#& w/ that . . . i leave for work for real!

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[gizdathemxel]

i want to put sukuna in a minimum wage customer service job and then see how he would react

[my-fancy-hat]

I don't think the fate of Asa and Yoshida is settle in this conflict nor that Yoshida's strike is aimed to kill Asa (fjmt is an expert in making us believe things that aren't), for the simple reason that both of them still have not completed their own personal arcs nor have reached the culmination of their development, especially Yoshida, a character who remains a mystery for what he allows us to see from him. However, this last chapter showed a new facet of Yoshida which overthrows a previous assumption that us readers had about him.

Kishibe himself praised Yoshida for his combat skills and his templance as a devil hunter: a few screew loose reflected in a malicious almost childish smile while killing a man barehand. It comes natural for him to act as a weapon, the problem is to be human while being trapped in a problem/system way bigger than him. This time, he's about to kill Asa Mitaka, another enemy for PS, but the feeling is not the same as we saw in part 1: he's tired, definitelly sad. He knows he won't find joy in getting his hands dirty with her blood. It's safe to assume he doesn't want to do this. But, why now? why Asa? what change?

The maximum exposure of his personal conflict was through his conversation with Mitaka about the advantages of solitude through the construction of parasocial relationships, and how both of them should better continue down this path, an advice he assumed it would help her to content her need of connections: his own theory of happiness.

This topic is what later drags Asa Mitaka into a depresive episode due to the dissapointment of her attempts to connect with people, and how she cannot stop herself from becoming attached and creating expectations from relationships that barely exist to only end with her feeling stupid and miserable, where the last nail of the coffin were Denji standing her up on their second date and Yoshida rejecting her feelings again all in the same day. Why do I mention all of this? If you think that Asa is quick to create ideas in her mind out of her extreme emotional starvation, we can say the same thing about Yoshida. His phylosophy of interpersonal relationships takes an expector seat in the movie about his own life, where his feelings are well secured out of the reach of what the screen projects, where he's away from the pain and dissapointment to interact with the reality of rejection. While Asa suffers because she's stubborn and doesn't give up trying again and again to someday end her pain, Yoshida accepts and lives with it as an unchangable reality.

Yet, I believe his theory started to fail to him even before he noticed, during his time in highschool his world-view started to crack little by little (most likely by Denji's influence on him). Even if he didn't share significant moment with the rest of the cast, he enjoyed his time as a highschooler and, well, it isn't what parasocial relationships are about? happiness comes from the ilusion of companionship, and during all this time we've seen Yoshida chatting with someone or reacting about his surroundings in a group, especially with Denji at his side, feeding this needed ilusion of belonging. After all, the deep of these bonds doesn't matter but they're still important/meaningful to the person in question.

Maybe this expression shows that he does care about the people he spend time with pretending to be human just as them, maybe feels sorry to destroy this little life he believes doesn't fit into but had the opportunity to experience. He wants something like that for him too, a normal life where his lack of humanity isn't in the way to his desire of connection.

This is why I find this line very powerful for him to say, he apologize because he couldn't be of help to Asa, to have separate her from Denji while securing her to follow his theory of happiness, and by that to have made her situation worse than before and for things end up like this. He failed to fight the unchangeable once again.

[spidrboots]

had someone on discord tell me that they read a lot of my texts in angel’s voice & i have no idea whether to be honored or deeply, personally offended.

[icewindandboringhorror]

examining a seemingly normal image only to slowly realize the clear signs of AI generated art.... i know what you are... you cannot hide your true nature from me... go back where you came from... out of my sight with haste, wretched and vile husk

[bunnyboy-juice]

spent the first hour and change at work deleting some old files and am having a grand ol time laughing at myself for not realizing i was a lesbian sooner

[crossbackpoke-check]

Looks like that video is about a month & a half after The Trade and trevors broken ankle 😣

re: this video… anon 😭 i had suspicions but it is so much worse to have them confirmed that really was like. trevor’s first Public Appearance without jamie AND post-broken ankle which is traumatic in and of itself no wonder every beat reporter was like ‘oh yeah trevor’s just devastated’

wouldn’t you be miserable too if your best friend just got traded and your body betrayed you and what if it was maybe all your fault!!!

[constantvariations]

Recently saw a post in the Adam Taurus tag (an exercise in patience, that tag) that claimed that the signs of Adam not actually caring for the Faunus cause start as early as the Black Trailer. Their evidence?

Blake: What about the crew members?

Adam: What about them?

They proposed that the lack of concern Adam felt for the SDC crew whilst knowing that Faunus were often employed against their will meant he always put his revenge above the needs of the Faunus

Let me tell you, my jaw dropped at the stupidity

The way they went on, you'd think he was about to kill a small nation's worth of SDC workers, but like.

Babe.

It's a cargo train. Their skeleton crew barely has bones

According to the Association of American Railroads, the standard practice is a two-person crew, a locomotive engineer and a conductor, but it's not uncommon to have a crew of one. It would undoubtedly suck to be one of those guys if Adam had succeeded, but it's not the unbridled massacre people seem to think it is

As for the Faunus angle, I highly doubt any slave would be given the skills of either of those positions, much less left in charge of who knows how much lien's worth of name brand products, so no danger of accidentally eliminating the unfortunate kin there. Had they been Faunus that did join the SDC of their own volition, then they's be SOL just like the humans

I'm so tired of people making shit up or blowing things out of proportion to justify their Adam hate

[kitkatpancakestack]

You want a psychological horror saw trap just go to the grocery store

[caimitos]

saw a post about projecting your ethnicity onto a character and started missing vespa ilkay. so so bad

[angelsdean]

i am just. so fucking tired of my mom acting like i don't do shit and i'm useless bc i work from home

[luxaofhesperides]

hope the president of my uni dies in a fire btw ✌️

[woodsborostabathon]

“how could richie’s family possibly want to avenge him when he groomed and murdered people” well first of all he did neither of those things so let’s start there

[corvidaedream]

in my quest to maybe move back to providence after 20 years, im looking at jobs down there and damn i think i might be better off financially pivoting to carpentry/construction work for a while

[grif-hawaiian-rolls]

look

i never claimed to be smart

[tevatron]

i'm so glad i won't be working with my pi after this month. i think i've reached my limit. i just can't deal with her anymore