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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1772 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What did ya think of the GoT finale?

The argument that things were "rushed" is an interesting one to me. The Night King gains a dragon and the wall comes down. There are 8 90-minute episodes left. That's more than the entirety of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Two thirds of Harry Potter. It's as many episodes as the last "season" of The Sopranos, except each episode is half again as long. It's more episodes than the last season of Mad Men, more episodes than the last season of Breaking Bad. The final season of Game of Thrones is twelve hours. All four Avengers movies is ten hours.

So - in more time the ENTIRE AVENGERS SERIES we have to kill the night king - who is either killable or not - and defeat Cersei. That's the show. We go from "undead dragon marching on Winterfell" and "Barbarian hordes landing at Hastings" to "final, inevitable battles" in eight. Ninety minute. Episodes.

If you keep in mind that George "RR" Martin worships John "RR" Tolkien, Frodo throws the ring into Mount Doom at Part 2, Chapter 3. That's 2/3rds of the way through Return of the King. Arya kills the Night King at the end of Episode 3. The rest of LoTR is all mop-up. We could have had four episodes of "Who will Sansa marry" and "what book will Samwell write" and "will the Unsullied sail off to chickless Club Med" but instead we had "and also Danerys is Hitler" which, as above, she's been raised in a revenge plot environment since she was a mewling babe. The Starks wanna be left alone in a world free of White Walkers. Danerys wants to wipe out everyone who doesn't bend the knee. We got six hours of "how do you solve a problem like Maria" and yes. We got to watch two minutes of shuffling chairs.

Because in the end? We had 73 episodes to show us it's nothing but shuffling chairs.

Just had my teeth cleaned. The dental hygenist was mad because she doesn't know what the dragon is gonna do with the dead queen. You're not supposed to know. Some ends are supposed to be loose.

Although someone on Twitter did quip "behind every king there's a woman who dragged him around for three years never to be heard from again." I appreciated that one.





fletcher  ·  1772 days ago  ·  link  ·  

When you put it into that context it is a lot of time. And absolutely it could have been a snooze-fest after the Night King's demise. I'm not unhappy with the plot at all (other than what the hell was Bran doing warging in Winterfell? Was he just trying to get a better view of the battle? - actually, maybe I'm just super slow... Was he warging so the Night King would be able to find him?)

    The dental hygenist was mad because she doesn't know what

    the dragon is gonna do with the dead queen.

This made me chuckle a bit. I'm going back to work today after a week on holiday - it will be interesting to see what my colleagues made of the finale.

If I'm honest... I had a horrible premonition as Drogon flew off of some stupid dragon egg unhatching reveal a la Godzilla (1998). Very glad that wasn't the case.

kleinbl00  ·  1772 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Did you read the books? I don't say that to indicate "you are not a true fan if you didn't read the books" because fuckin' hell, the last book was a snoozer. But an early and often divergence between the books and the series is "warging". Arya makes one appearance in the entire fourth book - having gone blind in the third - and that's to "warg" around and kick the shit out of her master amongst the Faceless Men. Martin makes it crystal clear that what makes Arya such a ninja badass is her ability to "warg" into whatever random creatures are around long enough to get a good sense of the battleground and then "warg" back to open a can of whoopass.

I think the showrunners took a long, hard look at the source material and said "let's minimize this 'jumping into other bodies' bit as much as possible because it's confusing and off the spine." I also get the sense that they reduced the airtime of the wolves. They were a lot more important in the book. I don't think this was a bad decision - but I think it made the whole "warging" thing confusing and weird. Bran was drawing attention to himself, plain and simple. Which is a pretty weak use of the all-seeing, all-knowing eye but really, battles are often won by the stupidest shit.

fletcher  ·  1772 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I did read the books, but that was so long ago that I'm not confident enough in my memory of the source material to draw any real comparisons. (I completely forgot that Arya was even able to warg).

Having said that, I think you're right about the downplaying of the wolves. They seemed a much more integral part of the written material than the series.

I'll definitely have to go through the books again for a refresher.

kleinbl00  ·  1772 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Winds of Winter doesn't even have a release date. You won't hurt for waiting.