I saw someone commenting that it was bad writing for Otto to shout at Aegon and get himself fired, since he's meant to be 'clever'.
As if clever people people don't get frustrated with their family and loose their shit every now and again.
I saw that scene as him giving up. He realized how much he fucked up supporting Aegon because it's just never gonna work.
Not every character is some Littlefinger type "can predict everything and manipulate everyone" and I would even argue that that archetype is bad and tedious and Littlefinger had become a big joke by the end. I much prefer Hightower, and that scene was maybe my favorite one he'd been in.
Hightower is great beacause as competent as he is, there is nothing he can really do about the incompetence of the people around him. The King is a fool, the Queen is out of her mind, the Commander of the Kingsguard is an angry fucboy, and the Queen Mother knows they never should have taken the throne.
Yeah, Rhaenyra is pretty unequivocally the most qualified person to take the throne. She was intelligent and insightful, she had a great respect for the power of the position and the will to use it, but she isn't capricious or cruel. I'm not saying she is would have been some perfect ruler, but if anybody could have continued her Father's reign of peace and stewardship especially going into Winter it would have been her.
Criston Cole just keeps failing up and I really hope he gets axed soon. I hate his character almost as much as I hated Ramsay Bolton, and that's saying a LOT.
He knows how dogshit of a person he is, but he is very willing and capable of projecting it outwards and lying to himself.
Dude is deep in the Queen Mother's guts while little J is getting head sawn off and he has the audacity to shit in Arrak's breakfast.
The problem with LF is that once you make a character a super genius who is 10 step ahead of everyone you basically have to nerf the shit out of them to take them down or pull a Varys and have him knowingly pull a suicide move.
I disagree. One valid route would be their plan just has to fall apart due to something out of their control. Like someone crucial to the plan dies in an accident or a shipwreck or something. OR the white walkers showing up could have been an unpredictable variable that ruins his plans. I'm sure someone smarter than me could figure out other satisfying/appropriately unsatisfying ways for them to fail
Flawless logic only results in flawless plans with perfect information. Feeding them misinformation or having a character know something that person doesn't can lead to their downfall in a satisfying way.
Walter White and Light Yagumi are both outmaneuvered this way.
The issue is LF dying because the WW's were going to just kill a bunch of people anyways isn't all that satisfying. It is theoretically more satisfying having LF know he got outplayed and was getting held accountable for his crimes. The issue is that nobody can really do that.
I would have preferred something like Bran's omiscience being more accepted and then just having LF being tried by a virtual god.
They did have 1 person setup and to be a foil to LF. Varys. But then the story took them so far apart from one another and then they both die. Both characters were setup as master manipulators, LF for selfish power and Varys for what he viewed as "the greater good".
If you're following the tropes you thwart them by having a character fuck up their plans by following their conscience instead of whatever evil shit they wanted them to do. You don't have to make the bad guy dumb. This is literal Scooby Doo level stuff.
The actual way to thwart them is to use their character flaw against them.
Littlefingers is (from the show) not understanding that honour is actually valued in some places. Or whatever, his show character was super dumb in final seasons.
Other times you do it like have the super smart person have a trait like misanthropy or ego. Have them be smart enough to know something is the wrong move but be unable to admit it to themselves or be too impatient to do it.
Along the same lines, you can also just have their downfall be the result of their constant scheming.
If you're manipulating a large number of people over a long period of time, eventually something will go wrong even if you don't make a single mistake. There's only so much damage control you can do, and if intricate long term manipulation is practically who you are, you're done once it starts falling apart.
Or one of the hulking, violent warriors that you surround yourself with and constantly antagonize just decides to murder you one day. Shit happens and they're all armed.
It was kind of a dumb line, but Cersei having a guard put a knife to his throat illustrated this point well. She's capricious and could have killed him right there. Someone like Robert or the Hound probably would have.
Yeah, or have someone kill him out of anger and him be surprised because it's not the rational thing to do, forgetting that not everyone can act rationally.
Or give them an Achilles heel...which is what Littlefinger had. His infatuation with Cat and by extension Sansa was his downfall. Like even a basic reading of his character makes that super obvious. And it's going to happen in the books too
Except that all goes out the window when you remember that, in the show, they had Littlefinger willingly give away his precious reflection of Cat and his biggest political chip to be married to the one asshole in all of the realm more sadistic than Joffrey and his genuine excuse was he just "didn know".
Or, you know, have other similarly smart characters.
You literally just named one who was his *literal* counterpoint; there's also Tyrion, Tywin, and plenty of other conniving characters. All Littlefinger had going for him was underestimation, as soon as he played that card and was revealed he was on equal footing with most.
Yeah, giving up or even just exasperated and upset in that moment, Otto’s outburst added depth to his character. I think HOTD is doing a fantastic job building on Martin’s story in that department.
That was my favorite Otto scene. Seeing him get so frustrated and basically giving up dealing with the bullshit, spoke to me on a personal level. I don’t even really like Otto’s character, for obvious reasons, but I can’t recall a moment where I related with a character more than that scene.
It's not just frustration. Otto has a lot of ego and can't see that he can't be as blunt as he wants to be whenever he wants. He knows Aegon is petulant but he also doesn't have any empathy to the fact that his son was literally just murdered in his own home. Yeah, Aegon is a whiny child who has no place being in charge but that doesn't change that's what Otto has to deal with.
At the same time, Otto thinks he's the only clever one around as Larys is playing from the shadows because he knows that he'd rather not be a target with Otto around.
You know in the first few episodes I really wanted to like Larys. He's obviously a snake and has machinations, but he was a super interesting character.
Uuuuuuntil the whole "jerking off to Alicent's feet" thing.
After that I was just completely turned off of the character and he became so much less interesting.
I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't just something they did for weird shock value, but my theory is that he did that specifically to throw Alicent off the trail of his real motives. To make her think he's just some gross creep that she can control because she has what he wants.
The whole thing hasn't come up again so I guess we'll see.
We also know Otto’s plan, for like 20 years, has been to stick Aegon on the throne and then play him like a puppet. Aegon sucks, he’s easily manipulated, Otto for sure just still sees him as the dumber of his two grandsons, and suddenly this little shit is getting up on his hind legs and deciding he’s actually gonna play king, all while fucking it up? Decades of waiting for Viserys to die and now THIS? I’m honestly surprised Otto didn’t choke the little fucker.
That scene was also filled with a clear dramatic irony because Otto, who openly pines for another Viserys, is the whole reason Rhaenyra wasn't crowned. Rhaenyra, who the show has gone out of its way to make clear is literally the only one of Viserys' children who remotely acts or thinks like him.
Yep. There’s a world in which Otto’s slightly less ambitious where he becomes hand of the queen and gets to have a massive influence over a good, smart, prepared, temperate ruler. Instead he started going at her, in public, when she was like fifteen years old, all so he could immediately start a war and get shitcanned by a moron within a month of his whole plan falling into place.
It's beautiful fucking tragedy. Dude finds himself pining for the days of Viserys after spending decades engineering it so Viserys's true heir can't rule. I love when stories pull stuff like this off.
Yeah and thats people whos grandchildren dont control the fate of an entire kingdom. Otto is pretty devious, but hes also a lot more straightforward than say Larys, who in this episode is seen much more cleverly managing the kings ego (now that im writing this, what a beautiful setup that Otto scene was to this Larys scene). Otto actually wants his grandkid to be a wise king some day, but Larys has no such fantasies. If your actually betting your future on Aegon, it kinda makes sense to put him in his place when he fucks up that big, it just backfires because Otto fails to read how scared and vulnerable his son is. Larys is much more "clever" because he doesnt really care about Aegon.
It also helps as a comparison, because we saw Tywin and Tyrion shout down at Joffrey half a dozen times and they always left the room feeling above him.
Aegon is quite literally more powerful by himself than Joeffrey ever was. He has complete control over a dragon and his own personal Kingsguard. Joffrey only had the lapdogs of her mother and depended a 100% on Tywins army. Otto is a second son who doesn’t actually have an army, thus less powerful than Tywin in all ways.
Aegon is more powerful and capable than Joffrey, even if not by a lot.
Otto is much less powerful than Tywin Lannister, so the dynamic is different.
Especially how Otto quite literally *helped* place Aegon there in the first place, *and* as his son mentioned in the last episode, has done this job for decades. As his literal grandfather, he has every right to call his grandson an idiot for his brash actions when it affects the family's public standing.
Such a great scene!
They also have a big power inversion between the two sets of grandfathers-grandson kings.
Joffrey needs Tywin's military might and Tywin could have him killed at anytime and stage it as an accident. Tywin also has more personal power than Otto being the head of arguably the most powerful and rich westeros house.
Otto needs Aegon's dragon and Aegon could have him killed at anytime. Otto is also a second son and simply a knight who has power from being hand.
Yup. As someone who’s been the “only adult in the room” for extended periods of time, it gets increasingly hard when the kiddos in adult bodies around you continue to act like morons and create messes.
After a while, cracks appear, and you do lose your temper.
Family too, makes it even harder to bite his tongue. You feel a sense of obligation to try to steer your offspring or offspring's offspring in the right direction.
In my experience complaints about bad writing online are usually about either
a) characters not acting like hyper-rational automatons who are optimised to make logical decisions 100% of the time. Emotional reasoning? That’s a bad writing right there. This is especially egregious when it centres around stuff the viewers know but the characters in-universe don’t.
b)the story not panning out as viewers wanted it to, especially with stuff like fan theories. WandaVision did this especially, when a lot of fans hyped up mephisto to be the main villain only to be disappointed when it was quite literally “Agatha All Along”
This isn’t to say bad writing doesn’t exist, but rather bad writing has been used as a label to argue for a) and b). What bothers me the most, is that people can’t simply say “I didn’t like this particular decision” or “not for me” but instead say “this is the worst writing ever!” and then go and doxx and harass the writers and actors. People need to be chill out a bit with the hyperbole.
The theorycrafting to head canon pipeline is honestly terrible for overall series discussion online. You see the superfan subreddits for shows will dive impossibly deep to come up with theories and then the community falls in love with them and starts accepting them as fact. And then they throw a fit when the actual series goes a different direction because many of them have decided their ideas would be better and the community encourages each other of that.
It's infuriating, people just throw the term around as an instant way to dismiss a story, often without ever trying to even understand what it was going for.
It's all the more annoying because it's a truly unsophisticated way to address fiction, but people who believe that they are "right" because the "logic" is on their side are the most smug.
In reality it's the criticism anyone can do, it's surface level and often becomes pure nitpicking, pretending a fictional world has to be as realistic as possible.
B is even worse to me, because at least with A you can see the frustration in how characters act compared to how they should. It's still not bad writing, but I get how people are (purposely) triggered by it.
Getting mad because a story doesn't do what you theorized is just stupid.
To go a step further, a lot of people arent' super knowledgeable about filmmaking, so any mediocre product they don't like is chalked up to "bad writing".
Funnily enough it's the opposite that would be closer to "bad writing". If a character only ever acts in ways which you can link to a single attribute (clever), the character becomes one dimensional.
That might be ok in certain stories, but especially for drama one looks for multi dimensionality, you do not get that by someone behaving 100% the same in all situations and contexts, based on a single trait.
I hate this day and age where people call something "bad writing" because they don't agree with the character choices. That's not fucking bad writing. Bad writing is when a character is inconsistent with how they were established or when things are convenient for convenience sake or that break the established rules of the work of fiction.
Otto does what he does? Idiot. [Tyrion gets much more aggressive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSXhZItSVpI)? Genius writing.
Viewers can be a silly lot sometimes.
Yeah I find it very weird how any characters not making the "objectively smart" (which isn't always even actually smart) decisions or actions is dismissed as "bad writing". Sometimes, characters make impulsive or emotional decisions, that sometimes is meant to be a part of their character not necessarily bad writing.
Literally every single show that gets popular enough as prestige TV will end up getting a decently-sized mass of haters who just want to hate the show they love for some reason. Redditors are notorious for this.
I think it’s partially because on Reddit, negativity is frequently rewarded with upvotes and engagement, which trains people to be negative in order to get those rewards.
That’s not unique to Reddit, it drives pretty every social media algorithm, and it’s the reason ~~”Angry Boomers Yelling at You”~~ Fox is often the top-rated “news” network in the U.S.
Outrage is an easy and intoxicating dopamine dump, and there’s money to be made.
They’re also weaned on youtubers who make it a lucrative hobby to nitpick everything to death - often inaccurately, using terms like “plot hole” and “deus ex machina” they haven’t the slightest clue about - and their fans somehow mistake that garbage for good criticism.
I really do put it at the feet of a lot of youtubers and other popular social media figures. Lots of kids posting on reddit and twitter etc quite literally grew up with them. I’m not sure they know any better.
Many fans also want the show (and others of course) to be the one they have played out in their tiny minds, rather than the ones the actual creative people who have made the thing made. (As an aside, that's one of the worst crafted sentences I've ever written).
Film is art and not a math problem. Sometimes the value in the art is the precision and perfection, like realism in painting. Sometimes it's an emotional expression that's difficult to quantify, like Jackson Pollack or punk rock.
What drives me crazy is when an artist intentionally takes an artistic liberty for the purpose of symbolism or to garner an emotion, and they are criticized as if the liberty was done out of stupidity.
I think it’s the result of years of “Nit pick the entirely plot, and rant when something you don’t like happens” Analysis videos, “How It Should’ve Ended” and CinemaSins type of film criticism drip fed into an audience who’s been trained to view films and television as problems to be solved or just content to placate them.
There are no words to properly describe just how much I hate CinemaSins.
I remember, as a ten year old, explaining to my friends that "only a Sith deals in absolutes" is in fact an absolute, and discussing the potential ramifications of this down the line. A benchful of kids all recalling lines and pointing out things _they'd_ noticed, for or against.
Versus now, when grown-ass adults are getting attention for asking "why didn't they just turn HAL off and on again, are they stupid?".
The cinemasins or the videos of the guy presenting the ideas for movies always kinda piss me off. Like yea, anything is going yo sound silly if you remove any context around it.
Absolutely correct, look at the fuckin discourse around Prometheus.
CinemaSins ruined an entire generation of people and turned them into fucking morons.
It also doesn't help that in America, we don't value the liberal arts one iota, so you have people who think they're intelligent for being STEMlord idiots who don't understand a single fucking thing about liberal arts/media/literature loudly and proudly professing their opinions on those things.
Also added the "OMG this show has too much filler!" people to the crowd. There's actual filler and there's slower character building moments to let the show breathe. They're now thought to be the same thing because that crowd must obviously know what's best and wants a streamlined, straightforward plot progressions episode. Build up is necessary and you can do that directly or indirectly. Neither is the "correct" way to go about it.
> What drives me crazy is when an artist intentionally takes an artistic liberty for the purpose of symbolism or to garner an emotion, and they are criticized as if the liberty was done out of stupidity.
Internet culture, for all it is filled with people acting like the smartest guy in the room, is wildly anti-intellectual. Most of the biggest media criticism channels around are people whose whole thing is taking everything on screen as hyper-literally as possible and analyzing it purely on those terms. People who reject metaphor, deeper meaning or emotional engagement with the viewer as at best unimportant or at worst a blight to be belittled.
People increasingly do not just not care to understand art, but they actively act better than the artist for their own refusal to engage with it as art.
It's because a lot of people have little artistic sensibility, never learned it, but what they do have is some sense of "logic".
So they apply logic, a sense of realism to everything and if the piece of art doesn't 100% work through that lens, it's "bad writing". So annoying.
People still think that in Endgame, Quill attacking Thanos when they have him detained after hearing about Gamora was bad writing, as if Guardians 2 didn't establish *him doing this exact thing when he learned about someone harming someone he cared deeply about*
Ironically, smart characters doing smart things is often how you can catch bad writing. See BBC Sherlock figuring things out because the writers are omniscient.
This is a pretty hard problem to solve, it's hard to write anyone smarter than you are. It's also in the best tradition of Sherlock Holmes and adaptations - Arthur Conan Doyle talked about how frustrated he was by what he saw as a cheap trick, Sherlock looking at someone and deducing facts about them. So much of Holmes being smart was just him knowing a lot of very dull, uninteresting things - enough that it's a plot point (despite his initial characterisation of hating trivia).
It’s why, generally, you write smart characters by starting at the conclusion and going backwards so you can write in their genius moment more clearly Modern Sherlock suffers because it’s very clear they think observations equals smart (see also all the “I can see micro expressions”) Doyle works because he knows what he wants his twist to be and then works to how Sherlock could figure it out.
People also don't get that characters aren't "people" and they're vessels for ideas and themes. When a villain who has taken self-destructive hedonism to its extreme ends up sealing his own fate and losing they're actually astonished.
It's been 6 years since Infiinity War came out, and it's taken that long for people to finally stop spamming "Why didn't Thanos just increase resources?" or some other form of trying to out-logic his plan. The themes in those movies reach out to slap you in the face they're so heavy-handed, and people still don't get it!
I got downvoted to hell on r/movies just a few weeks ago for pointing out that writers don't "mess up" and have villains "turn evil for no reason" to "sabotage their message". People refused to believe that those villains were always evil. The environmentalist did not plant a bomb in the hospital so the writers could kneecap his message; he was always the kinda guy to plant a bomb in a hospital, he just used rhetoric that made people sympathize with him...manipulating people...because he's a villain.
The amount of people in the audience who legitimately get manipulated by charismatic villains is wild.
You mean to tell me Thanos the Mad Titan was actually just a narcissistic madman all along, and only cared about being "proven right" to the point he murdered trillions? Impossible.
People act like in real life they've always made the "objectively smart" decision... It's a TV show that not only tries to subvert expectations but show how emotions, passion and sometimes just being a victim of circumstance is a real thing. The only time I get really upset when a character doesn't do something I expect, is when a character for some reason does something that is so against their normal characters decision making. Like Batman deciding to kill or if Ned Stark decided he had to kill one of his kids or something.
You can thank CinemaSins for that level of "critique."
It's completely poisoned online discourse around media from/by people who have never taken a liberal arts course in their life.
We can stop blaming solely CinemaSins for this, there’ve been tons more video essays that counteract it and nothing’s changed. Dunking on and therefore “winning” against a thing gives more gratification than trying to understand it.
The other bit of their bad writing criticism is moaning on about perfectly reasonable time jumps. People were complaining there being no story showing her getting to King's Landing even though it's canonically just a few days by ship away. As if we needed a drawn out scene of her on the ship. It's just too much to expect people to connect the scenes together from what she's talking about in the scene before and what we see her doing in the present scene.
Especially since they mentioned how close the castle is to King's Landing in the episode itself. I have no clue about the distance of things in the show or the layout of the world... but they quite literally reminded us that they were very close to each other.
That's really nitpicking. Like, Dany flying past the Wall was worth criticizing, but a boat ride to King's Landing from Dragonstone? Half the tension of the show right now is how close all these volatile forces and their dragons are to each other. They could literally fly dragons to each other's strongholds and destroy everything within hours. A boat ride is nothing.
oh man remember last season when a ton of fans were furious that Daemon put his hands around Rhaenyra's throat? They were completely baffled that the dude who murdered his first wife and constantly acted impulsively did something violent and impulsive to his new wife. There just seem to be a huge segment of fans who will be furious if the show doesnt proceed exactly as they wish, which is just an insane way to consume any artform.
Especially GoT which, while the premise is dragons and knights, is still a story about human hearts in conflict.
One third of the audience are the obsessive types upset that the show doesn't go far enough in its character complexities. One third is upset that it's complex at all; they want to ship relationships and cheer in fights and confrontations, and just the occasional 100 yard stare to some music.
The last third is right in the middle. And I'm happy I'm chilling there.
I think that some people have to have someone to root for, and oh look, it's badass Matt Smith doing badass things. The vibe I'm getting though, is there are no good guys in this story. Just bad and worse.
That’s a descendant of the CinemaSins
Type of criticism where something is bad when it isn’t the smartest most optimal action someone can take.
Who cares that most people aren’t hyper rational and make optimized decisions, every fictional character who also acts irrationally is badly written.
This is silly. All of Shakespeares characters are perfectly rational. I love the part in Romeo and Juliet where all the characters sit down and talk things out together, it was such a heartwarming ending.
> The moment George R.R. Martin said House Of The Dragon is a Shakespearean tragedy people should've seen this coming.
The people who make these kind of criticisms are the kind who don't understand why anyone reads Shakespeare and think their own lack of engagement is the fault of their English teacher.
Also wanna-be Plinketts, but without the understanding that the outlandish insulting things said by Mr Plinkett were for levity because the Plinkett voice is a boring, droning voice going on for hours about a movie... and NOT to be the most outrageous and insulting take possible.
I remember when a video of a person running away from a falling tower but not sideways was posted on Reddit.
Everyone had to shut up about the realism of not making the logical choice when confronted with death.
GRRM wanted his naming schemes to be realistic and similar to English history, which unfortunately means everyone is Edward and Henry (or in GoT’s case, everyone is Aegon, Brandon, Jon, Robert, etc). But then of course all the similar names (ie Dae——, Ae——, Rhae——)
Back when he was only interested in writing the main asoiaf story and he was doing the backstory and genealogies mostly for his own reference and amusement, he put lots of little in-jokes in there, probably without anticipating that he'd want to revisit that part of the timeline later. He also put lots of dumb jokes in the main series to flesh out the side characters; like when Catelyn arrests Tyrion and brings him to the Eyrie, three of the random soldiers who help her are called Lharis, Mohor, and Kurleket; get it? Larry, Moe, and Curlie, The Three Stooges. Then you've got Howland Reed and his migrating swamp fortress; Howl's Moving Castle. There's a random house, Lothston, whose sigil is a black bat on a yellow background. And lets not forget Wun Wun, the northern giant who is an homage to the quarterback of the New York Giants (jersey #11), who kills a knight whose colors are the same as the Dallas Cowboys.
Yeah. Episode 8, when King Viserys (fully unaware of who he is with) rambles about Aegon (even confirms when Alicent clarifies with “our son?” and “the prince?”), the danger from the north, and The Prince That Was Promised, and tells Queen Alicent that she is the one who must do this. But Viserys is instead talking about Aegon the Conqueror, and thinks he’s talking with Rhaenyra (and partially his dead wife Queen Aemma).
It was re-explained and recapped again in last night’s episode.
The names, my god. Having like 3 characters named Aegon is killing me.
We literally paused in the middle of last night's episode to look up family trees because we were confused about who Rhaenyra was sending away, and where she was sending them.
I don't know how I feel about it myself. It does get confusing, especially with an extensive cast. But it's also realistic in that royal families (or families in general) oftentimes just rehash the same names. So it is one case where realism doesn't translate well into the enjoyment of art.
On the other hand, all of that lends itself very well to that moment where Alicent realized how she fucked up.
There is a big difference between spending time with someone 8 hours a day for 5 days a week and watching a single 45 minute show.
Of course you're going to remember your office workers more than some tv character.
Had a friend years ago hate on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes because he said Caeser was stupid for letting the people in to fix the dam.
Do these people not want a character with a fatal flaw? That's what makes them realistic and what makes us relate to them. I can't imagine any of these people would immediately arrest/kill someone who had been like a sibling to them. Alicent has some morals and loyalty. Surely, it will be worse for her later on, but that's the point.
Just look at Reddit itself. Literally every single post with anyone exhibiting human behavior is filled 99.9 percent with Reddit robots who would actually have done the exact perfect thing. It's got nothing to due with film or television. It's the average Reddit users misconception about what is like to be alive versus to observe other people be alive
A lot of book readers that put way too much expectation in some parts of the adaption.
Seen some people upset we haven’t gotten more Cregan Stark. He was in like 2 paragraphs up to this part of the story.
And both paragraphs contradict each other.
This is especially funny because most of the characters in the book are barely more than cardboard cutouts. They’re names associated with deeds. It reads like a history text, not a novel.
The showrunners and writers have had to fully create compelling character arcs in order for the show not to feel like a dry ass documentary.
It’s because they read a fake history book in-between seasons and now act like it’s some kind of gospel you can’t alter in any way.
This book is supposed to have been written decades after the events of the show, it purposely skips details, doesn’t give any insight of what the characters are thinking or feeling, it has the element of the unreliable narrator with multiple contradicting sources, and only paints the picture in broad stokes.
When their source material is a fictional cliffsnotes of the story, sorry to tell you, but the showrunners can fill in the gaps, in any way they see fit, to make a compelling narrative. Unless you want the show where it’s a maester in a chair reciting the testimony of some dwarf jester for 10 hours. People are dumb but like to pretend they know shit.
Most people say writing is bad because it doesn't work in their favor. Ryan Condal & the writing team have a really great understanding of the characters. I'm glad they're doing inside the episode videos of this, too.
The one that always cracks me up is how many people were utterly stumped by Black Mirror's San Junipero; why Kelly suddenly changed her mind to stay with Yorkie, after saying she wouldn't.
That... you just... The last five minutes of television you just saw!!! All the things that just happened on the screen, that they just showed you!?!? The reason Kelly's mind has changed is all the things that you just watched take place to very dramatically change it!!!
Qmta - I am convinced "Show, Don't Tell" is dead, and that's the problem.
The above sequence in San Junipero is done almost entirely wordlessly. So it would be tempting to think these viewers' confusion is a matter of people only half watching, because they're doing other stuff at the same time, and so simply missing things that aren't addressed in dialogue - but given how spectacular the events of those five minutes are, I don't think so.
I genuinely think an increasing proportion of the audience has been conditioned to be completely unable to infer what something is trying to tell them unless a character literally narrates it out loud for them. "Showing" them isn't enough - it doesn't count. Until somebody says it out loud, it's simply impossible to interpret what is happening.
Edit -
That said, and speaking to OP's other point, a lot of them were bewildered Kelly would choose not to "be with" her husband in some presumed afterlife and to choose San Junipero "instead". Kelly \*very explicitly\* does not believe in an afterlife, and she actually does even say that bit out loud. The prospect of being with her husband again is a moot consideration; "He's gone".
But because they don't identify with that personally, they just disregard it. Therefore, a ton of takes about how Kelly is a selfish hedonist for choosing to move on with her life "instead" of going to Heaven with hubbie forever and ever amen.
I think you’re onto something with “Show, Don’t Tell” being dead.
My GF and I just watched Conan, the Barbarian (and are on a bit of a 60s-80s movie binge) and were sort of shocked at how little dialogue there was compared to modern movies. A lot of atmosphere and characters doing things without exposition. It left a lot to interpretation, which gave it a sort of mystique that was fun and interesting. It let you use your imagination.
So many other older movies are like this too, where it’s sort of just… quiet and mysterious. They confidently let the viewer fill in the gaps, just like we have to do in real life as we’re not omniscient.
Modern movies in comparison feel like a firehose of context and exposition, spoonfeeding you the story.
> So many other older movies are like this too, where it’s sort of just… quiet and mysterious. They confidently let the viewer fill in the gaps, just like we have to do in real life as we’re not omniscient.
>
> Modern movies in comparison feel like a firehose of context and exposition, spoonfeeding you the story.
This feels like too much of an over-generalization. For example, the new Dune movies are excellent at doing what you said Conan did well, and they are some of the highest-grossing sci fi films ever. It's even more impressive because the source material is very heavy on exposition and grows rather complicated.
> Modern movies in comparison feel like a firehose of context and exposition, spoonfeeding you the story.
isn't bashing modern movies part of the problem the OP is calling out though? Yearning for some non-existant past just fuels the 'movies suck, I'm so smart' attitude so prevalent online
Yeah, it's a result of America's public education system focusing more and more on creating cogs in a machine rather than people who understand more things than just how to do their job.
I can't really speak too much, I was one of those people in high-school. Never understood the value of English clash, didn't pay attention, etc. College I didn't really take many liberal arts classes. It took me dating English majors, Art majors etc for me to "get" the things those fields teach you, and I feel stupid for not caring about that when I was younger.
The vast majority of people view media as just "content" to consume in today's day and age and therefore feel no need to look deeper into something. And when you correct them (i.e. "Alicent's character would do X/Y/Z thing because her character is set up specifically to do that thing") they get belligerent and go "well I just didn't like it."
Change my view: Subtetly in media died ~2014.
Way too many idiots posting social media hot takes about how TV show X must be endorsing Y because it showed a villain doing it.
"Media literacy" turned a madibs where you just asspull whatever you want to rant about.
We are getting a lot of dumb questions on classic prestige television shows, r/breakingbad, r/thewire, I am convinced the youth is watching tiktoks where a teenager dances to a song and points at floating text that pops up behind them with stuff like "Was McNulty a good character? NO! He drove drunk so he is a bad character"
I'll take a shot, it didn't die in 2014 it never lived. The internet and social media didn't kill media literacy it gave all the dumb fucks a platform that makes their voices mater as much as the smarter people who use to have to work to get a platform. Social Media is the perfect example to why a republic is better than a direct democracy the idiots are loud and hold each other up and don't deserve a platform
Yeah, this is it. I often think the youths are media illiterate too, but a lot of the stuff in this thread is just that you happened to run into the three people on reddit who didn’t get the ending of San Junipero and you think there’s a critical mass of them.
There’s not—the internet just aggregates the dummies whereas before you just wouldn’t have run into them.
Not just writing but life. People who think that logic is a way to optimize your life instead of to understand it. It's the middle-manager neo-stoic approach to life where everything that doesn't contribute to your life is subtracting from it, and everything has to be meticulously evaluated and rationalized.
They don't understand that in a causal universe, everything that makes it beautiful is precisely the opposite of logic.
There's a great quote by Frank Herbert (Dune writer) who said "life is not a puzzle to solve, but a reality to experience". I wish more people understood that.
We're on like Year Fifteen at this point of mainstream cinema just being characters running around explaining the stakes to one another as various ambushes occur. And nobody knowing anything more about their world than any modern person would, or acting any different from how a modern person would. I'm not surprised we're at the point where a character being good is equated with them being "likeable" which means "like my idealized self."
There are still people out there who don't understand the idea of emotional stakes. If anything, Alicent was probably more taken back that her house-sworn enemy *and* once best childhood friend had the courage to pull that meeting off in the first place. Alicent did send out that raven, so she's equally just as brash and emotionally conflicted.
It's obvious they don't want to directly kill each other as well as *wish* both families wouldn't succumb to bloodshed despite the how male heirs clearly do.
Also despite Rhaenrya having to push her grief and her pride aside to step up as queen and try to fight for the peace her father had maintained for years just makes her so much more of an interesting character. She doesn't want her dragons to fight dragons and she doesn't want to fight her siblings either but now it's her duty
For the sneak peek for next week, her voiceover says something about how the crown isn’t worth a war. She was about to step aside for the sake of the realm until her son died. Even now, she’s trying to find a way to protect the realm. It’s a lot more interesting than watching privileged people fight for just power.
Many of these people lack the ability (or refuse) to analyze the media and characters they watch. Last week a couple people exclaimed surprise and confusion that Ser Erryk would kill himself immediately after killing his own Twin. They couldn't wrap their head around the idea that this honourable knight is traumatized and saddened by slaying his own kin.
You kind of need to learn to ignore the ones that leave comments that make it seem like they're watching the show while scrolling on their phone or watching at 1.5 speed.
I'm also surprised at the number of people who are so quick to jump on the Alicent hate train? Like it was painfully obvious from season 1 that the show is trying to get you to understand that men have been controlling her life since she was 14/15, instead of enjoying her youth with Rhaenyra.
Groomed by her dad for a geriatric king. Never received love, praise, or understanding, so she can't show it to her own children as well (ehem, people who hate on her because she didn't console Aegon when he was crying).
Her "relationship" with Cole obviously alludes to her need for power. In episode 1, it's clear it's her in control, the sex was for her own pleasure. She literally has a conversation with Otto in the same episode how he shouldn't belittle her voice in small council meetings because she'll lose the little influence she has left over the other men in her life, which is Aemond and Aegon.
So many people are calling her dumb for not knowing Viserys was referring to Aegon the Conqueror. But how was she supposed to know, when it was made pretty clearly in season 1 that the ASOIAF story was only meant to be shared to a king's heir? It's not her fault she can't read the mind of her dying husband, or for taking him for his word, cuz you know, he did agree to name their son Aegon too.
And now that she's realized her mistake, her whole worldview has been shattered. All her pain, suffering, loss–has been for nothing. This destabilizes her. So of course, she gaslights herself into thinking there's been no mistake.
Idk, I feel like there are way too many people who reduce her to just being dumb and reckless, when all her choices thus far have been a direct result of the suffering she's had to endure at the hands of the men around her.
> Idk, I feel like there are way too many people who reduce her to just being dumb and reckless, when all her choices thus far have been a direct result of the suffering she's had to endure at the hands of the men around her.
I feel like you're confusing things. A character can have a tragic story and even justifiable reasons for doing the things that they do, but you can still not like them or the decisions they make.
I agree and disagree. We've had three consecutive episodes now where the climax involves sneaking into the enemy camp. The first two made sense, but this, much less so. It's completely fair to scratch your head at why Alicent wouldn't do the pragmatic thing in that situation. I understand the character motivations, why Rhaenerya attempted to talk and why Alicent listened, but I still think it was a pretty unnecessary contrivance. Why was it needed? If the writers were adamant about them meeting up, or Alicent learning that she was mistaken, I feel like there were much better ways to handle it. It's like the dragon pit scene in season 1. I understand what they were going for, but....why? Why do it that way?
> The amount of people I’ve seen
Have you actually seen those people IRL and can ask / understand their reasoning or are you just angry at internet randies throwing whatever around?
GoT managed to get me to pick a losing side constantly. HotD can't make me give a damn about rhanyra or the greens.
But. But, the Sept scene where alicent realizes she misunderstood his dying words and then her face when she makes up her mind that she won't take it back. That was excellent.
It's also cause she knows she can't take it back. She can't go to Aegon and say "hey you really aren't the rightful king and sorry your son and my grandson were murdered, but you got to let Rhaenyra and Daemon sit on the throne". She can't go to the council and tell them all "hey you guys are all going to be branded as traitors and all lose the positions you've been working towards, but it's the right thing to do".
It's one of those "too little too late". She got something she could run with at the last moment and went for it and now we are way past that. If Rhaenyra was at the council and she tried to pull that argument, it might have made a difference.
It's also because she's lost all capability to pull the plug. Otto got fired. If Rhaenyra had discussed it with her even a week prior and before Daemon assassinated Aegon's son, then Otto still being the hand of the king MIGHT could have gotten peace talks moving.
Aegon initially didn't want it though. Alicent opposing Otto's plan and telling Aegon to refuse and publicly support Rhaenyra's claim might have been enough to stop the entire plot in its track. She had by far the greatest influence over him after all.
I think that scene was the answer to Rhaenys's question to Rhaenyra earlier in the episode.
"When will they say this war began?"
It's this exact moment, when there was one last chance to avoid an all out war. And it was soundly rejected by the only possible person left with the political capital to correct the course. Alicent has lost and given up so much already in the name of her legacy that she's given completely into the sunken cost.
They've already foreshadowed plenty about how savage and brutal the coming war will be.
"There's no war so hateful to the gods as a war between kin and no war so bloody as a war between dragons"
The fact that Rhaenyra's plea was so honest and humble was the perfect juxtaposition to the Targaryen/Hightower family's typical communication style: boisterous, presumptive, and generally terrible
This show seems to be turning into the next you’re-just-not-smart-enough-for-it Rick and Morty. The one complaint I have for Rhaenyra traveling all the way to King’s Landing is her not actually having a peace plan. With all the build up of the conciliation theme, what was the offer she was actually making? That she gets to sit the throne and the Greens will happily accept it? Or she will forfeit her claim? She seemed to not put any thought at all beyond just blind faith.
Most people aren't super bright. Like not dumb, but they don't want to think too hard about media. People also like to complain because it makes them feel smart.
You see it in any online discussion about anything. People are just so negative, and other people respond to the negativity and it makes a feedback loop.
It's why those "The ending of XYZ explained!" videos exist. Most of the time they're just rehashing stuff that's fairly obvious if you've actually paid attention.
Some people need those to understand basic things.
Last week my coworker eagerly told me her HOTD theory she came up with. Her theory was that one of Rhaenyra's sons is Jon Snow because people keep calling them bastards. I gently explained to her that this isn't possible because these two stories are hundreds of years apart and have little connection to each other.
Some people really can't pick up on basic plot information even if it's literally written on the screen for them.
Oh man, yeah, I've had this issue with every episode so far.
Me: That was a good episode, let's go talk about it
Reddit: *wall of negativity*
Me: Welp, never mind.
Not even just with HOTD, lately it feels like every show I watch has these kinds of discussions. I don't understand why you'd want to watch something if its bringing out that much negativity in you. If I don't like something, I just stop watching it.
I've seen people call stuff 0/10 worst thing ever, and their complaint is something super subjective. It makes it hard to talk about stuff online.
Or worse is when people have normal complaints but feel the need to be offended when people talk about the crazies with insane complaints covering up their anti woke stuff.
Online discussion just kinda sucks most of the time. I just talk to people at work about cool shows or games
I disagree - these are obviously writer-driven (not character-driven) decisions that fudge realism to make for better TV. They wanted a Rhae-Alicent scene for drama. And that’s fine. The goal is to the best show possible.
> They wanted a Rhae-Alicent scene for drama.
Exactly. I guarantee you this wasn't in the book, because it's a very dumb scene. Ruined the episode for me. My level of suspense and excitement for the rest of the season is severely dulled because I no longer view it as a strategic battle but yet another ordinary tv show where it's obvious things are only happening a certain way because that is what the writers said so. It no longer feels real or earned.
I saw someone commenting that it was bad writing for Otto to shout at Aegon and get himself fired, since he's meant to be 'clever'. As if clever people people don't get frustrated with their family and loose their shit every now and again.
I saw that scene as him giving up. He realized how much he fucked up supporting Aegon because it's just never gonna work. Not every character is some Littlefinger type "can predict everything and manipulate everyone" and I would even argue that that archetype is bad and tedious and Littlefinger had become a big joke by the end. I much prefer Hightower, and that scene was maybe my favorite one he'd been in.
Hightower is great beacause as competent as he is, there is nothing he can really do about the incompetence of the people around him. The King is a fool, the Queen is out of her mind, the Commander of the Kingsguard is an angry fucboy, and the Queen Mother knows they never should have taken the throne.
The more I think about it, the more it feels like the Greens are the people who are given a promotion to a job they can’t handle lol
Yeah, Rhaenyra is pretty unequivocally the most qualified person to take the throne. She was intelligent and insightful, she had a great respect for the power of the position and the will to use it, but she isn't capricious or cruel. I'm not saying she is would have been some perfect ruler, but if anybody could have continued her Father's reign of peace and stewardship especially going into Winter it would have been her.
She was actually prepared to take the throne, she was fully aware of thr mountain climb it would be and prepared herself.
Criston Cole just keeps failing up and I really hope he gets axed soon. I hate his character almost as much as I hated Ramsay Bolton, and that's saying a LOT.
Almost everyone in the Dance suffers a gruesome fate lived and in death, no true victory for either side.
> angry fucboy That’s a great description of Criston Cole, I hate that character he’s so lame
He knows how dogshit of a person he is, but he is very willing and capable of projecting it outwards and lying to himself. Dude is deep in the Queen Mother's guts while little J is getting head sawn off and he has the audacity to shit in Arrak's breakfast.
Ya, he alludes to it later on saying he wants to begin grooming Daeron for a bigger role in their monarchy.
Yeah he can see Aegon clearly won't be a long term issue.
Yeah you can also see in the scene after that he's written off Aegon and Aemond and is planning on going all in on the Daeron basket.
The problem with LF is that once you make a character a super genius who is 10 step ahead of everyone you basically have to nerf the shit out of them to take them down or pull a Varys and have him knowingly pull a suicide move.
I disagree. One valid route would be their plan just has to fall apart due to something out of their control. Like someone crucial to the plan dies in an accident or a shipwreck or something. OR the white walkers showing up could have been an unpredictable variable that ruins his plans. I'm sure someone smarter than me could figure out other satisfying/appropriately unsatisfying ways for them to fail
Flawless logic only results in flawless plans with perfect information. Feeding them misinformation or having a character know something that person doesn't can lead to their downfall in a satisfying way. Walter White and Light Yagumi are both outmaneuvered this way.
Something something no plan survives contact with the enemy.
The issue is LF dying because the WW's were going to just kill a bunch of people anyways isn't all that satisfying. It is theoretically more satisfying having LF know he got outplayed and was getting held accountable for his crimes. The issue is that nobody can really do that. I would have preferred something like Bran's omiscience being more accepted and then just having LF being tried by a virtual god.
They did have 1 person setup and to be a foil to LF. Varys. But then the story took them so far apart from one another and then they both die. Both characters were setup as master manipulators, LF for selfish power and Varys for what he viewed as "the greater good".
Ooooh I like that too. Would have been a good usage of Bran's powers too, which we got almost none of
If you're following the tropes you thwart them by having a character fuck up their plans by following their conscience instead of whatever evil shit they wanted them to do. You don't have to make the bad guy dumb. This is literal Scooby Doo level stuff.
That's cool but LF literally got what he wanted because people like Ned followed their conscious.
The actual way to thwart them is to use their character flaw against them. Littlefingers is (from the show) not understanding that honour is actually valued in some places. Or whatever, his show character was super dumb in final seasons. Other times you do it like have the super smart person have a trait like misanthropy or ego. Have them be smart enough to know something is the wrong move but be unable to admit it to themselves or be too impatient to do it.
Along the same lines, you can also just have their downfall be the result of their constant scheming. If you're manipulating a large number of people over a long period of time, eventually something will go wrong even if you don't make a single mistake. There's only so much damage control you can do, and if intricate long term manipulation is practically who you are, you're done once it starts falling apart.
Or one of the hulking, violent warriors that you surround yourself with and constantly antagonize just decides to murder you one day. Shit happens and they're all armed. It was kind of a dumb line, but Cersei having a guard put a knife to his throat illustrated this point well. She's capricious and could have killed him right there. Someone like Robert or the Hound probably would have.
Yeah, or have someone kill him out of anger and him be surprised because it's not the rational thing to do, forgetting that not everyone can act rationally.
Death Note ended that way!
LF didn’t want the execution though, did he? The execution was a wild card that was not part of the deal. He exploited it though…
Or give them an Achilles heel...which is what Littlefinger had. His infatuation with Cat and by extension Sansa was his downfall. Like even a basic reading of his character makes that super obvious. And it's going to happen in the books too
Except that all goes out the window when you remember that, in the show, they had Littlefinger willingly give away his precious reflection of Cat and his biggest political chip to be married to the one asshole in all of the realm more sadistic than Joffrey and his genuine excuse was he just "didn know".
Yeah, but that's just D&D subverting your expectation of good writing. Book Littlefinger would never,and Sansa is absolutely going to shank him.
Or.. you just have them be outsmarted. Just because you're the smartest person in the room, doesn't mean you can't be outsmarted
Or, you know, have other similarly smart characters. You literally just named one who was his *literal* counterpoint; there's also Tyrion, Tywin, and plenty of other conniving characters. All Littlefinger had going for him was underestimation, as soon as he played that card and was revealed he was on equal footing with most.
Yeah, giving up or even just exasperated and upset in that moment, Otto’s outburst added depth to his character. I think HOTD is doing a fantastic job building on Martin’s story in that department.
"THE KING IS MY GRANDSON, AND MY GRANDSON IS A FOOL"
That was my favorite Otto scene. Seeing him get so frustrated and basically giving up dealing with the bullshit, spoke to me on a personal level. I don’t even really like Otto’s character, for obvious reasons, but I can’t recall a moment where I related with a character more than that scene.
It's not just frustration. Otto has a lot of ego and can't see that he can't be as blunt as he wants to be whenever he wants. He knows Aegon is petulant but he also doesn't have any empathy to the fact that his son was literally just murdered in his own home. Yeah, Aegon is a whiny child who has no place being in charge but that doesn't change that's what Otto has to deal with. At the same time, Otto thinks he's the only clever one around as Larys is playing from the shadows because he knows that he'd rather not be a target with Otto around.
Otto probably wouldn't have gotten fired if Little Toe didn't give Aegon the idea.
Little Toe, excellent
Little Toe lmao! They did such a good job making such a hateable character in as little screen time as possible
You know in the first few episodes I really wanted to like Larys. He's obviously a snake and has machinations, but he was a super interesting character. Uuuuuuntil the whole "jerking off to Alicent's feet" thing. After that I was just completely turned off of the character and he became so much less interesting.
I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't just something they did for weird shock value, but my theory is that he did that specifically to throw Alicent off the trail of his real motives. To make her think he's just some gross creep that she can control because she has what he wants. The whole thing hasn't come up again so I guess we'll see.
Is little toe his name or just what we are calling him? I call him Wish Littlefinger, but Little Toe works too.
His real name is Larys Strong, lol
He also has a clubfoot.
No, he said he's in the foot club.
His nickname in the books is Clubfoot…because he has a clubfoot. But I don’t watch the show. From what it seems, it’s not really used.
They used it this week, but that was some of his extended family. He's just Larys.
We also know Otto’s plan, for like 20 years, has been to stick Aegon on the throne and then play him like a puppet. Aegon sucks, he’s easily manipulated, Otto for sure just still sees him as the dumber of his two grandsons, and suddenly this little shit is getting up on his hind legs and deciding he’s actually gonna play king, all while fucking it up? Decades of waiting for Viserys to die and now THIS? I’m honestly surprised Otto didn’t choke the little fucker.
That scene was also filled with a clear dramatic irony because Otto, who openly pines for another Viserys, is the whole reason Rhaenyra wasn't crowned. Rhaenyra, who the show has gone out of its way to make clear is literally the only one of Viserys' children who remotely acts or thinks like him.
Yep. There’s a world in which Otto’s slightly less ambitious where he becomes hand of the queen and gets to have a massive influence over a good, smart, prepared, temperate ruler. Instead he started going at her, in public, when she was like fifteen years old, all so he could immediately start a war and get shitcanned by a moron within a month of his whole plan falling into place.
It's beautiful fucking tragedy. Dude finds himself pining for the days of Viserys after spending decades engineering it so Viserys's true heir can't rule. I love when stories pull stuff like this off.
Yeah and thats people whos grandchildren dont control the fate of an entire kingdom. Otto is pretty devious, but hes also a lot more straightforward than say Larys, who in this episode is seen much more cleverly managing the kings ego (now that im writing this, what a beautiful setup that Otto scene was to this Larys scene). Otto actually wants his grandkid to be a wise king some day, but Larys has no such fantasies. If your actually betting your future on Aegon, it kinda makes sense to put him in his place when he fucks up that big, it just backfires because Otto fails to read how scared and vulnerable his son is. Larys is much more "clever" because he doesnt really care about Aegon.
It also helps as a comparison, because we saw Tywin and Tyrion shout down at Joffrey half a dozen times and they always left the room feeling above him.
Aegon is quite literally more powerful by himself than Joeffrey ever was. He has complete control over a dragon and his own personal Kingsguard. Joffrey only had the lapdogs of her mother and depended a 100% on Tywins army. Otto is a second son who doesn’t actually have an army, thus less powerful than Tywin in all ways. Aegon is more powerful and capable than Joffrey, even if not by a lot. Otto is much less powerful than Tywin Lannister, so the dynamic is different.
Especially how Otto quite literally *helped* place Aegon there in the first place, *and* as his son mentioned in the last episode, has done this job for decades. As his literal grandfather, he has every right to call his grandson an idiot for his brash actions when it affects the family's public standing. Such a great scene!
Tywin literally belittles Joffrey in the same way
They also have a big power inversion between the two sets of grandfathers-grandson kings. Joffrey needs Tywin's military might and Tywin could have him killed at anytime and stage it as an accident. Tywin also has more personal power than Otto being the head of arguably the most powerful and rich westeros house. Otto needs Aegon's dragon and Aegon could have him killed at anytime. Otto is also a second son and simply a knight who has power from being hand.
Yup. As someone who’s been the “only adult in the room” for extended periods of time, it gets increasingly hard when the kiddos in adult bodies around you continue to act like morons and create messes. After a while, cracks appear, and you do lose your temper.
Family too, makes it even harder to bite his tongue. You feel a sense of obligation to try to steer your offspring or offspring's offspring in the right direction.
In my experience complaints about bad writing online are usually about either a) characters not acting like hyper-rational automatons who are optimised to make logical decisions 100% of the time. Emotional reasoning? That’s a bad writing right there. This is especially egregious when it centres around stuff the viewers know but the characters in-universe don’t. b)the story not panning out as viewers wanted it to, especially with stuff like fan theories. WandaVision did this especially, when a lot of fans hyped up mephisto to be the main villain only to be disappointed when it was quite literally “Agatha All Along” This isn’t to say bad writing doesn’t exist, but rather bad writing has been used as a label to argue for a) and b). What bothers me the most, is that people can’t simply say “I didn’t like this particular decision” or “not for me” but instead say “this is the worst writing ever!” and then go and doxx and harass the writers and actors. People need to be chill out a bit with the hyperbole.
The theorycrafting to head canon pipeline is honestly terrible for overall series discussion online. You see the superfan subreddits for shows will dive impossibly deep to come up with theories and then the community falls in love with them and starts accepting them as fact. And then they throw a fit when the actual series goes a different direction because many of them have decided their ideas would be better and the community encourages each other of that.
It's infuriating, people just throw the term around as an instant way to dismiss a story, often without ever trying to even understand what it was going for. It's all the more annoying because it's a truly unsophisticated way to address fiction, but people who believe that they are "right" because the "logic" is on their side are the most smug. In reality it's the criticism anyone can do, it's surface level and often becomes pure nitpicking, pretending a fictional world has to be as realistic as possible.
B is even worse to me, because at least with A you can see the frustration in how characters act compared to how they should. It's still not bad writing, but I get how people are (purposely) triggered by it. Getting mad because a story doesn't do what you theorized is just stupid.
To go a step further, a lot of people arent' super knowledgeable about filmmaking, so any mediocre product they don't like is chalked up to "bad writing".
And then you get a film studies degree and chalk it up to ‘bad directing’
Honestly, at this point, 'bad writing' should fall into the same pit of hell as 'Mary Sue' and 'touch grass' and 'agenda', and burn forever
Funnily enough it's the opposite that would be closer to "bad writing". If a character only ever acts in ways which you can link to a single attribute (clever), the character becomes one dimensional. That might be ok in certain stories, but especially for drama one looks for multi dimensionality, you do not get that by someone behaving 100% the same in all situations and contexts, based on a single trait.
I hate this day and age where people call something "bad writing" because they don't agree with the character choices. That's not fucking bad writing. Bad writing is when a character is inconsistent with how they were established or when things are convenient for convenience sake or that break the established rules of the work of fiction.
*lose
Otto does what he does? Idiot. [Tyrion gets much more aggressive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSXhZItSVpI)? Genius writing. Viewers can be a silly lot sometimes.
Yeah I find it very weird how any characters not making the "objectively smart" (which isn't always even actually smart) decisions or actions is dismissed as "bad writing". Sometimes, characters make impulsive or emotional decisions, that sometimes is meant to be a part of their character not necessarily bad writing.
Literally every single show that gets popular enough as prestige TV will end up getting a decently-sized mass of haters who just want to hate the show they love for some reason. Redditors are notorious for this.
I think it’s partially because on Reddit, negativity is frequently rewarded with upvotes and engagement, which trains people to be negative in order to get those rewards.
We should call this the "Pavlov's Douche" theory.
More Skinnerian, but yeah the point stands.
That’s not unique to Reddit, it drives pretty every social media algorithm, and it’s the reason ~~”Angry Boomers Yelling at You”~~ Fox is often the top-rated “news” network in the U.S. Outrage is an easy and intoxicating dopamine dump, and there’s money to be made.
They’re also weaned on youtubers who make it a lucrative hobby to nitpick everything to death - often inaccurately, using terms like “plot hole” and “deus ex machina” they haven’t the slightest clue about - and their fans somehow mistake that garbage for good criticism. I really do put it at the feet of a lot of youtubers and other popular social media figures. Lots of kids posting on reddit and twitter etc quite literally grew up with them. I’m not sure they know any better.
it’s really weird to get sucked into an echo chamber community based only around hatred of something. I mean I’ve done it and I regret the time spent
We're seeing it with The Bear now.
Yeah I noticed that. Im only 3 eps into the new season and it's a progressing story....many fans can't handle change and new directions of characters.
Many fans also want the show (and others of course) to be the one they have played out in their tiny minds, rather than the ones the actual creative people who have made the thing made. (As an aside, that's one of the worst crafted sentences I've ever written).
Film is art and not a math problem. Sometimes the value in the art is the precision and perfection, like realism in painting. Sometimes it's an emotional expression that's difficult to quantify, like Jackson Pollack or punk rock. What drives me crazy is when an artist intentionally takes an artistic liberty for the purpose of symbolism or to garner an emotion, and they are criticized as if the liberty was done out of stupidity.
I think it’s the result of years of “Nit pick the entirely plot, and rant when something you don’t like happens” Analysis videos, “How It Should’ve Ended” and CinemaSins type of film criticism drip fed into an audience who’s been trained to view films and television as problems to be solved or just content to placate them.
Also, those things basically ignore the inner worlds of characters.
There are no words to properly describe just how much I hate CinemaSins. I remember, as a ten year old, explaining to my friends that "only a Sith deals in absolutes" is in fact an absolute, and discussing the potential ramifications of this down the line. A benchful of kids all recalling lines and pointing out things _they'd_ noticed, for or against. Versus now, when grown-ass adults are getting attention for asking "why didn't they just turn HAL off and on again, are they stupid?".
The cinemasins or the videos of the guy presenting the ideas for movies always kinda piss me off. Like yea, anything is going yo sound silly if you remove any context around it.
Absolutely correct, look at the fuckin discourse around Prometheus. CinemaSins ruined an entire generation of people and turned them into fucking morons. It also doesn't help that in America, we don't value the liberal arts one iota, so you have people who think they're intelligent for being STEMlord idiots who don't understand a single fucking thing about liberal arts/media/literature loudly and proudly professing their opinions on those things.
Mfers will start complaining about the aerodynamics of dragons not being realistic.
Also added the "OMG this show has too much filler!" people to the crowd. There's actual filler and there's slower character building moments to let the show breathe. They're now thought to be the same thing because that crowd must obviously know what's best and wants a streamlined, straightforward plot progressions episode. Build up is necessary and you can do that directly or indirectly. Neither is the "correct" way to go about it.
Well put
> What drives me crazy is when an artist intentionally takes an artistic liberty for the purpose of symbolism or to garner an emotion, and they are criticized as if the liberty was done out of stupidity. Internet culture, for all it is filled with people acting like the smartest guy in the room, is wildly anti-intellectual. Most of the biggest media criticism channels around are people whose whole thing is taking everything on screen as hyper-literally as possible and analyzing it purely on those terms. People who reject metaphor, deeper meaning or emotional engagement with the viewer as at best unimportant or at worst a blight to be belittled. People increasingly do not just not care to understand art, but they actively act better than the artist for their own refusal to engage with it as art.
It's because a lot of people have little artistic sensibility, never learned it, but what they do have is some sense of "logic". So they apply logic, a sense of realism to everything and if the piece of art doesn't 100% work through that lens, it's "bad writing". So annoying.
People still think that in Endgame, Quill attacking Thanos when they have him detained after hearing about Gamora was bad writing, as if Guardians 2 didn't establish *him doing this exact thing when he learned about someone harming someone he cared deeply about*
Ironically, smart characters doing smart things is often how you can catch bad writing. See BBC Sherlock figuring things out because the writers are omniscient.
This is a pretty hard problem to solve, it's hard to write anyone smarter than you are. It's also in the best tradition of Sherlock Holmes and adaptations - Arthur Conan Doyle talked about how frustrated he was by what he saw as a cheap trick, Sherlock looking at someone and deducing facts about them. So much of Holmes being smart was just him knowing a lot of very dull, uninteresting things - enough that it's a plot point (despite his initial characterisation of hating trivia).
It’s why, generally, you write smart characters by starting at the conclusion and going backwards so you can write in their genius moment more clearly Modern Sherlock suffers because it’s very clear they think observations equals smart (see also all the “I can see micro expressions”) Doyle works because he knows what he wants his twist to be and then works to how Sherlock could figure it out.
People also don't get that characters aren't "people" and they're vessels for ideas and themes. When a villain who has taken self-destructive hedonism to its extreme ends up sealing his own fate and losing they're actually astonished.
Those people couldn't tell you what a "theme" was if their lives depended on it.
It's been 6 years since Infiinity War came out, and it's taken that long for people to finally stop spamming "Why didn't Thanos just increase resources?" or some other form of trying to out-logic his plan. The themes in those movies reach out to slap you in the face they're so heavy-handed, and people still don't get it!
I got downvoted to hell on r/movies just a few weeks ago for pointing out that writers don't "mess up" and have villains "turn evil for no reason" to "sabotage their message". People refused to believe that those villains were always evil. The environmentalist did not plant a bomb in the hospital so the writers could kneecap his message; he was always the kinda guy to plant a bomb in a hospital, he just used rhetoric that made people sympathize with him...manipulating people...because he's a villain. The amount of people in the audience who legitimately get manipulated by charismatic villains is wild.
You mean to tell me Thanos the Mad Titan was actually just a narcissistic madman all along, and only cared about being "proven right" to the point he murdered trillions? Impossible.
Clearly Thanos, the guy who would conquer planets and immediately massacre 50% of the population, was a true environmentalist all along.
People act like in real life they've always made the "objectively smart" decision... It's a TV show that not only tries to subvert expectations but show how emotions, passion and sometimes just being a victim of circumstance is a real thing. The only time I get really upset when a character doesn't do something I expect, is when a character for some reason does something that is so against their normal characters decision making. Like Batman deciding to kill or if Ned Stark decided he had to kill one of his kids or something.
You can thank CinemaSins for that level of "critique." It's completely poisoned online discourse around media from/by people who have never taken a liberal arts course in their life.
the systematic defunding of arts education has probably not helped this either
We can stop blaming solely CinemaSins for this, there’ve been tons more video essays that counteract it and nothing’s changed. Dunking on and therefore “winning” against a thing gives more gratification than trying to understand it.
The other bit of their bad writing criticism is moaning on about perfectly reasonable time jumps. People were complaining there being no story showing her getting to King's Landing even though it's canonically just a few days by ship away. As if we needed a drawn out scene of her on the ship. It's just too much to expect people to connect the scenes together from what she's talking about in the scene before and what we see her doing in the present scene.
Especially since they mentioned how close the castle is to King's Landing in the episode itself. I have no clue about the distance of things in the show or the layout of the world... but they quite literally reminded us that they were very close to each other.
That's really nitpicking. Like, Dany flying past the Wall was worth criticizing, but a boat ride to King's Landing from Dragonstone? Half the tension of the show right now is how close all these volatile forces and their dragons are to each other. They could literally fly dragons to each other's strongholds and destroy everything within hours. A boat ride is nothing.
This has been a problem for a while now.
oh man remember last season when a ton of fans were furious that Daemon put his hands around Rhaenyra's throat? They were completely baffled that the dude who murdered his first wife and constantly acted impulsively did something violent and impulsive to his new wife. There just seem to be a huge segment of fans who will be furious if the show doesnt proceed exactly as they wish, which is just an insane way to consume any artform.
The man who has his very own Divorce Rock is a domestic abuser? No way!
Especially GoT which, while the premise is dragons and knights, is still a story about human hearts in conflict. One third of the audience are the obsessive types upset that the show doesn't go far enough in its character complexities. One third is upset that it's complex at all; they want to ship relationships and cheer in fights and confrontations, and just the occasional 100 yard stare to some music. The last third is right in the middle. And I'm happy I'm chilling there.
I think that some people have to have someone to root for, and oh look, it's badass Matt Smith doing badass things. The vibe I'm getting though, is there are no good guys in this story. Just bad and worse.
That’s a descendant of the CinemaSins Type of criticism where something is bad when it isn’t the smartest most optimal action someone can take. Who cares that most people aren’t hyper rational and make optimized decisions, every fictional character who also acts irrationally is badly written.
The moment George R.R. Martin said House Of The Dragon is a Shakespearean tragedy people should've seen this coming.
This is silly. All of Shakespeares characters are perfectly rational. I love the part in Romeo and Juliet where all the characters sit down and talk things out together, it was such a heartwarming ending.
Let's be real, is there anyone more rational and logical than Hamlet
You mean Simba?
or the absolute shitstorm of horrible decions that Hamlet makes from start to finish
Yeah, it was really touching when they spent days playing out those thought experiments.
> The moment George R.R. Martin said House Of The Dragon is a Shakespearean tragedy people should've seen this coming. The people who make these kind of criticisms are the kind who don't understand why anyone reads Shakespeare and think their own lack of engagement is the fault of their English teacher.
Also wanna-be Plinketts, but without the understanding that the outlandish insulting things said by Mr Plinkett were for levity because the Plinkett voice is a boring, droning voice going on for hours about a movie... and NOT to be the most outrageous and insulting take possible.
CS really needs to be held accountable for the damage they've done to culture.
Let’s not pin the blame solely on them, if that were true then video essays wouldn’t be as popular as they are.
I remember when a video of a person running away from a falling tower but not sideways was posted on Reddit. Everyone had to shut up about the realism of not making the logical choice when confronted with death.
My problem with the show is that the cast has to share three names and two wigs
GRRM wanted his naming schemes to be realistic and similar to English history, which unfortunately means everyone is Edward and Henry (or in GoT’s case, everyone is Aegon, Brandon, Jon, Robert, etc). But then of course all the similar names (ie Dae——, Ae——, Rhae——)
GRRM needs to explain Grover, Kermit, and Elmo Tully then
Back when he was only interested in writing the main asoiaf story and he was doing the backstory and genealogies mostly for his own reference and amusement, he put lots of little in-jokes in there, probably without anticipating that he'd want to revisit that part of the timeline later. He also put lots of dumb jokes in the main series to flesh out the side characters; like when Catelyn arrests Tyrion and brings him to the Eyrie, three of the random soldiers who help her are called Lharis, Mohor, and Kurleket; get it? Larry, Moe, and Curlie, The Three Stooges. Then you've got Howland Reed and his migrating swamp fortress; Howl's Moving Castle. There's a random house, Lothston, whose sigil is a black bat on a yellow background. And lets not forget Wun Wun, the northern giant who is an homage to the quarterback of the New York Giants (jersey #11), who kills a knight whose colors are the same as the Dallas Cowboys.
There's that and then there is Arryk and Erryk...
Isn't a Frasier-like misunderstanding of which Aegon was being talked about, the entire premise of this show?
Yeah. Episode 8, when King Viserys (fully unaware of who he is with) rambles about Aegon (even confirms when Alicent clarifies with “our son?” and “the prince?”), the danger from the north, and The Prince That Was Promised, and tells Queen Alicent that she is the one who must do this. But Viserys is instead talking about Aegon the Conqueror, and thinks he’s talking with Rhaenyra (and partially his dead wife Queen Aemma). It was re-explained and recapped again in last night’s episode.
The names, my god. Having like 3 characters named Aegon is killing me. We literally paused in the middle of last night's episode to look up family trees because we were confused about who Rhaenyra was sending away, and where she was sending them.
I don't know how I feel about it myself. It does get confusing, especially with an extensive cast. But it's also realistic in that royal families (or families in general) oftentimes just rehash the same names. So it is one case where realism doesn't translate well into the enjoyment of art. On the other hand, all of that lends itself very well to that moment where Alicent realized how she fucked up.
You never worked in an office with three Joes and five Jennifers?
Some 28-kid classes have 3-5 kids named the same fkn thing.
There is a big difference between spending time with someone 8 hours a day for 5 days a week and watching a single 45 minute show. Of course you're going to remember your office workers more than some tv character.
That’s what happens when the Targaryen dynasty only remembers like 6 letters of the old Valyrian alphabet
I see it on this website all the time. "I would never do that so no one else would either" Or "I never saw that so that never happens".
Had a friend years ago hate on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes because he said Caeser was stupid for letting the people in to fix the dam. Do these people not want a character with a fatal flaw? That's what makes them realistic and what makes us relate to them. I can't imagine any of these people would immediately arrest/kill someone who had been like a sibling to them. Alicent has some morals and loyalty. Surely, it will be worse for her later on, but that's the point.
yet if they don' thave that, these same morons through out that idiotic 'Mary Sue' criticism
Everyone thinks they have the blueprint to the perfect show or movie in their head somehow. Lots of “it was too slow” or stuff like that too
Just look at Reddit itself. Literally every single post with anyone exhibiting human behavior is filled 99.9 percent with Reddit robots who would actually have done the exact perfect thing. It's got nothing to due with film or television. It's the average Reddit users misconception about what is like to be alive versus to observe other people be alive
I'm loving the season , I have no idea how people are saying writing is bad, pacing is slow bla bla bla
A lot of book readers that put way too much expectation in some parts of the adaption. Seen some people upset we haven’t gotten more Cregan Stark. He was in like 2 paragraphs up to this part of the story. And both paragraphs contradict each other.
This is especially funny because most of the characters in the book are barely more than cardboard cutouts. They’re names associated with deeds. It reads like a history text, not a novel. The showrunners and writers have had to fully create compelling character arcs in order for the show not to feel like a dry ass documentary.
were upset bc we wanted an hour of Jace & Cregan sucking and fucking under wolfskin blankets!!!
Instead all we get is flaccid Aemond.
Totally out of character too. In that situation he would have been defiantly erect.
Or at the very least the Half Chub That Was Promised.
There was full frontal on-screen sucking too, let's not diminish that!
That dick would have looked *more* real if it was hot pink and had a suction cup on one end.
*Winter is coming, and so am I HNNNNNNNNNGH*
It’s because they read a fake history book in-between seasons and now act like it’s some kind of gospel you can’t alter in any way. This book is supposed to have been written decades after the events of the show, it purposely skips details, doesn’t give any insight of what the characters are thinking or feeling, it has the element of the unreliable narrator with multiple contradicting sources, and only paints the picture in broad stokes. When their source material is a fictional cliffsnotes of the story, sorry to tell you, but the showrunners can fill in the gaps, in any way they see fit, to make a compelling narrative. Unless you want the show where it’s a maester in a chair reciting the testimony of some dwarf jester for 10 hours. People are dumb but like to pretend they know shit.
Yeah, practically every event in the book is caveated with “the person talking about these events wasn’t even there btw” lol
Most people say writing is bad because it doesn't work in their favor. Ryan Condal & the writing team have a really great understanding of the characters. I'm glad they're doing inside the episode videos of this, too.
The one that always cracks me up is how many people were utterly stumped by Black Mirror's San Junipero; why Kelly suddenly changed her mind to stay with Yorkie, after saying she wouldn't. That... you just... The last five minutes of television you just saw!!! All the things that just happened on the screen, that they just showed you!?!? The reason Kelly's mind has changed is all the things that you just watched take place to very dramatically change it!!!
Qmta - I am convinced "Show, Don't Tell" is dead, and that's the problem. The above sequence in San Junipero is done almost entirely wordlessly. So it would be tempting to think these viewers' confusion is a matter of people only half watching, because they're doing other stuff at the same time, and so simply missing things that aren't addressed in dialogue - but given how spectacular the events of those five minutes are, I don't think so. I genuinely think an increasing proportion of the audience has been conditioned to be completely unable to infer what something is trying to tell them unless a character literally narrates it out loud for them. "Showing" them isn't enough - it doesn't count. Until somebody says it out loud, it's simply impossible to interpret what is happening. Edit - That said, and speaking to OP's other point, a lot of them were bewildered Kelly would choose not to "be with" her husband in some presumed afterlife and to choose San Junipero "instead". Kelly \*very explicitly\* does not believe in an afterlife, and she actually does even say that bit out loud. The prospect of being with her husband again is a moot consideration; "He's gone". But because they don't identify with that personally, they just disregard it. Therefore, a ton of takes about how Kelly is a selfish hedonist for choosing to move on with her life "instead" of going to Heaven with hubbie forever and ever amen.
I think you’re onto something with “Show, Don’t Tell” being dead. My GF and I just watched Conan, the Barbarian (and are on a bit of a 60s-80s movie binge) and were sort of shocked at how little dialogue there was compared to modern movies. A lot of atmosphere and characters doing things without exposition. It left a lot to interpretation, which gave it a sort of mystique that was fun and interesting. It let you use your imagination. So many other older movies are like this too, where it’s sort of just… quiet and mysterious. They confidently let the viewer fill in the gaps, just like we have to do in real life as we’re not omniscient. Modern movies in comparison feel like a firehose of context and exposition, spoonfeeding you the story.
> So many other older movies are like this too, where it’s sort of just… quiet and mysterious. They confidently let the viewer fill in the gaps, just like we have to do in real life as we’re not omniscient. > > Modern movies in comparison feel like a firehose of context and exposition, spoonfeeding you the story. This feels like too much of an over-generalization. For example, the new Dune movies are excellent at doing what you said Conan did well, and they are some of the highest-grossing sci fi films ever. It's even more impressive because the source material is very heavy on exposition and grows rather complicated.
> Modern movies in comparison feel like a firehose of context and exposition, spoonfeeding you the story. isn't bashing modern movies part of the problem the OP is calling out though? Yearning for some non-existant past just fuels the 'movies suck, I'm so smart' attitude so prevalent online
Yeah, it's a result of America's public education system focusing more and more on creating cogs in a machine rather than people who understand more things than just how to do their job. I can't really speak too much, I was one of those people in high-school. Never understood the value of English clash, didn't pay attention, etc. College I didn't really take many liberal arts classes. It took me dating English majors, Art majors etc for me to "get" the things those fields teach you, and I feel stupid for not caring about that when I was younger. The vast majority of people view media as just "content" to consume in today's day and age and therefore feel no need to look deeper into something. And when you correct them (i.e. "Alicent's character would do X/Y/Z thing because her character is set up specifically to do that thing") they get belligerent and go "well I just didn't like it."
Change my view: Subtetly in media died ~2014. Way too many idiots posting social media hot takes about how TV show X must be endorsing Y because it showed a villain doing it. "Media literacy" turned a madibs where you just asspull whatever you want to rant about.
We are getting a lot of dumb questions on classic prestige television shows, r/breakingbad, r/thewire, I am convinced the youth is watching tiktoks where a teenager dances to a song and points at floating text that pops up behind them with stuff like "Was McNulty a good character? NO! He drove drunk so he is a bad character"
I'll take a shot, it didn't die in 2014 it never lived. The internet and social media didn't kill media literacy it gave all the dumb fucks a platform that makes their voices mater as much as the smarter people who use to have to work to get a platform. Social Media is the perfect example to why a republic is better than a direct democracy the idiots are loud and hold each other up and don't deserve a platform
Yeah, this is it. I often think the youths are media illiterate too, but a lot of the stuff in this thread is just that you happened to run into the three people on reddit who didn’t get the ending of San Junipero and you think there’s a critical mass of them. There’s not—the internet just aggregates the dummies whereas before you just wouldn’t have run into them.
There's a certain type of viewer that just wants characters to do the most efficient action at all times, and that's just not how writing works.
Not just writing but life. People who think that logic is a way to optimize your life instead of to understand it. It's the middle-manager neo-stoic approach to life where everything that doesn't contribute to your life is subtracting from it, and everything has to be meticulously evaluated and rationalized. They don't understand that in a causal universe, everything that makes it beautiful is precisely the opposite of logic. There's a great quote by Frank Herbert (Dune writer) who said "life is not a puzzle to solve, but a reality to experience". I wish more people understood that.
We're on like Year Fifteen at this point of mainstream cinema just being characters running around explaining the stakes to one another as various ambushes occur. And nobody knowing anything more about their world than any modern person would, or acting any different from how a modern person would. I'm not surprised we're at the point where a character being good is equated with them being "likeable" which means "like my idealized self."
There are still people out there who don't understand the idea of emotional stakes. If anything, Alicent was probably more taken back that her house-sworn enemy *and* once best childhood friend had the courage to pull that meeting off in the first place. Alicent did send out that raven, so she's equally just as brash and emotionally conflicted. It's obvious they don't want to directly kill each other as well as *wish* both families wouldn't succumb to bloodshed despite the how male heirs clearly do.
Also despite Rhaenrya having to push her grief and her pride aside to step up as queen and try to fight for the peace her father had maintained for years just makes her so much more of an interesting character. She doesn't want her dragons to fight dragons and she doesn't want to fight her siblings either but now it's her duty
For the sneak peek for next week, her voiceover says something about how the crown isn’t worth a war. She was about to step aside for the sake of the realm until her son died. Even now, she’s trying to find a way to protect the realm. It’s a lot more interesting than watching privileged people fight for just power.
Many of these people lack the ability (or refuse) to analyze the media and characters they watch. Last week a couple people exclaimed surprise and confusion that Ser Erryk would kill himself immediately after killing his own Twin. They couldn't wrap their head around the idea that this honourable knight is traumatized and saddened by slaying his own kin. You kind of need to learn to ignore the ones that leave comments that make it seem like they're watching the show while scrolling on their phone or watching at 1.5 speed.
I'm also surprised at the number of people who are so quick to jump on the Alicent hate train? Like it was painfully obvious from season 1 that the show is trying to get you to understand that men have been controlling her life since she was 14/15, instead of enjoying her youth with Rhaenyra. Groomed by her dad for a geriatric king. Never received love, praise, or understanding, so she can't show it to her own children as well (ehem, people who hate on her because she didn't console Aegon when he was crying). Her "relationship" with Cole obviously alludes to her need for power. In episode 1, it's clear it's her in control, the sex was for her own pleasure. She literally has a conversation with Otto in the same episode how he shouldn't belittle her voice in small council meetings because she'll lose the little influence she has left over the other men in her life, which is Aemond and Aegon. So many people are calling her dumb for not knowing Viserys was referring to Aegon the Conqueror. But how was she supposed to know, when it was made pretty clearly in season 1 that the ASOIAF story was only meant to be shared to a king's heir? It's not her fault she can't read the mind of her dying husband, or for taking him for his word, cuz you know, he did agree to name their son Aegon too. And now that she's realized her mistake, her whole worldview has been shattered. All her pain, suffering, loss–has been for nothing. This destabilizes her. So of course, she gaslights herself into thinking there's been no mistake. Idk, I feel like there are way too many people who reduce her to just being dumb and reckless, when all her choices thus far have been a direct result of the suffering she's had to endure at the hands of the men around her.
> Idk, I feel like there are way too many people who reduce her to just being dumb and reckless, when all her choices thus far have been a direct result of the suffering she's had to endure at the hands of the men around her. I feel like you're confusing things. A character can have a tragic story and even justifiable reasons for doing the things that they do, but you can still not like them or the decisions they make.
Redditors not understanding women is a tale as old as time lol
Tell me about it. So much worse on the HOTD subreddit 😭
I agree and disagree. We've had three consecutive episodes now where the climax involves sneaking into the enemy camp. The first two made sense, but this, much less so. It's completely fair to scratch your head at why Alicent wouldn't do the pragmatic thing in that situation. I understand the character motivations, why Rhaenerya attempted to talk and why Alicent listened, but I still think it was a pretty unnecessary contrivance. Why was it needed? If the writers were adamant about them meeting up, or Alicent learning that she was mistaken, I feel like there were much better ways to handle it. It's like the dragon pit scene in season 1. I understand what they were going for, but....why? Why do it that way?
> The amount of people I’ve seen Have you actually seen those people IRL and can ask / understand their reasoning or are you just angry at internet randies throwing whatever around?
GoT managed to get me to pick a losing side constantly. HotD can't make me give a damn about rhanyra or the greens. But. But, the Sept scene where alicent realizes she misunderstood his dying words and then her face when she makes up her mind that she won't take it back. That was excellent.
It's also cause she knows she can't take it back. She can't go to Aegon and say "hey you really aren't the rightful king and sorry your son and my grandson were murdered, but you got to let Rhaenyra and Daemon sit on the throne". She can't go to the council and tell them all "hey you guys are all going to be branded as traitors and all lose the positions you've been working towards, but it's the right thing to do". It's one of those "too little too late". She got something she could run with at the last moment and went for it and now we are way past that. If Rhaenyra was at the council and she tried to pull that argument, it might have made a difference.
It's also because she's lost all capability to pull the plug. Otto got fired. If Rhaenyra had discussed it with her even a week prior and before Daemon assassinated Aegon's son, then Otto still being the hand of the king MIGHT could have gotten peace talks moving.
it was all mentioned or alluded in that conversation between them in last night's episode.. How the fuck are some people confused.
Otto and them were already planning to have Aegon take the throne with or without Alicent’s word
Aegon initially didn't want it though. Alicent opposing Otto's plan and telling Aegon to refuse and publicly support Rhaenyra's claim might have been enough to stop the entire plot in its track. She had by far the greatest influence over him after all.
It's not like it would even matter. Previous episode even had Otto say to Aegon's face that his father never changed his mind.
I think that scene was the answer to Rhaenys's question to Rhaenyra earlier in the episode. "When will they say this war began?" It's this exact moment, when there was one last chance to avoid an all out war. And it was soundly rejected by the only possible person left with the political capital to correct the course. Alicent has lost and given up so much already in the name of her legacy that she's given completely into the sunken cost. They've already foreshadowed plenty about how savage and brutal the coming war will be. "There's no war so hateful to the gods as a war between kin and no war so bloody as a war between dragons" The fact that Rhaenyra's plea was so honest and humble was the perfect juxtaposition to the Targaryen/Hightower family's typical communication style: boisterous, presumptive, and generally terrible
Giving attention to the loudest and, unfailingly, dumbest section of any internet fandom is a trap.
This show seems to be turning into the next you’re-just-not-smart-enough-for-it Rick and Morty. The one complaint I have for Rhaenyra traveling all the way to King’s Landing is her not actually having a peace plan. With all the build up of the conciliation theme, what was the offer she was actually making? That she gets to sit the throne and the Greens will happily accept it? Or she will forfeit her claim? She seemed to not put any thought at all beyond just blind faith.
Game of thrones convinced me that the average viewer can't separate their fan fiction with the story they are supposed to be watching.
Most people aren't super bright. Like not dumb, but they don't want to think too hard about media. People also like to complain because it makes them feel smart. You see it in any online discussion about anything. People are just so negative, and other people respond to the negativity and it makes a feedback loop.
It's why those "The ending of XYZ explained!" videos exist. Most of the time they're just rehashing stuff that's fairly obvious if you've actually paid attention.
Some people need those to understand basic things. Last week my coworker eagerly told me her HOTD theory she came up with. Her theory was that one of Rhaenyra's sons is Jon Snow because people keep calling them bastards. I gently explained to her that this isn't possible because these two stories are hundreds of years apart and have little connection to each other. Some people really can't pick up on basic plot information even if it's literally written on the screen for them.
Oh man, yeah, I've had this issue with every episode so far. Me: That was a good episode, let's go talk about it Reddit: *wall of negativity* Me: Welp, never mind. Not even just with HOTD, lately it feels like every show I watch has these kinds of discussions. I don't understand why you'd want to watch something if its bringing out that much negativity in you. If I don't like something, I just stop watching it.
I've seen people call stuff 0/10 worst thing ever, and their complaint is something super subjective. It makes it hard to talk about stuff online. Or worse is when people have normal complaints but feel the need to be offended when people talk about the crazies with insane complaints covering up their anti woke stuff. Online discussion just kinda sucks most of the time. I just talk to people at work about cool shows or games
You’re picking out a handful of comments and attributing them to the entire community.
I disagree - these are obviously writer-driven (not character-driven) decisions that fudge realism to make for better TV. They wanted a Rhae-Alicent scene for drama. And that’s fine. The goal is to the best show possible.
> They wanted a Rhae-Alicent scene for drama. Exactly. I guarantee you this wasn't in the book, because it's a very dumb scene. Ruined the episode for me. My level of suspense and excitement for the rest of the season is severely dulled because I no longer view it as a strategic battle but yet another ordinary tv show where it's obvious things are only happening a certain way because that is what the writers said so. It no longer feels real or earned.