#sorry im having a moment here

[tabooiart]

how we feelin women enjoyers

[fisherrprince]

Instead of writing a fanfic like a normal person this oneshot turned into two separate, contextless things,

[cestacruz]

Doodles as i forget i have to wake up early

I miss Skywarp and Thundercracker so i wanted to doodle them in the RiD15 style

And some humanformers concepts because i like drawing people (not final designs, will try to refine more because this is fun, Grimlock is getting redesigned ASAP) (i yap in the tags)

[eddiegettingshot]

“i guess so” was so insane of buck to say. what do you mean you guess so. there was no reason to respond like that. why not just say yeah. YEAH. YOUR ATTENTION. what was the point of i guess so. he looks soooo relieved to have an answer for his feelings but he’s saying i guess so. girl what. what! you’re guessing? you still don’t know for sure? he’s standing in front of you and you still can’t conjure up an emphatic yes? you’re acting in ways so strange your sister is baffled? you don’t even know why your father figure would approve of your relationship? you don’t know what you’re ready for? you don’t know why you lied to your best friend or why you hurt him? you’re just not certain of anything? “i guess so” WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY KNOW!!!

[blueskittlesart]

save button briefly remapped to dialog advancer in climactic scene of visual novel. 10 dead 30 injured

[crybaby-bkg]

I know I've talked about bull and bear hybrid Bakugou, but has anyone ever talked about lion hybrid Bakugou???? I thought about this concept when I was still half asleep this morning but like,,,,

lion hybrid bakugou with his big ole head and even bigger mane of hair, all soft, colored like the sand you'd dig your toes into at the beach. he has a little scruff on his chin, but he never grows it out because he hates the upkeep of it.

he's always loud, growly yawns whenever you see him, his canines sharp and pointy when he opens his maw wide enough for you to peek in. he's so big and soft where it matters, lazes around all day everyday, and gets these big bursts of energy at the most random of moments. he's basically an overgrown cat basically

omg and he has this complex where he's just sooo high and mighty, like he's some king meant to be worshipped. but all you have to do is kiss his cheeks and rub a hand through his hair when he lays his big dumb head in your lap, and he's purring up a storm.

and and and lion hybrid bakugou whose tongue can feel so rough when he's feeling lazy about it, but somehow knows how to work it just right whenever he wants to lounge between your legs. gets so huffy and growly when you mumble that you can't cum anymore, just nudges your thighs a little wider with his shoulder as he nuzzles his nose against your mound. doesn't care to hear any of your complaining, because he's still eating and doesn't intend on finishing until he's ready.

omg and and lion hybrid bakugou whose favorite position is, of course, doggy style. but only because he gets to wrap your little dainty neck up in his powerful jaws and pin you there, likes how you whimper and shiver but go limp either way because you trust him with your life. he pins your arms beside your head and grunts so loud into your nape when he finally sinks his cock inside of you. he practically lays flat on top of you, just rutting his hips against your ass over and over until he knots you.

which is his favorite part because you two get to just lay there for what feel like hours, and you keep coming intermitally because he can't help but rut his hips a few more times, and hiss at the way his knot tugs at your clenching lips. sigh just lion hybrid bakugou who looks so mean and intimidating but he just loves you so much and can't get enough of you

[try-set-me-on-fire]

Ok well i had the brief thought “what about an ER nurse Eddie au?” and then this popped fully formed into existence so fuck it Friday pt 2.. warnings for smoking and vague references to critically injured kids

“That doesn’t seem very healthy.”

Smoke curls up from the cigarette held loosely in Eddie’s hand. “It’s not, particularly.”

Buck’s hands are in his pockets as he strolls away from the glass doors out into the ambulance bay where Eddie is doing the mature, professional equivalent of playing hide and seek. He comes to a stop barely a foot or two away from where Eddie leans against grimy concrete. “Didn’t know you were a smoker.”

“I’m not,” Eddie sighs, “Particularly.” He looks over Buck’s face as he takes a drag, cataloging bruises and cuts. He hadn’t been the one to look him over before he was discharged, probably because he was out here avoiding having to do so. “Only when it’s- only after the bad shifts.” And only once a month, even if the bad shifts come again and again. He bought this pack in January, it’s stale as shit.

Buck’s eyes follow the smoke as it drifts skyward. “Rough one today?”

Eddie thinks he probably doesn’t have to explain to Buck that it’s sometimes better when a kid is dead on arrival so he doesn’t have to try his best to administer care he knows will be useless. He doesn’t have to explain a day where nothing goes right and he loses more people than he can save and he still has to walk away from someone’s parent or wife or sister, left behind forever in a waiting room on the worst day of their life, and go on to lose the next person too. Doesn’t have to explain why he’s out here, and not in there. “Mm. We’ve got this repeat customer, always hate to have him back.”

Buck’s eyes flick to his face before they settle somewhere around his elbow. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. He seems like a nice guy. I worry about him. He’s here too often.”

Buck doesn’t look up. “What was he in for this time?”

“Minor concussion. Bruising. Lacerations.” Eddie sucks cancer into his lungs. “Heard a house fell on him.” Exhales it into the night.

Buck does look up this time, eyes a darker blue out here in the shadows. “Part of a house. Just a staircase and the- like, the balcony, really.”

“Maybe he should stay away from those.”

“From houses?” Buck asks, half his mouth twitching into a smile.

Eddie rests his head on the wall behind him. “Guess that’s not really practical.”

“No.” Buck is quiet for a moment, one hand slipping out of his pocket and running through his hair. Eddie wonders what he looks like, when he’s not here. He’s more styled, sometimes, when things aren’t very bad. He wonders if he’s usually all gelled up and neat. Eddie kind of likes the loose curls. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Making your day worse.” Buck looks genuinely apologetic, and Eddie shakes his head.

“The guy made it out okay this time.” Buck is just close enough that Eddie can kick at his boot with his sensible orthopedic sneaker. “You didn’t even need stitches.”

“That’s good.” Eddie’s left foot is pressed along the inside of Buck’s right, and Buck is staring down at them. “His favorite nurse was on break. I would have missed you if someone else had to do them.”

Eddie laughs, just a few bursts of soundless oxygen. “You gotta find new ways to see me before something happens that I can’t fix.”

Buck moves, taking the few steps necessary to lean against the wall beside him. Carefully, he takes the cigarette from Eddie’s hand, holds it between two of his own fingers, and takes a drag. Eddie watches it happen like he’s monitoring somebody’s pulse ox, and when Buck coughs he laughs again, louder this time. “Fuck,” Buck says, laughing too. “Thought that would be cooler than it was.”

“Smoking isn’t cool, firefighter Buckley,” Eddie says, taking the cigarette back and pulling from it again between smiling lips.

“Hm,” Buck says, grinning out into the night. Then he sighs, and rolls his head along the concrete to look at Eddie. “I think there’s nothing you can’t fix.”

They’re very close. “There’s lots I can’t fix.”

Buck shrugs like he disagrees. “I also think I’d like to find other ways to see you.”

Buck’s eyes are even more in shadow at this angle, and they’re the color of the lake back in El Paso that he and a bunch of kids went to after graduation, drunk off beer somebody’s cousin got for them, skinny dipping with breathless terrified delight under bright constellations. “Then ask me.”

Buck inhales as Eddie exhales. “What time’s your shift end?”

“5:30 AM. So, probably 6:15.”

Buck traces the two fingers he’d used to hold the cigarette down Eddie’s arm. “You wanna get breakfast with me?”

“Yes. I would.”

Buck smiles, and Eddie snubs out the cigarette on the wall between them. “I’ll meet you here?”

“Alright.” He takes a step forward, then a step to the right so he’s standing in front of Buck. “Two hours.”

“Uh huh.”

He should really get back inside. They’re understaffed, as always, and there are too many patients, as always, and not enough beds, as always. “See you then.” He doesn’t make any move to leave.

“See you then,” Buck almost whispers. He leans forward, and Eddie still doesn’t move, so he presses a tiny kiss to the corner of his mouth for just a moment. His lips are warm. Eddie hadn’t noticed it was cold outside.

Buck pulls back and leans against the wall again. Eddie smiles, puts a hand in his pocket, and walks back toward the doors.

[coolnonsenseworld]

A little promo with my little obsession on the side...........

Reminder all items are shipped from Poland - for details on shipping times check out FAQ or send me a private message!

 mmezzy.bigcartel.com

[cerealmonster15]

caytober day 21: this is the funniest way that poll couldve gone why did you do this to him LOL 😭

[bonefall]

Maybe I'll make a post on this at some point but like, something deeply fucked up about TNP and Po3 that people have totally forgotten about is how badly they try to whine that "Tigerstar Had Good Traits :("

Firestar does it, Brambleclaw does it, and they keep doing this after it becomes this GRAND irony that Firestar almost gets Tiger'd to death in a fox trap because he was too trusting. Bramble gets his pity award of keeping deputyship and then cries to his son about how No One Saw The Good In Tigerstar :(

And it's wiiiiild that no one else in this fandom has done anything with the fact that Leopardstar broke the Warrior Code to appoint Hawkfrost, who had no apprentice, an extremely aggressive and warmongering Tigerclone who says things like "Tigerstar wasn't the worst cat to look up to." ONLY qualifying trait was being kinda like Tigerstar.

And she practically did that the SECOND Mistyfoot went missing. And then Leopardstar continued to be one of the most violent and xenophobic leaders through Po3, joining with WindClan to attack ThunderClan.

What I'm getting at is that like, a few years ago, with books like "Blackfoot's Reckoning" and "Shadow in RiverClan" it's like they suddenly decided to retcon in a bunch of "redemption arcs" in hindsight. They just pretended like there was this grand high reckoning with TigerClan, when there literally wasn't, and if anything that caused SERIOUS problems for the cast that the authors didn't fully acknowledge as such.

And now ppl haven't actually read the main series and are just working with their recent memory of all these retcon books.

But TNP and PO3 are still there, and you can go and see the ACTUAL timeline where Leopardstar is really not apologetic at all, and Blackstar is a useful stooge for the very next wannabe dictator that strolls in, in spite of the new side content that COMPLETELY mischaracterized them for their plots to work.

[mydream-synopsis]

here me out i think togame and endo are two sides of the same coin.

they are willing to do anything for choji and chika, respectively, but they do so in two very different ways - endo destroys, while togame fixes.

for endo, takiishi is his god: whatever chika shows is right, is endo's definition of right. takiishi's actions are absolutes, and endo is his most devoted follower. therefore, endo does every thing to provide, even if that means burning down the world till only its ashes are left. like he did for this arc, he would dig a path with his bare hands for takiishi, so chika doesn't need to lift a single finger.

on the other hand, togame knew what he did was wrong. he knows he should have made sure that choji did not step into the wrong mindset that day in front of the ori. but, he couldn't bring himself to do so because choji is his king, and he is merely a knight in service. whatever tomiyama wishes is his command. however wrong choji's decisions may have been, togame's decision was to protect him and his authority as the leader of shishitoren.

that's why im really excited to see how endo and takiishi reach a conclusion at the end of this arc. for togame, meeting sakura and being confronted of his own decisions had pushed him to realise his own doing; this makes togame's decision to go to sakura with hiiragi, suo, nirei, and sugishita a major turning point for his character - for the first time, togame became his own person. this is my own assumption, but im guessing that togame chose to go to the bridge where sakura would be rather than to go with choji, as both a strategy for the fight and as a gesture for sakura. this was the first time he wrote his own morals.

as for endo, his fight with sakura is the first time he was ever "seen". this is what endo has been searching for this whole time; he just wanted someone to see him, and only him for even just a second. now the question is, can endo receive this from takiishi? can umemiya bring takiishi to this realisation, just like he did for choji? most importantly, what will endo choose?

(also. i really hope we get to see takiishi's backstory. because it's interesting how, even with the way he reacts to endo, he does Not actually get rid of him. takiishi has the power to practically end him on the spot but he doesn't!!!!!!!! WHY.)

[treasureplcnet]

also quite obsessed with karl being as detached from the story as he is. there's nothing that makes him have to be the detective that has to be involved, but he unknowingly dooms himself by agreeing to work with the KYAL cult. every other detective basically deals with elias head on except weissman, who only meets him right before he kills him. like he's right when he says "by my choices" because everything that leads him to being mixed up with the mannix cult is himself. it's the gambling debts and the choice to do the dirty work for an organisation he knows nothing about. he's the only one that doesn't encounter that body doing police work and it's specifically because he's told to cover it up. he gets himself into the mess and eventually fixes it but the fact that esther always dies in the doomed timelines and he's always too late even if he starts wanting to change things ("till this child. esther.") it just makes me very ill

[oshaskell]

after Eddie got shot and recovered for how long do u think Buck looked at him disbelieving, like you're here, you're alive, you're in front of me, thinking "hey, I want to reach out and hold on to you just to make sure, make sure my hand won't phase through you like you're a ghost and this has all been my wishful thinking and you actually did leave die that day, but it would be deranged to still be thinking about this so I won't". for how long do you think Buck looked at him like that and Eddie looked back and recognized the wide-eyed look in his best friend's face and just never said anything because that's what they do, isn't it? they almost lose each other and come back to each other and don't acknowledge it because if they did it would change everything irrevocably and I don't know if I'm ready. are you ready? please tell me if you're ready. but don't. but please. I need you more than anything. I can't lose you to my own feelings. I love you. don't leave again. this doesn't change anything between us but it changes everything.

[purpurussy]

a few ppl were asking me how i made some of my friendship bracelets so I thought I'd explain (because everyone should make as many bracelets as possible, I love seeing them):

I used this tutorial to make the pink one (here's a version that doesn't require a beading needle but I think it's a lot easier if you use one), except I skipped the first bit where they made the "snake" part (I just threaded the beads onto both strings). Also I used 3 beads per letter for the pink one instead of 4, because I think mine are a little bigger than the ones used in the tutorial

as for the double layered text, @pinofdnp taught me how to do that! you also need to layer 2 strings, then you start by threading beads onto both of them (again a lot easier if you have a beading needle), and then you just split them up, thread beads onto each string individually, then join them up again by threading beads onto both of them at once again.

give it a go, it's not as hard as it looks! just a bit fiddly.

(these are the bracelets in question):

in general pinterest gave me a lot of inspiration, I'd recommend checking out what the swifties are doing on there because they are eating this up i gotta hand it to em

[charmac]

just wanna say I agree wholeheartedly with your tags on that fandom post. I have been following sunny on here since 2015 and there is a constant cycle of sensitive, and frankly delusional people, who claim the show, make crazy headcanons and justifications to make it tolerable and acceptable to them before they eventually shun and condemn the show altogether. it was very bad in 2018 and made me withdraw from the fandom lmao. I remember being most annoyed with the endless woobifying of charlie and the absolute condemnation of dee above everyone else. like, they're all bad. that's the point of the show. I just don't understand how they could stomach it in the first place

You are a warrior, dude.

The reason it took me so long to join Sunnyblr in the first place was the fact that ~early 2020 I was rarely seeing anything here that was based in canon, mostly weird headcanons that made no sense to me, and Reddit genuinely seemed like a more based place to exist for this show.

I literally needed a friend to give me specific accounts to follow because the tag was (and, sorry, lowkey still is) a nightmare. (Though to be fair I’ve been in fandoms on Tumblr for over a decade and literally never liked scrolling tags.)

I got into Sunny and I fell in love with Sunny because of canon. Because it’s so fucking weird and fucked up but it’s FUNNY, and there’s genuinely nothing like it. The characters are horrible stupid terrible people but they’re actually deeply complex and rich to study, so much so that you feel extremely compelled in a multitude of ways to dedicate yourself to some part of them, or all parts of them. But.. if you strip them of those core identities, of what the characters stand for, that compulsion is gone, void, irrelevant.

Because it’s the extremely raw, almost purely acting on basic instinct, unfiltered humanity, worst parts of the self, inability to recognise or follow societal norms aspects of these characters that are relatable. It’s relatable in a way that *should* make you uncomfortable, feel unsettled, and maybe a little relieved that these parts of people can be acknowledged... That’s a unique and interesting feeling, something people engage with media like this to explore and expand upon, and it’s often something that genuinely helps or supports people who wrestle with a lot of the heavy concepts Sunny satirises (and sometimes just, shoves at you head on).

When people start to disregard all of this, for whatever reason they do, that’s when you end up with the Fandom using Sunny Characters as an “ability to project” or (much worse) a “near blank canvas to play with” (because, yeah, if you strip them of their literal reason for being created and continued existence, ofc you lose their whole identity!?)

The problem seems to be that either 1) they just don’t understand the show well enough to get that they’re disregarding this aspect of the plots and characters, and so they genuinely don’t recognise that the fandom for Sunny exists because of these terrible compulsions and insane trauma exploration and that’s why we enjoy discussing and playing with these characters or 2) they do understand this but they can’t engage with it without some kind of personal moral conundrum or extreme discomfort, so they have to sanitise or completely alter the characters to enjoy them.

The thing is, if you fall into category 2, you just don’t belong in the depths of it all, and it’s an unfortunate truth you have to face. If you cannot enjoy canon, if the actual show makes you extremely uncomfortable and you’re only here for a gay ship or to project your gender and sexuality onto one character, you need to go stan something else. I say that with the greatest intentions for you. As Anon here has stated, it’s an insane cycle in this fandom over and over, you’re just going to upset yourself and resent the show and the people here, because we like the canon and the fuckery because that’s what the show is for. That is the literal point of the show at the end of the day.

Now if you’re in category 1, I heavily encourage you to actually *talk to people about the show and the characters*, read analysis, watch the episodes with different frames of reference and in alternate states of mind. Do your own analysis or character work, try and just write out the plot of your favourite episode and put to words *why* you like it. Hell, try and write a fanfic or a spec script from the mind of one of the characters, even if you think you can’t write.

Honestly, honestly, honestly, if you genuinely like this show at face value but you’re only engaging with fanon because you feel like you ‘shouldn’t’ openly enjoy the canon because it’s seen as ‘bad,’ the best thing you can do is have a conversation with someone, or multiple people, who get the show.

That being said, I do wanna open this shell Discord I’ve made to people. For people who *enjoy* the canon, who want to discuss actual Sunny (and also have fun with it, of course!) you’re welcome to join.

A lot of you get it. I’ve made some amazing friends in this fandom and regularly have extremely stimulating and insanely throught provoking convos with the people I’ve met here. I love it, it drives my insane passion for this show and I am eternally grateful to have found people who love this show for what it is. I hope, if you’re struggling to figure out why you like this show or struggling to accept that you like media like Sunny, you reach out or join a conversation and learn to love it too. And if you don’t, if you genuinely hate the canon of this show and only like the version of Macdennis you saw in a dozen different Tiktok edits to Taylor Swift songs, I really hope you move on for your own sake.

[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.