#vague but i want to be safe so

[surreal-duck]

es rarepair week 2024 day 1 | AU/future

lil ghostic au of mine!!! yuzuru and the rest of fine are long since trapped souls in an abandoned mansion of which rst come across while looking for shelter during a storm :] it doesnt um. particularly end well

[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.

[askmarcille]

Buhguh….guh? Guhhbuh… huhghubgh…. Lebs…biab?….

Lesbian? Hm...I'll give it some thought!

Truth be told, a lot's been happening lately (especially that license debacle from the other day) that I haven't really had time to think about my preferences.

ooc: please perceive Marcille how you want to <3

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

yknow something i really love about WH so far is that i really, truly, have no idea what the fuck is going on. like i can theorize and speculate on the Scrumptious little crumbs we have so far, but looking at it as a whole and the info/hints sprinkled everywhere. man i cannot guess where this is going to go lmao

[elisedonut]

i really like the concept of Percy outright hiding someone in his flat during the war but like it doesn't fit well with most of the people I ship him with

Like the ones i could actually think of that would benefit from it are mostly ones that would be too young to really be having much happen between them during that year

which im not saying the situation can't be just platonic because that is fun too

Like with Oliver it loses out on what makes a forced proximity fic fun to me because of them having already roomed together for years so there's no like weird phase of having to get used to the other being around and having to learn to live with them

similar situation for Penny honestly they've already been together so while i do like the idea of her staying with him its not as fun for a ship set up to me

Marcus doesn't really have a reason to be staying with him, like he could but he's not going to be in a life or death situation if someone sees him so it doesn't have the same like flavor.

Stan is fun i think if you play with him being imperioused and Percy somehow breaking him out of it or something and having him stay with him after that could be fun. Hiding him to keep him from getting imperioused again or worse outright killed

plus then you get to play not only with the fact he was in Azkaban and effects it had on him as well as the trauma of anything that happened while he was under

which is fun

[lavenoon]

The demons in Y/N's life sure are playing "stack the trauma on the human"

@naffeclipse Do you like the color of Cryptid Sightings?

[throughpatchesofviolet]

... okay. I have blocked the person who was making me feel the most uncomfortable on all my platforms.

[theshadowrealmitself]

A member of a species with feathers being insecure about their feathers because they don’t have as many colors as some of the other people in their species

Human crewmate offhandedly mentioning how much they like their crewmate’s feathers because the colors and the order they’re in remind them of a specific pride flag back home

Crewmate with feathers now taking any chance to display their feathers around their Human crewmate since they appreciate them

[eggbagelz]

Sharing a moment

[ceaseless-rambler]

I just did Jonny d'Ville eyeliner and how the hell did he get his off. I used a pencil which I believe is generally easier to get off than liquid liner (although I could be making that up idk) and it was horrible to remove. I think Jonny's eyeliner looks more like liquid based on the smoothness of the lines and opacity and stuff. How the FUCK

[steakout-05]

having social anxiety on tumblr dot com is so fucking frustrating cause like. i'll see a post i like and want to reblog but i do it with so so so much embarrassment because my brain's just thinking "oh god oh fuck im being so stupid right now what if op sees it and thinks im annoying" but like. they realistically would either not care at all or be happy about someone reblogging their post so like what the actual fuck am i afraid of??? but here's the kicker. the reason i have social anxiety in the first place is because i HAVE experienced these comically horrible social experiences of being judged and insulted for no reason before. multiple times. recently. the possibility of this happening is not a 0 chance. i have legitimate reasons to be afraid. and that is. actually horrific

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

I'm so sorry but I really do think it's funny that Knives' plan in volume 8 is just "I'm going to store my siblings (yes, all of them, even my twin) in some containers and put a grate over it. Surely this will solve everything."

[here-there-were-dragons]

i have to wonder what super hardcore militant vegans think should be done about obligate carnivore animals, because in all my painfully-rapidly-approaching-30-years i've literally never actually seen anyone give a clear consistent much less halfway feasible answer on that

[kirby-the-gorb]

[trigunart]

WAIT IT'S YOU LMFAOOOO

I was just gonna hop by and say I love how you find art with like three notes and share it around, it feels awesome to find new artists & trigun enjoyers lol

but holy shit I didn't realize it was you running this blog!! you are an absolute pillar of trigun fandom tumblr fr ❤️❤️❤️

ASDFGHJKHGFDS OH MAN! Listen, I'm just trying to spread Trigun love and joy and pain because it's such a beautiful set of stories, and the fandom deserves to be fed!!! I'm doing my best to be the change I want to see in the world, and I want to see more of and support all the Trigun things. (Though boy it's a good thing I decided I was too lazy to tag ships and wanted to support more gen art because the queue over here is always nearly-full, y'all are killing it.)

But for real, it makes me so happy whenever I see some love come in for any work, and I just hope that it brings a little joy to the artist behind them! I'm not the best at catching everything posted, but I do my best to brave the tags and do my part and queue up the art I find. I was so devastated to learn that there wasn't a blog I could follow and support art that wasn't run by someone blatantly hateful, so it was important to me to step up and be totally clear about who's running this blog for that purpose. I'm just so happy that people are enjoying it!!! <3

[kalashtars]

if I think abt the state of trans politics in the US for more than .2 seconds I start wanting to sob god I hate it here