I agree that D&D are plotters now. The real problem is that they were panters for every season up to these last 2. They'd look at book characters and think "not that important" and leave them out, or wildly change events from the books to put out something that seemed more dramatic.
But like a kid who partied too hard senior year and found out his final project is due in a week, they seem to have woken up one day and realized they'd moved way, way too far from the source material, and then just jerked the wheel to steer it back in a straight line towards the intended book ending. Characters who've developed differently in the show than in the books? Whiplashed back to the book versions. The Night King taken down in a single episode, with no real understanding of what he was trying to do, or what any of it really meant. Dany destroying all of King's Landing, but instead of a culmination of increasingly morally grey choices as she takes the throne from a loved leader, she's murdering civilians who don't even like Cersei because a bunch of dudes kept saying she was crazy (or something).
Frankly I'd have preferred they just made up some hollywood ending that vaguely fit the direction they'd brought the show, instead of giving us all whiplash.
> Dany destroying all of King's Landing, but instead of a culmination of increasingly morally grey choices as she takes the throne from a loved leader, she's murdering civilians who don't even like Cersei because a bunch of dudes kept saying she was crazy (or something).
From, like, season 1 on Dany is established to be explosively vindictive, especially to perceived betrayal by those who are either personally trusted or whom she feels owe her duty, as well as desperate for (and violence tempered only by) receiving love on both an individual and mass level.
And those factors are directly the source of the violence she turns to in S8E5. The direct lead up has been decidedly unsubtle and started before S8. It wasn't a culmination of increasingly morally gray choices, it was a simple continuation of a pattern of behavior that's been constant the whole show combined with a pattern of increasing erosion of the factors that were previously established as mitigators combined with an increasing accumulation of factors previously established as triggers.
That it was headed for something like this has been evident for some time, that it was likely to erupt at the particular time it did against the particular target was clear in S8E4 with Missandei’s killing even before they laid on more triggers in the part of S8E5 preceding the break.
I stopped following GoT since S05E04 or around that so i did not see nor do i understand what's all this noise; but from the writing lessons i took years ago i learned that foreshadowing is NOT character development. If you use foreshadowing, especially if it's not subtle, you still have to "earn" your twist (see: Frodo if front of Mt Doom, Gollum).
You can only foreshadow and drop hints about a character changes if you do those change away from the action (the protagonist that will change is away from the limited narrator), or if the spectator do not know the character that well (he is one of the antagonist).
Let's compare to other "masterpieces" with a lot of public love. Does the character change feel as justified as Darth Vader's one in Return of the Jedi? Or even as Severus Rogue (Harry potter) change? Those change are not really well written imho (a bit too rushed for the 1rst one, a bit forced for the second, but that's only my opinion). If the character change in GOT is not at least on this level, i would understand why people are disapointed.
The error GoT have done for me is from way back. The first few seasons used realistic plot, few plothole, believable and clever characters, pretty realistic choices and political stuff. My suspension of credulity bar was set pretty low. Season 4 was weird regarding time and distance, but still mostly believable (and the dialogs were really good too). But S05 broke my suspension of credulity almost every 10 minutes and that made the show a bit boring (imo).
That's the issue for GoT: they did set the bar too high at first, then couldn't reach the same level again.
The thing is Dany doesn't have a character change, just a change of location, available power, and other circumstances. She has a consistent pattern of “This is how she acts in in this kind for circumstance”. And then those triggering circumstances recur in a different time and place and when she has vastly more power. And she acts exactly the same way she always has.
In fact, I'd argue that a distinguishing feature of GOT as a series (and ASOIAF, the book series) is that there is remarkably little character development in the narrative, and even further that a major theme of the narrative itself is that binary positive and negative character assessments tend to be made on the basis of circumstances when the same character in other circumstances would be assessed very differently, and that changes of circumstances are easily (and dangerously) mistaken for changes of character.
Dany has shown a pattern of burning her enemies. Her enemies. Those that betray her, enemies in the field who don't bend the knee. Yet every time the thought of killing innocents comes up, she's gone extremely out of her way to avoid it. She kept her dragons locked up for years because they killed a single child.
There was plenty of development to have her destroy the Red Keep, and the horrifying thing would've been that she did so even though Cersei had filled it with innocent people. There was plenty of development to have her destroy the Lannister soldiers in the streets, leaving 0 quarter to the surrendering army.
There was no development to have her burn every inch of King's Landing and destroy all the people who lived there. There was no motive (Cersei pissed her off, but none of those people even liked Cersei), there was no benefit (none of those people would've cared who the Monarch was), there was no development leading to her personality cracking (your advisers deciding you're crazy and your nephew not kissing you right now just isn't enough to make you commit genocide).
That the ending the book is shooting for, almost certainly. D&D didn't earn it. Since they didn't earn it, they'd have been better off going with something else.
> Dany has shown a pattern of burning her enemies. Her enemies. Those that betray her, enemies in the field who don't bend the knee.
And people who by situation of birth are in a group whose way of of life conflicts with her moral preferences, even if they've never personally wronged her or owed her a duty of allegiance, c.f., Astapor.
> Yet every time the thought of killing innocents comes up, she's gone extremely out of her way to avoid it.
To the extent that’s even arguably true—at least, after Mirri Maz Duur in S1 (the negative results of which are the impetus for the one Stark example of Dany’s character development)—it was directly tied to a belief that she was loved (either personally or as a leader by the masses or, most often, both) and that acting otherwise would undermine that—a factor which very much was not at play in the attack on King's Landing.
And she's made very clear since very early on (though it's clear her practical expectation that this duty would be fulfilled has evolved over time) that she feels the masses of Westeros (and therefore those of King's Landing) do owe her a duty of loyalty that they betray by obedience to anyone else. It also made clear that her relative restraint was due to the restraining influence of a particular set of advisers and allies, all of whom were either dead or seen as betrayers (the latter—and in one case also the former as a direct result—in a couple key cases in part largely because their confidence in their ability to continue to restrain her impulses was slipping for reasons clearly shown in the narrative) by the time of the attack on King's Landing.
That take rests too heavily on the idea that pulling together a lot of loose ends necessarily means an undercooked and fan-service-y plot.
>What big moments did they want to deliver? Where should the characters end up? What did they think we, the audience, wanted to see on screen before the show came to an end? It was a Game of Thrones bucket list. /18
This tweet from that set sorta highlights it. Because choosing to build a timeline working backwards is different than how they approached filling up that timeline.
The takes don't seem to be substantially different. For instance, this tweet
> A show that had been about the weight of the past became about the spectacle of the present. Characters with incredible depth and agency - all the more rope with which to hang themselves - became pieces on a giant war map.
If the CEO of HBO wants 5 more seasons, WTF doesn't he just replace the show runners or buy out their rights to the show and hire Peter Jackson or James Cameron or better yet Ridley Scott to finish this thing? We desperately need a redo, I enjoyed 6/7 --minus some pacing, but 8 is a fuck up... just give us even 3 more seasons or 24 episodes to reconcile things.
If you're familiar with manga(comics) and anime(manga comics adaptations to animation video) then this is a good and hilarious analogy that works perfectly for the latest season of game of thrones done by the meta anime Gintama - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4S9NuI6NKo
Looking forward to Game of Thrones: Brotherhood whenever it comes out
I think they’re just arrogant and full of themselves. They don’t have the chops to end what Martin started. They’ve got to use cheap plot twists to be compelling.
Martin provided outlines through the end of the series early on; this was widely reported at the time.
And what twists? Other than “who kills the Night King”, most of the “twists” people have complained about are deeply flawed characters acting on accord with, rather than transcending, flaws that have been consistently shown since S1.
It's a twist only in that it defies narrative traditions of the medium, but then that's also in accord with the character the show has shown since S1 (notably with the execution of Ned Stark.)
Really?! I'm not saying we should have all expected it or something, but there were decently strong hints in retrospect she wasn't what we all wanted her to be, whereas Jon was what we wanted but lacked the ambition or whatever -- which almost perfectly mirrors Ned and everyone else in the story.
The only thing I can't believe is that the prophecies were pointing toward Arya as Azor Ahai, or the (apparently now) more likely theory that the "darkness" mentioned in the prophecy didn't have anything to do with the army of the undead (http://time.com/5589654/game-of-thrones-jon-snow-azor-ahai-p...)
You can read the corresponding thread and see that not many folks there were really talking about that at the time. I think this analysis is too retroactive. E4 had many issues, particularly centering on Jaime, Brienne, Euron and the Iron Fleet, and the nonsensical nature of the Cersei negotiation. It also declined to fix issues presented by E3 (e.g., other than the funeral, it was as if the NK and WW conflict never happened, it didn't expand on Bran, etc.).
Everyone is analyzing how the process of writing may have changed but I think we need to go deeper. The show is created by mere mortals with families and children who burn out like everyone else. They've also got contracts that pay them by the season rather than the episode, and a contract for a Star Wars trilogy in the waiting. They are just sick of the show and are doing the bare minimum to fulfill their contractual obligations.
Explanation fails when you take Marvel studios into account. Overall consistent product with some outstanding and satisfying movies. Disney/HBO seem like hacks in comparison. Now that Disney is assuming control of Marvel however i expect the quality to drop because of things like James Gunn incident etc. Companies that are too concerned with image and aligning with the cultural zeitgeist are consistently putting out mediocre products
Although this is in Scientific American, it's an informal article about an informal pop-culture topic. However, I'd still prefer it to make its claim, and make its case.
Here, that means first defining "sociological/institutional storytelling" and "personal storytelling", then arguing that GoT is the former and not the latter, by reference to the source material (i.e. examples).
I can only infer these definitions: "sociological" means reacting to circumstance; "personal" means agency.
If we take the first season, the climax shows the two main actors acting with agency - against sociological forces: Ned chooses honour, against all circumstance, advice, sense and customs of the world. Joffrey chooses execution, again against all circumstance (protocol, advice, expectation of others - even self-interest).
The article mentions another aspect, of characters being killed off, and that this shows the story is sociological rather than personal. But not all characters have been killed off, notatable, the Stark children have only been top-and-tailed (Robb and Rickon), leaving Jon, Sansa, Arya and Bran. They were present at the very beginning; they are present at the end. The story is about them.
The standard argument is that character deaths make us fear for the main characters, instead of assuming plot armour. Minor and major characters routinely die. Even within the family, Ned, Cat, Robb and Rickon die. Further, Bran and Jon also appear to die, though live on. But most of the children, the core, remain.
The claim of sociological storytelling would have more support if all major characters died, and were replaced with other characters, who behaved in similar ways under similar forces. Then the story would be about those forces.
Therefore the story is personal, not sociological. Of course, the world is deep and interconnected, and makes sense. In this sense, the novels are "sociological". But the story itself is not.
It is not a story about circumstance and institution forces, but a story about personal agency.
Other examples of sociological storytelling y'all might recommend—other than Game of Thrones and The Wire—and not necessarily from TV but in any medium?
The biggest reason is that fans can’t stand seeing someone that they thought was the epitome of good and someone they identified with, become evil before their eyes. Every other reason is secondary to that.
Most negative opinions I heard and read were not about the fact that Dany turned evil - this has been telegraphed for a long time and most have expected it. It's that the transition was almost completely unmotivated. It makes no sense whatsoever. People want to understand the characters, that's the central point of this article.
The underlying character needs and triggers were established over many seasons, and the multiple triggers were laid on heavily throughout S8 (and some pretty heavily in S7.)
The idea that the actions were unmotivated is bizarre; I get that some fans were hoping (and that narrative convention supports those hopes) that Dany would transcend her clearly established flaws, but the idea that there was anything not clearly established, in either general orientation or specific triggers, is hard to believe.
