Poll of the Day > Is Game of Thrones worth watching now?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Didn't watch it during its run but heard everyone say it ended bad.

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Nope. Stop watching at 5 and pretend the show was canceled. Trust me show deserved better.

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GoT became of phenomenon because the first 4 seasons were pretty accurate to the books.

Season 5 and onward tosses the books out the window and they make up silliness.

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Just read the books, then write your own fanfiction ending for the series. It probably won't be any worse than the show was.
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I watched most of it in terms of individual story threads, and only watched the last season as full episodes.

The show generally seemed pretty good from what I saw of it, but they make so many weird decisions in the last two seasons especially that super-rushed final season where so much shit was anticlimatic or stupid. I will say that it's hard to end the series while making everybody happy, but it's almost as hard to end a series making everybody unhappy. They, uh, opted for the worse of the difficult outcomes.

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Zeus posted...

but it's almost as hard to end a series making everybody unhappy. They, uh, opted for the worse of the difficult outcomes.

They opted for the option where they halfass their exit so they could rush over to Disney as quickly as possible and get started working on the new/separate Star Wars trilogy Disney promised them full control over.

Which they then fucked over by dropping that contract because Netflix offered them a metric shitton of money to make bad films and TV shows. It's the best (worst) of both worlds!
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Just read the books, then write your own fanfiction ending for the series. It probably won't be any worse than the show was.

P much.

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The first couple of seasons were gold and easily make up for the end

You could buy a month of HBO and knock it out or get the box set for around 100 bones

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I'd say the ending retroactively ruined the show, sure the early parts are still great by themselves but knowing the payoff is one of the worst endings a show has ever had taints it.

Cruddy_horse posted...

I'd say the ending retroactively ruined the show

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I've never watched it but the last season must have been pretty awful given that the show was the single biggest TV hit of the 2010s and it effectively stopped being talked about at the end of the last season. It's like it vanished from public discussion altogether.

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FinalFantasyIV posted...

Season 5 and onward tosses the books out the window and they make up silliness.

I thought the problem was that they ran out of source material and then forgot who all the characters were.

It's still absolutely worth watching imo.

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After the whole Stannis arc I completely lost interest. They really fucked that up. I didn't even read the books and I was like "this dude would never do this"

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EvilMegas posted...

After the whole Stannis arc I completely lost interest. They really fucked that up. I didn't even read the books and I was like "this dude would never do this"

Did it surprise you that he sacrificed his family in fire, or are you talking about something else? The way I look at it is that Davos was always his only voice of reason.

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The former.
Stannis spent almost all of his time devoted to family, making unpopular choices that kept them safe. then all of a sudden he was just like "fuck my family, I guess"

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kind9 posted...

Did it surprise you that he sacrificed his family in fire, or are you talking about something else? The way I look at it is that Davos was always his only voice of reason.

lets not forget 10 good men and a little snow force him to burn his daughter for a nice day just so he can lose and die offscreen.

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Then the magic lady just kinda abandons her plans. That whole arc was just a narrative dead end. Lmao

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lets not forget she did it to bring back a guy so he can job to an army, lose, then get saved by someone completely unrelated who would have won regardless if he was alive or not, and nothing else.

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EvilMegas posted...

Stannis spent almost all of his time devoted to family, making unpopular choices that kept them safe. then all of a sudden he was just like "fuck my family, I guess"

I have a pretty shitty memory. I can't remember what decisions he made specifically for the safety of his family. I remember the first scene he's in he's burning some of his family, and I remember him murdering his brother and wanting to murder his nephew. He never showed any affection for his wife. His daughter was the only one he seemed to care about, but I didn't imagine his affection for her would outweigh Melisandra's influence.

Kimbos_Egg posted...

lets not forget 10 good men and a little snow force him to burn his daughter for a nice day just so he can lose and die offscreen.

Yeah that's what I was talking about. Didn't the majority of his army defect and they were facing imminent starvation? Did Melisandra not steer him by the balls through the entire show?

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kind9 posted...

I thought the problem was that they ran out of source material and then forgot who all the characters were.

It's still absolutely worth watching imo.

It's more that they never really understood who the characters were in the first place, but that didn't matter so long as they were following someone else's story.

When they had to come up with their own, they started leaning too hard into fan service (People like Arya? Great, she's a super-hero now. People like Tyrion? Great, let's keep him front-and-center), even when it didn't necessarily serve the story.

Plus, they've said in the past that Martin told them how the story ends (which I assume means Dany dead and Bran on the throne), but not how it was going to get there, which meant they had to be good enough at storytelling to fill in the blanks and actually get those characters where they needed to be narratively, by the end. But they wasted three seasons avoiding any real character development because they're bad at storytelling, and then realized at the end they only had one season left (which was shortened because they wanted to leave and didn't really give a fuck), so everything got crammed in at the end and felt ridiculously unearned and unjustified.

At that point, they should have been like "Ehh, you know what? Fuck it." and just went with their own, completely different ending. It's not like Martin would be able to do anything about it at that point, and if they'd followed their fan-pandering to its natural conclusion, they at least could have had an ending that felt shallow but which people actually kind of enjoyed.

Or they could have gone with the Dany/Jon/Tyrion having threesomes ending that book readers have been predicting for a while based on in-story hints.
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Read the books, or watch the first four seasons and stop and pretend the show got cancelled.

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I have read the books: I'm on my third time through right now, actually. They're great, although the fifth wanders a bit.

However, I didn't watch the shows and am not at all surprised that people didn't like the ending. The series is based on a complicated world with complicated morality, which is exactly the sort of thing that TV fails to get across, especially if they're driving for some sort of happy series ending without source material to guide them. It was doomed to failure once ol' George stopped making progress, and now his all time classic ends with TV trash unless he manages to write the ending the series deserves.

Your fans were right all along, George!

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wpot posted...

The series is based on a complicated world with complicated morality, which is exactly the sort of thing that TV fails to get across,

The series had no problem with that...when they had source material. When they started doing their own shit, that's when it all went downhill.

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The thing is though is that the showrunners created a lot of great original content early on in seasons that isnt present in the novels

For example the interactions between Tywin and Arya at Harrenhall. That only exists in the show and provided a lot of compelling insight into both characters.

I really think it is as simple as the show getting too popular for its own good. By the end everyone was more concerned about their upcoming projects based on the success of the show. I mean all those millions being spent but they are leaving Starbucks cups and water bottles in final shots that went to air? Thats a clear sign of a production that nobody at the top was taking active ownership over and was just on autopilot.

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@EvilMegas That's what I was saying in the last part of my quoted sentence, wasn't I?

I suppose the way I structured the sentence was a bit misleading. I fully agree, though: no source material = no complexity of thought.

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Oh, then yes. I agree wholeheartedly lol

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I think it is worth watching, the last 2 seasons are not that good and they focused on spectacle over story. Some of the spectacle is still entertaining if you don't think about it too much. I highly recommend the books if you are a reader unless all you care about is the ending.

Mead posted...

For example the interactions between Tywin and Arya at Harrenhall. That only exists in the show and provided a lot of compelling insight into both characters.

That's pretty much an example of their fanservice mentality, though. "What's that? People like Arya and Tywin? Fuck it, let's put them in a scene together."

The flip-side of that was Ros - she was their OC DONUT STEEL character that they liked so much they decided to turn her one throwaway scene into a much longer running role at least until they killed her off.

Those are the tendencies they had right from the beginning, which weren't as terrible while they were still mostly stuck to the rails of the existing plot, but which spiraled out of control once they ran out of source material to work from.

It's also not a huge plus in their favor, when you realize they left out scenes from the books that gave better insight into the personalities of other characters or events. So things kind of balance out a bit.

One could argue that their main flaw was that they got lost in the idea of having little moments or cool scenes, but never really thought about how they all flowed together as part of the larger narrative. Which, again, wasn't a huge problem so long as they had the road-map to tell them where to go, but once they had to start plotting their own course everything fell apart because they simply weren't Big Picture type people.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

One could argue that their main flaw was that they got lost in the idea of having little moments or cool scenes, but never really thought about how they all flowed together as part of the larger narrative.

Which is the primary reason that, IMO, almost all TV series with continuing plots don't work very well. Lost would be the poster child. I you aren't going somewhere then you're just trying to get me to watch next week via fan service or something else: that doesn't do anything for me in the long run. It's a weakness built in to the medium without strong source material or detailed plan.

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No, if something ultimately ends up being shit then the pay isn't worth it. I'm not gonna pretend otherwise

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wpot posted...

Which is the primary reason that, IMO, almost all TV series with continuing plots don't work very well. Lost would be the poster child. I you aren't going somewhere then you're just trying to get me to watch next week: that doesn't do anything for me in the long run. It's a weakness built in to the medium without strong source material or detailed plan.

The problem there is less about the format of TV, and more about the writers.

The problem with Lost is that they essentially promised SHOCKING REVELATIONS yet had literally no idea what the answers to those questions were. And when people started pestering them, they just asked even more questions to distract you. Until it became utterly impossible to ever pay off in any satisfying way. This is the same problem the Battlestar Galactica remake had - they've admitted they had absolutely no idea where they were going or who the Cylons actually were until they arbitrarily decided, even if those choices made no sense at the time.

But creators/showrunners/script editors CAN pay off on longer-term storytelling IF they plan out the story in advance. Babylon 5 was the famous example of this - J. Michael Straczynski had a five-year story arc entirely planned out, and actually came up with ways to justify actors leaving/dying in advance so that he could write them out of the show if he needed to, no matter how important their character was to the overall arc. There were definitely hiccups (mostly from network execs screwing them over a bit vis-a-vis cancellation/renewal, and the lead actor suffering from legit schizophrenia mid-season 1 and needing to retire to seek medical care), but for the most part they kept to the original story outline, and to this day it has a fanatical fanbase loyal to it because of it.

Supernatural is sort of example of both methodologies - it started out as a show where the writers had a pretty good idea of where the plot was going for the first five seasons, but after that it kept getting renewed year after year after year and they wound up having to constantly keep coming up with new storylines on the fly, each of which became weaker and weaker as they went because they'd sort of lose track of where they were going (and power creep made things more and more ridiculous).

Long-running TV shows can write on the fly if they're not promising a dramatic ending or answer to underlying story arc questions, but if a writer wants to build a show that way, they pretty much NEED to plan stuff out in advance. Which rarely happens, because most creators are fairly lazy, or get screwed over by their network (ie, there were multi-year plans for shows like Sliders an Andromeda that got derailed because the original writers got forced off the show and replaced by people who didn't follow the original outline).
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I must not be organizing my thoughts clearly enough. The above is more or less exactly what I meant by:

wpot posted...

It's a weakness built in to the medium without strong source material or detailed plan.

...so agreed! It's possible, but the pressures of regular episodes, fan opinions, lazy writers, etc usually overtake any plans the writers may have started with. STRONG plans are rare.

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wpot posted...

I must not be organizing my thoughts clearly enough. The above is more or less exactly what I meant by "It's a weakness built in to the medium without strong source material or detailed plan."

I was more responding to the "built into the medium" part, whereas it seems you were leaning more into the "without strong source material or detailed plan" part. So we're in agreement then. ~thumbs up~
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~thumbs up~

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while it definitely tanks later on, there is still a lot of good to watch.

big part of why the last season tanked so hard was because they wanted to rush through so they could start star wars stuff.
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The season before was shit too

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The first 4 seasons were fantastic. 5 and 6 were hit and miss (though 6 had an excellent season finale IMO). 7 and 8 had a few good episodes each but damn what a nosedive.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

write your own fanfiction ending

Why? Can't we just wait for George R.R. Martin to finish the series?

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ComradeSeraphim posted...

Why? Can't we just wait for George R.R. Martin to finish the series?

*spit take* LOL that's a good one. The dude's been writing the 6th book for the past 10 years and there's another book after it.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

They opted for the option where they halfass their exit so they could rush over to Disney as quickly as possible and get started working on the new/separate Star Wars trilogy Disney promised them full control over.

Sounds to me like they were trying to hog the limelight (and production money). They should learn to share the stage with other directors and not try to hog all the cool projects.

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InfernalFive posted...

The dude's been writing the 6th book for the past 10 years

That must mean it's almost done, right? Right...? :D

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ComradeSeraphim posted...

Why? Can't we just wait for George R.R. Martin to finish the series?

Ha, good one!
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Well I understand he regrets the shows went past the books in interviews. That said, it sounds like he also signed a deal with HBO to do prequels, so


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wpot posted...

Well I understand he regrets the shows went past the books in interviews. That said, it sounds like he also signed a deal with HBO to do prequels, so

He already wrote those books, though. They're the books he'd write when he didn't feel like writing the books that people actually wanted him to write.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Dunk_and_Egg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_%26_Blood_(book)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sons_of_the_Dragon
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God I could barely make it through that Fire and Blood book. It was interesting but for a lot of it I felt like I was reading a book for a research paper.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fjjJ9IBKAXo
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