#and what happens at certain points etc

[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.

[perilegs]

i know astrology is fake but i'm not too keen on how a lot of people on this website seem to be clowning on it as a hobby a bit too hard. i swear the woman who thinks it's neat how she and her friends with the same sun sign are all similar isn't trying to say that you are who you are born as and there is nothing you can do to change it. it's a hobby. an interest. what happened to finding meaning and joy in the small things. does it affect you if someone enjoys tarot reading or crystals. does it make you upset someone has interests that they enjoy.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I know we skirt around and sometimes talk about the ~trauma~ of it all, but I think seeing how loudly Taylor and Travis support each other on main (while still carving out a private life together) really starts to illuminate to an even clearer degree how many of Taylor's choices and actions were a response to all of ~that~ in the last decade or so (and particularly since 2016).

Again, which is not to say it's all bad, and many of them were choices she needed to make at the time for her own health and I'm sure there are some things from the time period she's continued to keep with her, but it's just really striking that she's, like, in full bloom now. And as a lot of people here are saying, she's probably more like herself these days than she'd been in the last decade. It's getting to the point (at least for me) that sometimes I can't even imagine her the way she was in the last few years because she just seems soooooo much more comfortable in her own skin. Which is silly, because that was as much her as the person she is now, she is an amalgamation of all those parts of her (just like any other person is).

But you just see *how much* she just loves so freely -- not just romantically but in everything she does -- and it's even sadder to think about how she felt like she had to slice off all these parts of her and like she had to accept a certain way of living (and being loved) in order to survive and have a life of her own.

I'm just really happy for her that she seems to be healing every passing day and is just embracing everything coming her way.

ok gonna word vomit more in the tags

[seiya-starsniper]

.

[abstractlesbian]

Find someone slightly annoying but in really small harmless ways so I decide none of the behaviours are worth bringing up with them → realizing: hey, Im also annoying! solidarity! → realizing we have a lot in common and starting to bond → finding out other people find this person annoying and are vocal about it behind their back → finding out this person has ADHD like me that's (at least one reason) why we have all these traits in common → fear.

[eisthenameofme]

"you are not immune to propaganda/cult indoctrination" is largely useful and the sort of shit it's used to point out as not making you immune (being "smart" or a certain degree of educated, etc) is worth pointing out and it never feels like the appropriate place to mention it, but a lot of people seem to be conflating "the things people think make them immune to this kind of thing doesn't because it doesn't work that way" along with "the same conditions that make people more vulnerable to indoctrination/conspiritorial thinking/etc can happen to anyone" with "everyone in the world is equally vulnerable to every kind of indoctrination under the same conditions" and i just don't think that's objectively true.

It may be true that someone started out holding one belief and flipped to hold the apparently opposite belief, but does that actually mean everyone who holds that belief is equally liable to change their mind? Why did they hold that belief in the first place? Is it consistent with their values and what they care about more broadly, and do they specically go out of their way to combat the potential for misinformation and propaganda? Are they prone to making their decisions based on what the people around or closest to them think instead of thinking for themselves? To what extent do they base their values and decsions on kneejerk emotional reactions? (these aren't the only factors obviously, just examples of other potential contributing factors) It is not a given that everyone will answer these questions in the same way, and this is part of why different people respond differently in similar situations. Also not everyone will respond positively to techniques that often work to draw people in (eg lovebombing is a common tactic that works on a lot of people, but may be actively offputting or ring alarm bells for others; different people have different tolerances for attempts at social control and some might nope out the moment they see it attempted regardless of any other factors).

"You Yes Even You" can be an important tactic to get people who wouldn't otherwise to legitimately consider why these tactics work on people and what might work on them and keep in mind that the people it Does happen to usually aren't aware of it and it's not always their fault the way it's often presented, but that is not objectively the same thing as "anyone can fall down any pipeline not matter what forever"

like maybe no one is literally "immune to propaganda" but if a type of propoganda is something that necessarily hinges on X mechanism and a person is notorious for both intellectually and instinctively being violently opposed to X. then yeah I think the propoganda that hinges on X is probably going to be a Very Difficult to Impossible sell, even potentially under coercion, especially if that person has already demonstrated that they are willing to put themeslves at risk/resist that kind of coercion about it. unless your argument is that there is scp level literal mind control happening.

[fadedflora]

it sucks to have to be scared to update the game, no matter the size of the update, because you have no idea if it's going to break your game or not (not to mention going through the process of updating your mods)

[secret--history]

the whole 'there are not very many Great Causes worth fighting for these days' from Julian scanned as WAY more out of touch than the moon landing thing for me the first time i read tsh

[gregmarriage]

gonna become pepe slivia charlie, while trying to write the plot for this fic

[thiriumstains]

hey guys u should read this fic i just finished bc WHAT THE FUCKKKK . WHAT THE FUCK. :(( i am emotionally destroyed

[fappellmoan]

so stressed bc my stupid drug test results were too diluted the other day (god forbid a bitch is hydrated) (ok i overdid it a little bit but i’ve been thru the wringer of Not having enough water for tests but enough that i desperately needed to pee but had to wait and then have sonograms pressing into my bladder so ig that got into my head what Ever who gaf) and the fucking email i got said a second test being too diluted would qualify as a failure and they’d take away the job offer 😭😭😭 and i just pissed at home and it was like the Same color even tho it’s early yet in the day im not drinking that much ohhhh brother i hate it here

[muninnhuginn]

having to make myself just pull back a second and go for "simplest explanation that fits all the facts and isn't accidentally inferring beyond the facts we do have".

[shrimp1y]

the relationship between labels and someone's personal/social identity is kinda getting completely demented due to capitalism and social media

[lucalicatteart]

Poll adventure (paventure? lol) Day 5: read the small story tidbit below the poll for more details, OR just vote based on initial impression

(✦ see past poll results + further information HERE (link) ✦)

The winning option of yesterday's poll was that the adventurer should choose a suspicious egg as his gift ….

"He carefully plucks the egg from the gift pile, wrapping it in spare fabric and tucking it away inside a small wooden box within his backpack for safety. Not really wanting to stick around and get accidentally pulled into scary underground tunnels or something, he shakily bids the Well Creature farewell, and continues on through the forest, just following whatever he can find that looks vaguely like a path.. He makes an occasional stop to pick up a cool rock, harvest berries, or let the cat play in the grass, but mostly just wanders aimlessly, lost in daydreams and contemplations of how his New Fun Life Of Spontaneous Adventure is going so far......

Eventually, the forest tapers off into a more open area of land, hosting what seems like a humble little village. By this point, it's nearly nightfall, which reminds him that he's actually quite afraid of the dark, so he scrambles about town for a moment until finally finding the local Inn. After nervously stumbling inside, he rents the cheapest room available, then sits alone, snacking on some free leftover food scraps and plain water. It's been a tiring day, but in the spirit of becoming an adventurer and pushing himself to have as many experiences as possible, he figures he could hang around downstairs a little longer, perhaps get one more thing done before bed -- What should he do?"

[eyeoftheaxolotl]

"this was so obvious to me" wasn't for me. "this game is so easy who would even enjoy this" i did and i found it challenging actually. "nobody would ever fall for this" i did.

when you talk about a video game through the lens of your own experience, you are speaking as a player with your own capabilities and preferences. remember that