There was sincere support in the S8E06 thread, which is what the quoted posts of Bijou Drains were responding to.
For example:
etc…
Ludovic that’s an interesting opinion.
I was considering putting together a “timeline of stupid” following my previous post, and even at a casual draft I could only find a handful of things to criticize early on, but they really mount up by the end, with unfathomable character decisions, plot armor, plot threads that go nowhere, world inconsistency, cringey dialog, and ever more obvious fanservice.
One thing I have noticed; somewhat minority opinions of GoT seasons (and I’m not saying you’re wrong; I’m interested to hear more about your perspective), seem often to come from people who binge watch the whole shebang very quickly.
I can see how, if I knew in advance I had 8 seasons of hour-long episodes ahead of me, that some of the early seasons may seem plodding. But that’s not how it felt for many of us watching over a longer time span.
Also, did you hear any spoilers? For example, I think just knowing Daenerys would make it to the end would make a lot of her story hard to watch, because a lot of her thread is about a struggle to survive.
Redoing the last season is a terrible idea because its based on the premise that what went wrong is contained in that last season alone. Season 7 was just as bad if not worse, people quickly forget about that idiotic trip beyond the wall. And what we got was the result of decisions made many seasons before, mostly about things cut and changed. We got a fan fiction ending due to a million butterfly effects that would require the entire show to be rebooted to fix.
I’ll just say that while the flaws seem obvious to me beginning with the end of season 5 and the start of season 6, as I watched the episodes on first run and even on re-watch with DVDs, everything seemed satisfying enough up until Season 8 episode 2, inclusive. Seasons 6 and 7 only seem bad to me in retrospect now that I know where it’s going and that none of the questionable decisions that might have been justified later through a reveal of some hidden motivation will in fact receive no such pay off. The characters that everyone keeps saying on screen are “so smart, so calculating” really are just that dumb. Sansa, Cersei (who really IS a monster), and Tyrion to name a few.
It’s clear, to me anyway, that the show runners didn’t know how to weave a satisfying tale when they ran out of source material, and so just plodded along to the conclusion, substituting roadblocks born out of idiotic decisions in lieu of real conflict between competing characters with differing aims immersed in their own world.
Who should have killed the Night King? Don’t care. But the way it went down made no sense. It was a stupid plan, executed poorly, but it worked because it had to for the story to happen. But even there, it was salvageable, had episode 4 not proceeded to drive home “teh stupid.”
Calling the later seasons fan fiction is a perfect description. Having the broad strokes of the plot outline is not having the story. Nothing brought this into more focus than Hodor’s death, which is the only confirmed bit of story that came directly from Martin. That tiny bit of Martin storytelling stood head and shoulders above any other aspect of the later seasons.
The only good things the showrunners brought to the table were the visual storytelling, like the dragon wings unfolding behind Dany. But that’s not narrative storytelling, which was sorely lacking. It seemed to be all jump cuts to the next big battle that would have taken months to get to. Those “months to get to the next battle” WAS the story in the first few seasons/books.
I’m disappointed in the later seasons but not the people who made the show; they churned out top shelf, A+ fan fiction. But fan fiction itself just isn’t very good.
I hated both franchises I’m about to mention, but it’s similar to the quality drop-off going from Twilight to Fifty Shades of Gray.
I don’t like assuming that Martin would give us greatness and these guys gave us amateurish bullshit when they ran out of source material.
Clearly the show declined when they ran out of source material, but that doesn’t mean that Martin’s end would be just as good as Martin’s beginning and the middle. It’s harder to land the ending of a complex story than it is to write the first parts of it. Martin isn’t doing it in part because he probably can’t. The showrunners had to actually try to make an ending, and while it was disappointing, they didn’t have the option to just not do it. Martin can just ride off into the sunset and people will just assume that he had an amazing conclusion to the story and just never gave it to us, but I think it’s clear that he doesn’t know how to finish his own story either, and his ending would not be as satisfying as people are assuming it would be.
So I don’t like slamming the show creators on the basis of how far the show has fallen when the source material ended, because there’s a good chance the source material would’ve been a pretty big disappointment too. In my view, Martin’s ending is worse, since it is non-existent.
You know, that’s fair. As Exhibit A for how hard it is to stick the landing: Every Stephen King novel.
OTOH, it is undeniable that when the showrunners went off book, the plotting and dialogue suffered greatly. Look at the whole Dorne plot and compare that to what has been written about Dorne in the books - I mean we didn’t even get the “Fire and Blood” speech by Doran Martell!!
So the ending GRRM has in mind may have be the best, but I have complete faith that the journey to get there would have been much better.
Exactly right.
Sticking the landing is damn hard, and I think SenorBeef is right to point out that endings are hard to write and we don’t know whether GRRM could have finished GoT satisfactorily.
But I also agree with ISiddiqui. Most of my beefs with the later series are not about the endings; I’m on board with Dany’s transformation, with only minor changes required to make it a completely satisfying end. King Bran and the Night King’s attack…needed much bigger changes to the lead up, but I still have no issue with the end points.
The issue is with the quality of story writing (particularly with regards to character decisions), dialogue and self-consistency etc. There is no reason for all that to fall apart regardless of how the story ends.
My beefs with the earlier seasons are far fewer and almost entirely where the show and books diverged. I was so annoyed when I heard that in the books the white walkers talk, and have motivations.
It’s a terrible decision to make them mute in the show. It plants the seed, right from the start, for a plot thread that has nowhere interesting to go.
For me, the big difference is not where it got to, Danerys being evil, really, was where they spent the time to get there.
For instance, all the lack of real sense in S07E01, the one where Arya quickly murders a full house of people before the titles, and might have been when Meera, despite being a major character in an arc of five seasons, and daughter of Neds biggest ally and friend, just wanders off to be never seen again, they’ve still got that five minutes spare to show Samwise shovelling shit because, shit is funny, hehehehe. What?
I agree and disagree. (Not that there’s any chance at all that season 8 will actually be redone, ever). There were certainly signs of rot before season 8. But I don’t think that season 8 was in an impossible position.
In fact, I think the tragedy of season 8 is that the broad strokes were actually reasonable. This isn’t Lost or Battlestar Galactica where there was just this big muddled mess, and we were pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to sew it all back together, and we were right. Rather, they somehow managed to tell a story that was reasonable in large strokes, and generally well done in small strokes, but just abysmal in medium strokes. Does it make sense for Dany to go mad with grief/rage/pyroinsanity after one of her dragons are killed, and her closest adviser is killed, and then burn up all of king’s landing, and then Jon Snow has to end up stabbing her? Yes, that could be VERY powerful. And the scenes of her torching King’s Landing were epic and gripping. But so much of what happened in the middle there, the lack of care for the order in which things happened, or consistency in how things work, etc., were just abysmal and frustrating.
Could there have been an exciting battle at Winterfell where the army of the dead show up and almost win and at the last minute Arya is the one to kill the night king because she’s a badass? That’s not necessarily the BEST possible choice there, but it certainly could have been an incredibly exciting hour of television… if it hadn’t been (a) way too dark and incomprehensible, and (b) full of people doing stupid things, and (c) full of people who should have been helpful doing nothing at all to help, and (d) all the good guys survived for no obvious reason.
The problem was not that the writers wrote themselves into a corner. In fact, they had a very clear path to a satisfying ending. And they came tragically close to taking it… but still somehow missed it by a mile.
I’m pretty sure all we see of the White Walkers talking in the books is in the opening scene where the rangers are killed north of the Wall. It might have just been them laughing at the ranger too. We never know what they said. And any motivations are purely inferred.
Are they mute in the show? They definitely communicate with each other.
It’s still amazing to me that they chose not to have a scene with a line of “the best of the living”, Beric/Hound/Jaime/Brienne/Jon/Jorah/etc., armed with Valyrian (or flaming/dragonglass) blades, fighting against that final line of White Walkers, until we get to Jon vs the Night King. And it could have even ended with Jon losing, on the verge of being killed, when Arya saves the day.
But the White Walkers didn’t fight anyone, except on a dragon in the sky.
Lots of missed opportunities and writing mistakes, but that was one of the most obvious and dumbest, from a filmmaking perspective, IMO. Everyone wanted to see Jon vs the Night King!
shrug not me. I didn’t really care who faced who or what personal grudges got settled and which ones didn’t. I’m pretty much with MaxTheVool on this, though we might quibble over he definition of small/medium/large strokes. There were plenty of ends we could have arrived at that could have made sense, including, for the most part, the one we did. Except the way we got there really didn’t make sense, even though it could have.
What I would have loved to see, in getting to the same end but arrived at with better story telling, is season 8 dealing exclusively with the campaign against the Night King, and then let season 9 be Dany’s long fall. Take some time to properly set it up (not necessarily make it predictable, but enough so that it’s just a little more plausible that she’d turn in the second or third episode of the 9th season), and then get into the endgame showdown during the latter half of the season. I could take or leave Clegane Bowl, Jon vs the Night King, Tyrion vs Cersei, or whatever memes are out there that the show runners might have thought constituted a good source for future plot lines. A really neat way to draw out season 8 for the Night King only would have had that “broken” horn from one of the earlier seasons (found north of the wall) and the crypt of the Starks occupy a couple episodes that come together in resurrecting the Starks, Uncle Ben style, to fight alongside the living against the Night King (this is an idea I’ve seen proposed in various videos put out by fans of the novel, trying to guess at how the novels might proceed).
HBO also missed out on a big marketing opportunity by not selling King Bran cereal (“Cryptic but colon-cleansing!” “The royalty among high-fiber cereals!”).
Also as someone who’s run RPGs and has read a lot of books, it’s a lot easier to do a lot of worldbuilding than to build a complex and satisfying story in such a world and bring it to a conclusion. I’ve read a number of books and serieses where there’s a vivid world that’s very interesting but the actual story is pretty meh, and while I enjoyed visiting the world, I wouldn’t recommend the story as a story. In some cases, I’d really rather just have an encyclopedia in place of the novel that was created. And when I’ve made campaign worlds for games, putting in place different cultures and kingdoms and long running grudges and world-scaring threats is so much easier than making the pieces interact and come out to a satisfying conclusion. Martin seems a lot like a DM who has a whole file cabinet full of background info on his campaign world and a big complicated plot setup, but then shies away from actually running games when the campaign progresses enough that things need to wrap up.
Also a lot of the gimmicks work early on but don’t work by the 8th season/6th book, and that also makes it hard. Setting up characters and killing them off in horrible ways worked for a bit, but by the latter part of the series there aren’t enough established characters to keep ‘unexpectedly’ killing them off. Similarly, it’s hard to repeat the surprise of things like the Red Wedding or reveal of John’s ancestry. (I wasn’t even into the series when the Red Wedding happened, but when people talked about being shocked by it I was confused, because most of what I had heard about the show was ‘it’s very violent and sexual, and they love giving you a likable character for a bit, then killing him off’.)
I called Daenerys doing a heel turn as far back as season 4, similarly as I followed along in the book. Her becoming the Mad Queen was not a surprise to me, though it could’ve been handled much better. The problems seem to stem from the showrunners not giving a shit.
I never read the books, but Daenerys kept saying that she wanted to “break the wheel”, meaning free enslaved people, while at the same time insisting that others “bend the knee” to her and accept her as the undisputed ruler (or face death by dragon). So she’s never really been someone who wants to establish some sort of democracy.
I didn’t start watching until after the show had been running for several seasons, and caught up on DVD. When I first heard speculation that Daenerys would end up being an antagonist I was skeptical, but watching the show with that possibility in mind it was obvious (at least to me) that that was being set up. In fact, going back there were instances of Dany taking delight in the suffering of others, notably the execution of her brother, even in season 1. I’ve been nonplussed by people saying her turn was sudden and unexpected, since there were hints from season 1 on.
Well said, and having played a lot of RPGs myself, I agree.