TURN BACK NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE HUGE SPOILERS FOR GAME OF THRONES.
With that out of the way. In about a span of a week my brother and I binged the entirety of Game of Thrones. Well, he did. I had to pursue such petty things as sleep, and as such, he would watch without me, but I caught most of it. He's read all the books, as well as tried to get me into them; alas, I couldn't get into it, struggling through the first book. But the show, holy shit, the show. The production design for it is top-notch -- the sheer detail in everything is astounding. The cinematography is usually very good, with one outstanding example being the wildling attack on the wall, where every shot looks like it's from a painting. You can see the visual effects getting better with every season. The characters with good screen time are multifaceted, helped greatly by the performances. There are only a handful of not very good performances in the show.
The writing for all the seasons (except for the last) is excellent as well. But it's the last season that gets dunked on, and for good reason. Prior to watching the show, I had avoided as much Game of Thrones-related talk as I could. However, there were some things I couldn't not hear about. One was Arya going blind, temporarily as it was. Another was Robb's death (though I had no idea it was going to be during the Red Wedding), and then about the origin of Hodor's "Hodor". But the main hubbub in 2019 was about how shitty most people thought some of the choices the writers made were. I didn't stick around long enough to hear about it.
That changed eight hours ago. Hey, writers: What the fuck? Some of the choices before were pretty strange, like Varys and Missandei's deaths, which felt rushed and unnecessary. Neither felt heavy enough; neither had much impact on both the characters and the audience, save for us hearing about Danaerys and Grey Worm's grief. They weren't given time to make an impact; instead the show moved on quickly enough that we didn't really feel it. We loved those characters, so let us grieve for them. But no. We went straight to the siege of King's Landing. At this point in the story, Danaerys is becoming more violent, what with her killing of Varys and also the deaths of people very close to her. But we don't feel the change that would show us why she did what she did during the siege. Sansa doesn't like her because she's stubborn, Tyrion's worrying about her becoming like her father, Jon's having a crisis over his heritage and is too emotionally inept to talk about it with Danaerys, leaving her with no one to work through her supposed grief with. But she's been shown before to make measured decisions. She is a good leader, who wants to hear people out. Look at when the slaver's son came to her with the request to take his father down from the cross.
august 8 2023
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