The Shrine

This won’t be too deep of a thread, I am just getting some impressions out on paper.

Now, in case it’s been forgotten, I was probably the least impressed by the books of anyone here. But I think there were some things the books did well, others they did poorly.

The show, the moment I heard that Sean Bean, Natalie Dormer, Charles Dance, and Diana Rigg were in it, I knew I had to watch it at some point. The backlash over the end of it probably encouraged me to give it a shot - it meant that the plot likely went in an unwanted direction: that means it probably did something interesting.

I'll admit, when I got to season 7, I was thinking "for fuck's sakes!" But I felt season 8 cleared up most of the issues of 7 and had some of the best episodes in the show. That fans gave season 7 so many high ratings and season 8 so many low ratings is sound evidence they're just unhappy that the writers didn't have some lame "As you like it" artistic direction rather than anything inherently wrong. Shakespeare was making fun of that crap nearly 500 years ago. When reading a bunch of responses of people's opinions on how they wanted the show to end: they wanted a happily ever after ending where Jon and Daenerys get married =D

Anyway, it's not fair that I shit on other peoples' opinions without showing my own (for retaliatory defecation, if it comes to that).

The TV series improved a lot of the characters that were weaker in the books. Jon Snow was made more of an arrogant prick, in the books he was kind of a Mary Sue where any flaw he had was his circumstances. In the TV series he’s a bit of an arrogant cunt, and that drove his story along. Daenerys’s story is less of a series of events. And overall, It honk the characters are a little more multi-dimensional. Some already were fine to begin with, Arya and Davis most notably. Many characters they scaled back on their sliminess to make them more likeable by the audience (Tyrion fits the Bill here).

Where I differ with the fanbase on the series is actually with the 8th season which I thought was a good way to end it all.

1. Bran winning the throne, I don’t think this will surprise anyone who read the books, maybe the TV series because they de-emphasized Bran’s story compared to how it was in the books. But GRR Martin presented him a bit as the King Arthur child. He also has one of the best claims on the throne, especially after Jon became a Queenslayer. The idea of not having a child as heir is a very Roman thing, they didn’t like their Emperors to have offspring inheriting the titles because that almost always worked out poorly for them. During the Nervan Antonine dynasty, the height of the Roman Empire, every heir was an adopted child until the reign of Commodus - we all know how that went.

2. Daenerys was a tyrant from the beginning. One of the common elements of a tyrant is they often come in as the champion of a people or a popular ideology, and they’re not afraid to use destructive military force to do so. This was true right back to ancient Athens and the age of tyrants. By the era of Plato, the fear of democracy was that it would bring about demagogues who would then become tyrannical. Daenerys was a massive tyrant, and all the clues were there from season 1. On top of being a massive tyrant, she was also a Mongol warlord - I mean, come on! Wasn’t that obvious? Of course she was going to massacre Westeros to achieve her aims. It wasn’t out of nowhere, it was her character. Yes, she was also a bit like Cyrus the Great, a messiah who freed the slaves - but she was also like Genghis Khan and Tamerlane who brutally slaughtered the nobles and governing class of every place she conquered; it’s not surprising that she would cull a population that would be insubordinate and stand in the way of her goals, she was already doing that before she came to Westeros. Even Cyrus the Great, who was so beloved by those he conquered that he is the anointed Messiah according to the Jewish biblical tradition, while he didn’t survive, his Empire attacked Greece and massacres people in Greece and also the rebellious Egypt; Darius, the first major successor of Cyrus, was no saint as he schemed and assassinated his way to the throne, and Xerxes was relatively incompetent.

3. Jon and Arya didn’t belong in Westeros. Jon was a Targaryen and Arya was a magical creature. It is a bit contrived how they Jon was exited, but Arya’s decision to leave was within her character’s adventurous MO.

4. The battle of the bastards was a pile of shit, in my opinion. This is a strong disagreement I have with the fan base. Also, I didn’t like season 7 - though I LOVED the Dothraki charge with Daenerys on the dragon, this is not a part of that - I didn’t like how armies and advanced military arms just kept proofing into existence for the purpose of making a big battle. There is no way Ramsay Bolton would have got his hands on that weaponry and somehow had an army perfectly trained to use it. Just a season earlier his the main fist of his army was cavalry, what happened to that? Worse was that giant fleet in season 7 that popped into existence when all they had were islands covered in bird shit and sparse troops? Where did they get all the lumber? Where are the shipwrights? What about all the time required to build those ships? And, they didn’t explain how his fleet always managed to sneak up on everyone all the time - until Daenerys did the same to them in season 8.

5. Season 8 had some of that contrived stuff from 7, but it was nowhere near as bad, and they didn’t really add anything new - it was consistent contrivances =P

6. The death of Princess Shireen of the house Baratheon was the most gut wrenching in the whole show by far. It was an unthinkable betrayal of trust between father and daughter - and I felt was more effective than its inspiration: Agamemnon and Iphigenia.

7. Ramsay was like the main character or villain of a dark comedy. He was so horrible that it was over the top comedic. I think Joffrey managed to stay behind that line. While the fans don’t outright say this, you can tell by the fact that many seem to like Ramsay and despise Joffrey. I’m not trying to criticize either character, just making an observation.

8. Brown continuously upping his Sellsword price to the highest bidder was amusing, especially when he ended owning not one, but TWO of the seven Kingdoms.

That’s it for now.

A few more thoughts.

1. My favourite storyline was Stannis's Aristotelian tragedy. He was attempting to do the right thing, and fought with his own ego, and ended up succumbing and losing everything. It was to where he welcomed death at the end because he despised himself so much. This played out mainly between season 2 and 5.

2. Daenerys's tyranny arc and Jon becoming the equivalent of Jaime Lannister will probably work a lot better in the book because in the show they didn't treat the title of "Kingslayer" with nearly the contempt; but I enjoyed that storyline too. I really like stories of the rise and fall of tyrants, especially those who seem of good intention - like Peisistratus and Julius Caesar.

3. My least favourite storyline was season 7's catch the Wight to bring to King's landing to prove something. Not only was the whole idea a little hair-brained, but they used their primary leaders to go about achieving their goals. It's the equivalent of a retelling of WW2 by saying Winston Churchill led an expedition into Nazi Germany to fetch a Nazi and bring it back to the US to show that fascism was happening in Germany.

4. My least favourite episode was Sansa and Arya being manipulated into fighting each other, then suddenly turning on Little Finger. That felt more contrived than giant fleets popping up out of nowhere (which also happened in season 7 with Euron Greyjoy). There are really two possibilities, either they randomly changed their mind and had him executed, or the whole thing was a ploy - equally dumb because who would they be convincing when they cited the reasons they cited for his execution were things dating back to earlier episodes, anyway. I am not a fan of doing anything merely for the benefit of the audience, it's handholdy and very 1980s trash TV.

5. Season 7 had one great moment, this is probably one of my favourite action scenes of the whole show:

But it's also breaking the canon of the series. The Dothraki are based on Steppe people like the Huns, Turkics, and Mongols; GRR Martin describes them in the book and also describes their fighting style as being similar: largely based on composite bow attacks of riding in, firing, and retreating. The composite bow used on the steppes is short and has incredible range, so it's easy to aim it on horseback without the bottom hitting the ass of the horse. For nearly 2000 years, it was the most effective weapon of the steppes. The show never shows this, and the one real Dothraki battle we see is a simple charge into the enemy lines, which is not how they'd fight. They had a dragon on their side in the show, but even so, they'd likely have waited until they dispersed the lines to charge through into arrow range.
But yeah, this is the equivalent of a "don't think too hard" scene because it's just fun to watch, we've waited nearly the whole show to see the Dothraki in a battle like this, and for the Lannister army to be crushed.