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The show was never going to have a satisfying final season since on a basic structural level there wasn't enough time left to deal with the white walkers and on top of that they needed to resolve danaerys' storyline as well. You can't have 68 episodes of slowly building threat and have it defeated in 3-6 episodes without it feeling like a wet fart even with good writers. Really the wall needed to fall and have the invasion proper start by the end of season 6 at the absolute latest and when it didn't I knew the show was in trouble. Having said that they also went about the final season with the stupidest possible decisions, especially they got dany / cersei and the white walkers the wrong way round. Dany should have attacked king's landing first, preferably with gradually escalating disregard to civilian collateral damage until she's just outright burning down fortified towns on her way to king's landing and then there's actual conflict as the others can see she's a monster but still need her against the white walkers. Still gonna feel rushed whatever you do though.
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# ¿ May 11, 2020 15:32 |
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 23:17 |
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Alhazred posted:Once the wall falls down you have to fastrack it though. It's an invasion of an unstoppable force that grows larger all the time, you can't really stretch that out for two seasons. Just take all the plots that were going to happen north of the wall and set them in the northlands, somewhere we actually care about. Have some pitched battles, including at the neck, have the north be abandoned, have streams of refugees and skirmishes to slow the walkers down long enough for people to escape. Westeros is the size of South America it can easily take months for the walkers to be coming up to the riverlands. If they'd actually given them brains and a purpose it's be even easier to see them being meticulous and taking their time. The more I think about it though, all the problems in ASOIAF stem from GRRM's decision not to have a time jump after book 3 because he decided he didn't like them. Much easier to start again with all the pieces where they need to be to begin the climax and explain what you need to with flashbacks. His hubris in deciding it was cheating to not write the interlude and then finding out he can't do it has tanked the series.
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# ¿ May 12, 2020 14:25 |
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I hate the mystery box style of TV storytelling it's so cheap. The whole reason people get invested in a mystery is that you believe there's some cleverly hidden truth just under the surface that will explain everything but 99% of the time the writers don't even know and there's a 'worry about it next season just give them a hook to keep watching' philosophy. Unless you get really lucky there's no way they can come up with a satisfying explanation when nothing was planned, it's hard to write a mystery and tease the answers but it's easy to just put in a bunch of cool mysterious events with no rules and then bullshit out an explanation after the fact. Makes it so hard to get invested in any TV show when you know there's a good chance they're just pulling it out of their rear end. Also BSG should have ended with them thinking they were following god's path but finding a burnt out earth, realising it was all bullshit and setting off to create their own society that sucked less. The only possible resolution to a theme about worrying that history is repeating itself in a loop is that you can't possibly know and you should stop tearing yourself apart trying to stop the future. Leaving all technology behind was idiotic.
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# ¿ Jun 16, 2020 09:13 |
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Xealot posted:I also have this complaint. Every goddamn genre franchise winds up in this place where the original thing is the most important event in its fictional history, so everything else becomes a supplement or coda to it. Like, the Night King dying and the Iron Throne melting is the End of History. The One Ring being destroyed is the End of History. Nothing important can possibly happen after. But, here's a random and less-important story that precedes it, replete with winks and nods to the original while never quite justifying its own existence as a unique thing. The war of the ring isn't even the most important event mentioned in the lord of the rings, let alone the wider world though. It's just the one that frodo witnesses and that marks the end of the 3rd age but the scale is much smaller than something like the last alliance
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# ¿ May 6, 2021 15:34 |
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It's worth reading the transcript of the legasov tapes after watching Chernobyl because they do have a very different thrust to that which the show portrays. The show pivots hard towards 'secrecy is bad and Chernobyl happened because of our love of secrets' with legasov's speech at the trial, which is conspicuously absent from the real life legasov's own words. The show also emphasises the fault of the RBMK reactors safety shutoff and this being kept a secret by the kgb as a primary reason for the disaster to support this. The problem is that this isn't true at all and the team at Chernobyl were probably well aware of the fault and it was not covered up. Legasov's complaints in the tapes are more to do with systemic problems in the Soviet nuclear program and a lot of what we now call 'human factors' and are well recognised contributors to disasters and are taught in areas like aviation and medicine. The problems legasov wanted to highlight weren't even limited to the Soviets and are present in other countries and other industries.
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# ¿ May 8, 2021 23:03 |
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My favourite part of season 8 is Tyrion giving Bran the insulting epithet 'the broken' like right to his face in front of a bunch of people. I'm imagining some medieval priest proudly announcing the coronation of 'Childeric the idiot' or 'Aethelred the unready' to a suspicious crowd.
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# ¿ May 10, 2021 11:01 |
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 23:17 |
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Alhazred posted:There actually was one Norwegian king called Inge the Hunchback. There were also kings called childeric the idiot and aethlred the unready' too, probs not to their face though.
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# ¿ May 11, 2021 11:19 |