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So, after all these weeks, Amazon's Rings of Power wraps up its first season. A section of mainstream media is still defending the show while others are somewhat calling it, we have a 2nd season coming, several retcons to the lore, and a very predictable Sauron reveal. Now we're supposed to expect a certain special someone from Galadriel's past that I'm shocked even exists in this canon. If there's one bit of character development in this whole debacle, it would be Erik Kain's diminishing confidence in the show.
I'm gonna nitpick a line from this piece:
I don't know if Amazon Studios will face a crisis as was reported earlier, or if they intend to trot out a slightly less expensive season 2 before axing it altogether, or drag it all the way. But it seems, as several others had stated in last week's thread when I brought it up, this is really just a billion dollar gig for Bezos' ticket to the ultra-woke Hollywood clique to maximise his elite status after all. To that end, he likely has succeeded many times over.
I know the article doesn't bother but: has the mainstream come up with a coherent theory for why HoD - which was coming off a controversial Game of Thrones finale and it's own "woke" PR problem - is doing vastly better than RoP in audience ratings?
Sexists are more motivated than racists?
If it is good the complainers just get laughed at and ignored.
Also, ASoIaF is way less iconic than LotR.
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Better writing, better acting, the creator is alive and presumably has the last word over any alterations, lessons learned from the final season of GoT, things do actually happen at more than a snail's pace, the audience is more familiar with the GoT world so there is less need to tell you all about dragons and the Targaryens and the background lore they don't have the rights to.
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Amazon has more than twice as many streaming subscribers though.
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Did you watch HoD? It's genuinely amazing. Not sure how to put it exactly but its treatment of power and tragedy makes GoT look one-dimensional. And there are some scenes that took my "#1 Tv/movie writing" spot. For example king Viserys' ruminating on the nature of his rule and what it means to be King to his Hand, if you've seen it.
This show deserves more cultural spotlight than GoT had, imo. And I love GoT.
I am still a bit salty after the GoT disaster, but I keep hearing it's a good show, also from people who aren't shy to call out a shitty one when they see one. So maybe worth trying out...
Do beware: I initially almost dropped it out of annoyance at the woke casting of one Old Valyrian family (not the Targaryens thankfully). Since then they've more than made up for it. On the other hand, the woke actors are at least very good, and it's consistent (instead of making random characters black they really bit the bullet and made an entire family black with white hair).
I don't even mind diversity casting by itself, unless it breaks the story. So fine, who knows, maybe some Valyrians did have dark skin. Doesn't bother me, if the actors are good, who cares.
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I'm glad to hear it works well, but in the stills I've seen, it looks so silly an obviously wiglike. (as do some of the white people's hair though).
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Which Targaryen is race-bait casted?
Can you name one, please? I don’t recall any from the show, unless you count Daemon’s kids, which seems silly - their mom’s black.
Those are Daemon’s kids, which I just mentioned. Their mom’s black.
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But at least it has been established that in the ancestral homeland of the Targaryen, there are black and brown people and we've been shown them and their cities and cultures in GoT. so you can squeeze in "oh and there is this noble black house" without too much upsetting the apple cart.
Rings of Power just went "Here's one black Dwarf even if we never show any other black Dwarves in speaking or main parts, here's one black Elf with no other black Elves around. And if you don't shut up and accept this unquestioningly, you're a racist".
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But the race-bait makes a lot of "Strong" sense given plot and the difference between reading and watching.
Warning Spoilers: Who the real father of the king's daughter's children is and appears to be is a key plot point. In the show the real father is white, while the guy who is supposed to be the father is black so it's extremely obvious to everyone what is going on. The king ignoring what is going on makes him either a fool or someone playing a deep game where pretending can make something real if you are the king. While I haven't read the book, someone who has says that in the book both men are white and people infer what is going on from less obvious phenotypical features. Mathematically, the race change makes its 99.99% likely in the show that the kids are bastards but, say, 95% likely in the books and the plot of the show does reflect this extra 4.99% likelihood. The race change also makes it extremely salient to we the viewers that the kids are bastards.
If you're talking Lost in Space (which fits), that daughter is actually adopted, and ends up meeting her father, who is black, so it works in-world quite well. It was weird at the beginning, I grant you.
RoP has no such excuses. I found it okay for the elf (in the army, people come from all over, and he was more elf-like than most of the community-theater-roman-senator elves anyway), but for the Harfoots it's very distracting and weird.
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One powergirrrrrrl moment where a girl attacked by an animal survives without injury in a situation where she probably shouldn't have.
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The problem with HoD is honestly not the show itself, it's GoT. GoT had an amazing first season too! But after how abysmal the ending was, I'm not going to watch HoD until after it's over and we know if it wound up going to shit the way GoT did.
I think it's still worth watching, more than anything I've watched over the last few years. It dethroned Better Call Saul as my favorite. It would suck if they cock it up but the writing, acting, and aesthetics are still so good that they stand on their own.
You're genuinely depriving yourself of something Great.
Besides, why would they cock it up again? Are the conditions for that happening even there? It's a finished story of a smaller scope. They know they fucked up. I'm not worried.
I mean, why would they cock it up the first time? If you went back in time and told someone after GoT S1 or S2 "this will end up sucking and the show's legacy will be how they ruined it", that person would think you were crazy. Back when GoT started, it was so good that nobody would have believed it could ever turn out so bad.
It wasn't at all obvious from the outset of GoT that they were going to fuck up so hard by the end. And if they do fuck this show up, it certainly wouldn't be clear now that they will do so. Now, maybe they learned their lesson at HBO and this will be great. But for myself, once bitten twice shy. Besides, if it actually is good in the end, then I will still enjoy watching it at that time. I'm not depriving myself of anything, I'm simply putting this off until we can assess the work as a whole.
Fair enough, they certainly might fuck it up. Personally I think it's much less likely than it was for GoT. Baseline probability for fucking up shows that start so great is low, smaller scope, and lessons learned are still my arguments.
But that's not the point. I just don't share the overall sentiment that GoT is not worth watching because they fucked up the last few seasons. It feels like you are substituting the legacy of the whole show for its overall quality.
Stories have endings. The narrative arc that has a identifiable beginning, middle, and end is what defines a given story. In general, stories that have a poor ending are unsatisfying in some way, linked to exactly how the ending was "poor." GoT S8 was widely panned for nonsensical/unexplained plot devices (teleporting armies, for example) that made the story intellectually unsatisfying, and character-arc reversals and betrayals of theme (Jaime's sudden un-redemption arc) that made the story emotionally unsatisfying. That's a massive double-failure.
Let's say I had a book, and told you, "Hey, read this, it's super good, but you'll want to stop after Chapter 15 of 20, the rest of the book's shit," would you want to start the book at all?
I wouldn't read that book because reading is much harder than watching a TV series but I do get your point. GoT is worsened by its bad ending, how can I argue it's not. I'm just saying it's not completely ruined and that I'll rewatch it no problem.
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I think the problem is Martin's outline ended up being a very conventional fantasy story, but it hid who the main characters were for a long time. So it looked like something else. People invested in the genre rule breaking early part of the story were always going to be disappointed when the traditional fantasy story emerged.
It also suffered from one of the themes of the book is all the people playing politics are ignoring a slow building apocalypse with little evidence, but the people playing politics are also very popular with the fans of the show which left them in a pretty severe bind, do they kill off everyone in the south who is unprepared (last scene the winter king sitting upon the iron throne before a zombified court as snow drifts across all Westerns) or do they save them with a deus ex machina solution that staves off the apocalypse. Either is going to piss off a lot of fans.
I feel like the problem is that A Song of Ice and Fire breaks genre conventions by not deus ex machina'ing things you expect to be deus ex machina'd. Ned being killed makes total sense, you just expect him to have plot armour. It definitely does get more high-magic/standard fantasy as it goes on, but I don't think that's the problem people have with the ending (whether they know it or not).
But it feels like what the writers took away from that was that what people liked about the show was "That can never predict what's going to happen next!" and made all sorts of nonsensical stuff happen because "subverting expectations is what GoT is about!" I don't envy them running out of GRRM to adapt and having to wing it (even if he gave them the broad strokes, a big part of the work is in the execution).
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"Unsatisfying scriptwriting" is the default scriptwriting. Ask not are the conditions sufficient to create a cockup; ask are the conditions sufficient to maintain a very unusually high level of quality?
That's true in general but not here I think. Other 'good' series usually manage to maintain great scriptwriting, for example Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc. Bad scriptwriting is the default starting position, but series that start good and are intended to be good really do require special circumstances to go down the drain.
We know what caused the GoT fiasco (lack of source material, producers wanted out, extremely long and built careers which caused pressure to move on). Those are the conditions.
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The GoT problem was that the show runners were counting on GRRM to finish the series and wrap up all of his plot lines. They would have only needed to adapt and simplify what GRRM wrote.
GRRM didn't publish enough adaptable material and D&D were left to come up with a conclusion on their own.
HotD is based on material GRRM has already published. It's adapted from about 120 pages from a book on Targaryen history.
So it won't have the depth and twists of the early seasons of GoT but there is a complete arc for the show runners to follow.
GRRM purportedly told the showrunners exactly where the show was going. But because he didn't flesh it out at GRRM levels of detail, the showrunners had to fill stuff in and didn't. Why did Daenarys turn evil? Clearly GRRM told the writers it's because all the people she loves get killed and she suffers a lot. But if he were to actually write it, he'd realize that Missandei getting killed isn't narratively sufficient.
It's the same reason that a lot of "software architect" type people are kind of disastrous - if they actually sat down and wrote code instead of making diagrams and saying "fill in the details", they'd realize where the actual hard parts live.
GRRM could probably have made it work, though maybe 2 books would have become 4. The TV writers couldn't.
The showrunners have shown they can fill in Martin's skeleton in the past: S1 had some great non-canon scenes, and there are well-received TV-only plots (like Arya meeting Tywin in S2)
The problem imo is that GRRM's entire plot has spiralled out of his control and he keeps adding new and new plotlines to push things forward. This is fine for GRRM because he explicitly left TV to not have writing constraints. However this is obviously a problem for a TV, even the one with the largest budget ever.
Disclaimer: everything after this is well-worn fandom speculation.
In this case the problems in GoT are likely due to the showrunners - understandably- removing major characters like the alleged surviving Targaryen heir Aegon and his Dornish allies. Why? Cause we'd have to go back to Dorne and explain just how this Targaryen hid for years just like Dany, maybe adding seasons to the show and annoying the audience.
The problem is that roles like this are likely pivotal and its absence explains a lot of weird things.
For one: why Cersei has permanent support despite her actions which are so norm-breaking I can't think of a real-world precedent. In the books, if this happened, Aegon and his wife (lovelier than Cersei) would likely depose her and they'd be the threat to Dany.
This actually makes a lot more sense: Season 7 and 8 basically butchered Tyrion and Varys' characters to provide some justification for why Dany wouldn't just destroy Cersei instantly to much rejoicing (this causes the attendant problem that any/all warnings about Dany going evil aren't credible until she does something ludicrously over the top)
However, Dany's reticence would make sense if she was dealing with a fellow Targaryen pretender to the Throne. She actually can't just roast him. And his existence is the perfect thing that would cause her to be insecure and/or slip up.
I think there's sort of a cascade of problems like this, due to having to deal with an increasingly spiraling Martin plot. A plot that is so dense and complicated and unworkable that Martin literally scrapped a lot of work that didn't go well and hasn't successfully put out a book since Dance With Dragons. So I actually wouldn't be convinced that Martin can do it in two.
As I said:
Fair enough. Then I should say: I'm not convinced that Martin can do it at all (especially given that the "split the books up" was tried for Feast/Dance and we've been stuck for a decade)
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Could you give more detail? In my (biased) experience, they're normally competentish (if given to trends and overcomplicating things). Generally they've been developing for a decade+ before taking the role, from what I've seen. There are however many PMs or such who misrepresent/get overly stuck to diagrams and i've met some people who managed to become architects without coding at all. At my work, I make architectural mvps with seniors with chunks of the functionality and low effort piping, then tell other juniors how to make everything production ready while seniors work on hard parts we aren't quite sure about.
But fundamentally it's an organizational issue. 10 experts alone could very well be better (and in some projects, I'm able to give parts each to domain experts who write their parts in a week and it's all done (waterfall can work!)). But engineers are normally at the behest of non-tech people coming up with stupid features, who change their minds, or the domain space isn't even properly explored with exploratory test models (so we can't do good engineering practices). But this can be justified, since the tech is supposed to automate away concrete tasks and processes, for people who are paying for it. Path of least resistance etc.
So I'm referring to software architect types who probably are competent, but also aren't doing a lot of coding anymore. The net result is grand plans that often fail, or succeed but overbudget, due to a lot of stuff just getting bogged down in bad ergonomics and day to day tasks that are harder than they should be. As a concrete example, I once worked on an ETL task run by a high level architect plus a bunch of fairly junior folks.
ETL tasks just dragged on, took forever, had lots of errors. One of the biggest errors was simply importing stuff to the wrong column, because the developer actually mapping json -> SQL had to manually map "input field_name -> integer column position in CSV file -> SQL loads the CSV". After about a year of delays due to transposing columns (
return [...20 columns...row['foo']['bar'], row['baz'][0]...]when it should have beenreturn [...row['baz'][0], row['foo']['bar']...]), a clever (new) junior dev finally figured out developers should just doreturn { 'foobar': row['foo']['bar'], ...}and wrote the system to translate 'foobar' -> column 23 by just checking the column order in SQL. Another example would be days added to any ticket just because setting up a testing env is a lot harder than it needs to be.The key point here is that in neither case did the architect actually spend much time actually doing the task that was dragging on and slowing the project. If they spent a month doing that, they probably would have just fixed it without much notice. And once we got that one clever guy, it did get fixed.
As it relates to this example, from what I've read, GRRM is actually good at the details of writing. But since he's retired from writing, he's put into the "clueless architect" role, and the actual people doing the implementation are just not able to actually fill in the details.
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I have only very rarely worked with an architect who is competent. Most of the time, it's someone with little to no experience actually doing the technical work, who gives these high-level pie in the sky statements like "the system will take in lead, and output gold" with no indication whatsoever of how it should do that. Then they dust their hands off, go "OK your turn now" and leave it to the technical people to figure out how to actually make that happen.
I'm not saying competent architects don't exist, I've actually worked with some! But they are very much not the norm in my experience.
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I've seen this said before but I don't think it's true. Game of Thrones' problem was that the showrunners started writing their own fanfiction well before they ran out of material. This was made worse by them cutting things that must have seemed, at the time, unimportant, but later led to the last two seasons feeling incredibly unbalanced. The changes start around season or 4 (it's been a while), start getting really bad by season 5, and finally compound to where the average viewer can tell things are very off by the end
By fanfiction I don't necessarily mean fleshing smaller characters out, like Tywin and Margaery — generally this was done well and didn't conflict with anything pre-existing. I'm talking about things like Jaime's storylines after returning to King's Landing being completely different, whatever they did to Euron Greyjoy, and literally everything about the Dorne plot.
An example of cut content is the ignored storyline of Aegon Targaryen landing his armies in Westeros while Daenerys is fucking around in Meereen. He kind of comes out of nowhere in book 5 but it really feels like he should have been there for the endgame in the show. What we had instead is the situation where everyone is against Cersei and the writers have to bend the story in knots to have it be an even fight. A multipolar conflict with Dany, Cersei, Euron, and Aegon all facing off would be much more chaotic and even, assuming this was Martin's intention.
Perhaps the most infamous example of cut content was not including Lady Stoneheart. As I recall, this heavily strained the showrunners' relationship with Martin and led to him distancing himself from the show and depriving it of its most important advisor.
For all the things you can say about the showrunners at least they finished their damn job. I'm more bitter now at how GOT/Martin influenced Attack on Titan's writer and caused him to run that off a cliff too.
Lol, serves me right to write a post about this and scroll down and find someone has put it more succinctly hours ago.
I'll just reiterate: I'm very sympathetic to the showrunners here, despite them usually getting the criticism for this.
It would be one thing if there was a complete series but Martin himself has proven incapable of resolving his own narrative kudzu. He basically spent years on the "Meereenese Knot" problem of trying to get all of the characters in the right place and iirc has dumped more than one version of the story. His last few books only covered parts of the world due to the rapidly proliferating viewpoints.
All of this stuff costs when you're doing a show, in a way it doesn't cost a writer.
I agree with your sympathies especially when it come to cut stuff. On a show you have to cast, build sets, account for the limited ability of your core audience to follow many concurrent plotlines. On a finite budget it’s pretty easy to say “where the hell is this going” to a lot of the book 4-5 plots and cut them, especially when the books don’t have an easy answer to that question.
I’m less sympathetic in cases like Dorne where they built the damn sets and hired actors, just the wrong ones. That felt like the writers just didn’t understand what Martin was doing with Dorne at all and said fuck it, let’s add some girlbosses and put Jaime in it. Give me Arianne back
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I mean, sure. But the problem wasn't just "the writers inherited a thorny plot from GRRM and weren't up to the task of concluding it well". The problem is "the writers turned out to be a failure at basic writing". In the last few seasons of GoT character motivations are all over the place, things regularly happen that make no sense in-universe, and the writers lack even the most basic fucking attention to logical coherency of the story. In the last episode, Jon Snow goes from one scene (and location in the world) to the next in ways that would require him to literally teleport for it to be possible.
I have sympathy for the writers that they inherited an unfinished plot that GRRM himself hasn't been able to finish successfully yet (and may never do so). But my sympathy runs out when they make writing mistakes so large that anyone, even a completely untrained fan like myself, is able to spot them. That's 100% on the GoT writers, and not GRRM.
Yeah, but I see this as partly a problem caused by the giant hole left by the aforementioned kudzu when they cut it out.
For example: Varys and Tyrion HAVE to be stupid cause there's no other way to stop Dany from just killing Cersei but this then makes it hard to take their ambivalence about Dany seriously as foreshadowing. All of the political complexity of Westeros has to be removed or Cersei would never last as Queen.
And so on and so on.
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I am morbidly-curious now that you mention this. I've only ever watched the first season of the anime and I left off in the manga when they introduced the anti-human 3DMG. I'm roughly aware that AOT goes to some weird places, and I know from watching Ironmouse that Eren does Some Shit(tm) that was apparently guaranteed to turn the audience against him.
You should watch at least the first 3 seasons; they really are something special.
I should be able to explain what I mean in a mostly spoiler-free way. The creator of Attack on Titan, Hajime Isayama, binged Game of Thrones in 2016 and got really into it, even saying that the ending of his story would be inspired by the show.
There's a point in the story where the themes and style of storytelling vastly shift and not for the better. This coincides with the split between season 3 and the "final season" and there's an easy visual cue to tell when it happened because a different studio took over animating the show. This also coincides with around when Isayama got into Game of Thrones and it started influencing his writing.
I would summarize the original themes of the show (Seasons 1-3) as RAGE, SCREAM, FIGHT. There is something existential coming for you and it won't leave a single one of you left alive. Your 'leaders' think it best if your people quietly went extinct, and as you learn they are far from the only ones... Fight with your lives and with everything at your disposal, even if it means literally turning into your mortal enemy. There are times when good friends have to fight eachother but the mission is never in question because those are the stakes. This and the military imagery gave the show heavy nationalist themes and the series began to be criticized at the end of season 3 once certain interpretations became circulated online. I found it to be extremely refreshing compared to what I'm used to.
The post-GOT era show has heavy Martin themes. War is bad and you'll be heavy-handedly browbeaten for liking the cool parts with the sobering reality of characters you like dying. Morality is very grey all of a sudden. Killing others is wrong, even if they all want you dead... it feels quite incongruent with the earlier themes of the show, even with the story that the author laid out. These themes may sound better to you as you read this but consider that they are kludged onto a work that was saying the exact opposite things for so long. It's a different bill of goods now.
I should elaborate on the storytelling changes as well. Attack on Titan's narrative framing ties you and Eren very closely together. Later this expands so you get the POV of a few other main characters at times, but the important thing is that you and the characters are almost always on the same page. You know what they know, you discover the mystery together. This was the style of storytelling until the shift I talked about, at which point it becomes basically... Game of Thrones.
Tons of characters. You don't follow characters, you check in with them to see where they are with their story. Your relationship to Eren is completely broken as he goes from being the POV character to someone you don't see the inner world of outside of 4 episodes or so. You're catching up with his plans like everyone else is. This is pretty much exactly how Martin does it and the style has its merits... just not on something that did it differently for most of its existence. This is harder to articulate for most people but I think it's why the new seasons are so jarring.
As for the ending of Eren doing Something Crazy — this is certainly where the show was going from the start. His words to a certain betraying friend are downright genocidal in rhetoric. I think in a world without the influence of Martin it'd be framed much differently by the narrative, which would make for some interesting discourse online.
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I'm not sure anyone with thematic sense should have been expecting Eren to not go into a bad place. The way it gets there is weirder than the resolution that a super-angry kid who turns into a race of cannibals goes to a bad place when worldviews are shattered.
Western young adult literature it was never going to be.
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Oh see I thought that, like many things in AoT, the ending where Erin Does Shit (which I also haven't seen yet) was going to be Evangelion-adjacent.
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The "non-mainstream" explanation is that despite the obvious woke overtones and casting, the writing is pretty solid. They're also making a Jon Snow sequel, have to see how that goes.
Well...yes. But the non-mainstream view easily lends itself to deflation of the naive mainstream view (it's all racists/sexist) - if writing quality is what leads to more or less prominent trolls why are we always talking about racists/sexists? So it's not much help figuring out what mainstreamers think.
Which is why I ask if they've come up with some theory that avoids this line of argument.
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