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Game of Thrones Season 8 Discussion (spoilers)


Sawdamizer

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Giving this show the bare minimum of my attention this season has been so relaxing. No great disappointments because I only watched snippets and the full zombie battle episode since the last season told me all I needed to know about how the writers would fuck everything up.

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I'm cool with Dany being the Mad Queen, but the way this show presents it just doesn't convince me it's earned. So she commits mass genocide over... Missandei? Jon not wanting to bang? If they had put more effort in her breaking naturally over the politics of war and greed for destiny as they did in the past, then cool -- but again, that's not what you're gonna get post-George.

Tyrion is made a fucking clown by D&D, holy shit. Gullible and naive, not even remotely the character we've seen before.

Arya bailing on her bloodlust: so uh why is she in King's Landing? She doesn't need a reason to kill Dany beyond knowing she decimated innocents. We just needed to see her glorious plot armor once more as she survives a nuclear bomb multiple times.

Cleganebowl was the only reason to watch, and yet even that felt somewhat underwhelming. I was hoping for something as brutal as Brienne vs. The Hound but whatever.

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18 minutes ago, Opium said:

I'm cool with Dany being the Mad Queen, but the way this show presents it just doesn't convince me it's earned. So she commits mass genocide over... Missandei? Jon not wanting to bang? If they had put more effort in her breaking naturally over the politics of war and greed for destiny as they did in the past, then cool -- but again, that's not what you're gonna get post-George.

Tyrion is made a fucking clown by D&D, holy shit. Gullible and naive, not even remotely the character we've seen before.

Arya bailing on her bloodlust: so uh why is she in King's Landing? She doesn't need a reason to kill Dany beyond knowing she decimated innocents. We just needed to see her glorious plot armor once more as she survives a nuclear bomb multiple times.

Cleganebowl was the only reason to watch, and yet even that felt somewhat underwhelming. I was hoping for something as brutal as Brienne vs. The Hound but whatever.

Pretty much agree on all points. I found the episode to be entertaining, but thats leaving all my narrative expectations at the door. They could have done themselves a huge favor by just making Dany's slide into madness a little more pronounced. I mean Aerys II Targaryen was a clear psychopath far removed from what Dany was prior to episode 5. Tyrion would be next in line for most inexplicable/out of character behavior and the Varys death felt completely contrived.

Edited by saito34
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4 minutes ago, saito34 said:

Pretty much agree on all points. I found the episode to be entertaining, but thats leaving all my narrative expectations at the door. They could have done themselves a huge favor by just making Dany's slide into madness a little more pronounced. I mean Aerys II Targaryen was a clear psychopath far removed from what Dany was prior to episode 5. Tyrion would be next in line for most inexplicable/out of character behavior and the Varys death felt completely contrived.

Yea you saw hints of her predilection towards burning innocent people alive throughout the series but she only started getting the crazy eyes last episode.  Like most problems with this show, it's a function of them being tired of it and trying to rush to a conclusion so they can do other things.  

Yea they killed Varys there because they didn't know how to end his story.  Same with Qyburn.  

Honestly, I am more forgiving of this episode not because of the content of the episode itself but because of how much the worst GoT fans are loathing the narrative turn of their Slay Kween.  

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Jesus, what a stupid fucking episode.

Cleganebowl was just awful.

But...

Like...

I was right.... Kinda.

Bran not being the night king tho... What the fuck was I thinking?

Edited by Clu
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10 hours ago, enad said:

Yea you saw hints of her predilection towards burning innocent people alive throughout the series but she only started getting the crazy eyes last episode.  Like most problems with this show, it's a function of them being tired of it and trying to rush to a conclusion so they can do other things.  

Yea they killed Varys there because they didn't know how to end his story.  Same with Qyburn.  

Honestly, I am more forgiving of this episode not because of the content of the episode itself but because of how much the worst GoT fans are loathing the narrative turn of their Slay Kween.  

Dude, do you ever shut up about shit like this? Cause it just sounds like you're hating on female fans now. The majority of the female fans I see online are cool with Daenerys not getting the throne or even going mad if the storyline had been followed through in a logical way.

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11 minutes ago, SorceressPol said:

Dude, do you ever shut up about shit like this? Cause it just sounds like you're hating on female fans now. The majority of the female fans I see online are cool with Daenerys not getting the throne or even going mad if the storyline had been followed through in a logical way.

Actually I was hating on the Burlington Bar type fans, which mostly consist of beta orbiters.  

But no I don't shut up about it because the categorical absolute worst fans of this show all stan Dany in a world of snipsnap giffys.  My member throbs with veiny righteousness at the spectacle of their misery this glorious day.

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18 minutes ago, enad said:

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pizzanomnom.JPG

I get it. Women with strong opinions about GoT bothers you. There are just as many dudes with emotional opinions about Jon. And where is she wrong? It's shit writing with story arcs that feel like they're on triple speed fast forward. That isn't natural storytelling. 

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19 minutes ago, SorceressPol said:

I get it. Women with strong opinions about GoT bothers you. There are just as many dudes with emotional opinions about Jon. And where is she wrong? It's shit writing with story arcs that feel like they're on triple speed fast forward. That isn't natural storytelling. 

Actually, it's women running things that bothers me, but thankfully out of the many wrong turns the writers went down the last couple of years the stopped clock struck the right time twice and they put that nonsense to bed.  They realistically depicted that either the characters ended up dead or insane and everyone else ended up dead.

It did seem rushed of course but the turn makes sense, given her heritage and the hints that were sprinkled about in the years before this.  The ramp up should have been more gradual with the events that lead to this spread out over the course of a couple seasons but that goes back to the production crew getting senioritis.  

But the thing she was most correct about was the whole pizza part.  Whole pizza / Starbucks cup is the new Hound / Arya.

 

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1 hour ago, enad said:

It did seem rushed of course but the turn makes sense, given her heritage and the hints that were sprinkled about in the years before this.  The ramp up should have been more gradual with the events that lead to this spread out over the course of a couple seasons but that goes back to the production crew getting senioritis.  

This was my general thought. They've really never given a solid reason for why the last two seasons were so short and rushed. Stretching out an extra couple hours each season for more character development would have gone a long way.

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21 minutes ago, Admin_Raptorpat said:

This was my general thought. They've really never given a solid reason for why the last two seasons were so short and rushed. Stretching out an extra couple hours each season for more character development would have gone a long way.

HBO wanted two more full seasons actually but dumb and dumber insisted upon truncated ones.  Quite literally because they were tired of making it and didn't want to do it anymore.

I think that's why this feels disjointed and not a piece with how the show has been over the last couple years.  They basically had George's notes on the ending and that was it, so in the in between they reverse engineered a bunch of fanfiction that was thematically Hollywood audience pandering in a way that George's writing is not.

Edited by enad
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For those interested this is a pretty good review and explains in a more articulate fashion than I can muster why I think the choice is appropriate and thematically right.  Though I'm nowhere near as positive on the episode as a whole given the lack of appropriate narrative buildup.  

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/game-of-thrones-the-bells/

But a deeper problem is that we don’t want to admit that Daenerys is right, because we don’t want to admit what monarchy is. There are no good kings and queens, something Varys should have known (Jon Snow would be a good king, maybe, and his reign would be extremely short). Kings and queens are selfish people who will kill you when they need you to die; while Tyrion should have been reading Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt, Daenerys was out learning, in the field, what exactly the throne is. She is open about it. She is honest. She had wanted everyone to love her, and tried to make it happen. But as the people who loved her kept dying—and as her “allies” turned against her and her enemies grew stronger—she correctly identified the failure of this strategy, and changed tactics. Just like she attacked the ships from the sun—ambushing them instead of letting them ambush her—she has abandoned a failing tactic, based on her knowledge of the field of play, and adopted a winning one.

And she wins. She has an effectively unkillable dragon and her army is victorious; while Jon and Tyrion and Sansa and Arya were out there doing literally nothing, she ran the board. No one loves her, but is anyone going to fuck with her? Is anyone really going to fuck with her? After that?

I guess we’ll find out next week. But if there’s any realism left in this show, they won’t. She might be wrong to imagine that her reign will be any different than those before her; she shows every sign of being the latest iteration of every king or queen ever. That kind of narcissism is the most normal thing in the world, so of course she thinks she’ll be an exceptional monarch (and, lest we forget, “she’s a girl who walked into a fire with three stones and walked out with three dragons. How could she not believe in destiny?”)

Edited by enad
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52 minutes ago, Admin_Raptorpat said:

Have they actually said/implied this beyond the quotes about "there's not enough time" or whatever their public rationale was?

They don't need to. If Disney gives you Star Wars then you drop everything and do Star Wars unless you're David Lynch.

Goldman Sach boys want glory, not art.

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Some people are going to absolutely hate how this all ends. Some will argue that it was rushed and this caused a lot of bad things to happen to the story that could have been done much better. They aren't wrong.

Others are going to hate it simply because of the actual plot. It is fair if they hate it because of that but you kind of have to prepare yourself for this since it is Game of Thrones. I feel some are going to freak out big time.

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Though it's kind of beautiful the way everyone has come together in hatred of GoT; the book readers and early show watchers are pissed because so much of the latter show has been Harry Potteresque fanservice, and the Twitter babies who have learned what the cost of warfare is from Avengers movies are now pissed because they're not being pandered to anymore now that George's actual plotting is fucking up their CGI spectacle aesthetic.  The one point of agreement seems to be the whole thing is ending 2 years too early.  

Maybe D&D were the right men for the job after all.

Edited by enad
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I like how there was a time jump between the moment Jon shivved her to them electing Bran as King of the Steep Ramps.  The writers literally didn't know how to handle the immediate aftermath with the Unsullied and the DothIraqis so they just want to say "whatever they handled it, don't think about that."

At least they're doing gentry elections now, that's something of a step up.

I like how D&D didn't do their after-credits explainer.  I guess they're tired of people making fun of them.  

I hope they lose Star Wars over the forthcoming blowback.  That would be the best plot twist of this season.

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I don't think they did, I think they were woefully unprepared to tie together a show with so many elements and believed they could and then lost confidence in themselves likely after season seven's reception. The writing was awful gun-shy and unsure of itself which resulted in things like Jon's character arc and growth doing a complete 360 and placing the most underdeveloped and unexplained character on the throne by the ending, trying to gain favor in what they could like Jon petting the fucking dog because they realized the backlash that got and it was something really easy to fix. That's really the biggest problem to me and why I think season 8 is the only season that's been genuinely awful, it rendered so many plot threads and character arcs moot. When I think of my favorite works of fiction I think of what they mean, or what they mean to me and unfortunately in the end Game of Thrones is pretty meaningless.

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2 hours ago, enad said:

I like how there was a time jump between the moment Jon shivved her to them electing Bran as King of the Steep Ramps.  The writers literally didn't know how to handle the immediate aftermath with the Unsullied and the DothIraqis so they just want to say "whatever they handled it, don't think about that."

At least they're doing gentry elections now, that's something of a step up.

I like how D&D didn't do their after-credits explainer.  I guess they're tired of people making fun of them.  

I hope they lose Star Wars over the forthcoming blowback.  That would be the best plot twist of this season.

I like how the Dothraki completely vanished after her death. I'm not sure why they didn't just extinct them in Episode 3.

Bran being king is just... hilarious. This whole time, in his spaced out almost mentally handicapped state, Bran was playing the game of thrones. I mean, what was the point of the dragon melting the throne if it's just gonna be replaced with a regent wheelchair?

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You know what we can ramble about this and that and the bad writing rushed ending  but I guess this is the best they could give and I'm ok with it sort of. I mean I had no high hope's of how it was going to end just the way the season went i just accepted what was coming. John should have died or been king. Lol bran the broken. Sansa became queen of something. Arya well shes gonna Christopher Columbus her way to new land. Most importan my boy Ghost got a good boy pet by John.

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2 hours ago, wacky1980 said:

must have been pretty awkward for gendry and arya, being seated like 3 feet from each other for that meeting. glad they didn't explore that tension like, at all.

They just sort of forgot about it.

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