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justintyme
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 Posted: 05/16/19 9:09 am ::: |
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Yeah, the writing's been bad, the decision to truncate the last two seasons to 7 and 6 episodes respectively when HBO was more than willing (would have preferred, actually) to have the full 10 episode slate, is just a mind-boggling creative decision...but that petition is just stupid.
We are not "owed" anything. We have no right to demand anything from them, including good writing. We have the option to not turn it on next week, or never watch a rerun. Or write criticism and explore the work on our terms.
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GlennMacGrady
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| Posted: 05/16/19 9:49 am ::: |
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| GlennMacGrady wrote: |
In addition, Thousands of Game of Thrones Fans Sign Petition Demanding Season 8 Remake:
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. . . thousands of fans have already thrown in the towel on the showrunners' version of Season 8 and are demanding HBO give someone else have a shot at bringing the series to a satisfying conclusion.
More than 46,000 people have now signed an unlikely, fantastical Change.org petition demanding a remake of the final season with someone else holding the keys to the adaptation of George R.R. Martin's still-unfinished A Song of Ice and Fire series.
"David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have proven themselves to be woefully incompetent writers when they have no source material (i.e. the books) to fall back on," the petition's originator wrote. |
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The TV Guide article has now been updated 12 hours later to say that 385,000 fans have now signed the petition. The actual petition is HERE, and as I type, more than 407,000 fans have signed, and is updating every second. |
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cthskzfn
Joined: 21 Nov 2004
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| Posted: 05/16/19 6:41 pm ::: |
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| 639,000+.
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justintyme
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| Posted: 05/16/19 7:00 pm ::: |
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2019/05/16/game-of-thrones-is-having-its-last-jedi-mass-effect-3-fan-rage-moment/#2b0a49148d5c
Forbes' Paul Tassi has a really good take on the petition that pretty much sums up my thoughts. (I also fully agree on his Last Jedi and Mass Effect 3 take as well here too...).
| Quote: |
| This is a complicated topic and I don’t think it comes down to just “entitled fans” versus “supreme creators,” the way some are saying. Yes, things like the petition are stupid, but I understand where the fan anger is coming from, because I feel it too. And to see concerns dismissed because people think fans are just looking for happy endings or their perfect versions of their favorite characters onscreen, that’s missing the point, as there are shades of grey here. |
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pilight
Joined: 23 Sep 2004
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| Posted: 05/16/19 7:08 pm ::: |
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| I don't think it's the "vast majority of fans" as he asserts. It's just a noisy minority.
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justintyme
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| Posted: 05/16/19 7:33 pm ::: |
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| pilight wrote: |
| I don't think it's the "vast majority of fans" as he asserts. It's just a noisy minority. |
The "vast" is likely an overstatement, but the "majority" part seems to be supported by the Critic and Audience scores of the episodes.
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pilight
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| Posted: 05/16/19 8:14 pm ::: |
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| justintyme wrote: |
| pilight wrote: |
| I don't think it's the "vast majority of fans" as he asserts. It's just a noisy minority. |
The "vast" is likely an overstatement, but the "majority" part seems to be supported by the Critic and Audience scores of the episodes. |
I put zero stock in online audience scores. Too easy to manipulate.
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GlennMacGrady
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| Posted: 05/16/19 10:32 pm ::: |
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Criticisms or not, the last episode should pull in a huge audience. Don't know that it can surpass the most watched series finale ever, the 1983 finale of M*A*S*H, which was watched by 105.9 million people in the U.S., 60% of American households, according to Nielsen.
Of course, GoT is watched worldwide, much of it probably on computer streaming, so I don't know how comparable statistics can be. |
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sambista
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| Posted: 05/17/19 2:00 am ::: |
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yeah, um, "audience scores" can only show percentages of those who participate in such ratings. another version of a vocal minority.
speaking of worldwide viewers, i was at a tennis tournament outside lisbon, talking with a friend about GoT, and one of the tournament staffers overheard me and yelled, in english, "please! don't say anything about that episode. i haven't watched it yet!"
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GlennMacGrady
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| Posted: 05/17/19 2:05 am ::: |
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| sambista wrote: |
yeah, um, "audience scores" can only show percentages of those who participate in such ratings. another version of a vocal minority.
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If that were true, all polling would be useless. If the (audience) sample is large and representative enough, the polling results can be statistically generalized to the (viewing) population at large. |
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sambista
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| Posted: 05/17/19 2:53 am ::: |
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| GlennMacGrady wrote: |
| sambista wrote: |
yeah, um, "audience scores" can only show percentages of those who participate in such ratings. another version of a vocal minority.
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If that were true, all polling would be useless. If the (audience) sample is large and representative enough, the polling results can be statistically generalized to the (viewing) population at large. |
i don't think you can compare the two. one is taken from among people who are exercising their rights as citizens. the other is taken from among people who have made a proactive choice to participate as fans. one is more passive; the other, more aggressive. they're not the same, as far as i'm concerned.
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justintyme
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| Posted: 05/17/19 8:23 am ::: |
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| While review bombing is definitely a thing, and should not be discounted out of hand, the fact that these scores are not limited to one or two places but are down across the board, and also echo the the thoughts of professional critics (whose numbers are not susceptible to these review bombs), and the fact that they are simply consistent with what we are actually seeing on the screen, should make us feel much more comfortable with their accuracy.
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sambista
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| Posted: 05/19/19 2:14 am ::: |
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this - said more clearly than i could have - is all i'm saying. "majority" in this case would be that group among a larger group of people proactively opining. it doesn't necessarily equal most of GoT watchers. you could call it an indicator, if you wished. rather like all the polls that said no way would trump win.
| the new york times wrote: |
Of course, readers who rate episodes on IMDb do not constitute a representative sample of television-watching Americans or even of all “Game of Thrones” fans. There’s nothing random about people who seek out and rate episodes of the television shows they just watched. Fans who particularly disliked the most recent episodes may be more likely to post reviews, or online reviewers may be demographically different from the show’s viewers as a whole.
But the general pattern shown here is consistent with the aggregate views of critics, who have been more positive about earlier seasons. Some particularly engaged fans have even set up a petition to remake the latest season, with 600,000 people signing on as of Thursday evening. |
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/17/upshot/game-of-thrones-imdb-ratings.html
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cthskzfn
Joined: 21 Nov 2004
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| Posted: 05/19/19 7:40 am ::: |
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| i'm anxious for the ending, just so I can read the bitching.
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pilight
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justintyme
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| Posted: 05/19/19 1:08 pm ::: |
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Very nice read! Thanks for sharing. I might need to contact the author and see if I can use it in class, as she brings a very interesting perspective that is sometimes hard to get across to students, and it being so topical could really be useful.
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pilight
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| Posted: 05/19/19 1:41 pm ::: |
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| justintyme wrote: |
Very nice read! Thanks for sharing. I might need to contact the author and see if I can use it in class, as she brings a very interesting perspective that is sometimes hard to get across to students, and it being so topical could really be useful. |
The shift started long before this season. The destruction of the Sept of Baelor, way back in season six, should have had wide ranging repercussions, but there haven't been any.
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GlennMacGrady
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| Posted: 05/19/19 3:22 pm ::: |
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| justintyme wrote: |
Very nice read! Thanks for sharing. I might need to contact the author and see if I can use it in class, as she brings a very interesting perspective that is sometimes hard to get across to students, and it being so topical could really be useful. |
Agree.
The author uses the lack of sociological story-telling skills among Hollywood writers to put the bad writing, plot holes and inconsistencies, compressed pace, and unearned character shifts into a larger matrix, which makes sense to me as to the reason so many fans feel let down by this season, notwithstanding the entertaining CGI pyrotechnics, the psychological heroism and evil of individual characters, and decent acting.
| Quote: |
For seven seasons, the show had focused on the sociology of what an external, otherized threat—such as the Night King, the Army of the Undead and the Winter to Come—would do to competing rivalries within the opposing camp. Having killed one of the main sociological tensions that had animated the whole series with one well-placed knife-stab, Benioff and Weiss then turned to ruining the other sociological tension: the story of the corruption of power.
. . . .
Told sociologically, Dany’s descent into a cruel mass-murderer would have been a strong and riveting story.
. . . .
Varys, the advisor who will die for trying to stop Dany, says to Tyrion that “every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” That is straight-up and simplistic genetic determinism, rather than what we had been witnessing for the past seven seasons. Again, sociological stories don’t discount the personal, psychological and even the genetic, but the key point is that they are more than “coin tosses”—they are complex interactions with emergent consequences: the way the world actually works. |
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During the Viet Nam War of the 1960's and early '70's there was a simplistic worldview of individual psychology that trumped the actual interplay of complex sociological and political forces: that the war would end if we only could kill one evil individual, Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Viet Nam. Many or most did not understand that Ho was merely a creature of his time and circumstance; that if he were killed, or had never even lived, another would have arisen and done the same things for his country. |
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cthskzfn
Joined: 21 Nov 2004
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| Posted: 05/19/19 7:47 pm ::: |
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As I rewatch Ep 5, I remember that I forgot to mention that the juxtaposition of arya and sandor as each struggled to survive was pretty good, imo. My initial sense was that both were fated to die, nearly simultaneously. That would have been poetic.
Alas, given that the writers are shit now, of course Arya was spared. 
Re: VietNam. The people with that view were as ignorant as those who thought "killing Saddam Hussein", among other folks presented over the years to the proles as "the enemy", was a legit call for the USA to "fight for good", when, in fact, mostly, it's just the usual USA/european white boy thirst to dominate and exploit non-whites.
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GlennMacGrady
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| Posted: 05/20/19 12:35 am ::: |
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The finale.
Given the few remaining main characters of interest and qualifications, I thought the episode was reasonably appropriate and the closure of the characters reasonably correlated to their overall series character arcs. Satisfying, but predictable in a clichéd way: evil punished, happy endings for everyone else. The only really unsatisfactory ending would have been a triumph by Daenerys.
Bran the Unspoken, the one remaining creature of magic, was the heavy betting favorite in Las Vegas. |
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sambista
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| Posted: 05/20/19 3:47 am ::: |
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| GlennMacGrady wrote: |
The finale.
Given the few remaining main characters of interest and qualifications, I thought the episode was reasonably appropriate and the closure of the characters reasonably correlated to their overall series character arcs. Satisfying, but predictable in a clichéd way: evil punished, happy endings for everyone else. The only really unsatisfactory ending would have been a triumph by Daenerys.
Bran the Unspoken, the one remaining creature of magic, was the heavy betting favorite in Las Vegas. |
agreed. i was a bit underwhelmed, but i have to admit i'm not sure what ending would've made me more satisfied.
i honestly never considered bran until folks started talking about him taking the throne.
among the best decisions they made was to make dany's death completely unceremonious. like other good- and evil-dooers, she was just another who came along and was, well, dispatched.
there's been a lot of talk about how rushed this season felt to people. i never felt that until this last epi.
one of my head-scratchers was drogon's behavior after dany was stabbed. he couldn't tell jon killed her (and, therefore, would've lit up his ass)? ok, he's just a dragon - how would he know? well, then, what was up with him burning down the throne? did he understand the significance of that? and if so, then he could've known, by his natural sense of smell, that jon was the killer. clueless and insightful. didn't work for me.
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Genero36
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pilight
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| Posted: 05/20/19 8:15 am ::: |
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| They wanted a man of noble birth and after recent events putting a Targaryen or Lannister in charge was a non-starter. That pretty much just left Bran.
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sambista
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| Posted: 05/20/19 9:08 am ::: |
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well, i finally read this, and the nyt critic was pretty unforgiving. though he ultimately claimed he wasn't dissing the show.
i agree with most of what he said. and i still celebrate "game of thrones" and am grateful for its many seasons of quality tv.
‘Game of Thrones’ Series Finale Recap: All Hail King Who?
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PUmatty
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| Posted: 05/20/19 10:23 am ::: |
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| justintyme wrote: |
Very nice read! Thanks for sharing. I might need to contact the author and see if I can use it in class, as she brings a very interesting perspective that is sometimes hard to get across to students, and it being so topical could really be useful. |
This may be of interest to you: I don't watch GOT, but this piece came up in my book club this weekend. We read the fantastic "There There" by Tommy Orange, but many (myself included) found the last section of the book out of place and unsatisfying. One friend then referenced this article and the book's shift from sociological to psychological. It fit pretty perfectly.
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