Ever the class act, Peter Dinklage defends Game Of Thrones’ final season
“Game of Thrones wasn’t really a TV show — it was like my life”
Aux News Peter Dinklage
Promoting his new film, Cyrano, Peter Dinklage is, once again, forced to reckon with the last time he played a character with a very specific nose (though, he avoided the prosthetics both times0, Tyrion Lannister of Game Of Thrones. It’s been more than two years since one of the most popular shows of the 2010s ended with a backlash so loud that the show’s creators opted not to make a Star Wars trilogy.
Fan backlash is nothing new, especially on a show that prided itself on side-stepping expectations or easy answers. But Game Of Thrones’ final season is still a sore spot for many fans, some of whom still want a re-do of the finale.
This doesn’t surprise Dinklage, who tells The New York Times that the backlash comes from a lack of more Game Of Thrones. But Dinklage, for his part, is at peace with it because “it was the right time,” and he didn’t “want to wear out your welcome” before conceding that he’s “not sure that show could have.” After all, he described, “Game Of Thrones wasn’t really a TV show — it was like my life.”
Ultimately, saying goodbye isn’t easy, and Dinklage believes that at least some of the backlash owes itself to fans being angry that the show was over. “They wanted more,” he said, “so they backlashed about that.”
Dinklage also concedes that some of the criticism may come from the show’s surprise heel turn, which he notes was a theme George R.R. Martin baked into the text:
We had to end when we did, because what the show was really good at was breaking preconceived notions: Villains became heroes, and heroes became villains. If you know your history, when you track the progress of tyrants, they don’t start off as tyrants. I’m talking about, spoiler alert, what happened at the end of “Game of Thrones” with that character change. It’s gradual, and I loved how power corrupted these people. What happens to your moral compass when you get a taste of power? Human beings are complicated characters, you know?
It’s hard not to see his point, even if the final season tended to rush the outcome, taking some last-minute shortcuts to hammer home its themes. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of maligned pop culture properties that became the object of fan hate simply for digging their heels into their artistic vision, denying viewers a clear-cut happy ending.
“They wanted the pretty white people to ride off into the sunset together,” he said. “No, but the show subverts what you think, and that’s what I love about it. Yeah, it was called Game of Thrones, but at the end, the whole dialogue when people would approach me on the street was, ‘Who’s going to be on the throne?’ I don’t know why that was their takeaway because the show really was more than that.”
Despite Martin’s pleading with HBO for more seasons of the hit series based on his works, Dinklage seems content with the finale, insisting the creators crafted a show “where you thought one thing and they delivered another.”
“One of my favorite moments was when the dragon burned the throne because it sort of just killed that whole conversation, which is really irreverent and kind of brilliant on behalf of the show’s creators: ‘Shut up, it’s not about that.’”
246 Comments
A valiant effort, Sir Dinklage.
Yay.Another article about Game of Thrones where some people will say it was terrible, some will say it was fine, and totally watchable if messy.And others will come in talking about how no one talks about the show anymore and this will be the most read and commented on article that isn’t a currently running Marvel or Star Wars story. And House of Dragons will rate when it premieres.Ahh, the internet ShrugsAside: final season is fine. Easily rewatchable. Stuff I’d change, stuff I love.
“Oh, yawn, here’s meta-commentary about how this will go as a bunch of idiots argue about their obvious opinions.By the way, here’s my obvious opinion.”
Is that not what qualifies me to be a modern AVClub and Television writer?Comment on the trope and then do the trope anyway.
Hmm, that’s a good point.
What make this sense?
a bunch of idiots argue about their obvious opinionsThe AV Club
About here is where a commenter should state they don’t care about this topic so much they bothered to log on and say so.
Obvious opinions need the most attention.
your comment, somehow, is even worse
Obligatory “I didn’t watch this show”.
You wanna talk about South Park now?
Can you believe Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air?
Every year it’s the same thing. Dredge out those tired old songs, fat man comes down chimney and eats cookies, couple of turtledoves and wassailing, wassailing and more wassailing. Yawn.
Too cool for yule.
Don’t be hating on wassailing! Wassailing is my life. WTF is wassailing?
I love the people that continue to talk about the show ‘no one talks anymore.’ They say they hate the show, but it has gotten under their skin. Bad works of art don’t get such reactions. Bad works of art get forgotten.
“Bad works of art get forgotten.” You must not have read yesterday’s Nathan Rabin article about Studio 60.
Counterpoint: Neil Breen. Horrible films, lunatic filmmaker. Also unforgettable.
Warhol’s later exhibits got pretty lame and derivative, didn’t’ they?
“Bad works of art don’t get such reactions. Bad works of art get forgotten.”This isn’t even remotely accurate.Exhibit A from recent memory: The Rise of Skywalker which is still notable from how it was received (not at all well) but there’s plenty more going back over the years than just that one.
Okay, let me make an addendum. I wasn’t talking about the recent spade of woke remakes where the anger primarily comes from lazily trashing an established francise while shoehorning in an extremely sanctimonious ideology in the process. This is a new, specific and easily identifiable phenomenon to which Game of Thrones doesn’t belong, certainly not after in which direction they chose to take one of the greatest powerful female characters in history.
Let’s look at some widely acknowledged bad works of art and how they were received: The Star Wars prequels, The Matrix sequels, Hobbit trilogy, The Ghostbusters sequel, later seasons of the Simpsons or just about any other show that gradually tapered off in quality. Did you have hordes of people angrily demanding George Lucas or Peter Jackson never work again?
No, and the reason is simple. These were unsuccessful attempts at pandering. This is completely forgivable in the eyes of the masses, and they will gladly give an established and beloved artist several more tries to get it right before tiring of him completely. No, D&D did something else entirely. They REFUSED to pander. This was unforgivable!
Ergo, ‘Game of Thrones’ is thrown into the same lot as ‘How I Met Your Mother’ where, again, people were glad the writers never found work again. I never imagined it, but the people making the movie ‘The Player’ turned out to be completely correct in the way people want their endings.
Honestly, after RoS first came out and the immediate discussion died down, I haven’t really seen anybody talk about it. Instead, it’s all arguments about episode 8 or the prequels, *0r* discussion about the franchise as a whole (which usually centers on discussion of episode 8 or the prequels).
Same here. Also how I feel about “The Rise of Skywalker.”
Dear Tormented Thoughts: Last four episodes sucked the ass. Stuff you’d change, stuff you loved mmmm…nah, sucked the ass.
Well, at least we’re not talking about Firefly anymore.
in other words the AVC did their paid promo for GoT nicely
“They wanted the pretty white people to ride off into the sunset together,” Everyone knows the best way to convince people of something is to insult them by painting them all as a ridiculous stereotype.
Everyone knows the best way to convince people of something is to insult them by painting them all as a ridiculous stereotype.
you’re describing the AV Club house style
Ironically it was the Unsullied who rode off into the sunset and that ending both blew and they weren’t white.
From what I’ve heard, aren’t the Unsullied all going to an island full of killer butterflies which kill all outsiders with a deadly disease they have no immunity to ? (Though apparently that’s only mentioned in the book -still in that case if you don’t directly contradict that mention that’s in the source material … well …).——Disclaimer I’m putting at the end of every comment I’m making on this thread: I’ve never seen the show but the commentary about its implosion at the end fascinating. Having been through something comparable with the final season and end of Battlestar Galactica, I can relate.
It also makes no real sense within the context of the show itself, which was almost entirely white. Even then, many of the complaints were not about a couple not running off together, unless you count Brienne and Jaime, which is partly the show’s fault for rushing a sexual relationship between them and then ending it in the crassest way possible. The complaints about Dany’s fate were largely not based on her not having a man – they were based in large part on how badly done the setup was.
Yeah the fact that Tyrion had to deliver a speech going “of course it was obvious she was going to go bad!” tells you how…not obvious it was.
Except it totally was, IN RETROSPECT. That’s the point. They were disguising the heel turn while at the same time making it obvious in retrospect. Rewatch the S1 episode “A Golden Crown”, especially the end, and tell me that those seeds weren’t planted from the very beginning. Locking people in the vault in Qarth, crucifying the Masters in Meereen without bothering to discover who was actually at fault or if there was even an internal dispute, threatening to raze cities TWICE before actually doing so and only being talked down by her advisors. Dany’s heel turn is literally one of the best heel turns ever set up in fiction, it’s not the writers’ fault that most audiences are deeply stupid.
You’re right, a series where multiple people end up becoming something totally different than the person who they started as simply has ‘stupid’ readers if they expect the character growth shown onscreen to…not revert all the way back to that character’s initial introduction.
One, it’s not readers it’s viewers here. I read the books, just like I read Wheel of Time, but the show Game of Thrones is a different thing from ASOIAF, just as the WoT show is different from the books. The knowledge of one can be interesting to compare to the other, but canonically they aren’t the same and can’t be treated the same. Two, don’t blow smoke. Neither you nor anyone thought Dany was a villain at that point. Again, it’s brilliantly setup both for its retrospective clarity and the fact that it took a retrospective to really see it. Tyrion’s monologue is brilliant because it displays the theme of how belief (in this case, audience expectation) informs how we see someone rather than in any kind of skeptical or pragmatic sense. Here we forgave Dany her excesses because she killed evil people and hated slavery.
She didn’t have character growth into being a hero, she was NEVER a hero. Not. Ever. That’s the point.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. In fact I think it’s a message that a lot of people hate because it says if you believe in Bernie or Trump or anyone in between you are wrong. I find that position to be interesting and satisfying from a thematic perspective but I suspect most people don’t.
“One, it’s not readers it’s viewers here”Not with two walls of text it ain’t.
Ah, yes, ye olde “wall of text” criticism. Cool, cool. That’s always relevant and engaging, especially on a site like this devoted to media analysis. Have fun with that.
And for others, again, this is all subverting the IDEA of narrative arcs. It’s calling BS on Darth Vader’s redemption, it’s calling BS on Aragorn’s becoming a good ruler just because he was a heroic warrior, it’s calling BS on the general model of seeking a *person* to fix things. The reason Bran ends up as King has absolutely nothing to do with his abilities and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that he’s not cruel and he can’t have children and Tyrion needs to trick everyone into abolishing the hereditary monarchy as an institution. I don’t think people are stupid for not liking it, I think people are stupid for not grasping that this is what the story is doing thematically and narratively. It’s the kind of story most people don’t like because they don’t like having their ideas of how things should be subverted, or really having to examine them at all. I can forgive that, but not even getting it is just eyerollingly foolish.
Jesus, you ARE fucking stupid.
If you actually read the book, she never locked anybody in a vault. In fact, the guy was just a rich asshole who wanted to marry her for status and had nothing to do with her dragons being stolen. Her handmaiden who betrayed her in the show had died in the desert long before they even got to Meereen.
Yet those things happened in the TV show, which is what is being discussed. We won’t know where she winds up in the books, because GRRM will never, ever write them.
I read the books, but none of that is relevant to the show criticism. At all. Shows and books are different things, both aesthetically and canonically. You may have also missed that while the Seven in the books are a quasi-Catholic Trinity deal of multiple aspects of the same entity in the show it is a clear polytheism as contrasted against R’hllor aka The Lord of Light. The events of the show inform the characters of the show. Now, having read the books, I’m also 99 percent sure Dany is headed for a heel turn. But in the universe of the show it’s extra super obvious in retrospect.
I don’t disagree that the heel turn was coming. It’s just the show lacked the context and buildup to earn it. Try as you might, trying to argue that rightfully killing slavers somehow leads to the mass murder of smallfolk is not a good justification for a heel turn. Hell are we gonna forget that Tyrion literally burned people alive during the Battle of the Blackwater and that was ok but when Dany does it everyone’s thinking about the Geneva Covention?
‘Try as you might, trying to argue that rightfully killing slavers somehow leads to the mass murder of smallfolk is not a good justification for a heel turn.’
Yeah, because people who are cruel totally have a switch to make sure they’re only ever cruel towards the ‘right’ kind of people. All revolutions started by killing the bad people and then…. nothing ever bad happened and only the bad people were killed. /s
‘’Hell are we gonna forget that Tyrion literally burned people alive during the Battle of the Blackwater and that was ok but when Dany does it everyone’s thinking about the Geneva Covention?’’
Now you’re just being facetious. You gonna in all seriousness compare morally a defensive measure within a defensive war with a genocide committed during a war of conquest?
Yep. I cannot grasp how anyone thought that the woman who never saw a problem she didn’t want to set on fire would, at the end of the day, do anything less than set everything on fire. Maybe it’s because I didn’t start watching the series until the final season had begun, and therefore Dany’s various atrocities were compressed for me, but her final turn seemed to me to be well signposted.
The issue is that with every single one of those, there was an internal logic driving her, an overly-violent “ends justify the means” approach to justice by which she viciously stomped out those she viewed as victimizing the poor, the weak, and the downtrodden. The latter part of that is just as important to her characterization as the first part: her violent temper had a consistent motivation.The show tried to ease into things by pulling back on the latter portion, keeping the temper while shifting her motivation toward a petty need for admiration, but it started too late and happened too abruptly.There’s a reason people saw Dany turning from the very beginning (as you said, the seeds were planted long ago) while still feeling let down when it actually happened (her violent nature got adequate development, but the balance of “rigid sense of justice” versus “pathological need for affection” was all off going into the final season).
I think the difference is if you are able to look back retrospectively and realize the “sense of justice” was always secondary and always really about a single injustice, slavery and that because she personally related to it in having never been in control of her own life. Which is good so far as it goes, she should hate slavery, everyone should hate slavery. But, critically, she still threatened to destroy Meereen, Astapor, and Yunkai which would have brought disaster to rich and poor alike, and only didn’t because she was talked down. She still brutally killed Mirri Maz Duur because Mirri took the same kind of vengeance that the audience chears Arya for taking. She didn’t stop the Dothraki from destroying the Lamb Men and selling them into slavery because that was going to help her get to and conquer Westeros. Again, Tyrion’s nearly 4th Wall breaking monologue to Jon comes into play. He’s literally contextualizing what you saw to try to break through protagonist centered morality with which many consume media (how many of us have seen people defending Walter White online?) She kills evil people because evil isn’t a monolith. BUT the Family Unfriendly Aesop there is that NO ONE who believes they are the moral arbiter society can be trusted because once you are there that attitude and lack of skepticism/self reflection becomes a delimiter on the kinds of actions you can take. The show has her believe in a sense of justice and believe for herself that’s what she’s doing because it’s necessary for the ethic of the show which is against believing in people like that even if they’ve otherwise appeared to be fighting against the right people. Again, I don’t think a lot of people are on board with the themes of the show, and that’s fine. It’s a narrative with an endgame that was never going to be to a lot of people’s liking. But I think critiquing it as though it’s a traditional fantasy narrative, as many do (“they ruined Jaime’s redemption arc! Dany suddenly became a villain! Bran shouldn’t be king!”) is an absolutely ridiculous position to take and shows not that the critic disagreed with the point, but that they missed the point.
BUT the Family Unfriendly Aesop there is that NO ONE who believes they
are the moral arbiter society can be trusted because once you are there
that attitude and lack of skepticism/self reflection becomes a delimiter
on the kinds of actions you can take. The show has her believe in a
sense of justice and believe for herself that’s what she’s doing because
it’s necessary for the ethic of the show which is against believing in
people like that even if they’ve otherwise appeared to be fighting
against the right people.
My issue isn’t that she turned out to not be a protagonist, or that she went from righteous to unrighteous. Her morality was always questionable at best and her methods were undeniably brutal (which, again, is why so many predicted that she would ultimately be the villain).My issue is that her heel-turn didn’t happen as a natural evolution of the motivations she’d been displaying up to that point, but as a rather abrupt shift in them that the suddenly-condensed timeline wasn’t able to fully develop. It felt like we’d been seeing her holding Chekhov’s Gun for seven seasons, only for her to stab someone in season eight instead. Yeah, she still killed someone like we expected, but the approach just didn’t mesh in the final portrayal.I have no problem with any of the plot beats in season eight. Dany burning King’s Landing, Jon killing her, Bran becoming king, Arya killing the Night King… all totally fine. But with each of those, it felt like we got about 90% of the way to fully setting them up before saying “okay, y’all see where this is going, let’s wrap things up and get out of here.” Yes, I see the intended arcs, but none of them feel earned because the storytelling got sloppy at the end and started relying on shorthand to communicate things that would have taken multiple episodes earlier in the series.
I’m going to agree with you aesthetically, I am 100% in agreement that from an artistic perspective the last two seasons were rushed and should have had more time to breathe. Where I take issue is the idea that the bad artistic decision somehow invalidates the prior six seasons of groundwork. It doesn’t. What it DOES do it turn what should have been the A+ deconstructionist masterpiece we all reference for the next generation into a B+ competent deconstructionist work that functions but made poor aesthetic decisions in its final stretch.
I’m gonna echo what I said to someone else recently on another GoT thread: I absolutely agree that a significant portion of the show’s detractors had a problem with Dany turning evil and there’s no way it could’ve been done that would satisfy them. And there are definitely reasons why ‘But she only killed bad people before!’ is a pretty lame response to that. You’re also right that a lot of the critiques came from a traditional fantasy narrative lens (I’d defend over the validity of some of them, to an extent, but whatever).
But. The main issue, here, is the utter lack of impetus for her to burn King’s Landing. I also linked this article in my last post:https://deadspin.com/a-better-way-game-of-thrones-could-have-arrived-at-this-1834720538The alternative version of events outlined in this article would resolve pretty much every point of disagreement that you and the others on this thread or having. But the show needed Dany to turn/reveal herself as being irredeemably awful by the finale, with no room for ambivalence on Jon or Tyrion’s part, so they could wrap everything up. While you’re right that Dany’s bad side has always been on display, the problem is that it has always been in response to something – that she has always responded to threats/obstacles with (literal) scorched-earth tactics. The same is true of most evil and/or power-hungry people. Really, the show didn’t need to do a whole lot to justify Dany’s decision to burn the city – the article above is just one example. It just needed to show, somehow, that the citizenry of King’s Landing had become a threat to her rule. Maybe one of them throws a stone at her, or something. Maybe they fail to greet her as a liberator and instead meet her with mistrust.Deconstruction can be used as a defense for certain things, but I think bad storytelling isn’t one of them. I sympathize with your point here, somewhat: for instance, I happen to think the much-maligned Architect scene from the Matrix Reloaded is a brilliant moment of deconstruction, but I also have to acknowledge that it fails within the context of the movie and so I can’t really use deconstruction as a shield for it when someone tells me they think it sucks.
Thank you. THIS is a response to how well they do or do not do the deconstruction of the tropes they are aiming at. I think this is a place we’re going to run into Your Mileage May Vary. Because I agree the specific moment where Dany decides to burn King’s Landing could have been staged better. Emilia does everything she can with it, but it does need something else. (BTW, I’ve seen that article and I think it’s pretty dumb and needlessly complicated).
I suspect (though obviously there’s no way to know) that the showrunners didn’t quite trust the audience far enough to have Dany respond to, say, the city not surrendering. That’s your easy response. There’s no surrender but the Unsullied and Northerers together can conquer the city without help, but Dany still burns the city. THAT’s the best narrative choice for her doing the horrific thing she did.
But I think the showrunners might have worried, not without reason (see, e.g. the United States in 2016, also Jan 6 2020) that the audience would side with Dany in that case. Now I think that still would have been the stronger choice, but I understand why they didn’t (see also White, Walter).
So I agree that the staging of the moment itself had better options, but I don’t agree that the awkwardness of that somehow wipes out the prior 7 seasons or the power of the deconstruction itself.
(Also, The Architect is the BEST part of The Matrix: Reloaded. The problem is that the action and SFX become self indulgent, not the plotting or mythology.)
It’s interesting – I recently watched a Youtube vid called ‘The hypocrisy of the Sopranos’ Core N’grato scene.’ IDK if you know the scene itself, but reading the comments on the clip of the original scene, it is astonishing how many people are passionately defending the mafia in the comments. I don’t know why, but this example really struck home to me how powerful the protagonist effect is to certain viewers. Before then I’d probably have disagreed with you, but now I could actually kind of believe that audiences might side with Dany even when she burns an entire city full of children down (the only catch being that when obviously evil characters are defended by audiences, they’re almost always male).Honestly, though, I think the rushing of S7-S8 really is the original sin here. The problem with the article’s version of events (which I think is pretty good, even if the article itself has some problems) is that having things go down that way would, perhaps, still leave wiggle room for Jon and Tyrion to want to reason with her. But because there’s only 1 episode left they NEED her to be murderably evil by the end of it – which can only be achieved by her senselessly burning of the city, as opposed to burning it out of fear, panic, heartbreak, grief etc. And I think you kind of encounter the same problem if there’s no surrender – it’s not so much that the audience can’t justify it, but the show would have a harder time justifying Tyrion and Jon plotting to murder her because of it (bearing in mind that, from a utilitarian perspective, she’s also saved the entire continent against the White Walkers).But I think if none of that ruins the show for you, that’s great. I don’t think it has for me either – not entirely, at least – and I can still remember it for what it was at its highest points. It’s just a bummer that the ending of the show didn’t live up to the rest of it.
Re: The Architect – I think we agree on the scene’s merit on some level, but not on the rest of Reloaded. My take on it is that it would’ve worked really, really well if it had stood out more strongly in contrast with the remainder of the movie. That way, it would work as a brutal showstopper rather than yet another long, wordy, philosophy-heavy conversational scene. And the Architect’s coldness and calculation, and the message of the scene – ‘Hey, you’ve been having fun here rebelling against the system, but now it’s time to get real and make some difficult choices. Also we’ve been playing you this entire time and you’re all fucked’ – would’ve been so much more impactful.
I entirely agree with you re: Reloaded. I don’t want to give the impression I don’t see the film’s myriad sins. Because damn. But I remember seeing it in my twenties and being deeply frustrated at all the philosophy/architect stuff, and rewatching a few months ago and realizing the Architect is the best (though flawed) part and the action scenes are a little long and indulgent.
For GoT I want to be clear, it IS NOT perfect. I wanted it to be because I love deconstructionist content, but it does drop the ball toward the end because of how rushed the final two seasons are.
Now for me, that does not invalidate S 1-6. It just means things weren’t done as well as they could have been at the end. And I absolutely thing everything flows from those seasons even if we think they could have been done better.
And that’s the issue. I think there’s a tendency to say “the whole project was for naught” and I do think a lot of that comes from most audiences not wanting to engage in deconstructionism. For those who are willing, I think the answer is it is a flawed but important part of the conversation.
Definitely agree re: audience responses to deconstructionist content, which is why I think the criticism that ‘Danaerys was all about freeing slaves and fighting oppression!’ ring hollow – the signs were there, but a lot of people just wanted their uncomplicated heroine to root for. And I also 100% agree with criticizing a work on its own terms rather than your own expectations (which I think is a lesson that certain critics could do with learning). My only caveats: I think there’s a certain validity to the idea of placing a strong emphasis on an ending, especially to serialized stories (even when people do get carried away sometimes when an ending disappoints). Also – I think art can be appreciated both viscerally and intellectually, and that we all do the former but only some people do the latter. So, I think it’s an inherent danger of deconstruction that you risk alienating those who experience art on a purely visceral level – and while those audiences can often be conservative/reactionary/anti-intellectual at times, there is a certain validity to their mode of experience as well. So while you and I can at least appreciate what GoT was trying to do, if the emotional/instinctual through-line isn’t there, those people are gonna end up feeling cheated (see also: HIMYM). Which is why it’s gotta be done well if you’re gonna do it – you can’t really take any shortcuts with deconstruction, which I think is what GoT was ultimately guilty of in its latter stages.
Hope that all makes sense. Also hope it doesn’t come across as hair-splitting or arguing for the sake of arguing – definitely not trying to contradict anything you’ve said, and I think there’s very little we disagree on in practice (it’s especially heartening to find someone who agrees on the Architect). Just wanted to offer a soft defense/explanation for those audiences who responded to the ending with such ire. In any case, Merry Christmas to you! Gotta check out for the night but will read/respond to any further replies as soon as I’m able.
Oh, I think the distance between our positions is minimal. I’m probably slightly more forgiving of the aesthetic storytelling errors of GoT than you are, but from where I stand that amounts to a rounding error.
I KNOW I come across aggressive on this subject, but it’s because in my experience there’s a LOT of non-thoughtful discourse here. I’m totally good with THOUGHTFUL discourse (as we’ve had here) even if I disagree with the other person. But there’s a lot of less than thoughtful discoure on this show particularly, and it’s become emblematic for me of an artifact people consume but don’t think about. Which is, admittedly, my issue more than anyone else’s.
‘So while you and I can at least appreciate what GoT was trying to do, if the emotional/instinctual through-line isn’t there, those people are gonna end up feeling cheated (see also: HIMYM). Which is why it’s gotta be done well if you’re gonna do it – you can’t really take any shortcuts with deconstruction, which I think is what GoT was ultimately guilty of in its latter stages.’
Well, this is something I have to vehemently disagree with. Neither GOT, not HIMYM took any shortcuts. What you call an ‘emotional/instinctual through-line’ is nothing more than an amalgam of tropes that the audiences have been trained to react to emotionally and instinctively, essentially a more refined version of ‘Two Minutes of Hate.’
Every bit of set-up was there, but the audience chose to ignore it. Dany literally burns an innocent person alive and feeds him to her dragons. Repeatedly says things like ‘They can live in my new world or die in the old world’ which if you didn’t know any better you’d think it was a remark by some villain. Constantly has to be talked down by her advisors from applying extreme violence. The audience CHOSE to ignore all of it! Why? Because she was their khaleesee!
Ditto when it comes to HIMYM. In ‘Vesuvius’ they even TELL the audience point blank that Tracy is gonna die and the audience still thinks they’re somehow talking about Ted’s mother!
As for the whole ‘validity to this perspective’ thing, something like 99% of all movies, shows and other works of art cater precisely to this perspective. You’ve got new shows coming out almost weekly that are nothing but cheap pandering. When’s the next GOT gonna come out? Nothing is even close. It’s extremely depressing to see something right up you alley get trashed not just once, but twice (GOT, HIMYM) by an enraged mob of ‘fans’ that has far many options that cater to them and thanks to them, few shows will be encouraged to daringly experiment in such a way in the future.
I’m not talking about either of those aspects of either show. Dany breaking bad was fine, but the lack of impetus in her specifically choosing to torch King’s Landing at that moment was not. The Mother in HIMYM dying was fine, but the manner in which it was handled in the finale was not (I’m not gonna go into specifics here though or we’ll be here all night).
When I say an emotional/instinct-level through line, I’m not talking about adhering to mainstream tropes or pandering to the audience. I’m talking about making her horrific action in ‘The Bells’ arise as a natural outgrowth of her character in a way that makes it recognizable to less theory-inclined audiences. There are reasons why this one moment, out of all the times GoT shockingly upended traditional fantasy conventions, receives such scorn whereas all the other moments – Ned’s death, the Red Wedding, the Mountain and the Viper, etc. – are praised.
When I say GoT took a shortcut, I’m not saying it failed to set up Dany’s rampage at King’s Landing – I’m saying it failed to connect that setup to the act itself. What all those examples of Dany’s past behavior that you mention tell me is: Yes, Dany would absolutely be willing to burn an entire city… if not doing so would damage her ambition/self-image. And yes, there is a difference between choosing the wrong option on this situation and massacring a population with no provocation. Thus, for this moment to work, she needs to be forced to choose between taking the moral high ground at a cost to her personal ambition or grandiose self-image, or committing an atrocity in order to gain/maintain power. (This is also the MO of practically every evil communist despot of the 20th century, who Danaerys’ arc seems to be heavily based on – Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Stalin etc. were first perceived as liberators/revolutionaries and turned out to be evil, but the acts they committed were fueled by extreme paranoia and a refusal to cede control to others. They were not just bloodthirsty maniacs who killed for fun a la Joffrey or Ramsay).
Having Dany do this at her moment of victory, unprovoked, does not follow as an outgrowth of her character. But it’s done because – as I’ve said – she needs to be unquestionably evil by the series finale so that Jon can justifiably murder her. That’s the shortcut.
I’ll skip over the side-discussions or we’ll be here all day and get to the meat of things:
1) ‘Yes, Dany would absolutely be willing to burn an entire city… if not doing so would damage her ambition/self-image.’
2) ‘[F]or this moment to work, she needs to be forced to choose between taking the moral high ground at a cost to her personal ambition or grandiose self-image, or committing an atrocity in order to gain/maintain power.’3) ‘Having Dany do this at her moment of victory, unprovoked, does not follow as an outgrowth of her character.’
Just these three sentences alone show me that you do not understand Dany’s character on anything other than a surface level. ST1 implies that Dany’s motivations are that of a ‘normal’ person, a person who is either well-meaning but prone to anger at an imperfect world due to her idealism OR a purely ambitious person who pursues their ambitions amorally. None of these are even close to acurrately describing Dany’s actual psychological make up or her motivations.
There is one scene and it is perhaps the most important scene in the entire show, that quite clearly exposes Dany’s psychology. It is the scene where she talks to Mirri one-on-one after Mirri ‘extracted her revenge’. The most telling aspect of this conversation is not Dany’s anger but that she still does NOT understand why Mirri would do such a thing. Though one could initially chalk it up to naivete, there is no lightbulb moment even after Mirri effectively tells her: ‘’You (plural) took everything I had and killed everyone I ever held dear. Thus, my life has no value anymore, so you can’t expect me to be grateful just for being ‘saved’.’’ She still doesn’t get it! Something that anyone with even a sliver of empathy would get, even if angry beyond measure. That’s because to Dany, Mirri was never a person, just a THING that was supposed to make her feel good for being so magnanimous. And once her human toy no longer worked as advertised, it was time to chuck it into the fire, and this becomes a recurring theme throughout the entire show!
We have a word for people who see other people not as people but things: psychopaths. Dany is a stone-cold psychopath.
Remember when everyone was criticising Emilia for her ‘wooden’ acting in the early seasons? She herself remarked how she felt constrained by the producers. There was always something off in the way Dany talked and emoted with other people, almost like you could never get a grasp on her internal world. In hindsight, her acting was completely fine, it’s just that she was not playing a normal person, but a psychopath.
And what are the two primary traits of psyhopaths that Dany quite clearly exhibits:
1) Sadism. The JOY of inflicting pain unto someone. Dany quite clearly takes unmistakable PLEASURE at other people suffering. Her eyes glaze with delight any time violence is being talked about or happening right in front of her. The look of pleasure is unmistakable.
2) An ego that primarily feeds on the emotional reactions of others. Dany wanted to be admired not because she is a people-pleaser, quite the contrary, but because it fed into her ego, i.e. how awesome she is. She spends literally the entire show building a narrative around herself with her awesome list of titles that would rival even Idi Amin’s precisely because of this.
So now you have the answers to all of your questions:
She doesn’t ultimately care about her self image. Whether people love her or fear her is really all the same to her as it feeds her ego equally. A wolf doesn’t concern himself with the opinion of the sheep, let alone a dragon. The only thing that happened in S8E5 was that the long-worn mask of hers finally fell off.
Ditto on her ‘ambitions.’ They, too, were a front all along. Even getting the Throne is just but a stepping stone to her further conquest. It didn’t satisfy her. She was never gonna be satisfied even when she conquered the entire planet, as there would always be a further level of compliance or degradation to extract.
Knowing Dany is a psychopath, the reasons for her rampage are now obvious. She believed she could achieve the same level of admiration necessary to her that she achieved in Mereen and using pretty much the same tactics. Instead, she got outplayed and outmanouvered time and time again, flustering her to no ends, a dangerous thing to do to a psychopath with dragons. Burning down KL was a punishment for the people of KL for not flocking to her right away and giving her the admiration she ‘justly deserved’ and a stirring message to everyone to never ever f*** with her again!
Now for me, that does not invalidate S 1-6.
At least in this particular discussion, I don’t think anybody has been arguing otherwise. The failures of seasons 7 and especially 8 only sting as much as they do because of the equivalent successes of the first six seasons. In fact, I get the sense that everyone more-or-less agrees on what the issues are, with the only real differing opinion being on how damaging those issues are.I view season eight as a promising rough draft: it really should have had another couple passes and more time allotted to fill in the shading and better connect some of the dots, but the core concepts are fine. And given the process of how the last few seasons had to be adapted compared to the earlier seasons (working from notes vs working from completed books), that’s not a terribly surprising result. The less material D&D had to draw from, the more they tended to struggle with the finer details.I think there’s really very little difference between your position, mine, and SoftSack’s.
Also, though I’m sure it wasn’t meant this way it just came across that way rhetorically, deconstruction isn’t just a defense. It is what the work is trying to do just as it’s what The Matrix trilogy is trying to do. We can debate how effectively it does that, as we’re doing here, but I think we can both agree any critique that comes at it by attacking how it doesn’t do traditional narrative expectations right is off base.
I don’t think the problem is merely aesthetic, because taking the time to examine motivations and consequences wasn’t just a surface element of the show’s deconstruction, it was the foundation upon which the deconstruction was built. It didn’t just point to Tolkien and go “nuh uh,” it explained and demonstrated in excruciating detail why “nuh uh.”
I’m sorry we’re just at an impasse. I just think you are completely and fatally incorrect. While the last two seasons are rushed and that’s an aesthetic problem, you really do have to ignore S1-6 to say that the final moves were unjustified. They were rushed, yes, but they absolutely flowed form what we had seen in the prior seasons. NOTHING came out of nowhere. Nothing. I’m on board with saying it could have been done better, but saying it came out of nowhere or wasn’t justified by the narrative strikes me as a response out of disappointment or anger.
And I’ve already said I was neither disappointed nor angry with the narrative beats, I just wish they were conveyed better. You can paint my reaction in whatever light you want, but I know what it actually was.
That’s fine, but I’ve shown in my reaction to others that I’m willing to engage in a discussion of how well it did what it actually was, and it’s fine to disagree on that. I don’t think you understand what deconstruction is, I don’t think you understand narrative build, and I don’t think you have a strong critique. I absolutely think your reaction is emotional.
Does that make me a smug or arrogant asshole? Probably. Do I care? Not in the slightest.
I don’t think you understand what deconstruction is, I don’t think you understand narrative build, and I don’t think you have a strong critique.
And I don’t think you’re willing to read critique of something you like, I think your last reply was unreasonably smug and condescending considering this back-and-forth has been impersonal and in good faith up to this point, and I think that indicates an emotional attachment on your end.The funniest thing about this is my initial, emotional response to season eight was a defense of it. I enjoyed what it did conceptually, so I ignored all the steps I had to fill in to get it there, and for a year I insisted it was fine. It was only with time and a revisit that I realized its narrative shortcomings.But since we’ve moved on from discussing the work itself to trying to pick the minds of each other, I’m pretty sure this is the natural end-point of an internet argument. I’m glad you still enjoy the season, less glad that you feel the need to be smug about it.
To be honest, GoT is to me a microcosm of America at this point. So I am emotionally attached at that level. Because I’ve realized most of us are deeply engaged in belief in things that aren’t helpful, and at worst that manifests as a rising fascist movement that treats Jan 6 as a dry run not a horror show.
So yeah, forgive my bitterness, but I’m not super empathetic to most people’s ability to use reason at this point. And if that’s smugness or arrogance I’m past caring because I’ve learned “smug” and “arrogant” are these days synonyms for “educated” and “rational”.
There’s something to be said for accepting that someone can be rational while still disagreeing with you, and there’s something to be said for accepting what a person is saying in good faith rather than ascribing traits to them and arguing against those instead. You never actually asked me what my initial response to season eight was, you made an assumption (“instantly hated it”) and decided to debate that instead, but I’ve got a pretty long history of arguing in favor of season eight on this very website, particularly when it came out. I’m not saying “I’m fine with the broad plot points” as a feint to try and trick you, I’m saying it because I’m fine with the broad plot points.
Sometimes people who disagree with you are dumb insurrectionist assholes. Sometimes they’re not. You’re probably not going to be able to tell one from the other based on a Game of Thrones take.
I don’t particularly disagree with anything you said as a generality. However I think my broader point is that our social confrontation is much more about thoughtful vs. non thoughtful and I fear we are grossly outnumbered. I realize using a GoT take to engage with that seems silly, but yet here my psyche is.
I’m not trying to say people have to agree with my take. I think if you look at my engagement elsewhere you’ll see that. What I am saying is that not thinking about what you consume, or engaging with it on IT’S own terms is a big problem. And I do think the general GoT commentary is emblematic of that.
Hence my “it’s fine to disagree with or hate what the show is doing” because it is. I hate Catcher In the Rye because I think what it’s going for is ridiculous. It doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it’s a great work of literature, it’s just not one I connect to.
But SO VERY MANY critics of GoT are INSISTENT that you if you like/love it you are somehow engaging in an awful or gross or broken narrative. I fully admit its imperfections, especially in the last two seasons re: pacing, but I still think it’s a valid, complete, powerful deconstructionist narrative. And from what I can see my holding that position is offensive to a large number of people.
“And I don’t think you’re willing to read critique of something you like”Prove your response isn’t emotional by responding emotionally.
“My issue is that her heel-turn didn’t happen as”There. Was. No. Fucking. Heel. Turn.
Again, I don’t think a lot of people are on board with the themes of the show, and that’s fine.You’re making the mistake of assuming the show was being made with themes in mind. It wasn’t. One of the show runners said this to a interview when asked the themes of one of the earlier seasons.On Game of Thrones, characters are free to while away hours, even entire seasons, on the periphery. The story lines move forward and dig deeper as the episodes progress but rarely circle back and almost never pause for reflection. When I asked Benioff and Weiss if it was possible to infer any overall intentionality to the upcoming 10 episodes, they sneered. “Themes are for eighth-grade book reports,” Benioff told me.http://grantland.com/features/the-return-hbo-game-thrones/While they tried to reach for random themes in the last episode, I think the way Beinoff responded should tell you all you need to know about the alleged themes of the Game of Thrones tv show. She didn’t stop the Dothraki from destroying the Lamb Men and selling them into slavery because that was going to help her get to and conquer Westeros.Yes she did. Her trying to stop Drogo’s khalasar from pillaging the Lhazareen villages is the whole reason he ends up getting into the fight that killed him. But, critically, she still threatened to destroy Meereen, Astapor, and Yunkai which would have brought disaster to rich and poor alike, and only didn’t because she was talked down.One of the major problems with the scenes you’re referring to is that they didn’t make any sense. Think about the scene you’re referring to here. Dany shows up to her city under attack. It appeared to be sunrise when she got there. The next scene seems to be set several hours later and has Dany talking to Tyrion. Why did she wait several hours to talk to Tyrion? I think the writers wanted us to see Tyrion as her trusted advisor, but they had just met before she left. Why did she wait to talk to Tyrion when she could be have been using her dragon to defend the city? I don’t know what the writers would answer that question, but what they were doing is kind of obvious if you re-watch that scene. It’s blatantly obvious if you read the script for that episode.The writers didn’t have Dany threaten to burn down Astapor and Yunkai because it was a part of their plan for her heel turn. They had her threaten to burn down those cities because they had written Tyrion into a corner by having him agree to bring slavery back. I don’t know why the writers didn’t realize this when they wrote it, but Dany was never going to go for that nonsense. Tyrion realistically should have been fired. That whole scene was just a way for the writers to set up a situation where Tyron appeared to be useful. The script for that episode set up the scene with Dany and Tyrion like this:
INT. GREAT PYRAMID – PENTHOUSE – DAY The sound of the impacts and the distant chaos they cause are audible throughout this scene between DAENERYS TARGARYEN and TYRION LANNISTER, adding further pressure to an already pressurized situation. Tyrion flinches each time a projectile lands near the pyramid, because he’s human and it’s a natural human reaction. Dany never flinches. She is not the same woman who flew away from Daznak’s Pit on the back of a dragon. She is changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty glaring at Tyrion. BOOM! TYRIONWhat was supposed to have happened to Dany in the Dothraki sea to cause her to be “changed utterly”? Nothing that happened to her between the end of season 5 and that episode was out of the norm for her. The writers randomly choose to change Dany’s personality just so they could have Tyrion talk down to her.The thing they used to make Tyrion seem useful also didn’t make sense btw. Tyrion bringing up up Aery’s plan to burn Kings Landing fucks up a key part of Jamie’s story. No one besides Jamie(and Brienne after the bath scene) was supposed to know about the wildfire plot. Jamie made a point of not telling anyone and killed all of Aerys co-conspirators. Jamie keeping Aery’s plan a secret was the entire reason he was derided for being a kingslayer. That entire situation doens’t make any sense if people know that Aerys was planning to blow up Kings Landing.
I have much less of a problem with where it ended up than how it got there. The prior seasons were artfully crafted and told, pace was perfect, characters and stories developed at a deliberate and realistic pace. The best part of the last season was the night before the battle, with everyone talking and nothing happening. The whole series was leading up to the battle with the frozen hordes, it should have been a more drawn out affair, the re-animated dead’s strength wasn’t crazy speed and strength, it was relentless numbers. The fight should have been longer, with alliances forged and broken, guerilla warfare, back and forth victories and defeats, not a slaughter ended with an admittedly cool assassination. They pretty much screwed up the last season beyond redemption at that point. Dany’s arc was too abrupt, as was Jaime’s, once again, sure you can take them there, but do it right.The books are now a mess too, GRRM has spent the last 1000 pages or so wandering aimlessly in new directions that go nowhere and not advancing the story at all (the knight who gets burned up is the classic example). A five book series would have been about perfect, but at this point I guess they just keep the money train rolling.
Rewatch the S1 episode “A Golden Crown”, especially the end, and tell me
that those seeds weren’t planted from the very beginning.
To me that’s exactly what makes it a bad heel turn: it’s not about carefully outlining a descending arc for the character, like Walter White slowly evolving from Mr. Chips to Scarface; it’s just about planting a land mine in season 1 that blows up in season 8. That’s substantially less rewarding than following a character step by step through his or her degeneration.And that’s how Game of Thrones tended to deal with characters more generally in its waning years: they didn’t develop episode to episode or season to season as much as ping back and forth between a couple basic states. That’s Arya going from “I am no one” and “I’ll always be a Stark” over and over again, or Jamie vacillating between “I can do better than Cersei” and “I don’t deserve anyone but her.” The characters’ ultimate fates were determined not by the slow aggregation of their choices and experiences but by whichever basic state they happened to have landed on at the moment the music stopped.
Again, I think a lot of people didn’t grasp what the show was doing. The entire point is that people don’t work like that. Jaime is BOTH the person who loves Cersei and loves Brienne, the person who saved King’s Landing from the Mad King and pushed a ten year old out of a tower to hide his incestuos reationship; he doesn’t evolve out of it from one to the other because people are complicated and contradictory and don’t actually work in narrative arcs. Ditto for Dany, who was always vicious and power hungry but also had this empathy for the enslaved and downtrodden. So she liberates Slaver’s Bay, but also has to be talked down more than once from just exterminating populations and/or wiping out cities. She says “the Law is the Law” but then crucifies masters at random without trial or even cursory investigation. It’s a consistent throughline across the series, not just a “bomb” planted in S1. And Arya who wanted vengeance for her family but also was working through how much she was willing to sacrifice to obtain those skills while also being a child (and sort of stuck in that place developmentally). They have Stannis of all people deliver the theme in Season 2, “The good act does not wipe out the bad, nor the bad the good.” The show calls BS on narrative arcs as a thing, and on the idea that you can actually analyze anyone as a unitary “good” or “bad” or “was good then bad” or “was bad then good”. It’s literally saying the world doesn’t work that way, you can only look at actions as good or bad and some people (Joffrey) may consistently do bad things and others (Brienne) may consistently do good things, but there’s a massive range between those poles and trying to slot people as one or the other, or as “evolving” from one to the other, is foolish and reductive. People may not like that theme or critique of mainstream storytelling (I suspect most don’t) and that’s fine. My issue is people ignoring that theme and acting as though they were just telling a traditional fantasy story.
You keep saying that people didn’t get it. People understood what the show was doing, they just think it did a shitty job of doing it in the last season.
I fundamentally disagree. The nature of the criticism (you ruined this arc, you didn’t set up this arc right) suggests they absolutely DON’T understand what the show is doing. If you are analyzing with the lens of traditional narrative expectations, which is what you are doing when describing Dany as HAVING a Heel Turn, or describing Jaime having a “ruined” redemption arc, you are not engaging with the themes of the material at all.
Dany was ALWAYS a heel, just one with sympathetic motives at many points. Jaime is neither good nor bad, but makes decisions that are both from before the show started right up to the last season. So no, I just think you are fundamentally incorrect to the core. Almost every critique is from a perspective of not getting it.
Why do you think it is that people had little-to-no trouble with the panoply of complicated characters with complex and sometimes contrasting emotions, motivations and actions prior to season eight? Characters with at least as much going on as the surviving cast came and left during that period without any outrage or confusion.
People didn’t have a problem prior to season 8 because you can still think you are watching a conventional fantasy narrative where those characters will END UP somewhere else, at least the surviving ones. And to be fair to people who felt that way, episodes like “The Broken Man” did hint towards that idea (obviously in retrospect as a tool to subvert it.)But I do generally think the show played fair and a lot of people missed it. Ned’s death should have been a big sign, ditto The Red Wedding. Let me ask you, though, why do YOU think people did engage with it as a deconstructionist work even though almost ALL the critiques are decidedly not in that lens but instead from a traditional fantasy narrative lens? (Unexpected heel turn, ruined redemption arc, Jon ends up being a little useless to the final resolution, Bran is a weird choice for king…) None of the criticisms that get leveled engage with it as deconstruction, but instead are angry about not following traditional fantasy narrative tropes.
Let me ask you, though, why do YOU think people did engage with it as a
deconstructionist work even though almost ALL the critiques are
decidedly not in that lens but instead from a traditional fantasy
narrative lens? (Unexpected heel turn, ruined redemption arc, Jon ends
up being a little useless to the final resolution, Bran is a weird
choice for king…) None of the criticisms that get leveled engage with
it as deconstruction, but instead are angry about not following
traditional fantasy narrative tropes. Because previous deconstructionist elements also functioned fairly within the context of the narrative, because they were given the time and space to establish complex motivations and to examine the aftermath of unexpected events in a way that felt earned. Ned’s death was a surprise in a “but he’s the protagonist” sort of way, but it was a surprise that followed naturally from his own naivety, Joffrey’s need to establish his authority, and the show continued to examine the fallout from the event for quite some time.To put it simply, the show always had a certain verisimilitude that was a core aspect of selling its deconstruction. There was always an internal logic driving both the narrative and the individual characters within it. When that verisimilitude slips, when that internal logic seems to be sacrificed for the sake of expediency, it becomes harder to accept choices that work purely as deconstruction. Bran is a weird choice for a king, but there’s a definite logic to it that could make it work for people… but having Tyrion in chains explaining it to his captors as “the power of stories” simply isn’t it. Plenty of people saw Dany’s final act coming, but the motivation is so unrelated to anything she’s really demonstrated previously that it still feels like a heel turn, even if we knew the event itself was coming. Jaime returning to Cersei feels like a regression because his previous break from her was well set up and motivated while his need to return happened more-or-less out of the blue, when just a couple scenes establishing his not-entirely-broken longing for her and doubts of his worthiness for Brienne could have made it function just fine.Like I’ve said a few times now: it just didn’t have enough time to justify the final moves these characters took, so people defaulted to the last moves that were well-justified. If season eight had just shown the patience that earlier portions of the show had, I think people would have had a much easier time accepting the events themselves.
“Dany was ALWAYS a heel”It’s amazing how many people forget the way she had her brother killed.
You don’t get to have this both ways. Dany’s scenes were consistently set up to be big heroic moments- you’re supposed to cheer for her throughout those scenes. Even the golden crown is an audience cheer moment because Viserys is portayed as such an out and out asshole. Yes, there’s a tinge of darkness to some of them (Viserys, the crucifixions, etc) if you want to see it there, but they’re tremendously underplayed. That kind of writing requires the deft hand of someone like Vince Gilligan to manage those moments both individually and incrementally across the seasons.
If what Benioff and Weiss did worked for you, that’s great, but based on the responses you’re getting here (to say nothing of hundreds of articles, blog posts, and response videos from critics both professional and amateur for the last two years), you seem to be the outlier.
Yes you do get to have it both ways. You are supposed to cheer for Dany’s triumphant moments and then feel icky about cheering for her for doing so.I feel a lot of people “disappointed” and unable to predict her heel turns are Americans because Dany IS America.
“ You are supposed to cheer for Dany’s triumphant moments and then feel icky about cheering for her for doing so.”But not at the same time— the show never bothers to go to any efforts to make you feel icky until season 8, or maybe Season 7 (I can’t remember when Tyrion really starts getting second thoughts). Most of these opportunities (Crown of Gold, punishing the slavers, “Dracarys!”, the Loot Train attack) are shot purely heroically. And none of the characters around her show much doubt about her methods until Tyrion shows up. Hell, most of them are telling her to abandon Mereen and the other slave cities and go attack Westeros, effectively counseling her to be LESS heroic. If the show isn’t going to visually frame these events as dangerous *in the moment*, and it isn’t going to give us reactions from the characters around her to communicate that we should be feeling icky, it’s not doing its job in terms of building that progression throughout the show.As with pretty much everything in those last two seasons, they could have salvaged this by taking their time and using more character moments to show this more incrementally. But they were in a hurry to wrap up the show… and frankly, I don’t think Benioff and Weiss really have the skill to write that complex of a story without the framework of Martin’s books to work from.Re: the disappointment of viewers… Hard disagree on that bit of GoT-apologizing. Shifting the blame to the audience for “not getting it” just isn’t a strategy that ever works. Audiences may not consciously understand why something doesn’t work for them, but if it doesn’t work for a big chunk of your audience, there’s something fundamentally wrong with your story. Especially for something with the broad appeal of Game of Thrones.
I realize I should also clarify, I’m not using “stupid” or “foolish” pejoratively about the person doing the critiquing. The English language, despite having a ridiculously huge vocabulary, is still limited in some ways. I mean the take is missing a huge amount of subtext that should seem obvious in retrospect. I don’t find this to be something to be ashamed of, though I realize most people hate having realized they missed something, especially something that retroactively recontextualizes an entire narrative.I hated Brazil the first time I saw it because I just absolutely didn’t get it. (It was the theatrical, not Gilliam, cut, but there’s plenty there even so that I absolutely missed what was going on.) It was only on my third watch (by then the Gilliam cut) trying to grasp it that the scale and depth of the social commentary hit me. It’s a hard realization because those of us who are bright (and that AVClub commentariat in my experience is disproportionately bright) hate feeling like we missed something. But I really do think there is something about this narrative in particular that caused a lot of people to miss it being a deconstructionist work and engaging with it from that perspective.
But I really do think there is something about this narrative in
particular that caused a lot of people to miss it being a
deconstructionist work and engaging with it from that perspective. People realized that from the beginning. It’s always been a huge part of the discussion.
If so the endgame critiques don’t reflect it. I don’t think most people understand what a deconstruction really is, and instead thought it meant making some more gritty choices rather than actually attacking sacrosanct narrative tropes.
But I really do think there is something about this narrative in particular that caused a lot of people to miss it being a deconstructionist work and engaging with it from that perspective. Maybe if a lot of people aren’t getting it, perhaps you as a writer and showrunner failed in your attempts to convey your ideas and what you’re trying to do to across to the audience.Anyway, I may not have seen the show myself but I have seen a lot of videos analysing the show who say they got what the show was trying to do, they were just inadequate in setting it up and hence earning it.——Updated disclaimer I’m putting at the end of every comment I’m making on this thread: I’ve never seen the show or read the books but the commentary about its implosion among the fanbase at the end fascinating. Having been through something comparable with the final season and end of Battlestar Galactica, I can relate.
No one who spends any appreciable amount of time on this site or those like it are missing the deconstructionist aspect of ASoIaF and GoT. It’s utterly baked into the DNA. Saying no one catches on to that is like saying no one noticed that Star Wars is a retelling of the Joseph Campbell model hero’s journey or Indiana Jones is supposed to be a throwback to old serials. Maybe some very casual fans, or people that don’t actually think about the entertainment they watch on any level other than “Dragons, cool!” don’t notice that stuff, but they also aren’t the people complaining about story arcs not resolving.
No, they didn’t. Not based on the comments here.
It’s not that I don’t get the reading, it’s that I question whether it’s satisfying to produce seventy hours of serial drama and then land on a conclusion that “calls BS on narrative arcs.” If the point is that none of what the characters went through matters, because they’re just gonna end up being who they’ve always been, then what’s the value of watching them go through it? If the point of Dany’s story is just to show a “consistent throughline” rather than any sort of development, at a certain point in eight seasons I think we get the point, and it’s not particularly interesting, at least from my perspective, to see it reiterated again and again.It’s like Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. I praised it in the early years for being pop culture’s most accurate take on Trump, for capturing how he’s just a dumb asshole who’s always miserable and never gets the joke. But before too long most people got sick of Alec Baldwin playing Donald Trump, because there’s only so many different ways you can say “Donald Trump is a dumb asshole who’s always miserable and never gets the joke” before it becomes really tiresome despite its accuracy.And that’s not even to say you can’t make a satisfying serial drama about how people don’t really change. Arguably that was the main point of Mad Men, for instance. But that didn’t mean Mad Men threw out the idea of narrative arcs; instead, the series was built around the characters resisting, wrestling with, and ultimately accepting the fact that they are who they are. To me, watching that kind of journey step by step is a much better use of seven or eight seasons than watching all the characters do the same two-step over and over.
Yes characters were, are and should be complex, but they were not jumping back and forth between good Jaime and bad Jaime, very bad Hound and not quite so very bad Hound, they were very much following a narrative arc in both the books and the series. The Jaime in book three is not the same Jaime who dropped Bran out the window in book one (he might have still done it, but a little less cavalierly). Then suddenly in the last season they stopped taking their meds and instantly morphed.
“like Walter White slowly evolving from Mr. Chips to Scarface;”Slowly evolving? Jesus fuck, did you even watch the god damn show? Did you SEE the first episode???
‘’it’s just about planting a land mine in season 1 that blows up in season 8. That’s substantially less rewarding than following a character step by step through his or her degeneration.’’
Oh, I’d totally beg to differ! It all depends on which people are standing on the mine when it blows up, and judging from the enraged hordes of Dany-stans, I’d say that mine hit it’s target extremely well! This, of course, is not to say that her degradation wasn’t happening, just that people chose to ignore it!
‘’The characters’ ultimate fates were determined not by the slow aggregation of their choices and experiences but by whichever basic state they happened to have landed on at the moment the music stopped.’’
Stop the presses! Why that almost sounds like REAL LIFE! One bad day can destroy years of hard work and sink you into a spiral of depression and self-destruction. Conversely, one tiny of moment clarity or inspiration can turn a failing person completely around. That’s life, bud. Ugly and messy and not always following a character arc, which is why people retreat to fantasy in the first place with predictable characters behaving in predictable ways.
Again, this is not to say that character developments weren’t happening, only that people chose to ignore them. If you wanted Arya to kill Cersei, then you were certainly going to ignore Arya’s subtle but undeniable journey of healing that started all the way back when she met those friendly Lannister soldiers and ended with Hound’s pep talk.
You can set up all the seeds you want, but if you don’t make the progression felt after planting them, you still failed.
The problem with Dany’s heel turn isn’t in the long term, its the short term. It’s not about what happens in season 1-7, it’s how they handle it in season 8, and especially in “The Bells”. And they totally blow the actual moment itself, by staging it so clumsily. Emilia Clarke does about as good a job as you can do with portraying Dany’s rage, but she can’t invent the scenes and dialogue needed in the previous 2-3 episodes needed to explain why she would still burn down the city after she had won.They rushed and shortchanged Dany’s arc across season 8, much as they did everything, and so it felt unsatisfying to a lot of people.
And it’s absolutely about what happens in S 1-7. That’s literally my point. THERE IS NO HEEL TURN. She is ALWAYS that. Always. She was NEVER a hero, she just had some sympathetic motives. That is literally the point that Tyrion explains at the end. And you aren’t supposed to get it while it’s happening because a big part of it is a critique of protagonist centered morality that dominates a lot of media (again, right from the beginning, we condemn Mirri and side with Dany even though objectively Dany is basically Mirri’s Walder Frey. Yet we cheer Arya getting revenge. The show is literally showing you how narrative manipulates you.)
The show disbelieves in heroes, it disbelieves in arcs, it disbelieves in belief itself. Tyrion only becomes incompetent once he *believes* in Dany. It’s a big part of the S 6-8 plot. He’s only able to be the clever manipulator he is at his core when he abjures belief again and returns to skepticism and pragmatism.
Sorry, but that’s crap.Arcs exist because they are satisfying. What you’re basically saying is the same thing thousands of first year creative writing/film students say: that they don’t want to tell stories “the old way”, only to find that their stories tend to be dull, pointless, or aggravating because they’ve eschewed all the elements that tell good stories.GoT goes out of its way to subvert tropes, but a story that doesn’t successfully build and follow an arc both in plot and characterization will not be received well. That doesn’t mean it can’t be surprising, or unconventional, only that it has to set up and properly pay off its resolution.
You’re making some interesting points, but you started this conversation by saying “Dany’s heel turn is literally one of the best heel turns ever set up in fiction, it’s not the writers’ fault that most audiences are deeply stupid.” Now you’re insisting there was never a heel turn, never mind one of the “best in fiction”. Is this one of those things where real people are complicated?
Just piped in to say, I mostly agree, though I think a critique of the show should include how effective (or ineffective) it was at communicating what you’re saying. I think the last seasons were rushed (though honestly, I prefer that to usual prestige tv pacing), but given the general reaction to the final seasons, was something off?Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe that’s just people. Lots of folks thought Mueller’s investigation was going to topple Trump and—I don’t think I’m saying this out of cynicism—that wasn’t really going to happen.Anyway, for me, the major characters went in the arc that I thought they would, more or less. I’ve said this elsewhere, but Daenrys’s speeches feel in line modern mores and despite GoT being a fantasy, I think a lot of her appeal is best describe as anachronistic in a lot of ways, so I was always a skeptical of her heroic reputation. It is a common mode in historical fiction, certainly. I thought the most pointed comment was the scene when Samwell Tarly suggests democracy and gets laughed off. A straightforward point about expectations and what most of the characters themselves are capable of imaging/believing. What’s always striking/conflicting is that the limits of imagination constrains both what’s possible and what’s impossible. Here the difference being one: Daenrys will free everybody and two: Daenrys will turn out a tyrant. In a similar way, regular news stories come up and people attribute pure selfish motives to all acts while also being shocked at the scope of some crimes.
Tyrion only becomes incompetent once he *believes* in Dany. It’s a big part of the S 6-8 plot.
You reading way too much intention into the writing. Tyrion was an idiot after he joined Dany’s team because the writers wanted to insert their weird ass think about the slavers message(season 6) and wanted to keep Cersei around(season 7 and 8).The idea that Tyrion even believed in Dany doens’t make any sense if you go back and watch their scenes together btw. All but a few of their scenes feature him questioning her ideas and methods.He’s only able to be the clever manipulator he is at his core when he abjures belief again and returns to skepticism and pragmatism.What in the world are you talking about here? Tyrion was an idiot right up until the end.
Look here, buddy, this kind of thoughtful and well-reasoned critical analysis of a pop-culture juggernaut has no place on this, a website for (ostensibly) critically analyzing and discussing works of pop-culture!
“You can set up all the seeds you want, but if you don’t make the progression felt after planting them, you still failed.”Your inability to follow the seeds was not their failure.
“Dany’s heel turn is literally one of the best heel turns ever set up in fiction, it’s not the writers’ fault that most audiences are deeply stupid.”It wasn’t set up at all. Daenerys burned tens of thousands of innocent people alive, after the battle was won. That’s the key point. She had absolutely nothing to gain from doing that, and nothing, absolutely nothing in her back story suggests she was capable of it.Yeah, she was cruel on occasion. But her cruelty was never purposeless. When she burned Mirri Maz Duur, she didn’t stab a random Dothraki just to make sure people would take her seriously. When she locked Xaro Xoan Daxos in the vault, she didn’t chuck a few nearby children in there just for a laugh. When she crucified the Masters of Meereen, she didn’t nail up a few hundred slaves because she had some extra wood she wanted to use up. When she burned Randall and Dickon Tarly, she only burned Randall and Dickon Tarly. So why, when the battle for King’s Landing was won, did she then spend the next half an hour flying round the city barbecuing everything that moved? To assert her authority? I think defeating the Lannisters in less time than it takes to make a sandwich accomplished that. To intimidate people into following her? She has an army of Unsullied for that, and the world’s only dragon.And speaking of the Unsullied, why did she recruit them? Wasn’t it precisely because they wouldn’t kill innocents? Didn’t she have a big debate with Jorah Mormont and Barristan Selmy about that very thing back in season 3? And remember in season 4, when she agonised about whether or not to execute that slave who’d murdered his master? That was a genuinely difficult moral decision for her. And yet we’re supposed to believe that the same character would be capable of killing literally tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in the most awful way imaginable even when doing so would gain her absolutely nothing?I could’ve perhaps bought a heel turn if it’d been less extreme. If, I dunno, she’d used her dragon to quell an uprising or something. But to use it to kill half the city when they were already on their knees? Nah. Massive betrayal of the character.
Dany always struck against people in power – horse lords, masters, slave traders, etc. She always stood up for the common people. So in the last frame she suddenly strikes against the common people for no reason even as her real enemy was within easy reach.
Not obvious at all, ex pet for how glaringly obvious it was to those of us possessing at least half a brain. Did your genius brain never ONCE question why everyone talked about the mad king, FFS?
It wasn’t obvious that Dany – the colonizer, the very very white saviour with weapons of mass destructions who frequently tortured, crucified and murdered people in horrific ways weren’t a good guy? Yeah I think old Dinklage might have a point there.I wasn’t mad about the heel turns, the plot or that Bran ended up on the throne as a “yeah, whatever I guess”. I was mad about the execution.
Speaking as someone from a ‘colonized’ country, I don’t think Dany comes across as a colonizer at all. White savior, 100%. But colonizer? Her whole thing was stringing up the rulers to give the downtrodden a voice (which of course she goes about in the clumsiest possible fashion, and no long-term plan to make sure it sticks).Also, none of what she did was particulalr uncommon for rulers during the medieval period (except, actually, for the Mongols – they weren’t big on torture or drawn-out deaths saving a few special cases). Keep in mind that crucifixion was a standard Roman punishment for certain crimes.
You didn’t understand the point of Jaime’s entire arc then. Go back to Star Wars.
Times: Peter, what would you like to say to fans who were disappointed I. The ending of Game of Thrones?Dinklage: Racists.AVC: Now that’s a class act!
As with all of these conversations, he’s probably right… about the 90% of upset people whose opinions aren’t worth a fraction of a community college credit, at Greendale. I mean, sure, they matter, insofar as much as pandering to them is a safe play that makes some people a lot of money. Granted.But if we’re talking about artistic criticism, then no, they don’t matter, and it’s profoundly dishonest to hide behind the deficiencies of your detractors’ dumbest voices.I might as well find a random Nazi that hates any art I generate and just keep pointing to him any time anybody tries to criticize it.“Oh well, you know, some of the people who hate my work are Nazis, and I suspect their Naziism plays into their distaste for the work I was doing.”It’s the “9/11″ of pop art apologetics.
I don’t think he was trying to convince anybody, he doesn’t seem to care people didn’t like the finale. That’s fine.
Celebs do this alot, when their work gets criticized. But even that is not the sort of remark I’d expect from Dinklage. He disappoints me
Yes, what a stupid, bigoted thing to say.
He’s so not wrong here, come on lol
you joke but i think market research is probably showing just that. appeal to people’s narcissistic anxiety by making it seem like if you dislike the show, you must support [insert -ism] and watch them all “re-evaluate” the show
I don’t think anyone had a problem with when it ended.
You haven’t read all the comments from people who think the show should have run forever and ever so they could get the perfect ending that they wanted it to be.
GoT would have needed decent writers for that to have been a possibility.
You watched the series from series premiere to finale because the writing was so bad?I guess that makes you a moron for wasting all that time, eh?
There were some decent writers…until the last season.
You haven’t read all the comments from people who think the show should have run forever and ever so they could get the perfect ending that they wanted it to be.Could you please point to any of these?Because after reading thousands of posts here:https://www.reddit.com/r/freefolk/and watching hundreds of hours of video dissecting and critiquing Season 8 (and how they think it crashed and burned), this is literally the one thing that I’ve never seen claimed by anybody.——Disclaimer I’m putting at the end of every comment I’m making on this thread: I’ve never seen the show but the commentary about its implosion at the end fascinating. Having been through something comparable with the final season and end of Battlestar Galactica, I can relate.
I theoretically have a problem with when it ended. The only way they could have successfully told the story they were trying to tell would have been to spread it out over at least 10-15 more episodes. But that would have required a different creative team with different priorities.
I had a problem with how it ended, but I agree there was also a problem with who ended it.
At least they ended it. Unlike someone else…
Neither was/is good.
I theoretically have a problem with when it ended. The only way they could have successfully told the story they were trying to tell would have been to spread it out over at least 10-15 more episodes. But that would have required a different creative team with different priorities.Studio: “You can have more episodes.”Showrunners: “No.”——Disclaimer I’m putting at the end of every comment I’m making on this thread: I’ve never seen the show but the commentary about its implosion at the end fascinating. Having been through something comparable with the final season and end of Battlestar Galactica, I can relate.
I disagree with him, but I respect the fact that, having earned a buttload of money for being in the show, he declines to criticize it.
This is the best take, methinks.
“I have seen the final season, and it’s just as wonderful as the beach house it paid for.”
having earned a buttload of money for being in the show, he declines to criticize it.Or, his defence of the show is genuine.
Where do you people come from? Is HBO paying you?
Imagine being so god damn pathetic that you not only think it, but say it publicly.You are a sad, sad little person.
The heel turn felt rushed but it made sense, and didn’t really bother me but the way they ended the white walkers/winter is coming storyline was just pathetic and sad.It’ll be rebooted with a better ending in a few years though, so whatever.
Maybe in the medium of animation there wouldn’t be a budget constraint for GRRM’s nonsensically large chairs & walls.
While the heel turn made sense, the fact that it was entirely too rushed along with the White Walker plot meant that good ideas ended up being bad tv.
It was never about who will sit on the throne. It was always about ice zombies and how little of a threat they actually are when you’re in the final battle.
I dunno, wasn’t it threatening the way they just sort of walked to the big tree, then just kind of shattered and crumpled, like, that’s that!
It really stopped making sense when they introduced Kevin Costner and the cast of Yellowstone during the series finale.
No, it was earlier then that when Ted McGinley showed up as Lord Cunningham.
AKA Sir Jefferson D’arcy, Esquire. The Right Honorable.
Or when Lord Cunningham’s older brother Ser Chuck, mysteriously disappeared after being recast.
Well, if anyone moves slowly, cooly and methodically while representing the coming of Winter, it’s… KC.
Costner was the body at the funeral, right?
In a way, yes, but it was still ultimately about who sat in the throne. The entire book was over just that conflict. The fact the show ends with a battle over the throne and not the white walkers felt right to me.
It can be two things.
No, it was about the nature of power. It was about the nature of ideologies. It was about how societies progress. It was about how old cultural mores get abandoned and new ones take their place. It was about how to conduct oneself in life. How to weather the challenges life throws at you. How to change. How to grow. How to find yourself. How to resist the temptation to be cruel, evil or vengeful. It was about the best of human nature and the worst of it. It was about all of this and so much more…
If you think it was about the ice zombies or the throne, you’re off by a mile.
“you’re off by a mile” smug guy who can’t actually defend his points 🙂
Last I checked, in the books the ice zombies were supposed to be an allegory for global warming, like here you idiots are squabbling over kingdoms and ignoring the existential threat.
The “global warming satire” angle was really funny for most of the series run — until it came time to pay that off and there was nothing “there” when it came to the ice zombies.The allegory falls apart once the threat can be entirely averted in the span of one hour after a silly girl stabs the living avatar of global warming.If they committed to the bit, the Night King would have wound up on the Iron Throne after turning all of Westeros into zombies, and then the various exiled factions would have been squabbling in Essos about whose claim was more legitimate.
Hah, yeah.
Imo that’s yet another problem with the show getting ahead of the books. Like, I totally believe Martin could sell that (after five very dense novels, probably), but the last two seasons were so rushed.
Eh, I never saw it as specifically being global warming. More of a stand-in for any existential threat that the population refuses to face. TONS of examples of that shit, up through (and including) the worst of COVID.
I thought I saw somewhere that’s what it was supposed to be specifically, but yeah, legit. At any rate I can’t tell if D&D didn’t understand that or just didn’t care.
I thought I saw somewhere that’s what it was supposed to be specifically Hell, might be!
Tell me you didn’t understand the show without telling me you didn’t understand the show.
I think the moral of the story is, “don’t piss off a women who can make a dragon do her bidding”…and I’m NOT talking about her mom.
I’m with you. And disappointed because the Ice King (or whatever he was called) was my favorite character.
What do you mean “It’s not about who sits on the throne”?!
Trust me I wish the problem was I wanted more. I’ve made peace with crushing disappointment and moved on, although my loathing of GRRM is still going strong!
GRRM reads your comment and decides not to release Winds of Winter after all.
That threat no longer means anything. Its like saying the world will end tomorrow. I’ll believe it when it happens and Dream of Spring is just a dream.
Too many characters survived insurmountable odds in improbable battles. Beloved characters surviving to series end is inconceivable!
Countless remakes prove that you can tell the exact same story to wildly different results. The problem was never with the plot beats (Dany, Jon, Bran and Arya’s respective “moments”), it was with their execution.
Okay, I’ll bite. What about the execution was the problem?
Too little setup, too little time spent on consequences, and character motivations which were muddled by the compressed timeline. Dany’s descent made sense conceptually, but not two episodes after her selflessness in the fight against the white walkers, which itself seemed to go from the biggest existential threat the world had ever faced to almost completely forgotten by the next episode.
1) 7 seasons of set-up not enough?
2) The consequences thing I also don’t get. Because, for example, when you see Tyrion walking amongst the ruins to witness the horror of what Dany has done, you have some accussing the show of dead air.
3) Character motivations made perfect sense, in fact in most cases were overtly telegraphed. It’s only that the audience fatally misjudged the role of each character within the story based on standard tropes (e.g. Jaime was supposed to have a ‘redemption’, Jon be the hero savior, Cersei the cackling baddie that gets her comeuppance and so on…) and kept looking at what they wanted each character to be rather than what they were.
4) Let’s just take the example you used: your assertion that Dany was selfless in her fight against the NK. It’s absolutely and blatantly false. If Dany helped defeat the NK out of selflessness, why would she be jealous that Jon was taking the credit and being admired by his close longtime buddies? There may have been an altruistic component to her actions, but it was most certainly not selfless. She believed helping defeat the NK would cause everyone to rally around her and was extremely miffed that that didn’t happen.
5) Ultimately, the NK was NOT the ultimate existential threat. That was the POINT of the show. It was Dany. It’s easy to rally and unite against an outside threat, no matter how powerful it may be, but against someone you truly believed in that went astray? Much harder. Essentially, in LOTR you had the main defeat of Sauron and the scouring of the Shire which is more or less treated as an afterthought. In GOT, the roles of the two are reversed.
And you think the battle of Winterfell was forgotten? ‘ We die today brothers. We die bleeding from a hundred wounds. With arrows in our necks. And spears in our guts. But our war-cries will echo through eternity. They will sing about the battle of Winterfell until the Iron Islands have slipped beneath the waves.’ Sansa’s tears when she made Theon an honorary Stark weren’t enough for you? It’s one of the most moving scenes in the entire show. The war was not over for the people who defeated the NK. They didn’t have time to mope around for an entire episode. How come Frodo jumping up and down on his bed gets a pass? Where is the scene where the survivors of fighting against Sauron solemnly bury their dead?
7 seasons of set-up not enough?
Not when they don’t get the characters to where they need to be for the intended season eight plot. Season eight had enough material for at least two regular seasons, and it played out as a single abridged one. The good pacing up to that point doesn’t salvage it.
Character motivations made perfect sense, in fact in most cases were overtly telegraphed. It’s only that the audience fatally misjudged the role of each character within the story based on standard tropes (e.g. Jaime was supposed to have a ‘redemption’, Jon be the hero savior, Cersei the cackling baddie that gets her comeuppance and so on…) and kept looking at what they wanted each character to be rather than what they were.
Dany going nuts and being killed by Jon had been a common prediction for years, and the show had subverted expectations with major characters plenty of times in the past not only without incident, but to great critical and popular acclaim. This assertion that GoT viewers just wanted a standard fantasy story seems odd considering it spent almost a decade building its reputation and viewership on being not-that.
Ultimately, the NK was NOT the ultimate existential threat. That was the POINT of the show. It was Dany. Something doesn’t have to be the ultimate existential threat to still be an existential threat, which the NK still was.And yes, there were speeches. There were individual scenes of devastation. But this is a story that was built on showing how individual actions could spiral out into dozens of unintended consequences. To use real-world analogies, season one understood that the murder of Franz Ferdinand could lead to World War I, while season eight barely comprehended that dropping nukes on Japan could lead to decades of scars and fear.
How come Frodo jumping up and down on his bed gets a pass? Where is the scene where the survivors of fighting against Sauron solemnly bury their dead?
Game of Thrones is not Lord of the Rings. That’s the whole point. Which is why it was so weird to go from seven seasons of intricate detail and precisely-plotted character motivations to giant broad strokes and Massive Event after Massive Event like it was suddenly the goddamn Silmarillion.
1. Seven seasons of intricate setup, one episode payoff. There is nothing more to say. This is exactly, and the only reason people are pissed, especially those who spent their YA years with the show.
(wow-whee lookie here Danny forgot there were ships)
Are you like actually DnD? This is long and…very sad.
I think the consequences were more “Cercei blew up the sept and nobody cared” in a world where the city folk nearly murdered their king for food shortages.
They just pretended it didn’t get a reaction cause it fucked with their future narrative.
Edit: commented to wrong person.
The last few seasons feel incredibly rushed compared to the first few. The first few seasons took ample time to show how long it takes characters to travel from one part of the continent to another and form alliances. They also took time to develop all of their characters and add nuance to their villains. When you got to the big battles / betrayals / deaths, they always felt earned.The latter half of seasons accelerated how quickly the plot moved to get to the bigger moments sooner and stopped trying to develop new characters as anything other than one-dimensional. The Sand Snakes and Euron are almost cartoonish characters and any time spent with them felt like a waste. Alliances were formed in one episode and then dismantled two episodes later (the ending scene of S6 with Dany gaining allies in the Tyrells and Sand Snakes feels so hollow looking back on it). The big scenes felt less earned and thus landed worse. Some of that may be because D&D didn’t have the detail from the books but they also chose to not use a lot of the detail from the books that did exist and accelerate the ending to eight seasons despite HBO wanting more seasons and GRRM recommending it.
Yeach, pretty much long story short. It’s like they wrote on the first page of the last season bible: Long Story Short.
Having just rewatched it, I agree about the Tyrells and Sand Snakes joining Dany. S6 ends with her setting sail, and we presume she’s got a lot of work to do. It’s exciting. In 7×01 she literally just arrived in Westeros, and its a monumental moment. But Highgarden is on the opposite end of the continent, and Dorne is further south still than even that. Yet in 7×02 the very next episode, everyone’s already at the war council. Imagine Ellaria’s reaction to seeing dragons for the first time. How does a first encounter between Daenerys and Lady Ollena go? Wouldn’t it have been something to see how these alliances are brokered?
The rush not only messed with the pacing, but also made the timelines unclear (how long did it take for Euron to build a massive fleet of new ships? Cause it seemed pretty fast) Characters move around a lot in Season 7, because so much of them are coming together, and the stuff everyone is doing is still pretty great, but there needed to be at least an episode of travel in between these big meetings. ( Also acceptable: characters being offscreen for a week.) That way the show isn’t betraying its own sense of geography. But most importantly, those travel episodes are the breathing room needed to develop things more.
Exactly this. Even with the short seasons I think they could have pulled this off by not picking random baffling character moments to focus on instead (making Brienne look like a lovesick sad girl, for instance).
I still called it that the throne itself would get destroyed, though. You can’t take that away from me. None of you can!
Just wait until G/O Media or what company now owns all this deletes all our comments like they did with Gawker and so on.My last ever post on that Gawker Media account was a quote from Logan’s Run (the movie):THERE IS NO SANCTUARYIndeed.
There’s those 8th grade book report themes for you.
Shows what you know, Mrs. Gillian! Give me a B- will you?!
times0 You meant to write “times)”. a backlash so loud that the show’s creators opted not to make a The actual content of the link indicates that their Netflix deal required them to be on set, so it would be hard for them to juggle that and Star Wars at the same time. The “toxic fandom” of Star Wars was listed as a factor, but without the Netflix deal I don’t think we could say that would be sufficient to make them drop Star Wars (not that the high turnover of writer-directors in Star Wars would make that unlikely anyway).
The concentration of power was always the main problem. I had happy tears when the throne melted. Bran the Broken might turn out to be a problem though, when he is able to live for centuries and see into everybody’s bedrooms anytime he wants. He’s GoT’s Leto II.
Amen, Peter, amen! Thank you for speaking up! Every word he said was worth its weight in gold. He gets it. It’s really depressing that such a brilliant show gets so much hate for trying to do something new and daring, even if you are of the opinion that it didn’t work, which I am most certainly not.
“Every word he said was worth its weight in gold.”So, nothing, as words don’t weigh anything?
Words are wind.– someone, somewhere
It was me. I said it. Just now.
Bad storytelling is neither new nor daring.
“It’s really depressing that such a brilliant show gets so much hate for trying to do something new and daring…”You mean for doing what everybody expected it to but in an increasingly rushed and shoddy fashion?
Something new and daring? Lol.
You must be trolling. New and daring my ass.
being this obtuse makes me think you’re a paid plant or something but the truth is you’re probably just contrarian
I mean… It’s hard not to see his point, even if the final season tended to rush the outcome, taking some last-minute shortcuts to hammer home its themes. That’s basically my complaint. It was fine. Could have been better, not near Dexter-level bad.
honestly I think people are going to come around on GoT sooner or later. The audience expectations were absolutely impossible going into the last couple of seasons but in retrospect they made some really great TV. Not quite what people wanted but still really great.
Given how one-dimensional and irrelevant Tyrion felt after the first 4 seasons (due in large part to how much the show whitewashed him in those first 4 seasons), I’m still surprised sometimes at just how much Dinklage’s talent was wasted.
Yes, you can’t tell me Dinklage was happy about Tyrion’s character progression in the last 2 seasons. He went from smart and shrewd to utter moron. He gave Dany terrible advice, and we’re supposed to believe it never occurred to him that dead people might rise from the crypts?
“‘The Station Agent’, on the other hand, was a steaming dog turd.”
This is some deeply delusional shit
I was just looking up the “you had one job” meme on my phone and the first page was all Loki plus a couple of randos, no GOT.Maybe that gifsearch is very primed to recency but *damn.*
The problem wasn’t with where things ended up, it was with how they ended up there.
and who has a better story than bran the broken?
He’s 100% right and saying a lot of what I’ve been saying since it ended. This was not a show for everybody (which is NOT to say HBO didn’t want it to be popular, just that maybe they treated something that wouldn’t satisfy a large number of people as though it would.)Many people don’t want hardcore subversions of their narrative expectations. Among GoT’s main themes: – Belief (regardless of the politics behind it) is for fools, skepticism and pragmatism are where it’s at.- No one is all good or all bad, you can’t analyze people that way only actions. – Darth Vader style redemption arcs are total BS, you can’t just casually wipe out your own history. And others. The ethics and themes of the show are not what most mainstream audiences want, and never were but there was a lot of projection.
-Cruelty should NEVER be applauded or celebrated, even when violent action is 100% justified (e.g. self-defense, killing Hitler or Dany and so on)
-Good intentions mean nothing if you’re operating within a harmful moral system.
-Reason and duty are the prime drivers of moral action, not feelings or emotions.
-Positions of power should be treated as responsibilities, not prizes you ‘deserve’ and certainly not something that should automatically be given to you based on which two people created you.
-Changing the world through radical means, as opposed to small and incremental change, is not only something that cannot happen without tons of bloodshed, but is also an exercise in futility.
-The overlooked outcasts who quietly develop their crafts make for the best people to lead a country.
-Sometimes even an unsatisfactory compromise is better than further bloodshed.
I wonder how many people that watched the show would agree with even half of these 3+7 points.
Not to beat the whole “I’m always talking about Conan” thing to death, but Dinklage and Lena Heady were on an episode of that bit where Conan does video games, and Heady gave him some shit during a “Halo” match or whatever and the camera cut to Dinklage’s face scrunched up in concentration.Hilarious. Peter Dinklage should do more comedy — him and James Caan, too, both proving themselves in “Elf.”
It’s always just possible that maybe the last season wasn’t considered good enough for an ending by many of the viewers as opposed to wanting more per se. The same pool of people more or less are voting on all of these episodes.Season 8Also, these figures are out of date:The Iron Throne = 4.0The Last of the Starks = 5.4The Bells = 5.9The Long Night = 7.4Winterfell = 7.5A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms = 7.8Season 6Blood of My Blood = 8.4No One = 8.4——Disclaimer I’m putting at the end of every comment I’m making on this thread: I’ve never seen the show but the commentary about its implosion at the end fascinating. Having been through something comparable with the final season and end of Battlestar Galactica, I can relate.The comment came with the graph, I have no direct opinion on the quality of any of the episodes having seen none of them yet.
ah yes, IMDB ratings, the true mark of quality!
In this case, relatively speaking yes as it’s the more or less the same pool of people who voted on the earlier episodes as well. The relative comparison of the scores shows they found the last season increasingly less good than all that came before it.We can do Rotten Tomatoes as well.How about Metacritic then? We could do that as well.
What’s with the dip in Season 3? That year was great!
Don’t know, I haven’t actually seen the show.——Disclaimer I’m putting at the end of every comment I’m making on this thread: I’ve never seen the show but the commentary about its implosion at the end fascinating. Having been through something comparable with the final season and end of Battlestar Galactica, I can relate.The comment came with the graph, I have no direct opinion on the quality of any of the episodes having seen none of them yet.
It would be interesting to break down the votes for those two episodes by date. The episodes in question are “The climb” and “The bear and the maiden fair, and both were kinda “table-setting” episodes where not a whole lot of really huge stuff happened. Arya, Jon, Briene and Jaime, Sam. Bran, etc. were all traveling from one place to another with not a lot happening at that moment, the red wedding was being set up, and in kings landing there was some setup as well but nothing super-exciting. It’s fair to say these episodes may not have been as entertaining as people might have been expecting at the time, but they are certainly not bad episodes in my opinion. My guess is that if you filtered out early votes they’d be better rated, as expectations aren’t as high when re-watching them and you the table-setting is more interesting when you know they are setting up some shocking developments a couple of episodes later.
Oh sod it, I forgot to put my disclaimer on my previous reply. If you could imagine these two replies were the one comment, that’d be really helpful, thanks!——Disclaimer I’m putting at the end of every comment I’m making on this thread: I’ve never seen the show but the commentary about its implosion at the end fascinating. Having been through something comparable with the final season and end of Battlestar Galactica, I can relate.The comment came with the graph, I have no direct opinion on the quality of any of the episodes having seen none of them yet.
Wow did not know “rabid game of thrones fan” was such a thing.A few very sad commenters: “You didn’t seeeeeeeee that it was brilliant!!!!”Me: “I saw that it was a sack of dog shit, please stop insulting my intelligent by pretending it was SMORT ;)”
Just when an AV Club article needed more snark. Matt Schimkowitz you had one job!
Nobody wanted more. They wanted better.
At the end of the day, the TV show’s ending was going to be doomed and fairly messy with no source material to go off of.You can just feel the gradual decline of the latter four seasons as it strays further and further from the books. Benioff and Weiss deserve some criticism, but I don’t envy any creator that has to be put in that position of recapturing what made the first four great.My analogy is imagine if the last Harry Potter movie had to be produced before the last Harry Potter book was published and the filmmakers were just starting from scratch.
I think the problems go deeper then that. GRRM has been taken so longer to write the next book because he painted himself into a corner with the red wedding and there isn’t really a satisfying way to get out of it.
“They wanted the pretty white people to ride off into the sunset together,” he said. “No, but the show subverts what you think, and that’s what I love about it. Yeah, it was called Game of Thrones, but at the end, the whole dialogue when people would approach me on the street was, ‘Who’s going to be on the throne?’ I don’t know why that was their takeaway because the show really was more than that.”No one was really saying this. Most people wanted the last two seasons to be paced and developed more naturally so the moments at the end of the last season felt more earned.This is such a foot-in-mouth comment to make about fans of your show – he’s claiming they’re all idiots to justify a shit ending. Which wasn’t even his fault to begin with…
That’s a rubbish take.I didn’t care at all that Dany and Jon lived happily ever after, but frickin’ Bran as king ‘Because of stories’? GTFO with that nonsense.It wasn’t well written and it was a rushed last season.
If you were a little smarter, you might wish that you understood it more.
In the first episode of S8, Tyrion and Varys have reunited and are riding together. These two always have great, witty banter. Yet the dialogue came down to: “You’re short.” and “You have no cock.” That was literally it. And that was my first red flag that something felt…off.I can defend Season 5. I can defend Season 6. I can even defend Season 7. But it’s just not possible for me to defend Season 8. I’m not talking about the ending. I’m talking about the whole thing. A lot of moments that felt like fan ficton. The on-the-nose dialogue, the barrage of cliches, the pacing issues… it wasn’t objectively “bad” but- and this is going to sound weird- but it felt like… a TV show. And I mean this in a pejorative sense, because TV can be dumb, and suddenly Game of Thrones got dumb. I know obviously it isn’t immune to the flaws any show can face, but GoT, at least for me, had been operating on a level far above a typical series, if that makes sense. Maybe the books were responsible for that, but I guess I considered regular TV problems beneath GoT, yet here they all were. Pretty much all at once. Shortcuts. Tropes. Moments were cheaper. Moments were cheesier. Brienne is getting laid for the shippers and “Clegane Bowl” is happening for the nerds. What the fuck was going on?? It just felt like lesser television than it had been.
People are still talking, still ‘backlashing’ about GOT? Maybe only in Dinklage’s head.
“Human beings are complicated characters, you know?”No, Pete. They really aren’t.
Spoken like a true genius.
Succession may be Shakespeare’s poor lost stepchild, but it does get its DNA from GOT.
I agree the heel turn could have been more elegantly written. But this implies they were rushing through and didn’t really care
Tried to insert that Starbucks cup, but the magic of Kinja forbids it.
The idea that the show needs defending is an online canard. What a bunch of babies. It’s some of the best high fantasy aimed at adults ever made.The editorial judgement and quality of AV Club has gone off a cliff in only the past few days. Yeesh.
The last couple of seasons of Game of Thrones was really strange because by that point it was pretty terrible show but it was getting more popular. There is no way that the finale would have been good and Martin seems to have been stuck after the Red Wedding but I have never seen a view of a show collapse so suddenly.
I can never get over the hatred so many man children express towards of the creators of the novels and TV show that they obsessed over for so many years. If they were so awful how did you get so obsessed by it in the first place?
I feel like that logic gives a pass to every TV show in the history of the medium that most people agree eventually had a decline in quality.
If finding it ridiculous that man children express such a level of hatred for the creators of such TV shows then quite happy to give them a pass. If they are such awful human beings then why do these nuts even care about the TV shows they created?
I am neither man or child, and the show started out very good and got worse as it went along. Are you daft? Do you not understand things change over time?
Read again. It’s the absolute violent hatred for the creators that is the point, not the decline in quality. If you think that level of hatred is justified because the show ended poorly then God help you. If they are such awful human beings then why did you get so obsessed with the novels and show they created?
because they merely adapted someone else’s work and thus had most of the difficult writing decisions made for them. once they had to make their own decisions they showed how small their bag of tricks was.
Is it classy to talk down to fans who have legitimate criticisms? Really?
“Themes”…you mean those things that are only good for 8th grade book reports?
The last four episodes WERE SO SLOPPILY MADE IN EVERY WAY. In the end, there needed to be at least four more episodes so everything that happened in those final episodes did not feel like a rushed parody of everything that had come before. It was crazy making and no amount of talk can justify what was presented as the finale of everything that has come before. What the fuck were the creators thinking?
The problem wasn’t the character beats and what happens. The problem was always that the final season (s7 as well but mainly s8) was VERY rushed, with no room to breathe, and the quality of the writing, especially the dialogue between our favorite characters, went to shit. It was not good – and the big, big moments in GoT worked best BECAUSE the smaller moments were so, so good and got us invested in these complex characters.For example: We all knew Dany was, if not evil, definitely up to some shit. But we needed more time with her in s7 and s8, alone or playing off her suddenly very quiet supporting cast, to truly feel the repercussions of the burning of the city.None of the cast gave their best performance in s8. It was noticeable. And whether justly or not, it really colors the entire show because that’s just how human brains remember media like this. It’s a shame.
The last season was rushed.Also, Daenerys was obviously going to become more brutal–that was every other conversation she had about ruling.
You know what? It wasn’t that bad. There. I said it, and I’d day it again if I had to. So anyway, I says to Mabel I says…
You know, I rewatched the whole thing recently, and it’s not THAT bad. It’s not great, but I think time and distance from the hype is gonna do some good.
translation: GoT has a new property coming out soon and Tyrion has to do damage control. they’re going with the tried and true method of misrepresenting the criticisms and disparaging the criticizers for not forcing a love of mediocrity.
I think most of the fandom didn’t even want the pretty, white people to even be together, let alone rule as a couple. Could there have been any less chemistry between what’s her face and what’s his face? You know, the one from the Solo movie and the one from being married to the chick from The Good Fight. Names elude me this morning.
The last two seasons of Game of Thrones were really hurt by the huge audience expectations. after watching them again a couple of months ago I was surprised to find that I really enjoyed them. In fact, I’d say they are some of the most ambitious television that’s ever been made. As far as the sheer spectacle of the big battles there hasn’t been anything like it on television before, and each of those half-seasons had two episodes dedicated to huge battles (as opposed to the one per full season in seasons 3 through 6). To be fair, that’s also part of the problem, because the other thing that really struck me upon re-watching the whole thing is how the show changes from the first few seasons to the last 2-3 seasons, because it’s really not the same sort of show by the end. It starts out as a very character and plot-driven drama, and ends up being more of an action and plot driven popcorn spectacle. So those who were looking for the show to wrap up the story lines with the same attention to characters that is found in the first couple of books, it’s obviously a disappointment. But what they ended up making instead was also a pretty remarkable achievement.
My only complaint about the final season was that it was too short and felt rushed; I have no problem with the story. Tyrion was still alive and thriving at the end and that’s all I really wanted. Drogon melting the throne was pretty cool too.
It was great how the show subverted expectations of the last season being good.
How are those involved still suggesting that the ending ‘subverted expectations’? IIRC, that’s exactly what everybody expected to happen. Daenerys Targaryen, scion of a house renown for going mad and turning evil, rises to power, goes mad and turns evil? My only objection was that they didn’t earn that ending by giving her sufficient motivation for going mad and turning evil.