#this is horribly messy but i couldnt care less and in fact i think it adds to the charm

[aceedoodles]

listen. LISTEN. LISTEN TO ME. these four mean the world to me. they're all different brands of fucking idiot and i love them all.

(Atsushi and Akutagawa have a bet going about their superiors. Atsushi is about to win. Thanks Chuuya.)

[shizekarnstein]

At first I had doubts about posting this bc as a prequel fan I GET how annoying is to have to read and listen as so many ppl at once make fun and nickpick everything about a movie you like but... god was this bad. Like so so bad.

Lets start with the opening credits. I honestly start laughing right there. Palpatine pulls as Moriarty and leaves a threatening message announcing his return and im ????? HOW DID THAT HAPPEN AND WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME INSTEAD OF S H O W I N G AAAAAAH. As soon as I saw that I knew I was in for an unconfortable ride.

I'll try to make this short.

Things I liked: aka the Good.

For the first time in years C3PO was actually funny? He made me laugh fulltime.

The new droid. Protect it pls.

Reys training montage.

Hans cameo. Especially his I know.

Luke and Leias flashback even if kind of contradicts everything about ST Leia but more on that later.

Force ghost Luke.

?????

Oh god I can't think of anything else????

Lando and his like three lines.

Oh I supposed all the people arriving to end the new sith fleet or whatever was cool if kind of unrelevant. Yes disney we know it's up to us regular people teaming up to put a stop to tyrannical regimes but the OT already told that. And better.

Palpatine's evil bitch energy. On that note I also liked Hux petty and dramatic energy.

The seeds for Kylos conflict were there more or less for the wholr three movies so AT LEAST that arc felt somewhat logical. Even if the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

At least the final shot was pretty??????

Oooh and Chewie's medal.

Things I didn't like: aka the Bad.

Lack of any semblance of glue connecting the story as a whole. For me at least it felt like a lot (and I mean a lot) of disconected threads and plot points one after each other.

John is a phenomenal actor but omg the "trio scenes" are horrible. I tried but I couldnt feel a single thing watching them. Their lines also felt so empty to me. In general I didn't connect with any of tje dialogue.

Finns arc is?????? Horrible.

Same as Poes (even is Oscar is like extra sexy this time around). Please stop trying to make him the new Han Solo.

Rose. Like cmon she deserved a better role.

The whole lets erase 3pos memory arc.

Rey can use force lighting.

Honestly I hated all the storylines.

Rey and Kylos fight in the watery version of Mustafar.

Palpatine is... just there. No explanation whatsoever.

REY PALPATINE.

His weird ass ritual like sooo unnecesary pls.

The force reviving people just bc rip Anakin.

It's not as if they didn't have the budget to make all the forces ghosts they wanted so WHY ONLY VOICEOVERS IM SO MAD.

The exegol plot was just such a mess. And boring. This is one of my major problems with the movie: I had never been so bored watching sw in my entire life. I almost fell asleep multiple times. Why.

LEIA BEING A JEDI CONTRADICTS LIKE EVERYTHING OF THE PREVIOUS MOVIES LIKE. AND HER REASONS FOR QUITTING IM. It was all in vain. Also omg they should have killed Leia in TLJ and be done with that bc her scenes in ROS are so so messy.

How they rushed Kylos redemption like. Well you healed me and my mother died and after interacting with this hallucination of my father (whom I killed btw just bc for the evil lols) I guess I don't want to opress the galaxy anymore.

Rey returning to Tatooine to bury the lightsabers pls.

REY PALPATINE.

Also wtf is that narrative: we, the palpatines, love our daughter very much. So we are going to sell and abandon her. For her own good.

Also ew Palpatine had a biological son. Who apparently wasn't as important as his granddaughter or something.

ASSPULLS EVEYWHERE.

And now the Funny:

C3PO is the MVP. srsly he was the only character I liked in the whole movie. What a legend.

Kylos new mask with red veins like omg I was laughing so hard

HUX BEING A PETTY BITCH AND ONLY CARING ABOUT KYLOS RUIN. AND THEN HE FUCKING DIES. I stan.

When they ran out of Carrie Fisher footage and compensated by throwing some pillows under a blanket and tried to make me feel something for "leias body".

The mustafar watery edition.

Rey being so angry all the fucking time.

Finn in general was a joke. Sorry finn fans.

The dialogue was so forced I coped by laughing all the time.

Palpatines evil lair.

THE KNIGHTS OF REN WERE SO USELESS OMG.

The tiny alien whose name I forgot.

Chewies resurrection.

The final showdown.

REY PALPATINE.

Guys I can't wrapped my head around the fact PALPATINE FUCKED.

When Ben dies and zaz his and leias bodies dissapear I laughed so hard the guy who was sitting at my right (who btw fell asleep in the middle of the movie 😂) startled.

So as you can see... i had to use humour as a coping mechanism to even endure this movie. They truly ruined Anakin and Luke so I guess the ot and pt are a waste of time. Anakin didn't destroy palpatine. Leia and the rest couldnt do shit to at least preserve the so hard won peace. Also rip padme im sorry the secret spell to revive the dead was invented like 50 years later.

[jaimetheexplorer]

I brought down by niks latest interview.Saying "J never needed redemp.He was a guy who certain circumstances in his life e.g. Kingslayer so then he needed to redeem himself bc he did this horrible thing when killing the Mad King. Then N said the redemp arc where he had to be good guy, stay with Bri etc that's not GOT.You cant erase ur prev life.Jaime bel that redeem urself meant redeeming his past and he couldnt. He can't cut off who he was.The idea of leaving C alone is impossible to him" Wtf?

2/2 Downhearted anon. Just that interview makes no sense. In prev season interviews, wasnt Nik wanting Jaime to escape Cersei for good and be with Braime forever, like he was the biggest Braime shipper??? I dont understand. Does he think ppl don’t remember stuff? Its a shame theres no way to ask him about this.

Dear Downhearted anon,

I have to admit I read only a short excerpt from that interview, so I might have missed some of the other content, but, from what I read, this is what I can say.

There are different layers to his comments, IMO. One is the take on the story, and the other is the justification of the writing choices. And, as much as I might vehemently disagree with the former, what I take issue with is the latter.

When it comes to the take on the story, we have to remember that he has to talk about the actual content of the show. The show, unfortunately, did go with the idea that Jaime is essentially doomed to never escape his past. I do not believe that is his arc in the books for many reasons, and I think it was extremely underwhelming, nihlistic and unsatisfying even just taking the context of the show into account. But, unfortunately, nihilistic and unsatisfying is what we got. The show was aiming for romanticizing incest and abuse romantic tragedy with JC, in the end (I actually think there was a far more disastrous chain of events at play, which required multiple OOC developments for multiple major characters just to arrive to Jon killing Dany - but that’s a longer story), and it is what it is. He has to talk about the reality of the episodes, not the alternatives.

If you take most of Nik’s comments, and go back to read D&D’s and Cogman’s interviews from the past, you’ll notice that it’s mostly stuff that’s lifted straight from their quotes, even down to the language: “good guy/bad guy”, “he doesn’t have a redemption arc”, “it’s just life, and he has made some mistakes”. I don’t know whether this is because he had a “final season” briefing with them and came around to see things their way and agree, or because he was told this is what he was supposed to say about the story, or because even though he doesn’t agree with it, this is what was written in the end and so this is what he talks about. His reasoning for saying these things is anybody’s guess and kind of beyond the point. But, where before he used to have his own take on the character and his arc, he’s now basically regurgitating the party line.

For my part, I never completely disagreed with the idea that Jaime does not need redemption per se. Jaime doesn’t need atonement for slaying the Mad King, for sure. He needs recognition for that. He needs atonement for a other horrible things he’s done, but even those (e.g., pushing Bran, the incest) are more about moral gray areas areas than villainous behaviour per se, since he’s never committed atrocious acts just for his own selfish gain, or for power, or because he enjoyed hurting and killing. More importantly, I have always seen Jaime’s story as more of an identity arc, where redemption is just one component. In that sense, I can agree with the take that that he is a “complex character who, at times, has made some terrible mistakes”. Jaime is not, and never was, a straightforward villain who needs to atone for his sins. He’s a much more complex and layered mix of sins and honour, and goodness and idealism turned bitterness and cynicism, and a messy product of living most of his life in toxic and abusive environments who, in some situations, has committed some horrible mistakes that he needs to own up to and face the consequences of, and who is trying to redefine and reinvent himself in the aftermath of some life-changing events such as losing his hand, meeting Brienne and growing disillusioned with Cersei. 

The problem is that, while D&D preach about Jaime being a complex character who does not need a ‘cheesy’ linear redemption arc, they also, in the same breath, justify an ending that shoves him precisely into a clear, black-and-white, simplistic category (”he just accepts he is a hateful man”) or display the psychological depth of a 5th grader (go check out their take on the sept scene in their Oxford Union Q&A and their inability to think in any more complex terms than “good guy/bad guy” or to understand that not all “bad” actions are equal). They’re not deep writers, and that shows painfully in their execution. But I can understand the “no need for redemption” arc, from a theoretical/philosophical perspective.

What I take far more issue with is justifying writing choices by attempting to play the realism card, or the adult writing card, or the “this is GoT” card, basically implying that everyone who dislikes or criticize it is being unrealistic, immature or unsophisticated for not accepting the only inevitable outcome to a story (I wrote a twitter thread about it this week). Just because your story has decided to depict things in a certain way, it does not mean that that is the only realistic option for the story, and that people who expected/wanted/hoped for something different were fooling themselves, let alone that it had to be written that way because that is how life works.

Sure, there are people who fail to break away from their (abusive, traumatic, toxic, what have you) past and move on, but there are also plenty of people who do, and who end up thriving. One outcome isn’t any more realistic or true to life than the others. And, while some might think this is a hyperbole, it is highly irresponsible, IMO, to say that being unable to escape toxicity and your past is “the way things are”, when there might be people out there who do struggle with trauma, toxic and abusive relationship (or know people who do).

On top of that, it is rather silly to imply that we were expecting some unrealistic, too-easy scenario, where Jaime flipped a switch and totally erased his past overnight. That implication is misguided, at best, and dishonest, at worst. We put up with four entire seasons of show-only “non-linear” storytelling when it comes to Jaime, and were incredibly patient with it. Wasn’t the point of those four seasons precisely to show that life is complicated and he couldn’t just let go of his past so easily? We watched that. It happened. Nothing about this was easy or unearned.

Had we been shown a Jaime who was 100%, stupidly and completely devoted to Cersei at every turn, cruel, evil, selfish and not caring about the innocents, of course expecting an outcome where he just leaves it all behind for a honourable wench or what have you would have been a ridiculous expectation to have. Indeed, back when Jaime did come across as that kind of character, nobody was expecting anything from him. He could have died with Cersei under those bricks and most wouldn’t have cared.

Instead, for years, we were shown a Jaime that did struggle between his toxic past/Cersei and his honour and, far more often than not, we saw his honour win out. While I can see an argument for saying that didn’t guarantee an outcome where he did break free of his past for good, it’s not like like there was no buildup or seeding for the more positive, less nihilistic alternative. So I don’t find it so far fetched to have expected the events of S7 to be the last straw that finally tipped the scales completely to the other side (especially considering how 8x02 was written very heavily to imply just that or, at the very least, did not seed any doubt).

By Nikolaj’s own admission in TONS of interviews, he had been fighting with D&D for years because he expected things to move in a certain direction and kept getting frustrated when they didn’t, or when they confused him. He wanted the exact same things we wanted for Jaime and in his relationships with Cersei and Brienne since SEASON 2. He might have resigned himself in the end to having lost the battle, but he behaved exactly like us for years. So, assuming he believes what he is saying, if I could talk to him, I’d ask him how is it that he got the same feeling of “expectation” for something that in the end never came? Maybe because the seeding for both options were there all along? Maybe because, if the seeding for both options were there all along, the alternative isn’t so far fetched and inconceivable after all? Maybe because if the alternative isn’t so far fetched and inconceivable after all, then what we got isn’t the only inevitable way this could go down? Food for thought.

Of course, I want to believe that he isn’t that tone-deaf and unsophisticated as an actor (and a writer) not to realize that the only problem with the way Jaime and JB were written in S8 was not the fact that they didn’t get a HEA. Ignoring the writing quality, for a moment, and just focusing on the writing choices, there were literally dozens of ways of writing a story that ended even in a similar tragedy (EVEN with Jaime dying with Cersei), that would have been far better and more satisfying than what we got. The problem isn’t that Jaime didn’t declare his everlasting love for Brienne or that he didn’t stay together with her. The problem is that we patiently waited through all the buildup and seeding mentioned above, for years, for a relationship that ended up being butchered within 30 minutes, destroying literally everything it ever stood for (first and foremost trust and respect - I am not going to list everything, but Jaime trying to sneak out without so much of a goodbye and being completely indifferent to her pain after she vouched for him and saved his life multiple times was not only OOC, but completely unnecessary to the plot, unless it aimed to destroy the foundations of their bond, way beyond the romance).

To conclude, I’ll leave you with GRRM’s own words, when asked about Jaime’s redemption arc that he, unlike the show, has explicitly stated he wishes to explore:

“I want there to be a possibility of redemption for us, because we all do terrible things. We should be able to be forgiven. Because if there’s no possibility of redemption, what’s the answer then?”

The show decided that the answer is that we don’t escape our past. We are doomed from the beginning and any attempt to change and move on is eventually futile (and that ended up being true of nearly every character in the show, not just Jaime). But that doesn’t seem to be at all the stance GRRM has on this whole thing, and I would dare anyone to tell me that GRRM’s vision and his writing are inferior, too easy, or less realistic than what we got from the show.

There’s no guarantee that Jaime will survive in the books, or that he and Brienne will get a HEA (although I do not rule it out at all).  But the fact that the man who invented these characters and this world has a different stance on Jaime and redemption automatically invalidates any nonsense show people can say about how this was the perfect and only way it could end, and that expecting anything different from this series was wishful thinking.