Game of Thrones

[Seraphim73]

@Rinel said in Game of Thrones:
***Thoughts on chivalry***

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I don't know that it's misplaced Southern chivalry that made this moment so awesome, I think it's more that from almost the moment we met Jorah, the one thing he wanted to do was protect Dany (okay, one of the two things he wanted to do). So to allow him to die doing that, it was powerful. And as they mentioned in the Making Of after the episode, they did a good job of not making her a damsel in distress during those scenes, while also making it clear that he was her real defense.

[Arkandel]

@surreality Well, shit.

[Selira]

@Sockmonkey ***zomg spoilers***

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Who is he? Like, who the person was that became him?

Pretty sure that's meant to remain a mystery and be unanswered. Not every last detail needs to be spelled out explicitly, though I do love the hints that he might have once been a Stark - a poetic justice to it. I'm also fine if he was just Some Guy, but he was made the Night King at the same spot he died which was Winterfell.

What he definitely was and what we have had confirmed is that he was a weapon created by the Children of the Forest to try to stop humanity from expanding into their territory. He is essentially biological warfare, the undead an agent spreading a contaminant that kills more and more humans over time. He's driven by magic, and that's why all he wants is death. Extinction. Genocide. Then he fell out of their control, they realized they fucked up, and - well, everything else. It's pretty classic gray goo scenario stuff.

He wants to kill everything because it's literally the only reason he exists. He's a weapon.

[Arkandel]

***=From Yahoo! right now...***

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"Game of Thrones kills even more immigrants and it's a problem"

Sigh.

[bored]

@Arkandel

***=We the spoiler thread***

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While I had issues with the Arya ending, it wasn't because it messed with 'oh Jon is supposed to have a big swordfight,' and I don't think it was really the kind of subversion that things like Ned or Rob were. It's almost the opposite, because we get told what the new prophecy is halfway into the episode by Melissandre.

At that point, we know what the ending is. Except the director then goes ahead and sets up a bunch of 'people in dire peril' scenes that we know are going to be saved at the last moment. It's true Jorah isn't, but that's telegraphed too, as he slowly takes wound after wound, whereas Brienne, Jaime, Sam, etc are never shown to be seriously hurt. Indeed, the only way you could do a Martin style subversion of the (predictable) TV-style writing, is for the next episode to reveal 'Whoops, so-and-so totally DID die while the Night King and Arya were taking their sweet time. War is hell. Oops.'

But in general I felt for all the tools there, it was a weak scene. We don't get to see Arya do anything to set up the kill (and she has some crazy tools at her disposal, like shapeshifting). Theon just dies stupidly. With all his knowledge, it would have been fascinating to show Bran actually masterminding events to some extent, even say, sacrificing Theon to win the day (if Arya struck while the NK was killing him, or something). Instead it was a lot of deus ex machina and two slow motion kills with foregone outcomes, highly minimizing the drama.

[Pandora]

THIS IS A SPOILER
***Spoiler tags suck and are not intuitive.***

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Slow-clap for Lyanna Mormont. She was amazing, she died exactly the way she lived, sticking it to the man who thought he was bigger and badder than she was. Fear just wasn't in her soul and Westeros is worse off without her in its future.

[bored]

@Rinel

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Yeah, I don't have any problem with some positive chivalry and thought it was a beautiful moment.

I think part of the reason it's OK for the show to do this and for it not to be cheesy is that it's otherwise spent so much time deconstructing and examining the knighthood ideal. Jaime at the start of the show is publicly the perfect knight, the shining sword... and a total bastard. Gregor is a knight, and he's an actual monster (and not because he ends up a zombie). On the other hand, Brienne actually lives up to the supposed ideals but is denied the title due to their inherently sexist nature. You even have chars like Pod showing that nobility doesn't have much to do with it, or examinations of how the romance of the ideal can touch characters barred from it, as in Tyrion's case: he clearly idolizes his brother, and his desire to be out there fighting shows that he's so affected by the ideal of perfect bravery that he's willing to put aside his otherwise pragmatic nature for it.

So they do a whole lot with the concept. Jorah wasn't perfect, but he strived for his ideals and died fulfilling them, which is basically the best a character can get in the Martin world of senseless ends.

[Arkandel]

***=I read an interview by the episode's director...***

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... who also did some of the series' most esteemed episodes like Hardhome and Battle of the Bastards. He basically said (I'm mildly paraphrasing) he intentionally didn't set it up more for Arya so we wouldn't see her coming, so instead of placing more emphasis on her he had us follow Jon around the battlefield being teased with a direct confrontation between him and the Night King.

I mean in retrospect I'd have also preferred if he had thrown us a bone here. Maybe some parkour in the background eagle-eyed viewers could spot her in, a last second face-shift from where she pretended to be some dead guard. But there were many moments in the episode where the narrative wasn't detailed, perhaps in the interest of simplicity or because it was all so packed with all kinds of logistics it became overwhelming; how many times did we see Brienne or Jaime pinned against walls by multiple wights without being shown just how they survived the bind?

What I'm saying is I agree there were weak points that could have been done better.

But I mean the fucking magnitude of what they pulled off in the episode - can we agree it was impressive? I mean even not for just TV? They had aerial dragon-versus-dragon fights, for a solid ten minutes it was raining zombies in Winterfell, they had cavalry charges, one on one fights, catapults hurling fireballs. That's some badass scenes. They are also not going to be coming to our TVs again any time soon by any other show, and I think we'll miss them when they're gone.

[Thenomain]

We could just put this entire thread behind a spoiler tag. This and "Good/New Movies".

[bored]

@Arkandel

***=NSFW content***

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That's really interesting, although it makes id doubly odd to give Melissandre that line, if you were intentionally obfuscating Arya's role (ofc, writing is different than directing, which falls back to my general complaint on TV-style writing in the later seasons). Without the line, the whole 'Jon runs around looking for a boss fi- ARYA STAB!' would have been a perfect misdirect, as it was structured and shot well to give you that sense of building to a confrontation even knowing he wasn't getting the kill. Maybe (again leaning on the writers) they don't give modern audiences the credit they deserve in terms of parsing details like that and thought the line wouldn't be so obvious?

I agree on all the rest, epicness wise, per my first post!

[Arkandel]

@bored Oh, one more thing I just responded to a buddy of mine on FB posting (spoilers to anyone who visits the link) this YouTube analysis from a strategic point of view.

My takeaways from it:

1. This is a TV series, not a tactical simulation. Spending 20 minutes to discuss fantasy-military siege strategy is missing the point by... a lot. This isn't an RTS game.

2. Comments like "I still enjoy it but..." just baffle me. But what? What the hell...? What do people want more than enjoyment? Life-long fulfillment?

[Arkandel]

***=Sorrynotsorry because so much cool new art and memes to post. ***

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Kingslayers of Westeros:

[insomniac7809]

@Arkandel Your second one doesn't show for me? And when I try to follow the image link it tells me I need to sign in.

Okay so I did have some issues with the episode. One of which being, frankly, a ninety-minute battle scene starts to drag, and I don't think cutting some of the slo-mo and a few of the "<CHAR> IS MOBBED BY ZOMBIES they're okay now" scenes would have hurt the experience.
***=SPOILER stuff***

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It's probably my book-reader issue that it wasn't Dany or Jon who saved the day. Martin's big on the prophecy bit, but the show's been less focused on that, and while it bugged me in the moment, I guess that's my issue not the episode's.
Jorah's death was badass. His job was done, and then he can lie down. "Here we stand," Mormonts--here we stand indeed.

[Arkandel]

@insomniac7809 Try now for the second image.

[insomniac7809]

@Arkandel Nice.

[Rinel]

@Arkandel said in Game of Thrones:

@Spending 20 minutes to discuss fantasy-military siege strategy is missing the point by... a lot. This isn't an RTS game.

But this is not stuff that's esoteric military tactics. This is stuff like "why is that ditch there?"

[bored]

@Arkandel Uh, sure? I'm less clear why this is @ me when you're mostly ranting at some guy on Youtube (I promise you did not by coincidence discover my secret youtuber identity). I could do that kind of analysis, as I'm sure plenty of the history-nerds that occupy our hobby could, but I recognize it's entertainment and that's why my mentions of those things were brief, not in a 20+ minute sprawling rant.

What I don't get is why there's anything wrong with someone saying they "enjoy something but..." and analyze it?

Action in cinema (and lets be honest that GoT spends money that puts it beyond TV quality standards) can be stylistic, but it still needs to be coherent. When it falls down (and at saner hour I could find some really bad examples to demonstrate), it's usually because of a lack of clear continuity of location, sequence of action, cause and effect, etc. Those things make the frenzy into a story. In this ep, the biggest problem was a bunch of disjoint 'peril' scenes that didn't connect to one another, were sometimes repeated or redundant, and did not build to the climax, but just waited for it.

If as the viewer you think 'oh wow they're dead for sure' as the camera pans away, then the next appearance of those characters should confirm what happened, either reaffirming what you saw (someone discovers bodies, mourns their loss later) or explaining how they in fact managed to not be dead. Failing to do that is an error. There was plenty great about the ep, but I think others (Battle of Castle Black esp) were far more coherent.

[buttercup]

Spoilers

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I felt the last episode was hot garbage.

The night was dark and full of pixels.

Melisandre or however you spell it was the real MVP of the show for giving us some +100 brightness at times.

Go back and watch the beginning with Ghost in the horse charge. He is running so much slower then the horses. It was just terrible work.

There was one cool scene with the Dothraki at the beginning. I was so hyped.

Here we have the undead dragon... dude blew through an ice wall a gazillion feet thick and tall. His weakness? Rubble. Snow/Targ's plot armor was so thick even Pod was jealous. If only they had some rubble on the other side of that massive wall.

And lets be honest we hauled around a wight for a late part of a season in a wood box. No problem. Now they can burst through stone like it was nothing.

So where the hell do they have their army to march on Cersei? Because pretty much everyone without plot armor died.

And Jorah just deserved better then walking out to the sound of a dragon. He just deserved to die in a better episode.

How did Jon even get in Winterfell to find the indestructible rubble?

Ninja Arya was lame. Truly lame. At least have her steal a Whitewalker face she pinned down to sneak up. Did she grab a dragon's tail to fly down like that? Just death from above? But from where? They were surrounded with undead all over and they defended the tree because they had space to shoot arrows.

And Lady Mormont? Bleh. The best death she could have had was being killed by giant pimp-hand / bitch-slap. Why rob us of that?

I felt this was a sloppy episode. One of the worst. Otherwise love the show.

[Cupcake]

@Pandora said in Game of Thrones:

THIS IS A SPOILER
***Spoiler tags suck and are not intuitive.***

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Slow-clap for Lyanna Mormont. She was amazing, she died exactly the way she lived, sticking it to the man who thought he was bigger and badder than she was. Fear just wasn't in her soul and Westeros is worse off without her in its future.

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In her interview, she mentioned that her director advised her that Lyanna basically didn't have the fear gene and that's the direction that clicked for her as an actress and informed her performance.

[Pandora]

@Cupcake I saw that, she's so talented, it's amazing. I hope she goes really far in her career and keeps that wide-eyed humbleness for as long as she can, it's totally endearing.

@bored said in Game of Thrones:

If as the viewer you think 'oh wow they're dead for sure' as the camera pans away, then the next appearance of those characters should confirm what happened, either reaffirming what you saw (someone discovers bodies, mourns their loss later) or explaining how they in fact managed to not be dead. Failing to do that is an error.

I believe the implication of 'Oh wow they're dead for sure' followed by their not being dead is that they managed to overcome the odds, deflecting a stab here, dodging a bite there, running away, etc. You know, kind of what they were doing when you thought they might die, and what they were doing the next time you saw them as well?

Like, I agree that we're all entitled to our opinions, don't get me wrong. But I definitely wanted to see all the many and varied situations and and moments of imperilment shown - which they would not have been able to do if they'd hand-held us through explanations of how famed swordsmen and women used their swords to not die.