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SeekingBlood  1yr ago (text post)   2417 thread views

I feel that people often praise movies that call out or subvert expectations of their genre solely because they do that, even if execution of the subversion itself is not good.

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How good would the first few seasons of Game of Thrones have been if Tywin Lannister abruptly died of a disease in the beginning of Season 3, or if Jon Snow were killed by unnamed wildlings after he travels with the Night's Watch beyond the wall, as realistically someone in his position would be?

It's funny you say this, because Game of Thrones arguably got famous for an "anticlimactic" death or even a set of them

I remember a fan being absolutely offended at the death of Ned. Yet it was broadly considered bold and became famous. Why?

Because it was set up by the story. Ned's death is simultaneously unpredictable but also predictable and it's consequences were similarly so. It fit with the themes Martin was writing.

Similarly, No Country for Old Men is about many things, but it emphasizes the limits of the Sheriff's power to change life's brutality and the hubris of Llewellyn. This is emphasized multiple times, even directly at the audience via parables with helpful summations. The ending is also an "anticlimax" where Chigurh gets hit and walks off but it highlights that even Chigurh isn't really separate from vagaries of the world despite his rules (which he believes protect him), again tied to debates in the film.

Now, I get why that might not work for you but that similarity to GoT's Season 1 (maintaining thematic consistency) is why the movie was so well-received in spit of its "anticlimax".

Another factor is that No Country for Old Men is a movie, which means that it has a much more compressed time frame. We knew Moss for two hours, Ned for 10, Jon Snow for ~75. Different expectations.

tl;dr: My defense is that Game of Thrones and No Country for Old Men are admired for similar reasons, therefore GoT isn't a good counterexample.

When I read A Game of Thrones back in 2004 (while I was supposed to be paying attention in Grade 9 English), I was absolutely floored by Ned's death. All the fantasy books I had ever read drilled into me, consciously or not, expectations about how the story would go. The hero always survives, good ultimately triumphs, things come around in the end. There's a sort of nervous, excited energy you get when you realize a story isn't going to go the way you thought, and all of a sudden instead there are a million possibilities. I can remember vividly some of the times this has happened to me and Ned's death was one of them.

From a writing perspective it's also a very well constructed twist: it's set up in the book itself of course, but I'm referring more to the way it toys with the reader. The reader is used to seeing the protagonist escape seemingly impossible situations, and the book gives you various different reasons why it would make sense within the logic of the characters and the story for Ned to survive (not to mention the reader's knowledge that this is book 1 of a series). And then he doesn't.

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