Game of Thrones, Season 8 (spoilers allowed)

This is a good example of how generally stupid your analysis is. I actually think Dany breaking bad is the right choice, and figured it was always in play, and likely. The issue is always in how we got there. D&D wanted to get it over with, so they rushed it, and they relied on lazy tropes to do it. She was rejected by a man! Her hair all messy, that's how you know she going crazy! The disappointing thing about this show is, they did so much right for so many years. Slowly making Jamie and The Hound and Arya and Sansa and Tyrion into complicated nuanced characters was good. Yes, they had the books, but they did a good job with them. Better than Martin on some stuff, even. (Sansa, for example.) They just didn't have the patience to see it to the end.

I get it, on some level. They pitched this show in 2007 and it went into development the same year, I believe. So they've spent such a long time with it. But they fucked up the landing because they wanted to rush past all the correct emotional beats.

 

I don't think they fucked up the landing. You could maybe say they fucked up the dismount, or whatever the parlance is, but they stuck the landing.

The ending worked.

 

Your posts come across quite differently, but I’ll chalk it up to me not being able to read “tone.”

It’s not so much that I had traditional expectations. Hell, I half-expected Jon to die and Danaerys to rule. My problem is that they chose the absolute worst, most boring, least inspiring character of the entire series to ascend to Ruler of the Six Kingdoms.

Your arguments about the show's abrupt turn toward Danaerys becoming the Mad Queen are better applied to Bran suddenly becoming king. If there's one storyline that came out of nowhere, it was Bran becoming the ruler. The foundations were laid for Danaerys. They laid plenty of foundation for Jon becoming king. In fact, they laid foundations throughout the series for multiple characters to become ruler. But not for Bran.

Martin, Benioff and Weiss didn't "upend traditional expectations." They failed to tell a complete story, as if they simply threw a dart and landed on Bran when trying to answer the question of who would sit on the Iron Throne. Now, Martin may do a better job at getting the story to Bran in the books, but that has nothing to do with the story that was told on screen for eight seasons.

 

This is all very fair. The problem I have with most of the criticism I've seen is the idea that Dany's turn "came out of nowhere." It was rushed and lazy, as you said. But the signs were there throughout the series.

It's unfortunate that they did get so rushed. I think it's important for a show like this to have a finite run of seasons, or it falls into the trap that "LOST" did, meandering for a few seasons because they didn't know how long the show would last. But if the final two seasons of GOT had just been 10 episodes each, the story would have been fleshed out so much better.

 

Oh believe me, the Bran stuff was no better than the Dany stuff.

I think some of that was because the actor who played Bran was so limited, but maybe they also told him to play it that way. Who knows. It's so hard to pick an actor at age 8 or whatever he was when he was cast and have him be a good actor when he's 20. Shows you how much the Harry Potter franchise struck gold with their three kid leads.

I think, in the end, how they handled Varys, Littlefinger and Tyrion might pissed me off the most. The idea that three of the smartest characters turned into idiots to serve the plot was just criminal.

 

Bran is so bad, when they asked him in an interview how he found his far-off, three-eyed raven gaze, he said that he's just really blind without his glasses, so he didn't wear contacts. He literally just can't see in all of his scenes.

Man, the show really ground to a halt whenever he was on-screen. I really am mostly satisfied with the show's ending. I'm just disappointed that dipshit ended up being the ruler. He really brought nothing to the show.

I remember my wife asking why we were still watching him get dragged through the wilderness for all that time because he's so boring, and I said, "Well, there must be a payoff with him. Everything else is so good, I'll trust that it will be worth it." It really wasn't.

 

Here is the quote from the article you posted and agreed with.

"As the sole protagonist in her own storyline, far from the rest of the characters, she was set up to be one of the few unambiguously heroic figures in the series."

I took my assessment of your point of view from your agreement with the article. You whined when you falsely assumed I hadn't read it. Now you whine when I hold you to its contents. I based an assumption on your flawed post and your lazy attack on me. My analysis was fine. You just don't like being called on for acting like a jackass and engaging in lazy personal attacks because it's below your reputation. Well, welcome to the mud, bubba, because you dragged us down here. You saw my name on a post and figured it was an excuse to post like a jackass. Now you want to live up to your handle? By all means, but you're not showing your best self here.

They didn't just rely on the things you mentioned. The seeds of Dany's turn were there all along. I saw them. I posted that I could see Dany turning on Jon rather than let him get in her way all the way back on the first page of this thread. As far as I can tell, you didn't see those signs. That's your mistake, not mine, and it colors your flawed analysis and whining about the outcome. You say it wasn't earned because you think that makes your whining more reasonable. I say it was flawed, but it followed up on things that had been there all along.

The same is true of Jaime. There was all this talk of a redemption arc. I just didn't see it that way. I saw it as a flawed person who was mostly bad, but had some endearing qualities. As we learned more about him and saw that he was capable of a mixture of decency to go along with the horrible behavior, some people mistook that for redemption. I think we were just learning more about the character. It wasn't so much that he was humbled by the loss of his hand as it was that he had to tone down his act because he was no longer a great fighter. In the end, I was correct there, too, as Jaime proved to be the same person all along. He temporarily rebelled against Cersei, but in the end, his love for her came first. And that's fine, because in the real world, people who seem to free themselves from destructive relationships backslide into the same old patterns quite often.

Here's the thing. Part of the genius of Game of Thrones is it got the audience to root for terrible people. Dany is a ruthless dictator who more than once burned people to death when it wasn't necessary even before King's Landing. She was mostly good, but after the traumatic war with the dead, the loss of two of the dragons she saw as her children and two people she loved dearly and what she saw as a betrayal by the man she loved, she fell further into darkness. Jaime Lannister was always arrogant and ruthless and he put his love for Cersei above everything. Sure, he was capable of doing the right thing, such as turning on the Mad King and saving Brienne, but he's still the guy who shoved a 10-year-old out a window at the beginning of the story.

Hell, people were rooting for Melisandre and she manipulated Stannis into burning his own daughter to death.

I'm sorry you can't handle people seeing things differently from your perspective, but you are relying heavily on ad hominem attacks to support your points. I'm firing back with some of the same, but I'm also rooting mine in the story.

 

Now on this last point, we agree. I have no problem with what they did with Dany, but the mistakes by Varys, Littlefinger and Tyrion drove me nuts. That is especially true of Tyrion. They set him up as this brilliant mind, yet he failed far too often over the last season or two of the show.

 

Nailed it.

 

Nah. I pick at things I see as flaws in movies and TV shows (which sometimes drives my wife bonkers as I point out TV plot holes you could drive a semi through), and that one bothered me far more than an errant coffee cup.

 

The problem with that argument is that the Starks repeatedly dealt with similar offenses by executing the offenders. You can argue the brutality of decapitation vs being burned to death, but dead is dead.

 

This is bang on.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/05/game-of-thrones-finale-death.html