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lezard_valeth
Mar 14, 2016

Happy Thread posted:

That scene with the Hound guiltily giving that family a proper burial was cringe. Maybe it's just how it was executed and what it was surrounded by (lovely late season stuff) but I did not find it compelling for that character to feel that way.

I think at that point they really didn't know if they wanted to go with the potentially reformed and pietous Hound the books were hinting at or not.

Of course next we see him a few episodes later that doubt is thrown out the window, old epic t shirt one liner Hound's back babeh.

To me the part that completely took me out of the Hound's plot is when he sees the Mountain and says "yEaH, tHiS iS wHaT yOu'Ve aLWaYs bEeN". Cleganebowl felt like a checkpoint crossed out of the list at that point and completely unearned, but the Hound acting as if fighting his zombie brother was all he ever wanted, specially after giving Arya a heart to heart talk about revenge in the previous room, felt hilariously out of left field.

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Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Pretty sure the concept of Cleganebowl was born completely out of the fandom.

The actual Cleganebowl fight is as a result staged like a wrestling match, including a spot where Sandor has to wriggle out of the Mountain's famous finishing move. You kinda lose track of how bad and pointless it is since it's only one such thing among many.

Laterite
Mar 14, 2007

It's Gutfest '89
Grimey Drawer
lmao the hound ended up fighting a giant baby

Chris James 2
Aug 9, 2012


Laterite posted:

lmao the hound ended up fighting a giant baby

He fought the showrunners?

Eau de MacGowan
May 12, 2009

BRASIL HEXA
2026 tá logo aí
The hound scene where he walks up to a bunch of poor soldiers who are inevitably burping and farting and sticking their fingers up each others arses and kills them with the axe and one of them goes “....oval office?!” As his last words and the hound goes “you’re poo poo at dying” is peak late season got

Groovelord Neato
Dec 6, 2014


Why'd they make the rezzed Mountain look so dumb.

An insane mind
Aug 11, 2018

It really is baffling how bar 2 or maybe 3 none of the characters arcs had a satisfying conclusion. That's just such a crappy move towards the audience.

Sodomy Hussein posted:

Male gazey writers writing what male gazey writers think is funny. It's also so out of tone with the rest of the show that it's painful.

Yeah, but I'm a dude and I can laugh at a good dick joke but these were just...just ugh. You're right that it's probably the tone that nuked it most of all but then again to me at some points it really felt they were doing nudity and dick/oval office jokes to be as edgy as possible because people were expecting an edgy show when...Ugh I can't explain it well, in the later seasons the nudity/profanity felt way more...tacked on I dunno ignore me.

Groovelord Neato
Dec 6, 2014


Everyone keeps talking about him having a big dick but I thought that was the first thing they asked Ros and she said he wasn't any bigger than your average fella.

thunderspanks
Nov 5, 2003

crucify this


Someday, when GRRM is on his deathbed and surrounded by piles of pizza grease stained money, I hope his big powermove is finally releasing the last book in the series- a novelization of seasons 6-8.

Just Chamber
Feb 10, 2014

WE MUST RETURN TO THE DANCE! THE NIGHT IS OURS!

thunderspanks posted:

Someday, when GRRM is on his deathbed and surrounded by piles of pizza grease stained money, I hope his big powermove is finally releasing the last book in the series- a novelization of seasons 6-8.

It wont even be a novel it will be one last blog post that just says "Season 8 was the perfect ending."

Captain Splendid
Jan 7, 2009

Qu'en pense Caffarelli?
Just a reminder that the last lines in the series are

"I once brought a jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel..."

Happy Thread
Jul 10, 2005

by Fluffdaddy
Plaster Town Cop

An insane mind posted:

Yeah, but I'm a dude and I can laugh at a good dick joke but these were just...just ugh. You're right that it's probably the tone that nuked it most of all but then again to me at some points it really felt they were doing nudity and dick/oval office jokes to be as edgy as possible because people were expecting an edgy show when...Ugh I can't explain it well, in the later seasons the nudity/profanity felt way more...tacked on I dunno ignore me.

It's cringe because it's similar vibes to the gratuitous swearing and sex found in bad reality shows for boomers. In those you're not allowed to swear or portray sex very often because they're sins. But you're perfectly allowed to insinuate them as heavily and as often as possible. The viewers love it, because it doesn't quality as a sin if you only secretly think of it in your head and enjoy it. Which happened only because you're smart and thought of it yourself. Surely the show didn't intend that exact brainless reaction from you by calling their show names like "hardcore pawn stars" and including millions of innuendos. Or just generally including "adult conversations" for their own sake, done just barely tastefully enough to not trigger prudishness.... like imagine how long a supercut would be of every GoT character who worked the word "cock" into a sentence while giving a coy look. Or like that boomer reality show about sword-making where they bleep out 999999 swear words per second, but the clever-feeling viewer can still guess what is hidden behind the beeps. That one is beyond parody... it's like the whole show. Like making prudes pay a fee to think about naughty words.

Game of Thrones nudity feels off because they're doing that dumb phenomenon, plus the seediness of paying actual people for sexual performances for such a purpose, plus the context of abuse in Hollywood's widespread practices, plus it's a show that places other very young actors and actresses in proximity to that environment (some of whom were destined for sexual scenes themselves once they got a little older by the show's end).

Happy Thread fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Apr 8, 2021

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

Sodomy Hussein posted:

The actual Cleganebowl fight is as a result staged like a wrestling match

Close

Groovelord Neato
Dec 6, 2014



I made an animated version of this with the Mountain boss life meter but I have no clue if I still got it.

Barreft
Jul 21, 2014

I thought Jorah went out really well.

e: it all sucks yeah, but i'm picking the corn out of the poo poo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2PBkZoi1Ho&t=75s

Barreft fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Apr 8, 2021

Solice Kirsk
Jun 1, 2004

.

Groovelord Neato posted:

Everyone keeps talking about him having a big dick but I thought that was the first thing they asked Ros and she said he wasn't any bigger than your average fella.

Was it Preston Jacobs that suggested that was all a ploy from Littlefinger trying to get Pod to keep coming back and maybe through him have some insight into Tyrion's plans? Because that makes a lot of sense. Also I seem to remember that video pointing out a bunch of stuff that kinda supports it too.

lezard_valeth
Mar 14, 2016
Jorah has a good beginning and a good ending, but a really bad sandwhich filling. Him getting the stone people disease was the most sidequest poo poo the show had, it served no purpose in his, Sam's, Daenerys' or Jon's plot. Just "Khaleesi imma go find the cure for stone people...ok i'm back I found out the cure for stone people". Also him suddenly being cool bros with Jon when he realised Daenerys is in love with him was very out of character.

Mat Cauthon
Jan 2, 2006

The more tragic things get,
the more I feel like laughing.



lezard_valeth posted:

Tragically, post season 5 Game of Thrones has some of the best music I've heard in a tv series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LASz6HAL7E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j34Xa6DGi4s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeYNHwRswYU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1frgt0D_f4
and the unreleased Daenerys theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K318JWc85Dk

Ramin Djawadi did some serious heavylifting

Ramin Djawadi was really killing it the whole way through. He got better over the course of time, which is kind of insane to think about. Don't think he's had as much time to stretch on Westworld, but I'm not really a fan of the epic orchestra cover thing so maybe it works better for other people.

Anything that works in the whole Night King sequence works because the score is just amazing.

Solice Kirsk posted:

That added scene of Theon writing Rob a warning letter and then burning it added tons to his character. Putting out there early his ability to swing to the good side. Theon probably has the most complete arc of any character in the show.

Theon's arc owned despite all the stupid poo poo in the middle, same goes for Jorah. Alfie Allen acted his rear end off despite being given basically nothing for seasons 4 through 7.5 and it's kind of unfortunate that he seems to have ended up typecast as sullen little brother character in a lot of stuff. The guy has range.

It's insulting that he (and Gwendolyn Christie IIRC) had to submit their own Emmy consideration material because HBO couldn't be arsed to do anything for anyone that wasn't Dinklage.

Barreft posted:

I thought Jorah went out really well.

e: it all sucks yeah, but i'm picking the corn out of the poo poo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2PBkZoi1Ho&t=75s

Jorah went out on his own terms, living up to the oath that everyone expected him to break. Even the magical greyscale cure sidequest can't diminish it.

Sky Shadowing posted:

Theon and the Hound are pretty much the only characters that S7 and S8 did not ruin.

They absolutely botched the Hound. Everything post Battle of Winterfell is just immensely dumb and nullifies his entire arc. To quote Lindsay Ellis, he tries to scare Arya out of assassinating Cersei et al even though Arya has already surpassed the Hound in immensely hosed up and wanton vengeance. He had already discarded his old life and literally survived the apocalypse - why would he care about going back to King's Landing to kill his already dead brother? The writers got amped up on the whole Cleganebowl thing and couldn't even stick the landing of some trite fan service.

lezard_valeth posted:

I guess, but that's not saying much seeing how things turned out

speaking of deleted scenes, a lot of early seasons deleted ones were....puzzling. Like Tywin and Pycelle's speech is soooo good in explaining Pycelle's motivations and they removed that in favor of more Pod the Rod scenes

That Pycelle/Tywin interaction was great, we should've gotten more of that. A lot of the deleted scenes and the various animated history segments are better than just about everything in seasons 5-8. I could probably do a rewatch if I stopped at Oberyn getting his skull crushed, or maybe Hardhome.

lezard_valeth
Mar 14, 2016
With just changing that one line I mentioned earlier they could have completely turned around Cleganebowl into something justifiable and not just half assed fanservice. Instead of having the Hound seeking his brother for "AAAARRR VENGEANCEEEE!!!!except not you arya, vengeance is bad" they could have turned it into an act of mercy, knowing that his brother was long gone and wanting to free him of his misery.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





lezard_valeth posted:

Tragically, post season 5 Game of Thrones has some of the best music I've heard in a tv series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LASz6HAL7E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j34Xa6DGi4s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeYNHwRswYU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1frgt0D_f4
and the unreleased Daenerys theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K318JWc85Dk

Ramin Djawadi did some serious heavylifting

God, I want to know what the story behind "Stay A Thousand Years" is, because it never appears in the show, and it sounds suspiciously like its a coronation theme for a victorious Jon and Dany. Because it's basically their love theme kicked up to 11,000. Was it some sort of musical gently caress you to Weiss and Benioff?

Vichan
Oct 1, 2014

I'LL PUNISH YOU ACCORDING TO YOUR CRIME

lezard_valeth posted:

Jorah has a good beginning and a good ending, but a really bad sandwhich filling. Him getting the stone people disease was the most sidequest poo poo the show had, it served no purpose in his, Sam's, Daenerys' or Jon's plot. Just "Khaleesi imma go find the cure for stone people...ok i'm back I found out the cure for stone people". Also him suddenly being cool bros with Jon when he realised Daenerys is in love with him was very out of character.

The actor was going to appear in a new Resident Evil movie so they had to think of a way to get rid of him for a season, when that fell through they had to think of stuff for him to do. I do agree that giving him Greyscale was one of the worst ways to go about it.

Bolingbroke
Jan 4, 2015
One of the (many) problems in S8 was that they never developed a way to defeat the Night King and the army of the dead in a way that made metaphoric sense. For the obvious LoTR comparison, Sauron represents greed, industrialisation, and expansionism. He is defeated by the actions of humble hobbits who love gardening and small country life, and in the final moment the ring is destroyed by greed itself, because no one is immune to greed. This makes metaphoric sense. In GoT, the Night King represents climate change and death itself. How on earth do you defeat that in a way that makes metaphoric sense? Do all the nobility come together for a Paris accord? It's just not that kind of show. There is no character who could have stabbed the Night King and defeated death itself and it make sense.

The only sort of solution I've come up with for this is to actually do something with Melisandre and the Lord of Light. The battle of the long night rages, thousands of Daenerys' soldiers die, Melisandre is praying desperately for her Lord to please deliver them. And he does - Melisandre channels magic fire which rains from the sky and kills all the dead, including a bunch of the living. The survivors celebrate this morbid victory. Varys, whose arc has always been lowkey defined by his distrust of the Lord of the Light (for whom he was cut), drily congratulates Melisandre on her and her God's victory. In terror, she confesses to him that when the Lord of Light acted through her that night she saw a glimpse of what he really was, and he is not a good guy, and one day an endless summer will replace the endless winter and it will be much, much worse. And as in the show she kills herself. This does mean you just replace the imminently looming threat with a different, more distant looming threat, but you could end the show on a note of "we've succeeded for now, but in a few decades or centuries the whole world will burn". Death cannot be defeated, only delayed ("What do we say to the God of Death? Not today"). It would also work well as a parallel for humanity actively exacerbating climate change rather than combating it in the real world.

Anyway that's my GoT fanfiction. Not a perfect solution, but better than "and then Arya stabs him with her ninja skills and it's totally dope!!"

Vegetable
Oct 22, 2010

Barreft posted:

I thought Jorah went out really well.

e: it all sucks yeah, but i'm picking the corn out of the poo poo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2PBkZoi1Ho&t=75s
I've forgotten how poorly lit this episode was

Solice Kirsk
Jun 1, 2004

.

Vegetable posted:

I've forgotten how poorly lit this episode was

What do you expect to get if your showrunners aren't that.....bright!

Happy Thread
Jul 10, 2005

by Fluffdaddy
Plaster Town Cop
Uggh Bolingbroke, why is that so good too. It would have been so easy to give us that

lezard_valeth
Mar 14, 2016
Ok, so I went to check on r/freefolk after a while.

Can someone explain what the hell happened in the ending of Attack on Titan and why is it being compared to GoT, including the creation of r/titanfolk?

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





lezard_valeth posted:

Ok, so I went to check on r/freefolk after a while.

Can someone explain what the hell happened in the ending of Attack on Titan and why is it being compared to GoT, including the creation of r/titanfolk?

I'm not too well versed on AoT, why its good or bad, or why people are setting themselves on fire over it but apparently the manga ends with the main character Eren going back in time to engineer the tragic genocidal events that spur his younger self into becoming the insane fascist lunatic he ultimately devolves into by the time the story is over.

Honestly, the Freefuckers are WAY to overly dramatic about poo poo so the only point in going there anymore is to just laugh at how they still haven't given up the ghost and moved on yet. Although they seem to keep finding new things to freak out over in other media properties for some reason :thunk:

Orange Devil
Oct 1, 2010

Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!
Show had many great actors. Great locations and sets, great costumes, great music, poor fight choreography, increasingly poo poo writers and the worst producers of all time. The result is rather unique imo:

On first watch the first 4 seasons (and especially the first) are good to great and very enjoyable.
Season 5-8 are progressively worse until they are objectively poo poo.
The way the arcs progress and are "resolved" and loose plot and character threads are left hanging all over the drat place makes the entire show utterly unrewatchable. A lot of the things that are cool, mysterious, foreboding or promising on first watch turn out not to lead to anything at all, or worse, lead to objective poo poo. I cannot fathom being able to enjoy even the beginning of this show on a second viewing after you have seen the entire show. Everything is just utterly poisoned by knowing either how little it matters or where it will end up.

Happy Thread
Jul 10, 2005

by Fluffdaddy
Plaster Town Cop

lezard_valeth posted:

Ok, so I went to check on r/freefolk after a while.

Can someone explain what the hell happened in the ending of Attack on Titan and why is it being compared to GoT, including the creation of r/titanfolk?

Haven't watched it, but according to a friend who read about Attack on Titan the plot is roughly this:

Everyones' homes are under attack by big ole Titans. They all just assume the whole world is under attack and that they're the only society in the world. The main character is a security guard in that society. His dad secretly held onto some of the long-lost knowledge of how it's possible to control the Titans. It turns out that this society once controlled them, tried to use them aggressively to conquer the rest of the world, and lost the battle. The rest of the outside world moved on to modern life, leaving them to exist on a prison island alone with the Titans for generations. Not only did the Titans turn on them after the ability to control them was lost, but also lost was the knowledge of their ancestors' past aggressive war even happening or their shameful origins -- plus the knowledge that outsiders even exist at all!

It sounds quite original but the story is apparently an allegory for recent Japanese history, its wars of aggression and subsequent denials. The topic is rather sensitive and completely unresolved in the real world. This delicate nature of it was... apparently not handled well, especially in the final episode.

Happy Thread fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Apr 8, 2021

Homora Gaykemi
Apr 30, 2020

by Fluffdaddy

lezard_valeth posted:

Ok, so I went to check on r/freefolk after a while.

Can someone explain what the hell happened in the ending of Attack on Titan and why is it being compared to GoT, including the creation of r/titanfolk?

Titanfolk wasn't a response to the ending, it's been around for a while. Couldn't tell you how long, but yeah

As for the ending,

Collapsing Farts
Jun 29, 2018

💀
Is he handing him a turd?

Homora Gaykemi
Apr 30, 2020

by Fluffdaddy

Collapsing Farts posted:

Is he handing him a turd?

It's a seashell, this isn't a Toriyama manga :v:

Eau de MacGowan
May 12, 2009

BRASIL HEXA
2026 tá logo aí
is eren supposed to be gaunt or extremely into the cure

An insane mind
Aug 11, 2018

Eau de MacGowan posted:

is eren supposed to be gaunt or extremely into the cure

I think Eren is basically supposed to be a just missed it incel which is why they loved him so much before...y'know the actual ending.

Vichan
Oct 1, 2014

I'LL PUNISH YOU ACCORDING TO YOUR CRIME
I also loved Qyburn from beginning to end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb-RVIETRCE

This is the scene that was talked about before.

Vichan fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Apr 8, 2021

Homora Gaykemi
Apr 30, 2020

by Fluffdaddy

Eau de MacGowan posted:

is eren supposed to be gaunt or extremely into the cure

That's what people who can turn into titans look like as they age. It's Robert Smiths all the way down to titan Hitler

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Sky Shadowing posted:

Theon and the Hound are pretty much the only characters that S7 and S8 did not ruin.

IDK man, Cleganebowl basically completely jettisoned the Hound's character arc and took him right back to where the show started him, that's pretty loving lame.

I do like the suggestion that If only he'd said something like, "I'm not here for revenge, I'm just here to put a corpse in the earth" would improve things a bit so at least his character wasn't completely altered.

But seriously bringing him back just to have him march to King's Landing, duel his brother and die in a fire is a loving awful ending for where his arc was going.

D&D threw most of the characters under the bus in incredible fashion. Jaime's arc was undone completely as well as others.

lezard_valeth
Mar 14, 2016
Jaime is the character that definitely got it the worst. While most of the characters end up doing one or two things that are inconsistent with their established personality and motivations (Tyrion and Varys for example) or arrive at the conclusion of their character arc through poor execution (Daenerys), Jaime's actions go against the very core of his character.

It defies all reason that someone would accidentally write this poo poo up while believing they were writing a masterpiece. They specifically used a sentence that contradicts everything he has stood for.

And it's not like he only had that scene way back in s2 with Brienne. No. The very previous season when he sees Daenerys burning everyone he charges at her with no regards for his own life, when he learns that the army of the dead is coming, he immediately jumps to action and starts rallying his troops, only to then be completely disgusted when he finds out Cersei plans. He has always consistently seen the bigger picture.

Come season 8 he was the only character I was still invested on and felt that he could still have a more than satisfactory character arc, but then D&D swerved the van into a wall of bricks at the last minute.

Nikolaj Coster Waldeu deserved better.

THE BAR
Oct 20, 2011

You know what might look better on your nose?

Waldorf. It's spelled Waldorf.

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thunderspanks
Nov 5, 2003

crucify this


You know what else is for 8th grade book reports? character arcs, and 8th graders are better writers than those two chodes.

edit: I actually forgot how much the last season bothered me until I caught up on this thread. My coworker told me last night that she's finally watching GoT (and currently in season 2) and I wish I could rewatch all those early episodes for the first time again

thunderspanks fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Apr 8, 2021

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