen time. Have no issue doing what she did, but it needed to be a much longer descent into madness than it was.
White Walkers were ruined. Build them up for 7 fecking seasons as this existential threat that can wipe everything and everyone out if the wall is breached. But they are defeated at Battle 1 and nobody important dies. Garbage.
I bought all the books ready to read but zero interest in it now.
Same here. If you'd asked me during seasons 3 and 4, I would have been sure that I'd rewatch it at least once or twice. Having seen that final season, there's no way I'll ever watch it again. Bit like Lost, in that respect.They single handedly stopped this from being one of my GOAT shows. Sometimes I watch reruns and think whats the point?