HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones - Thread 2. There are a lot of nerds.

mostly just a lot of silent buildup/ominous portent xp

I don't think it's true that the Night King story was unexplained. he got an origin story and a motive of sorts. but the conclusion was definitely a bit of an anticlimax.

the stakes are kind of big. there were, what?, 50 people left alive out of the forces Dany spent the entire series building?

someone made a good point re: the Dothraki getting wiped out early - took care of most of the horses which surely helped with the budget and logistics

i do think the scene with all the flames in the dark slowly extinguishing was a nice, dread-inducing touch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MG-KjqtI6s

When I went on a guided tour of a cave one time, the guide told everyone to hold their lamp down by their side, not up in front of your face. If you do the latter all you’re going to be able to see is the lamp, he said. Those poor Dothraki rode in blind as bats.

that scene was kinda the whole episode (series?) in a nutshell, simultaneously impressive and stupid xxp

I guess we know why these people haven't discovered electricity yet

lmao @ that Romney video

Re stakes: LOL, I bet 5 minutes into the next episode Dany sniffs momentarily about how her Dothraki all died, then we never hear of them again.

I had this embarrassing moment as we saw Arya’s dagger drop, where I was like, “Who is below her?!?!” And then that split second of realization, “It’s her other haaaaaand!”

lmao

so does this episode qualify as climate change denialism y/n

It was a triumph of geoengineering imo (in the face of an overwhelming systemic threat, human innovation unexpectedly saves the day at the very last moment)

stabbing climate change in the face - could it stop global warming? in this essay, i will

I’d be interested in reading about how reasonable the tactical decisions being made would seem to a historian. I really palpably felt, in the past, especially with the Battle Of The Bastards, that there were some surprising and yet logical tactical decisions being made. It all made sense and felt real.... but then I thought it seemed really weird to start the battle by spurring on the cavalry into the darkness right away, but maybe not?

A lot of strategy is based around forcing an army into a retreat, which was not going to happen with a bunch of zombies

I've been rewatching some Spartacus lately and, while it's much more deliberately lowbrow (and low-budget!), the battle sequences in the last couple of seasons have a lot more ingenuity, invention and lucid staging than anything on GOT

For a second I was all "Kubrick? Seasons?"

lol

Posted byu/glimmerofdawn
1 year ago
Arya will kill the Night King

The valyrian steel dagger reappearing in the Stark storyline quite conspicuously, more than necessary for the sansa-arya plotline.

the useful Chekhov's gun of Nymeria's wolfpack, capable of running across snowy land without attracting attention from the wights.

the general tendency of the show to frustrate expectations in interesting ways. nothig will be as you are led to believe it will be. if they want you to believe that either dany or jon will do it, neither will.

the general theme of her being committed to the heroic lifestyle, while limited by being a girl. if she can pull this off she beats all the knights ever hands down in terms of heroism.

the beric dondarrion suggestion for no plot purpose in that scene, for reasons (the mass of wights to fight through) that arya would not face (she could sneak past).

1 comment

JinnDante
2 points ·
1 year ago

no.

I don't think it's true that the Night King story was unexplained. he got an origin story and a motive of sorts. but the conclusion was definitely a bit of an anticlimax.

― Simon H., Monday, April 29, 2019 7:58 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, the idea that he needed a motive beyond what was already shown is kinda mystifying to me. the white walkers are like mickey's brooms from fantasia--they were created to do one job, and they did the job way too well. for the brooms, it's fetching water, for the white walkers, it was to kill.

it does create some story problems imo--i thought the whole point of the white walkers was to prove that the internecine conflict between the human factions was meaningless, and that the real threat to humanity came from the forces of nature. now, i guess not? the forces of humanity didn't have to come together at all, and they still won, and the real story ends with the political squabbling that was supposedly a distraction.

Lots of rumbling on Twitter this morning that the HBO GO stream of the last night's episode looked considerably better than the cable airing.

i watched on hbo go and could barely see anything for long stretches due to darkness

video compression + lots of blacks = ????

It can be argued that it’s a failure of the show runners that the battle didn’t feel consequential and it felt anticlimactic, but it seems to me that when you put the battle in the context of the rest of the show, it feels pretty grand: it took the amassing of like four armies, two dragons, the training of a ninja who can steal people’s faces, a sudden amassing of magic stone from across the continent, days of forging weaponry, to hold off the wights long enough for a ninja to sneak along and stab the night king.

I think part of the anticlimactic feeling was that I was hoping for humans and wights to progressively and cleverly one-up each other—you want the Night King to do things you don’t expect. He didn’t, he just slammed bodies against the walls until it worked (which, at the end of the day, really is the central looming threat of the white walkers).

The episode had a ton of great moments, it thrilled me and made me feel emotional. For someone who knows nothing about battlefield tactics, the battle provided a few head scratchers, but overall, there were some incredible visuals and it inspired existential terror in me.

idk i was totally thrilled watching the episode, but it fell a bit in my estimation when i thought of it in a broader story context

Usually these sorts of spectacles inspire complaints that the CGI has superseded the writing, but this might be the first show or movie where I've heard people repeatedly defend bad writing with "well, they only had so much CGI money ..."

Also the first time I've actual seen discussion/debate about TV calibration/screen quality in reviews

we switched to the bedroom TV a 10 year old 46" Panasonic Plasma that handled the dark scenery like a champ .

Yeah I had relatively little trouble making sense of things via hbogo so I was surprised how unanimous that reaction was.

I would probably have felt better about the episode if there'd been 4 or 5 fewer instances of name characters getting saved at the last possible second by another name character

Also I found it funny that after all that talk of Sam's inability to keep up as a soldier/fighter, he was able to hack n' slash like a champ through the whole thing

My major problem with the battle was that they went to the trouble of building and ranging all those catapults and trebuchets and fired each of them exactly once. Come on, guys. I know you got dragons, but jeez

When they kept getting saved by each other among the chaos I was fine with it, but when it got to the point that Jon runs in (from outside winterfell) and sees each named character standing on top of their own personal hill of corpses swinging swords (and getting overwhelmed -> cutaway -> cut back and they're fine) it was extremely silly looking to me. My memory might be exaggerating it, though.

I would probably have felt better about the episode if there'd been 4 or 5 fewer instances of name characters getting saved at the last possible second by another name character

the showrunners are totally addicted to this--it was the worst in that beyond-the-wall sortie from last season, where everyone rescued everybody else and only thoros kicked it.

i was amazed by the dragon's precision fire breathing more accurate than modern day drones that's for sure

My only issue with this extremely cool episode of TV where a zombie army invaded a castle (that part owned) was really that they pushed a few characters to the margins and kept cutting back to them in frantic retreat with never any moments of escape. Brienne and Jaime and Podrick(?) were against a wall desperately fighting for the last thirty min before Arya saved the day. I understand the issues of time and devoting more of it to certain characters but wish there’d been some relief for them, cf. Arya hiding out in the Winterfell library.

I thought this was largely anticlimactic. I had a hard time tracking what was going on (muddled and dark picture quality for me) -- I was confused why Arya was making her way through the innards of Winterfell.

The one death that really hit me was Lyanna's, and her revenanting was a moment of real dread (that unfortunately didn't get a followup).

lol @ Bran essentially sending Theon to a ineffectually pointless death.

It certainly would have looked more plausible to have them keep retreating into safe areas that allowed them break the overwhelming attack into chunks they could deal with one at a time. Like multiple rooms they could keep backing into in order to funnel. It was a stretch to assume they could just keep coming out of stabby zombie dog piles without mortal wounds.

xp

lol @ Bran essentially sending Theon to a ineffectually pointless death.

― Perfect Leee Cromulent (Leee), Monday, April 29, 2019 12:34 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was surprised he charged like that. Didn't think he had the balls

zing

we're on season 8, and we can't keep track of which characters had which genitalia removed???

we've been over this. it's everyone

i appreciated Theon's final charge, there's was no dicking around with him there.

His death didn't leave any loose ends?

Disappointed at the broad consensus takes on this episode (it was too dark, not enough characters died, they killed the Night King too early).

Is there no wingnut waste dump where Jordan Peterson fans are hashing it out over how inconceivable it is that Arya could kill the walking embodiment of death? I’m supposed to be finishing up a research paper and I need better distractions. Get me out of the filter bubble. What are the flat earthers saying?!?

Dragon fire can't melt Sean Beans

the Night King was a blank slate villain, I have no problem getting him out of the way this early.

Cersei is coming off as the smartest person on the show again -- didn't she say something about not wanting to bother with NK and his posse because she'd wait it out til it was over and deal with who was left in the north later?

yeah she turned out to be totally right.

one of the biggest differences between the show and the books is that cersei is actually a mastermind, not just a vain person who thinks she's a mastermind.

still she has to hang with Euron

Yeah it was a totally naive plan. She got lucky, so it makes her seem smart. The likely scenario was her being consumed by zombie armies a month or so later than the northerners.

i m dumb: what was the weapon arya had gendry smith for her? Did it not play a part here?