Game of Thrones & House of the Dragon

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Noiretirc
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Re: Game of Thrones

#376 Post by Noiretirc » Mon May 13, 2019 12:44 am

I finally started watching this. The hype got to me. I enjoy this. Season 1 Episode 5 is next......I think.

Should I just stop now?

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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#377 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 13, 2019 12:47 am

Well, you should probably not read or post in this thread if you are planning to continue watching

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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#378 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 13, 2019 2:20 am

Also, the sheer number of people who didn’t see that contentious turn coming from one of the main characters tonight is stunning— do so many people really not pay attention to what they’re watching? So many upset fans crying out that this was a last minute plot twist and I feel like most of us here have considered this a possibility for at least the last few seasons because the show has not sugar coated that character’s actions. People overlooked the negative aspects because the character’s worldview mirrored their own and missed why the methodology employed might be an issue going forward...

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Luke M
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Re: Game of Thrones

#379 Post by Luke M » Mon May 13, 2019 2:45 am

domino harvey wrote:Also, the sheer number of people who didn’t see that contentious turn coming from one of the main characters tonight is stunning— do so many people really not pay attention to what they’re watching? So many upset fans crying out that this was a last minute plot twist and I feel like most of us here have considered this a possibility for at least the last few seasons because the show has not sugar coated that character’s actions. People overlooked the negative aspects because the character’s worldview mirrored their own and missed why the methodology employed might be an issue going forward...
Yup. Twitter been a hell of a thing tonight. I thought this was the best episode of the season and probably the most interesting one since the "Red Wedding."

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movielocke
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Game of Thrones

#380 Post by movielocke » Mon May 13, 2019 4:02 am

With Varys’ scene, I initially thought they missed a massively huge opportunity to make the first scene (post prologue) of the first episode be revised to something far more complicated and foreshadowy,

but seeing the rest of the episode, putting the first scene of Ned Stark executing a man into the recap with his line “the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword” would have tipped off too much.

So it’s worth remembering, that one of Ned starks first admirable qualities viewers really liked (and called charisma and good leadership) was killing people himself and bragging about how when he does killing, that killing makes him an even better person than he already was.

(Because he does the “right” kind of killing)

Shoe is on the other foot now, hmm, just doing the judging and killing yourself doesn’t absolve you, no matter how many times Ned Stark says it does.

Sort of brilliant, I think, and certainly the books have been leading up to this for Dany since she met Miri maz dhur.

And red wedding is an apt comparison.

Why?

Because I never thought that Dany would go full Roosevelt/Truman and Marshall on firebombing extensively civilians, ruthlessly and repeatedly

I never thought Dany would go full Churchill/Lindeman on attacking/systematically demolishing cities instead of focusing solely on military targets

But I should have because it seems the series is contextualizing the small scale horrors of history like a wedding with a few dozen deaths, and scaling it up to show you people/leaders are the same and will happily do horrors with a few hundred thousand deaths of “innocents”. Because that is what people are fundamentally like and have always done.

Given Martin is an old school hippy, and that the books have no allegory about climate change in them (in spite of ludicrous journalists reading it into it) it should have been more clear that the weapons of mass destruction aspects of Dragons in the books was far more significant and that the books were playing with exploring nukes (and other modern munitions of mass death) and crafting a message around power seated on that.


And Martin has always said the books are about power.

In a sense if you want an metaphor, the iron throne (which is a dragon fire slag melted heap of obsolete swords) is a throne of nuclear waste, so to speak.

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John Cope
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Re: Game of Thrones

#381 Post by John Cope » Mon May 13, 2019 4:58 am

I have never had much love for Daenerys as her authoritarian tendencies and attitude of entitlement were always clear but this gets at what many see as the problem here. Personally, I think it's mainly the fault of the tightened up and compressed seasons.

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tenia
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Re: Game of Thrones

#382 Post by tenia » Mon May 13, 2019 8:25 am

John Cope wrote:
Mon May 13, 2019 4:58 am
Personally, I think it's mainly the fault of the tightened up and compressed seasons.
I'm not sure it has to do with the compressed seasons but rather how the reduced time was used. Tightening up is OK, but it means what it means, not managing to still waste some more precious time here and there. It's not unexpected thus that the final season has to push fast-forward a lot to end on the planned time slot, but it's only made more difficult when previous seasons' writing hasn't allowed this final time slot to be prepped up.
Not surprised thus to see something that foreshadowed still feeling rushed or approximatively delivered.

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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#383 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 13, 2019 11:02 am

As much as the show did get character dirty, I had to laugh when I saw it pointed out elsewhere that Lena Headey got paid half a million dollars an episode to just stare out at the city from her balcony

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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#384 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 13, 2019 11:25 am

John Cope wrote:
Mon May 13, 2019 4:58 am
I have never had much love for Daenerys as her authoritarian tendencies and attitude of entitlement were always clear but this gets at what many see as the problem here. Personally, I think it's mainly the fault of the tightened up and compressed seasons.
That article makes some silly claims on what the author thought the conflict was, then brings up the admittedly useless D&D post-episode explanation to do all their heavy lifting. But literally every plot point sounds dumb in those show runner recaps, and authorial intent is, as we all know, not something to hang a good study of anything on. I’ve yet to read one of these hot takes that isn’t just a scorned fan of Dany mad about their hero being the bad guy because they ignored all the warning signs in favor of romanticizing her power when it was used to do things they agreed with. Which is surely the point overall, and those who most need to hear it are now talking their way out of even acknowledging it

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YnEoS
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Re: Game of Thrones

#385 Post by YnEoS » Mon May 13, 2019 12:11 pm

I’ve seen plenty of people who’ve been saying Daenerys is going in this direction for a long time be disappointed in this episode and it’s certainly understandable to me. I can see her deciding to kill off any number of beloved characters at this point with the right spark, but burning a city without any motivation, and putting her armies at risk when she’s supposedly pushed to this point because of how many close people to her have died?

We could’ve had a big confrontation between two major villains and instead we spend very little time with either of them despite them being some of the most focused on characters up to this point, yet we have sit through a completely random confrontation between Euron and Jaime?

Jaime suddenly saying he doesn’t care about anyone in the city when that was supposedly the whole reason he broke his oath and killed the mad king and left Cersei to fight with the Starks against the undead, and seemingly no emotional recognition within him of the parallel.

The show runners are certainly in a tricky position to tie everything up, and GRRM seemingly can’t figure out a solution either, but I can see why the fans are let down after all this build up.

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movielocke
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Game of Thrones

#386 Post by movielocke » Mon May 13, 2019 12:32 pm

YnEoS wrote:I’ve seen plenty of people who’ve been saying Daenerys is going in this direction for a long time be disappointed in this episode and it’s certainly understandable to me. I can see her deciding to kill off any number of beloved characters at this point with the right spark, but burning a city without any motivation, and putting her armies at risk when she’s supposedly pushed to this point because of how many close people to her have died?

We could’ve had a big confrontation between two major villains and instead we spend very little time with either of them despite them being some of the most focused on characters up to this point, yet we have sit through a completely random confrontation between Euron and Jaime?

Jaime suddenly saying he doesn’t care about anyone in the city when that was supposedly the whole reason he broke his oath and killed the mad king and left Cersei to fight with the Starks against the undead, and seemingly no emotional recognition within him of the parallel.

The show runners are certainly in a tricky position to tie everything up, and GRRM seemingly can’t figure out a solution either, but I can see why the fans are let down after all this build up.
She had motivation, did you not notice the scene with Varys and the little “bird” (child spy). The spy mentions that the queens men are watching her.

Dany worked out that Jon betrayed her by telling Sansa (which led to Tyrion and Varys’ betrayals of that information she told Jon to keep secret, so she can also suss out an implied plot against her.

She was having Tyrion and Jamie obviously watched because she doesn’t trust Tyrion. It was far to easy for Tyrion to get Jamie out which means she let him go. Tyrion conspired with Davos to smuggle Jamie but Davos is far too canny not to immediately report the entire plan to Dany.

So Dany takes the ringing of the bells to mean one thing, not surrender but confirmation of a Lannister conspiracy against her: Tyrion has conspired with his family to get Cersei to escape, the absolutely last thing Dany wants, and because this is the only plot she knows about and it’s pretty suspicious if that’s all it is, it means she expects an additional betrayal or series of Lannister plots and traps against her. If Tyrion is conspiring with his family, it probably means Tyrion is conspiring to remove her from the throne as far as she is concerned.

Since Tyrion is continually bleating about the “innocents” of King’s landing, to Dany, Tyrion begging for those lives must mean the pool of conspirators and insurgents the Lannister’s have in Kings Landing is incredibly deep and widespread—exactly like Meereen where the begging for “innocent” lives and her acceding left a conspiracy intact with plenty of personnel and nearly got her killed.

Having gone through the painfully long, bloody and politically convoluted insurgency in Meereen, only to be forced to torch the Meereenese in the long run (when she returns from the Dothraki), Dany pretty clearly decides—when the Lannister family conspiracy is revealed by the ringing of the bells—that she has to firebomb the city to both try to rid the city of traps and to crush as many future allies of insurgents and conspirators as possible—because she is trying to prevent another Meereen.


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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#387 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 13, 2019 1:05 pm

That seems like very complicated reasoning when it’s far simpler to remember she always wanted to take the city by force and was only held back by her council. No council + feeling like shit from everything happening + the means of absolute power at her fingertips whenever she wants to use it = Mad Queen

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Re: Game of Thrones

#388 Post by YnEoS » Mon May 13, 2019 1:10 pm

That's far too much credit than I'm willing to give the show writers, and I'm not so concerned with making sense of what might have been going on in her head to justify the turn, so much as the fact we're suddenly left out of such a huge shift, during one of the biggest moments of the series, with only one episode left to go. We've been with Daenerys for a long time, we know she likes to be the center of attention, and we know she won't hesitate to massacre people who get in her way, and probably too many fans didn't take pay attention or take seriously enough her constant threats to kill her advisors if they failed her, but we've always known how she's thinking and feeling throughout the process.

Certainly its set up that Daenerys is extremely paranoid and thinks everyone is against her, and if they had her kill Tyrion or Jon, or make it seem like she was hunting them down with Cersei and didn't care about civilian casualties in the midst of a tense battle, I would've been completely on board. Its not set up that she just starts burning things down and killing civilians indiscriminately, and even doing the writer's work for them and reasoning out a way to find them all guilty, its not an emotionally satisfying way to end that character's story, by suddenly being shut out.

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Shrew
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Re: Game of Thrones

#389 Post by Shrew » Mon May 13, 2019 1:36 pm

I think the best summary of the Daenerys issue I've read is that the groundwork was all there in the writing, but the show's aesthetics consistently portrayed her as a hero (up till this season). It feels like keeping the various episode directors and actors (assuming Emilia Clarke wasn't told of her character's fate until this season) unaware of the final plan produced some strong dissonance. Clarke has sold this arc as well as she can--her Emmy nods in the past have been questionable, but this would easily merit a win--but more of this unstable Daenerys a season or 2 back would have helped immensely. And the truncated season hasn't given enough time to let the developments in her psyche sink in, or to properly connect her actions to her past (i.e., movielocke's explanation of Daenerys learning the wrong lesson from her half-measures in Mereen). Credit to the "Previously on..." editors for adding the voice tracks to the clip of angry Daenerys from last episode; that sold the arc a lot better than the whole previous episode.

This article from back in Season 7 gives a good explanation for the series's ending woes. I think the showrunners have made a lot of poor choices, but the competing tensions (between genuine heroic fantasy and subversion of that same thing) in Martin's books were always going to be difficult to resolve. Also interesting is Martin's original pitch to publishers (no spoilers for anyone who's caught up to this point) back when this was just supposed to be a trilogy. I imagine some of these bum character notes are the result of showrunners trying to adhere to set-down fates that the source had long ago started to veer from (see: Jaime).

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jazzo
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Re: Game of Thrones

#390 Post by jazzo » Mon May 13, 2019 2:01 pm

All of this aside for a second, anyone else notice a distinctly John Carpenteresque vibe to Ramin Djawadi's score just before the battle began? I quite enjoyed that!

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jsteffe
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Re: Game of Thrones

#391 Post by jsteffe » Mon May 13, 2019 2:30 pm

I don't think we should underestimate the incestuous lineage of Daenerys contributing to her growing madness, in addition to the points that others have raised earlier. So even if her decision is sudden and took some viewers by surprise, I feel that it was amply prepared by events and character revelations in previous seasons. If anything, I consider it the most successful turning point in the final season.

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Re: Game of Thrones

#392 Post by bearcuborg » Mon May 13, 2019 2:34 pm


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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#393 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 13, 2019 2:36 pm

jsteffe wrote:
Mon May 13, 2019 2:30 pm
If anything, I consider it the most successful turning point in the final season.
Definitely. Also, this show’s fans certainly give Star Wars a run for their money for toxic fanbase that hates what they profess to love. The parallels are too similarly aligned to ignore too (Lucas = Martin, etc)

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Re: Game of Thrones

#394 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon May 13, 2019 2:52 pm

jazzo wrote:
Mon May 13, 2019 2:01 pm
All of this aside for a second, anyone else notice a distinctly John Carpenteresque vibe to Ramin Djawadi's score just before the battle began? I quite enjoyed that!
In an up-and-down season, the scores have been consistently great.

While I share the frustrations pretty much everyone has to one degree or another with the pacing of these last two seasons and inability/unwillingness to flesh out characters like Euron or adequately lay the groundwork for major character choices to pay off, I have no issues with the overall arc of the story and the character turns and plot resolutions we've been given.
SpoilerShow
For example, while an extra episode showing the impact of Varys' dissemination of the truth of Jon's lineage probably would have gone a long way to making palpable for the audience how threatened Daenerys has become by her lack of reliable allies and made her decision to enforce her claim to the throne through sheer power and terror feel more earned (if equally inexcusable), it's not as if there hasn't been ANY groundwork laid for this. To Domino's point, people being upset about the showrunners "betraying the character" remind me of the people who still thought Walter White or Tony Soprano were somehow redeemable late into their respective series' runs.
ETA: Speaking of Euron, I am totally flabbergasted that the writers
SpoilerShow
would set up a fight between him and Jaime and NOT have it center on or even acknowledge the paternity of Cersei's unborn child.

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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#395 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 13, 2019 3:00 pm

I mean, it’s an unpleasant truth that most people love fascists and tyrants when they are on their side. Unlike, say, the surprise reveal of Arya resolving the third episode of the season, I think the element of suddenness here was an effective way to force the issue in a way that causes people to quickly re-examine and question their own beliefs. I think it’s quite telling how many people can’t even do that (though I’m not claiming anyone who didn’t like this character turn or how it played out is reacting out of protective dismissal by refusing to self-examine how they could have supported a character who has been shown to actually be the most despicable person in the history of the show by a wide margin, I do think there’s a sizable amount of protestors who fit that bill...)

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Re: Game of Thrones

#396 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 13, 2019 3:05 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:
Mon May 13, 2019 2:52 pm

ETA: Speaking of Euron, I am totally flabbergasted that the writers
SpoilerShow
would set up a fight between him and Jaime and NOT have it center on or even acknowledge the paternity of Cersei's unborn child.
I think that Tyrion spilling the beans was just a gaffe the creative team didn’t catch (to be honest, I didn’t realize either til it was pointed out). Scharpling and Wurster often reach out to a superfan of the Best Show to get clarity on the minutiae of their own creation when planning future routines, and if DJs/podcasters can do it surely it wouldn’t hurt series like this to consult an obsessive fan or two who would pick up on details like this immediately. What nerd wouldn’t love being on retainer for creators to make use of their arcane knowledge?

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Re: Game of Thrones

#397 Post by movielocke » Mon May 13, 2019 3:10 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Mon May 13, 2019 3:00 pm
I mean, it’s an unpleasant truth that most people love fascists and tyrants when they are on their side. Unlike, say, the surprise reveal of Arya resolving the third episode of the season, I think the element of suddenness here was an effective way to force the issue in a way that causes people to quickly re-examine and question their own beliefs. I think it’s quite telling how many people can’t even do that (though I’m not claiming anyone who didn’t like this character turn or how it played out is reacting out of protective dismissal by refusing to self-examine how they could have supported a character who has been shown to actually be the most despicable person in the history of the show by a wide margin, I do think there’s a sizable amount of protestors who fit that bill...)
Indeed. and I think the point of firebombing King's Landing, is to try to get everyone to self examine these sorts of things, but the twisting of this knife is fairly painful and also huge, going back to the hero point of views of the first episode of the series. That sort of layered revelation (for example: "wait, Ned is wrong?")is going to take a while for people to grapple with. or they'll just avoid it, as one always does.

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Re: Game of Thrones

#398 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon May 13, 2019 3:15 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Mon May 13, 2019 3:05 pm
DarkImbecile wrote:
Mon May 13, 2019 2:52 pm

ETA: Speaking of Euron, I am totally flabbergasted that the writers
SpoilerShow
would set up a fight between him and Jaime and NOT have it center on or even acknowledge the paternity of Cersei's unborn child.
I think that Tyrion spilling the beans was just a gaffe the creative team didn’t catch (to be honest, I didn’t realize either til it was pointed out). Scharpling and Wurster often reach out to a superfan of the Best Show to get clarity on the minutiae of their own creation when planning future routines, and if DJs/podcasters can do it surely it wouldn’t hurt series like this to consult an obsessive fan or two who would pick up on details like this immediately. What nerd wouldn’t love being on retainer for creators to make use of their arcane knowledge?
SpoilerShow
I’m not even saying Euron should have been suspicious because of anything Tyrion said, just that it’s clearly the most obvious point of conflict between those two characters. Using it to trigger their fight to the death would have been substantially more satisfying than Euron just deciding to have it out for no particular reason.

For example, if when Jamie had insisted that they had to get Cersei out of the city, Euron had refused and said something about his (Euron’s) unborn child not mattering if it was only going to be the heir to a pile of rubble, or asking why Jamie was so interested in saving a woman carrying another man’s child, the ensuing fight might have had some emotional stakes for each character.

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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#399 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 13, 2019 3:22 pm

Spoiler for DarkImbecile’s last post and also (I think) book four
SpoilerShow
I mean, Euron on the show has consistently been the worst/least-interesting character, so it was kind of a fitting end for someone no one ever liked. Almost anything other what we got for his end would have been better, but I suspect they were trying to highlight his inferiority complex when it comes to Jaime, which the show never really exploited like it could. At least book Euron is weird as hell and has that Dragon Horn (which of course never came into play in the show)

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Re: Game of Thrones

#400 Post by jsteffe » Mon May 13, 2019 3:23 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:
Mon May 13, 2019 2:52 pm
ETA: Speaking of Euron, I am totally flabbergasted that the writers
SpoilerShow
would set up a fight between him and Jaime and NOT have it center on or even acknowledge the paternity of Cersei's unborn child.
It is arguably a missed opportunity of sorts, but I didn't mind too much because
SpoilerShow
having the audience know more than the child's paternity than Euron does during the fight *and* Euron never learns the truth
is just a type of dramatic irony. I'm not even sure that I would call it an oversight.

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