#let people live! christ!!!

[audible-smiles]

pet peeve time

it's ghoulish that we turn making fun of unusual baby names into some kind of sport. why is this the one area of culture where pedantic, hypercritical conservatism is fine and cool? there used to be an epidemic of so-called comedians in the US making fun of black names (because they thought black people were stupid!) and then when blatant racism became a faux pas in certain circles of white society they were all just like "we meant women are stupid, actually, as well as all white people in different social classes than us" and so far we've all gone "oh, that's fine!" and passed around memes of pregnant women naming their kids "Arson" or "Kayleieiigh" or whatever the fuck is supposed to be funny at the time.

I just looked at the top ten baby names in the US by binary gender and guess what, most of them date back to at least the 14th century if not much further, because again, naming conventions are astonishingly conservative. the exceptions? "Lily", because flower names for girls weren't popularized until the 1800s, and possibly "Mia" and "Aiden", which are, respectively, a diminutive version of a much older name, and an anglicized spelling of a much older name. your cousin who named their kid something weird is not necessarily indicative of a widespread societal collapse that must by guarded against by those wise preservers of our culture, internet trolls.

you are not being oppressed because somewhere a baby has a name that's spelled weird or sounds weird. in fact, that baby's name affects you in no way whatsoever, and fixating on it is deranged, "fall of civilization" behavior that makes you sound like you spent the 90s forwarding chain e-mails about ghetto kids named Oranjello and Lemonjello, because you're a tool. that's my hot take today!

adults can in fact change their names if they hate them. kids who dislike their names often end up going by nicknames. it is not child abuse to give your kid an unusual name! sometimes kids hate their traditional names, even, because names are super personal. sometimes kids are trans! The Public Universal Friend was born in 1752, you literally cannot stop people given traditional names from renaming themselves something weirder as an adult, and you still have to treat them with respect if they choose to do so!

naming a kid a nearly unpronounceable string of characters may in fact be the only remotely cool thing Elon Musk has ever done in his life, but it was almost certainly Grimes' idea

[laurents-secret-diary]

Can we see any of your drawings you may have had for the side characters please??? 👉👈

I only got a couple so far! I think I'm gonna do Nicaise next

[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.

[thesilliestcryptid]

punk pinterest is 40% people sharing their DIYs and 60% middle schoolers acting like every patch on a jacket needs to be a band or it should burn

[stiffyck]

The way homeless people are treated is INSANE.

I'm sitting inside a building. There's two other guys here.

A security dude comes over and tells the two guys to get out while he ignores me. He clearly saw me. But because i "don't look homeless" I can stay.

What the fuck. It's cold outside, it's raining, why the fuck can't they sit here. Literally there's almost no people here what is your ISSUE.

[stargore]

breaking my silence: therians are cool as hell. like my dude, i too feel the absence of wings on my shoulderblades like two brutally amputated limbs. i too wanna play in the creek.

therians aren’t bothering anyone they’re cool as hell if you’re a therian follow me cause i’ll follow you back cause i love you

[thousand-winters]

I think we should bring back the concept of "if you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything", especially for fandom.

[snekdood]

how is sacrificing indigenous people in america by not voting/voting third party going to help palestinians, can i ask?

[hauntingblue]

Oh now the villagers know..... and arlong burned the town to punish her..... for some reason

[cartoonchaos]

“gee i wonder why there’s still so much more fanfiction about male characters” “we need more morally complex female characters” “i love relationships that are doomed by the narrative” “more stories need to treat mentally ill characters with compassion and respect” “all his problems could’ve been fixed if he only went to therapy” you fuckers can’t even handle the ending of fionna and cake

[james-spooky]

this is a test

[ae-cha08]

What kind of person do you want to be? Are you surrounding yourself with the friendships that could help you become that person? One of the best investments you can make is in friendships that encourage you to be more like Jesus.

[ozzieinspacetime]

Thinking about the INSANE moral grey area of the thg victors at the minute,, these scared, small children killed 23 (or 47) other equally scared, small children in order to make it out alive. Every year afterwards the wound that is the games gets ripped open and they have to go about closing it up all over again. They can never escape the blood of the other scared little kids on their hands. They are being punished by the Capitol, made to watch other kids do what they did, for something the Capitol made them do in the first place. If they want the kids to die because they don't want them suffering the way a victor does for the rest of their lives, then they're uncaring & complicit in the tributes death. If they get the kids out, they're signing the tribute up for a life of misery. No winning. No moral high ground. Just a train ride that never stops.

[butnotbubblegum]

using the tags to vent my current emotional state into the void bc ig story feels like a bad plan for this, read at your own risk.

[janiedean]

two episodes of nervous crying your brains out for longer than one hour in the span of three days were not in my bingo card for 2024 when I graduated ten years ago and I would like to frankly get the fuck over myself

[torchickentacos]