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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday June 16 2015, @06:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the got-books? dept.

Mike Hale writes in the NYT that after Sunday night's Season 5 finale the wildly popular show seems to have lost its way, and to be losing faith with a growing number of its viewers. After two or three seasons of coherent and satisfying action, the show is spinning in place, stalling for time as it crawls toward an ending that will be more disappointing the longer it's delayed. Sound familiar? As with "Lost," there may be a blueprint, but it's not looking very sound. According to Hale, the escalating series of shocks in the season finale was a prime example of substituting sensation for imagination, busyness for drama. "Not content to kill off a mid-major character, the episode moved on to whipping girls, putting a major female character through an excruciatingly long, nude walk of shame and, in its closing seconds, assassinating a fan favorite who was one of the few wholly sympathetic figures in the show."

Amy Sullivan says that the problem is that it's incredibly hard to craft a epic series without getting necessarily bogged down in the middle installments. "Your protagonists are usually in some long-term predicament or up against an enemy who will keep winning until some resolution is reached in the finale," says Sullivan. "So the need to throw in a few shocking moments for the sake of surprise and to keep readers/audiences off-balance is understandable." According to Hale when you look at the overall framework, nearly all the characters are where they were when the season began. "The usurping Boltons are still in Winterfell; Sansa is still on the run; Arya is still hiding in Braavos; the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen and the sly dwarf, Tyrion, are still marooned in Essos; the Lannisters still occupy the castle in King's Landing," concludes Hale. "This can be blamed on the show's semidependent relationship with Mr. Martin's novels, but viewers (like me) who haven't read the books don't care about that. The question is how much longer we'll care at all."

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday June 16 2015, @09:16PM

    by looorg (578) on Tuesday June 16 2015, @09:16PM (#197038)

    ... but viewers (like me) who haven't read the books don't care about that.

    Here is the problem. They took some books and made a show about it reach a wider audience. Fantasy had become somewhat popular after the Lord of the Rings movies. But overall the audience wasn't really into fantasy (or reading books), they just liked a good story like they are used to being served in a lot of other TV shows. In these stories good triumphs over evil and all things are resolved nicely. This show isn't that. The "nicest" character in the TV show might be Tyrion and he is a drunken whoremonger that killed his own father and back-stabbed his way to the top (... and that is just in the TV show). Even as it diverges from the books it's never going to be a fairy tale story, there is not going to be any great Disneyfication moment. Living in Westeros clearly sucks no matter your social class or standing.

    Add to this the growing problem of people trying to draw parallels between fiction and reality. This has been the cause for the last couple of seasons "social media outrage" as the SJW crowd goes ape as characters literally go on the chopping block. That this is fantasy in a fantasy world in a land with dragons and magic has somehow passed them by. They are seeing real-world connections, where there really are none. I think the first real "outrage" was the Red wedding episode, then we had the Sansa being wedding-raped (thank God they didn't read the book cause it would have been so much worse, not for Sansa but rape scene wise; come to think of it there are few main female characters in the show that hasn't been forced to have sex or "raped" by now), the burning of Shireen (the kid), slutwalked Cersei and killed some other characters. Seriously nothing nice happens in the world of Westeros. It shouldn't have taken any sane person fifty episodes to realize this. Things are not going to get better. They should just stop watching cause nothing is getting turned around.

    I don't really know anything about making TV shows or movies but I feel that they are somehow trying to show and tell to many different stories each episodes. It might have been better if they had made them character episodes and shown only what happens in one or two places each episode instead. But that might just be me. It's not even my favorite show but it is interesting enough so I'll keep watching.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2015, @10:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2015, @10:58PM (#197068)

    This is R.R. Martin's MO. Unfortunately not many people know it. When he writes things without someone to rein him in his craptastic worlds don't go anywhere. The good guys get punished badly for being good. The bad guys get a little punishment relative to their actions. Everybody that survives is slightly worse off. There is usually a twist or two at the end that turn even your most obvious hero into a villain and then the story is done. No crescendo, no climax, no closure, no purpose. It is just a prolonged slide through mud and suffering before the whole story falls off a cliff. The End.

    Martin makes for a great tween writer, as in, in between key events that someone else writes. Other than that his works always leave an aware audience disappointed.

  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Tuesday June 16 2015, @11:54PM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Tuesday June 16 2015, @11:54PM (#197078) Journal
    Sansa's wedding rape hasn't happened in the books published so far as of June 2015. At the end of Dance with Dragons she's still stuck in the Vale with Littlefinger babysitting her retard cousin although it's speculated that Littlefinger plans to send her to the Boltons, and Stannis's daughter Shireen is still very much alive, but it looks more like Melisandre will sacrifice someone else for her fire and blood rites. The only thing that has already happened in the books from what you've mentioned is Cersei's slutwalking (the Walk of Shame) and of course the Red Wedding. Naturally any real-world connections are bullshit: the first book came out in 1996, the second in 1998, the third in 2000, and those three form the bulk of the first four seasons, season 4 has stuff from the last two books which came out in 2005 and 2011. The story of the TV series began to diverge from the books in a very big way with Season 5 though. Some of the stuff in the TV series not in the books could conceivably still happen in the books (e.g. the Sansa arc and Tyrion meeting with Daenerys), but there's a lot which contradicts the books. The death of Mance Rayder for instance was a substantial change. He dies outright in the TV series, but in the books, Melisandre spares him, with someone else getting burned at the stake in his place, with some of her magic helping to deceive everyone. Mance winds up going on a mission to attempt to rescue a fake "Arya Stark" being married to Ramsey Bolton but the outcome there was a cliffhanger.
    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
    • (Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 17 2015, @01:41AM

      by looorg (578) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @01:41AM (#197096)

      I think the general view is that the character of Sansa has been merged with Poole for the TV show. As I recall Poole got married and raped by Ramsay in the book (Dance ...). It would be somewhat weird book wise then if Sansa goes there for another rape. But who knows how they'll resolve that problem; it's already messed up considering Poole was seen in the first season of the show. But its not like Ramsay isn't down for more rape.