The Ringer closing out its stellar GoT coverage in a blaze of glory
Evil or Incompetent: The Bran Stark Edition
The Seven Iconic ‘Game of Thrones’ Scenes That Season 8 Makes Worse
That first article is from Danny Heifetz, so you can skip that one, like I do all of his articles. He's their resident filler writer. He just fills the site with crappy articles for the clicks.
Huh?
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
All negative or links to negativity.
Maybe I should just bail on this topic, because I don't really want to join the hate parade.
Middcore, you're being a major downer in this topic the past couple of days. Is there anything about Game of Thrones that you like? If so, maybe you could share it!
Sorry for striking a discordant note in the chorus of universal praise since the airing of the finale, I didn't realize this was the "Game of Thrones celebration and positivity thread".
Oh wait, almost all the other posts the past couple days have also been somewhere on the spectrum from bemused resignation to baffled disappointment. I guess those people wandered into the wrong thread too. Maybe the title should make it clearer this is the thread for people who only want to write and read nice things about the show.
In all seriousness: I posted links to three articles on the show I thought were interesting and well-written and expressed some of my thoughts better than I could, from a source other people in the thread have also noted as being one of the best sources of GoT coverage. f*ck me, right? I would think a reasonable reaction would be to present your own perspective if you disagree, or just ignore it, rather than demand I make some meaningless token positive statement so you feel better.
But if I must! S8E2 was terrific and Pod has a heavenly singing voice to match his presumably godlike endowment. How's that?
Seems I got my GWJ and SA threads crossed up...
Overall, I'm satisfied with the outcome of the final season. I don't know why anybody was expecting a happy ending to all of this for their favorite characters; the whole thing - book or show - has been a carnival of tragedy from the start. I love Dany as much anyone, but anybody paying attention to the Targaryen history and her choices along the way should have seen the foreshadowing on the wall. The same could be said of almost everyone: Sansa became the Queen in the North, Jon left the power he never wanted and ended up heading off into the frost with Ghost and the Freefolk, Arya said f* it all - I'm out.
I can go on, but if anything the only major character's story arc that I felt let down by was that Cersei didn't meet the brutal demise she so completely deserved (and I'm pretty sure we all wanted to see) and I was only very mildly surprised by Bran's crowning. My one real problem with the whole thing, as echoed by others here and elsewhere, is how we ended up with so many unanswered questions because of how rushed the last two seasons became to get here. Given what we have seen throughout the series, I completely get the fall of Dany, but her character change from savior of the downtrodden to "f* it, burn them all was so abrupt it was downright jarring.
(For the sake of brevity, I'm focusing on Dany, who is one of the two the most obvious examplse of rushed storylines with the other being the Night King.)
Regardless, I've enjoyed the ride and I'm satisfied with the final conclusion. I just wish they had given more time to flesh out those dangling loose ends.
DSGamer wrote:Huh?
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
All negative or links to negativity.
Maybe I should just bail on this topic, because I don't really want to join the hate parade.
It’s a TV show. Like all art, sometimes you love it, sometimes you don’t.
I enjoyed Game of Thrones for the first 5 seasons, even in spite of being really frustrated by the cruelty, misogyny and cynicism. I said to myself that there are times the world is like this, so reflecting it back makes sense.
As the show accelerated in pace I feel the quality started to falter. I personally started to feel like it was a bit of a B show. Maybe it was always a B show.
And being the kind of person sensitive to so much violence and cruelty and way too cynical on my own, I started to think the show wasn’t so good for me.
I opted out of season 8 entirely and now I personally enjoy reading opinions and recaps.
In short, I think it’s okay to like a thing and to grow to dislike a thing and still be interested.
I can go on, but if anything the only major character's story arc that I felt let down by was that Cersei didn't meet the brutal demise she so completely deserved (and I'm pretty sure we all wanted to see)
Something I like to remember about Cersei is that she was essentially sold off to Robert Baratheon and forced into a marriage she didn’t want to be in. Obviously she was a victim of abuse as well as being someone who did terrible things.
The show never proposed a way out or alternatives. That’s why I eventually grew tired of it. And at the end it took the best hope for breaking the cycle, had her “turn crazy” in order to engineer a “happy” ending. Blah.
I drink up the hate about this show now. Mostly because it never had anything meaningful to say about how the world could be anything other than what it was.
The show never proposed a way out or alternatives. That’s why I eventually grew tired of it. And at the end it took the best hope for breaking the cycle, had her “turn crazy” in order to engineer a “happy” ending. Blah.
I drink up the hate about this show now. Mostly because it never had anything meaningful to say about how the world could be anything other than what it was.
But they broke the wheel! They figured it out. Hereditary rule: that's the source of all their problems! The 8 or so of them just need to huddle up and handpick a king. Then, when that king eventually dies, his replacement will be chosen by... the hereditary rulers of each of the houses.
I was amused that they settled on the political system similar to that used in the Holy Roman Empire since the 13th century, in Poland since 1370, in Sweden since at least before 1000, and in Anglo-Saxon England since sometime before the 7th century. Plus the Republic of Venice elected the doge for life since 697, but also had a Roman-style Senate. And the original kings of Rome itself were elected, though they only got through a handful before they decided that the king thing was investing too much power in one person.
Going Medieval: Medieval History, Pop Culture, Swearing: Let’s Talk About Game of Thrones part 3: Holy Roman Imperial Edition
DSGamer wrote:The show never proposed a way out or alternatives. That’s why I eventually grew tired of it. And at the end it took the best hope for breaking the cycle, had her “turn crazy” in order to engineer a “happy” ending. Blah.
I drink up the hate about this show now. Mostly because it never had anything meaningful to say about how the world could be anything other than what it was.
But they broke the wheel! They figured it out. Hereditary rule: that's the source of all their problems! The 8 or so of them just need to huddle up and handpick a king. Then, when that king eventually dies, his replacement will be chosen by... the hereditary rulers of each of the houses.
I think the meaningful thing the show had to say is that there's No Magic Bullet for improving the world. You can defeat the Night King and prevent an apocalypse, but that won't bring about a paradise of endless summer. Be careful of any Promised Princes, they turn out to be nothing more than Stallions that just wind up wanting to Mount the World.
If the world becomes a better place, it's through progress like a pushback on heredity rule. Not eliminating it in one fell swoop and replacing it with something perfect, but pushing back on it, with plenty of backsliding along the way.
haha, I just looked up the Magna Carta, because in a work full of historical references, I figured that was the one for this ending of Bran the Broken's Settlement of the Dragonpit or whatever the Maesters with eventually call it, and I found this:
The charter became part of English political life and was typically renewed by each monarch in turn, although as time went by and the fledgling English Parliament passed new laws, it lost some of its practical significance. At the end of the 16th century there was an upsurge in interest in Magna Carta. Lawyers and historians at the time believed that there was an ancient English constitution, going back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons, that protected individual English freedoms. They argued that the Norman invasion of 1066 had overthrown these rights, and that Magna Carta had been a popular attempt to restore them, making the charter an essential foundation for the contemporary powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus. Although this historical account was badly flawed, jurists such as Sir Edward Coke used Magna Carta extensively in the early 17th century, arguing against the divine right of kings propounded by the Stuart monarchs. Both James I and his son Charles I attempted to suppress the discussion of Magna Carta, until the issue was curtailed by the English Civil War of the 1640s and the execution of Charles.
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The political myth of Magna Carta and its protection of ancient personal liberties persisted after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 until well into the 19th century. It influenced the early American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies and the formation of the American Constitution in 1787, which became the supreme law of the land in the new republic of the United States.[c] Research by Victorian historians showed that the original 1215 charter had concerned the medieval relationship between the monarch and the barons, rather than the rights of ordinary people, but the charter remained a powerful, iconic document, even after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th and 20th centuries. Magna Carta still forms an important symbol of liberty today, often cited by politicians and campaigners, and is held in great respect by the British and American legal communities, Lord Denning describing it as "the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot".[4]
stories really are as important as Tyrion said!
The legend will probably start off: "there once was a king who chose a throne of wood over a throne of iron..."
Sophie Turner pushes back against backlash and petition.
In an interview with the New York Times published Monday, Turner pushed back on some of the negative fan reaction."All of these petitions and things like that — I think it's disrespectful to the crew, and the writers, and the filmmakers who have worked tirelessly over 10 years, and for 11 months shooting the last season," she said. "Like 50-something night shoots. So many people worked so, so hard on it, and for people to just rubbish it because it's not what they want to see is just disrespectful."
I.E. f*ck off
Sophie Turner pushes back against backlash and petition.
In an interview with the New York Times published Monday, Turner pushed back on some of the negative fan reaction."All of these petitions and things like that — I think it's disrespectful to the crew, and the writers, and the filmmakers who have worked tirelessly over 10 years, and for 11 months shooting the last season," she said. "Like 50-something night shoots. So many people worked so, so hard on it, and for people to just rubbish it because it's not what they want to see is just disrespectful."
This will go well.
I don't buy that. All those actors and staff were paid for their time and efforts and they don't get a pass just because they worked hard.
I also thought the ending was fine. A bit "meh" but fine.
I agree with Sophie that some of the response is on the ridiculous side, but you also don't get to soak up people loving something for years and then act like they don't get an opinion when they no longer like it.
She's right, but it's all much ado about nothing.
The end of GoTdam is more depressing than the end of GoT. 
Yeah I hate seeing headlines about this asinine petition to re-film Season 8. It's obviously incredibly stupid and never going to happen, and signed by people who are probably just gross trolls (or at best, just very stupid people), so why give it any coverage at all? Like calls to boycott the Last Jedi, I worry that coverage of this sort of thing pointlessly elevates stuff that is best ignored, and creates the appearance that this sort of backlash is much bigger than it is.
ETA: the backlash in terms of "this was a bad final season" is, of course, quite large and, in my view, more or less correct, and that's fine, I'm referring specifically to the "kidnap the cast and crew and raise $500M on kickstarter and shoot the replacement script that I have written" strain of the backlash
My main criticisms of the show are that they rushed it from the start (it was already and it accelerated), and there was so much other stuff to focus on that most viewers weren't onboard with the overall narrative.
Now I can point out how everyone including the Mad King started going apeshit and defying longstanding convention. (Burn everyone in a city, kill the king to keep him from doing so, kick the child of a noble out the window, execute a Lord for no decent reason, the Red Wedding, it goes on and on with decisions big and small.) I can also point out why. However, my slideshow doesn't mean much to folks who didn't go on the same trip. With more time and episodes, they could've taken more of us along. They didn't.
"Cripples and bastards and broken things": Why the "Game of Thrones" ending was nearly perfect
"Game of Thrones" ended as it began, subverting the chivalric tradition for a more progressive medieval fantasy
It's hard not to miss the parallels between Bran and the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King (sometimes called the Wounded King), whom scholars suggest is based on the Welsh sea-god named Bran. In legend, the Fisher King is crippled and impotent and the heroes need to restore his body to wholeness in order for the dying land to come alive again. He's a symbol, most famously in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," of the supposed rot of modernity and social change and the need to restore the nation's supposedly previous state of glory.
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But "Game of Thrones" turns this tradition on its head by offering Bran not as a symbol of the waste land, but as a corrective. His impotence and disability isn't a problem, but, as Tyrion suggests, a solution, an opportunity to break the cycle of hereditary monarchy and move, however incrementally, into a better, more just future. Instead of presiding over a collapsing world, Bran's reign starts as spring visibly returns.
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Daenerys and Jon, in contrast, are the more Arthurian figures, both in that they're regents raised in exile and frequently assumed, by both other characters and the audience, to fit the "prince who was promised" prophecy, which sounds about as much like "the once and future king" as you can get. Daenerys, whose fire-born dragons are an amped-up form of pulling Excalibur from the stone, is proved too tyrannical to rule. Jon, while noble and just, is simply too compromised politically.
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This isn't just subversion for its own sake, however. These chivalric tropes, which persist in both genre stories and high literature, are what the kids these days would call problematic. They equate able-bodiedness, masculinity and having the "right" bloodline to morality, and justify a might-makes-right attitude towards leadership. It's not a surprise that medieval fantasy and fantasies about medieval society have long had a pull on the reactionary mind and supplied images and ideas that motivate actual fascists.
Also Rome. Without Rome there would have been no GoT.
As much as I love Rome (it’s on my top ten tv shows of all time list) it just was never popular enough to be like GoT.
Nevin73 wrote:Also Rome. Without Rome there would have been no GoT.
As much as I love Rome (it’s on my top ten tv shows of all time list) it just was never popular enough to be like GoT.
Rome might be my favorite show of all time. But they had to cram *everything* into the 2nd season. I really wonder what might have been...
My main criticisms of the show are that they rushed it from the start (it was already and it accelerated), and there was so much other stuff to focus on that most viewers weren't onboard with the overall narrative.
Now I can point out how everyone including the Mad King started going apeshit and defying longstanding convention. (Burn everyone in a city, kill the king to keep him from doing so, kick the child of a noble out the window, execute a Lord for no decent reason, the Red Wedding, it goes on and on with decisions big and small.) I can also point out why. However, my slideshow doesn't mean much to folks who didn't go on the same trip. With more time and episodes, they could've taken more of us along. They didn't.
You can't please everyone.. and in fact your likely to not please anyone ever. Let's face it there was little hope that rushed or not rushed or even if they went 2 more seasons that fans were ever going to be happy with any ending.
Once these shows take on this level of fandom you have no shot of ending it "well".
jrralls wrote:Nevin73 wrote:Also Rome. Without Rome there would have been no GoT.
As much as I love Rome (it’s on my top ten tv shows of all time list) it just was never popular enough to be like GoT.
Rome might be my favorite show of all time. But they had to cram *everything* into the 2nd season. I really wonder what might have been...
My point was that Rome helped lay the groundwork in depicting sex, violence, and historical detail that infused a lot of GoT. Sadly, no, it was never as popular.
I don't buy that. All those actors and staff were paid for their time and efforts and they don't get a pass just because they worked hard.
A pass from what? What crime did they commit that they need a "pass" from? I have my problems with Season 8, and from what I can tell, Sophie Turner caused exactly zero of them, let alone the veritable army of set designers, makeup artists, costumers, grips, etc.
It's possible to recognize the incredible talent and hard work of the cast and crew while also recognizing that storytelling decisions made several levels above them were maybe not the greatest.
I finally got a chance to digest the finale.
THE GOOD
-House Bronn's Unicorn sigil and motto "Friendship and Magic are Magic"
-Direwolves riding on Dragons
-The food fight
-Jon's bong
-Heist scene was tense
-Arya's horse from previous episode turning out to be Jaqen
THE BAD
-Kit seemed sad IRL and I want him to be happy.
-They met a ghost named Direwolf and that seemed like a confusing choice
-Drogon keeps leaving coffee cups in scenes where they wouldn't make sense, but not in scenes where they would fit in seamlessly
-The part where Jaqen forgot to remove his horse mask and it seemed like it was a weird Bojack Horseman / Game of Thrones crossever event and frankly I wasn't ready
Yeah Rome is definitely one of the "prerequisite" shows for GoT to succeed... "period" costume drama with lots of sexy violent intrigue. Maybe also The Tudors?
"Cripples and bastards and broken things": Why the "Game of Thrones" ending was nearly perfect
"Game of Thrones" ended as it began, subverting the chivalric tradition for a more progressive medieval fantasy
But "Game of Thrones" turns this tradition on its head by offering Bran not as a symbol of the waste land, but as a corrective. His impotence and disability isn't a problem, but, as Tyrion suggests, a solution, an opportunity to break the cycle of hereditary monarchy and move, however incrementally, into a better, more just future. Instead of presiding over a collapsing world, Bran's reign starts as spring visibly returns.
This doesn't make sense because they've setup the mother of all succession wars when Bran dies. This is the same problem all countries all over the real world have. If you have a strong leader and not a strong system, you will have problems when that leader is gone. You have to have a strong system, which they did not setup at the end. They all just laughed at the idea of the strong system.
Also..
Am I the only one who got really excited for a fraction of a second when it seemed like Jon might turn and join Dani? I mean, I knew deep inside that he wouldn't, 'since that would be a super interesting twist, but man.. for just a moment...
I also didn't know for a second if Dany hadn't stabbed him.
I thought her finally doing away with him and embracing the power of the Dark Side on her fully operational dragon would have aligned with Ramsay's "If you think this has a happy ending..." prophecy.
Yeah we actually asked who stabbed who? here when watching. There was a moment when maybe...
Oh well.
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