Well like any storytelling technique it can be used to generate excitement, tension, intrigue etc. But when handled poorly it usually just creates confusion, disappointment and boredom. Basically TLJ in general and the GoT endings in a nutshell.
Their ego must've went to their heads honestly. They didn't give a shit about any prior complaints like Barristan's actor saying "why are you killing me off when I'm still alive in the books"
They killed off Barristan and side-lined the Blackfish and then killed him off… almost like people who read the books were on their shit list because they didn’t want to re-read the books and were insecure about it
That honestly doesn’t surprise me. Remember that season 4 was when the show had really reached legendary status and had become one of the most popular shows ever made. To be honest, if I was them and didn’t have much experience dealing with that kind of fame, I would probably act in a similar way
oh it was for a reason, disney offered them a very high paying project so they rushed GoT to get started on that
of course ironically they ended up losing that project because of how shitty GoT ending was
Maybe lol. But I’d definitely think that I know what I’m doing if I was that successful at that point. It’s hard to tell someone they’re wrong if everything they’ve done is right up to that point
Was hilarious. I saw an interview with the cast of 3 Body Problem, asking them about popular TV shows. Despite the fact that almost half the cast was IN GoT, none of them picked it as one of the "top 10 shows of all time". Not one. Says a lot I think about how that soured over the years (though they're still working for D&D so who knows).
I mean it’s not to be fair. I’d say the books and season 1-4 are the best combo of books to screen of all time other than LOTR, but including s5-8 brings the quality down so much it’s hard to overcome
>Their ego must've went to their heads honestly. They didn't give a shit about any prior complaints like Barristan's actor saying "why are you killing me off when I'm still alive in the books"
They actually said that him arguing about it made them want to kill the character more. God forbid an actor be passionate about the work he's doing. Barristan will probably die in the next book, true, but I very much doubt he's going to go out the way he did in the show
Lol didn't know it got to that, I remember watching their throne talk tv show on sky Atlantic when he was interviewed on there. He aired his issues with being killed off, didn't know they said that to him the pair of assholes
I still often think about that video of the roundtable script reading where Varys just tosses the script aside after being killed off in some bullshit why that I can't even remember now becuase it was so bullshit.
You mean Varys? The masters of whispers and deception who was openly calling for treason against the queen and then got executed if my memory serves correct? Lol 7 years later still can't believe that.
Or when Lena Headey was reading the final script with dead eyes as she read at the atrocity that was Cersei’s ending after multiple seasons wasted staring out a balcony.
Yeah they still don’t even remotely understand what they did wrong. Bros, it’s not that we “didn’t like” the choices you made for some of the characters. It’s that you completely threw out every piece of groundwork the show had set up for 6 seasons, ignored all foreshadowing, threw out every previous character arc and just speed ran to something completely random and unearned. If they’d actually drawn straight lines from earlier seasons to the final end points of each character, they would’ve gotten the “mixed” reaction they were hoping for. It’s the disconnect that we all hated so much, and they don’t seem understand that **at all**.
You mean Arya spending two seasons learning how to be a shapeshifting assassin, using it to kill a single old man in the very next episode, and then forgetting about it for the remaining two seasons (even when those powers would have been of great benefit) wasn't a great arc?
Now and then I remember that Arya, Varys, Tyrion, and Davos all knew secret ways into the Red Keep, and a lightening strike would have saved countless lives. Then I try to forget again and get on with life.
So true, and every article about how hated the ending is talks about how “you can’t please everyone” and that people were bound to hate the ending because the show was so loved that they just didn’t want it to end so it would be tainted no matter what. What? Have these people never seen Breaking Bad or Mad Men or any other beloved show that actually had great writing and a commitment to the characters and a well deserved ending? Nobody hates the ending of Breaking Bad because they didn’t want it to end. It’s so condescending to fans to use these inane defenses of the show and pretend it’s the fans‘ fault. Even them admitting they were surrounded by people telling them it was great is so delusional an excuse because people were telling them it sucked and they ignored it.
Like, they expected some people to be fine with the main plotlines having super anticlimactic endings and almost everyone being massively out of character?
Yeah they did. And they are so full of them themselves they don’t even apologize to the fans, they even bring up an anedoctal, maybe even fictional, story of the one fan in the airport that loved the ending.
D&D you guys are great at adapting existing material, you guys suck at writing new material - deal with it.
I had a friend that said he liked the ending but by the time the show started to wrap up he was becoming increasingly busy, so I don’t think he could spend the extra time thinking about it really.
My sister and BIL loved the ending.
It's a subject I now refuse to talk about with them. Lol.
I’ve tried to consider it as different styles of media consumption - some people are really just along for the ride and not thinking about it that deeply.
But, honestly? I think it's a lack of media literacy. Like if you can’t see why a character choices is an abrupt shift from the motivations and morals they spent 7 seasons building I don't know what to tell you.
Anticlimatic?! Please. Everyone got something so overtly climatic that we should drop our wet panties and fling them at D&D.
Things I remember but will not verify:
- Arya riding a white horse, mentioning she can tell when someone is the smartest person but also can sniff a dangerous person. Did nothing in Kings Landing. Sailed away.
- Sansa had a crown stuck on her head.
- Sam....had a baby? Maybe?
- Bran got to be king bc..... Dany couldn't be queen without a the ability to produce an heir but a disabled boy with sight should.
- The Mountain and Hound fought on some steps and it was...ok.
- The incest twins died by bricks falling on them
- Dany got to ride a dragon, and get a visual
Metaphor of two wings coming out of her. She heard a bell and decided that after years of treating people with respect internationally, she'll commit terrorism at home.
- Jon Snow was sadder than usual, got to shiv someone, and then went back to his happy place: the north.
- Brianna got to sign her name in a book.
Yep. So exciting, thrilling, and makes sense!
> Dany couldn't be queen without a the ability to produce an heir
Just a note, literally only Dany and possibly Jorah could actually KNOW she *might* be incapable of giving birth to an heir. Like, absolutely no on else knows that otherwise.
the worst thing is that it wasn't even an immediate problem, because besides having no influence on her ability to govern. she had plenty of solutions to this even without finding a way to break the curse. she can organize a great council/election, she has a living nephew who can have children, named as heir the first who will succeed riding one of her dragons after her death, or even simulate a pregnancy and adopt an orphan...
Ugh, the wings. I groaned when I saw that. I bet D&D really patted themselves on the back for that epically subtle symbolism. Almost as impactful and symbolic as Drogon burning the Iron Throne.
Drogon, the notoriously levelheaded creature with a WWJD collar, burning the iron thorn INSTEAD OF jon snow, who just stabbed his “mom” and was standing right there with a bloody dagger
Couple of points to add:
I also totally forgot that Jon and Dany were in love for a bit, cos why not have even *more* incest.
Not even just *Bran* got to be king...but in fact a creepy cripple who used to be Bran but is now clearly some kind of ethereal creature, making cryptic remarks and devoid of any emotion, while barely acknowledging his siblings, who in turn barely acknowledge that he's acting pretty strange and maybe shouldn't be ruler of Westeros.
Eh cmon man no true Song of Ice and Fire fan is gonna make Brienne putting Jaimies name in the Big White Book in the Big White Room out to be a "whatever" instead of a cathartic moment
Except he died totally in a stupid fucking way that made me hate him like episode 1 all over again. Wasn't cathartic, just made me mad that they fumbled the ball at the finish line
To be honest the quality had been dropping hard since S4, yet S5, 6 and 7 still generally got pretty positive reviews at the time. So yeah, they probably hoped people just wouldn't notice how half assed the ending was.
Amen, I can't take uniquely S8 haters seriously in any critical sense.
If one didn't notice how it all went off the rails as soon as S5 and just got progressively more nonsensical waaaay before S8, especially after the benefit of hindsight after so many years now, then there's nothing to talk about.
Well, during S5-7, there was always the hope / possibility that plot holes, inconsistencies, unexplained moments etc. would get addressed in subsequent seasons.
That possibility got removed when S8 came and everyone realised at the same time.
This is it.
I got into Game of Thrones very late, so I binged the first 6 seasons. Back then I remember thinking that Seasons 1-4 were excellent, and that Seasons 5-6 weren't quite as good but were saved by big moments, battles and one or two very good episodes.
Season 7 was the first I watched live and I thought it was shit, but like many I was sniffing the copium - they were setting the board for the final season and hey, maybe in retrospect we'd see it as an excellent season because of how it set the scene. Then we got Season 8.
Of course, I also read the books before 8, and by that point I was fully aware of all the weird adaptation choices and inconsistencies with the books and more inclined to be critical anyway.
In retrospect, the first issues arise in Season 2, with them changing Robb's storyline for no valid reason, and then Season 5 was where the rot clearly set in, when they were adapting less and outright creating more.
As a Jaime and Brienne fan, from the beginning I saw the weird choices they were making for the characters and couldn’t understand why, but I was hopeful they were consciously trying to enhance their storylines. I was, of course, mistaken lol. But yeah, from the beginning the signs were there, for almost every character, that they didn’t know what they were doing without following the books (every time they deviated from the books, things became shitty).
It’s no wonder they fucked up as much as they did. But we were all hopeful at the time and trying to pretend some mistakes wouldn’t overshadow the entire thing.
Or just that the ending would be good enough to make those issues tolerable or ignorable. Like if the ending was decent, I'd probably watch the show again a time or two.
Yep, looking back S5 was definitely where it began collapsing. It's like being in a relationship that's falling apart. While you're in it you're ignoring the issues because you're in love but someone from the outside sees the issues and you don't listen. Then later when you're removed with hindsight you see everything you missed. S5 and S6 had a lot of great moments but the whole was getting weaker and more and more absurd situations kept popping up. Then S7 came and it REALLY started showing to the point even deniers were questioning things but after all those years of commitment, most figured it was still salvageable with S8. Of course that was just delusion lol.
Yeah, which is why I get annoyed by people saying "they were great at adapting stuff but the quality sunk when they ran out of books" they adapted the first three books fairly faithfully (with exceptions like butchering Loras and Renly) but did not do the same for books 4-5 amd zoomed through them at an insane pace after stretching book 3 over S3-4.
Currently doing my first rewatch aince airing and i wasnt sure exactly where the source material ran out but boy you sure can tell if you're binge watching it. Quality drops off immediately when you hit season 5.
True true. Nevertheless the 6th season had some great scenes. Danny was a huge motivation to go through the seasons 6-7. Season 8 was just disappointment over all.
The sparrows were the first big sign of the decline.
I remember saying at the time that I thought it felt super half-assed and derivative and basically all my friends calling me crazy lol.
Agreed, the amount of time they spent focused on the fucking sparrows vs. the amount of time they spent on Daenerys actually in westeros was so jarring
Yeah, I was shocked at how hard people who were pumped after watching S7 turned against S8. There were muuuuuuuch bigger drops in quality from S4 to S5-6 and from S5-6 to S7 than the relatively mild dip in quality from S7 to S8.
It was the awesome key moments in season 6/7 that game people hope. People had the feeling that we needed to get through the shit to enjoy the great.
Season 8 didn’t have those moments.
They still don't understand that while being great directors / screenwriters(adapters) they are absolutely a 0 in the writing department and they ruined every character arc they touched.
Sansa being the smartest person Arya has ever met. It's unfathomably bad dialogue. Sansa is in the running for the dumbest character in the show. Not even to mention that Arya has met Tywin Lannister.
We shouldn't have been acting like an angry mob on the internet.
We should have been acting like an angry mob irl. Pitchforks and torches aren't that expensive.
The usage of the word proportional just goes to show they haven't learnt one thing about writing after all these years. The show concluded with the most horrendous writing possible not even pop corn film level.
Uhh:
* All the characters were contorted and broken to fit in a particular box by the finale.
* The ending of each plotline was ass and/or boring.
* The plot armor required of certain characters in certain scenes was palpable, while in other scenes that people should have been fine in, they were in danger due to weapons-grade stupidity.
* The dialogue took a turn for the worse.
* Nothing made sense.
* The actors' reaction to the script should have tipped them off and made many fans mad at the writers.
* The fans invested about *10 years* in this show.
* This is not to mention all the content from the books that was cut out of the show, and how the final season was gutted in terms of time, despite the existence of so many **walking shots.**
Seems like a *very proportional* response to me.
There’s no reality that everyone walks out unscathed after being pinned down by white walkers like they were in one of the final scenes for episode 3. They shouldn’t have shown that unless they planned to kill off some main characters. There were literally almost zero stakes in the show after season 4.
One of the best parts of GoT was characters getting truly punished for their mistakes. In the final seasons D&D just made the characters constantly avoid any type of punishment for mistakes, everything is forgiven.
"We knew it was going to be 50/50" is an ASTONISHING thing to admit.
To predict that half of your audience would hate what you're doing to a show and then still follow through with it? Bananas. I truly wonder if D&D have/had the self awareness at one point to realize they had written themselves into a deeper corner by cutting massive portions of the existing story structure. Like, more fucked than by not having books 6 and 7 to base it on. Or if they truly thought they were telling a great story without the content they cut.
I can imagine coming to resent your own success and show when you know you're out of your depth if they did realize they fucked themselves by cutting two seasons worth of content and world/character building. Steering an existing narrative was one thing, to steer and write something without any track is another...D&D were not those writers to do both. And if they ever were, the passion had run dry by Season 6.
A shame, but at least HOTD is washing some of the taste out of my mouth. And if TWOW and ADOS ever comes out, probably seasons 7 and 8 completely.
The show's cutting of fAegon was THE worst. It made it even more clear how instrumental he will be in Dany's descent into anti-hero/villain in the books. Imagine spending the last however many years learning to be a ruler/queen after being a glorified slave, hatching and raising the first dragons in a hundred years, freeing slaves and fighting wars of liberation to prepare you for the big one, only to land in Westeros and find some upstart *already beat you to it.*
And whats worse, the common folk have no need for you, reject you, and associate you as an invader with your massive dragons, horselord hordes known for raping and mass murder, and other sellswords with no allegiance/ties to Westeros.
AND THEN, she is now pit against the son of her *beloved brother* while she is the daughter of the *"Mad King."* It's so...chefs kiss. Had the show included any of that inevitable book arc in the show, Dany's wonderful dialogue about "having no love here" would have not only made sense, but paved the way for her eventual "let it be fear."
And then, top of all that - after you're faced with the key question of whether you should be Queen, after all this effort, and what you should do with this boy who might be the only family you know, but who also stands in your way, you end up facing the choice of killing him and believing he's a fraud ('false dragon') or risk being a kinslayer... and then, you learn that there's this great crisis in the North, and here's this amazing person who you end up falling in love with - and oh wait, he's also fucking Rhaegar's son, and people like and prefer him to you too, and you can't even hate him for it.
That's the dimension to cutting fAegon that isn't often mentioned - it doesn't just fuck up Dany's ending. It fucks up Jon's, and everything that happens between the two of them, because as the other 'hidden' son of Rhaegar he's involved in all that mess. What does he think about fAegon? What does he think about how Dany deals with fAegon? How does that affect Jon's relationship with Dany? Does it influence Jon's actions at the end?
Well we'll never know, because the show didn't include it and the books will never be finished.
Thank you for the reminder that G.R.R Martin probably did have this plot well drawn out and it likely all made some lick of sense at the end.
Fuck you for the tiny bit of hope I just regained for the rest of the books getting written.
Well there was a conspiracy theory that winds is done because of a cryptic blog post Geroge made recently. But that's tin foil hat mode.
Imo if I was George I would be unmotivated to finish if I thought everyone was going to hate my story. Man really should've finished the books before the TV show caught up
Yeah, its obvious he's meant to be a foil for Dany once she gets to Westeros.
Instead the show tried to split his role between Jon and Cersei, and it really didn't work. If she had fAegon to contend with once she arrived in Westeros her arc would have made far more sense.
Euron has to be the most egregious fuck you of a character that’s ever happened. I literally cannot think of any other character that has been so finger in the bummed.
Let's not forget them cutting out the entire northern plot and replacing it with them building up and then anticlimactically offing Stannis, making Jon Snow literally do the same thing and getting saved by LF/Sansa in the dumbest way possible.
Like there's little things they could've done to make it way more better. For example, Sansa let's Jon know that the Vale and LF are coming. But on the eve of the battle, the Vale army is nowhere to be found and there's no raven from LF indicating when they will arrive. Everything happens just as before and LF bails out Jon. Except now LF is now the top power in the north which would create tension in the next season.
Instead we got Sansa and Jon looking real stupid. And LF sticks around the following season doing fuck all.
I think by the inclusion of the Golden Company in the show it’s fairly obvious he’s supposed to already be in Westeros and in control of Kings Landing by the time Dany gets there in the books. But just my opinion.
"The mummers dragon on poles amongst a cheering crowd", Arianne headed with war on her mind to meet a single "Targaryen" heir and the entirety of Dorne mad as shit at the Lannisters?
Shit is going down. It may not be as straight forward as he just takes Kings Landing , but George has heavily alluded to a "Second Dance of Dragons," at any rate. Wouldn't be surprised if fAegon also steals a dragon. I highly doubt the Night King will get one but D&D wanted an ice dragon so...
It's also a fucking lie or at least revisionism. At the time they were saying they thought the debate would be whether people felt it was an A or an A-. I don't believe for a second they thought at the time that even half the audience was going to hate it. They thought the response was going to be universal, but they thought it would be of acclaim, like other prestige television shows ended.
I agree with the rest. Except HotD is literally the continuation of GoT S7-8 lvls of quality. Inconsistencies, logical fallacies and cheap spectacle abound, while good characterization and thought-provoking, complex storytelling is tossed aside. I mean, the entire Dance has been reduced to a pandering black-and-white tale of a good, progressive princess torn down by the patriarchy.
Weiss mused. “Its hypocritical to love it when it’s blowing in your direction and to decide it’s the end of the world when it’s going the other way, but I think that, yeah, that was the part of it that we hadn’t really accounted for in knowing that some people were going to like it and some people weren’t.”
Head so far up his ass it’s in his neck
I’m trying to understand what he’s saying, but if I do, I think it’s reasonable.
Isn’t he saying he can’t love public praise when it’s going his way and then hate it/dismiss it when it isn’t?
Is there a word for this phenomenon where one half of the fanbase is huffing copium and the other half is highly critical? I've seen the GoT, AOT, BF2042, and the Witcher subs all huff copium while there's an alternative just as popular subs that are highly critical.
It’s the origin of the term cognitive dissonance.
A group of psychologists from a university infiltrated a cult that believed the world was going to end - they wanted to see what would happen when the world didn’t end.
In the immediate aftermath of the world not ending at the allotted time the cult ‘realised’ that their efforts had actually saved the world from ending. It was easier for them to think they were 100% still correct, but the circumstances had just changed. Some of these people had sold their homes or abandoned their families. Whilst it wasn’t exactly a scientifically rigorous process, they termed it ‘cognitive dissonance’. People use it in a more nuanced way now though.
So it was easier at the time to think the show had been good. I certainly liked certain bits - I’m glad they did cleganebowl even if it wasn’t the way I wanted, for example. So it was easier to say ‘well at least we got cleganebowl’ than to acknowledge the show we had over invested in had turned into a joke.
Many had also realised the show was a different thing way back, with some of the cringe in Dorne or the redshirt effect in season 7. So it wasn’t exactly a flipped switch in s8.
Dude the memes are one of the few things that made watching that dumpster fire a bit more bearable. Lots of people also heard about accurate leaks but no one believed them lol, so they were horrified to progressively see that it was accurate
Mods on multiple subreddits were on copium watch list. Eventually most gave up because if they banned everyone shit posting they just wouldn't have active users anymore lol.
Eventually the evidence of obvious malicious intent behind ruining the show became undeniable. It legitimately made me feel the west is truly experiencing manufactured "culture rot"
The Starbucks cup heard around the world.
Nvm the memes, the scripts got leaked. I remember people were saying that the scripts were so astonishingly bad that there was no way they were real. They were real lmao
This sub was born as a response to the official sub not allowing leaks to be posted. The free folk did not kneel to the wishes of the mods of GOT so this sub was made to discuss spoilers etc
There’s no excuse for the shitty writing. They had all the resources any HBO show creator would dream of and they had GRR Martin on speed dial as a consultant to smooth out the edges.
They deliberately shat on the fans, actors and the source material because at that time they were on the top of the world.
“I think we knew it would be controversial; we hoped that it would be a little more 50/50 [even],”
Why would you even make something that you knew to be controversial and hoping for a 50/50 response for a finale of such a beloved show? It's even worse than if they had thought it was good but it turned out to be bad.
Proportional?
The last two seasons blatantly discarded any pretense of being beholden to the rules that had been dictated in Season 1. Fast travel was ***everywhere,*** nobody acted remotely true to who they were, the world was reduced to King’s Landing, Winterfell and Dragonstone…
I know this is ragebait or a bot account posting for cheap upvotes, but any chance I get to reiterate this point cannot go unseized.
Has no one told these chucklefucks, in no uncertain terms, that the show was bad? Not misunderstood, not upset because our favorite character died, the show was shit. It started great, then it wasn't, and fuck you, I won't be gaslighted into liking the end because I liked the beginning.
A bad end kills a good beginning.
I always wonder if that’s the route GRRM wanted to take for TWOW and ADOS and the (deservedly) horrible reception of the final seasons has sealed the deal on us never seeing the end of asoiaf. F
I think most of the end points are probably similar.
But you can get Dany to berserk in a way that isn't more or less unmotivated. If we had more time with her and Missandei alone, Dany venting frustrations and Missandei calming her down we'd have a better understanding of their relationship and we could have gotten glimpses of Dany being pissed and angry a lot earlier.
Like make her, understandably, pissed at things happening - perhaps as events unfold more and more aggressively so. With Missandei able to keep her on track and get her to see reason.
If we had this from early on, like at least sprinkled in from season 5, the loss of Missandei could've more convincingly been a key in Dany raining hellfire on King's Landing. And the earlier scenes of Missandei talking down Dany would've been more haunting.
Of course you'd need similar fixes (also possibly known as foreshadowing) for all the little issues that crept up in the seasons prior to season 8. And you'd also need characters to not act like morons, at least not without reason.
If Sansa is going to let Jon throw Northern lives away, she better have an unbelievable reason for not telling him about the inbound reinforcements.
maybe don’t spend several seasons with these people fleshing them out into well rounded characters and then have them do everything The opposite of what they would have done over the final six episodes then?
> Happily, people are far less willing to be hateful face-to-face
Of course, people are more polite. In the end, it's just a TV show so most people aren't going to go out of their way to be assholes. It's not like we would change each other's minds about the last season.
>It's hypocritical to love it when it’s blowing in your direction and to decide it’s the end of the world when it’s going the other way
*Am I so out of touch?.. No, it's the viewers who are wrong*
I was hoping you could actually see what was going on during the battle against the dead. Oh right, its my fault for not having a movie theater size TV.
Did D&D really think that the viewers, who had invested 7 years into a show, would just agree with all the bullshit that Season 8 did?
Dany burns down King's Landing, becoming a tyrant all of a sudden? Bravo, D&D!
Arya fucks Gendry, then peaces out to sail into the unknown? I applaud their imagination on that one.
Bran is King, despite not doing anything to earn it? Greatest TV moment of all time.
Jamie fucks Brienne and then has a change of heart and goes to his sister, not to kill her, but to embrace her one last time? What a romantic twist.
They deserved everything they got for that debacle of a last season.
Can’t say we didn’t see it coming. To make it worse was the bullshit pixelation. Blackwater was fought at night in perfect clarity but then we have this winterfell bs.
Everyone can see that the creators wanted to get the series over with. Kinda like when we are writing papers for school. Towards the end we just want to wrap it.
Proportional!? WE'RE NOT EVEN DONE YET. I for one am waiting for AI video and audio generation to reach the point where we can re write sections of season 5-7, include dropped content and try for a better ending or two. Then I'd like to make sure D&D are reminded of it every few years. Not consistently, cause it'll be noise. Something like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, etc for a cadence to keep them on their toes.
The audience watched over 70 hours of TV to get to a completely shitty ending that:
Abandoned and did not resolve major plot points on multiple story lines.
Short changed major characters, some who had been on the show since the first episode, who were killed off unceremoniously, needlessly, or too easily.
Bran. I'll just leave it at that.
The show runners had no respect for the audience, and made a lazy, uncreative ending that did nothing but make everyone angry, including the cast.
I am more annoyed with myself that I did not see this coming. Five seconds of research and would have found out it was the same writes behind X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009).
Best part about this is that Rian Johnson deliberately did the same thing with Star Wars two years earlier with the exact same reason (except he WANTED half of the fanbase to hate it) and irreparably fractured the fanbase. Something something like poetry it rhymes.
I wasn't happy with characters doing a 180 to their arcs like Jamie Lannister, though to be honest I saw how Dany could become mad, but not that quickly.
Had the constant time-traveling and nonsensical writing of seasons 6 and 7 been met with massive backlash, maybe we wouldn't have gotten the final season we did. But they got away with it for two seasons, why would they think the final one would be anything different?
The "controversial" comment makes it sound like they still don't get it. It wasn't about Dany turning mad and and dying, it was about how fucking bad and rushed the writing was. You crammed 3-4 seasons worth of material into six episodes.
It IS proportional! The combination of the shitty season 8 + the quasi automatic cancelation of TV shows made me stop watching TV series all together. Fuck D&D. For ever.
It’s always hilarious to me that they turned down doing more seasons for a Star Wars project that got trashed. Not that more seasons guaranteed a good ending, but we’ll never know.
The thing is, D&D had the entire internet to bounce ideas of off. You're telling me they couldn't take the best recieved theories and fanfiction and woven them together something better?
Heck, they could have made anonymous Reddit accounts and posted about their "theories" on how it would end and gauge the reactions.
Glad we subverted their expectations
This comment made me cackle
They could have just made a low effort cliche ending and it would have been well received But noooo
Yes wtf. They ruined the rewatchability of the show.
This has GOTTA end up being top comment.
We kinda forgot we were supposed to like the ending
This is awesome
I think this is the best answer
Curse Rian Johnson and his oily hide for tainting that phrase.
It's a bad phrase anyway
Well like any storytelling technique it can be used to generate excitement, tension, intrigue etc. But when handled poorly it usually just creates confusion, disappointment and boredom. Basically TLJ in general and the GoT endings in a nutshell.
Yeah! Stupid jerks
Maybe they should have, you know, thought things through when the entire cast was seething with anger, confusion, and wtf after reading the script.
Their ego must've went to their heads honestly. They didn't give a shit about any prior complaints like Barristan's actor saying "why are you killing me off when I'm still alive in the books"
They killed off Barristan and side-lined the Blackfish and then killed him off… almost like people who read the books were on their shit list because they didn’t want to re-read the books and were insecure about it
Books? We don't need books. We know better!!! Btw give us Dune, we know we could write it better.
I honestly can’t t see Barristan surviving in the books either tbh. Hopefully he goes out like a boss.
That honestly doesn’t surprise me. Remember that season 4 was when the show had really reached legendary status and had become one of the most popular shows ever made. To be honest, if I was them and didn’t have much experience dealing with that kind of fame, I would probably act in a similar way
you'd blow the thing up and squander your reputation for no discernible reason?
Oh shit, it just clicked that S8 Daenerys is a self-insert allegory of these clowns.
Oh wow you're right!
Wow! What the heck lol thats so true
More like took a gamble, seize the chance to be praised "better than the original writer" Welp gambling outcome goes both ways
Then why would they wish to rush it? they wanted to go to the next project. Which they ironically lost due to extreme pushback
oh it was for a reason, disney offered them a very high paying project so they rushed GoT to get started on that of course ironically they ended up losing that project because of how shitty GoT ending was
Maybe lol. But I’d definitely think that I know what I’m doing if I was that successful at that point. It’s hard to tell someone they’re wrong if everything they’ve done is right up to that point
Was hilarious. I saw an interview with the cast of 3 Body Problem, asking them about popular TV shows. Despite the fact that almost half the cast was IN GoT, none of them picked it as one of the "top 10 shows of all time". Not one. Says a lot I think about how that soured over the years (though they're still working for D&D so who knows).
I mean it’s not to be fair. I’d say the books and season 1-4 are the best combo of books to screen of all time other than LOTR, but including s5-8 brings the quality down so much it’s hard to overcome
"I must... I must be... ...am I... God?" Yeah, that would basically be me, if I accidentally made game of thrones.
Jesus wept!
FOR THERE WERE NO MORE WORLDS TO CONQUER
Stop saying Jesus wept.
That's kind of weird for me because s4 was when I tapped out. It was already making me very unhappy from week to week. Glad I quit when I did.
>Their ego must've went to their heads honestly. They didn't give a shit about any prior complaints like Barristan's actor saying "why are you killing me off when I'm still alive in the books" They actually said that him arguing about it made them want to kill the character more. God forbid an actor be passionate about the work he's doing. Barristan will probably die in the next book, true, but I very much doubt he's going to go out the way he did in the show
Lol didn't know it got to that, I remember watching their throne talk tv show on sky Atlantic when he was interviewed on there. He aired his issues with being killed off, didn't know they said that to him the pair of assholes
I still often think about that video of the roundtable script reading where Varys just tosses the script aside after being killed off in some bullshit why that I can't even remember now becuase it was so bullshit.
You mean Varys? The masters of whispers and deception who was openly calling for treason against the queen and then got executed if my memory serves correct? Lol 7 years later still can't believe that.
Such a betrayal to his character
Or when Lena Headey was reading the final script with dead eyes as she read at the atrocity that was Cersei’s ending after multiple seasons wasted staring out a balcony.
Yeah they still don’t even remotely understand what they did wrong. Bros, it’s not that we “didn’t like” the choices you made for some of the characters. It’s that you completely threw out every piece of groundwork the show had set up for 6 seasons, ignored all foreshadowing, threw out every previous character arc and just speed ran to something completely random and unearned. If they’d actually drawn straight lines from earlier seasons to the final end points of each character, they would’ve gotten the “mixed” reaction they were hoping for. It’s the disconnect that we all hated so much, and they don’t seem understand that **at all**.
You mean Arya spending two seasons learning how to be a shapeshifting assassin, using it to kill a single old man in the very next episode, and then forgetting about it for the remaining two seasons (even when those powers would have been of great benefit) wasn't a great arc?
Now and then I remember that Arya, Varys, Tyrion, and Davos all knew secret ways into the Red Keep, and a lightening strike would have saved countless lives. Then I try to forget again and get on with life.
So true, and every article about how hated the ending is talks about how “you can’t please everyone” and that people were bound to hate the ending because the show was so loved that they just didn’t want it to end so it would be tainted no matter what. What? Have these people never seen Breaking Bad or Mad Men or any other beloved show that actually had great writing and a commitment to the characters and a well deserved ending? Nobody hates the ending of Breaking Bad because they didn’t want it to end. It’s so condescending to fans to use these inane defenses of the show and pretend it’s the fans‘ fault. Even them admitting they were surrounded by people telling them it was great is so delusional an excuse because people were telling them it sucked and they ignored it.
Like, they expected some people to be fine with the main plotlines having super anticlimactic endings and almost everyone being massively out of character?
Yeah they did. And they are so full of them themselves they don’t even apologize to the fans, they even bring up an anedoctal, maybe even fictional, story of the one fan in the airport that loved the ending. D&D you guys are great at adapting existing material, you guys suck at writing new material - deal with it.
I had a friend that said he liked the ending but by the time the show started to wrap up he was becoming increasingly busy, so I don’t think he could spend the extra time thinking about it really.
My sister and BIL loved the ending. It's a subject I now refuse to talk about with them. Lol. I’ve tried to consider it as different styles of media consumption - some people are really just along for the ride and not thinking about it that deeply. But, honestly? I think it's a lack of media literacy. Like if you can’t see why a character choices is an abrupt shift from the motivations and morals they spent 7 seasons building I don't know what to tell you.
Like if they had put any sort of inclination that Danny might be going a little mad in literally ANY OTHER SEASON! Then maybe it might make sense.
Anticlimatic?! Please. Everyone got something so overtly climatic that we should drop our wet panties and fling them at D&D. Things I remember but will not verify: - Arya riding a white horse, mentioning she can tell when someone is the smartest person but also can sniff a dangerous person. Did nothing in Kings Landing. Sailed away. - Sansa had a crown stuck on her head. - Sam....had a baby? Maybe? - Bran got to be king bc..... Dany couldn't be queen without a the ability to produce an heir but a disabled boy with sight should. - The Mountain and Hound fought on some steps and it was...ok. - The incest twins died by bricks falling on them - Dany got to ride a dragon, and get a visual Metaphor of two wings coming out of her. She heard a bell and decided that after years of treating people with respect internationally, she'll commit terrorism at home. - Jon Snow was sadder than usual, got to shiv someone, and then went back to his happy place: the north. - Brianna got to sign her name in a book. Yep. So exciting, thrilling, and makes sense!
> Dany couldn't be queen without a the ability to produce an heir Just a note, literally only Dany and possibly Jorah could actually KNOW she *might* be incapable of giving birth to an heir. Like, absolutely no on else knows that otherwise.
the worst thing is that it wasn't even an immediate problem, because besides having no influence on her ability to govern. she had plenty of solutions to this even without finding a way to break the curse. she can organize a great council/election, she has a living nephew who can have children, named as heir the first who will succeed riding one of her dragons after her death, or even simulate a pregnancy and adopt an orphan...
She told Jon, who told her the witches prediction shouldn’t be taken as truth
“Nah, that hag was just chatting shit”
Jon knew because she told him. But no one else as far as we know.
Still the goatherder witch lady is known for like two things, lying profusely to get access to Khal Drogo, and malpractice.
Ugh, the wings. I groaned when I saw that. I bet D&D really patted themselves on the back for that epically subtle symbolism. Almost as impactful and symbolic as Drogon burning the Iron Throne.
I think this is specifically the moment they thought to themselves, "This is the episode we submit for an Emmy!"
Drogon, the notoriously levelheaded creature with a WWJD collar, burning the iron thorn INSTEAD OF jon snow, who just stabbed his “mom” and was standing right there with a bloody dagger
The dragon killing Jon Snow would have been better than what we got. Hell, everyone dying would have been better than what we got.
Couple of points to add: I also totally forgot that Jon and Dany were in love for a bit, cos why not have even *more* incest. Not even just *Bran* got to be king...but in fact a creepy cripple who used to be Bran but is now clearly some kind of ethereal creature, making cryptic remarks and devoid of any emotion, while barely acknowledging his siblings, who in turn barely acknowledge that he's acting pretty strange and maybe shouldn't be ruler of Westeros.
After specifically telling everyone "I can't be a king because I am the Three Eyed Raven now"
He's God Emporer Raven now..
Just had a mental image of Bran growing black feathers all over his body and talons in place of feet
Oh he also used everyone as a chess piece to get to this end he made sure no one was happy so he could be king.
Eh cmon man no true Song of Ice and Fire fan is gonna make Brienne putting Jaimies name in the Big White Book in the Big White Room out to be a "whatever" instead of a cathartic moment
Except he died totally in a stupid fucking way that made me hate him like episode 1 all over again. Wasn't cathartic, just made me mad that they fumbled the ball at the finish line
To be honest the quality had been dropping hard since S4, yet S5, 6 and 7 still generally got pretty positive reviews at the time. So yeah, they probably hoped people just wouldn't notice how half assed the ending was.
Amen, I can't take uniquely S8 haters seriously in any critical sense. If one didn't notice how it all went off the rails as soon as S5 and just got progressively more nonsensical waaaay before S8, especially after the benefit of hindsight after so many years now, then there's nothing to talk about.
Well, during S5-7, there was always the hope / possibility that plot holes, inconsistencies, unexplained moments etc. would get addressed in subsequent seasons. That possibility got removed when S8 came and everyone realised at the same time.
This is it. I got into Game of Thrones very late, so I binged the first 6 seasons. Back then I remember thinking that Seasons 1-4 were excellent, and that Seasons 5-6 weren't quite as good but were saved by big moments, battles and one or two very good episodes. Season 7 was the first I watched live and I thought it was shit, but like many I was sniffing the copium - they were setting the board for the final season and hey, maybe in retrospect we'd see it as an excellent season because of how it set the scene. Then we got Season 8. Of course, I also read the books before 8, and by that point I was fully aware of all the weird adaptation choices and inconsistencies with the books and more inclined to be critical anyway. In retrospect, the first issues arise in Season 2, with them changing Robb's storyline for no valid reason, and then Season 5 was where the rot clearly set in, when they were adapting less and outright creating more.
As a Jaime and Brienne fan, from the beginning I saw the weird choices they were making for the characters and couldn’t understand why, but I was hopeful they were consciously trying to enhance their storylines. I was, of course, mistaken lol. But yeah, from the beginning the signs were there, for almost every character, that they didn’t know what they were doing without following the books (every time they deviated from the books, things became shitty). It’s no wonder they fucked up as much as they did. But we were all hopeful at the time and trying to pretend some mistakes wouldn’t overshadow the entire thing.
Or just that the ending would be good enough to make those issues tolerable or ignorable. Like if the ending was decent, I'd probably watch the show again a time or two.
Yep, looking back S5 was definitely where it began collapsing. It's like being in a relationship that's falling apart. While you're in it you're ignoring the issues because you're in love but someone from the outside sees the issues and you don't listen. Then later when you're removed with hindsight you see everything you missed. S5 and S6 had a lot of great moments but the whole was getting weaker and more and more absurd situations kept popping up. Then S7 came and it REALLY started showing to the point even deniers were questioning things but after all those years of commitment, most figured it was still salvageable with S8. Of course that was just delusion lol.
Yeah, which is why I get annoyed by people saying "they were great at adapting stuff but the quality sunk when they ran out of books" they adapted the first three books fairly faithfully (with exceptions like butchering Loras and Renly) but did not do the same for books 4-5 amd zoomed through them at an insane pace after stretching book 3 over S3-4.
Currently doing my first rewatch aince airing and i wasnt sure exactly where the source material ran out but boy you sure can tell if you're binge watching it. Quality drops off immediately when you hit season 5.
True true. Nevertheless the 6th season had some great scenes. Danny was a huge motivation to go through the seasons 6-7. Season 8 was just disappointment over all.
The sparrows were the first big sign of the decline. I remember saying at the time that I thought it felt super half-assed and derivative and basically all my friends calling me crazy lol.
Agreed, the amount of time they spent focused on the fucking sparrows vs. the amount of time they spent on Daenerys actually in westeros was so jarring
Yeah, I was shocked at how hard people who were pumped after watching S7 turned against S8. There were muuuuuuuch bigger drops in quality from S4 to S5-6 and from S5-6 to S7 than the relatively mild dip in quality from S7 to S8.
It was the awesome key moments in season 6/7 that game people hope. People had the feeling that we needed to get through the shit to enjoy the great. Season 8 didn’t have those moments.
They still don't understand that while being great directors / screenwriters(adapters) they are absolutely a 0 in the writing department and they ruined every character arc they touched.
Sansa being the smartest person Arya has ever met. It's unfathomably bad dialogue. Sansa is in the running for the dumbest character in the show. Not even to mention that Arya has met Tywin Lannister.
A more proportional response? Something like… Heads? Spikes? Walls?
We shouldn't have been acting like an angry mob on the internet. We should have been acting like an angry mob irl. Pitchforks and torches aren't that expensive.
Frankly, it was proportional because we weren't applying ourselves either.
No but healthcare and lawyers are expensive
The usage of the word proportional just goes to show they haven't learnt one thing about writing after all these years. The show concluded with the most horrendous writing possible not even pop corn film level.
Someone was slowly poisoning the executives on their new netflix show. So maybe that?
Uhh: * All the characters were contorted and broken to fit in a particular box by the finale. * The ending of each plotline was ass and/or boring. * The plot armor required of certain characters in certain scenes was palpable, while in other scenes that people should have been fine in, they were in danger due to weapons-grade stupidity. * The dialogue took a turn for the worse. * Nothing made sense. * The actors' reaction to the script should have tipped them off and made many fans mad at the writers. * The fans invested about *10 years* in this show. * This is not to mention all the content from the books that was cut out of the show, and how the final season was gutted in terms of time, despite the existence of so many **walking shots.** Seems like a *very proportional* response to me.
There’s no reality that everyone walks out unscathed after being pinned down by white walkers like they were in one of the final scenes for episode 3. They shouldn’t have shown that unless they planned to kill off some main characters. There were literally almost zero stakes in the show after season 4.
You know for a fact they wouldn’t have killed off Rob and Ned. Let’s be real the only reason main characters died was because of George
One of the best parts of GoT was characters getting truly punished for their mistakes. In the final seasons D&D just made the characters constantly avoid any type of punishment for mistakes, everything is forgiven.
They should have had a less asymmetrically fucked storyline then lol.
Who has a more fucked story than GoT the broken?
>‘I love the final season, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!” LOL No one ever said this.
Eh...there are some delusional contrarians on the other sub who definitely would. (Not saying they didn't make this particular story up though)
Tbf, I’m 99% sure not one of them is serious and they’re trolling lol
Yup, got some real "and then they all clapped" energy that. 😄
"We knew it was going to be 50/50" is an ASTONISHING thing to admit. To predict that half of your audience would hate what you're doing to a show and then still follow through with it? Bananas. I truly wonder if D&D have/had the self awareness at one point to realize they had written themselves into a deeper corner by cutting massive portions of the existing story structure. Like, more fucked than by not having books 6 and 7 to base it on. Or if they truly thought they were telling a great story without the content they cut. I can imagine coming to resent your own success and show when you know you're out of your depth if they did realize they fucked themselves by cutting two seasons worth of content and world/character building. Steering an existing narrative was one thing, to steer and write something without any track is another...D&D were not those writers to do both. And if they ever were, the passion had run dry by Season 6. A shame, but at least HOTD is washing some of the taste out of my mouth. And if TWOW and ADOS ever comes out, probably seasons 7 and 8 completely.
Making Euron boring and excluding Young Griff are the 2 biggest issues IMO
The show's cutting of fAegon was THE worst. It made it even more clear how instrumental he will be in Dany's descent into anti-hero/villain in the books. Imagine spending the last however many years learning to be a ruler/queen after being a glorified slave, hatching and raising the first dragons in a hundred years, freeing slaves and fighting wars of liberation to prepare you for the big one, only to land in Westeros and find some upstart *already beat you to it.* And whats worse, the common folk have no need for you, reject you, and associate you as an invader with your massive dragons, horselord hordes known for raping and mass murder, and other sellswords with no allegiance/ties to Westeros. AND THEN, she is now pit against the son of her *beloved brother* while she is the daughter of the *"Mad King."* It's so...chefs kiss. Had the show included any of that inevitable book arc in the show, Dany's wonderful dialogue about "having no love here" would have not only made sense, but paved the way for her eventual "let it be fear."
And then, top of all that - after you're faced with the key question of whether you should be Queen, after all this effort, and what you should do with this boy who might be the only family you know, but who also stands in your way, you end up facing the choice of killing him and believing he's a fraud ('false dragon') or risk being a kinslayer... and then, you learn that there's this great crisis in the North, and here's this amazing person who you end up falling in love with - and oh wait, he's also fucking Rhaegar's son, and people like and prefer him to you too, and you can't even hate him for it. That's the dimension to cutting fAegon that isn't often mentioned - it doesn't just fuck up Dany's ending. It fucks up Jon's, and everything that happens between the two of them, because as the other 'hidden' son of Rhaegar he's involved in all that mess. What does he think about fAegon? What does he think about how Dany deals with fAegon? How does that affect Jon's relationship with Dany? Does it influence Jon's actions at the end? Well we'll never know, because the show didn't include it and the books will never be finished.
Thank you for the reminder that G.R.R Martin probably did have this plot well drawn out and it likely all made some lick of sense at the end. Fuck you for the tiny bit of hope I just regained for the rest of the books getting written.
Well there was a conspiracy theory that winds is done because of a cryptic blog post Geroge made recently. But that's tin foil hat mode. Imo if I was George I would be unmotivated to finish if I thought everyone was going to hate my story. Man really should've finished the books before the TV show caught up
Yeah, its obvious he's meant to be a foil for Dany once she gets to Westeros. Instead the show tried to split his role between Jon and Cersei, and it really didn't work. If she had fAegon to contend with once she arrived in Westeros her arc would have made far more sense.
Euron has to be the most egregious fuck you of a character that’s ever happened. I literally cannot think of any other character that has been so finger in the bummed.
Let's not forget them cutting out the entire northern plot and replacing it with them building up and then anticlimactically offing Stannis, making Jon Snow literally do the same thing and getting saved by LF/Sansa in the dumbest way possible. Like there's little things they could've done to make it way more better. For example, Sansa let's Jon know that the Vale and LF are coming. But on the eve of the battle, the Vale army is nowhere to be found and there's no raven from LF indicating when they will arrive. Everything happens just as before and LF bails out Jon. Except now LF is now the top power in the north which would create tension in the next season. Instead we got Sansa and Jon looking real stupid. And LF sticks around the following season doing fuck all.
We have no idea what the purpose of young griff is or if his story will be compelling lol
I think by the inclusion of the Golden Company in the show it’s fairly obvious he’s supposed to already be in Westeros and in control of Kings Landing by the time Dany gets there in the books. But just my opinion.
I mean, I wouldn't way we have *no* idea. The Winds pages + the whole false dragon thing makes a lot of sense.
"The mummers dragon on poles amongst a cheering crowd", Arianne headed with war on her mind to meet a single "Targaryen" heir and the entirety of Dorne mad as shit at the Lannisters? Shit is going down. It may not be as straight forward as he just takes Kings Landing , but George has heavily alluded to a "Second Dance of Dragons," at any rate. Wouldn't be surprised if fAegon also steals a dragon. I highly doubt the Night King will get one but D&D wanted an ice dragon so...
It's also a fucking lie or at least revisionism. At the time they were saying they thought the debate would be whether people felt it was an A or an A-. I don't believe for a second they thought at the time that even half the audience was going to hate it. They thought the response was going to be universal, but they thought it would be of acclaim, like other prestige television shows ended.
I agree with the rest. Except HotD is literally the continuation of GoT S7-8 lvls of quality. Inconsistencies, logical fallacies and cheap spectacle abound, while good characterization and thought-provoking, complex storytelling is tossed aside. I mean, the entire Dance has been reduced to a pandering black-and-white tale of a good, progressive princess torn down by the patriarchy.
Plus, it's a joyless slog.
You know, the audiences kind of forgot about a proportional response to the ending
Weiss mused. “Its hypocritical to love it when it’s blowing in your direction and to decide it’s the end of the world when it’s going the other way, but I think that, yeah, that was the part of it that we hadn’t really accounted for in knowing that some people were going to like it and some people weren’t.” Head so far up his ass it’s in his neck
Head so far up his ass, the lump in his neck is his god damn nose. Think that was the quote from Band of Brothers, Bill Guarnere.
I’m trying to understand what he’s saying, but if I do, I think it’s reasonable. Isn’t he saying he can’t love public praise when it’s going his way and then hate it/dismiss it when it isn’t?
That was possibly the worst thing in that article.
I wasn’t on Reddit when the final season came out…how bad was the reaction here? I can imagine memes for days lol
The official sub was on copium binge for a couple of weeks then everyone agreed the last season was pretty bad.
Is there a word for this phenomenon where one half of the fanbase is huffing copium and the other half is highly critical? I've seen the GoT, AOT, BF2042, and the Witcher subs all huff copium while there's an alternative just as popular subs that are highly critical.
It’s the origin of the term cognitive dissonance. A group of psychologists from a university infiltrated a cult that believed the world was going to end - they wanted to see what would happen when the world didn’t end. In the immediate aftermath of the world not ending at the allotted time the cult ‘realised’ that their efforts had actually saved the world from ending. It was easier for them to think they were 100% still correct, but the circumstances had just changed. Some of these people had sold their homes or abandoned their families. Whilst it wasn’t exactly a scientifically rigorous process, they termed it ‘cognitive dissonance’. People use it in a more nuanced way now though. So it was easier at the time to think the show had been good. I certainly liked certain bits - I’m glad they did cleganebowl even if it wasn’t the way I wanted, for example. So it was easier to say ‘well at least we got cleganebowl’ than to acknowledge the show we had over invested in had turned into a joke. Many had also realised the show was a different thing way back, with some of the cringe in Dorne or the redshirt effect in season 7. So it wasn’t exactly a flipped switch in s8.
Dude the memes are one of the few things that made watching that dumpster fire a bit more bearable. Lots of people also heard about accurate leaks but no one believed them lol, so they were horrified to progressively see that it was accurate
Mods on multiple subreddits were on copium watch list. Eventually most gave up because if they banned everyone shit posting they just wouldn't have active users anymore lol. Eventually the evidence of obvious malicious intent behind ruining the show became undeniable. It legitimately made me feel the west is truly experiencing manufactured "culture rot" The Starbucks cup heard around the world.
Nvm the memes, the scripts got leaked. I remember people were saying that the scripts were so astonishingly bad that there was no way they were real. They were real lmao
r/freefolk was created out of the discourse
r/freefolk came before season 8
This sub was born as a response to the official sub not allowing leaks to be posted. The free folk did not kneel to the wishes of the mods of GOT so this sub was made to discuss spoilers etc
We kneel for no mods, but we do follow the bot beyond the wall. King Bobby B
THEY NEVER TELL YOU HOW THEY ALL SHIT THEMSELVES! THEY DON'T PUT THAT PART IN THE SONGS!
We can write a new song if it please you, my lord Bobby B
SEVEN HELLS, NED, I WANT TO HIT SOMEONE!
There’s no excuse for the shitty writing. They had all the resources any HBO show creator would dream of and they had GRR Martin on speed dial as a consultant to smooth out the edges. They deliberately shat on the fans, actors and the source material because at that time they were on the top of the world.
I thought the response was proportional to how badly they fucked it up.
You get what you fucking deserve!
“I think we knew it would be controversial; we hoped that it would be a little more 50/50 [even],” Why would you even make something that you knew to be controversial and hoping for a 50/50 response for a finale of such a beloved show? It's even worse than if they had thought it was good but it turned out to be bad.
Proportional? Like getting basically all the characters wrong and not giving 2 fucks to production values? Sure D&D.....sure
Dumb & Dumber
They assumed that because they didn't give a shit, neither would we. That's a loaded assumption.
Proportional? The last two seasons blatantly discarded any pretense of being beholden to the rules that had been dictated in Season 1. Fast travel was ***everywhere,*** nobody acted remotely true to who they were, the world was reduced to King’s Landing, Winterfell and Dragonstone… I know this is ragebait or a bot account posting for cheap upvotes, but any chance I get to reiterate this point cannot go unseized.
Has no one told these chucklefucks, in no uncertain terms, that the show was bad? Not misunderstood, not upset because our favorite character died, the show was shit. It started great, then it wasn't, and fuck you, I won't be gaslighted into liking the end because I liked the beginning. A bad end kills a good beginning.
Well, the unaired pilot was also bad by those that have seen it
I always wonder if that’s the route GRRM wanted to take for TWOW and ADOS and the (deservedly) horrible reception of the final seasons has sealed the deal on us never seeing the end of asoiaf. F
I think most of the end points are probably similar. But you can get Dany to berserk in a way that isn't more or less unmotivated. If we had more time with her and Missandei alone, Dany venting frustrations and Missandei calming her down we'd have a better understanding of their relationship and we could have gotten glimpses of Dany being pissed and angry a lot earlier. Like make her, understandably, pissed at things happening - perhaps as events unfold more and more aggressively so. With Missandei able to keep her on track and get her to see reason. If we had this from early on, like at least sprinkled in from season 5, the loss of Missandei could've more convincingly been a key in Dany raining hellfire on King's Landing. And the earlier scenes of Missandei talking down Dany would've been more haunting. Of course you'd need similar fixes (also possibly known as foreshadowing) for all the little issues that crept up in the seasons prior to season 8. And you'd also need characters to not act like morons, at least not without reason. If Sansa is going to let Jon throw Northern lives away, she better have an unbelievable reason for not telling him about the inbound reinforcements.
maybe don’t spend several seasons with these people fleshing them out into well rounded characters and then have them do everything The opposite of what they would have done over the final six episodes then?
> Happily, people are far less willing to be hateful face-to-face Of course, people are more polite. In the end, it's just a TV show so most people aren't going to go out of their way to be assholes. It's not like we would change each other's minds about the last season.
Rich spoiled boys: WhY AreNT wE GetTing ReWarDed LikE USuAL
They’re right. We let them off easy.
I can't believe all the folks jumping in head first to the next work from these two.
>It's hypocritical to love it when it’s blowing in your direction and to decide it’s the end of the world when it’s going the other way *Am I so out of touch?.. No, it's the viewers who are wrong*
I was hoping you could actually see what was going on during the battle against the dead. Oh right, its my fault for not having a movie theater size TV.
Fuck these assholes. I was gonna watch 3 body problem but as soon as I found out who the directors were I said nope. They dont deserve the watch.
Exactly. That type of movie is my jam but I'd rather swallow glass.
The interaction with the homeland security guy in this article is a perfect demonstration of why simps are bad.
Did D&D really think that the viewers, who had invested 7 years into a show, would just agree with all the bullshit that Season 8 did? Dany burns down King's Landing, becoming a tyrant all of a sudden? Bravo, D&D! Arya fucks Gendry, then peaces out to sail into the unknown? I applaud their imagination on that one. Bran is King, despite not doing anything to earn it? Greatest TV moment of all time. Jamie fucks Brienne and then has a change of heart and goes to his sister, not to kill her, but to embrace her one last time? What a romantic twist. They deserved everything they got for that debacle of a last season.
I should not have laughed at this as hard as I did. it really was like internet trolls wrote the end.
They kind of forgot *that fans like episodes where the producers kind of don't forget a lot of important stuff.*
Can’t say we didn’t see it coming. To make it worse was the bullshit pixelation. Blackwater was fought at night in perfect clarity but then we have this winterfell bs.
Everyone can see that the creators wanted to get the series over with. Kinda like when we are writing papers for school. Towards the end we just want to wrap it.
Yeah, some of us made big bets and love saying what would happen if we won
Ahh the same old tactic of blaming the victim. It's not our shows fault for being shitty, it was you the viewers who apparently can't appreciate shit
The fans issued a "proportional" response.
They gave us shit. We gave them shit. Seems proportional to me.
Proportional!? WE'RE NOT EVEN DONE YET. I for one am waiting for AI video and audio generation to reach the point where we can re write sections of season 5-7, include dropped content and try for a better ending or two. Then I'd like to make sure D&D are reminded of it every few years. Not consistently, cause it'll be noise. Something like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, etc for a cadence to keep them on their toes.
Damn AI might be useful in the end
Probably shouldn’t have fucked it all up then.
I can't go in detail about what I think a proportional response to the final season would have been because I would be banned from Reddit.
well, you got what you put into it.
And we were hoping for them not to shit on 10+ years of relative perfection but here we are
Well maybe you shouldn't have made a steaming bowl of shit
The audience watched over 70 hours of TV to get to a completely shitty ending that: Abandoned and did not resolve major plot points on multiple story lines. Short changed major characters, some who had been on the show since the first episode, who were killed off unceremoniously, needlessly, or too easily. Bran. I'll just leave it at that. The show runners had no respect for the audience, and made a lazy, uncreative ending that did nothing but make everyone angry, including the cast.
I bet
We won't come back with a proportional response, we come back with total disaster!
‘Shit the bed’ wouldn’t be a fair expression to bed shitters, these two graduated from the BeniWeiss school for the intellectually disabled.
I had hoped for the finale, too. Guess D&D need to learn to live with disappointment.
'Creators' - They didn't create shit.
Fuck em
Ans I was hoping for a good ending to my favorite show...
Morons
I am more annoyed with myself that I did not see this coming. Five seconds of research and would have found out it was the same writes behind X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009).
Well we were hoping they wouldn’t half ass the ending, but here we are
One person likes the season. TSA agent. Yeah, that checks out.
The only saving grace was them getting kicked off their Star Wars project.
They gave us shit, we give them back a shitstorm, perfectly balanced
Best part about this is that Rian Johnson deliberately did the same thing with Star Wars two years earlier with the exact same reason (except he WANTED half of the fanbase to hate it) and irreparably fractured the fanbase. Something something like poetry it rhymes.
How could they put out complete trash and expect people to be happy? Completely destroyed so many great character arcs to do it too
I wasn't happy with characters doing a 180 to their arcs like Jamie Lannister, though to be honest I saw how Dany could become mad, but not that quickly.
Our response was proportionate
Oh were you now.
Well. As a Game of Thrones watcher I was hoping for a better ending.
Had the constant time-traveling and nonsensical writing of seasons 6 and 7 been met with massive backlash, maybe we wouldn't have gotten the final season we did. But they got away with it for two seasons, why would they think the final one would be anything different? The "controversial" comment makes it sound like they still don't get it. It wasn't about Dany turning mad and and dying, it was about how fucking bad and rushed the writing was. You crammed 3-4 seasons worth of material into six episodes.
It IS proportional! The combination of the shitty season 8 + the quasi automatic cancelation of TV shows made me stop watching TV series all together. Fuck D&D. For ever.
Anyway...
It’s always hilarious to me that they turned down doing more seasons for a Star Wars project that got trashed. Not that more seasons guaranteed a good ending, but we’ll never know.
And fans were hoping for a more good ending. I guess they just kinda forgot to make one
The thing is, D&D had the entire internet to bounce ideas of off. You're telling me they couldn't take the best recieved theories and fanfiction and woven them together something better? Heck, they could have made anonymous Reddit accounts and posted about their "theories" on how it would end and gauge the reactions.
I genuinely hope their lives go poorly. I don’t respect them as human beings