Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

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Snowy
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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Snowy » Tue May 14, 2019 5:44 pm

Late to the party, but fuck me what a steaming pile of faeces that was. It actually started fairly promisingly, but then the battle started and all the usual lazy fucking shite came frothing to the top.

I mean, are Cersei and Jaime dead? Not if you take the Arya approach, where you get killed by 100 different buildings falling on your noodle, get roasted by a dragon, disappear in 100 clouds of fade-to-black-cut-to-the-next-scene. And Arya - her hatred and thirst for vengeance was so great she turned her back on her family and lived a hideous plot arc getting stabby all the way, but a word from Clegane and she walks away from it?

Clegane was robbed of a decent fight, Daenerys' actions made precisely zero sense.

Ah fuck it, what a pair of cunts those writers are.
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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Drarok » Tue May 14, 2019 7:13 pm

Did you know they filmed Arya's trek through the city streets as a single shot? 12 minutes of uninterrupted hell, hours and days of work from all involved... and then the editors went "lol, let's cut back and forth between Arya and Cleganebowl to SuBvErT eXpEcTaTiOnS". Pricks.
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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Mantis » Tue May 14, 2019 7:24 pm

I'm so sick to death of Arya now. She consistently gets put into scenarios where she should die and then just walks out with barely any impact on her character. Literally the whole city was just incinerated and it looked like everyone died and then she just miraculously gets up out of the ashes. I want her to die so badly but because she's the show runner favourite there's no chance of it.

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Raid » Tue May 14, 2019 7:27 pm

Frankly it looked like it was several shots stitched together via the screen-covering dust clouds, as if they were trying to replicate the success they'd had with the uninterrupted sequence during the Battle of the Bastards.

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Alan » Tue May 14, 2019 7:38 pm

It was shit but I think Denny was the one thing they did right. From day one she’s been a petulant child with a god complex. This is the logical resolution. Handled piss poor sure but I never really thought it would go much different when she got to Westeros.
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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Drarok » Tue May 14, 2019 7:51 pm

Her eventual turn to the crazy side makes sense, but not at the speed and complete lack of motivation they did it with.
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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Strudel » Tue May 14, 2019 8:25 pm

Agreed; the descent to madness works as a story arc, they just haven't written it very well. The five episodes we've had so far this season could easily be a full ten episode season, if not more, if only they had actually spent the time fleshing it out properly and nudging the characters to where they are now as a natural consequence of who they are, rather than Reasons.

Danny going mad and torching King's Landing could easily be the end of a season with a full further season after it to mop up what the hell everyone in Westeros does about it.

I really don't see how, in one last episode, they could satisfactorily deal with:
- Whatever the fuck Sansa is up to
- Whatever the fuck Yara is up to
- Whatever the fuck Gendry is up to
- Is Bran doing anything?
- The result of Varys's letters
- The general Mad Queen revolt/murder/whatever and aftermath
- The results of Tyrion's release of Jamie
- The response of the people of King's Landing to the genocide

Danny may have started the assault on the civilians, but it's not like her armies backed off immediately - what happens with them? Are they moving the throne? Is Greyworm going to be killed for war crimes?

I think a lot of my annoyance is that so many of the issues with this season are entirely due to the fact that Weiss and Benioff didn't want to do the show any more, and rather than get other people to help write it, HBO let them end it prematurely.

It's like when you're writing in an exam and you realise you've got ten minutes left and you're only half way through answering the question so you quickly start bullet-pointing some arguments you were going to make but now can't.

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Raid » Tue May 14, 2019 8:31 pm

Alan wrote:
Tue May 14, 2019 7:38 pm
It was shit but I think Denny was the one thing they did right. From day one she’s been a petulant child with a god complex. This is the logical resolution. Handled piss poor sure but I never really thought it would go much different when she got to Westeros.
Viserys was the petulant child with a god complex, Dany was a pretty meek, passive individual to start with. She started to become more confident as she 'tamed' Drogo. She only really started to get delusions of grandeur after she hatched the dragons.

And yeah, Strudel's pretty much boiled the problems down into one post. There is *so much* that needs to be finished off in this last episode (although I don't think Yara will feature; with Euron out of the way, her arc is done with), and I'm expecting it to be a train wreck.

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Strudel » Tue May 14, 2019 8:34 pm

Oh yeah, I'm totally expecting that Yara isn't even mentioned, nor Bran. I imagine Sansa will get 60-90 seconds to say "Told you". They're just going to have to leave so much untouched, or squish it into quick moments of character goodbyes.

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Maturin » Tue May 14, 2019 8:40 pm

Yeah, I read elsewhere that HBO offered D&D as many episodes as they wanted for the final season but they chose themselves to wrap it up in 6. A lot of stuff surrounding the show's last season has all been a bit strange really, especially when taking into account the Star Wars connection.

Feels like they were creatively running on fumes here.

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Strudel » Tue May 14, 2019 8:44 pm

Yeah, I've seen that too. The head of HBO said he wanted them to keep going and not rush to the end. Before season 7 he had said they could have as much time as they needed, even having ten episodes apiece for seasons 7, 8, AND 9. But D&D basically wanted it done it seems.

I almost feel like that sat down with GRRM Martin and asked him where the story was going and he sketched out the broader plot points and they've just translated that and only that into screenplays.

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Animalmother » Tue May 14, 2019 9:12 pm

I like to think they did it just to fuck with all the dipshits that named they're child Khaleesi. :-k

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Wrathbone » Tue May 14, 2019 9:16 pm

Alan wrote:
Tue May 14, 2019 7:38 pm
It was shit but I think Denny was the one thing they did right. From day one she’s been a petulant child with a god complex. This is the logical resolution. Handled piss poor sure but I never really thought it would go much different when she got to Westeros.
The problem isn’t that she went mad, it’s that she snapped for no reason, without the gradual and tested descent over a long period that could have made it work. Her execution of enemies wasn’t a sign of madness, it was a sign of ruthlessness with fair warning issued in advance. Everything she’s done to this point, however dubious, has had rationale behind it and a goal in sight. When King’s Landing surrendered, she’d achieved that goal and had everything she wanted, but she decided to burn everyone anyway. Because... why? To rule by fear? No, fuck that - this is not a character who wantonly kills innocent people on a whim. She burned children! Hundreds of thousands of civilians who had surrendered and had no stake in her war! It’s the stupidest and least justified character 180 flip I can recall in a major TV show.

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Mantis » Tue May 14, 2019 9:36 pm

As a character she has always been particularly strict on not bringing harm to innocents, even more so in the books. She has always shown absolute ruthlessness to her enemies but never wanted to harm others, she imprisoned her dragons in the pyramid at Meereen because they ate a single child for Christs sake.

If they were creatively burnt out and didn't care anymore (which seems to be the case because they're on record that they wanted to do this series purely for the Red Wedding and that they're not overly keen on fantasy shows as a whole) then they should have allowed someone else to take over running the show. We could easily have had 10 seasons from the material on offer and all of the character arcs would have felt satisfying. Instead they have condensed so many things down to the extent that even key reactions are hastily cut away from before you get to see their effect, like cutting away from the Stark's finding out Jon's true lineage for instance. Jon has literally been reduced to an extra who's only lines seem to be "You're my queen!" this season.

Dany's arc in the book will make much more sense as the young 'fake' Aegon is heavily geared up to take King's Landing from Cersei, so when Dany finally arrives she will find that the people reject her as a foreign invader in favour of a young Targyren already sitting on the throne who the people have come to love. It just doesn't make anywhere near as much sense when she is in King's Landing confronting Cersei, even with Missandei being executed.

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Re: Game of Thrones S8 (Here be spoilers)

Post by Strudel » Tue May 14, 2019 10:30 pm

I also wonder if they're actually going to do anything with Cersei and Jamie in the final episode. The only people who had seen Cersei since the beginning of the battle are all dead, so for all our heroes know she legged it early on and escaped. It's going to be pretty shit if they're all like, "Well, we didn't see her get out so she must have died".

Which is exactly what I'm expecting.

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