Author Topic: TV Shows (Read 63989 times)

Sierra · « **Reply #475 on:** June 02, 2015, 08:39:15 PM »

Quote from: Fenrir on June 02, 2015, 12:42:25 PM

Who's the more compelling puppetmaster, his father?

Littlefinger, which is who Sansa spends this comparable period of book time with (although like most things in the latter books this is mostly underused and wasted potential).

Fenrir · « **Reply #476 on:** June 02, 2015, 11:37:59 PM »

Oh yeah.

Littlefinger's scenes here have been the best of this season's though, and you can both understand his plans more easily, and why other characters don't. He is less "MUAH AH AH" than before and more Delita. He is so Delita.

The series is following the books less and less, they've just offed a character who's not dead yet in the books! He's also not really important in the series but apparently a pretty damn big deal in the books. It's as if the series just told the books to fuck off

Grefter · « **Reply #477 on:** June 02, 2015, 11:46:21 PM »

Cause ring fucking with e pectTions is kind of one of the pivotal things about ASoIaF I am just surprised they waited this long to do it.

At this rate I expect that the TV show will finish 10 years before the books with Stannis having been revealed to really be Azor Ahai reborn and his Lightbringer is legit and then the books last minute jumping feet first into the same ending after faking out for a decade to it "secretly" being Hodor.

Fenrir · « **Reply #478 on:** June 03, 2015, 01:15:06 AM »

The white walkers are actually the viewers of the show, who perversely want the characters in the show to be miserable just for their viewing pleasure.

Stannis find a door to enter Real Life and kills R.R. Martin in the climatic penultimate episode

Sierra · « **Reply #479 on:** June 03, 2015, 01:20:40 AM »

Grefter, if you actually expect him to ever finish the books, you're more optimistic than I am.

Captain K · « **Reply #480 on:** June 03, 2015, 03:35:03 AM »

I'm not terribly optimistic about him finishing the next one.

Grefter · « **Reply #481 on:** June 03, 2015, 08:14:55 AM »

Quote from: Fenrir on June 03, 2015, 01:15:06 AM

Stannis find a door to enter Real Life and kills R.R. Martin in the climatic penultimate episode

GRRM is not Stephen King.

Hunter Sopko · « **Reply #482 on:** June 03, 2015, 11:03:28 PM »

Quote from: Grefter on June 03, 2015, 08:14:55 AM

Quote from: Fenrir on June 03, 2015, 01:15:06 AM
Stannis find a door to enter Real Life and kills R.R. Martin in the climatic penultimate episode

GRRM is not Stephen King.

Or Luther Lansfield.

Anthony Edward Stark · « **Reply #483 on:** June 04, 2015, 04:36:46 AM »

Quote from: The Daleks on June 03, 2015, 03:35:03 AM

I'm not terribly optimistic about him finishing the next one.

Neither is he; he gave the outline of his narrative to the showrunners years ago. I assume it's because he is an older dude who is super fat so death lurks around every corner but maybe he just knows his heart's not in it anymore.

Scar · « **Reply #484 on:** June 04, 2015, 05:37:14 AM »

Stannis has been more likeable this season...

but then you remember he is a horrible person and his demon poop baby murdered his brother.

But all is forgotten in this season because he loves his daughter! awwwwwwwww

Fenrir · « **Reply #485 on:** June 08, 2015, 10:33:23 PM »

GoT: ..........................................

Fuck, how did it get me again. Somehow this was really really obvious but it was too horrible to really consider? Just like the red wedding.

Anyway it was weird seeing 20 more minutes after that moment. And this ended with a total anticlimax, Daenerys being all "KTHXBY losers" with cheap looking special effects everywhere

Scar · « **Reply #486 on:** June 10, 2015, 01:53:22 PM »

Stannis gonna stannis.

And just when you started liking the guy.

Pyro · « **Reply #487 on:** June 13, 2015, 02:31:26 AM »

I don't know why but Shireen's demise hit me harder than anything else in the series.

At some point the good acting and plotting can't save a show when you realize that you just watched a little girl the show has spent 3 years making incredibly likable be burned to death by her parents while futilely screaming for mommy and daddy not to horrifically murder her. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to find a more healthy fiction to get entertainment from.

Also the plotting has been pretty miserable recently. The White Walkers are a big deal sure but it doesn't feel like people are actively talking about them and hyping up their danger. The ones who saw them should have been acting like 'true believers' proselytizing about their dangers to everyone else. This is incredibly downplayed or non-existent.

Arya's entire season has been a pointless waste of screentime from an otherwise eminently likable character. There has been no one of value for her to play off of. And the 'push oyster cart around entire city tracking dude who can totally recognize you, including following him into brothel' thing was mindlessly stupid. And the scene with her preparing the poison for her intended target in wide open while staring at him so intently was also very dumb. I guess they want to make her out to be incompetent to increase drama? Why follow her storyline at all then.

And the Dorne/Sand Snakes plot was a stupid and pointless waste of time. "And you didn't think to send me a raven?" summarizes it nicely. The Sand Snakes are also incredibly flat and boring as characters go.

Just Bugs Me: 20 of Ramsay's men completely cripple an army of thousands effortlessly because reasons or something. Ramsay Bolton is a character the show's writers enjoy taunting the audience with. "Look how evil he is! He has women eaten to death by dogs for getting pregnant! He beats and rapes a likable character while mocking viewers of the show!" and he keeps succeeding to such an extent that it seems he is favored by some kind of evil god (namely the show's writers). Ramsay is is played up to be both totally lacking in self-control and yet hyper-competent. This is retarded. I get that the show feels it can get a lot of emotional reaction out of baiting the viewers with him, but it makes for miserable plot.

TLDR: Fuck Game of Thrones. I signed up for a lot of crap, but not to watch fathers burning their little girls.

Sierra · « **Reply #488 on:** June 13, 2015, 04:52:44 PM »

These are the comments of someone who hasn't watched the show since season 3, so I may not be familiar with context, but: my sister assures me that the further the show deviates from source material this season (which was probably inevitable to some extent just due to how messy books four and five are), the more the quality of plot and dialogue degrade. Case in point: that burning is not a thing that happened in the books, and I struggle to think of a good reason to have included it either narratively or politically in-context (who's going to support a king that negates his own line of succession? Isn't that basically the point of kings in the first place?) It sounds like HBO's writers love shock tactics so much that they have to make them up where the source material isn't obliging (again see nothing happening in books four and five).

The TV show writers' fascination with Ramsay Bolton is also really fucking baffling (again this is just based on season 3, if he's all over the damn screen now then more reason not to bother catching up). A Song of Ice and Fire has a lot of compelling, devious schemers, and the TV show has occasionally made very good use of them, but Ramsay Bolton is not such an individual in original context. Book Ramsay is never really portrayed as any degree of competent without his dad around to keep him in line. Short of that, he's a bully with the capacity to terrorize a modest corner of the country and that's about it. If the show has decided to give him any talent for warfare, well, why? It sounds like someone on the writing staff must really think that mustache-twirling villainy is best villainy, and if there isn't constantly someone around that's obviously hateable in the most aggressive ways then people will stop watching or something.

The Duck · « **Reply #489 on:** June 13, 2015, 07:52:38 PM »

I haven't seen much of the show (just the first season) but I have heard all the surprises this season in grisly, endless detail from friends and everything I've gleaned makes me inclined to agree with Cid. Whenever the show makes a big departure from the books it seems like it's there to make these GAMES OF THRONES moments that get talked about and elicit reactions like the ones we've seen here (got me again, GoT!) and to get people writing longform pieces on pop culture sites.

There's something really calculated and cheap seeming about it, and I guess that's kind of a weird criticism to have about a series that is there to mostly fuck with expectations. It's cheap and manipulative to me in the same way that Larry Clark movies are, if anyone has seen those, with the concerted effort to keep topping itself.

Dark Holy Elf · « **Reply #490 on:** June 14, 2015, 07:51:21 AM »

GoT/ASoIaF spoilers, though by this point you should have figured this out.

Having not watched the show, I'm a bit surprised that Stannis sacrificing his daughter has created such a strong reaction, actually. You all remember this is the same guy who used dark magic to murder his brother, yes? He's a horrible human being in a "the ends justify the means" way. (Although it is pretty stupid to kill off your heir as a king.)

That said overall I do agree more broadly with Cid and Gourry. It sounds clear to me that the show is very much going for shock value and flagrant toying with viewer emotions at this point. To some extent that's just Game of Thrones being Game of Thrones, and was part of why I lost interest in the books despite digging the political intrigue and the setting of Westeros. It certainly sounds like the show has only played that the shock value more in recent seasons, now trying to calculate for maximum viewer emotional reactions. Doesn't sound like something I'd care for.

Fenrir · « **Reply #491 on:** June 14, 2015, 12:44:34 PM »

I agree with this

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/06/09/game_of_thrones_is_a_classical_tragedy_don_t_be_so_shocked_my_the_deaths.html

Try to ignore the extremely cheap line "As the Dothraki might say, it is known that the heroes emerge triumphant." everything else is sound

tl;dr: Shakespeare did it too

Also the wardens have been complaining about the walkers since ages ago, people know they're coming but they have too much other shit to do to send more than a few men there to fight them
I'm pretty sure the walkers are climate change

Also the season has been portraying Stannis as a generally nice guy, and his brother was his enemy

The Duck · « **Reply #492 on:** June 14, 2015, 03:05:01 PM »

From what I've heard, they resort to the sacrifice in way similar to if plane crash survivors resorted to cannibalism after a half hour, so it seems badly plotted and very cheap, especially since they've built the sacrificed character in question up in order to make her sympathetic (she is basically a background character in the books as I recall) in order to increase the impact of the scene.

One thing about classical tragedies is that those with tragic flaws must suffer a reversal of fortune or fall because of that flaw, so I guess we'll see what happens. I would say just as equally that ASoIaF falls into a kind of world that is harsh and based on medieval sensibilities where our narrative assumptions don't apply, so characters don't necessarily have to suffer if they pull some of this shit.

I have this weird fatigue with the series and I haven't read the books in years or watched much of the show. It's partly due to online overexposure and my friends won't stop talking about it but also partly due to the strong likelihood that the books will never be finished. I am still sort of curious about how it will resolve but I am not nearly as invested as I was five years ago. If it's going the way of the show I don't think I'll care.

Dark Holy Elf · « **Reply #493 on:** June 14, 2015, 05:15:40 PM »

Fenrir: Book!Stannis is very much not a nice guy; he's cold and sinister and you don't want him to win the war even though he's technically "right", which probably explains some of the difference. When I heard about what he'd done my reaction was to not be remotely surprised, it seems a logical way to complete his downfall.

Quote

One thing about classical tragedies is that those with tragic flaws must suffer a reversal of fortune or fall because of that flaw, so I guess we'll see what happens. I would say just as equally that ASoIaF falls into a kind of world that is harsh and based on medieval sensibilities where our narrative assumptions don't apply, so characters don't necessarily have to suffer if they pull some of this shit.

Yeah, this. Also, the "tragic flaw" of characters like Ned/Robb/Oberyn being some variation on "they were too nice/trusting" (kinda the wrong word for Oberyn but the similarity is obvious anyway) gets rather tiresome. Shakespearean tragedies are great because we get to see how a tragic flaw leads to a character's downfall, and we chronicle that every step of the way, from the start of the story to end, and the character changes throughout (thinking particularly Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Hamlet here). GoT "tragedies" (at least the ones cited in that article) tend to be more along the lines of "well you made a mistake, now you're dead". They're more Mercutio than they are Othello.

If the series had been about Ned Stark's fall from nobility as he stooped to steadily greater depths to achieve honourable ends, I'd freaking love it and that would be much closer to Shakespearean tragedy. (To come full circle with this post, that's actually not too from from what Stannis is, but Stannis isn't sympathetic / he's already pretty bad when we first meet him, I guess? I dunno, I don't find him that compelling.)

Fenrir · « **Reply #494 on:** June 14, 2015, 06:31:53 PM »

Ned died from being too nice and trusting, Robb died from putting his own interests above those of his army, Oberyn died from being too arrogant. (Politically, he was in a nice situation, but he completely underestimated his enemy) I feel those three situations are extremely different and could have been predicted from the characters. So, no complaint from me.

Stannis is still working for the greater good, unlike the Boltons or Lannisters, he's willing to do anything to achieve it though. It's what's led to last episode's death and I think it's going to kill him (it's already making him miserable anyway)

SnowFire · « **Reply #495 on:** June 14, 2015, 11:41:16 PM »

Lala not reading anything about what's happening in the TV show or what the deal is with Stannis recently, but brief aside:

Book Robb very much dies from authorial fiat, it feels like. I think Martin decided that Robb was being too perfect (a role reserved for Jon Snow?), so he needed to have him make some mistake, but he didn't have the heart to, you know, actually write it. So that's where the whirlwind romance with Jeyne Westerling comes from, to give Robb some new problem to deal with and solid excuse for his downfall. I suspect it was also an excuse for a bit of deconstruction, that abandoning arranged marriages for some newly met true love has a price and doesn't always work out (though Martin of course goes far in the opposite direction to have it lead to disaster rather than something milder). But yeah, Martin spends literally no time describing this; it all happens off-screen, "oh by the way Robb is married now."

I suppose since the TV show (rightly) gives more time to the romance (it's something that adapts well to HBO!), you can read more into it, but as is, I'm not going to fault book Robb too much for having authorial intervention crush him. (And I don't even mean this in a particularly mean way toward Martin, all authors need to do this - you have 2 reasonable things that can happen, but 1 leads to the plot you want to write. Martin himself said as much about Ned: in an alternate universe where Janos Slynt doesn't sell the City Watch to the highest bidder, the City Watch obeys the Hand and arrests Cersei, and the series is very short. So... that can't happen, Slynt needs to be a worse person, and this isn't necessarily Ned's "fault.")

Fenrir · « **Reply #496 on:** June 16, 2015, 06:28:11 PM »

The GoT season finale was really great, the whole season was a setup for this all this, really. I still genuinely totally love the series.

Three things I really really liked:

- Stannis' sacrifice didn't help, half his army deserted because of it and he died like a chump, blinded by his lord of light mythos.
Ramsay gets to be Luca Blight though, damn it
- Jon dies for focusing on the big conflict and ignoring the micro level. Brilliant scene too.
- SHAME SHAME SHAME

The kiss of death was obvious, Jaime's such a loser.

Nice callback to the (cheap) earlier scene with Bronn in the prison though. Emotions = Poison gets more effective.

We need an RPG in which you can cast POIZN on the enemy, then tell it a really sad story about a dying puppy to double POIZN's effectiveness (or strip to quadruple POIZN's rate, at the cost of defense. (Do note that the effects of telling a sad story and getting naked don't stack))

Fenrir · « **Reply #497 on:** June 16, 2015, 06:58:41 PM »

Quote from: Pyro on June 13, 2015, 02:31:26 AM

TLDR: Fuck Game of Thrones. I signed up for a lot of crap, but not (...) burning

Change your username Pyro, you are unworthy

Pyro · « **Reply #498 on:** June 17, 2015, 02:04:06 AM »

Seriously too much. And more little girl death in finale because BOLD AND DARING TV.

I hope you guys like Ramsay Bolton. He is the hero the show deserves.

Cotigo · « **Reply #499 on:** June 17, 2015, 03:17:16 PM »

I think it's worth mentioning that a large part of why Ned's death and the Red Wedding worked fine for me is that it was showing that the story wasn't going to cheat for the good guys to win. That is a large part of why those scenes don't just read as shocking to be shocking, and the purple wedding shortly after shows just as well that the story isn't going to cheat to have the "bad guys" win either.

It really sounds like with this last season and all the shit Ramsay has been pulling out that the show misunderstood that element that made those scenes fine, and started having the story cheat so the bad guys would win. I've heard from virtually everyone up to date with the show that Ramsay has been pulling out some incredulous victories out of his ass and meeeeeeeh that's just bad writing. Kinda glad I waited to binge watch the series until after the season finale, because now it sounds like I'm fine waiting for TWOW to come out and for Martin to not be able to finish the last book in time.

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Author Topic: TV Shows (Read 63989 times)