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[Urist McScoopbeard]

So I am now all caught up, and I have to agree with that assessment. For every detail they get right in these past few seasons they get two or three wrong. The production and cinematography have been great ofc, but the quality of the storytelling (especially a slew of character arcs), continuity errors, and plot in general have gone steadily downhill--held aloft only by big budget battles like Battle of the Bastards and the wight fight on the ice. (Danerys' partial conquest of Westeros, the Siege of Winterfell, and Kings Landing 2: Electric Boogaloo were all subpar imo, having problems with pacing, cinematography, and story logic) Mostly great acting still. Wish Coster-Waldau was playing Geralt instead of making shitty B movies

Everything else I could say is pretty much just a more detailed elaboration of the above.

[TD1]

I just think it's impressive that the writers remembered Davos was a smuggler, and that his area of speciality was King's Landing. Of course, in the end they could have asked Rick Smuggler to do it and it would have made no difference, but at least they remembered!

[nenjin]

I think the reason GoT lost me is this:

It's a character-driven show. That was its strength. Interesting, different people reacting to the situations they're put in. That's what made all the previous seasons worth watching. Things happen. Characters have to react. They have arcs.

Tyrion goes from a lovable whoremonger to a position of power. He's conflicted, often endangered. He's got daddy and family and respect issues. All that stops once he becomes part of Dany's retinue. He just....stops having things to do.

Jaime. Heroic knight asshole. Similarly conflicted, endangered, etc....Losing his hand was one of the best parts of his arc because it forced him to become a different person, and that was interesting to watch. But basically after he gets his replacement hand and him and Cersei are on the outs....he stops having anything to do.

Sansa. Probably the character for me that had the widest arc. Hated her at the start. But she goes through a bunch of shit, changes as a person, has to deal with challenges...but once she returns to Winterfell she has nothing to do.

Cersei. Delightfully unlikeable. Has trials and tribulations throughout the show and most of what's interesting about her is how she reacts to the various intrigues. Will she play it cool? Will she go apeshit and try to have people killed? Her arc is maybe a little flimsier than other characters, but the death of her children, her public shaming, those all mattered because she as a character had to react to them all. But once she becomes Queen of Kingslanding she just.....spends a whole season drinking wine for the most part. She becomes a non-character who doesn't have anything to do really because the plot won't let her. She just patiently needs to wait for the Wight Fight to happen like everyone else.

Arya. Started out as one of my favorite characters. The underdog. Being in places doing things she probably has no business doing. You're constantly wondering if she's gonna get hurt, violated, all while the promise of being awesome is continually dangled out there. Her quest for revenge going bit by bit was great. But as soon as she gets to Bravos, all that goes away. Now she's a super hero badass and all the things that made the character interesting are now subsumed by the show's need to cheerlead her and make her awesome. Once she leaves Bravos....she has nothing to do.

Jon Snow. Has a crazy arc that takes him from the lowest of the lows to the highest of the highs. From bastard to Night's Watch to Night's Watch Commander to King of the North to.....NOTHING. After he's resurrected he suddenly stops being a force of anything, and just becomes a figurehead. A cypher for the North's wishes. He's got something to do but it's not surprising. Other than organizing the defense of Winterfell he just has nothing to do.

Bran. After becoming the Three-eyed Raven he has nothing to do, other than sit there, look distant and spoil the plot. Bran didn't have the most interesting arc but I felt like after he became the Three-eyed Raven what little there was for him to do was over. Now he just needs to sit around, tell people where they need to go and wait for the NK to show up.

This all basically tracks with when they ran out of GRRM plots. And the writers just didn't have the wherewithal to try their hand at anything original, so they played it safe, leaned far too heavily on character traits that made characters recognizable throughout the series and spun their wheels for most of a season on the build up to the Wight Fight.

[Mephansteras]

As someone mentioned earlier, Martin was writing a fantasy History story. Part of the strength of his story telling is that characters just exist because they exist, not because the story needs them to. If he the plot doesn't need them, they're just not there/mentioned, but they don't stop existing. And their stories can end abruptly and stuff can be messy and it all feels real because that's how history works.

The show writers don't do that. They're writing a story and so everything has to fit the story. So it feels like a story. And the further we get from the history Martin wrote the more and more obvious it becomes, to the point where you can predict almost everything, even the 'twists'.

Like much in life, it's the letdown that makes it so bad. If this was just a generic fantasy story from the start we'd all watch and go 'Eh, the story's a bit predictable but the action scenes are fun. It's fine'. But we started with something deep and complex and mysterious where you could actually be shocked and surprised and there were deep political machinations going on and it felt like people doing stuff. And then that all slowly drained away and we're left feeling disappointed.

[zombat]

Glad I hadn't jumped in to pick up the show a while back expecting it to be more of what it was.

Saw folks note that if they had just put the dragon being shot down/her hand being executed in THIS episode the whole thing makes sense and the character flipping the fuck out is suddenly not lazy as fuck writing.

In hindsight all the "so what did you think of the ending, now that it's almost time for it to air" interviews and those strange pained laughs they got are understandable.

Sure it would be lazy writing, but would it be more lazy than "GRRM told us Danny snaps and burns down King's Landing, so we have to as well - even though we've made her a perfect Mary Sue (aside from that time GRRM told us she crucified people, but atleast we were able to not make her hilariously incompetent!) and offered no prior build up to her being a krazy kunt!"?

[MorleyDev]

Don't think her being saint-like can be laid entirely at the show writers, just her not believably becoming less so over time.

In the most recent book, a plague called The Bloody Flux (basically dysentery) ravages slave refugees from Astapor outside the walls of Meereen. Daenerys at one point goes out amongst people suffering from the disease to deliver the food and water, despite the city preparing for a siege and her advisers saying she should leave them and save the food.

She baths a dying man, and shames her men into helping bathe and feed the survivors and burn the bodies of the fallen, and her internal dialogue in the scene shows severe guilt she can't do more for them.

From what I can tell, she's not anywhere near burning them all at the point the writers were left with no books to go from, just still young and immature, too quick to anger and lash out at those she sees as abusers of the weak, and a bit too attracted to dangerous men (i.e Daario). The writers just either didn't know how or didn't care to actually take her character believably from that point to burning them all.

A fall from grace only really works when you watch it happen slowly and painfully, not suddenly and infuriatingly. For a long and slowly paced series to do it so quickly is part of the problem. D&D are bored of Game of Thrones, and want to move on. And they refused to hand the writing reins off to other writers who aren't burned out. So it went from characters behaving naturally as characters and the plot resulting from that, which is how GRRM writes and why he is constantly going back and re-writing things and the books take so long, to characters behaving in the way needed to make the plot happen, which is how TV writers write since deadlines.

It basically went from the best example of the former to some of the worst examples of the latter, which is why it's so jarring. The contrast just makes it all the more obvious.

[nenjin]

I feel like the hints have been there since like Season 4. More in how the actress portrayed it than in any specific instance you'd point to. Especially the way she relates to her dragons as they interact with other people, long ago crossed over from "I'm proud and smug I control these dragons" to "it would amuse me to watch them eat you" for me.

Having that spoiled for me didn't really surprise me, I'd kinda suspected something like that was coming. You can't go on and on about how Targaryens are mad and not ask the question "could she be mad too?" The more they made of it, the more likely it seemed to me she'd suffer a similar fall from grace.

Likewise, if every Targaryen up until now snaps at some point, who is to say Jon Snow also wouldn't snap?

[Kagus]

Likewise, if every Targaryen up until now snaps at some point, who is to say Jon Snow also wouldn't snap?

He's got dark hair, and as we all know hair growth starts at the brain, so this is a clear indication that his brain is different from other Targaryens.

Also, he's the only one who has died and lived to talk about it.

[Virtz]

I never really liked Dany. Outside of being a Mary Sue for modern western audiences, everything on the show seemed to have gone her way all too much. The Unsullied take-over was the most banal manufactured scenario ever, and it was played out like it was somehow clever. She had a lot more close calls and dumb decisions that seemingly would've gotten anyone else on the show killed (at least at that point, right now it's like everyone's got her earlier plot shield). The harpy assassination attempt was the stupidest.

Spoiler: Concerning her recent motivations, however... (click to show/hide)

seems pretty clear to me it comes down to what she told Jon - something about him having the love of the people, and her having only their fear. At the moment she goes berzerk, she sees soldiers laying down arms in front of Jon. And she doesn't look happy or even outright pissed to be doing what she does. Kinda looked almost like crying to me. My guess is she's decided to solidify her rule as a terrifying tyrant, doing something that goes against her own sense of morality.

It's still a bit dumb and could've used more foreshadowing, but I feel that's what they were going for.

What I'm more confused about is how she told Tyrion about his brother being held prisoner, and this wasn't an obvious trap to check his loyalty (which he immediately fails). Nobody seemed to care, really. I was half expecting that tent to suddenly become surrounded by silhouettes of Unsullied, but no. Whatever.

Spoiler: What did piss me off was... (click to show/hide)

the horribly shot and played out battle of King's Landing.

The last episode gave me hope that dragons could be something other than an end-all answer to every military conflict Dany faces. Like a strong card to be used sparingly under the right circumstances? But no, one dragon recks everything. Might've been a good idea to do that before Euron recked the fleet.

Worse than that, all of the Lannister armies are presented as completely useless. Any time armed conflict is shown on camera, it's a Lannister soldier dying, often explicitly having weapons go through metal armour like it's made of paper. The battle is completely unbelievable and one-sided. Boring and rushed.

Spoiler: Clegane, tho. (click to show/hide)

When was it established he lives for vengeance? He's been doing anything but the entire series, steadily moving farther and farther away from King's Landing. He's been acting like that was the last thing on his mind. Didn't seem like he ever gave much of a shit about his brother, and now suddenly he's there to deliver some weird wisdom to Arya? Should've said "don't end up like me, I live to do random self-destructive shit whenever I feel like it".

[Caz]

idk what you guys are talking about, game of thrones was cancelled after season 6

[TD1]

The problem with dangerous men, of course, being that they die.

As for liking Dany, book Dany was good. There was character there.

[nenjin]

I think the actress harms the role a bit too. Like in S8 EP2, she's talking to Sansa in a little sit down chat, and the expressions she makes with her face.....whenever she tries to convey a mood or a tone, it seems so manufactured. Some people make acting look effortless, but Emilia Clarke looks like she's trying very hard, every time.

[Xantalos]

I think the actress harms the role a bit too. Like in S8 EP2, she's talking to Sansa in a little sit down chat, and the expressions she makes with her face.....whenever she tries to convey a mood or a tone, it seems so manufactured. Some people make acting look effortless, but Emilia Clarke looks like she's trying very hard, every time.

Spoiler: Case in point (click to show/hide)

[MorleyDev]

I tend to think that if an actors performance isn't right, all blame lies at the feet of the director. It's why I try not to place any blame on Hayden Christensen for Anakin Skywalker, for example.

That being said, I tended to think Dany's faces in previous seasons were often meant to look forced since the character often was forcing herself to play a role she wasn't comfortable with: Threatening her enemies with Fire and Blood, despite the fear and uncertainty inside. It never really came across before this season as "forced because the voices won't stop telling me to burn them all. Daddy is that you?" though.

I mean, Emilia Clarke didn't seem particularly happy with how her character went anyway (BEST SEASON EVA).

[nenjin]

I dunno, a good director can give you guidance, but they can't force an actor to emote correctly. That has to come from within. TBH, maybe it's actually a good acting job. She's just matching her fake expression to the fakeness she projects at other characters in the show, which is why anyone that isn't sexing her doesn't actually like her. (Wow that sounds bad, but I mean it in the context of the show.)