Game of Thrones begins....

[Syt]

Long but interesting Twitter comment: https://twitter.com/DSilvermint/status/1125856091261136896

Want to know why Game of Thrones *feels* so different now? I think I can explain. Without spoilers.

It has to do with the behind-the-scenes process of plotters vs. pantsers. If you're not familiar with the distinction, plotters create a fairly detailed outline before they commit a single word to the page.

Pantsers discover the story as they write it, often treating the first draft like one big elaborate outline. Neither approach is 'right' - it's just a way to characterize the writing process. But the two approaches do tend to have different advantages

Because they have the whole story in mind, it's usually easier for plotters to deliver tighter stories and stick the landing when it comes to endings, but their characters can sometimes feel stiff, like they're just plot devices.

Pantsers have an easier time writing realistic characters, because they generate the plot by asking themselves what this fully-realized person would do or think next in the dramatic situation the writer has dropped them in.

But because pantsers are making it up as they go along (hence the name: they're flying by the seat of their pants), they're prone to meandering plots and can struggle to bring everything together in a satisfying conclusion.

That's why a lot of writers plot their stories but pants their characters, and use the second draft to reconcile conflicts between the two.

What does this have to do with Game of Thrones?

Well, GRRM is one of the most epic pantsers around. He talks about writing like cultivating a garden. He plants character seeds and carefully lets them grow and grow.

That's why every plot point and fair-in-hindsight surprise landed with such devastating weight: everything that happened to these characters happened because of their past choices. But it's also the reason why the narrative momentum of the books slowed over time.

After the first big plot arc, book four was originally going to skip ahead five years. But GRRM didn't know how to make the gap in action feel true to the characters or the world, so he eventually decided to just write his way through those five years instead.

Which meant planting more seeds, and watching those grow. And suddenly his garden was overgrown, and hard to prune without abrupt or forced resolutions. He had no choice but to follow each and every one of those plot threads, even when they didn't really matter to the story.

And now that the plants were fully in control, he struggled to get some of the characters that had grown one way to go where they needed to be for the story. (Dany getting stuck in Meereen is the example he frequently cites.) 

And because he had all this story to cover and pay off, some of which was growing in the wrong directions and needed enough narrative space to come back around, he started increasing the number of books he thought it would take him to complete the series. And, well.

So the books the showrunners were adapting ran out. What now? People assume the show suffered because they didn't have GRRM's rich material to draw on anymore, as if the problem was that he's simply better at generating new plots than they are. But that's not what happened.

For a season or two, the showrunners actually tried to take over management of GRRM's sprawling garden, with understandably mixed results. When that didn't work, they shifted their focus to trying to bring this huge beast in for a landing.

They gave themselves a fixed endpoint - 13 episodes to the finale, and no more - and set about reverse-engineering the rest of the story they wanted to tell.

You see, I think the showrunners are not only plotters, they're ending-focused plotters by design.

They want to deliver an ultimately satisfying experience. So with only two seasons to work with, they started asking themselves what was left to do. What could they build with the pieces left in the box? What beats did they just have to include? 

What big moments did they want to deliver? Where should the characters end up? What did they think we, the audience, wanted to see on screen before the show came to an end? It was a Game of Thrones bucket list.

And once they had that list, it was time to connect the dots to make it all happen. So they started maneuvering the characters into the emotional and literal places they needed to be for all those dots to connect up in the right way.

That's why Game of Thrones feels different now. A show that had been about the weight of the past became about the spectacle of the present. Characters with incredible depth and agency - all the more rope with which to hang themselves - became pieces on a giant war map.

Where once the characters authored their own, terrible destinies, now they were forced to take uncharacteristic actions and make uncharacteristically bad decisions so the necessary plot points could happen and the appropriate stakes could be felt.

Organic developments gave way to contrivance. Naturally-paced character arcs were rushed. Living plants became puppets of the plot. The characters just weren't in charge anymore. The ending was.

No one's to blame. Keeping a million plates spinning the way GRRM did is hard. And setting those plates down without breaking too many, which the showrunners had to do, is also really hard. Creation in general is hard.

There's a reason writers have haunted eyes and always seem like they need a hug. Give everyone a break. But: the shift in approach did have consequences.

Is pantsing better than plotting? No. And this has nothing to do with which approach is 'right', anyway. It's about the approach changing in the third act. That's the sort of thing an audience can feel happening, even if they can't put their finger on exactly why.

The audience fell in love with one kind of show, but the ending is being imported from a different kind of show. Now, I happen to think the finale will stick the landing. It's what the showrunners have been building toward these past two seasons, after all

But to be satisfying, it matters how we get there, too. Treating the journey as equally important is how you get endings that feel earned. And it's how characters keep feeling real the whole way through, even though they're completing arcs some writer has chosen for them.

By placing so much emphasis on the ending, the showrunners changed the nature of the story they were telling, meaning the original story and the original characters aren't the ones getting an ending. Their substitutes are. 

That's why no amount of spectacle or fan service can make this ending as satisfying as it should be. Resolutions invite us to consider the story as a whole; where it all started, where it all ended up. And we can feel the discontinuity in this one.

[Iormlund]

It's not merely a problem of bringing all the different threads to a conclusion, though.

You could arrive at the same place without involving supersonic bolts and widespread stupidity.

[crazy canuck]

It's not merely a problem of bringing all the different threads to a conclusion, though.

You could arrive at the same place without involving supersonic bolts and widespread stupidity.

Yeah, if Dani is going to go crazy in the end, then show us why or at least a little more than Jon won't have sex with her and her favourite personal assistant was killed.  She has already endured a lot more than that.  Maybe don't spend valuable minutes on a stupid fight between Euron and Jamie that was meaningless and show the audience why, in the critical moment, Dani snapped.

They completely ruined an amazing story arc of a vulnerable girl who transformed into a wise, powerful well intentioned by further transforming her in a matter of days in the story line to something worse than the mad king.

[Habbaku]

Worse than the Mad King? Not sure I'd agree with that, though I agree with all the other stuff. The Mad King was worse because he murdered innocents on a far more frequent basis, but he had every intention of doing the same thing to King's Landing if not for Jaime's intervention.

[grumbler]

It's not merely a problem of bringing all the different threads to a conclusion, though.

You could arrive at the same place without involving supersonic bolts and widespread stupidity.

But how do you counter the dragons without supersonic bolts?

I'd have liked this ending a lot better if the Long Night battle had wiped out Dani's army and all she had left were the dragons.  They wouldn't be enough by themselves to take down Cersei, but Dani could have used them as weapons of terror (wiping out some castles or towns in the Stormalnds, for instance) to convince Cersei's supporters not that Cersei was doomed to lose, but that they wouldn't survive no matter who won, unless they yielded to Dani at least for the moment.  You'd have the same outcome but it wouldn't be a deus ex machina "Dani suddenly turns into The Mad Queen" rationale; she'd simply be more ruthless than Jon or Davos would think allowable.  That would set up a more "gray" showdown than the show will use.

You could also have skipped the supersonic bolts in this scenario, because Rheagon could be loyal to Jon and Drogon to Dani, and when Jon and Dani clash the dragons could fight and kill each other.

[Josephus]

here's a decent review written by someone who's a fan of the books

https://tv.avclub.com/game-of-thrones-brutally-asserts-that-the-game-in-quest-1834707954

[crazy canuck]

Worse than the Mad King? Not sure I'd agree with that, though I agree with all the other stuff. The Mad King was worse because he murdered innocents on a far more frequent basis, but he had every intention of doing the same thing to King's Landing if not for Jaime's intervention.

The mad king tried but did not succeed, Dani actually did burn the city and not through the impersonal act of issuing a single order.  She did it herself.  She could see the people she was killing in cold blood. And she kept doing it, run after run.  Much worse than the mad king.

[Valmy]

The Mad King was also delusional. He thought burning the city down would do some magical thing like bring the dragons back to life or something. So if you are going to make that kind of parallel you need to show Dany being delusional and losing her grip on reality.

[Grinning_Colossus]

Betraying the Slaver's Bay merchants and burning them alive, crucifying hundreds of Masters, feeding the heads of Mereenese great houses to her dragons, burning all of the khals alive, demanding that the heads of the Slaver's Bay armies pick one of their number to die and then killing the two who didn't volunteer, burning the Tarlys alive, etc. Her solutions are always violent and often wantonly so.

In each instance a response to a threat and/or betrayal, vistied upon the threat. She executes slaver masters and merchants becuse she is freeing slaves, she doesn't burn the slaves to save them.

She destroyed King's Landing in response to a threat, too. She saw her rule being undermined before it even began so she decided to make a point to the lords of Westeros: 'I have a big dragon and I'm more than willing to use it frequently and to excess.' Now anyone who considers defying Queen Daenerys will remember what happened in King's Landing. She's mad in the 'volatile and tyrannical' sense rather than the certifiable sense.

[Zoupa]

That would have been achieved by burning the red keep. You could say it's already been achieved by burning the Tarlys.

[HVC]

Betraying the Slaver's Bay merchants and burning them alive, crucifying hundreds of Masters, feeding the heads of Mereenese great houses to her dragons, burning all of the khals alive, demanding that the heads of the Slaver's Bay armies pick one of their number to die and then killing the two who didn't volunteer, burning the Tarlys alive, etc. Her solutions are always violent and often wantonly so.

In each instance a response to a threat and/or betrayal, vistied upon the threat. She executes slaver masters and merchants becuse she is freeing slaves, she doesn't burn the slaves to save them.

The city didn't rise up so they were enemies. If she can't be loved in westeros then she will be feared. She basically told you this at the beginning of the episode

[Grinning_Colossus]

That would have been achieved by burning the red keep. You could say it's already been achieved by burning the Tarlys.

And Cersei refused her offer of surrender regardless. She went around all of Essos saying that she was going to be a great conqueror who burnt cities to the ground. And now she's conquered a city that refused to open its gates before the ram touched the wall, so she decided to send a message that would be remembered for centuries.

[crazy canuck]

The Mad King was also delusional. He thought burning the city down would do some magical thing like bring the dragons back to life or something. So if you are going to make that kind of parallel you need to show Dany being delusional and losing her grip on reality.

Not sure if you were addressing Habs or me.  My point is she did it purposefully and repeatedly.  Not because she thought it would prevent the fall of the city (like the mad king).  Her acts are much worse.

@ Josephus, good article.  But I think the author lets the writers off too easily.

But two weeks after the Night King was revealed to be something of an empty antagonist, and a week after Cersei was reframed as the ultimate evil, to have the focus shift again to Daenerys feels like whiplash, not poetry. There's a thematic through-line about the toxic power of vengeance, but it feels sort of thrown together, because how can ending a show this sprawling not feel that way?

Agreed, not well written, but certainly not inevitable that it feels thrown together.  That is the produce of poor writing choices and editing.

[crazy canuck]

Betraying the Slaver's Bay merchants and burning them alive, crucifying hundreds of Masters, feeding the heads of Mereenese great houses to her dragons, burning all of the khals alive, demanding that the heads of the Slaver's Bay armies pick one of their number to die and then killing the two who didn't volunteer, burning the Tarlys alive, etc. Her solutions are always violent and often wantonly so.

In each instance a response to a threat and/or betrayal, vistied upon the threat. She executes slaver masters and merchants becuse she is freeing slaves, she doesn't burn the slaves to save them.

The city didn't rise up so they were enemies. If she can't be loved in westeros then she will be feared. She basically told you this at the beginning of the episode

all the damage she did with her dragon before the bells rang made that point.  She could have just gone for the Keep.  She looked at it, considered it, and went crazy.

[Valmy]

Not sure if you were addressing Habs or me.  My point is she did it purposefully and repeatedly.  Not because she thought it would prevent the fall of the city (like the mad king).  Her acts are much worse.

Just generally discussing making Dany as some kind of mirror image of her father as a plot point. If the idea is to show how she became her father she would have to experience that kind of madness. I was just giving my 2 cents in the conversation.