Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/21/scientific-american-on-why-fol.html
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The GoT TV show has suffered from an inevitable problem that all book adaptations suffer from during it’s entire length - the inability to hear the inner monologue and flashbacks of the characters renders the complex, deep characters into pale shadows of their former selves in the transition to screen. I watched the first series and a half of the TV show and just couldn’t be bothered to watch any more, I just didn’t care about the vast majority of the characters and couldn’t give two sh*ts if they lived or died. Especially Tyrion. Then my sister browbeat me into reading the books, the difference is night and day. I couldn’t help myself but cram as many pages into every spare second I could find. The characters leaped off the page and I loved / loved to hate every single one of them - especially Tyrion! So I’m not at all surprised the end of GoT was disappointing, taking vague outlines of characters from a hard-defined storyline and transitioning to a vague outline of the storyline was never going to work.
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It started as the whole structure of their societies as the villain, and ended with people trying to stop a crowd of monsters and a couple of humans.
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OR…it could be fans hate it because, ya know…they write like shit.
Amazing how the most obvious explanation seems to be the most elusive.
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“It’s not just bad storytelling—it’s because the storytelling style changed from sociological to psychological and it ran and sprinted away from the magic”
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This article seriously overthinks the problem with the final seasons of GoT. The issue that viewers have is not the style of the storytelling, it’s that characters were forced into actions that made no sense given what had come before (without lots and lots of viewer rationalization and hand-waving), to service a plot that made little to no dramatic sense and abandoned huge swaths of story, so that the showrunners could rid themselves of their responsibilities as quickly as possible and chase those sweet Star Wars bucks.
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First: I haven’t read the books. My wife has, and she’s filled me in on quite a lot. That said, the direction this story seemed to be moving in was apocalyptic. The appeal, to me, was in these horrible humans finally realizing that all of their petty squabbling for a (literal) seat of power was meaningless in the face of death itself. The Night King stood in for the reaper, and I fully expected their final clash with it to happen in the penultimate episode, leaving all of the “civilized” world in ruins. Picking up the pieces and starting society over from scratch was the direction the story was heading in from the beginning. I thought they might actually do it, when the throne was melted down. Instead, it was basically a happy-ending reset. Everything is still in place, just different people in power.
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It’s pretty clear that they had more structure and complexity in a single scene about the fate of a wolf, than they ended up having in any of the last season’s conversations about the state of the whole continent. Each character seems like that character, whether they’re silent or speaking out, and everybody’s communicating a lot about their individual conflicted loyalties.
At the beginning it was way better at showing the nuanced ways their society led to daily tragedies and forced unhappiness. You’re right, the way things ended meant the only difference is that it would be Sansa in charge of whose head got cut off instead of Ned Stark. She might make different choices, but nobody’s going to stop her if she decides someone deserves it.
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Agreed. The showrunners gave into the social media phenomenon of “Who will sit on the throne?” betting pools. They tossed out what made the show fantasy and left only the political social drama.
Edit: They only kept the dragon because there was no expedient way to write it out of the script.
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I wasn’t interested in the first season at all. It looked like Rich People Problems In The Middle Ages. Once Ned’s head rolled on the floor and the kids had to run for their lives, that’s when I started being able to relate to it. By the end everybody gets their privileges back and it’s rich people problems again.
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THIS.
The average viewer has ZERO practical knowledge about storytelling techniques and writing styles. However…the average viewer CAN tell when total bullshit is being force fed to them.
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The biggest thing that the reaction to the finale showed me is that a whole lot of people confuse “objectively bad” with “subjectively I didn’t like what they did”.
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It wasn’t enjoyable to see random stupid people make stupid choices, but it really sold the idea that this was a world that contained jerks, and what it meant letting assholes hold onto weird arbitrary power.
I think the books started as “Bosses are bad because they make us kill something inside us”, and he kept everyone irritating because it’s so easy to fall into “But my boss is so funny and nice, though.”
Personally I’m going with the AT&T executives couldn’t leave the most popular show on the planet alone, the HBO CEO quit because of their general meddling with the HBO brand and I can’t believe it didn’t infect GoT and spin-offs.
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The critics haven’t even gotten around to how, after all these years, the climax of the whole story is a young woman being stabbed to death by her boyfriend and everybody agreeing she had it coming 
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I don’t need science to tell me why somethings sucks.
“well … you put you hand over the end of the vacuum …”
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From one money perspective (He’s disappointed):
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Agreed. I don’t get why there’s so much hand wringing over this. I love the books (mostly) and was able to enjoy the show for entirely different reasons. It was series of entertaining moments, placed one after another for us to watch.
It was fun TV, right up to the end.
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I think you miss the point here. Throughout the books, the reader is kept grounded in the reality of what happens to the little people outside the courts and palaces and armies. You are regularly reminded that they are the ones who suffer when the Game of Thrones is played, the brutality and injustice of the world they live in is central to the story at every turn, and the observations of the main characters as they move through (or stay aloof above) that world drive many of the decisions and plot developments. Martin’s genius is crafting an epic story that is grounded in it’s world, rather than floating above it. As soon as you lose that connection, no-one makes any sense any more. The screw-up in writing style is the fundamental reason why the writing is so bad and why the TV series takes an enormous nosedive in writing quality when it runs out of book material to base itself on.
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