A Song of Ice and Fire Discussion Thread (HBO Show and Novels)

The entire point, which has been obvious since season 1, is that the entire "Game of Thrones" is a pointless exercise by the elites of society who are too self-absorbed to understand the real issues, and even the point of life itself.  

I find it very hard to believe they're still following Martin's outlines at this point.  What they did to the White Walkers by sending them out like complete wimps goes against everything the series stood for, both naratively and thematically.  

Naratively the whole point is that the "game of thrones" is pointless.  So to simply wipe away eight seasons of buildup in one episode to go back to said pointless conflict is, essentially, awful writing.  

But not only that, the way they did it goes against the very ideals the series was founded upon.  Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire was about bucking the cliches of the fantasy genre.  It was about showing what would truly happen if the situations commonly seen in a fantasy series played out properly.  

And yet the White Walkers are vanquished through poorly constructed fantasy tropes and cliches.  An unstoppable army that can take the dead and add them to their forces creating an inexhaustible quantity of soldiers that cannot feel or fear.  There are, obviously, ways such a force can be dealt with.  Fire was established early on as the bane of them.  There are also weapons that can kill the more powerful among their ranks.


So how is this situation resolved?  In a series that has staked its fame on being the "realistic" fantasy story you would think the day would be won through a brutal battle where the heroes outsmarted the enemy, exploited all of their weaknesses, and strategically outmanoeuvred them.


But no, what beats them is a girl materialising out of nowhere stabbing their leader with a magical blade that kills the entire army.

And so now the series whose entire point was about how pointless the petty squabbles over positions of power are is going to conclude as if the entire point was that squabble over a throne.  

whose arcs are unrelated to the major villain kill said villain while the character whose arc does tie in to said villain left on the sidelines doing nothing then you are guilty of bad writing on multiple accounts.  You have created a setup with a lot of payoff involved and decided to not give any payoff whatsoever, and then compound that by delivering a payoff with absolutely zero setup.

so when they are defeated (I did expect more impactful deaths in the process) it get's the TV show in and of itself back to what pulled a lot of people in to watch it in the first place, the power struggle for the Iron Throne.

Your reductionism reduces the show and books down to two "whole points:" A rebuttal of fantasy tropes and realism, which is a massive disservice to the books and the show.

You write at length about how the "Game of Thrones is pointless." That game is a representation of the Middle Ages and the feudal system of power, a period of history that lasted over a thousand years, and includes such highlights as the Crusades and the one hundred years war. The greatest possible fantasy cliche GoT could produce is one in which a significant enough portion of its characters recognise the folly of feudalism and work together to build a better world with the small folk in mind. I mean, GoT is literally set in the aftermath of a long winter, in which the NK almost wiped out Westeros. It's people didn't learn then, and it's people shouldn't learn now.

Because what's the difference between the NK or an invasive force or rival pretender to the throne when the rule of kings is a divine right and that game they're all playing is a celestially ordained game of chess? When the mandate of rulership is bound by honour or piety, and the penalty for picking the wrong side is death. When the family name is the only thing of permanence, then the game matters. It's not wrong to be disappointed the the NK didn't do more in Westeros, but it's a naive view of feudalism, of it's power and historical permanence as a governing system, to argue that the NK makes the Game of Thrones irrelevant.

Historically, Feudalism provided Serfs safety, lords stable income, and kings loyalty. If a king's rule is just, only the most ambitious lords would plot against him. If the realm was stable, serfs would have no need to rebel. Yeah, it's a pyramid scheme, but one with checks and balances that ensure a stability and generally better state of being than the Dark ages. It's all there'd ever been for people at the time, presently and historically, and it's why most characters wouldn't realistically be able to think outside of feudal power structures. And this is why the mountain men of the vale would be hated by everyone, serf to lord, because they're a manifestation of the dark ages.  

It's just that Westerosi history is at a critical juncture that's caused those checks and balances to go haywire throughout the realm. But that doesn't mean they should have a revolution, or a redistribution of governing power, especially given the technological barriers to effective communication in sparsely populated feudal Westeros. It's not a coincidence that the only Westerosi low born character with their own book chapters, Davos, doesn't hesitate to take the titles Stanis grants him while becoming steadfastly loyal to the man in the process. The mongal hordes and bubonic plague didn't stop feudalism. Hell, Russia needed a first world war, shit Tsar and a Bolshevic revolution to overthrow it's feudal order in 1917. I really hope George doesn't conclude the books with a move towards Republicanism or mercantalism for the realm at large. The fact that Danny's rule in Essos after dismantling slavery went so badly gives me hope that he's not about to pull away from feudalism cleanly in the books, even with an undead impetus.


And on the whole battle of Winterfell tactics. Please do try to keep in mind the logistical nightmare that is filming GoT. Sure, artillery on the frontline is stupid. But I bet it's insanely expensive to film and having them on the walls would've meant they had to fire them more. Yeah, charging into the dead wasn't a great move, but the Dothraki are the most feared cavalry in the world of GoT, and the imagery was really good. Moreover, there are some decent hot takes by self-acclaimed military historians on youtube, like this one as to more effective battle plans. But even it massively undersells the overwhelming force that was the NK's army, completely failing to discuss the pace at which the undead scaled the walls of Winterfell, while massively overselling the power of guerilla warfare against an undead army and the practicality of relocating everyone to the Reach. So while sure, there were better ways to fight the dead, the story the episode wanted to tell was the overwhelming force of the dead coupled with the tension of watching your favorites on the brink of being overrun. They definitely overdid the heroes in peril shots in the show, more main characters should've been injured if not killed, but it was a roller coaster 80 minutes and I can only imagine how difficult it would be to make an 80 minute melee griping. It's not a perfect episode, but it was good.

But most importantly. Even yer ardent "military historians'" best laid plans revolve around miraculously killing the NK without actually proposing how this would be done beyond an elite strike team.

So if you think the NK was made to look like a wimp, then you really shouldn't rely on things you hear vicariously before judging a show you've skipped the past 6 seasons of because he looked like a fucking badass. It was poetic that the two sins he has encompassed, wrath and pride, were shown throughout. He withstood dragonfire and smirked. He created a blizzard to neuter the heroes dragons (or at least yer fantasy poster boy, chosen one, John Snow) while extinguishing the fires of Winterfell (because, you know, the writers weren't so bad that they had the Westerosi avoid using fire against the NK and characters were all equipped with as much dragonglass as could be mustered ). He systematically commanded his army to dismantle every line of defence the living had. When he was challenged by John Snow to melee combat, he resurrected legions of the newly deceased around him before waltzing off to an overrun Winterfell because fighting Mr Ice and Fire is beneath him... He's smart enough to avoid confrontation with Valarian steel or dragonglass because he knows what his weaknesses are, and he knows his primary purpose is the destruction of the Children of the Forest, of which Bran is the last remnant. So of course, once total victory is assured, at the point in which the living are completely overwhelmed and Bran's guardians have been decimated, he takes the time to gloat. And when his wrathful pride at its zenith, he was undone by that elite strikeforce yer military historians were blabbering about.

Also the whole "the entire legacy of the show is killing off main characters" stuff. That's never what GoT was. It has a higher body count for named characters, but it's always had it's fair share of plot armour.

Look no further than Tyrion. Every single time he's about to die a deus ex machina saves him. In S1/Book 1 his money and tongue buys him Bron and the mountain clans when he was facing death. But then his dad puts him in the van of a battle, in which he gets knocked out by the mountain men and miraculously isn't trampled to death and conveniently wakes up on a stretcher the next time we cut back to him [different in the books, but we learn Tyrion's flank was meant to rout so they could capture Robb]. Podick Payne saves him from an assassination in the battle of Blackwater, even though Pod's basically a twig-like 13 y/o in the books at that point. He's had a Dornish prince fight his corner at the 11th hour, lose, and then been released from jail on the sly anyway, while still finding the time to assassinate his dad, the most influential and powerful man in Westeros, while he was taking an actual shit. This isn't realism, or "killing off a character when it makes sense;" in isolation it's dodgy sensationalist YA logic. But we're ok with it because he's a good character that talks about boobies and his winky.

And no, I'm not calling George a YA author, and I've enjoyed all the Tyrion chapters. I'm just saying, even his most beloved character has a fuck ton of plot armour in the books/show. As gritty as GoT is, it's still unequivocally fantasy.

Besides, it's not as if George's books have avoided stupefying swerves either. Our introduction to real magic is a shadow assassin that strikes down Renly in the heart of his warcamp whilst under the protection of his Rainbow guard. Which was dumb, because hitherto we'd be introduced to mythical bests and zombies, but mortals had never been shown to use magic beyond dubious prophecies and witch doctors. But we're suddenly meant to be ok with a cheeky bit of blood magic. Which is, you know, less realistic than Ramsey's 12 good men... or having a Stark whose spent the past year training with an assassin guild pick off the NK when he least expected it. In the books, Melisandre is a character from so far east we're just expected to accept she can do a good magic because we'll never have her homeland explained fully. Which is meant to be fine because fantasy has magic or something?

Oh, and let's not forget, Catelyn Stark is a fucking zombie in the books now too   Thank fuck that shit wasn't in the show.

I still love GoT, or A Song of Ice and Fire if you prefer, but there's some serious left-of-field bullshit in those books.

I don't view it as some deconstruction of the fantasy genre. Sure, it kills off it's fair share of characters, including Ned, arguably the main character of the first book. It has subversive moments. But how many times does the book have characters "die" but not really die? George frequently has cliffhanger endings to chapters that turn out not to be the death of the perspective character/side character. Book Hound is almost certainly alive even though a fever should have been mortal. Briene is almost certainly not dead even though her and Pod are an in the midst of being hung by lady Stoneheart. Wouldn't it have been more subversive if she was a myth? Aren't pull back and reveals a literary trope?

George takes a really in depth look at the politics of monarchy and feudalism, but that's not subversive. Setting a fantasy novel, no matter how in depth it is, in medieval Western Europe, with an emphasis on Tudor history, isn't subversive. There are a lot of fantasy books that use monarchical politics as key points in their narratives. He does nothing subversive with the dragons, or direwolves. His interpretation of dragons is incredibly European: they're big scary nukes and symbols of authority. If they're the fire in his title, that's no more subversive than George and the Dragon.

His folklore and religions aren't subversive. They use elements of Greek, pagan, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and other elements. You'll find very few medieval fantasies that don't do something similar, even if it's not to the same level of detail. Indeed, the lord of light stuff is pretty lame all told. George has always talked about how important to a world or the authority of a religion that magic would be. Yet we just have to accept this super powerful priestess and religion coming into play at just the right time to take on a spooky cold boy. Because George's use of prophecy and voodoo isn't really subversive.

Most importantly. George is an established author. Like many Brandon Sanderson lectures allude, George (like Brandon) is allowed to do weird things with his book that a debutant can't. I wouldn't be allowed to kill a main character off in a debut novel unless I was self-published. Agents and publishers tend to hate prologues in fantasy novels, but George has one in every book. He gets to do things because he's not a debutant. But that doesn't make it subversive. It's just an author doing something he wants to do, and is allowed to do, because he has a history in literature and TV. That it's unlike most fantasy novels you'll find in a shop is more a function of the market system in literature, and the pressures of the contemporary publishing industry, than some grandiose subversion of the fantasy genre.

George has always helped himself to fantasy bullshit pie with a side of plot armour when convenient. Because his book isn't subversive or deconstructionist. It's just that he wanted to write a more historically feudal society on a grand scale while focusing on what he always says drives his work: the human heart in conflict with itself. And that's why I love GoT, and I think the show still does a good job of capturing that essence even if it's taking more logical leaps than the source material at this point.

Anyway, that's quite enough of this from me. It's easy to write an essay about the things you love! Cannot wait until Winds of Winter gets a firm release date so I can go through all the prior novels in the build up. HYPED.

Anyway it's safe to say after the latest episode the show is deader than all the people that got roasted by dragonfire.  At this point it's safe to say the lead writers of the show are absolute hacks.  Dany and Jamie's entire character arcs and development got undone in their entirety for soap-opera levels of sensationalist drama, and the show seems happy to end in one of the lamest ways it ever could have.  

he is literally saved by a pre-pubescent boy in the midst of a the battle of Blackwater... or there's that time he falls into the Rhoyne, the river that gives you greyscale, but was fine... or that time he was meant to die in an arena but Danny calls off the farce in the nick of time...

I enjoyed this episode!

I've always thought we'd see an eventual heel turn from Dany and I think losing two of her dragons and her most trusted confidante is a good catalyst for said heel turn. The Targaryen madness is a well documented premise in the books and the show alluded to it with Varys's chat about tossing a coin when a Targaryen enters the world. She's shown glimpses of that ruthlessness with how she handled the Tarlys, but to be fair, we've seen her be utterly ruthless in how she dealt with the slavers of Meereen or the warlocks in Qarth. However, as it was all happening to morally reprehensible individuals, we rooted for Dany and loved seeing the dragons torch the bad guys.

But in Essos Dany was seen as a saviour - Mhysa was her name. The breaker of chains. Of course we'd root for the woman who abolished (or at least attempted to) slavery in Essos. We'd seen her overcome rape and starvation to pull herself away from the Dothraki and to become her own woman. We'd grown with her, we loved her. But now that her target is set on characters and locations that we like in Westeros, it becomes easier to see why people fear the Mother of Dragons. Dany talks about being feared in Westeros and it becomes clear to her that she'll never rule as an adored leader like she did in Meereen. I think it's important that the viewers start to fear her now too to allow us to empathise with how Jon feels. He's the hero of this tale, after all - his is the song of ice and fire. I'm excited to see how his and Dany's story concludes next week.

What I wasn't too fond of was how they handled Jaime in this season. But, I think that's more of a personal desire to see him with Brienne and to grow away from Cersei. I like Jaime despite all the wicked things he's done over the years, but I suppose it's a fitting yet tragic end to his arc that he could never truly pull himself away from Cersei.

CLEGANEBOWL THOUGH FUCKING MOUNTAIN CRUSHING THAT SHIT QYBURN'S HEAD AND THEN THE HOUND LAUGHING WITH BURST EYES AS THE MOUNTAIN PULLS A DAGGER FROM HIS ZOMBIE HEAD WOOOO THAT WAS AWESOME

Yep I loved it.

That fight with mountain and the Hound really was something else! When mountain stripped his armour off I couldn't help but think oh shit here comes the phase 2 dark souls boss.

Now I'm probably wrong but I felt the Jaime & Cersei scene seemed a bit abrupt and cut away quickly giving us the classic we didn't see them die so they might be alive still? Also just as they got below the keep in the first place you see a person fall in, I initially thought this was Arya and fate bringing them together so she could finish her list but we later see it isn't. Is it someone else, Grey worm maybe? Am I reading too much into it? Am I mad? If they are dead I think they have got off light compared to other characters.

Dany going "Mad Queen" as a concept is fine.  Plenty of foreshadowing, it's basically been baked in to her at the genetic level, no matter how noble or virtuous she intends to be her very genetic mean she would eventually have fallen to tyrany, and while she was very much a "noble tyrant" in the making there is always that fine line between a good tyrant and a bad one.  

No, the issue is that the character has jumped from "wrathful to wrongdoers, violent saviour of the innocent" to "GRRRAAAAAHH I'm insane now so I'm going to roast all you fuckers alive to the last woman and child, STARTING WITH THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN!!"  Unless Dany has become a complete opposite of herself in the seasons I've missed this is quite possibly the biggest breaking of character I have seen in anything ever.  And this is coming from the guy who has watched trash anime like Guilty Crown.

There are loads of ways they could have made this turn work.  Indeed with sufficient development even this turn of events could have in fact worked (it would have required an actual arc showing Dany increasingly viewing those who don't outright declare loyalty as direct enemies, a storyline that could have spanned an entire season in and of itself).  But how it's been done contradicts the entire establishment of her character, and the reasoning behind it is "well, she's insane duh!  Insane people do insane things!"  

I remember a time when Game of Thrones was about the tragedies.  Y'know, where people make the wrong choices and pay the consequences for those choices?  Yet all I'm hearing is a bunch of plot-induced stupidity to try and justify this latest development.  

EDIT: And just to be clear, in case someone misunderstands me, I'm well aware that Dany burned the city to the ground after winning.

See this is the problem with the season.  I could in fact see these developments, Danny going insane and having to be put down and Jamie backtracking on his development, as being GRRM's ultimate intention given the tragic tones that were so prevalent in the first two seasons.  However you can be damn well sure that GRRM was planning on actually having the characters develop this way, and the overall message was likely a nihilistic "nobody can escape their true selves regardless of how tragic it is or how hard they try".  True to the start of the story, where nobody is black or white and everybody is capable of evil and good deeds regardless of what their moral alignment is, and where their fates are completely created by their actions and choices.  

The developments of the last episode saw characters morph in to puppets doing things according to what the plot demands they do, as opposed to their developing organically in to tragic figures over time.  We may (or may not, given what they've said about Arya killing the Night King I am dubious about how closely they're sticking to GRRM's plans at this point) be in for a similar ending to the books.  I wager if we are they're a hell of a lot more satisfying.  

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't really disappointed by how they wrapped it all up.

I think up until the three week timeskip, the episode was pretty good! The visual of Dany with dragon's wings was awesome as was her speech atop the stairs to her army. Peter Dinklage acted his socks up and presented Tyrion's plight in a really believable way - you can see how utterly defeated he felt mentally and the moment where he discovered his siblings's bodies was heartbreaking. Even the Jon/Dany scene, as clichéd as it was, was still the right end to Dany's arc.

But crowning bloody Bran Stark felt so out of left field that I couldn't really concentrate on how they wrapped up the show. Like, his arc was about becoming the Three Eyed Raven and revealing Jon's parentage, right? Not becoming the king of the six kingdoms? It fell flat for me, big time. It wasn't a terrible ending or anything, but really disappointing considering the level of build behind the show and R+L=J being the driving storyline for ASOIAF for years now. If this is how GRRM plans to end the novels, I hope he manages to present it in a more believable way because a byproduct of having fewer episodes meant that the ending had no time to build or settle with me.

A shame (shame. shame. shame.) considering that the show is full of incredible moments - it didn't deserve to fizzle out like this.

It was definitely left way more open ended than I thought it was going to be, I didn't think it was amazing but I didn't hate it either.

Overall it left me with a lot of questions with the biggest one being have they really changed the wheel like they thought they have? Yeah the people in power are now good but for me there will always be a Kingdom/house that resent that Winterfell is now independent basically because they said they are without any kind of vote & the fact Bran is King only makes that worse in my book.

Though one upside from it all is I can see films being pitched in the future.