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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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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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