I'm hearing nothing except whining from people about how they don't like the ending, but I think the truth is that ending a programme like this one was always going to be controversial.
To those saying that Daenerys becoming mad queen was out of character, I disagree, I found the programme to be full of foreshadowing for this moment (I've expected it for years); the following link is very informative on the matter: https://tinyurl.com/y3pf68e2
>>22759 Jaime escaped Cersei's influence and when she was on trail for fucking Lancel, et al, he let her rot. In the show, he does this later and for different reasons, but still does it, and then... goes back? Completely nonsensical. Especially considering what he says when he confesses to Brienne at Harrenhal vs what he says when he leaves her at Winterfell this season about the small folk in the city of Kings Landing. Jaime wants to be an honourable knight, that's his character arc.
Stannis says in Theon's PoV from the start of WoW, a chapter that coincidentally George released after he burned Shireen (I think not), that Lord Darry might hear of his death at Winterfell while in Bravos hiring sellswords, but that it wont matter. He was to seat his daughter on the throne or die in the attempt. George also describes Stannis as the only real hero in Westeros. Burning Shireen is miles off base. Fucking miles.
Dany going mad has not been foreshadowed, in quite the way you imply and it needed an entire season to mature not a single poorly written episode where she burns a city because Euron killed her Dragon.
>>22759 I've been saying she was going to be a mad Targaryen since series four or five, but I didn't expect it to happen in the span of fifteen minutes. This series has been a half-arsed hack job, anyone not seeing that is willfully ignoring what's right in front of them. Even the underwhelming series seven looks like a masterpiece compared to what's happening now, it's just become this character kills that character over and over, with said characters acting as if hours of on-screen personal development hadn't occured, all in order to wrap the show up so D&D can leave and earn that fat Disney cash (in my opinion). No intrigue, no mystery, nothing, just labourious plots done as quickly as possible, with so much of what came before discounted I'm actually staggered by it. From the silly, "I've never known bells to mean surrender", Davos Seaworth, series 2, episode 9, to the confusing, regarding Jaime's direct contradiction of his previously stated reasons for killing Aerys II, the Mad King, and thereafter being known as the most dishonourable man in Westeros for the rest of his life. I guess he just did it because he thought it would be funny.
Honestly this might be the worst ending I've seen, ever, and it's not even over yet. People flipped their lid about how dumb the ending of Mass Effect 3 was, and they weren't wrong, but it didn't do an about turn on loads of its major characters for no reason. But what's the point in rewatching old GoT episodes now, if none of those scenes with Sandor build up to anything meaningful, or all the mystic happenings beyond The Wall end in the blink of an eye with no real pay-off? At least Bioware were being leaned on by EA to get ME3 out the door ASAP, whereas HBO were offering as much time as Benioff and Weiss wanted to finish up the show, but they decided to spend two years on dodgy scripts and all but meaningless battle sequences.
I mean, it wasn't as shit as it could have been, but fuck me. It was still pretty shit.
I've been joking for a while that they'd have no king and turn into the Democratic People's Republic of Westeros, and they very nearly went and did it, the mad lads. THAT would have been an ending.
>>22767 It annoys me how they've left so many loose ends.
Bran is a psychopath that not only knew Dani would destroy Kings Landing but knew he would be made king and now wants to warg Drogon. I don't care what the SNP party political broadcast says: There's no way the other lords would just let Scotland go without either going their own way or crushing them. Why did the salt queen laugh when she's an elected monarch herself? There's a giant hole in the wall now. It's useless for stopping Wildling raids. There's an army of Huns in Westeros who only know how to destroy settled peoples. Seriously, Bran is a Greenseer who will presumably live thousands of years and holds a proven ability to change past events without creating a time paradox. Our equivalent would be letting a skynet rule humanity after it has manipulated history to its own ends. The Starks must've destroyed a Greenseer King for a reason - maybe that was Bran's doing seeing as how he is effectively a god that can only be stopped by another timelord.
Oh well, we will have forgotten about this in a week and the prequel will never be released. The end.
>>22770 It just feels like Beinoff and Weiss didn't give a toss. What Wildling raids for starters, surely the Free Folk and "the South" are allies now? And yeah, there wasn't enough of a schism developed between The North and the rest of the Kingdoms to justify such a huge change with no push back. Samwell brought up democracy but didn't mention that Jon, the bloke who everyone thinks is the bee's knees, was democratically elected, as was every other Lord Commander of the Night's Watch? And half the people at that meeting have either barely featured for several series now, or are literally unnamed nobodies only nerds familiar with the regional fashions of Westeros will even recognise as being from a place? And no one seems concerned that Jon could be dead, maimed or whatever, and that's why Grey Worm won't bring him out?
The tone was also all over the place. Benioff and Weiss seem to love indulging in repeated jokes like they were character traits. There's a scene from a couple of series back that's been on my mind a lot; Sandor's been given some pork or something, and Thoros of Myr asks how it is and Sandor replies "it's fine, but I prefer chicken". That's just a callback to the scene in the inn when he's talking about eating all the chickens several series ago. So him saying that is either a private joke for Sandor, by Sandor, something Sandor thinks people ought to know about him above a great many other things, or a pointless callback. I know which answer my money's going on. Anyway, this happens again in the finale with Edmure being silly, Bronn and Tyrion sharing wise cracks about brothels and Davos correcting people's grammar, all of which are faintly tedious and eye-rolling, but when I'm supposed to be watching the climax of a show like this, one episode along from witnessing thousands of innocent people being burnt to death and during a series littered with named character deaths, it's just confusing.
I could go on, but I'm really knackered. In conclusion I just think it's amazing how many different ways people are pulling apart the ending of the show, it's been so poorly executed there are entirely disparate schools of thought opening up explaining why people feel let down, that's fascinating in and of itself.
I'm really not the man for your feminist hot-takes, but I can't imagine a scene in which a male character is threatened to be raped to death by a horde of violent steppe raiders, and potentially even their horses, after which he defends himself by killing those who threatened him, later being reframed as being part of a manic lust for power.
I don't have a problem a problem with Dany being mad, but the manner in which it happened was pure garbage. The finale did nothing to change my view on that.
You'd have a point if that was the only time she'd done a similar thing. The point is she kept doing it and got more confident and arrogant each time.
i don't quite buy it to be honest- She's clearly been a villain since the early days. They've consistently shown that she knows how to conquer and subjugate, but demonstrably lacks even the most basic qualities of mercy and compassion required to be a benevolent ruler. People have only been rooting for her this whole time because they're so desperate for a boss-ass bitch dragon queen female character to "win" the story that they've utterly ignored all of that characterisation.
Sure they rushed the pay off, just like they rushed everything in this shitty series, but you can't say Dany's fall to the dark side came out of nowhere.
Case in point- Sansa's entire story arc is that she got raped; but she's the direct opposite of Danaerys. She's no good at war but she's calm, collected, rational, and ends up the Queen of the North.
>>22777 People keep saying she's been a wrong'un since forever, and I agree, but going from nought to sixty in a matter of minutes is pathetic. They should have kept Viseron alive, but he gets killed attacking King's Landing, then, in a blind rage, Dany takes Drogon and raises The Red Keep to the ground, resulting in hundreds of smallfolk dying inadvertently, and beginning her journey to concluding "the ends justify the means". But you'd need showrunners who care and another season for that to take place. Because Daenerys might have done brutal things, but the only time she harmed innocents was when she crucified the Masters of Meereen without knowing the full facts, and she seemed pretty embarrassed about that and afterwards began making serious consessions to the Meereenese. The foreshadowing doesn't make it okay to have a snap decsion that she's bonkers now, and completely ruins any suprise or satisfation in this turn, from either the pro or anti-Dany camp respectively. I genuinely don't think the writers understand how tension works, because when someone like me, who's been saying she would go nuts for years, has the immediate reaction of "huh, what?" when she starts burning King's Landing, you've made a mistake.
Honestly it seemed childish at first consideration, but I think the people saying HBO should take a mulligan on the whole series have a point, not just because the show ended poorly, but because those poor bastards at HBO got conned. Weiss and Benioff told them they only needed six episodes to wrap up their flagship show and that was clearly untrue. This series was the equivelent of paying hundreds of pounds for a wedding feast, and getting a bowl of cheesy beans and a pitcher of lemon and lime cordial. This goes far beyond Dany's turn and riddles the whole programme.
To be fair I think the problems with Dany's character go further than can be fixed if we merely retcon this last series or two out of existence. She started off as somewhat of a mary-sue type of bland "chosen one" and she really hasn't developed much since then. She's just wobbled between hard-ass and feeling guilty about this things she did as a hard-ass, before eventually going mental.
Lots of characters had good arcs that got utterly thrown away, but characters like Danaerys, Jon, and to a lesser extent Cersei, have always been characterised pretty blandly. Jon in particualr has wound me up the entire series- He could have been the one guy you were behind the entire time, the one honourable man who heeded Ned Starks words about honour and duty, but instead he's just a bit of a mong who gets carried along wherever the plot is. Cercei used to have a bit of an interesting plot about how she's not evil, she just loves her family etc etc, but that all went away pretty quickly and she's been the same sort of psychopath ever since, just an increasingly overt one.
All the interesting characters, people like Olenna and Tywin, all the intrigue between Littlefinger and Varys, all that stuff that was great in the early seasons... They threw that away and took the plot in a direction that made it much harder to create that kind of tension. It's not that they're necessarily bad at it, they just made the wrong decision in trying to make the plot bigger and more epic. None of that subtle stuff works when the characters are all physically separated by hundreds of miles and an ocean or two, and the baddies are either literal monsters or Fantasy Hitler. That's why we began to see fast travel and blatant arse pulls.
It was a fun journey but I think we all knew in our hearts it was never going to end as strongly as it started.
85% of Internet is a crazy man/woman/attack helicopter ranting in a corner. 14% are the trolls goading them, all the rest is rational human beings discussing quietly.
I honestly love this mindset where any fictional story featuring a bad thing is inherently also bad, because it endorses the bad thing. It's fucking bonkers.
If you use the same logic that a show is racist because it has themes and plotlines involving real life stuff like slavery, does that also mean it's condoning mass murder and incest? Why do these lot never get outraged by the fact all the main characters are lords and knights born into privilege, and the show endorses feudal hierarchy?
What kind of TV shows and films would we have if these morons had their way? Oh well.
>>22783 >I honestly love this mindset where any fictional story featuring a bad thing is inherently also bad, because it endorses the bad thing.
I'm not endorsing what was written in that screenshot, but that's fairly obviously not the logic at work. Their problem isn't with the subjects depicted, but how they're depicted.
I genuinely can't get The Rains of Castamere out of my head, it's gone full ear worm. Even the pidgeon outside appeared to be hooting the tune just now.
>>22793 He'll be 80 so assuming the Mancunians can keep on top of their air pollution I wouldn't bet against it.
I struggle to think of anything more tragic than Stuart Maconie with advanced dementia, desperately trying and failing to remember old TV programmes that someone has just shown him a clip of.
It's sad in a way.
Back when this thread was born we used to have decent discussions and speculations about the events of each episode.
And now the entire final series has had next to nothing.
>>22799 Because it was depressing. Nothing exciting happened, just everyone's worse fears about what would happen to thrones when they ran out of George's stuff came to pass.
There is a lot of sunk cost fallacy related posts flying about the web, where people are just attacking people for not enjoying it rather than saying what they thought was good about it. While D&D are competent directors, they should not be allowed overarching authority over the writing of a show like this without a strict producer on board to reign them in ever again. This is what happens.
>>22799 Yeah, I skimmed through the thread post-episode six and felt much the same. All those fan-theory videos on YouTube too, I thought about looking back through a couple of them, but there isn't much point given how the show just stopped dead. It just feels so empty. I could go on for another sixty lines but I'll spare you all my grandiose ranting for once.
I don't believe I've watched anything after the 6th series. Without any spoilers, what is so wrong with the new one? I'm trying to avoid spoilers but even I've noticed people online shitting on it. Also, is GoT over now?
>>22803 It's extremely rushed and the writers are incompetent. They forget about sub plots and the fast travel option is unlocked for everyone.
I'm fairly certain they have some spin off shows in Westeros lined up but it's only something I've heard from otherchan.
>>16590 "And does anyone else get the sense that they're cramming far too much story into too little screen time? I'm not sure I'd be able to understand what the fuck was going on without having knowledge of the books for a reference, it makes me wonder how people who've only ever seen the TV series are coping."
if only you knew then , over 5 years ago how it would all turn out.
>>24005 It's a prequel on a failing streaming service with a new cast and little written material to work with. This time rather than trying to imitate GOT they just bought the rights. And Westeros is now a multicultural utopia.
>>24005 Dreams don't make people kings, dragons do
Ask any Targaryen and they'll tell you it's true
I have mild hopes for this. Whilst I'm generally opposed to going back to worlds and settings for what could be more of the same (hello, Star Wars), Benioff and Weiss did such an embarrassing rush job on the final two series of GoT (hello, Star Wars) that a do-over seems worthwhile. It's not like remaking The Exorcist, which is insane and I hope everyone working on that gets stomach ulcers, it's like throwing away the charcoal'd dinner you left too long in the oven while browsing photos of Carol Vorderman and starting again because you don't want to eat worthless crap.
Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik are the showrunners and I've never heard of them before. They do have certain credits between them that make me nervous, such as Condal writing the Rampage film and Sapochnik directing Repo Men; that's "Men" not "Man". This isn't promising, but most importantly they aren't mates with JJ Abrams who I think may actually be an Xenomorph Queen like creature who spawns shitty screenwriters and film makers by the dozen. Paddy Considine's in it at too, you can't mess Considine up, although it does give me pause that they're aping the GoT formula and he'll be Ned Stark 2.0. That's probably paranoia, mind.
Overall I'll say my primary sources of, fairly limited, positivity regarding the show is that basically every human being on Earth understood GoT better than the two men helming the production, and HBO are well aware this new series has a reputation hole to climb out of, lest it end up becoming the biggest human folly since the Tower of Babel.