Carwash oval office posted:

To me that is the huge issue that GRRM has written himself into a corner with. You have all these groups that are going to kill each other, an unstoppable zombie force and a nuclear winter on the way. It always seemed to be heading towards a conclusion of “over the next 5 years, all the winners slowly starve to death because no one has any supplies”. That is an ending, don’t think people would like it though.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Some of that's on the Gurrminator to be fair. But like, why have any of season 2 Dany given what ended up happening? None of it matters. Her dothraki get killed off, all the Qarth prophecy and magic bullshit doesn't matter, Barristan comes and does nothing, she gets new dothraki later anyway, why? Ducksauce got owned and the spice king was kinda funny. Otherwise, would have preferred more Tyrion and Varys snarking at each other.

Not sure that's even unpopular, especially in the show where Winter Isn't In Fact Coming and the whole zombie army, years-long winter right after Dany and Jaime just destroyed all the food, none of that poo poo matters at all

PostNouveau posted:

All that has potential. I think GRRM went one step too far with fake Aegon and all that. Just too much poo poo going on in the past. It requires such a close reading to get even Jon Snow's parentage, but check it King Aerys' former hand who got exiled and then later his family got un-lorded has been secretly raising a fake heir and he might be a sympathizer to the Blackfyres. Who are the Blackfyres? Well this is covered in two paragraphs 4 books ago, but 50 years before King Aerys.....

PostNouveau posted:

All that has potential. I think GRRM went one step too far with fake Aegon and all that. Just too much poo poo going on in the past. It requires such a close reading to get even Jon Snow's parentage, but check it King Aerys' former hand who got exiled and then later his family got un-lorded has been secretly raising a fake heir and he might be a sympathizer to the Blackfyres. Who are the Blackfyres? Well this is covered in two paragraphs 4 books ago, but 50 years before King Aerys.....

Mike N Eich posted:

I totally forgot about Victarion and him landing in Essos right as the 'books' ended. It makes me feel sad that everything Dorne and Iron Island related absolutely did not matter and will be weird whenever we get our Brandon Sanderson minted version of Winds of Winter to read 2/3 of the chapters focusing on characters and factions we know will play no, or some very tiny, role in the overarching story.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Most of the dumb poo poo makes some sense, could even be cool if you imagine the GRRM bullet-point list only and not how it actually went down

Carwash oval office posted:

I was thinking how could the Night King killing be written, if it played out the same way. Couldn’t do an Arya POV or that would be her hiding for hours. Anyone else would just have Arya pop out of thin air and it would be completely random. I think it would work even worse on paper than on film

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

The lone wolf dies but the pack survives

That's a great example of a thing that could've been great if you described it in bullet points. Each surviving Stark kid, including Theon who completes his redemption arc by dying a proud Stark, kills the bad guy buy working together. But no Jon and Sansa aren't there, Arya does the deed, and neither her or Bran use their cool powers in any way.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

The lone wolf dies but the pack survives

quote:

When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives. Summer is the time for squabbles. In winter, we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths.

quote:

The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the darkness. She began to run.

quote:

The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.

quote:

For a long moment there was no sound but the wind and the water and the creak of leaf and limb. And then, far far off, beyond the godswood and the haunted towers and the immense stone walls of Harrenhal, from somewhere out in the world, came the long lonely howl of a wolf. Gooseprickles rose on Arya's skin, and for an instant she felt dizzy. Then, so faintly, it seemed as if she heard her father's voice. "When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives," he said.

quote:

Off in the distance, a wolf howled. The sound made her feel sad and lonely, but no less hungry.

bobjr posted:

There was probably a good time for her to head to Westeros when she got a huge army of unsullied, but then she says for 3-4 more seasons.

I wonder how people who had no idea she just sticks around and doesn’t leave took that development.

kaworu posted:

This (and several other recent comments) to me speaks to a fundamental area that GRRM *really* screwed up in, starting around the latter part of book 3 when a number of important plot threads begin to get wrapped up, and continuing onward from there. Thing is, there was supposed to be this really critical, significant, and important 5-year time skip that took place approximately at the end of ASOS, and the arcs of pretty much ALL the significant characters up to that point are ALL reaching natural resting points where the interesting plot action was supposed to come to a screeching halt.

You can run down essentially ALL of the main POV characters from the first three books within this context. Dany was supposed to stay in Meereen for 5 years as ruler, doing essentially nothing while her dragons (and base of power) both got significantly bigger and more imposing and grew up from a girl into a woman herself. Jon was supposed to be doing more or less the same thing as Lord Commander of the Night's Watch for 5 years - that is, doing little but consolidating power and growing to adulthood. Bran was supposed to have just reached Bloodraven in time to spend the next 5 years learning to be a badass Tree Wizard. Arya was also meant to be undergoing transformative training of her own in Braavos that frankly would have been cooler had it remained a mystery, and we just see Arya's return to Westeros transformed by her training. Sansa was tucked away safely in The Vale doing boring political machinations with Littlefinger. Catelyn and Robb's story had come to a natural conclusion, and coming back to her as Lady Stoneheart 5 years later probably would have been more meaningful. Everything with Tyrion since he left King's Landing has felt forced and contrived, which makes sense if you figure that his next appearance probably would have been immediately alongside Dany - which would've been much more interesting, and worked out far better.

That's not even taking into account other things he was very obviously setting up for the 5-year time skip - like Edric Storm, the Dayne bastard who was a little older than Arya (and Jon Snow's milk brother) and clearly meant to play some role - most likely wielding the sword Dawn - 5 years into the future. But because that didn't happen, little Edric gets dropped and instead this random edgelord named Darkstar who is "of the night" shows up out of nowhere and it feels really forced and stupid.

I dunno, I do remember there were reasons why he felt he had to abandon the time-skip, but I mean... from where I'm sitting, it sure looks like that was the single biggest way he wrote himself into a corner. Every last character is currently stuck in a place where they were obviously never intended to be.

It's like when you're playing massive open-world video game, and about two thirds of the way through the game when the map opens up completely, you get sidetracked doing all these optional sidequests and excessively challenging optional dungeons, ignoring the main quest completely for a while. But in the process you get bored with the game and lose interest, and never actually end up finishing. I feel like that's essentially what happened to GRRM.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

GRRM won’t ever release short books focused on individual POVs because he cannot resist rewriting entire plot lines when he reaches some problem and he can’t do that for published stuff.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

bobjr posted:

I do like how a large part of the final seasons was characters trying to convince Cersei to help them at no benefit to herself, at least in her mind, only for her to not do it.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Tbh I would've preferred Cersei successfully loving the idiot protagonists over and reigning forever

bobjr posted:

I do like how a large part of the final seasons was characters trying to convince Cersei to help them at no benefit to herself, at least in her mind, only for her to not do it.

roomtone posted:

I think Cersei is one of the few characters who doesn't get ruined towards the end. She acts like herself all the way through, and any stupidity on her part that I'm forgetting is totally explained by the fact Cersei is actually not as smart as she thinks she is, even if it is actually the writing just becoming lazy and bad.

roomtone posted:

I think Cersei is one of the few characters who doesn't get ruined towards the end. She acts like herself all the way through, and any stupidity on her part that I'm forgetting is totally explained by the fact Cersei is actually not as smart as she thinks she is, even if it is actually the writing just becoming lazy and bad.

roomtone posted:

most people will probably disagree but in my memory it's only after the sept blowup that the show really declines. s5 was kind of lovely but that was mostly due to boring storylines. s6 was a lot more entertaining. it's immediately obvious that something is off in s7. the moment bronn appears out of nowhere to pull jamie into the river to safety just as the dragon is about to incinerate him is the flashpoint where the show is now officially bad and it continues like that until the end.

Groovelord Neato posted:

The dip in quality between 4 and 5 was like falling off a cliff and 6 was still pretty poo poo but had some good moments like the sept explosion where you think oh maybe it'll go back to the good politics and consequences poo poo and they just totally gently caress it up.

Groovelord Neato posted:

She's sort of ruined by the fact that blowing up the sept didn't have a realistic fallout.

Precambrian posted:

So she just swirls a wine glass menacingly to remind us she's still in the show and will be relevant later, because doing things would take up too much time for D&D.

Precambrian posted:

Yeah, they just sort of hand Cersei wins because they know she has to be the final enemy for Jon/Daenerys/Tyrion to defeat, but the writers just don't care by that point and they have to wrap things up. They could have had a cornered and isolated Cersei nobody respects (outside of weird lunatics like Euron), but able to rebuild her power as Dany's forces are directed at, and ultimately chewed up by, the Zombie Crisis. Instead they just... have her defeat Highgarden and Dorne because the plot needs to move forward and they don't have enough episodes to really show what made Highgarden weak instead of a really dumb offhand line. And they certainly can't cover what the ramifications of blowing up the Sept and being forced to rely on honorless men (a good chance to show why honor actually mattered in the Medieval world) had for her. So she just swirls a wine glass menacingly to remind us she's still in the show and will be relevant later, because doing things would take up too much time for D&D.