A Song of Ice and Fire /Game of Thrones Discussion V2: Winter Is Here
999 replies, posted
She gave Sansa an obsidian dagger and kept the Valerian Steel one.
Sam should have gone to the crypts.
So, about the third episode.
On one hand, this may as well be the best horror movie I've seen in ages. Really, one hour and a half of the best atmosphere, cinematography, props and special effects I've ever seen in a TV show, with the initial charge of the Dothraki and Arya sneaking around the library being my personal highlights.
On the other hand, however, even if I pictured how everything was going to end from the last season (not because I'm a writing genius, but because I've read, watched and played so much fiction at this point I learned to know better, most of the time), that doesn't change the fact that the way the Night King, and by extension the White Walkers, are dispatched is complete and utter bullshit. Aside from the fact that Arya being able to move in for the kill is as outrageous as it gets and that the showrunners have "revealed" only after this episode that stabbing the Night King in the same place the Children of the Forest did to create him was the only way to destroy him, this event made a lot of episodes and plot threads from the last seasons completely and utterly pointless, especially after the showrunners and the marketing pushed the Others as the main villains of the setting for years.
There's "subverting expecactions" and then there's tricking your own audience to shock it as a substitute for an actual good narrative. Something I've been saying from the release of The Last Jedi.
Whelp, at the very least now we know for a fact that the fantasy elements of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones were a red herring all along and the human/political features of the setting were the only stuff that really mattered all along.
Nor that I particularly mind, but I only wished we got to this point sooner
I was expecting to see a Night Queen show up and reveal that the Night King is not the "master" of the White Walkers. It could still happen.
I disagree. It had to happen this way, it was always going to happen this way. This show isn't really about zombies. They only ever existed to thin the heroes numbers. Cersei has always been the true villain. I would be so upset if the last episode was just a fuckin zombie fight. All the episodes of politics and skulduggery isn't going to culminate in 'lets put that aside to fight zombies!'. It's so much better this way.
The last episode can still be CleganeBowl, so technically a zombie fight.
i am fine with that however
So, some more thoughts on the last season in general, but especially that last episode -
People aren't wrong when they say that the iron throne was always the point of the show, and that we shouldn't be surprised we're getting a focus on that for the last few episodes.
The thing is, I think we've all always known how the iron throne plot is going to end. The show has simplified the political aspect to an insane degree. The iron throne is going to be dismantled or destroyed or whatever, the feudal system that caused all this strife is going to be left behind in favor of a more democratic approach. It's pretty obvious.
When the show decided to really dumb down the writing to the detriment of the political intrigue, the only thing we had left was the dumb fantasy angle of ice zombies.
I was so keen for the long night, guys. The apocalyptic endgame of the series. Remember how the characters used to say that they have to unite all of the living, or else they have no hope? What happened to that? The long night lasted a few uncomfortable weeks and the looming blight of the white walkers never made it past winterfell. I honestly thought we were going to get a season-long apocalyptic plot arc where team good guys have to fight tooth and nail, and lose basically everything, in order to secure victory for the living.
Instead, a level 99 stealth assassin snuck behind the final boss and hit him with a backstab for critical damage.
I honestly think more people would be okay with the arya killing nightking thing if they either A. had a minute fight where she gets her ass beat and throws him off with the dagger trick at the end, or B. let jon catch up and fight him and Arya comes in before he finishes jon. I think the abruptness of it was what made it feel so weird
I liked the episode. I wasn't unsatisfied.
The whole thing about the Night King being the big bad was flawed at best from the start. GRRM was never the author to have rivals put aside their differences to fight a common foe in the Grand Finale. He was always focused on the political intrigue that conflict brought above all else. This is, after all, a man who was more fascinated by the Scouring of the Shire in the Lord of the Rings than anything leading up to or after it.
To compare this to the Last Jedi is disingenuous. What we have now is the stage set for the remnants of the Stark and Targaryen armies to now have to face a full scale conflict with the reinforced and comparatively fresh forces of both the Iron Throne and the Golden Company. The while the White Walkers were an existential danger to everyone with a pulse, it would be fitting for GRRM to have them force a pyrrhic victory for the real finale of who (if anyone) gets the Iron Throne.
The most likely outcome in my opinion is that both sides will either destroy eachother or reach a stalemate, and the seven kingdoms will fragment into rival states once more. In light of the series being roughly comparable to the story of Ragnarok in Norse Mythology and the English War of the Roses (Wisecrack and a few other channels had some good input on this), this will be an appropriate death of the old world/birth of the new world with more than enough room for a bittersweet ending.
I mean, the Night King being the big bad is flawed, but that's always just been a show problem - it's obvious that the Others represent something significant in the overarching themes of the story in the books. You say GRRM isn't the author to have the good guys unite against the bad, but he isn't the author to give in to a grand number of overused fantasy tropes - but that's what we're seeing here. So much generic fantasy corner-cutting.
I think it's fair to say that what we're watching isn't going to represent the ending of general themes from the book. It can't, even as an extremely abridged version. It just doesn't really make any sense for the white walkers to have as little of an impact on the story as they have.
I really wouldn't call the Night King and the white walkers generic fantasy. Tbqh they're more similar to Lovecraftian horror, which GRRM is a huge fan of.
I can’t believe as many people are upset or displeased as they are.
Unfortunately, with how little time the show has devoted to them, they really do just come across as an army of ice zombies, with a hiveminded leader. That is extremely generic as far as fantasy goes, doubly so because it followed the 'kill the leader, the rest will fall' mentality. The only unique aspect about them, as presented in the show, is their bioweapon origin story.
I can understand more of the lovecraftian themes coming from the books, but again they're an entirely different beast in the books - and clearly not going to fall to a sneaky ruse.
No they’re generic fantasy. Draughers are literally a fantasy staple.
At least the idea i got from them being a Hivemind, is being like a corrupted version of the Old Gods magic. Cause the Old gods magic is based around the Weirwood trees and are believed to be interconnected in a hivemind network. Also GRRM's writing has had a history of hivemind-like beings or enemies.
That's the catch 22 of the whole situation. There's some genuinely cool ideas about where they come from, what they want, how they interact and behave, etc. They follow the same rules as the 3ER's 'magic' and obviously have a long history with the Weirwoodnet. But that element is almost completely stripped out of the show.
If you start entertaining all the possibilities the books present, you're met with the crushing disappointment that all that mystique, all that forethought and potential, accumulates to killing the night king and having the wights fall in a predictable, generic fantasy moment. If you ignore the possibilities the books present, you're left with what the show has presented as their backstory:
A bioweapon that turned rogue. No matter which way you slice it, the show has done the white walker plot a massive disservice.
i kind of disagree with this. Jon and the night king have had numerous scenes together for years building up a potential battle. of course it would be very obvious that jon would be the one to fight and kill the night king because of how they have built it up, but this to me just seems like a complete waste of immense tension building. i guess i just dislike that arya is the one to do it only for the fact that she has had 0 ties to this storyline whatsoever. especially the manner in which it was done too, the wacky last minute launch out of nowhere with a cheeky trick move.
honestly what i really was looking for was a resounding loss of winterfell, being completely overrun and a mad and scattered retreat south. maybe a retreat is not exactly in line with the character's beliefs towards this fight though, i'll give you that. I just figured with so many years of building this plotline slowly and quietly in the background of the political sparring that has made the show so great thus far that it would have more of an impact. i think maybe they just did a poor job of managing the two threats' weight for the characters.
cersei just seemingly holds no weight after you have to face the potential extinction of the entire continent and i find it hard to believe anyone would want to go down and fight over a metal chair for someone else after just going through that
i admit too that i was never really a fan of the white walker/magical plotline for the longest time, and always appreciated the fighting between the political factions as the main focus of the show, and im a bit disappointed that the end of the politics has been seemingly overshadowed. to survive death but fall to cersei's armies seems ridiculous to me.
I wish Valerian steel and Dragon glass weren't one-hit kills against White Walkers (with so much as a pin prick it seems like). I wish they were the only weapons that could harm them but you still needed a killing blow. On the "kill the leader, kill them all" I think they should have had it only apply for the wights and not from the Night King to the other White Walkers. They could have had it like the Night King was the only one who could make new White Walkers, so the goal to kill him is still important. Just to avoid a common Achille's heel against unstoppable forces in fiction.
I feel like picking apart the details is diving into a whole tangle of headaches, but yeah, if they were going to go with the 'kill the leader, kill them all' trope, they should have at least established some rules on how this works among the white walkers themselves.
Last season we saw a white walker die, and the wights surrounding him drop. We're lead to believe he was controlling that select party, and his magic works in sort of an AoE range. They seem to be a distinctly separate entity to the night king himself, capable of controlling wights just like he does.
So what type of sense does it make that the white walkers fall, along with the wights, when the night king does? Was he controlling all of the other white walkers, too? If we apply some of the warging/telepathy logic that GRRM commonly uses, are we to believe this guy was warging his peers who were warging wights around them?
If that was the case, what was the point of turning other white walkers to begin with? Just use the wight army, right? What would have happened if a white walker died during this latest episode. Would some wights drop, but not all of them? What is the point of turning other white walkers?! A signal boost?
Bah. I typed too much up over that - that's barely scratching the surface of this confusing mess.
Oh yeah no doubt they squandered it. I feel like the biggest disservice they did for the white walkers was explaining their origin. Which is the absolute last thing you do for a Lovecraftian threat. Its the same shit when like Ridley Scott tried to explain the engineers in Prometheus, you let the audience come up with their own interpretation of that shit. Instead of explaining it.
I mean originally my idea or interpretation of the White Walkers for like the book and the show, was that it was some unknown force that existed far out in the lands of endless winter. Completely unknown and untouchable to anyone who isn't a white walker/other. But whatever it is, its slowly creeping towards the land of the living. The Theories ranged from Magic becoming self-aware, Old God/Ice magic becoming corrupted, some demonic elder god/eldritch horror living within the wastes of the arctic, or possibly some weird natural process of the balance of Magic.
But the thing is, all those theories don't matter, cause if you try to explain an unknown threat, it stops being "Unknown" and "Threatening". I mean for me, i thought they were going to have winterfell fall and go along with the evacuation theory. But apparently now the Night King himself is dead, that's no longer a thing.
GRRM was always going to have the white walkers/others be more than an unexplainable spooky threat. As lovecraftian as that is, it's another trope he wants to subvert. Refer to his infamous "did aragorn slaughter baby orcs in their little cribs?" critique of LOTR.
In the books, the others even communicate to each other, laugh and taunt their victims. They're some sort of unmistakable evil, but there's also some culture, some perverse 'humanity' to them. I mean, it's literally in the name - the Other. It's easy to imagine the 'Other' as an irredeemable evil, but in most cases, they're not.
That is to say, at least in the books, we're definitely going to get some more insight on their origin, their purpose, and the reason for their return. At least some more solid hints towards the theories that have already been crafted. It's up in the air whether or not the rouge bioweapon theory is consistent between book and show.
Let's hope not.
Though yea, i'd can say the book white walkers or "Others" to be more precise, are probably set up for a more "Mysterious" motive with a blue/orange morality. Meanwhile the show makes the white walkers appear as a Lovecraftian threat, (Which they fucked up by explaining that they were originally humans, killing the whole point of the show's white walkers).
The way the Dothraki charged into the darkness and their flaming swords started going out one by one was honestly one of the coolest shots in the entire show
The entire battle was honestly one of the best battle scenes in cinema history. No one can really complain about a feature-length battle scene in a TV show. The way Arya killed the Night King was kind of anti-climactic, I guess, but the rest of the episode makes up for it. The episode would be even cooler if Jon at least got to beat undead Viserion if he didn't get to kill the Night King, but I guess nothing can be perfect
The episode did the impossible and made me care about the CGI dragon sequences - this shot, and most of that sequence, is fucking on point.
They don't have zombieitis and you don't get zombieitis from Wights, this isn't the Walking Dead.
I mean tbqh, i can say the battle overall and the episode itself was pretty fun, entertaining, and well done. I feel like the issues with the writing and what not is more of the overall plot itself. But i can say the episode itself had plenty of great character moments and everything else worked.
Maybe it's just me, but Arya pulling the trick on the Night's king, I'm ok with it. Like i'm fine with the idea of the Night King being killed by someone else besides Jon Snow. I think the issue is just how it was executed. Its one of those situations where it was possibly "This seems to work better on paper"
That was perfectly executed horror too. Just watching the Dothraki emerge from the darkness, completely broken and defeated. That set the tone for the rest of the episode perfectly.
Besides the whole hubbus about you know what, I have to hand it to them that
The dothraki charge under a rain of flaming artillery projectiles with Jorah and Ghost was some of the coolest fucking cinematography I've seen in a long time, fantastic scene and the way it came to a sudden stop in a tsunami of undeath was a great way to open up the episode.
Except basically nobody is left and Cersei has an army about half the size of her father's original forces with no one left to recruit to make up the difference. 'It wasn't apocalyptic enough' 'it didn't really change anything' umm the good guys have literally no troops left to deal with Cersei, whom has a whole nerd-dungeon full of dragon B-gone implements, and now owns the only stable economy and government on the continent short of the mid-territories, who frankly don't give a shit who wins for the most part. Armies win wars and the North no longer has an army. That's kind of a big deal. You can ding DB+W for choosing to make Cersei the greater threat, but the stakes are pretty skewed in one direction right now.
One thing’s been bugging me (S8,E03)
So when all seems lost (Jon being pinned down by the undead dragon, Jorah and Dany being surrounded, etc), the music playing sounded really familiar and I cannot place it at all. I half suspect it was a cover of No Quarter, but I haven’t compared the two directly yet and can only spot vague similarities.
Is there any info on this?
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.