Cowabungaa said:
Come now, that's a little too harsh. It's definitely noticeable that mister Martin isn't writing for this season, there's plotholes and terrible dialogue up the wazoo. But there's definitely some good stuff still to be found.
I'm salty.
I'm also completely unable to make arguments in support of a great many of the off-book changes that were made. Usually you can point to something and say "These being different mediums, and this being a slightly different translation of the source material, I can see that they made this choice because..."
Such as giving a major character extra things to do during a long season. This is how we end up with the hilariously poorly written Karl the Fookin' Legend Tanner, for instance. But then we have shit like...
1. No Pink Letter. Why does the Pink Letter matter? The Pink Letter is what provokes Jon into marching SOUTH and taking a wildling army with him to bring justice to Ramsay Snow. He breaks his vows and is determined to deplete the Watch of men at a crucial time. Without the Pink Letter, they're just killing him for bringing the Wildlings across. So why did they open the fucking gate for him in the previous episode, then? And if the Shaggy Dog rape of Sansa wasn't to "villain-up" Ramsay to make the Pink Letter hit harder, what was it FOR exactly?
2. Dorne and the Sand Snakes. We lose Arianne, we lose Quentyn, we lose "Fire and Blood", we lose the sub-plot to crown Myrcella (as due to Dornish primogeniture she is next in line for the crown, not Tommen). In its place we get the traveling road show of Jaime and Bronn, three absolutely gutted Sand Snakes that are horribly acted and scripted (and literally play paddy-cake in their jail cell). A Doran who does absolutely nothing and has no plans. A suddenly murderous Ellaria despite it being a complete reversal of her character from last season. And a ship sailing off with the sole heir of Dorne on it, now guaranteed to be murdered, likely triggering a succession crisis. Who came up with this plot? Children? What was the point of it?
3. We got an EXCESSIVE amount of Theon torture scenes in previous seasons, ostensibly to slowly build the myth of Ramsay Snow/Bolton, the horror of his existence of Reek, all to make his eventual casting off of the identity more powerful. Instead, Sansa is plopped into his story line and utterly hijacks it to "give her something to do". The thing she is given to do is "getting raped", after which she just sort of arbitrarily mopes around the castle a bit before the two of them abruptly kill a completely worthless ancillary character and jump off the battlements. Which, due to the absence of the winter blizzard that drove much of the plot in the novels, looks like suicide. Awesome!
4. Going back a bit, but what exactly was the purpose of the Jeyne/Talissa swap? What did we gain by that? Talissa was a complete anachronism, she stood out like a sore thumb. The way she was written and her personality in general actually under-wrote and diminished the challlenges other female characters faced and the ways they were restrained in this society by their gender...most principally Sansa, Brienne and Cersei. And what did we gain, for making that change? What did "Talissa" do that Jeyne Westerling could not have done? What was the
point?
5. Jon drags the Wildling Army he just rescued from the coastal city of Hardhome up to the Gates of Castle Black and asks to be let in. Check out this map:
Note the position of Castle Black, and of Hardhome. Remember he rescued them in ships.
Also remember they did not change the geography for the show. They publish Atlases and puzzle-maps of Westeros that look exactly like this. Now imagine how fucking lazy you have to be to write a scene like that. It's a little thing, but it's so preposterous it totally shatters your immersion.
6. By the same token, in last night's episode we have two armies clashing. One vastly outnumbers the other and has cavalry. Stannis is in the front rank when his tiny army is enveloped, on an open field. A scene or two later, he's staggering around in a woodland glade (??). All sounds of fighting have stopped (??) and there are only a couple of live men even on the scene (??). This is the kind of hilarious/galling continuity error that had people rolling in the aisles at the end of ME3. It's equally unforgivable here. Moreso even, given questions of budget and audience scale.
Put this up alongside any truly good television, like Breaking Bad or The Sopranos or The Wire or even moderately good television like Daredevil or House of Cards and Game of Thrones looks absolutely awful. It used to be a "good show" in the way middle seasons of Walking Dead were "good". Like...they were alright. Very flawed, but with some fantastic standout moments. Game of Thrones gave us Hardhome this year, which was fantastic. The other 9.5 hours saw me frequently asking aloud "What the fuck am I watching". The writers for the show are *horrible*. They have been ENTIRELY reliant on Martin's material. Think about the above. Think about Karl Tanner. Or Ros the prostitute, who existed for no reason other than to be brutally murdered by Joffrey because (??). Think about S2 Dany and the "where are my dragons" meme that insufferable Qarth storyline spawned. How well do you see these writers doing without anything but their own material to draw from. Imagine an entire season of Dorne and "de bad pussy" quality.
Now tell me you wouldn't rather watch Cop Rock. It has cops, and they are given to rock.
