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All book discussion in this thread is now allowed. |
On May 19 2019 17:18 Nebuchad wrote:
The takes on GRRM being a troll writer rely on not understanding what he's doing and assuming that therefore his goal is to shock us. Every major death in ASOIAF is fully in service of the goals of the narrative. We might miss it because the narrative goals of ASOIAF aren't usual, especially not for fantasy. And when we miss it, we might attribute it to GRRM trolling us. But we'd be wrong.
In contrast, having Daenerys commit a genocide serves an extremely mundane narrative goal: it allows us to justify having a conflict between Dany and Jon without any of the complexity, just because Dany is now very evil and we don't like evil. And it definitely has a lot of shock value: this person, who we could potentially root for (if we ignored all the colonialist aspect, so probably if we're white but let's face it, we're white), now committed a genocide, isn't that shocking! I don't know exactly how GRRM planned that turn, but if he is faithful to his ways of the first books, it wasn't like this.
Grats. Thats what madness does. It isnt doing logical things. Hence 'mad'
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On May 19 2019 17:36 sharkie wrote:Show nested quote +On May 19 2019 17:18 Nebuchad wrote:
The takes on GRRM being a troll writer rely on not understanding what he's doing and assuming that therefore his goal is to shock us. Every major death in ASOIAF is fully in service of the goals of the narrative. We might miss it because the narrative goals of ASOIAF aren't usual, especially not for fantasy. And when we miss it, we might attribute it to GRRM trolling us. But we'd be wrong.
In contrast, having Daenerys commit a genocide serves an extremely mundane narrative goal: it allows us to justify having a conflict between Dany and Jon without any of the complexity, just because Dany is now very evil and we don't like evil. And it definitely has a lot of shock value: this person, who we could potentially root for (if we ignored all the colonialist aspect, so probably if we're white but let's face it, we're white), now committed a genocide, isn't that shocking! I don't know exactly how GRRM planned that turn, but if he is faithful to his ways of the first books, it wasn't like this. Grats. Thats what madness does. It isnt doing logical things. Hence 'mad'
That's very lazy writing.
"Why did that happen?"
"Oh, she went mad"
"Wait, what drove her mad?"
"Nothing, she was born that way"
"But we hadn't seen that before and she's been around for a while"
"So? That's what madness does. Just happens."
I mean, it's probably realistic. I don't know. But it's not good storytelling. Imagine if Captain America suddenly decided to fight for Thanos in the middle of the movie, and the rationale was "oh, he's just completely crazy. There's no way to make sense of his actions. Just gotta go with it. Hail Hydra!"
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Pretty sure if you could explain madness it would be called mad?
How do you explain a psychological illness that gets inherited?
I am sorry but if you call that lazy writing then I would have explained your wish of a detailed route of her madness as bad writing because if it had become a step-by-step progress we all would have cried "WHY DID NO ONE STOP BEFORE HER BEFORE SHE WENT MAD. THE SIGNS WERE CLEARLY THERE..."
GoT lost the time the madness of the Targaeryans was first introduced...
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On May 19 2019 18:23 sharkie wrote:
Pretty sure if you could explain madness it would be called mad?
How do you explain a psychological illness that gets inherited?
I am sorry but if you call that lazy writing then I would have explained your wish of a detailed route of her madness as bad writing because if it had become a step-by-step progress we all would have cried "WHY DID NO ONE STOP BEFORE HER BEFORE SHE WENT MAD. THE SIGNS WERE CLEARLY THERE..."
GoT lost the time the madness of the Targaeryans was first introduced...
Varys did try to stop her... and failed.
It would have worked just fine. If they had spent less time on Arya running through a city and a bit more on showing Daenerys going mad.
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Of course madness can be explained...
And regardless of whether it can or not, this is a story. The authors decide when madness occurs and what it entails, they have all the tools at their disposal. This isn't an excuse for mundane storytelling or events happening for shock value.
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But there is literal 10 years of buildup to her suddenly going mad. It is not explained why, but it is foreshadowed for 10 years. So it is wrong to say that it was unexpected, because it literally was not. And it is wrong to say that it should be either explained or sudden, because it was intended to be shocking. People act that the first sign of her doing this is Varys suddenly out of the blue thinking Daenerys might be evil.
Her slowly commiting more and more severe war crimes and ignoring advice more and more is a completely different story. Not a better version of the same story.
What GRRM did with Daenerys is literally the same thing he has been doing always (Ned, Red Wedding, etc), except at a larger scale. It is troll writing, because it deliberately pisses off part of the audience while maintaining a very believable and logical story. It reads as if these events could really happen that way, and not like a contrived story where everything just happens in a way most entertaining for the audience.
When I said that GRRM was a troll writers they seem to think that Daenerys burning down KL is the same as Sam suddenly mounting Drogon and him burning down KL.
Yes, this is 100% about people refusing to accept Daenerys no longer being a 'good guy'. And they blame it on bad story-writing because other aspects of the show have become badly written. And if you think about it, this is actually the worst thing you can do as a writer to your audience. Make them believe a character is a good guy, make her become a fan favourite, drop hints everywhere that the audience might be wrong about it, and then have her suddenly show her true colours. People are so mad because they knew they have been watching the show the wrong way while they prided themselves on liking GoT because it was different.
GoT has become an analogy of Hitler and his supporters. Hitler had this absurd rhetoric for at least a decade before he got into power, and a minority of them voted for him anyway. Then when Hitler actually started doing what he told everyone he was going to do, people thought 'wait what I didn't vote for this'. Yes, they did.
Daenerys also told the audience she was going to burn cities for almost 10 fucking years. Yes, she never actually butchered innocents (except a few which somehow the story also told us without us fully realizing it). But Hitler also didn't kill any Jews before he started the holocaust. I was under the impression that Daenerys always was supposed to be this nutty tyrant to be. They had so many scenes of her yelling about power and destiny and taking what was hers, while these dragons sat next to her. And the story told us how devastating and evil dragons had been in the past. Yet people were honestly thinking "Yes, go team Dany. Wow her hair is so cute. Her and Jon together is so romantic." until she started to brutally burn those people. And those scenes were very well done. It was hard to watch. So apparently people weren't disturbed about having a Mary Sue-like character with weapons of mass destruction and a terrible family history, which was brought up all the time, yelling about power and destiny and destroying everyone and everything in her way? In season 3 we were all asking ourselves "What is up with Daenerys. She seems out of place in this story," and for season 4 to 7, we had all these scenes about what power does to her, but no obvious payoff.
People are mad because GoT tricked them into rooting for a evil person for 10 years. And they are mad at themselves because they now know that the clues well all over and they somehow thought GoT being GoT didn't apply to Daenerys. People are understandably disturbed by this. People are making these incredibly naive arguments about why Daenerys could never do an evil act because she did X or Y in some scene. Will you recognize a psychopath in your ordinary live? Will you vote for one?
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The problem I have with madness as a mental illness is that its a shallow way to portray a character, you simply flip a switch and that's it. While that's realistic, it doesn't make a for a compelling story. If its not mental illness and its because she suffered many losses along the way, I can better understand that in fact I do understand that, but the time it took to go from point A to point B was very short, which is simply bad storytelling because the viewer isn't allowed to come to terms with that on an emotional level. Of course you can retroactively apply logic and why that happened, almost everyone here agrees that its logical for her to go mad, but the emotional impact wasn't there.
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I don't think you are supposed to come to terms with the fact that Daenerys is going to burn down King's Landing before it happens. I cannot convince you that the story GoT tells you is more compelling to you than a different story. Personally, I would have never written the Red Wedding. In a way, I also didn't find that as interesting. But like this, after it happened we knew it was set up to happen and a realistic way for the story to unfold.
I also don't get why it is 'bad storytelling' to tell a realistic convincing story that just you don't happen to find compelling. And I think the emotional impact was there especially for those who hated to see Daenerys go evil. There are now 1 million people asking for a different ending. That is an emotional response.
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There was a lot of foreshadowing and her being generic cruel along the way. My only issue would be that the moment of going full mad (lack of better words) was lackluster. In mental illness a lot of things have a trigger. If you want to tell me that the bells are triggering the reaction it gets slightly akward for me. I could have seen a dragon die in this episode rather than the episode before triggering it. I could have seen Jorah die during this episode and the dragon in E3 rather than nothing at all.
That would be my only complaint. Besides that I feel its very true to nature of humans and Daenarys and if people don't like it, it just shows even more how well of a job someone did. You don't have to like everything and it doesn't always have to be happy end and joyful. It doesn't make the story worse in terms of a story.
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On May 19 2019 18:56 Rasalased wrote:
But there is literal 10 years of buildup to her suddenly going mad. It is not explained why, but it is foreshadowed for 10 years. So it is wrong to say that it was unexpected, because it literally was not. And it is wrong to say that it should be either explained or sudden, because it was intended to be shocking. People act that the first sign of her doing this is Varys suddenly out of the blue thinking Daenerys might be evil.
Her slowly commuting more and more severe war crimes and ignoring advice more and more is a completely different story. Not a better version of the same story.
What GRRM did with Daenerys is literally teh same thing he has been doing always. It is troll writing, because it deliberaly pisses off part of the audience while maintaining a very believable and logical story. It reads as if these events could really happen that way, and not like a contrived story where everything just happens in a way most entertaining for the audience.
When I said that GRRM was a troll writers they seem to think that Daenerys burning down KL is the same as Sam suddenly mounting Drogon and him burning down KL.
Yes, this is 100% about people refusing to accept Daenerys no longer being a 'good guy'. And they blame it on bad story-writing because other aspects of the show have become badly written.
I didn't say it wasn't foreshadowed, I said it was mundane and designed for shock value. You agree that it's based on shock but think a lot of things in ASOIAF were based on shock. You are wrong about that; more on that later. You don't touch on whether it's mundane or not but from your framing of us wanting Dany to be a good guy, it's clear that you think this is an unusual end. It's actually not: every fantasy story ever has an ultimate fight between people who are good and people who are bad. If you want to have Jon and Dany fight each other, which I think we can assume is what they're gearing up to and what they've been told by GRRM should happen, then forcing the audience to view one of them as evil through an act designed for shock value is the laziest thing that you can do.
But I'm more interested in the second part, and that's what I was touching on in my initial answer: GRRM is no troll and nothing happens for shock value. Martin starts from classic fantasy, and his argument is that some of Tolkien's beliefs about values and world building harm the genre. A simple way to go about this argument would be to write a fantasy story that ignores those harmful principles, but GRRM goes further than that and instead does a deconstruction of these principles.
Here is one example:
- Honor is a principle that is very central to fantasy, it usually serves to distinguish good people from bad people. If you're trying to oppose that framing, you could write a fantasy story where nobody cares about honor. A Game of Thrones doesn't do that. Instead it has a main character, Ned Stark, that is very similar to a classical fantasy hero in terms of how he views honor and, by extension, good and evil. GRRM then has his narrative question this trope in two main ways: practicality and commitment.
Practicality, because honor is by definition not practical: it's a set of rules that limit the scope of the actions you can take. You could side with Renly in the way that he wants to overthrow Joffrey, but that's not honorable. You could side with Littlefinger in the way he wants to overthrow Joffrey (think the show dropped that one btw?), but that's not honorable. So instead you stay on your own, satisfied with the fact that you are doing the honorable thing, and then you... lose, because other people aren't constrained in the same way that you are.
The show has an excellent illustration of this principle in one scene: when Bronn fights the knight of the Vale at Tyrion's trial, and defeats him using trickery rather than superiority in battle. Lysa then protests:
"You don't fight with honor!"
And Bronn answers:
"No. He did."
But we should also mention commitment, because it's pretty easy to be honorable as long as you don't care. ASOIAF presents a lot of people who are ready to act honorably but have some things that are off limits (for a lot of them, it's their own personal survival, see how Will in the prologue doesn't climb down the tree to help Waymar Royce fight the white walker). For Ned Stark, it's his family. It's not honorable to recognize Joffrey as the true king when he isn't. It's not honorable to lie to your king about the Targaryen having an heir. But Ned Stark is committed to his family's survival above his honor, and so he does these things. If even the most honorable among us, like Ned Stark, are only honorable when we haven't met their stakes, is honor really what's driving them, or anyone?
Now, if you don't kill Ned Stark at the end of season 1, the deconstruction doesn't work. You can't argue that honor is impractical and that people will abandon their honor if the situation warrants it, and then have your honorable character survive everything and continue his life anyway. That defeats the purpose of the narrative you've created. You have to kill Ned to complete the narrative arc. It isn't shocking, it's entirely logical based on what the story is saying. It's just that we aren't used to hearing this particular story, we are used to hearing another kind of story, one where the honorable guy is the good guy and the good guy wins at the end.
Contrast that with something that the show got wrong: Oberyn in season 4. Oberyn's deconstruction is about the concept of a quest. You have a very defined goal, you go and do it, and that moves the story forward. Again, very common fantasy trope. In the strictest sense, this trope is still deconstructed in the show, because Oberyn's quest fails and the story stays at the same point when he dies. But we lose a lot of the nuance because the show presents Oberyn as very similar to Inigo Montoya from the Princess Bride as a character, while the book presented him as the exact opposite of Inigo Montoya. Since we don't have all this framing and discussion about how quests work, Oberyn's death is more about shock value than it is in the books and therefore, I would argue, less interesting.
Since the end of the books isn't written, I can only speculate about what trope GRRM wants to revert when he has Dany fight Jon at the end of his storyline. Probably something about how power never corrupts people in fantasy? I don't know. But the show gives us nothing, and all we're left with is shock value.
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I don't get why people think the bells triggered insanity in her. To me the bells were just a huge signpost for the audience. She was doing the proper things in killing scorpions only at one point. Then the Lannisters surrendered and Daenerys' plan went exactly as she said it would go from season 6. So wtf were all her advisors so considered about about not taking her Dragons to KL. And the Lannisters even surrendered. But she had already made the decision. But what she did after the bells was different. The story could also have scenes about dragon fire burning 100% Lannister soldiers, then a random collateral damage citizen among them. Then a group of soldiers among civilians. And then just civilians and her no stopping. I think it was a good decision to not do it that way but to have a clear distinction. And the bells made that crystal clear. GoT is the most expensive show in tv history. Of course they are going to use cinematics to enhance the emotional impact. That is their craft as writers, directors, and producers.
We had this huge talk for years about R+L=J, it is even in the mod notes on the top of this page. And we had scenes of Dany and Jon talk about it. But people don't seem to fully realize what that means for Daenerys. Why? We saw her ramble for 10 years about her taking back what is truly hers by birth-right and about fulfilling her destiny. And it was all a lie because it is Jon, not her. She came to Westeros to continue her tour of being a beloved savior of the ordinary people. Yet everyone in Westeros disliked or feared her. I don't know how I would respond to realizing that my entire life is based on a lie. And even in Essos she needed advisors to show her a way of achieving her goals without just burning her enemies with dragons. So take the advisors away, and add the grief of losing those she lost, of course she is in a terrible state of mind. I think all the pieces were definitely there for her to do this. I don't see which puzzle piece was missing.
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On May 19 2019 19:43 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On May 19 2019 18:56 Rasalased wrote:
But there is literal 10 years of buildup to her suddenly going mad. It is not explained why, but it is foreshadowed for 10 years. So it is wrong to say that it was unexpected, because it literally was not. And it is wrong to say that it should be either explained or sudden, because it was intended to be shocking. People act that the first sign of her doing this is Varys suddenly out of the blue thinking Daenerys might be evil.
Her slowly commuting more and more severe war crimes and ignoring advice more and more is a completely different story. Not a better version of the same story.
What GRRM did with Daenerys is literally teh same thing he has been doing always. It is troll writing, because it deliberaly pisses off part of the audience while maintaining a very believable and logical story. It reads as if these events could really happen that way, and not like a contrived story where everything just happens in a way most entertaining for the audience.
When I said that GRRM was a troll writers they seem to think that Daenerys burning down KL is the same as Sam suddenly mounting Drogon and him burning down KL.
Yes, this is 100% about people refusing to accept Daenerys no longer being a 'good guy'. And they blame it on bad story-writing because other aspects of the show have become badly written. I didn't say it wasn't foreshadowed, I said it was mundane and designed for shock value. You agree that it's based on shock but think a lot of things in ASOIAF were based on shock. You are wrong about that; more on that later. You don't touch on whether it's mundane or not but from your framing of us wanting Dany to be a good guy, it's clear that you think this is an unusual end. It's actually not: every fantasy story ever has an ultimate fight between people who are good and people who are bad. If you want to have Jon and Dany fight each other, which I think we can assume is what they're gearing up to and what they've been told by GRRM should happen, then forcing the audience to view one of them as evil through an act designed for shock value is the laziest thing that you can do. But I'm more interested in the second part, and that's what I was touching on in my initial answer: GRRM is no troll and nothing happens for shock value. Martin starts from classic fantasy, and his argument is that some of Tolkien's beliefs about values and world building harm the genre. A simple way to go about this argument would be to write a fantasy story that ignores those harmful principles, but GRRM goes further than that and instead does a deconstruction of these principles. Here is one example: - Honor is a principle that is very central to fantasy, it usually serves to distinguish good people from bad people. If you're trying to oppose that framing, you could write a fantasy story where nobody cares about honor. A Game of Thrones doesn't do that. Instead it has a main character, Ned Stark, that is very similar to a classical fantasy hero in terms of how he views honor and, by extension, good and evil. GRRM then has his narrative question this trope in two main ways: practicality and commitment. Practicality, because honor is by definition not practical: it's a set of rules that limit the scope of the actions you can take. You could side with Renly in the way that he wants to overthrow Joffrey, but that's not honorable. You could side with Littlefinger in the way he wants to overthrow Joffrey (think the show dropped that one btw?), but that's not honorable. So instead you stay on your own, satisfied with the fact that you are doing the honorable thing, and then you... lose, because other people aren't constrained in the same way that you are. The show has an excellent illustration of this principle in one scene: when Bronn fights the knight of the Vale at Tyrion's trial, and defeats him using trickery rather than superiority in battle. Lysa then protests: "You don't fight with honor!" And Bronn answers: "No. He did." But we should also mention commitment, because it's pretty easy to be honorable as long as you don't care. ASOIAF presents a lot of people who are ready to act honorably but have some things that are off limits (for a lot of them, it's their own personal survival, see how Will in the prologue doesn't climb down the tree to help Waymar Royce fight the white walker). For Ned Stark, it's his family. It's not honorable to recognize Joffrey as the true king when he isn't. It's not honorable to lie to your king about the Targaryen having an heir. But Ned Stark is committed to his family's survival above his honor, and so he does these things. If even the most honorable among us, like Ned Stark, are only honorable when we haven't met their stakes, is honor really what's driving them, or anyone? Now, if you don't kill Ned Stark at the end of season 1, the deconstruction doesn't work. You can't argue that honor is impractical and that people will abandon their honor if the situation warrants it, and then have your honorable character survive everything and continue his life anyway. That defeats the purpose of the narrative you've created. You have to kill Ned to complete the narrative arc. It isn't shocking, it's entirely logical based on what the story is saying. It's just that we aren't used to hearing this particular story, we are used to hearing another kind of story, one where the honorable guy is the good guy and the good guy wins at the end. Contrast that with something that the show got wrong: Oberyn in season 4. Oberyn's deconstruction is about the concept of a quest. You have a very defined goal, you go and do it, and that moves the story forward. Again, very common fantasy trope. In the strictest sense, this trope is still deconstructed in the show, because Oberyn's quest fails and the story stays at the same point when he dies. But we lose a lot of the nuance because the show presents Oberyn as very similar to Inigo Montoya from the Princess Bride as a character, while the book presented him as the exact opposite of Inigo Montoya. Since we don't have all this framing and discussion about how quests work, Oberyn's death is more about shock value than it is in the books and therefore, I would argue, less interesting. Since the end of the books isn't written, I can only speculate about what trope GRRM wants to revert when he has Dany fight Jon at the end of his storyline. Probably something about how power never corrupts people in fantasy? I don't know. But the show gives us nothing, and all we're left with is shock value.
Haha what a typical fanboy argument about honor and its deconstruction. That was true till GRRM made Jon an immortal being. Jon is 1:1 Ned Stark and he is the main character who is most likely going to survive till the last chapters of the book. So in the end Martin goes back to what Tolkien did. Ned is just the "teacher" character who dies in all of generic fantasy. The difference was that Martin portrayed him as the main character in the beginning but in retrospect he was just that generic guy who dies in all of fantasy.
GoT the series totally ruined the books for me. I read them before the series and I thought they were good and something different but nothing special. But then the series came out and hordes and hordes of fanboys spawned who try to make aSoIaF something that it is not. Martin has done nothing no other author of any sort of fiction (be it fantasy, books, films or games) hasn't done before. It is a good book series and its recommendable but its not some sort of holy manuscript. Sometimes Martin wrote things in his books just because. There was no ulterior motive. He just wrote them because he felt like doing so. ALL AND EVERY author does it. There is no piece of literature that has 100% special meanings attached to it.
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On May 19 2019 19:43 Nebuchad wrote:
I didn't say it wasn't foreshadowed, I said it was mundane and designed for shock value.
The internet is filled with people that do say it was not foreshadowed (ie it was 'not earned'). I never posted this as a reply to only your post.
I don't know what you mean when you say 'it was mundane'. Are you saying it was bland and vanilla and the safest way to end the story? Really?
Yes, it was designed for shock value. This show has definitely changed a bit in that aspect. But the Red Wedding was also designed for shock value.
... but from your framing of us wanting Dany to be a good guy, it's clear that you think this is an unusual end. It's actually not: every fantasy story ever has an ultimate fight between people who are good and people who are bad. If you want to have Jon and Dany fight each other, which I think we can assume is what they're gearing up to and what they've been told by GRRM should happen, then forcing the audience to view one of them as evil through an act designed for shock value is the laziest thing that you can do.
You think GoT is the same as every fantasy story? I am really confused about what you are trying to tell us. I cannot think of a story that tells the audience "there are no good guys" but magically convinces the audience that one character is actually the goodly hero. And then in the end that character actually turns out to be the biggest bad guy that everyone in the story has been warning us about. And we look back and see all these red flags which we somehow missed. I stopped reading fantasy in my teens, but on tv I have never see an story like that. And neither have all these people that are now so mad.
As for the last episode, I don't think Dany and Jon will have an epic boss fight. But Jon will kill Dany and then Jon will still reject to be king. And that is how the story has been set up. But nothing is guaranteed, of course.
GRRM is no troll and nothing happens for shock value. Martin starts from classic fantasy, and his argument is that some of Tolkien's beliefs about values and world building harm the genre. A simple way to go about this argument would be to write a fantasy story that ignores those harmful principles, but GRRM goes further than that and instead does a deconstruction of these principles.
I have never and will never read a GRRM book. So if you want to have a book discussion with me, that won't work, I watch the show and he is a writer on the show. But from everything I have been told GRRM is indeed a post-modernist writer (one reason why I refuse to read him). And I would call him a troll writer. He sets up tropes and knocks them down, for shock value. You call the same thing 'deconstruction, but not for shock value'.
Since the end of the books isn't written, I can only speculate about what trope GRRM wants to revert when he has Dany fight Jon at the end of his storyline. Probably something about how power never corrupts people in fantasy? I don't know. But the show gives us nothing, and all we're left with is shock value.
What do you mean 'the show gives us nothing'? You still never explained what piece of the narrative is missing in the tv series. GRRM will obviously also have Dany go evil in the book, and there will be some conflict between them, which is why he calls the whole thing 'A song of fire and ice'. And it will be different, because it is a book and not a tv show. But what did the story do wrong? All you are saying is that you don't like a tv show that milks a story for shock value. I would agree that you cannot have your main character inexplicably go mad to have them burn down the capital city of your world just for shock value since you are already having a siege there anyway, so why not burn it down completely. And thus turn the only character in your story with the ability to do so 'evil'. Obviously, this is not why the story turned out the way it did. But it is kind of what you are saying. Daenerys only went mad because they wanted her dragon to burn down the city because that would be the most dramatic way to destroy KL.
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On May 19 2019 20:01 sharkie wrote:Show nested quote +On May 19 2019 19:43 Nebuchad wrote:On May 19 2019 18:56 Rasalased wrote:
But there is literal 10 years of buildup to her suddenly going mad. It is not explained why, but it is foreshadowed for 10 years. So it is wrong to say that it was unexpected, because it literally was not. And it is wrong to say that it should be either explained or sudden, because it was intended to be shocking. People act that the first sign of her doing this is Varys suddenly out of the blue thinking Daenerys might be evil.
Her slowly commuting more and more severe war crimes and ignoring advice more and more is a completely different story. Not a better version of the same story.
What GRRM did with Daenerys is literally teh same thing he has been doing always. It is troll writing, because it deliberaly pisses off part of the audience while maintaining a very believable and logical story. It reads as if these events could really happen that way, and not like a contrived story where everything just happens in a way most entertaining for the audience.
When I said that GRRM was a troll writers they seem to think that Daenerys burning down KL is the same as Sam suddenly mounting Drogon and him burning down KL.
Yes, this is 100% about people refusing to accept Daenerys no longer being a 'good guy'. And they blame it on bad story-writing because other aspects of the show have become badly written. I didn't say it wasn't foreshadowed, I said it was mundane and designed for shock value. You agree that it's based on shock but think a lot of things in ASOIAF were based on shock. You are wrong about that; more on that later. You don't touch on whether it's mundane or not but from your framing of us wanting Dany to be a good guy, it's clear that you think this is an unusual end. It's actually not: every fantasy story ever has an ultimate fight between people who are good and people who are bad. If you want to have Jon and Dany fight each other, which I think we can assume is what they're gearing up to and what they've been told by GRRM should happen, then forcing the audience to view one of them as evil through an act designed for shock value is the laziest thing that you can do. But I'm more interested in the second part, and that's what I was touching on in my initial answer: GRRM is no troll and nothing happens for shock value. Martin starts from classic fantasy, and his argument is that some of Tolkien's beliefs about values and world building harm the genre. A simple way to go about this argument would be to write a fantasy story that ignores those harmful principles, but GRRM goes further than that and instead does a deconstruction of these principles. Here is one example: - Honor is a principle that is very central to fantasy, it usually serves to distinguish good people from bad people. If you're trying to oppose that framing, you could write a fantasy story where nobody cares about honor. A Game of Thrones doesn't do that. Instead it has a main character, Ned Stark, that is very similar to a classical fantasy hero in terms of how he views honor and, by extension, good and evil. GRRM then has his narrative question this trope in two main ways: practicality and commitment. Practicality, because honor is by definition not practical: it's a set of rules that limit the scope of the actions you can take. You could side with Renly in the way that he wants to overthrow Joffrey, but that's not honorable. You could side with Littlefinger in the way he wants to overthrow Joffrey (think the show dropped that one btw?), but that's not honorable. So instead you stay on your own, satisfied with the fact that you are doing the honorable thing, and then you... lose, because other people aren't constrained in the same way that you are. The show has an excellent illustration of this principle in one scene: when Bronn fights the knight of the Vale at Tyrion's trial, and defeats him using trickery rather than superiority in battle. Lysa then protests: "You don't fight with honor!" And Bronn answers: "No. He did." But we should also mention commitment, because it's pretty easy to be honorable as long as you don't care. ASOIAF presents a lot of people who are ready to act honorably but have some things that are off limits (for a lot of them, it's their own personal survival, see how Will in the prologue doesn't climb down the tree to help Waymar Royce fight the white walker). For Ned Stark, it's his family. It's not honorable to recognize Joffrey as the true king when he isn't. It's not honorable to lie to your king about the Targaryen having an heir. But Ned Stark is committed to his family's survival above his honor, and so he does these things. If even the most honorable among us, like Ned Stark, are only honorable when we haven't met their stakes, is honor really what's driving them, or anyone? Now, if you don't kill Ned Stark at the end of season 1, the deconstruction doesn't work. You can't argue that honor is impractical and that people will abandon their honor if the situation warrants it, and then have your honorable character survive everything and continue his life anyway. That defeats the purpose of the narrative you've created. You have to kill Ned to complete the narrative arc. It isn't shocking, it's entirely logical based on what the story is saying. It's just that we aren't used to hearing this particular story, we are used to hearing another kind of story, one where the honorable guy is the good guy and the good guy wins at the end. Contrast that with something that the show got wrong: Oberyn in season 4. Oberyn's deconstruction is about the concept of a quest. You have a very defined goal, you go and do it, and that moves the story forward. Again, very common fantasy trope. In the strictest sense, this trope is still deconstructed in the show, because Oberyn's quest fails and the story stays at the same point when he dies. But we lose a lot of the nuance because the show presents Oberyn as very similar to Inigo Montoya from the Princess Bride as a character, while the book presented him as the exact opposite of Inigo Montoya. Since we don't have all this framing and discussion about how quests work, Oberyn's death is more about shock value than it is in the books and therefore, I would argue, less interesting. Since the end of the books isn't written, I can only speculate about what trope GRRM wants to revert when he has Dany fight Jon at the end of his storyline. Probably something about how power never corrupts people in fantasy? I don't know. But the show gives us nothing, and all we're left with is shock value. Haha what a typical fanboy argument about honor and its deconstruction. That was true till GRRM made Jon an immortal being. Jon is 1:1 Ned Stark and he is the main character who is most likely going to survive till the last chapters of the book. So in the end Martin goes back to what Tolkien did. Ned is just the "teacher" character who dies in all of generic fantasy. The difference was that Martin portrayed him as the main character in the beginning but in retrospect he was just that generic guy who dies in all of fantasy. GoT the series totally ruined the books for me. I read them before the series and I thought they were good and something different but nothing special. But then the series came out and hordes and hordes of fanboys spawned who try to make aSoIaF something that it is not. Martin has done nothing no other author of any sort of fiction (be it fantasy, books, films or games) hasn't done before. It is a good book series and its recommendable but its not some sort of holy manuscript. Sometimes Martin wrote things in his books just because. There was no ulterior motive. He just wrote them because he felt like doing so. ALL AND EVERY author does it. There is no piece of literature that has 100% special meanings attached to it.
Am I supposed to be insulted by the notion that I'm a fanboy?
Jon has his own deconstructions going on, mostly connected to prophecy and Azor Ahai. His story arc doesn't negate what happened to Ned. It's still there and it's still saying what it's saying. The notion that Ned Stark fills the teacher trope role of a classical fantasy story is absurd. He has none of the attributes and he does none of the acts.
If you watch Martin's interview with Strombopoulos from a few years ago you will see him say, himself, that this is what he's trying to do with his books, so that's probably an issue with your theory there.
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On May 19 2019 19:54 Rasalased wrote:
I don't get why people think the bells triggered insanity in her. To me the bells were just a huge signpost for the audience. She was doing the proper things in killing scorpions only at one point. Then the Lannisters surrendered and Daenerys' plan went exactly as she said it would go from season 6. So wtf were all her advisors so considered about about not taking her Dragons to KL. And the Lannisters even surrendered. But she had already made the decision. But what she did after the bells was different. The story could also have scenes about dragon fire burning 100% Lannister soldiers, then a random collateral damage citizen among them. Then a group of soldiers among civilians. And then just civilians and her no stopping. I think it was a good decision to not do it that way but to have a clear distinction. And the bells made that crystal clear. GoT is the most expensive show in tv history. Of course they are going to use cinematics to enhance the emotional impact. That is their craft as writers, directors, and producers.
We had this huge talk for years about R+L=J, it is even in the mod notes on the top of this page. And we had scenes of Dany and Jon talk about it. But people don't seem to fully realize what that means for Daenerys. Why? We saw her ramble for 10 years about her taking back what is truly hers by bright-right and about fulfilling her destiny. And it was all a lie because it is Jon, not her. She came to Westeros to continue her tour of being a beloved savior of the ordinary people. Yet everyone in Westeros disliked or feared her. I don't know how I would respond to realizing that my entire life is based on a lie. And even in Essos she needed advisors to show her a way of achieving her goals without just burning her enemies with dragons. So take the advisors away, and add the grief of losing those she lost, of course she is in a terrible state of mind. I think all the pieces were definitely there for her to do this. I don't see which puzzle piece was missing.
How often do we have to tell you that nobody thinks Daenerys going mad was a bad story? It's just that the show does a very bad job of *telling* that story.
It's the difference between Tolkien writing a story about a bunch of nobodies going on a quest to defeat the greatest evil in the world and me doing that. Sure, I could hit all the important plot points (assuming he gave them to me in a cliff notes version), but it'd *still* be a terrible story, because I am not a good storyteller.
That's the problem the show has right now. Daenerys going mad and burning King's Landing to the ground *could* be a compelling and gripping plot, but it.. well.. isn't. Because they didn't build up the drama of "will she be able to control her madness?" And then answer that with a resounding "no". They simply gave us the "no" and left it to us to build up the suspense ourselves.
Compare that to the red wedding. Where it was clear the Freys were horribly angry at Robb. Then they set demands, and it seemed like things might actually work out. A big point was made about guest rights and that that was when the Starks and Tullies relaxed and believed things could actually work. Into a huge betrayal. This was not something that came out of left field. We also thought the Freys would betray the Starks. The only thing that was subverted was the idea that nobody would stoop so low as to betray something as "sacred" as guest rights. Which is why it worked.
A similar build up was there for Ned Stark. Joffrey was a sadistic little shit and hated Ned, but we all thought his ruthless but sane mother (as well as all his other advisors) had him sufficiently under control. Turns out, they didn't. Ned betrayed his honor for his family, but it was ultimately pointless.
That build up simply wasn't there for Daenerys. She has been portrayed as at times being unstable, and favoring ruthlessly murdering her opponents over a more forgiving style. But she has also been shown to care for the downtrodden... and her whole arc in Essos was about that. She then decided to go out of her way and not attack King's Landing in favour of protecting the living from the dead (and risking her dragons and her entire army in an unwinnable fight). And then we're supposed to believe that her ruthlessness has turned to madness just because Varys says so a few times?
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You can repeat it all you want, but it is not very convincing. There is literally a 10 year build up. And there are like 40 scenes that should have told you that something is up with her and that she is not a normal person. And that completely ignores what kind of writer GRRM is and in what kind of world she is a character.
They told you this story for over 10 years, and I see people claim it all happened in 1 or maybe 2 episodes. How can that be!
And if you watch the complication of reaction videos of people watching that scene, people say all kinds of stuff indicating that they knew that Daenerys was going to burn innocents before it happened. How? You claim they never 'build up the drama'. If so, how did all these people know before it happened?
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On May 19 2019 20:08 Rasalased wrote:
I don't know what you mean when you say 'it was mundane'. Are you saying it was bland and vanilla and the safest way to end the story? Really?
Yes, it was designed for shock value. This show has definitely changed a bit in that aspect. But the Red Wedding was also designed for shock value.
Provided that they received the instruction that they had to have Jon fight Dany from GRRM, yes, it's the most mundane way of having that happen.
Red Wedding wasn't designed for shock value. It's the conclusion of the analysis of two different tropes, one about love and one about underdogs. Again, given what the story has said so far, it is perfectly logical that the Red Wedding happens. We're just surprised that it happens because we're used to seeing armies of 200 people win against armies of 10000 orcs like we saw at Helm's Deep.
You think GoT is the same as every fantasy story? I am really confused about what you are trying to tell us.
Have you considered reading entire posts before answering them, thus helping you clear some of those confusions?^^
I have never and will never read a GRRM book. So if you want to have a book discussion with me, that won't work, I watch the show and he is a writer on the show. But from everything I have been told GRRM is indeed a post-modernist writer (one reason why I refuse to read him). And I would call him a troll writer. He sets up tropes and knocks them down, for shock value. You call the same thing 'deconstruction, but not for shock value'.
Post-modernism is a pretty terrible reason to not read a book. I just explained what GRRM was trying to do and you dismiss all of that to come back to shock value, even though you haven't and won't read his work? Why are you doing this?
What do you mean 'the show gives us nothing'? You still never explained what piece of the narrative is missing in the tv series.
We miss the discussion of the trope that is being deconstructed by Dany being an antagonist. It could be about power, it could be about colonialism, it could even be about radical leftism since GRRM supports Biden. No idea. All we're left with is the shock value, which isn't compelling storytelling in itself. But I've said this already.
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The Red Wedding, in the tv show, was clearly designed for shock value. But you think that means it was 'only designed for shock value'.
I skipped your part of the post about you explaining how GRRM writes his books, because it is pointless in this debate about the ending of this tv series. You can simply say "I expected a careful and thorough deconstruction, but the story gave me a sudden but carefully foreshadowed switch of character and then scenes designed with shock value in mind" rather than "It was simply not compelling story-writing" and we wouldn't have gone down this road.
If you wanted a careful deconstruction of the 'power corrupts trope', I agree that is not what the tv series gave you. But that was never your complaint and it doesn't mean something isn't compelling storytelling. I am no book expert, but if this is your expectation of the book, I would say to you: "Prepare to be disappointed."
If you still want to convince me that this tv show was badly written as a tv show, give it another try.
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Red wedding was designed for two things: killing rob stark and preventing the end of the lannister rule (becsuse rob was winning) and for shock value.
Anyone else saying otherwise hasnt followed the story because there have been no consequences for the red wedding otherwise. Have other kingdoms decided to say something about it? No. They all just accepted it as "oh ok, good move by tywin".
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On May 19 2019 20:31 Rasalased wrote:
The Red Wedding, in the tv show, was clearly designed for shock value. But you think that means it was 'only designed for shock value'.
I skipped your part of the post about you explaining how GRRM writes his books, because it is pointless in this debate about the ending of this tv series. You can simply say "I expected a careful and thorough deconstruction, but the story gave me a sudden but carefully foreshadowed switch of character and then scenes designed with shock value in mind" rather than "It was simply not compelling story-writing" and we wouldn't have gone down this road.
If you wanted a careful deconstruction of the 'power corrupts trope', I agree that is not what the tv series gave you. But that was never your complaint and it doesn't mean something isn't compelling storytelling. I am no book expert, but if this is your expectation of the book, I would say to you: "Prepare to be disappointed."
If you still want to convince me that this tv show was badly written as a tv show, give it another try.
It's pretty self-evident that shock value alone doesn't give you compelling storytelling. It would certainly be shocking if an asteroid hits Westeros tonight and everyone dies. But that wouldn't be compelling.
One way I think we could get around your bias is to get you to see the difference between something that is shocking because you have weird expectations about what should be happening in the story, and something that is shocking because weird things are happening in the story.
If you're going to dismiss everything related to the books, probably best not to bring up GRRM and what you think he's doing as a writer.
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EPT
