Game of Thrones [Potential Book Spoilers]

D&D generally leave a bad feeling. And the fact that thrones is the most emmy'd show makes me laugh.

I seem to be one of the few people in this thread that like the show, but they occasionally do things I don't like. But then again so does GRRM.

D & D does several things I don't like per episode but they've done a very good job of appealing to the public

I have my complaints about the show but I still consider it the best TV show I've ever seen. Well, sorf of - I can never decide whether I like BBC's QI more.

The show is a veritable clickbait factory, so it has a pretty much unassailable level of popularity with twentysomethings, and its absolute devotion to cynical, edgy, yet altogether boilerplate drama, sometimes at the expense of the books, means that it has a built-in award show demographic.

I mean, inevitably, considering TV's power as mass media, the book audience would be drowned out simply because the general public has little patience for reading thousands of pages of dense prose.

edited 23rd Sep '16 11:24:45 AM by CrimsonZephyr

I would not make that kind of vast generalization...because there are people who came to the books from the show, myself for example.

The truth is that even show-watchers generally don't like Season 5 and Season 6. They like the individual episodes here and there, but stuff like Show!Dorne, Sansa-in-Winterfell, the Ramsay Bolton Hour is disliked by the same people.

What attracts people to the show is the parts which is most faithful to GRRM. That is to say, the whole politicking and gambits and counter-gambits.

Going to have to disagree with you on the average viewer's thoughts on the past couple seasons. First off, I think show watchers as a whole really did like 6 and considered it a return to form after season 5.

And, much as I think it was complete garbage (it was), your average casual viewer thought it was okay. Maybe not as good, and ratings did suffer somewhat, but it wasn't nearly as hated by the average viewer as a message board would indicate.

edited 23rd Sep '16 1:54:54 PM by Larkmarn

Yeah, reminds me of how on another site in the show thread o follow the shows biggest defender repeatedly ended up commenting on plots with "so the writing was just idioitc rather than a clever red herring".

I didn't start watching the show until it was on its fourth season, and only after that did I start reading the books. Now I've read almost everything - I've yet to read the short stories that weren't in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms but other than that I think I've read it all. The books are vastly superior to the show, obviously, but I don't dislike the show anywhere near as much as the average book fan seems to do.

For what it's worth, I consider season 4 the best so far. Season 1 is probably my second favourite. 5 was the worst, and then maybe 6. Season 3 was better than 2; so for me it's 4>1>3>2>6>5. My main gripe with the show, at this point, is the way they keep throwing away plots that they had built up and expanded to some extent, as well as starting new stories just to throw them away, as well. Just killing - quite literally - most of the Dorne plot, for instance, was a very difficult decision to understand.

To get back to TV and reading, I've probably spent more time watching TV than reading recently, but that's not been the case for long. I started reading when I was pretty young - by the time I was 13 my favourite authors were Victor Hugo, Terry Pratchett, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, and Stephen King (I don't rate the last three as highly anymore as I did back then).

Before the show became a huge hit I had heard of the books, but no more than that. I didn't want to start following the show early on because I'm not a massive fantasy fan (this despite the fact that Pratchett remains my favourite author, and I liked stuff like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings as a teen, albeit not as much as Voltaire or the then-favourites I mentioned earlier). Incidentally, I read the Harry Potter series to as far as it was published before the first film, but I only read Lord of the Rings after the first film came out - so I go both ways when it comes to discovering literature from adaptations and adaptations from literature.

The more I heard about the show the more interested I became, and when eventually I did watch the pilot I had to get my hands on the rest very quickly and I went through it in maybe a week or two.

I know some people who don't "like books" or "read for fun" but do like the show, but out of the show fans I know the vast majority also read at least a couple of books a year for fun, and most of them read a lot more than that. Whether that's representative of the show's main fanbase I don't know, but it's plausible.

Oh, and just to give some credit to GRRM, a friend of mine who basically never reads anything if he doesn't have to read the entire series after seeing the first season or two of the show.

When I was young(er) people I knew were getting into books - by which I mean reading at all without someone telling them to - through Harry Potter. (Just to be clear, I'm talking about kids in the case of Harry Potter, and an adult with the Thrones fan in this anecdote.)

If that friend of mine started reading books because of Game of Thrones, surely the show's had a similar effect on many more of its fans, the same as Harry Potter did. If I was an author and had something adapted from my works, if I ever heard that someone had started reading as a hobby because of the adaptation it'd probably be just about the best thing I could ever hear about anything I've done.

edited 23rd Sep '16 3:52:12 PM by BestOf

We may or may not have an actor for Rhaegar now.

Bonus points for having his hair in the same style as Jon's.

It's been deleted.

I finally decided to get back into the show. I'm halfway through season 5 and...I feel like the writers got carried away with the shock value while telling the story. I didn't like how they killed off Barristan, and Ramsay is starting to piss me off. Littlefinger's plan also seems to hinge on the writing bending itself illogically to accommodate it.

Oh and Mance Rayder was such a massive waste of a character.

@lu Oh my sweet summer child.

This is just the beginning.

Season 5 is considered the worst season.

Biggest complaints for the first half of season 5 were:

LF's illogical plan

Sansa following it

Dorne

Barristan's stupid death

Turning Varys into a true Targ supporter (why did he think Viserys would make for a better king than Robert?)

And Varys spending most of his screentime to fellate Tyrion

edited 1st Oct '16 12:28:54 PM by MadSkillz

And season six doesn't get any better. Really there are only two episodes worth watching between the two.

Seasonal Rot hit hard.

edited 1st Oct '16 12:54:30 PM by doineedaname

Season 5 is consistently awful.

Season 6 is more of a seesaw of bad and good. So I do think it's better. But when it's bad it's "bad pussy".

Season 6 is amazing. I feel that a lot of the criticism is that it deviates from the books, but that's not a bad thing, especially given that Feast and Dance's focus on world building doesn't translate well to TV.

Season 6 doesn't really deviate from the books since it's not really based on a book. I mean it has a couple scenes from Book 4 but that's about it.

Season 6's problem is that the plot is making the characters do things no matter how dumb.

And who is in charge of what doesn't make sense. For example:

Heavy season 6 spoilers: Ellaria becomes the leader of Dorne despite having just murdered the previous ruler and having no blood ties to the Martells. No one takes issue with this so there's no Dornish Civil War as there should be. Because there should be several other claimants putting their hat into the ring or some Doran loyalists lying around.

edited 1st Oct '16 2:18:07 PM by MadSkillz

Season 5 is s—t bad, a hot stinking mess...that permanently tarnished the show's quality.

Season 6 is salvage and as such it's good, and a number of interesting episodes, but alongside that a lot of wasted potential. The high points are good, the lows are not as bad as previous seasons.

I will say that the Season Finale of Season 6 is genuinely amazing piece of television, ruined by the whole Davos Melisandre scene. It was satisfying and compelling on the whole and wonderfully presented.

I dispute that the lows aren't as bad as previous seasons.

There are several lows that are just as bad imo:

Heavy season 6 spoilers: ( don't look lu)

Doran's......well.....his assassination

Arya being stabbed several times in the belly, falling in dirty water and then walking to a mummer's place only to recover shortly. Then doing a chase sequence (while still recovering) where she falls down several stairs and then beating the Waif in the dark.

Sansa not telling Jon about the Vale Knights to make it more surprising for the audience and re-create another surprise Calvary charge.

The northerners telling the Starks to fuck off.

Probably the halo effect of lowered expectations. I went in Season 6 expecting it to be just as bad as earlier season, and when it didn't meet those lowered expectations, I started cutting it slack for the parts that were quite awful.

Since they've passed the books, and given how the last season ended, it looks to me like the show runners decided they wanted to wipe the slate clean and tell the story they wanted to tell. And also wrap things up.

At this point the Seven Kingdoms have been split into three factions: The Lannister/Frey alliance, the North, and the Targaryen alliance with Dany, Dorne, Highgarden and the Ironborn. I really don't see how Cersei could even hope to resist Daenerys, much less force the North back into the fold.

To me, the main conflict is going to center around the White Walkers, who seem to be taking their sweet time marching south. If they've been steadily marching to the Wall for six seasons, why haven't they gotten there yet?

They answered that in Season 6. The Wall is keeping them out, it's a magical barrier and that prevents them from going past it.

@lawyer Next season is kind of anti-climatic as a result of knowing that Dany's forces are OP. It'd take a Diabolus Ex Machina or two for her to be next season's underdog.

I'm guessing Cersei and Euron are going to form some kind of alliance. I'm not sure how they'll be a threat though. Even together Dany is far stronger.

They either have to bring Dragon-binder out or have him do the mass blood sacrifice like in the books to sink most of her fleet.