At first this article reads like your typical anti-piracy screed. It rants about how 10x more people watched GoT illegally (confusing them with lost sales) and ends with how downloading movies can get your credit card stolen.
The middle of the article however, destroys the author’s case.
Time Warner (owning company of HBO) CEO Alan Bewkes stated in 2013 how becoming the most illegally streamed show in history was “better than an Emmy” and that torrenting ultimately led to more paid subscriptions.
“We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years—people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.”
The CEO of Time Warner, who knows more about the finances of his own show than ForeverGeek writer Tom Llewellyn, championed piracy and said that it brought them more subscribers rather than nearly destroying the show as the article claims.
Needless to say, Tom forwent a rebuttal in favor of writing how you can get malware from downloading it…
Anti-Piracy Propaganda: 0 Truth: 1
Good thing they were fast enough to destroy it with the shittiest last season ever.
See, I think that was the plan all along, to totally own all the losers that pirated GoT, by totally spoiling the show for everyone.
Let’s be real. HBO wanted to hold on to their cash cow for as long as possible, but D&D just shat all over the last season to get that sweet Star Wars cash.
Nobody was on-board with anything in that last season except D&D, who just wanted to finish it off as fast as possible. Not even the actors.
The hilarious thing is how their own bungling of the last season cost them the Star Wars gig. Maybe if they’d actually put in some effort instead of half assing it, they’d have gotten the job. But then again, the show was on a downward spiral since the end of Season 4, and Dumb and Dumber’s only talent was adapting the books really well (and even then, they still fudged details), so I suppose this was bound to happen.
Honestly, I want more Hollywood writers who are good at adapting books, instead of hating the source material and doing a terrible job winging it.
I can’t count the number of TV shows ruined by Hollywood writers usurping the universes from multi-million dollar and very successful source material, just to create their own shitty version themselves. In fact, it’s much easier to adapt source material, so I don’t even understand why they don’t do it out of pure laziness. If they could just drop their fucking egos for a bit, they could be as famous as D&D.
Another recent example of a horrible adaptation of a massive franchise is what Paramount did to Halo with their show. I can’t understand why they keep hiring writers that actively hate the source material and are only interested in taking existing stories and mangling them into their own shitty “vision”. It’s like Hollywood either hates writers who have actual passion for the franchises they’re adapting, or they can’t find them, which can’t be the case since these are beloved universes with millions of fans, many of whom are bound to be writers eager to work on an adaptation. They always hire talentless hacks interested in nothing more than a paycheck and doing what they want, not what the fans want. It’s infuriating.
Witcher, Foundation, The Stand, Y: The Last Man, Wheel of Time, recent Star Trek, Rings of Power, Legend of the Seeker… the list goes on and on. Sandman is only good because Neil Gaiman is keeping a tight leash on the series.
And then they cancel the rest that were turning out good, like The Expanse.
Do you notice a pattern?
Every single one of those is either SF or Fantasy.
There are a lot of artsy lovers of literature out there who hate exactly those genres, and who have a burning passion to fix all the (perceived) flaws which (in their view) come baked into them.
As I see it, that’s a big part of the problem: For the last century “a writer” was always “the literary type”. There were some nerds who pretended to be writers. And those wrote pulp, SF, fantasy, and comics. Those were not real writers. You wouldn’t hire one of those, if you wanted to have a real, well crafted story. At least that has been a rather common prejudice for the last 100 years or so.
And now, all of a sudden (over the last 20 years), the most popular franchises, generating the most income, all turned into SF and Fantasy, while eating everything else in their path.
In that context, I don’t think the current situation is all that surprising. If you want to hire “a real writer”, there is a good chance that you will hit one who despises what writers were taught to despise for the last hundred years. In an unlucky twist for everyone involved, that also happens to be what they now have to write.
That just sounds like some hardcore gatekeeping and No True Scotsman bullshit to me.
I also don’t think these new series writers are Boomers or Gen Xers, either. They are a bunch of young bloods with shit for brains and a lack of experience. It’s not a taught hatred, but inflated egos.
But, you can ruin a sci-fi or fantasy series by hiring the completely wrong type of writer. Those last few seasons of Dr Who certainly proved that, hiring a bunch of fucking soap opera writers, oof.
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Didn’t the actor who played Tyrion Lannister stand by the ending? I remember him being salty about criticisms of it. Though to be fair it must really suck to have your breakthrough role go up in flames like that. I wouldn’t want to admit it either. Now I can’t even remember the dude’s name. He was supposed to be a beacon of hope for dwarf actors who wanted serious roles, and the role became a joke.
Maybe that, yeah, but I also remember certain interviews of him being just as passively critical about the last season as Emile Clarke was at the time. As in, he couldn’t really say anything damaging (contractually), but you could tell by the reactions.
As far as dwarf actors, he really did break out into serious roles in various movies, especially in spots where his dwarfism wasn’t a highlight. But, I think Hollywood just treated him as an exception, instead of changing the framing of how they cast actors, which is extremely disappointing.
Then they were quickly fired from Star Wars which is some sweet street justice.
Here’s why I dno’t understand, if D&D wanted to dick away so badly, why didn’t the crew just, like, let them go, and bring in another director that was instead respectable and wouldn’t torch the franchise and run?
Heck, it can’t be that hard to come up with people who want to direct GOT. Heck, I would have done it.
But conspiracy is fun!
You give Dumb & Dumber FAR too much credit.
Nothing was calculated, other than how fast they could leave GoT for Star Wars. I’m still bitter, and at this rate, I most likely always will be.
Fuck D&D
Those clever bastards. Cheating the pirates by content enshittification.
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
That they yhrew away all the rules they established before like traveling now took 0 hours and soon. All of this because the last book wasn’t written yet so they had to write some story themselves and failed misserably.
HBO told the show runners(D&D) they could take as long as they wanted to finish the series. D&D had just landed jobs at the helm of a new Star Wars trilogy so they were eager to wrap up Thrones and start raking in that Disney cash. They made the last season shorter than other seasons, it sucked and they ended up losing the Star Wars deal.
Considering the star wars stuff that’s been coming out, if you told me they were responsible for it, i’d believe you
Give Andor a try, thats the one show I really liked out of the stuff Ive seen so far, after that the only other show Ive been into is the Expanse(non star wars), after the first season
I can second the recommendation for Andor. Used to love Star Wars, lost all interest in it after the new trilogy (although rogue one was alright) and finally got around to watch Andor which I really loved.
Come on, Rogue One is one of the best Star Wars movies of all time.
It was a cool movie with amazing scenes and it made A New Hope make more sense (explained why the death star had a design flaw.) But I found all the characters really forgettable and it just didn’t give me a satisfying emotional payoff.
Rogue One Spoiler
All the main characters just died and I didn’t really care 🤷♂️
Mando and Andor were awesome. what are you talking about? Only BOBF and that dumb Obi series sucked.
Sweet sweet justice.
What ever happened to the D&D Star Wars trilogy?
They lost the deal for it, after how badly received the end of GoT was. Then again, the new SW trilogy managed to be shit entirely without their help.
Yeah, Disney rejected them to protect the trilogy, and then managed to completely destroy the trilogy between two and half directors, and both Disney and Lucasfilm constantly interfering with the screen writing. Episode 7 might have been derivative, but without Episode 8 kneecapping all of the plot setups, followed by Episode 9 kneecapping all of 8’s plot redirections, it would have at least been fun.
I mean, being honest, the prequel trilogy was mostly not great. But it was fun enough that people still love it. The sequels are so disjointed that it’s just hard to enjoy. Proof that even with all the money in the world, anyone can still fuck up.
You said it all. Episode 8 ruined everything forever. I didn’t even bother trying to watch episode 9 after that, and been majorly checked out of anything SW since. The last good SW movie was Rogue One…
The worst part is some of the coolest moments of the trilogy happened in Episode 8. It could’ve been so good.
At any rate, Episode 9 may have been a letdown (more disappointing for what it could have been, than bad), but it’s worth watching just to cap off the run. Solo was a pretty fun heist movie. I’d expected it to be terrible with the way it was being talked about and it turned out to be a solid popcorn flick. Not as good as Rogue One, but Rogue One was amazing.
At least they’re taking a few years to to square things up before trying to release any more movies. Though, the strikes are probably gonna delay things even further.
As I understand it, they walked away from the Stars Wars deal to sign with Netflix to make another adaptation. One that I’m sad that they’ve hitched their names onto.
I read an essay where the author argued that in the first few seasons, the GRR Martin material, World events happened and the characters were forced to adapt and react.
Once the television writers took over, the dynamic flipped so characters’ actions forced the World itself to change and react, which is apparently how most television writing works since television writing revolves mostly around characters.
That’s a pretty inelegant way to explain it, sorry, but I think the idea feels pretty accurate to me. There is a definite point where you can tell when the staff writers have to start plotting for themselves.
I do think that sums it up pretty well, and as other have said, the last season had a “I don’t want to do this anymore, lets wrap this up vibe” and to make matters worse, they completely abandoned so many plots that you thought had a point to them. To me it felt so obvious that during the fall of kings landing, Cersi should have flipped out and Jamie should have killed her. History repeating itself. Maybe that was just too predictable for them to actually do it, but all the character development up to that point was the perfect setup for it and they just dropped it altogether.
I remember people knew the ending due to leaks about a year ahead of time and claimed it was all BS since it was so ridiculous. We were all wrong
For a secound i forgot we are talking about Game of Thrones and not Star Wars Episode 9.
I went from avoiding leaks to a few episodes in not caring and read the leaks and laughed. Then joined freefolk to laugh at the show as it aired, which made it a much less miserable affair than it would have been. A nice season long The Room roasting for the show.
Watching it straight up would have been pure torture.
A surprising amount went wrong.
While there are a sea of complaints, the biggest for me was that all of the characters stopped having internal logic. Take Jamie, he had a character arc moving from a vain knight avoiding responsibility and having an incestuous relationship with his sister, to having depth, showing that he was wracked with guilt for breaking his oath to help people. Falling in love with a woman for her character and who she was. Being responsible and honorable again. Then the last season came around and he dropped all of his growth to be with his sister.
It’s like D&D decided that there would be a cool scene of him dieing with Cersi and didn’t care how he got there.
It was hilarious to see Tyrion find them with a light dusting of bricks on top. Comedy.
The show reached a point where they’d surpassed where the books were in the narrative and things fell apart. The political intrigue, backstabbing, and subversive nature of the story was done away with in favour of forcing plot points through to get everything wrapped up, with no consideration made on why those characters would act in the way they did.
You could build a museum of horrible decisions and fill it with the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Whether you watched it or not, the show was a cultural touchstone, and the ending retroactively ruined everything that came before. Many shows have started well and ended poorly, but I’d argue that GoT was on pace to be an all-time top ten series, and there was absolutely nothing good to say about how it ended. Bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, sloppy editing, poor visual design, it was both rushed and too slow, and nothing made sense. If you paid someone to deliberately fuck up everything about the show, they would not have been as effective at it because it would have been obvious.
Everything
Compare it to this… Watching a highly rated chef come up with the most amazing sounding and looking dinner meal over the course of a few hours. You are anxiously awaiting to take a bite and salivating for that moment. When you finally get served your plate and get to that scrumptious first bite, the biggest wave of disappointment hits and you lose your appetite.
I don’t know how else to explain it
The dish comes out and it’s Spam topped with Kraft singles.
The best way to summarize it is the writing lol. And they tried to rush plot points way too fast.
And the plot points they decided to skip earlier in the season stuck out like a sore thumb. If you read the books and knew where they left off, you could see how those elements fit into the ending and made it a ton better.
The first seasons had the books with everything spelled out.
The end wasn’t (still isn’t) written. So the show runners were told who gets the iron throne at the end, but not how/why. Also a few other ending points.
So in the show, there’s no good reason for what happens at the end. D&D just had shit happen rather than try and show why people would do that shit
Tldr; the whole 6 first season they set up the table for some really juicy stuff and in the last season, some side quests were either ignored or fast-tracked to fit in 1/3 of an episode. Realistically, you had content for at least 3+ more seasons. But since GRR Martin is so slow to write his books (I don’t blame him, just pointing out the obvious), the producers of the show had to cut corner and take huge liberties that didn’t make any sense
Straight up ruined character arcs