Game of Thrones

[zoraster]

i'm pretty sure the greyscale was largely about jorah's plotline, not sam's.

[zoraster]

why does everyone suddenly give a damn about Ed Sheeran?

[zoraster]

I dunno. I'd argue this season and the last were easily stronger than the previous one or two.

It admittedly does suffer a little from realizing that certain characters are never really going anywhere satisfying, but by removing pieces from the board it really clarifies things.

[zoraster]

Huh????


Like sure there wasn't much battle shown but literally:

1. The resolution of what happened after the naval battle.
2. Casterly rock was taken. Danny's fleet further destroyed
3. Highgarden was taken. Olena poisoned. Jaime finds out she murdered his son.
4. Jon met Danny and had a complicated series of interactions, including getting his dragon glass
5. Cersei agrees to marry Euron.


I mean fair enough if you didn't like it, but to say nothing happened

[zoraster]

I kind of prefer that to the paranoid fear of Tyrion, honestly. And I think it plays in a show WAY better.

[zoraster]

pretty tense episode.

[zoraster]

Take the survey. Good vs. Bad. Evil vs. Good. Characters!

Mine:



Average:



Don't think I was fair on Sam's ugliness, but I also didn't spend much time considering that axis or making sure they all were calibrated correctly. I also don't really think Sansa is THAT attractive.

[zoraster]

PS. Why do people find Daenerys so hot? She's certainly attractive, but definitely not upper tier in terms of lookers on the show. Plus her acting.... leaves something to be desired.

[zoraster]

I think most people will find it difficult to explain why they are or aren't attracted to someone. Deanerys would be something like number 3 for me, and all I can say about it is that I've always had a bit of a thing for dyed blondes.

Yeah it's not that people are into her. It's the strength of it that puzzles me, I guess.

[zoraster]

Very different, particularly as the seasons/books go along.

[zoraster]

i'll buy the badass character part as playing a role, but eh. She's probably not in my top 5 most attractive on the show, depending on how big a character it needs to be to be a character.

[zoraster]

Kind of shitty to post spoilers for episodes unaired if you don't warn you're specifically doing so.

[zoraster]

you can survive for 5 days without food (of course fighting afterwards...). The temperatures substantially more problematic. Maybe they huddled around flaming sword.

[zoraster]

the pacing issues were very obvious the last episode and even the director admitted it was a problem

the issue is that GoT set its own pacing early by spending an entire season watching Brienne & Jaime travel to KL on the road
and now we get that timespan jumped in the span of a few minutes

if the Brienne & Jaime pairing happened now, one episode would have Catlyn telling Brienne to take Jaime and the next episode they'd be at King's Landing

or Arya/Hound

or LF/Sansa

i mean really any of the pairings we've started caring about were due to spending enough time just watching them talk and walk

now that we're in the endgame there isn't time for that and im not sure there is a good way to fix it

It's a problem. But at the same time I don't want to watch more episodes where things don't happen when we don't have that much time left. So I don't REALLY mind that things are now moving really quickly.

But I think the weakness here wasn't just pacing it was that the lake scene was about

timing

. That is it relied on Gandry running back, getting a Maester to send the raven, the raven arriving, Danny deciding to go, Tyrion telling her not to, and her flying and then finding (I'm guessing the raven's note did not include GPS info) the trapped guys all before they were assaulted.

It's one thing if you just feel like things are being fast forwarded. It's another to essentially remove barriers that the world relies on to make things work.

[zoraster]

It's a problem. But at the same time I don't want to watch more episodes where things don't happen when we don't have that much time left. So I don't REALLY mind that things are now moving really quickly.

But this is an artificial problem. D&D decided how much time they wanted to have left and then turned everything to plaid to fit it in. The best part of the last episode was the conversations the crew had just marching north. I'd gladly take more stuff like that, and it didn't really get in the way of stuff happening. It WAS the stuff happening, and led to more stuff happening. Or should we just skip stuff like that because who needs it when there's not much time left? Just show them walking out of the gate at the wall, cut to small band of wights to ambush. Just move it along, no time for conversations between characters.

I'm glad they had the conversations at all, but even they could have been done better. It was presented as a checklist of conversations one right after another. Like, first Jon and Jorah talk, then Hound and Tormund, then Jon and Beric, etc. Was that

really

the first opportunity Jon and Jorah had to talk about longclaw? Like I get that maybe Jon was busy mining on dragonstone or they avoided each other because they were kinda giving each other awkward glances around dany, but like didn't they just spend days together in a cramped boat sailing 1,000 miles from dragonstone to the wall? I'm fine with the show asking to accept that some time passes off screen or storylines not happening at the same time or speed. The problem is the show now constantly breaks the illusion of time passing by having characters stand around doing shit all with that time in between scenes that happen days or weeks apart. And that kind of stuff doesn't take a whole lot of effort to fix. Just film Jon and Jorah talking on the boat, when Jorah hands the sword back, pan up to the wall they just sailed into view of, couple quick cuts of walking and boom they're in the cells confronting Sandor and the BWB. They were already planning on spending the run time on the conversation anyways, just move it somewhere it makes more sense and it doubles as a proxy for time passage between dragonstone and the wall. Contrast what we're getting now, to Sam and Gilly's travel to horn hill and old town just last season. Might not be the best example since that was probably something they could have cut and wouldn't have been missed. But suppose they just warped from sam and gilly at the wall to horn hill in the same episode, and then just sat there and had all the same conversations anyways, as if they just spend weeks of travel sitting in silence. I like the version we got better.

I vote for indiana jones style travel map.

[zoraster]

To be fair, these are the same writers that had Jaime rape his sister in the sept and now we're supposed to view him as pretty honorable.

[zoraster]

sort of a letdown of an episode for me. It was all "fine" in the sense that it did what it needed to. The meeting with everyone was awesome just because it put all these characters/actors in one place (other than Sansa and Arya).

I'm not sure why they don't even nod to the fact that Sam ignored Gilly on the marriage thing and claimed credit for it. Oh well.

Littlefinger's end was disappointing to me, but mostly because I still want book Littlefinger. The show never really made me think "oh this is a genius plotter" so it kind of makes sense he meets his end this way.

I really hope it's not going to be (prediction spoiler)

Theon defeating Euron, taking over the Golden Company, and riding to aid against the White Walkers as a heroic transformation)

[zoraster]

Not yet.

[zoraster]

why is he supposed to be worse than joffrey or ramsay? I didn't get that sense that was intended at all.

He basically comes across as the evil version of Bronn.

[zoraster]

yeah, don't think the writers, creators and directors agreed. haha

frankly I'm glad for that. I thought Ramsay was not a good addition, bogged things down, and introduced needless cruelty rather than just "this is a cruel world" cruelty.

[zoraster]

He's more evil in the books but mostly a mystical evil, not really a sadistic evil.

[zoraster]

Like most of the recent two seasons, some cool set pieces but ultimately it felt hollow at its core. Bran being king is kinda... fine. But it sorta felt like Malcolm does in Macbeth. The boring epilogue that has little to do with the actual play/show itself as a way of ending it with a sorta high note but little to do with the preceding story.

[zoraster]

yeah, same here. TWOW will be great.

I hope so. The past two haven't really been that great.