Was kind of being sarcastic, but yeah, looking at what the good guys went with, Davos and/or Sam would've probably done as good a job commanding the battle as any of the seasoned veterans.SupahEwok said:
Game of Thrones Final Season Discussion Thread. (SPOILERS ABOUND, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED)
- Thread starter Samtemdo8_v1legacy
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1. I was hoping Jon would actually slay a Dragon.Gethsemani said:
2. Never thought you had those feeling for Lyanna "Giantsbane" Mormont.
3. I think I would not mind Arya killing the Night King if she died in the process. Night King fatally stabs her but she still manages to do that knife trick.
4. I don't mind the idea that you kill the Night King, all the zombies die, because in most fantasy depictions, its pretty much Necromancy 101. You kill the Necromancer and control over the undead is shattered. I mean in Warhammer Total War, its the Vampire Counts one weakness. So protect that Necromancer at all cost.
How does Rhaegar fit the prophecy? No shining sword, no sacrifice of his loved one, no rebirth in salt and smoke. Even Rhaegar himself believed it was his son, and not him, if the visions in the House of the Undying can be believed.Eacaraxe said:
I think Martin is just waiting for the internet to write his last books for him. Once the finale happens, GRRM will finish the books and they will just so happen to 'fix' everything everyone complained about and he will pretend he intended to do that the whole time.
Speaking of, how did she actually get there to begin with?Samtemdo8 said:
Remember, Bran was surrounded by a wall of wights at least a dozen deep. Except the little corridor the Night King was walking through while his WW posse laid back and watched. Did she casually faceless man herself through the whole thing? Did she monkey through the trees (would actually approve of this)? Did getting laid give her so much balls she gained Euron's teleportation powers? Plausible. I mean, worked for Theon when he grew a pair. Or, you know, the obvious answer of "cuz its all dramatic and stuff and the writers said so"?
I know, I know. The show doesn't bother with questions like that anymore, so neither should anyone looking to keep their sanity.
Ugh... So Sam survived, didn't he? A fat coward who should've been on his knees one second and dead during the next survives. Put him in the crypt if you want him to survive, dammit. Our enemy doesn't tire but neither do the main heroes. The whole thing with Arya is just so fucking obnoxious, she even gets her own battle theme music like in the anime she belongs to.
While dark it was still a really nice-looking episode with lots of steadycam shots and a bit of video game aesthetic, I guess.
While dark it was still a really nice-looking episode with lots of steadycam shots and a bit of video game aesthetic, I guess.
So, I think you missed my point.Eacaraxe said:
In the books, these are implications, memories and second hand accounts. They are things you can figure out retrospectively. There is no chapter which goes into a long description about Theon being strapped to a St. Andrew's cross and having his fingers and dick flayed off with lots of gloating and banter because there doesn't need to be. We see Ramsey's sadism primarily through the effect that he has on people around him.
In the books, Theon just disappears for ages and then suddenly we have one POV chapter with Reek, and we are left to infer from how broken Reek is and the hints we get of his memories that some really fucked up shit happened in between. In the TV show, that intervening stuff is given like an hour of screen time over a whole season in a show that is already struggling to squeeze all it's important plot points into a show format. It's very clear that the show wanted more exploitation (and exploitation is not the same thing as just having sex and violence in your story) so they added this stuff and then had to justify its existence by turning Ramsey into a much more prominent character. Book Ramsey is not an interesting character, he's almost a deliberate inversion of the movie-psychopath archetype which TV show Ramsey embodies in that he's not a clever manipulating genius, he's a sadistic thug with poor impulse control.
I think Stannis as depicted has a broadly utilitarian and proprietary attitude to religion. His attitude is basically "what do I get in return", which in many non-Christian cultures is a perfectly reasonable way to think about religion.Silvanus said:
Whether it's actually R'hllor or Melisandre herself, following the red god works in ASOIAF. It doesn't matter if you believe, Thoros openly admits that he didn't really believe and was just paying lip service until he started raising the dead.
I believe so, yes. The principal differences between Book Lady Mormont and Sassy Young Mormont (SYM) is that the former is a) a proven house leader b) the leader of a remote, poor house that everyone considers kind of weird (and who's main claim to fame in recent history is that the former leader was exiled for selling his subjects into slavery and his father had to take the black) and c) of no consequence to anyone and thus everyone largely ignores her antics, since that's just how stuff is on Bear Island. As a contrast SYM is somehow able to shame all the actual lords of importance in the North and manages to be their (or rather the writer's) mouthpiece in all important decisions somehow.Hades said:
1. Me too. I was more hoping for Jon to take out the NK though.Samtemdo8 said:
2. I'm a book fan. As I, evilthecat and others have said on this forum before, Martin shows us how terrible medieval patriarchy is to everyone involved, it is a deliberate part of his stories and he never shies away from showing the reader how it hurts everyone. From Catelyn and Cersei who internalizes the misogyny in different ways (Cat taking a step back and leading through her son, Cersei by hating every woman around her, herself included, and trying to be a man in performance) to Jaime and Bran, who are both emasculated by their loss of combat ability and leg function and who are both written off because of that or even Jorah Mormont who goes so far in providing for his wife that he sells his subjects to slavers to live up to the ideal of a wealthy Lord. Or even Khal Drogo who dies of an infected wound because he can't even comprehend the idea that a woman could harm him, let alone kill him through guile. Dany's arc is also largely focused on how a young girl has to work harder to secure loyalty and respect then a boy would, because people assume women can't rule and how this sometimes work to her benefit because people underestimate her because of her gender (see Xharo Xan for example).
GoT started out like this but somewhere around Season 4 (was it?) they got this "empowering women" idea, and decided to implement it in the most hamfisted way possible. Lyanna is just the epitome of this weird shift from actually taking on medieval gender dynamics and the way it screws people over to a world where season 1 is rife with misogyny and season 6 has a ten year old girl with 40 soldiers to her name somehow shaming out fifty year old, male lords with thousands of soldiers and who actually carries respect. Instead of being laughed out of the room as the cute but weird little kid she should have been. For me Lyanna ruined every scene she was in because she was a constant reminder that GoT by Season 6 didn't run on any internal logic, it ran on whatever the writers thought was coolest in the moment.
4. I'm not opposed of the idea of killing the NK somehow ending the White Walkers. I'm opposed to how very rushed his demise felt. He was foreshadowed at the end of what, season 2 or 3? He's been propped up as the ultimate, world destroying antagonist since at least season 4 and when he finally gets to really let loose and start being badass he's killed off in the same episode that the the threat he poses is fully realized. It is rushed and shoddy storytelling, instead of really letting him shine as an overwhelming and nigh impossible threat to face.
I think an apt comparison would be if Thanos got all the infinity stones in Infinity War but just as he's about to snap Antman (because he's got a similar lack of relation to Thanos that Arya has to the NK) just upsized and punched his head clean off. It is a way to end the story, sure, but it is a terribly rushed and botched way to handle the antagonist you've been building for the last 6 or so years. The NK doesn't need to win, but if we are to truly accept him as an antagonist he needs to be an imminent threat for longer then one whole episode, by which end he's dead and the threat is gone.
It's a little more than that. Stannis swore gods would not have his worship after his parents died. He places trust in Melisandre's power up until the Blackwater, but is quite clearly skeptical after then. It's not faith; that's my point.evilthecat said:
We don't know what Euron is up too exactly, but he's about a thousand times more sinister. He claims he wants to woo Dany to win the Iron Throne, but could very well have more occult ambitions.Samtemdo8 said:
His use of his baby mamma (and his brother) as the prow of his ship was some pretty grisly stuff, and satisfied the conditions of one of the visions Dany had in the House of the Undying (Grey corpse at the prow of a ship, smiling sadly - referring to Aeron Greyjoy's body), which implies Euron will be a big deal if Martin ever finishes the damn books.
No, I just disagree with it. I don't believe you're putting sufficient weight in the challenges of adapting this particular brand of content from written media to audiovisual, and how that applies to the axiom "show, don't tell". This is one place in which I feel the writers weren't being hacks.evilthecat said:
Fuckin' A. Jesus, I get sick of people who blow this show and its writers for how it portrayed women characters post-season 5, when the reality is any sort of real, meaningful social commentary has been stripped away and replaced by topical, social media-friendly, bite-size "you go grrl!" nonsense.
Which, thinking about it, from this point forward I will call for myself "the Eowyn effect".
It's not faith in the traditional Abhrahamic sense, but I highly doubt that Stannis is an atheist... I think it's more likely that he believes R'hllor is real, but he will not devote himself to him.Silvanus said:
Stannis is a man of many contradictions in any case, his approach to religion is just one more aspect of his inner duality.
Speaking personally, I don't really mind Arya killing the Night King per se, outside of some afterthought about whether or not she really is the best fit for the Azor Ahai prophecy and if there were better ways to affirm/reject the prophecy.Samtemdo8 said:
What ends up annoying me is the blocking of the scene itself, wherein the Night King is languidly about to cut down Bran in the middle of a clearing, with the former's entourage staring them down from a good 15-20 feet behind the Night King. And then Arya comes flying of the now blackened clearing behind the Night King.
...What.
They were in a clearing. Where the heck was she hiding? The closest thing we get to a hint on this is one of the Others seeming to notice something as a gust of wind blows by, as if implying Arya had zipped through their ranks at like an anime ninja. I just want to scream at whoever blocked out that scene. Have Arya swing out of the trees, have her lying on the ground imitating a corpse, clutter the clearing to give her places to hide, have Theon desperately try to wheel Bran into a chokepoint where Arya has been hiding above the archway, there are so many ways they could have made this scene work, but they simply went for a very lazy and almost literal "she came out of nowhere" presentation. And for goodness sake, they could have at least given the Night King an "oh shit" moment instead of seeming entirely disinterested in the scene up to the moment he exploded.
As an aside, the rationale for why Bran could bait out the Night King also pissed me off. He's the memory of the world, and death is forgetting, and the Night King wants to kill Bran to erase the world...hoo boy, where to even start on that...It's so spectacularly weak as a justification that it feels up there with when - during the production of The Birds - Hedren asked Hitchcock why the heck her character would be dumb enough to go into the attic after everything she's seen, and Hitchcock simply responded "Because I told you to".
Yup. I actually have real issues with how the writers of GoT seems to have been so bad at imagining what female empowerment looks like (especially in the context of living in a rigid, feudal patriarchy) that their idea of empowering women was to let them be sassy and/or violent. Arya and Dany gets to be at the forefront of this (Sansa's empowerment plot was to hand her the idiot ball so that Ramsay could rape a major character), with both being empowered by their ability to kill their opponents. It is not that I dislike badass women, but they really don't fit within the context of ASoIaF or GoT.Eacaraxe said:
When I want to watch bad ass women I put on Legends of Tomorrow. There's a distinct irony in the notion that GoT's writers felt that the best way to empower their female characters was to let them exercise violence and kill people, when a recurring theme of ASoIaF is the heavy cost, both personal and social, of violence as a means to solve problems or exercise power. Book!Arya learns to kill people, but it is also amply clear that she's incredibly psychologically damaged by constantly being so close to death and having to kill people and that the list she uses to cope is actually damaging to her psyche and emotional state. Show!Arya is just sooooo cool, amirite? She totally killed both Walder Frey AND the Night King!Saelune said:
Maybe if GoT hadn't started off on the same page as the books, by showing the terrors of using violence as a solution in the first few seasons, I'd have been more ok with Dany and Arya suddenly becoming murderous psychopaths as a means to show that they are strong women. But considering the source material and the early seasons of GoT, it feels more like the writers just had a collective amnesia, forgot the themes they were working with and wanted to cash in some brownie points with feminists, while not doing anything about the actually disturbing content of the show, such as the casual, borderline exploitative attitude towards women's bodies as titillation for viewers. The fact that the same season which "empowered" the women of GoT was also the season when Sansa got idiot balled so Ramsay could rape her (and the show then treating it as a "learning experience" for Sansa) speaks volumes as to the blindness in terms of women's issues that the writers of GoT suffers from.
"Feminists" need to figure out money shots aren't the only way to effectively make a statement or frame commentary.Saelune said: