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Comment by drc500free | Hacker News Reader

IMO, that's part of what made Game of Thrones fall off a quality cliff. It wasn't just subpar writing on the main plot lines when the source material ran out. The world itself became hollowed out, and the main characters stopped existing within an organic world. It turned into an avengers movie, where the leads were largely alone on screen only interacting with each other (except for designated Crowd Scenes).

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GoT has the same dynamic as Lord of the Rings, where the world itself is arguably the protagonist, and the characters are there to explore it for you.

The GoT show runners appear to have totally misunderstood that, and threw the suspense and world building stuff under the bus for creating moments of interpersonal drama. But the drama and actions increasingly made no sense vs the buildup of the previous seasons.

Who are the white walkers? What is the rest of their history? What are their goals? This was the big driving mystery of the show, and they simply decided to wrap it up in a single big battle with no further revelations.

That totally removed the payoff a lot of people were waiting for. Much like Lost, it became clear there's no actual coherent mystery.

Maybe GRRM deserves some criticism for not having things wrapped up himself. But mostly I think the show runners just totally misunderstood what was driving the earlier seasons.

From episode one it was a telenovela with more nudity, wigs, and CGI. There was one good scene between Cersei and her husband, though.

Ugh the Lost thing was so infuriating.

The Lost finale was definitely disappointing, but at some point it was expected. At some point it became clear that the mystery was just a huge MacGuffin, and the writers had painted themselves into a corner.

I think that taught newer generations of Showrunners to not make the same mistake. Modern shows like Breaking Bad and Dark managed to finish right on time with perfect endings.

(GoT however...)

New generations, maybe. JJ Abrams himself still seems to love a mystery box, to the detriment of more than one major franchise.

> I think that taught newer generations of Showrunners to not make the same mistake

I'm worried the opposite lesson is being learned here. Most shows "build up" then not worry if it's actually going somewhere or even can have a good ending.

Nowadays the exit strategy is first and doremost a cancelation or the next writer's problem.

Yeah, that's hard to disagree with. That's definitely true for a lot of Netflix series.

What happened to the polar bears

> where the leads were largely alone on screen only

I feel like that is many movies now. The worlds are small and the consequences / events are just there for the primary actors to respond to and seem entirely disconnected from any kind of universe.

Massive events happen just for the sake of having a hero mug for the camera. But no consideration otherwise.

At this point in the Star Wars universe I expect the regular people of the universe would realize that ALL force sensitive people are more trouble than they are worth… but no the people of the universe show up, say dumb things, die (or don’t show up… literally nobody at times) at the appointed time for really no reason that to give the heroes or villains something to do.

There does seem to be an absence of "angry villagers raid the wizard's tower" stories in the Star Wars universe. Missed opportunity, probably has something to do with Star Wars primarily being escapist fantasy for people who wish to be the wizard.

Maybe the EU novels have such stories, but I haven't read those.

There's a scene in the original movie that kind-of explains this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzs-OvfG8tE

> "Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the rebels' hidden fortr-"

From what I remember from wikis the EU novels expanded on this as: Jedi/Sith/force-sensitives are rare enough that even at the height of the Jedi's power, most people believed them to be a myth, that the Jedi Order was more like a powerful religious group of regular people.

This is reinforced in The Mandalorian, where (to memory) the protagonist hadn't even heard of the Force or Jedi. And Mando was much better-traveled than most of the Star Wars universe population.

It works there but the later trilogy just falls apart and makes no sense how invested everyone is in jedi-ism...

To be fair, that was also a problem with the books: the scale was completely off in quite noticeable ways – huge armies but no mention of how they’re supplied, cities which are referred to as large but feel small in terms of logistics, etc. We’re repeatedly told winter is coming but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of stockpiling supplies, building greenhouses, etc.?

Stocking supplies is much better conveyed in the books. Also notable that although the main map is shaped somewhat like England+Wales+Scotland, it seems to be continent scale, allowing southern parts to seemingly not even stock winter gear.

Greenhouses…would be a very rare luxury for a rich few, and would offer minimaly supplement for them; also, heating them (IRL, with coal) would be prohibitively expensive in labour, fuel, and fuel storage.

I was referring to the books – my primary memories of ASoIF were that the level of violence should mean more desertion and economic collapse back home and unless they just magicked it away there’d nowhere near enough food to survive the promised winter. It’s not like the books didn’t have good parts but I had to consciously suspend disbelief a lot while reading it.

Greenhouses don’t require heating but it’s also a proxy for the questions about urgency: if you knew this was coming, shouldn’t you have people working on every aspect of storage, stretching growing seasons, migrating south, etc.?

Is there a particular season when this happened?

Seasons 7/8.

Season 2.

Everyone was too busy suspending disbelief or distracted by their phones/laptops to really notice. I gave the show the benefit of the doubt until the end of Season 4, when Tywin Lannister would have come in and eliminated Joffrey - his family's success relied on installing a competent king to keep the throne, not a useless brat coddled by his incompetent kids.

But then rewatching it for the second time, the lack of causality was apparent in Season 2. There's a reason stories don't generally kill main characters, and that's because viewers invest in them. If they do kill a main character, there has to be strong point that leads to even more character development. But once you see through the charade, the whole series is revealed as a series of vignettes that imply awesome character development, without ever actually doing the work to bring it to fruition. The show was able to coast in pop culture until season 8, when it was no longer possible to ignore that the characters weren't going anywhere.

I thought they would have taken a step back and applied more massaged production to HoD. After all, this franchise had an outsized amount of upmarket interest, only to crater at the end to the point of completely falling out of the zeitgeist. But rather, it seems like they continued the same tack of not really having a good story and filling in gaps of time in place of showing character development - like the episode where all the actors switched out and everyone is just older. Classic GoT!

Yet apparently you still paid (at least your attention) to give house of dragons a try reinforcing this disgusting habit of making only remakes and childish franchise bollocks. We must punish them

Pirate life! I don't even know what silo had HoD.

But yes, guilty as charged. The worst part is I'm the type of person that doesn't just give up, but rather insists on finishing a show.

And regardless of formulaic production, I get disappointed by many series that start out great in the first season or two, and then the writing just craters. The best defense I've found is to stop binge watching. Watch one episode to relax after dinner, and then go do something else.

This is why I avoid dreck like Velma, even to hatewatch or to see if "it's as bad as everyone says". A view is a view, and unlike terrestrial television (in the absence of a Nielsen People Meter), watching is no longer passive, it's a signal to the network who is watching back.

Remember the lyrics of the musician whose wisdom resonates to this day, "Weird Al" Yankovic: "But I only watched Will & Grace one time, one day... wish I hadn't 'cause TiVo now thinks I'm gay!"

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