WhatIfGodWasALeaf
Active member
herman said:
That's true, I've found social media goes a little spoiler crazy when it's a leaked episode though.
Game of Thrones (S7)
- Thread starter CarltonTheBear
- Start date
That's true, I've found social media goes a little spoiler crazy when it's a leaked episode though.
WhatIfGodWasALeaf said:
I don't know if this was 'Spoils of War' good, at least as far as judging just an individual episode goes, but it was very close. I do have some nitpicks, which I'll talk about after it airs, but it was still a damn entertaining episode. I'll probably watch it again soon.
Guru Tugginmypuddah
Active member
Well I am no longer the master of my domain.
That was totally wicked!
That was totally wicked!
Nik the Trik said:
It's a good thing they just happened to have those lying around eh.
This season's had some of the coolest stuff happen but the writers sometimes can't come up with good explanation for why/how. Like I said before, I think that's the effect of not being able to use anything Martin's thought of now.
Benji's "there's no time!" line also made me laugh. What an awesome entrance/appearance for him and then he just gets himself killed.
I think I'm in the minority here but I thought that episode was ridiculous. Jon is always saved by some extraneous crap just when it looks like all is lost. Doing it literally ever time loses its effect. I think by the end of the episode I just became numb as to who lived and who died because it seems like such a wacky, logic free world now.
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Sent from my SM-G935W8 using Tapatalk
Bender said:
I didn't actually notice how similar this episode was to the Battle of the Bastards until I watched it the second time.
I'm really not crazy about how Arya's acting. She's drastically overreacting to that letter, which the rest of her family didn't take seriously for a second. I mean if she only told Sansa how she got it she'd be able to clearly explain that this is all Littlefinger just trying to stir the pot.
with that said, ZOMBIE DRAGON!!!!
Kin
New member
Bender said:
I actually think you're going to be in fairly strong company on this one. For instance, here's Alan Sepinwall writing at Uproxx:
And here's Alison Herman at the Ringer:
That seems to be a general theme among criticism of the show right now. Where once this show seemed subversive, twisting our concepts of fantasy on it's head(people who do brave but foolish things get mercked) now seems pretty conventional.
Some people seem to be really digging the spectacle. Ice Zombies and Dragons and huge naval battles and that's fair enough. Personally, I saw the Lord of the Rings movies. I've seen neat fantasy set pieces rendered into computer graphics. I'm down for some more but that itself doesn't do much for me. Spectacle without intelligence is Michael Bay.
Personally I'm not that down on the show, I've sort of accepted I need to switch my brain off for it these days and I never really figured the show would end with the Night King winning, but I will miss the show that got such great dramatic mileage out of Tyrion moving a chair across a room or scenes like Robert and Cersei going over their sham marriage. That seems like a long ways away.
(Also, while I appreciate that the show doesn't seem to want to take hard moral stands on the actions of some of its characters are they maybe steering too hard into whatever skeevy demographic apparently wanted Luke and Leia to make out some more in Star Wars? Trying to make us feel some empathy for a messed up brother-sister romance is one thing but the Aunt-Nephew thing they're leaning hard into isn't something I'm dying to see explored further)
I've yet to meet a single person who thought the "let's kidnap a wight" plan made a lick of sense.
herman
Well-known member
The problem with GoT since they've outpaced Martin's writing has been the showrunners' about-face on how the show built its cachet to begin with. And now they're clearly tired of the travel and the time and the set up.
They cut some fluff in the earlier seasons, but there was some clear meandering so as not to overtake the books, which gave a lot of time for characters to blossom. They also had a great deal of Martin's dialog to work with.
Beyond the books, we're seeing a lot of lazy writing. They seem to spitball out set pieces and spectacles first, then reverse engineering motivations. They're not very good at reverse engineering. As such, it has leaned towards far more conventional fantasy elements, rather than the realism that was the original intent.
Now they've capped their time and money investment, and dumped it pretty much entirely into the spectacle. Writing is shortcut further by simply recalling season 1 dialog and leaning on characterization that was developed earlier and just doing "oh I know yous". It's cheapening the product, but I see why they've done it. Same thing happened to other great shows that did not build an end game properly (BSG, Rome S2).
All that being said,
https://twitter.com/ringer/status/899451756618276864
www.twitter.com/ringer/status/899451756618276864
They cut some fluff in the earlier seasons, but there was some clear meandering so as not to overtake the books, which gave a lot of time for characters to blossom. They also had a great deal of Martin's dialog to work with.
Beyond the books, we're seeing a lot of lazy writing. They seem to spitball out set pieces and spectacles first, then reverse engineering motivations. They're not very good at reverse engineering. As such, it has leaned towards far more conventional fantasy elements, rather than the realism that was the original intent.
Now they've capped their time and money investment, and dumped it pretty much entirely into the spectacle. Writing is shortcut further by simply recalling season 1 dialog and leaning on characterization that was developed earlier and just doing "oh I know yous". It's cheapening the product, but I see why they've done it. Same thing happened to other great shows that did not build an end game properly (BSG, Rome S2).
All that being said,
https://twitter.com/ringer/status/899451756618276864
www.twitter.com/ringer/status/899451756618276864
herman said:
I'm starting to think that the show is planning on having Littlefinger come out on on top in this conflict. We all sort of figured that Sansa finally had him beat. And that Arya coming to Winterfell would likely lead to his death. But maybe we had it all wrong, as Littlefinger finally seems to have found a way to outmanoeuvre Sansa. At first he tried to pit her against her family and that failed (at least in the immediate present situation). So instead he pits her family against her. A show like this isn't going to have a happy ending in every single aspect. Not every villain is going to die and not every hero is going to survive.
Watching this weeks Talk the Thrones (the Ringer's post-episode analysis show), and while I've only watched these for this season, I've never seen them rip into an episode like this one before.
herman
Well-known member
On the Cast of Kings podcast, Joanna Robinson was asked if she still has hope for this show going into season 8.
This is the quote she clings to, assuming that D&D received far more notes about the ending elements that they have bumbled and fumbled towards in Seasons 5 - 7:
That above is pretty much what attracted me to the books and the show and is personified in the life of Robert Baratheon: ferocious, inspiring knight; piss-poor ruler.
And to be fair to D&D, they are exceptional adapters of the source material, and really good at executing the vision. Where they've failed now is in creating plausible routes to these new checkpoints beyond the books. The recap that Nik referenced earlier by Alison Herman nails it right in the title: "The Show Is Conventional Fantasy Now".
Judging by D&D's obsession with blowing their direwolf budget on a wight polar bear (clamouring for it since Season 2), we can really see the seams in the show without GRRM's innumerable revisions and dedication to internal logic to fall back on. Season 7 has been less a cohesive story than a series of vignette set pieces where all the effort and money and time went into doing the best explosions.
Take for example the ending of this episode: Viserion becoming a blue-eyed wight dragon. They wanted the eye opening to be the focus to mirror Drogon meeting Jon, and echoing the much earlier scene in the series when we first meet the Night King turning a baby into a White Walker. But with Viserion stuck in the bottom of the lake (a tragically beautiful bit of CGI, btw), the only way they could get that dragon into contact with the Night King was to... suddenly have ship chains North of the Wall and somehow get them around Viserion's neck, and then have thousands of wights with next to zero remaining muscle/tendon drudge it out onto land. Instead of being struck by how much of a game changer the Night King having a dragon is, now I'm stuck on where the hell the chains came from.
Alternative:
- Hardhome homage: NK, standing by the water, raises a hand, crane shot over NK to over the lake (and billows of blood in the water), and two bright blue lights pierce through the murk as the water begins to churn
This is the quote she clings to, assuming that D&D received far more notes about the ending elements that they have bumbled and fumbled towards in Seasons 5 - 7:
From GRRM's interview with Rolling Stones
That above is pretty much what attracted me to the books and the show and is personified in the life of Robert Baratheon: ferocious, inspiring knight; piss-poor ruler.
And to be fair to D&D, they are exceptional adapters of the source material, and really good at executing the vision. Where they've failed now is in creating plausible routes to these new checkpoints beyond the books. The recap that Nik referenced earlier by Alison Herman nails it right in the title: "The Show Is Conventional Fantasy Now".
Judging by D&D's obsession with blowing their direwolf budget on a wight polar bear (clamouring for it since Season 2), we can really see the seams in the show without GRRM's innumerable revisions and dedication to internal logic to fall back on. Season 7 has been less a cohesive story than a series of vignette set pieces where all the effort and money and time went into doing the best explosions.
Take for example the ending of this episode: Viserion becoming a blue-eyed wight dragon. They wanted the eye opening to be the focus to mirror Drogon meeting Jon, and echoing the much earlier scene in the series when we first meet the Night King turning a baby into a White Walker. But with Viserion stuck in the bottom of the lake (a tragically beautiful bit of CGI, btw), the only way they could get that dragon into contact with the Night King was to... suddenly have ship chains North of the Wall and somehow get them around Viserion's neck, and then have thousands of wights with next to zero remaining muscle/tendon drudge it out onto land. Instead of being struck by how much of a game changer the Night King having a dragon is, now I'm stuck on where the hell the chains came from.
Alternative:
- Hardhome homage: NK, standing by the water, raises a hand, crane shot over NK to over the lake (and billows of blood in the water), and two bright blue lights pierce through the murk as the water begins to churn