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

I did laugh at Tyrion doing the Westeros version of Looking Yourself up in the Index of the latest D.C. book

I just remembered another dumb and inexplicable choice: the early scene during Dany’s fascist rally where she is surrounded by Unsullied and Jon is forced to give up his sword to approach her followed five minutes later by a scene where Jon is able to approach her alone and armed to kill her. Why show the first if you are going to have the second happen?

I only recall Jon giving up his sword when he went to meet Tyrion in his cell.

yeah I remember wondering if Greyworm was going to let Jon get near Dany with his weapons, and he did

- Bran knowing he's eventually going to be king and letting everyone get slaughtered before it happens: Littlefinger was right. "Chaos is a ladder" and all that.

Ya I woke up this morning remembering Cat saying "Bran. You're always climbing. You mustn't climb."

Oh I thought this season was generally as good as Seasons 5-7 though I do wish they'd aimed for a more effervescent finish, ten hour-long episodes etc., my issues were seasons 7/8 were more with pacing than plotting

Somebody complained upthread that the initial Schindler's List scenes were overlong but actually I thought they were super-beautiful and a nice contrast to the confusion and violence of the previous episode, made it really clear what had happened and what people thought about it

Also, I called it, or called something anyway:

(I wouldn't go so far as to say "and then Samwell invented democracy" but there might be some kind of "rule by the small council" situation).

it was kind of funny that in the end no one gave a fuck about Jon's parentage. Like nobody said, "Oh hey, Jon's next in line to the throne, isn't he?"

which is weird because that's the series' biggest split from the books

Yeah it is strange. It seemed to end up being just a plot device to drive him and Dany apart. Also ignored is Gendry's claim.

I do like the "we will henceforth make these decisions by vote" denouement but did think it strange that Bran was their final decision.

Again, my frustration with seers-in-fiction has me looking at Bran's face like "you are just as responsible for the destruction of KL, why can't people see this"

I really loved Brienne's scene with the book, we're out here complaining about Jamie's bullshit arc and she's like "nope he was the best, remember?"

It has also produced the best memes on Twitter, imho.

I like this, too:

Tyrion walks into a brothel with a honeycomb and a jackass.
Madame: What can we do for you?
Tyrion: I need a woman to lay with, for mine has left me.
Madame: Whatever for? And what's with the honeycomb and the mule?
Tyrion: My woman found a genie in a bottle, and he granted her three wishes. The first was for a house fit for a queen, so he gave her this damn honeycomb. The second wish was that she have the nicest ass in all the land, so he gave her this damn donkey...
Madame: And what about the third wish?
Tyrion: Well... she asked the genie to make my cock hang down past my knee.
Madame: Well that one's not so bad eh?
Tyrion: Not so bad!? I used to be six foot three!

Bronn being on the new small council is 100% fan service and I thank them for their deference to my wishes

so in the end was GoT just a cautionary tale about radical socialist women and how we need to have a rational patriarchy?

I think the lesson is that if you have an inscrutable magic seer, put them in charge, not the person flying the fire-breathing dragon.

Bran the Broken is kind of ableist

Maybe it's ironic, like calling a big guy Tiny.

Daenerys (sorry for repeatedly misspelling her name) is American imperialism to create a "better world"
Sansa is equal parts free Ireland and Brexit
not sure what Bran's wise man of few words with brain trust behind him would be

didn't get to see what Euron's actual governing style was like so I'm making no suppositions

Cersei was Saddam Hussein maybe

SANSA: hey btw my brother's dick doesn't work. everybody keep telling me your private stuff, i'm cool

it's a show about how elective laws change from primogeniture to feudal elective

They fucking went with "Bran the Broken" when "Raven Bran" was on the table

— Caroline Lamarque (@badcree) May 20, 2019

the Day King, who can see through and control living things with his mind

also more lols:

Samwell invented Plastic #GameOfThrones pic.twitter.com/68xElQmdmD

— Jacob (@JacobLarche62) May 20, 2019

the Day King, who can see through and control living things with his mind

― mh, Monday, May 20, 2019 10:15 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also heard he's the champion of the sun

his karate skills, slightly lacking

jesus christ the internet and the fucking water bottle

I liked the kind of three-way splitting of the kingdoms:

- nu-Westeros moving toward political/social reforms
-winterfell representing tradition
-Jon and Tormund heading north of the wall, representing myth/unknown/unbelievable

However, several of those scenes were flat out awful. The one with Tyrion and the new small council in particular seemed like an outtake. The student council election ending in Bran’s King hood was weird as fuck, too. Didn’t they film three different endings to avoid spoilers? When they filmed those scenes I imagine everyone involved assumed it would never be seen

When Sam was inventing democracy I seriously thought he was going to look at the camera and wink

turns to camera, winks, takes big swig of water from plastic bottle

the bran election was really bad and i had to look away it was so cringe - basically every time tyrion started talking it felt like this episode of Boston Legal (iirc) where spader (iirc) says that the trick to a closing statement is to keep talking until you win the audience over so they just had tyrion talk hoping they could salvage something but that whole speech about stories and shit was so embarrassingly awful. however i thought the final shot of the wildlings heading back into the wilderness was among the best they've done and touched on what made the show actually great and they def picked the right image to end the show on.

blooper reel!

Another negative was that this series could have the subtitle “God’s Plan”, so that blows

But on the whole I was thought they closed out things in a semi-coherent way, which I was beginning to think was impossible. And the stabbing scene + drogon rage were season highlights

Looks like I am going to end up pulling a True Blood on GoT. I read all the books, watched all the seasons and then bailed from watching the last couple of episodes.

It was painful to watch Jon walk around aimlessly, having meaningful conversations with people. It reminded me of Stardew Valley.

But I loved Arya and her Reepicheep ending (even if she's going west rather than east) and I agree that seeing the free folk go home and take Jon Snow with them was great.

The “stories” speech sounded like those bits at the oscars where they talk about writers and the magic of cinema.

^^YES

I was trying to place it. That’s exactly right.

Also close to that nonsense M. Night Shyamalan pulled with "Lady in the Water," where a character was literally named Story, and a writer (played by Shyamalan DO U SEE) had to be protected because he was going to write a book that would inspire presidents.

xpost

The student council election ending in Bran’s King hood was weird as fuck, too. Didn’t they film three different endings to avoid spoilers? When they filmed those scenes I imagine everyone involved assumed it would never be seen

...actor Isaac Hempstead-Wright, like most of the audience, surely didn’t expect as much. “I genuinely thought it was a joke script and that (showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss) sent to everyone a script with their own character ends up on the Iron Throne. ‘Yeah, good one guys. Oh shit, it’s actually real?’” he told Entertainment Weekly.

I was very happy with the choice of Bran for king, but very dissatisfied with Tyrion's speech to that end. I do think there was an amazing parallel between Littlefinger's rapacious desire for the throne and Bran just floating his way into the position with effectively the same process. Again, it's an issue with seers-as-devices but I can't help but think that there was a subtly sinister way that Bran's arc concluded.

I didn't like Arya's denouement and had hoped for better.

I actually loved the Jon/Dany resolution, Drogon's reaction.

Bran is like the guy in those Rap Battle parody videos:
https://media1.tenor.com/images/5b1de781effe18d7df84d35e315369f2/tenor.gif?itemid=5518154

did anyone think the fascist rally bit at the start was a little racist even for GOT?

did I miss the racism?

the more i think about it the more i think that while having Daenerys destroy King's Landing was a pretty sick burn on Cersei and co, i also think the choice of not showing her while she was doing it was a slight (and perhaps unintentional) cop-out. They never had to deal directly with her turning from a hero we identified with into a genocidal villain, and even her post-massacre dialogue was either a fascist rally speech or vague justifications that didn't handle what she did head-on.

I think it was extremely interesting how the narrative POV shifted from us identifying with her and joining her on her journey and ascent to power, and moved into viewing her from the outside and as a figure to be feared. It was a really compelling decision narratively speaking, but it was all just too abrupt getting there. I think this kind of device can really work (to cite something completely different: what Friedkin did with William Peterson's character in To Live and Die In L.A.) but here, as much as I liked a lot of it, it was too easy.

SANSA: hey btw my brother's dick doesn't work. everybody keep telling me your private stuff, i'm cool

hahahah!!!

"did anyone think the fascist rally bit at the start was a little racist even for GOT?"

there was something that made me uncomfortable about the portrayal of the dothraki as 'savages' (through the entire series frankly) and greyworm as the angry black guy and yes, as I said above, the seeming warning about socialism. It wasn't overt but it was there enough that I thought "oh fuck some people on the right are going to really love this'

oh, right! ... i watched a documentary about Stalin after this episode, and there were definitely parallels.

Maybe better for the Biden thread, but
https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/60446985_10156952879206708_4145052742433374208_n.jpg?_nc_cat=101&_nc_oc=AQkS5zAXvyvPlMChMhvLf9l1N998_I98j2fBQgAJElTDeVAWB1VRlUCng9T0_9hL5os&_nc_ht=scontent-lax3-1.xx&oh=ca7e0ac2be4405e0958617d77ba67144&oe=5D9FBB8C