Game of Thrones Maesters Thread

[offspring515]

He wargs with Ghost.

If we have to suffer through two books of 20 chapters from the wolf's perspective I'm tapping out. The limited amount of that shit in the previous books was horrible.

[J.T.]

Stop trying to kill the man. Stop.

 

For real. Why do people keep projecting death on the guy? He's an older dude who is kind of heavy. I'm sure he's getting the best medical care money can buy.

 

I'm just being realistic.  I'll be better prepared for the news that he vapor locked in mid-novel should that horrible event come to pass.

 

And yeah, I also believe the rumors that Jon will survive by warging with Ghost.  Bowen Marsh is an idiot if he honestly believes that the Watch will be able to remain neutral.

[hobo joe]

Thoros didn't know he'd revive Beric the first time, it was just a funeral ritual. Melisandre could resurrect Jon unintentionally.

[Cliff Hanger]

Apropos of nothing, I feel obligated to point out that if the Exhibition comes to your town, FUCKING GO (but go early.  We went as soon as they opened at 9am,saw and did everything in 2 hours, but by the time we left the line wrapped all the way 'round the building).  Every item in the exhibit save the Iron Throne they use for photo ops is an actual screen-used prop, there's a ton of information on how costuming and prop-design decisions are made, and it's generally just a really cool "behind the curtain" peek.  The "Ascend the Wall" thing was great fun; they put you in a box the size of a small elevator, strap an Oculus Rift on you and shake the pod and use a wind machine to make it feel "real."  I am probably underselling it, but it was totally worth the 20 or so minutes in line.

[ultimoDANK]

Sunday! I've avoided trailers after the first one. Let's hope this Red Viper doesn't come off like a puss. Can't wait to see the fight vs the Mountain realized on screen. I'm not sure the show will be able to match what the book made me feel reading that scene.

Also I love GoT but it's not True Detective or Breaking Bad. HBO did not "screw over" GoT by submitting True Detective for best drama.

[Ace]

About time.  I waiting to see how Brianne survives hanging and Jon survives his stabbity death.

 

I'm guessing they light a funeral pyre, and we finally get R+L=J.

[scraylo187]

[EVA]

Also I love GoT but it's not True Detective or Breaking Bad. HBO did not "screw over" GoT by submitting True Detective for best drama.

Yeah, but GAME OF THRONES is a better show than TRUE DETECTIVE.

[Raziel]

Bait is no good, FSW doesn't sail these waters.

[EVA]

DAMMIT.

But I really do think that's true. Salladhor Saan is a better deveoped character than any of the supporting characters on TD, despite being about the 73rd most important person on the show and having about 1/16th the screen time.

[OSJ]

 

Also I love GoT but it's not True Detective or Breaking Bad. HBO did not "screw over" GoT by submitting True Detective for best drama.

Yeah, but GAME OF THRONES is a better show than TRUE DETECTIVE.

 

 

I'll bite. How? And this comes from someone who knows GRRM (and has for nearly thirty years). I love me some GOT, but I have to admit that certain episodes just seem like filler. That can't be said about TRUE DETECTIVE, every scene MEANT something, some of the best writing combined with some of the best direction I've ever seen on a tv show.

[supremebve]

I for one would say that Game of Thrones is better because somethings have actually had a resolution.  I think True Detectives was a good watch that was very well acted, but kind of sloppily written.  GRRM seems to be really specific, and True Detectives was outrageously vague.  At the end of Game of Trones I expect that most questions will be answered, while True Detectives just brought up more questions. 

[OSJ]

I for one would say that Game of Thrones is better because somethings have actually had a resolution.  I think True Detectives was a good watch that was very well acted, but kind of sloppily written.  GRRM seems to be really specific, and True Detectives was outrageously vague.  At the end of Game of Trones I expect that most questions will be answered, while True Detectives just brought up more questions. 

 

That's fair, although as a lifelong reader and writer of weird fiction I'm well used to ambiguity. The mind is always going to be able to conjure up more horrific things than the printed page or the screen. I guess it depends on what sort of fiction you are used to.

[supremebve]

 

I for one would say that Game of Thrones is better because somethings have actually had a resolution.  I think True Detectives was a good watch that was very well acted, but kind of sloppily written.  GRRM seems to be really specific, and True Detectives was outrageously vague.  At the end of Game of Trones I expect that most questions will be answered, while True Detectives just brought up more questions. 

 

That's fair, although as a lifelong reader and writer of weird fiction I'm well used to ambiguity. The mind is always going to be able to conjure up more horrific things than the printed page or the screen. I guess it depends on what sort of fiction you are used to.

 

I read as much as anyone, and I don't think ambiguity is necessarily a bad thing,  but True Detective seemed like it was missing major parts.  It ended in a way that made me think the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.  It was fascinating to watch, but the more I've thought about it and discussed it I've found that it didn't really have a resolution.  It's hard to say this far from the end, but I think Game of Thrones will have a much more satisfying ending.  At the end of the day they basically stopped a pawn in a huge state-wide conspiracy, but the main players are still out there and they can't do anything to stop it.  Oh, and the green ear thing was stupid. 

[EVA]

Also I love GoT but it's not True Detective or Breaking Bad. HBO did not "screw over" GoT by submitting True Detective for best drama.

Yeah, but GAME OF THRONES is a better show than TRUE DETECTIVE.

 

I'll bite. How? And this comes from someone who knows GRRM (and has for nearly thirty years). I love me some GOT, but I have to admit that certain episodes just seem like filler. That can't be said about TRUE DETECTIVE, every scene MEANT something, some of the best writing combined with some of the best direction I've ever seen on a tv show.

GOT is equal or better in every way that isn't Matthew McConaughey and Cary Fukunaga. And even then, I have caveats.

For one, it's hard to compare a show directed by one guy to a show directed by several different people. Overall, I'd give Cary Fukunaga the advantage, but if, say, the fantastic Michelle MacLaren had directed every episode of GOT, it would likely be a much tougher call, because she has done work in single episodes that compare more than favorably to what Fukunaga did. ("JACK! DON'T DO IT! JAAAAACK!")

Likewise, while nobody on GOT is giving an all-caps PERFORMANCE like McConaughey, it's also, as a much larger show in terms of scope and ensemble size, not asking anyone to give that performance, to go so big that they blot out the sun. (GOT has CGI for the dragons; they don't need anybody to play one.) And, as I've said a few times in the TD thread, aside from the very last scene of the show, the fact is that Rust Cohle is a one-note character. The only string McConaughey had to strum, however impressively he might have done it, was "relentless, brooding nihilism." Conversely, the actors tasked with playing the major Lannisters (Headey, Dinklage, Coster-Waldau) are required to play so much more, and do so wonderfully. Headey, in particular, has been a revelation as Cersei, taking what was a somewhat rote villain in the books and peeling back her layers to find a whole person underneath. She frequently plays two or three different facets of Cersei in the same scene. It's a crime she hasn't been give more recognition for what she's doing on the show.

And, I mean, Woody was good in a thankless role on TD, but I don't think he was doing work that was demonstrably better than some of the other top-line players on GOT. And in the role of "insecure lecher who destroys his family," I prefer Alfie Allen as Theon in season 2 of GOT.

But, yeah, I have to completely disagree with you on the quality of the writing. I'm not saying it was terrible or anything, but on the whole, I would say it was slightly on the lesser end of prestige drama that has aired over the past year.

I would agree that nearly every scene "meant" something to the overall story (although you could poke holes in that with numerous scenes concerning Marty's daughter which ultimately didn't mean a whole lot), but when you're only doing 8 episodes, I feel like having every scene "mean" something is a baseline expectation, not a standard of excellence. Like, if you're only given 8 episodes to work with, and you can't make every minute count, you should probably get out of the business of writing for TV.

GOT does have its "piece mover" episodes, but considering that the scope of the show is so much larger, and the timetable that they're working with so much longer (8 episodes vs. what will probably be close to 80 episodes when it's all said and done), it's perfectly acceptable, and expected, to have a few episodes where "not much" seems to be happen in terms of plot. Even though there is usually quite a bit happening in terms of character building in those same episodes.

And I think that's really the ultimate difference between the two shows. That's what sets GOT apart. Plot is necessary, plot is great; if it isn't, we're probably not watching. Snappy dialogue, formal gamesmanship, and all that jazz is good, too. But, above all else, TV is a character medium, and GOT does a significantly better job building characters.

Just as an example: Again, compare my dude Salladhor Saan to Detectives Gilbough and Papania. He's a person, they're talking furniture, despite him having roughly 75% less screen time than them. They're such non-characters, I had to Wiki their names, because who cares?

Compare Maggie Hart against any of the major female characters on GOT, and it's a squash for the ladies of Westeros. They're people, with their own agendas and motivations, often separate from men, and she's a plot device, one person for the first half of the season, then suddenly, without any groundwork being laid, a very different person because, well, that's what Pizzolatto needed to happen then. To me, that's the epitome of lazy writing.

And, ultimately, I think when you weed through TD's unconventional structure and the dense philosophical monologues, you find, at it's heart, a very conventional, dare I say banal, story. Strip away all that stuff and here's the general gist of the story (NO SPOILERZ, so relax if you're bothering to read this and haven't seen it):

Two cops become mismatched partners. One's a family guy, the other's a loner. Family guy has problems at home because of The Job. Their investigation into a murder leads them to a conspiracy that goes TO THE TOP. Eventually, they are warned by their superiors not to purse the case, but they continue to do so anyway. They continue to run afoul of Top Brass until one of them has to TURN IN HIS BADGE AND GUN.

I'll stop there to avoid spoilers. But tell me that's not the plot to every other hard-boiled detective story ever. I think Andy Greenwald was pretty accurate when he summed up TD as "the most ambitious way possible to tell what was, ultimately, an extremely conventional story."

Granted, I will be the first person to say that a story doesn't have to be totally original or unconventional to be worthwhile (in fact, I would argue that there are very few truly original stories left in the collective human imagination that have yet to be told). What matters is how the story is told. But when you take a timeworn story like this and add in some soft, borderline non-existent, characterizations, well...I'm going to say you're not telling your story so well.

Conversely, GOT is a show that presents you with all the tropes of epic fantasy, only to flip them on their heads in interesting ways, and all in service of sharply drawn characters who feel like something more than plot functionaries.

I gotta go GOT > TD on the writing front.

Music is kind of a toss-up for me. I love the orchestral score for GOT, but I thought T-Bone Burnett perfectly curated the songs for TD.

ALL THE WORDS

[EVA]

Oh, and the green ear thing was stupid.

You've said a lot of things I agree with, but THIS. Man. That was so bad. It's like Pizzolatto looked up from his typewriter, saw the clock, and said, "Shit, I gotta turn this script in in an hour."

Like, he couldn't even be bothered to write a couple of lines of dialogue where they bat around some of the more obvious explanations.

[OSJ]

EVA: A very nice dissection of both series. I have to agree that the green ears thing was ridiculous. I know a bunch of guys that have painted houses (and I even painted one myself) and I can't think of anyone (especially a pro) that was so inept that they would get paint all over their head. Unless a guy has ears like Dumbo, it's just not going to happen.

[JRGoldman]

I haven't watched True Detective yet, but I think any television series that makes people seek out and read Robert Chambers is a good thing.

[scraylo187]

Get that True Detective talk about of my boobs and dragons thread please

[OSJ]

I haven't watched True Detective yet, but I think any television series that makes people seek out and read Robert Chambers is a good thing.

 

There is that. ;-) I do have to wonder just how many people were inspired to do so.

[OSJ]

Get that True Detective talk about of my boobs and dragons thread please

 

Sorry about that, which should we discuss, boobs or dragons? I for one, am fond of both. (For entirely different reasons).

[EVA]

I haven't watched True Detective yet, but I think any television series that makes people seek out and read Robert Chambers is a good thing.

 

There is that. ;-) I do have to wonder just how many people were inspired to do so.

Apparently, enough that when you look up Pizzolatto's book, Galveston, on Amazon, the "Frequently Bought Together" suggestion is The King in Yellow.

[OSJ]

 

 

I haven't watched True Detective yet, but I think any television series that makes people seek out and read Robert Chambers is a good thing.

 

There is that. ;-) I do have to wonder just how many people were inspired to do so.

Apparently, enough that when you look up Pizzolatto's book, Galveston, on Amazon, the "Frequently Bought Together" suggestion is The King in Yellow.

 

 

 

Cool. May I also suggest Maker of Moons. It's a damn shame that Chambers stopped writing weird stuff in order to focus on what they called "collegiate novels".

[ultimoDANK]

For the sake of this thread Sunday can't come quickly enough.

[scraylo187]

For the sake of this thread Sunday can't come quickly enough.

 

Why, is the second season of True Detective starting on Sunday?