I agree the pacing is terrible.
Yup. Buried beneath the weight of a kingdom that carried a burden of responsibility which they were too damaged to survive.
What? The complaints are about the lack of moral ambiguity. I am not having “well her father went mad and she once burned some literal slaveowners” as a descent into Dany’s madness. That is one dimensional nonsense. There’s a complete in between of “I am a heroic princess delaying my ascent to the throne while i free any slaves” to “burn all the women and children”
So your issue is with the precise timeframe between emotional trauma and subsequent breakdown? I can see why that would ruin the show for you.
You’re being deliberately obtuse here. My issues with the show is that they have forced well written and intelligent characters into stupid situations to fulfil a need to have a certain amount of “cinematic” feel. The stuff with Dany last episode was farcical.
I think it's more that they saw Dany burning people alive and crucifying others without any sign of remorse as just and right and now that it's being shown as proof as her decent into madness they can't accept it. They equate it with Ned beheading the Nights Watch deserter even though he obviously did it with a heavy heart and they showed him explaining to Bran why he had to do it.
That particular scene was to set out the character of the Stark family. 'He who passes the sentence must swing the sword'. Honour, responsibility but compassion too. The salt of the earth.
Dunno about being obtuse but can’t say I’m hugely surprised at you turning out to be someone who prefers their narrative to be utterly black and white, with one dimensional heroes and villains and no nuance or shades of grey.
I think there was a way to make her madness seem rational. Whether she killed deserving people or not earlier, her method of burning them, crucifying them certainly were cruel and not as merciful as a quick death via beheading. She also seemed to delight in such executions in a self-righteous manner and was way too assured of her morality and higher position over others.
Season 2 and 3 can fall into the over-rated category, but seasons 1 and 4 are some of the finest TV ever made.
I guess my issue lies with the artistic presentation which, in the last two seasons, is closer to Marvel than to Martin's original work. Visually it's stunning but the tone of the series has definitely changed a lot. I'm not one of the people who will refer to D & D as "dumb and dumber" since Benioff has written two books i thoroughly enjoyed (one of them, the 25th Hour, became an excellent movie too) but i can't help but feel that they really missed a trick here.
Yeah I don’t disagree with you here Pogue. It’s well in line with her character and she’s been portrayed - she’s been well capable of it.
I can’t really relate to this post at all, for me the three characters you mention have lost all their complexity. By being honorable to the point of pure boredom, Jon loses the earlier complexity which had him break his vows. By becoming a pure evil child-murdering psychopath, Dany loses all her moral ambiguity. As for Jaime, tying his entire identity and destiny to his sister, to the exclusion of everything else, obscures the decisions he made which shaped his “Kingslayer” identity, which had nothing to do with his sister. There was actually a lot more to Jaime than his relationship to Cersei in earlier seasons; now however they’ve dumbed him down to a simple guy who is a slave to this relationship.
Yeah I agree. I loved Ned and I'm firmly stuck in camp Stark in part because of his character. He was an Island of morality in a sea of deceit and decay. His death crushed me but help me understand the concept of the show.
I’m kind of trolling at this stage tbh. I’m sure the writing is flawed. Just disagree with some of the issues being taken with it. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve no idea what you mean by “Kingslayer identity”. Should I have picked that up from watching the show? Or is that something which is more emphasised in the books? I definitely didn’t pay much attention to plot subtleties in earlier seasons. I just found all the exposition a bit boring. Always wanted them to fast forward to the next bit of hacking and slashing.
She could've done with some of Sandor's realism instead of Jorah's blind devotion.
Yep. I would pay to see season 2-5 Dany with The Hound as her only adviser. She would have turned out more ruthless but less self righteous about it.
That's fine, people watch these things for different reasons, and get enjoyment from different aspects of it. For me the battles, tits and dragons have been the least interesting aspects of the show, there's plenty of other stuff I can watch for those.
That actually made me LOLz. What a pairing that would have been.
Really?! I need to update my Netflix list pronto!
I'm in the same boat. Two people talking for 5+ minutes have always been the highlight of the show for me. It sounds arsey and pretentious but that doesn't mean I don't love the spectacles of Hardhome, BotB, the loot train etc. I just love the character stuff more.
More to the point, I think there's a failure to understand that the earlier seasons were far more in-line with television serialisation, whereas the last couple have effectively been aired as a group of movies - each season is about 7 hours long, which is significantly less than the LOTR franchise and about the length of the average cinema trilogy. That distinction may not be as clear as, say, the difference between the Start Trek TV shows and the Star Trek movies, but it is the kind of shift in mindset you have to watch with now.
GoT has always been popular though right from the very beginning. It certainly had more people watch it as the show progressed this is true, but it always had a very big fan base initially. So i'm not sure that argument is right, we all loved the early seasons, the show started getting criticised with the Sand Snake plotline in Season 5.
Agreed. I love that scene, one of the best in the show.
This criticism doesn’t make sense to me - it’s just book nerds - then why does everyone I speak to offline who has never read the books and is barely into the fantasy genre at all detest the final season and feel miffed.
I'd say it's the opposite if anything. A lot of fans who are pissed off are ones who would argue the last few seasons have moved away from that well-written moral ambiguity into the realm of poor writing where characters decisions are illogical and don't make any sense relative to the characters that have been presented, and the way viewers perceive them.
Genius stuff.
It is when you are facing a massive war during winter. What are you looking for in a show like this? Do you want her to write the seven kingdoms version of the Iliad?Genius stuff.
She's mostly stating basic stuff that the other characters around her should know: it's winter so people are going to need lots of food, and because they don't have enough food, they're going to need more. It's a development on the girl she is in Season 1, but the show has given us very little evidence thus far to suggest she's a particularly capable or adept schemer. Her taking down of Littlefinger is meant to be presented as this, but the only reason she beats him out is because Bran literally tells her he's a cnut and that she should trust her own sister ahead of him. Even though she should already know the type of person he is considering he sold her to the Boltons.
Both of them ended up dying with nothing while she could still end up with her arse on the Iron Throne. It's not about short term gains but longevity.
Well yes, but that's because the writing for them became progressively stupid at the show went on as well. Varys literally wandering around a beach telling Jon to betray Daenerys openly when he's been built up as a careful schemer being case in point. Their stupidity doesn't make Sansa particularly intelligent. She's still done nothing to demonstrate herself as being a particularly impressive schemer beyond the level of any average ruler, and yet the show again wants us to believe she's the most intelligent person in Westeros.
If she is an repressive schemer should the likes of you and I see her moves?
You should see the end results. There's one episode to go and little to indicate she's got some grand plan which is going to be remarkably impressive or which will take everyone aback. And the show has been written for the past few seasons in a way where characters don't really scheme all that much anymore, they just state things openly to each other for the most part because subtext has been stripped away in the writing.
After the death of her aunt she persuaded the Knights of the Vale to get behind Littlefinger which led to them turning up to support the North in the BotB. Then at the trial of Littlefinger she along with her sister and brother played the Knights to back her over Littlefinger.
She didn't have to work hard to convince them though, they had a literal demigod present who was able to inform everyone that Littlefinger had murdered their lord and that he'd been responsible for orchestrating the war of the five kings.
