#im not as happy with this as i could be but i am learning. things

[thedeadthree]

𝐃𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐎𝐍 𝐀𝐆𝐄: 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐕𝐄𝐈𝐋𝐆𝐔𝐀𝐑𝐃 ➸ irulanne . the rook .

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[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.

[triptychofvoids]

kinda love that people genuinely come to you for health advice and you earnestly answer them, thank you for your work

aheh gern gesehen, its what im here for!

[pepprs]

im home and already swallowed by despair. can you believe i was in CHICAGO a few hours ago. and now im here. lol

[astrxealis]

my favorite teacher plays dnd and bg3 do you know how crazy that is to me

[miercolaes]

fancy tags are making me sad so as of rn, everything will be simpler. i just want to write and for some reason i always create smth that just's sucking the enjoyment with a biodegradable straw. until i find smth easier to tag that doesn't make the brain juice sad, i'll only tag the user.

[fatcowboys]

my PA for ajovy got denied (booo) but the reason it did was bc a neurologist needed to prescribe it which i already had an apt set up for and gad yesterday (yay!) and the appointment went really well and i like the provider a LOT of migraine management (YAY!!!) so now i am once again waiting for an ajovy PA to be approved lmao

[the-trans-dragon]

Hehehe >:3 got a kissie and some headpats from a pretty girl >:3 muahahahahahaha >:3

[campyvillain]

you don't sound ungrateful at all. in fact, you sound extremely grateful, and self aware about what that attention means. one of the things about the internet is that we're all in a constant, overlapping group chat with eachother. it can be lovely and it can be good, but it's categorically /lots/ and not all the people who have eyes on us need to know about those crucial pieces of us.

i am an online creator as well (i hope you take my word for it- im on anon for similar anxieties about being Too Known), and my art is deeply affected by my experiences, both trauma and identity, but i never talk about it on main. my life improved immensely when i found a ""smaller group chat"" to let down walls and WordDump so i could just,, talk about my life and identity without risk. something private and to the side, where i could have feedback with a few people i trusted without it being Everyone At Once.

and like- let me be clear, this sounds easier than it actually is? growing that "smaller group chat" of people i trust took time and effort. its even harder when you're a respected content creator, because 9 out of 10 times people on the internet are looking at you on a pedestal. i dont know how to fix this. i do know i found my best friends in the world, my "safe" people, by deliberately inhabiting spaces outside my art, so that i didn't feel like people were only trying to get to know me. having those few "safe" people made engaging with my "content creator self" a lot healthier.

i dont know how to tell you it gets better, because, well, like. in my experience, hearing "it gets better" feels a lot like ignoring how it is now. and that sucks ass. but ive also spent my entire adolescence with pieces of me wound up and bricked off inside me, stigmatized pieces i stared at and went "nobody can know forever", and i just want to pass along that that's not true? one day you will find people where it's safe to talk about it. and it can live there, in the private group chat, and that's perfectly healthy. im sorry it may not be an option right now. i hope things get easier.

this is extremely important for me to hear. thank you endlessly

[dog-girl-zezora]

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[opens-up-4-nobody]

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[cornflowercanine]

oh yeah also almost forgot to post that one year ago today i moved out of utah. i went from constantly tired and 8ody Hurts Randomly All The Time and Gets New Minor Illnesses Monthly and Starting to get heart issues to like... i've only gotten sick once since i moved out. any pain i get is just from workin lots. ive gained TWENTY POUNDS(!!!) pro8a8ly more since i moved out (REALLY GOOD). i finally have irl friends :) and we go out shopping or to eat at least once a w33k, every other w33k X) literally every8ody in my store that i talk to loves me and is happy to s33 me and gives me compliments :D i kinda cant express how huge a deal it is for me to 8e a8le to Go Outside and TALK TO PEOPLE nevertheless MAKE FRIENDS WITH THEM!!! 8ut god this was kinda all i ever wanted? this was like the 8aseline thing? people are just as nice as i thought they'd 8e and my parents were wrong X) i am way more lova8le than anticip8ed even if i do get confused easy and am slow at some things people still WANT me there :D i have my own money now and can do whatever i want with it and i have :) a lot... in savings and i plan to learn to drive this year and move out next year or so!

LITERALLY EVERYTHING IS EASIER WHEN YOU DONT HAVE YOUR PARENTS 8REATHING DOWN YOUR NECK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I AM SO HAPPY A FUCKING MEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[the-physicality]

baby, let's talk about it

playing defense? i see you. natasha mack best defensive rating. by a lot. DT season low [low is good] defensive rating and second highest net rating on the team. highest offensive rating [high is good] on the team. that's what assists and playmaking will get you. ast/to ratio should be 5 bc i maintain if you get an intentional shot clock violation at the end of the game it shouldn't count [i see why it does; i don't like it]

across the board, these are probably some of the best defensive ratings we've gotten all season.

[defness]

you really need to study anatomy, your art is declining in quality RAPIDLY. i'm not saying this to be mean, but all of your art looks like the same fetish piece.

Errm. I kinda fuck w the way my art looks tho

[burnthybread]

>tried to be ultimate good friend by never talking to ky friends abt my issues because they were too extreme

>now have no one who cares

[sereniv]

apologies are hard and can be embarassing

but life is too short to let your grandma go to bed sad