The Massacre of Game of Thrones

we've seen massacres like the red wedding the fall of King's Landing but nothing like this like you I used to love Game of Thrones the worldwide phenomenon that had something for everyone that spouted complex themes out the wazoo and put characters and moral paradoxes hitherto unseen in popular media grounded world-building that made all this fantasy jargon feel real and lived in with endlessly quotable dialogue and fun battles with legitimate stake because everything tied back to the characters and their development subverting tropes without the conscious feeling that it's just for the sake of subversion that these events actually meant something at its peak we were strapped in and the only thing on my mind was that I had no idea where all these threads were leading some sure but I had no general sense of the bigger picture there were more rudaba land more hateable characters but there was no real sense of good or bad no one knew where exactly it was heading or really does because the real ending has yet to be written and published into existence but we were all strapped in for the ride it makes sense then that with only cliff notes and spitballs from george RR martin to work with the show spiraled out of control at the start of this channel i did a little video essay about the show but I've since shifted into a different kind of format so I've been waiting to talk about Game of Thrones again I've been looking forward to doing fun stuff like listing my top 5 episodes or ranking the seasons I think the first four seasons each progressively improved to the point where seasons 3 & 4 are some of the best television ever produced and while there's much debate I think season 4 is easily the best even though season 3 has the best episode and the best music all the characters were the best versions of themselves this season and it all threaded into a coherent singular feeling story that wrapped up most of what the show had been working towards and planting exciting seeds for what would happen in the future there's a notion that it was as soon as the show ran out of source material that it started to fall apart but I think the cracks begin to show was early as season 5 when they still had a book to work with and I think this is because the show had deviated so much from the source material and might as well have not had source material at all at that point so I guess there's some merit to that notion it's interesting to note then that this is the first season that one Emmy for Best Drama mostly because it was the first season that didn't have to compete with Breaking Bad but I see this Season five award is more of an honorary award for the first four seasons I honestly think season six is pretty great despite the lack of source material but it's clear in the dialogue in the more Hollywood style storytelling that this was becoming a very different show season seven was when it really started to [ __ ] the bed ignoring the pre-established geographic laws that made the show feel so grounded in the first place most of the interesting conflict in the show happened because of the detours and on one hand I understand abandoning this goal because they're wrapping stuff up and introducing new conflict is counterproductive to that goal but on the other hand there's a way to wrap stuff up organically that doesn't involve contradicting its own logic I could blame the showrunners insistence on doing 15 episodes for the last two seasons even though the producers were willing to give them as many episodes as they wanted but the show had already lost so much of its flavor that I'm not sure I'd even want more episodes than we got characters kind of just say things that need to be said and everyone feels more homogenized because the writers lost their individual sense of character which leads me to believe they never really had it in the first place and by sticking to the work of someone who did they were able to coast by this season had all those same flaws and just amplified them sprinting to the finish that led it to fizzle out so let's talk about season 8 or as I like to call it [Music] there was a lot of intrigue going into this season information like the two years it took to film the fact that it was only six episodes and the fact that most of those episodes were closer to the length of a short feature film rather than a TV episode but I think this all led to some really bizarre pacing on one hand I hated that we got two full episodes of just preparation but on the other hand I feel like what happened in those episodes was rushed maybe it's the fact that even though there's a lot to cram in the writers take breaks and include a scene where Jon and Daenerys go on a date writing this review I almost gave it props for establishing the awkwardness between Jon and Daenerys with the information that he's Aegon Targaryen but then I remembered that neither of them know that in this scene sure there's a callback to the cave but the whole scene feels like a long empty placeholder that doesn't establish anything new about the relationship and takes time away from more important character moments that are then consequently rushed this dynamic takes up a third of the season and then we get episodes like the last of the Starks which has no sense of momentum whatsoever with its disjointed acts I'm not suggesting they break these into two different episodes and make them longer than they already are but it feels like the fact that they're the same episode is more of an arbitrary decision to keep everything within the timeframe of six episodes there's nothing that makes this episode feel like a cogent chapter this is even true of the finale in traditional Game of Thrones fashion the climax always came in the penultimate episode and the final episode is the resolution more or less this might have seemed frustrating on a week-to-week basis but binging each season as a self-contained story this pacing was perfect when you only have six episodes to work with though you have to combine both of those into the same episode and it feels once again like two different episodes with a jarring time-skip in the middle the only episode that felt like one rightful episode was the Battle of Winterfell the rest of the season had no reason to be broken up the way it was and game in the Battle of Winterfell came out the same weekend and I remember even though I like the final battle and I'm game for the most part it was very much a relief to watch this episode and see a lot more practical stuff so it annoys me when people complain about the show striving for realism yes this is a show about dragons and ice zombies but that's exactly why it has to strive for realism and that's why I appreciate when it does and that's why I hate when it doesn't the show lost its sense of geography last season so I won't complain about Jamie making it to King's Landing overnight there are more important things to worry about like the fact that we're supposed to buy it that the whole show has revolved around Daenerys gathering the most competent minds in the discovered world yet they let her forget about the iron fleet and fly right into battle losing one of her dragons we're supposed to believe that with point-blank accuracy they can take out the dragon she's not on but miss her we're supposed to believe that after this close encounter her game plan is to just fly directly towards them again and hope that they miss and that it works stuff like you're on Graduate jumping out at the right moment I'll be it engulfed in flame and swimming all the way to the exact spot Jamie winds up call it nitpicky but this is the reason Jamie's crippled at the end the counter-argument to this would be to say Iran's wounds aren't what crippled him and that he would have died anyway and I may agree with that but then that line of thinking would support that this entire faceoff is inconsequential look Iran is just a terribly designed terribly executed character but I'm getting off track here John and Daenerys have no chemistry and belief in their love is what's supposed to sell us on Jon's loyalty to her this loyalty being the reason King's Landing burned down and the reason this sacrifice is supposed to be such an emotional rollercoaster this is a problem more at the writing than the acting but pointing fingers here is a little pointless because it's the final product that matters we get a good sense of the awkwardness between them with the knowledge that he's her nephew and also the rightful heir but that's not very effective when things already felt awkward between them even the physical believability of the show is diminished a little we've had some bad green screening and compositing in the past but this season has had a much higher concentration the penultimate episode looks like 90% of it was shot by a second unit team and the fire looks like an After Effects tutorial halfway through the episode the sword sound effects sound all compressed and low-cut considering all the extra time and money the show had I would expect them to at least maintain the same level of technical prowess but aside from some exceptional spurts of editing here and there some well composed minimal CGI shots I was let down and even when the CGI is good we'll get a ridiculously cartoonish shot like this I feel like I'm watching Angelina Jolie's Maleficent and while we're talking about editing I'm drawn back to this possibly inconsequential fight because it's like the worst thing I've seen since the [ __ ] sand snake fight in season 5 it's so hard to believe that this is the same director as battles like Battle of the bastards or hardhome because it's actually borderline incompetent there's no sense of continuity whatsoever which could be an intentional artistic choice to represent the disorientation of the characters but it's not jarring enough to really convey that disorientation and it just looks like a poorly choreographed poorly edited fight I hate to end the section on such an inconsequential note but these issues plague all sorts of moments throughout the past two seasons [Music] the characters have been on the downfall for a while now polar shifts to good versus bad have become comically clear and the dialogue is [ __ ] terrible again I suspect that this is because the writers never really had the chops for it in the first place and mostly relied on quotes from the source material or maybe they're just burnt out and I should give them a little more credit for the earlier seasons but characters have been dropping left and right more so in quality than an actual physical death of the few that have remained great characters I'd say Aria has Theon has and Brienne sort of has of course there were things this season that have hindered those characters namely Brienne assuming the role of a housewife after the Battle of Winterfell and not going to King's Landing for the battle her final character moment merely serving as a redemption of Jaime rather than anything for herself as well as Theon dying for no real cause his arc ended where it should have fighting for the Starks and it was great that he protected brand that whole time but his very final action didn't serve any real purpose he didn't slow the white walkers progression at all it didn't stall them for Arya to show up the knight King basically swatted him down like a fly that's a little more nitpicky though far from the massacre of Theon gradually but the character who I'd say has remained the most ambiguous and compelling who's maintained an arc perhaps both in spite of and because of that ambiguity is Jaime or should I say was Jaime by Episode four of the season I would say he's the best character then the show takes all the development they've given him and throws it in the garbage he's established as a scumbag then he's redeemed in season 3 we see the good in him but as good as we think he is he's still [ __ ] Cersei in season seven we get this moment where he finally leaves her a big moment for his arc it does make him a little less ambiguous but considering his relations with the Starks he still got a decent amount of complexity at least more so than most other characters then even though he's known all this time that the plan was to storm King's Landing he leaves Winterfell and confesses his love for Cersei when there's no catalyst for this change within him I'm not gonna say that the only good thing they could have done with Jaime is have him kill Cersei even though I would have liked that but the fact that he goes all this way suffers so much to get her again and then they died together in this romantic Nicholas Sparks situation almost condoning and even warding their incest goes against so much they've set up for him even worse though is his disregard for the innocent lives the whole reason he became the Kingslayer ruining his public image and making endless enemies was for the sake of this exact public the fact that in his last moments he contradicts something so crucial to his character is perhaps blatant disrespect for all the work the show was done and at the very least just embarrassing ignorance Cersei used to be a compelling yet successfully hateable villain but all she's had to do this season is stand around drink wine and talk about elephants she had no legitimate plan for this invasion aside from relying on the iron fleet I mean I just feel like this season has made everyone more incompetent but not for the sake of character I think it's out of a lack of knowing how to write these complex interactions and obviously I can't sit here pretending like I know how to do that that stuff is difficult but this is this is HBO this is the most popular show on television right now you'd think they would hire people the few people in the world who would know how to do that I mean one of Martin's active goals writing the series was to eliminate any sense of superficial Hollywood battling and presenting complex again realistic warfare where tactics are worked through and we benefit from seeing all these factors tied together where we have the theoretical plan and where in practice things go awry and we having been informed of all the factors can pinpoint this stuff for ourselves the show still tries that but it comes off as superficial and lazy but I'm getting off topic again I'm talking about Cersei right now in the past I've been one to complain about people saying stuff like this person should have fought this person or that person should have fought that person for instance I'm okay with Arya killing the night king but I will say that even though Daenerys is responsible for the rubble and it's her own city that kills her it's a little dissatisfying to the direction they've taken her character to have her die off in this romantic again potentially rewarding situation I feel like if she could have chosen a way to die she would probably choose this comforted in her lover's arms dying beside him but it's not even a complex ending to her character in the sense that she necessarily got what she wanted and won in spite of dying she still lost but she lost in a very lukewarm way and I know that this is because the show is officially deeming Daenerys that but when Cersei has been the overarching villain for so long it just feels like her ending fizzled out as for Tyrion season 4 put him through so much of course he couldn't be the same character as great of a character as he was but ever since season 5 he's had little to do and what he has done has just been [ __ ] after [ __ ] he's supposed to be archetypically at the smart character and he's just become a bumbling sidekick who hasn't done anything useful in years he used to be probably the best character in the whole show and now he's just it was a mistake but it's not that this is an arc where his fuck-ups help him learn something he just happens to be wrong a lot and I can't even spend much time criticizing him because at this point the show has given us so little of him to work with I will say that if there's one thing the finale fixed it finally made Tyrion smart again for the most part but there's this line where he says he loved Daenerys that's a little confusing my interpretation was that he loved her like a queen not a romantic love but then I was reminded of this scene where he's listening to Jon and Daenerys doing their thing so I really have no idea what to make of it I'm just gonna assume for my own sake that he didn't mean romantic love and that this is just an inconsequential scene because I don't think it's a smart direction to make Tyrion in love with Daenerys and speaking of this is the one people are gonna be divided on for the course of time the next Luke Skywalker in the last Jedi and unfortunately this time I find myself in the position saying she was mishandled there are characters for whom I wasn't crazy about the direction the show took them in like grey worm being the final villain in a sense but it's stuff I can't really complain about because I can understand how the character got there and it's just a matter of personal preference then there's Daenerys now the common argument in favor of return here is that it's been foreshadowed and yes this threat has been very explicitly dangled in front of her for the whole show she has this vision in season two that's directly paralleled in the finale she does this to the tarly's she talks constantly about winning her place with fire and fury and conquering with fear but first of all in none of these scenes does she advocate from massacring thousands of innocent civilians unless maybe she means they might have to be collateral damage but it's always out of necessity this is not collateral damage this is murder why does she believe the citizens of all these other tyrannical cities or victims to their government but the citizens of King's Landing aren't I think a cause for much of the discrepancy here is the fact that when you have a 70 hour TV show there's a lot of time for a lot of character moments and you wind up with so much to work with technically anything could be argued as foreshadowed however there's pretty much always a prevalent path with a more consciously paved route I used to play a game called tivitz in elementary school in a nutshell you have designated dice with numerical values that you want to place on the other side of the map so that the designated operations there with your numbers total to a higher number than your opponent there's not a right or wrong way of advancing the dice but there is a way to maximize your score with a certain formation at the end what game of thrones did with Daenerys is technically a valid placement in tivitz terms but I get the sense that it wasn't the placement that left with the highest possible sum now I know this analogy may seem to imply a certain objectivity that isn't entirely accurate to the situation but I do understand that these values are subjective to each person's individual experience most of us just happen to have very similar experiences I can get behind the show getting us to believe that her arc is about overcoming her family's past mistakes that long to corrupt her and then have her fail to overcome that as a sort of tragedy but the way it happens I'm not sold on it first of all within the actual scene it's hard to tell what exactly it is that makes her snap is it the bells the red keep the prospect of Cersei the scene doesn't visually clarify what exactly she's reacting to and poor Emilia Clarke then had to fill in the gaps herself and try to convey this inner turmoil but because of the lack of external ization it doesn't get the message across second of all it feels like with the most recent episodes the show took a route that could have naturally curved in that direction and gotten there eventually and just snapped it into the place they wanted it to go that's the problem in general with these last two seasons rather than letting the story play out until it got to its natural destination they decided on a destination and forced the story into it third of all I guess the only feasible explanation is that Daenerys his arc is about mental illness because throughout the show she does all these noble things claiming this isn't how we do it that Cersei Lannister so we know deep down that this is her character but it seems this mental illness as a result of Targaryen incest takes over and I don't find that particularly compelling not that a narrative about struggling to overcome mental illness isn't compelling but the way it's done here feels like a cop-out because her arc has always been about overcoming familial behavior and expectations rather than familial illness and to play this card at the end just feels cheap and disappointing people act like her death in the finale was some sort of big twist but I don't see what else could have happened to her after this episode unless these people wanted the show to end with Daenerys as a successful tyrant but I wouldn't even call this whole thing a twist I just call it a bad narrative direction now I know this is Game of Thrones and complex humans fighting each other is much more compelling than ice zombies but the show has spent so much time building this up for winter when the White Walkers will have peak power and I guess I had hoped that they would pose more of a threat than just being a powerful army sure they can only die from dragonglass or Valyrian steel but when they're going against an army of people wielding basically all the dragon glass and Valyrian steel in the world it's basically just an elevated man versus man fight also if the reason dragonglass and Valyrian steel is effective against the White Walkers is because they were forged with dragon fire why does dragon fire itself not do the trick anyway that bothers me a little along with some small things like the fact that this is supposed to be peak winter which is supposed to be brutal borderline uninhabitable weather to the point where people warned about it for years yet here in Winterfell beacon of the north snow is just casually melting as people casually stroll about what's the point of hearing winter is coming winter is coming winter is coming winter is coming into winter is coming winter is coming winter is coming winter is coming winter is coming drilled into our heads for years if it's gonna be this mild Fargo does a better job conveying brutal winter than this show and Westeros is supposed to be way more brutal than the American Midwest what really bothers me though is the fact that all this time the show has been establishing these threads and tying them together into the singular coherent work and I was always wondering how the white Walker stuff for tying to the throne stuff especially when the conflicts actually started to be integrated with each other finally and the answer is it doesn't it's like there were two separate shows going on and one just grabs the characters of the other for a little bit to finish up before letting everyone go back into the other one to finish that one up there are two entirely separate conflicts with little narrative connection and a lot of potential to be thematically connected that the show doesn't take advantage of I'm reminded of tivitz yet again in the end it gives us no reason for these two stories to be happening at the same time and this also ties back into how bad the pacing was this season because the first two episodes are building up to something entirely resolved in the next episode and after that they're like well now that that's done let's move on to the next thing to check off I think the biggest consequence of all this [ __ ] the biggest indicator that something's wrong is that by the finale I didn't care what happened anymore I cared an episode 5 because of the baffling narrative decisions that were made but by the end I really couldn't care less bran winds up on the throne or whatever he's the three-eyed Raven sure Zhaan's is Queen in the north great this is the council [ __ ] cool Arya is a conquistador alright I don't care that Jon didn't end up King his heritage caused the tension that led Daenerys to snap and while that arc is terrible at least his being a Targaryen served a purpose even if we didn't really feel much from it again I don't see how Daenerys couldn't have died but after all these seasons growing attached to her she went out with a poof with no other emotion I know I'm not doing the best job explaining why exactly I stopped caring about all these things but I think I just got so tired of all the poor decisions and lazy executions I was just ready for it to be over it was pretty strangely paced but I don't even think the finale is the dumpster fire everyone's making it out to be I think episode 5 is the big dumpster fire of the show and while it maybe didn't do the best job wrapping things up the finale was reasonable in a vacuum and was really only bad because of the circumstances the rest of the season left it under overall though I think people have a right to be upset with all the loose ends that went absolutely nowhere the quality of the show for the first four years and all the threads it set up gave us the impression that we were in store for an incredible knot-tying demonstration and what we got was a bunch of twelve-year-old boy scouts struggling to learn the clove hitch I think back to the days were in a single episode we would have Jon Snow in the moral dilemma of killing a man to maintain his disguise as a wildling for the greater good of the Nights Watch or spare his life to keep his oath at the cost of exposing himself to all these people who can kill him and to the love of his life who was also in a dilemma because she loves him despite the lie the relationship was founded upon as Jon's younger brother is a in a tower next to him but unable to reveal himself and be discovering that he has the magical power to warg into other creatures because his friend is having an unstable breakdown that would expose them and just a few minutes later we would see a quarter of the cast our good guys killed off slaughtered Azaria puts the pieces together outside the scene all this complexity in one episode now the kind of dilemma the show goes for is do I kill this person who massacred thousands of innocent people because she's a tyrant or spare her life because I apparently love her keep in mind I'm leaving out the complex facts that she's his aunt and he's the rightful heir because that fact is completely irrelevant to the scene even though that card would have added a lot of complexity to it tivitz people a lot of people stand by sure it's not what it used to be but it's only bad by Game of Thrones standards and is still in the upper echelon of TV and I would disagree with that I think you could maybe make that case about season 5 but season seven and eight are just bad in their own right they're just bad television but then again it is just television it's provided us a lot over the years and I am grateful for it by no means do these final terrible seasons make me regret sitting through the first amazing seasons but by analyzing these failures we further understand how to avoid them in the future also I say all this using the hyperbolically morbid template of massacre but I know that I'm just some loser who watches the fruit of thousands of other people's hard work and they owe me nothing I say this merely hoping that someone will agree with me and that my words can help someone make something better than they would have otherwise at the end of the day I'm sad that what my freshman self would have considered his favorite show plundered as much as it did but there are more important things to be more sad about and more importantly there's so much other great art out there if I'm sad that this show sucks now I can just turn it off and watch something good and then I will be happy I recommend you all do the same but not of course until after you follow me on Instagram and Twitter and letterboxed and pledged me on patreon and worship me in any other way that you can because I'm a power-hungry individual thank you for watching and have a nice day [Music] you

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 505,240

Rating: 4.7715931 out of 5

Keywords: game of thrones, a song of ice and fire, hbo, george rr martin, grrm, dan weiss, dave benioff, dan and dave, weiss and benioff, daenerys targaryen, tyrion lannister, jon snow, emila clarke, peter dinklage, kit harrington, arya stark, maisie williams, jaime lannister, cersei lannister, lena headey

Id: dnC-g1-wjt4

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2019