OT: Spoiler Alert [Spoiler Alert ((Spoiler Alert))] (The Newly Annual Non-Pens Media Thread)

[CheckingLineCenter]

Spoiler: Got

By Itself, that episode was ****ing great. Amazing cinematically and had me feeling angry/sad. As part of a series, way to butcher Jamies Story line. Also while the "mad queen" was teased/hinted this did come out of nowhere. I get that she was angry about missandie and Rhaeghal, but her whole shtick was freeing people. Also whats with the crossbow things? Make them OP as **** when you need them, then make a 100 of them utterly useless.

Spoiler: GoT

I think the “freeing” stuff was part red herring, part real -she wanted to help people, and part plot advancement (needed armies, shelter, etc). Deep down she was always a conqueror though. Came to foreign lands and won them. And that is kinda the point. The chaos of dictatorship/ your candidate vs my candidate.... all the people who seek personal power and the Iron Throne in the show have turned out to be “bad”.

Ned, John, even Robb shied away from their positions and were “voted” into their roles (esp the 2 Kings In the North). Kind of why I think if they do wrap it up with a more happy ending I think they’ll be setting up a republic or democracy of some sort.

Could not agree more that this season has been executed really poorly though.[\spoiler]

 

[CheckingLineCenter]

And I’ll default to what I always do when it comes to TV. Name me a good final season. I can think of maybe two off the top of my head.

Breaking Bad I liked the ending of.

 

[Gurglesons]

Breaking Bad I liked the ending of.

The last season as a whole was hit or miss for me. Some great episodes tho.

 

[Randy Butternubs]

The last season as a whole was hit or miss for me. Some great episodes tho.

Rian Johnson is a genius.

 

[Honour Over Glory]

I've been re-reading the GOT books and the other stories attached to this whole thing. People have built up this monument in their minds of what GRRM supposedly accomplished in their minds and the show.

A group give him far too much credit for the great seasons, but also forget that his books aren't amazing and are often times lost in its own world and grandeur.

Then there's a group that think D&D are crap and only ever got anything right because GRRM was hand holding them, but forgetting that a lot of it was the 3 of them creating all of this together.

It was rushed, yeah, no clue why they would want to do these long episodes and then continue to have filler in them, but there's also a huge group of people that literally gave up on this show from Season 5 & 6 and then came back for Season 7's hype by binging though 5 & 6 to catch up and now...kind of regretting it but also remembering that this show doesn't even hold a candle to Rome and people have over hyped the crap out of it since it's inception claiming it to be genius writing.

Rian Johnson is a genius.

I mean he's not, but ok.

I forgot Breaking Bad was all of 3 episodes that made it what it was.

Everyone, f*** the rest of that show, just watch those 3 episodes, it's all you need!

Also, watch Looper for that weird upper lip that JGL has for whatever reason to make himself look more like Bruce in a convoluted movie made by a genius.

 

[HandshakeLine]

Rome is up there with Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, etc. as one of the GOAT shows. It's a shame we only got two seasons, though. I really wanted to see more of Titus Pullo with his

Spoiler

illegitimate noble son

.

 

[Peat]

I love when people who obviously don't have a clue about
writing criticize people for criticizing poor writing and storytelling. This is most easily detectable in "it's a fantasy show" type of statements, as if that gives license to anything that shows up on screen. It doesn't.

Stories create their own rules and must abide by them. Plots have to progress in a way that makes sense unto themselves. Even in fantasy, things must stay grounded, else the audience will lose their suspension of disbelief.

*Especially* Fantasy. The element of unreality in speculative fiction demands greater internal consistency than reality. That is a truth that has been hammered home by so many of the genre's greats - which is what makes my twitter feed full of fantasy authors bringing it up all the more WTF.

Personally I think the whole "It's a Fantasy Show" has become a shorthand for "I didn't have problems with that and don't want to read or respond to your problems so I'll ridicule them anyway I can, regardless of logic, so I can ignore them".

And just this season she killed the Tully’s for no reason.

They’ve been making her out as someone that was going to do this for a long time. I dunno. Culture of outrage and all that.

It’s TV. It’s been entertaining. Not a total home run, but with all the characters I didn’t expect it to be.

I mean, when you saw this was the last season and there were only six episodes didn’t you assume like one or two would be what we just saw play out?

And I’ll default to what I always do when it comes to TV. Name me a good final season. I can think of maybe two off the top of my head.

East Bound and Down and the Shield.

Just because you see it coming doesn't make it okay! And, personally, it doesn't entertain in the way it did, or the books do - although Episode 5 was the first one of the series I mostly enjoyed.

Which is low-key why I love the John Wick movies- they rely very VERY heavily on old-school stunts and fight choreography, so even when the films ask you to imagine that every person in Manhattan is really a highly-trained, heavily armed assassin, you can kind of roll with it. Plus, the location scouting for that franchise is out of this world-- nothing's green-screened in, just lots of innovative lighting and set design in real locations.

I'll have to add them to my "To Watch List"


Incidentally, if anyone here likes Cop dramas and doesn't mind limey accents, watch Line of Duty as and when it becomes available in the States. The season finale was nigh perfect.

 

[Ogrezilla]

@Honour Over Glory I just want to say that I enjoy you criticizing people who are being overly critical of GoT for the pure irony of it all. I'm not saying you're even wrong, it's just funny to have flipped sides of the argument we've had 100 times

Overall my problem is just how much they have changed what the show is. Whether it's worse or not can be debated, but I don't know how anyone can argue that the overall writing style of the show is still the same as it was early on. It's a way different pace with a far greater focus on spectacle than on the characters.

I don't at all fault them for diverging from what books 4 and 5 are (they would be bad TV for sure), but I think they've gone too far the other way.

 

[Randy Butternubs]

I mean he's not, but ok.

I forgot Breaking Bad was all of 3 episodes that made it what it was.

Everyone, **** the rest of that show, just watch those 3 episodes, it's all you need!

Also, watch Looper for that weird upper lip that JGL has for whatever reason to make himself look more like Bruce in a convoluted movie made by a genius.

 

[xlm34]

I've been re-reading the GOT books and the other stories attached to this whole thing. People have built up this monument in their minds of what GRRM supposedly accomplished in their minds and the show.

A group give him far too much credit for the great seasons, but also forget that his books aren't amazing and are often times lost in its own world and grandeur.

Then there's a group that think D&D are crap and only ever got anything right because GRRM was hand holding them, but forgetting that a lot of it was the 3 of them creating all of this together.

It was rushed, yeah, no clue why they would want to do these long episodes and then continue to have filler in them, but there's also a huge group of people that literally gave up on this show from Season 5 & 6 and then came back for Season 7's hype by binging though 5 & 6 to catch up and now...kind of regretting it but also remembering that this show doesn't even hold a candle to Rome and people have over hyped the crap out of it since it's inception claiming it to be genius writing.


I mean he's not, but ok.

I forgot Breaking Bad was all of 3 episodes that made it what it was.

Everyone, **** the rest of that show, just watch those 3 episodes, it's all you need!

Also, watch Looper for that weird upper lip that JGL has for whatever reason to make himself look more like Bruce in a convoluted movie made by a genius.

Agreed on GRRM. He has so many loose ends to tie up and only two books to do it.

 

[Ogrezilla]

Agreed on GRRM. He has so many loose ends to tie up and only two books to do it.

yeah the books have the exact opposite problem of the show.

 

[Peat]

@Honour Over Glory I just want to say that I enjoy you criticizing people who are being overly critical of GoT for the pure irony of it all. I'm not saying you're even wrong, it's just funny to have flipped sides of the argument we've had 100 times

Overall my problem is just how much they have changed what the show is. Whether it's worse or not can be debated, but I don't know how anyone can argue that the overall writing style of the show is still the same as it was early on. It's a way different pace with a far greater focus on spectacle than on the characters.

I don't at all fault them for diverging from what books 4 and 5 are (they would be bad TV for sure), but I think they've gone too far the other way.

Yup. It's like they started with doing The Godfather and they're now doing Transformers.

 

[HandshakeLine]

Hot take: A Song of Fire and Ice is a vastly inferior work to Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun which would make for an AMAZING show, if you got a good director for it.

 

[Ogrezilla]

Hot take: A Song of Fire and Ice is a vastly inferior work to Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun which would make for an AMAZING show, if you got a good director for it.

Yeah but you mixed up ice and fire so your opinion is disqualified. Do your writers even know what they're doing?

 

[HandshakeLine]

Yeah but you mixed up ice and fire so your opinion is disqualified. Do your writers even know what they're doing?

They're currently on smoke break. I've gained sentience!

 

[HandshakeLine]

But no, seriously. I think we're ready for a story about a possibly insane man from the Guild of Torturers in future Buenos Aires.

 

[Peat]

Hot take: A Song of Fire and Ice is a vastly inferior work to Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun which would make for an AMAZING show, if you got a good director for it.

Apples and pears; they're very different takes on fantasy with different audiences. But it would be good show material. I only made it through one book as the prose is really tough work, but I can easily imagine it as a show.

 

[HandshakeLine]

Apples and pears; they're very different takes on fantasy with different audiences. But it would be good show material. I only made it through one book as the prose is really tough work, but I can easily imagine it as a show.

Yeah, Wolfe is the closest thing Sci-Fi ever had to Melville. But visually, it would be stunning. And the plot is super interesting, once you figure out the language.

 

[Peat]

Yeah, Wolfe is the closest thing Sci-Fi ever had to Melville. But visually, it would be stunning. And the plot is super interesting, once you figure out the language.

Well, the good news is that now Wolfe is dead, it's more likely to be looked at since there'll be no pesky author to say things like "You'll just get it wrong so stick your money elsewhere".

There's a lot of old school fantasy that I think would make better TV that some of the weighty modern epics they're looking at - more visually weird, more contained in story - shame there's just not as much interest in them.

 

[MartinS82]

My only issue is that it took 3 seasons to defeat Ramsay Bolton, but the larger villians are taken care of in about 1/2 an episode. The last few seasons are just....rushed (story wise). I have no real problem with where the characters eventually ended up.

Also, Drogon roasted Tarley's (Sam's family) not Tulley's (Catelyn's family). Just nitpicking there @pixiesfanyo.

 

[DanielPlainview]

The writers' obsession with the Bolton's was odd. They spent an enormous amount of time on Theon's torture and Ramsay being a psychopath at the expense of other, more important things.

The bad writing didn't begin this season, it's been on-going. It's just reached new levels of suck this season. It's really a shame that HBO let these guys tarnish a series that would have been archived, alongside The Wire and the Sopranos, as another HBO contribution to the short list of best TV series of all-time.

 

[HandshakeLine]

Apples and pears; they're very different takes on fantasy with different audiences. But it would be good show material. I only made it through one book as the prose is really tough work, but I can easily imagine it as a show.

I think the whole Dying Earth subgenre of sci-fi is an amazing idea that should be more often considered than generic medieval fantasy settings precisely because you can have both hard sci-fi elements and fantasy elements. The last media property to try this was that video game Torment: Tides of Numenara which had a great setting but kinda terrible, linear gameplay, and that's a real shame.

(For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, Jack Vance wrote a series of books about a far future earth, where the sun is dying and technology and magic are virtually indistiguishable because so many civilizations have come and gone, forgetting much of what came before, while retaining some of the higher technologies and mystical techniques. Other writers like Clark Ashton Smith and Gene Wolfe have done some excellent work in this setting.)

 

[HandshakeLine]

The writers' obsession with the Bolton's was odd. They spent an enormous amount of time on Theon's torture and Ramsay being a psychopath at the expense of other, more important things.

The bad writing didn't begin this season, it's been on-going. It's just reached new levels of suck this season. It's really a shame that HBO let these guys tarnish a series that would have been archived, alongside The Wire and the Sopranos, as another HBO contribution to the short list of best TV series of all-time.

Strokes and folks, I guess. I liked the first couple of seasons, but I never felt like even at its peak GoT was up there with Rome, The Wire, or the Sopranos, but maybe a rewatch in a year or two will prove me wrong. Lord knows it's happened before.

 

[Shwag33]

Strokes and folks, I guess. I liked the first couple of seasons, but I never felt like even at its peak GoT was up there with Rome, The Wire, or the Sopranos, but maybe a rewatch in a year or two will prove me wrong. Lord knows it's happened before.

I'm only 2 episodes into season 7, but I noticed a big drop off after the red wedding. I'm sure the farther they get away from the source material the worse it gets. The show feels very average at this after being really good.

 

[MartinS82]

Am I the only one that likes the Fargo TV series? It's got its kooky elements, but overall I really like it. Billy Bob's character in season 1 is fantastic.