#and frankly neither do it

[maeamian]

Back in college, during my first lab job, my cubiclemate Bill, who was like 50 or 60, asked me what my favorite theory of moon formation was. We had a nice little chat about it, he was a fan of the Giant Impact theory. No one really asks that one anymore, it is not really up for much of a debate, but I hope wherever he is, Bill's happy that he won.

[ok-pop-1]

an evening doodle of a modern!war from @linked-maze :)

[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.

[callie-flower]

"proship dni" this, "comship dni" that, "neutral dni" unfortunately the people you don't like are still human and deserve comfort. my fucking god shut the hell up you're just as annoying as they are and protest WAY too much about it. go unlearn your purity morality shit

[naamahdarling]

Augh

[mamawasatesttube]

i have to speak my truth. i think timkon clone baby aus fucking suck

[my-animeandmanga-journey]

He really should have said something before he let his worry turn to anger.

Yes, she should have said something, both about her nightmares and about Arata. Especially given that Arata secretly invited her to take him up on some offer. ('Course, tbh, I don't know if I would have said anything about it, either. It was a very awkward moment.)

Hmm... I get what he means, and he's not entirely wrong, but I don't think he was right in saying it this way. Miyo was thinking of him. She simply can't fathom the concept that someone might want her to trust them so completely. She didn't grow up knowing what trust even is, so she can't understand why Kudo would think she doesn't trust him.

Also, I think it may be that Miyo actually doesn't trust him, but not in a sense of, "I can't trust you not to hurt me," but "I can't trust you to be strong enough to handle this." Trust issues are complicated. Take the old trust fall: there's a big difference between looking at a strong, young man and saying, "I don't trust you to even attempt to catch me," and looking at a 75-year-old woman in a wheelchair and saying, "I don't trust you to not get hurt." Kudo may be thinking Miyo's thinking the first; Miyo is definitely thinking the second.

It's just one of those scenarios where everyone involved did everything wrong. Kudo should have said something, but he wants to respect Miyo's privacy and independence by letting her say something on her own. Which Miyo would probably never do- she's using "oh, he's so tired" as an excuse, she would probably never say anything because she's so used to bearing it all on her own.

Meanwhile, Kudo clearly IS tired, he's so exhausted that Godo had to practically YELL at him to get the heck outta the office and get some sleep at home. Half the reason Kudo's so tired is because he's worried sick about Miyo. But because Miyo's closed herself off and Kudo's pretty much written her off as "yeah, fine, do whatever you want, then," he's stopped noticing and just started sleeping in his office. And in the process, Miyo's getting worse and worse because Kudo's not there to protect her from her nightmares. Kudo wasn't even getting proper sleep at home because he had to stay up half the night watching Miyo.

Just a situation that kept spiraling out of control because nobody would open their mouth.

[flovey-dovey]

AU if Emmet somehow poofed into Hisui same as Ingo but also, same as Ingo, forgor everything but his name...

Emmet: Hello! I am Emmet. I'm not entirely sure why I'm here, but I believe there's someone I'm trying to track down. He's verrrrry important to me (I think)!

Ingo: Hello Emmet, I am Ingo. I also have no memory of where I came from. It's strange, but now that you bring it up I feel like I might be missing someone important to me too...

Emmet: Oh?

Ingo: Yes... Well, I hope you find him. It's been a pleasure meeting you. Take care and drive safely!

Emmet: You too! All aboard!

Everyone else:

[dreamlogic]

aye can i get a fuckin uuuhhhh

break. on my burger

[uncanny-tranny]

I know the posts that are, essentially, the Carl Sagan "you are made of starstuff" quotes can be cheesy or almost... I guess too fantastical, but I've looked at human cells, and do you ever notice they almost look like Van Gogh's paintings (at least some of them!). Each of your (conservative estimate) ~30 trillion cells in your body contribute to building you, and they're all just... really beautiful. Even the most "simple" of your cells reminds me of a very calming painting, lily-pads on a lake, a reminder that you're here. That feels like art that's only captured once in a lifetime, quite literally, too. I hope you remember that, whenever you feel incomplete, uncomplex, listless, whatever it may be. If you're made of starstuff, you're made also of trillions of paintings.

[britcision]

So partner and I are nearly done the first season of Arcane

And listen

We all knew Mr Who Needs Therapy When I Can Be Edgy And Menacing With My Robot Eye wasn’t going to suddenly realise the wonders of psychological health and good coping mechanisms just because he’s acquired a sad blue child

He already murdered his bf it’s too late anyway

But post time skip I do think he’s really starting to question that decision, and I think that’s beautiful

Of course, his solution thus far has been “uuuuuh what if we have matching trauma”, and I bet I know how that’s gonna go for him 👀

[shoulderholsterfreak]

Here, because it’s become a hot topic of debate again:

I don’t like Thrawn because he’s good or bad; I like him because he’s fascinating.

[clawsextended]

on a note to all: my plotting style is something i like to call i have adhd and if i see you on the dash and have an idea chances are i’ll im you about it. i’m an anxious little dude who isn’t always active in a broad scope, and it’s always been my nature to reach out to people. that doesn’t make me even remotely anxious. not even remotely expected to answer me — i totally get it, sometimes you don’t feel the vibe — but a general psa about how i work. i come from the dinosaur era where the only way to communicate with one another on any level was to directly talk to them and frankly i don’t even know how else you’re ever supposed to plot with a person otherwise. like… how do you write if you never talk????

[greeneyed-thestral]

[killedbyfrank]

chat.. thoughts on anxiety x ennui???

I don't really ship it to be honest. I watched the movie and Ennui was mostly there for decoration as I had anticipated lol

They get no interactions whatsoever and I don't really see them well together

[wonder-worker]

A.J Pollard’s biography on Edward IV was so cringe lol (generic; minor but frustrating inaccuracies; intensely judgmental at times and oddly dismissive at others while never considering the broader context; entirely diminished and trivialized Elizabeth Woodville as both queen and wife of his main subject in the name of "defending" her; created a false dichotomy between Edward and Henry VII’s styles of ruling and lauded the latter at the former’s expense even though Henry literally followed Edward’s example for the very things Pollard was criticizing Edward for; had a downright nonsensical and thoroughly misleading conclusion about Edward’s legacy & Richard’s usurpation that was based entirely on hindsight, Pollard's own assumptions, and the complete downplaying Richard’s agency and actions to emphasize what Pollard wrongly and misleadingly claimed were Edward's so-called 'failings', etc, etc)

I wanted to buy his book on Henry V but after reading this shitshow and the synopsis of that book, im guessing it's going to be 10x worse, so...no thanks