#Fighting for Jon's life

[jayktoralldaylong]

Jon: If you need a vessel so bad why don't you just become-

Elias: Because I'm not scared of them.

Jon: ......

Elias: I don't need your body, Jon. I need your fear. 😈

Meanwhile, Elias the Gaslight King in earlier seasons: Jon you know I'd never let anything bad happen to you, I'm only trying to help. We need to save the world together, isn't that what we're trying to achieve? Oh Jon, Jon, Jon, bad things are only happening because you do not trust me. Trust me, and we can save everyone. Don't you believe me?

Then it went the exact opposite with Peter and Martin.💀😂💔

Peter: I've got the perfect plan to beat Elias. Can you do what it takes to become the hero?

Martin: I'm going to save the world?

Peter: Yes, and it will be you and you alone. Do you trust me?

Martin: I trust you.

That same season 💀

Peter: You played me! 😳😭 You've been lying to me this entire time.

Martin: You lied first 🙄 and I knew it the instant you told me I'd save the world. I can't save the world. I've never saved anything in my entire life. I'm not important enough to be the hero.

[frownyalfred]

I just KNOW the “Batman dropped out of school too!” conversation has come up at least once in the Lane-Kent household.

Clark: Yes, Batman dropped out of school, but it was because he was genius adrenaline junkie who preferred getting hit in the head on a routine basis and tinkering with machines in his massive underground Cave he built and designed by himself, Jon.

[jjkyaoi]

i love hot jon but specifically the part where he’s not appealing to anyone and yet he’s appealing to. everyone . like season one is the most put together he looks and even that’s a stretch because she’s prematurely graying and wears little grandma glasses and big sweaters that make him look stick skinny (he is). and then season two hits him like a bullet train and he s so stressed out of his mind that he doesn’t even comb his hair . veins popping in his eyes wearing the same cardigan that he wore three days ago because he’s been sleeping in his office carrying a tape recorder everywhere and he has this odd little creature magnetism about her. her brown eyes turn green in season three and nobody knows what to say to him about that. he grows out his hair to mad scientist unbrushed length most of her shirts have been stained three times over LIKE THIS IS NOT AN APPEALING LOOK. but by god is he wanted by the masses

[graphicsgirlie]

miss liz & the doctor first meetings ft. the brigadier in the bg knowing his life is about to get so much worse

[tabooi]

Paul "Heart Eyes" Matthews

[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.

[introspectivememories]

i hope i am not just your average dc enjoyer to you but also your favorite timbern poster

[aloraaki]

Robin: You know, I'm surprised you managed to copy the exact chemicals that made the Joker go insane. They were disposed of after the incident, and literally never remade. Rex: Oh, it wasn't hard. In fact, the chemicals didn't even do much to him, they were just a slightly corrosive material that reduced his melanin, permanently. Robin: Really? Rex: Yeah. He was already crazy before them, but the chemicals just gave him a half-assed excuse for insanity. Superboy: So... doesn't that just mean you knowingly dumped Joker Junior into acid? Rex: Well when you say it like that it sounds bad.

[somewherefornow]

LOIS LANE & BRUCE WAYNE in JUSTICE LEAGUE (2016)

[nightswatchdisbandmentera]

Might be a hot take but a major character’s death is really only as good as the weight and the treatment that the narrative gives it. Sure, any author has the ability to write death as they see fit. But whether the consumer (of any given form of media) is actually able to emotionally connect and resonate with the departure of someone who has occupied a good chunk of narrative space very heavily depends on how it’s treated within the story. If it’s a major character, the narrative needs enough built-in breathing space. As in, the consumer doesn’t have to fill in the blanks as to how the death impacted the plot or the remaining characters. Let the narrative do that for them, and that would actually allow the consumer to better react and relate to that major death (sadness, anger, joy, etc). Allow the rest of the characters (who were impacted by the deceased) to react to their parting. Let them engage with the death in a manner that helps justify the character’s inclusion in the narrative to begin with. Make it clear how the character’s life and (especially) their death relate to the larger themes of the story. Because most consumers aren’t stupid. We don’t want our hands held at every waking moment, but we also don’t want our investment in a story to be insulted just for the sake of a cheap shock. Give us time to breathe and grieve. And respect that we have put in a lot of emotional investment in a story and its characters, and we deserve to have that acknowledged.

[rise-my-angel]

The person you reblogged that Direwolves post from is a Dany/Arya stan (loves Jonerys and Rhaelya and Jonrya as well because of course) who hates Sansa so they and their lot love to bring up the Direwolves being important to emphasize that Sansa is no longer a Stark, is not magical, has no claim to Winterfell, and/or will be beheaded just like Lady was lmfaooo. Just so you know lol.

You know I was laughing at the irony of how hilariously opposite my stances were compared to that person until you said they ship Jonrya.

Then I had to go vomit for a moment before composing my thoughts. Out of all the incest fetish ships these people force onto Jon Snow, shipping him with Arya is the most blatantly creepy and disturbing of them all.

But, of COURSE the Sansa stan critical post I reblogged was made by a targ stan. Every single time. Every Sansa critical post is a Jonerys stan. Every Dany critical post is a Jonsa. And sometimes the fucking Rhaelyas and Jonryas slip through the cracks too.

But I will clarify something here just so people don't get the wrong idea. I have my criticisms of Sansa, but not in any way the same level I have massive criticisms for Dany. Sansa is classist and a bully to her sister, but she isn't a mass murdering tyrant. They do not deserve the same level of criticisms.

I also think the direwolves are incredibly important which means I think Sansa being the only living character to have lost her direwolf is equally as important. Sansas story with Littlefinger is taking her down a dark path and not having her soul bonded direwolf with her makes it that much easier to lose her identity.

That being said, I think a big part of Sansa and Aryas stories are bound to intersect. Arya returning home to remind herself she is still a Stark, as Sansa finds her way home having to be reminded that despite everything she is and always will be a Stark and I think both sisters have an important role to play in reigniting their identities in each other, in a manner that helps them heal and forgive their very unpleasant past previously as sisters.

Also I swear every Dany stan is also an Arya stan specifically just to tinfoil hat their way into explaining why Sansa is the worst.

I am asking Jonerys stans and Jonsas to stop dragging poor Arya into their disgusting incest fetish for Jon Snow.

(Rhaelyas and Jonrya shippers get attacked with a tourney sword on sight like I'm Lyanna Stark and they are the fuck heads attacking Howland Reed. Those shipppers, get your gross child shipping away from those 2 girls)

[kvm24]

UFC New Champs

[snowangeldotmp3]

idk if you've already addressed this but like . in that scene where robin is being the spy IN the hospital (i think?? i haven't read it all yet lmao there is a LOT), i just imagine when they test to see what happens if they burn something from the upside down, robin screwing her eyes shut and trembling, biting her tongue hard as to not cry out at the pain she feels.

YEAH YEAH

tho i think since it's connected, if they do it to will, it happens to robin. and since robin's still at murray's with nancy and jonathan (i think... at this point in time in canon they might be on their way back to hawkins...) while they're trying to see what's wrong with will in the hospital, i'm just picturing robin in the backseat of jonathan's car like, GRIPPING the door bc she's in pain and none of them really know why, but nancy and jon can both hear it. robin winces because that's when they get that little flamethrower closer to that severed tentacle thing AND that's when will winces. it's all connected they just don't Know it yet.

[ravenintraining]

I think it would be really funny if the only Web things that have actual spider motifs are the web table and Annabelle Cane but because Leitner only ever really experienced those two he based his whole theory on the fear of control after them. And no other Web patrons ever try to disprove it because you can influence people a lot more when they don’t know where it’s coming from. While they’re looking around for spiders, you’re pulling their strings. It feels very relevant to the interworkings of the fear for it to be undermined as having a specific motif. Also it makes even more sense when you think about the Smirke categorizations being explained by only patrons of the Eye. Of course the Eye thinks all Entities have a single motif they follow: it’s called The Eye. 

[mxwhore]

I have an idea for an angsty somewhere else AU. It's where all the avatars get pulled into the somewhere else with the fears. Avatars being those who had a domain of their own. Not wanting to kill Jon, Martin cut the tether by blinding him. This results in Jon no longer being and avatar and he says in the original world, while Martin is an avatar so he gets dragged off to the new world.

NOOOOO

[misterradio]

if i wake up tomorow and david lost that poll im going to throw up. sorry i ranted in the tags so long i started feeling shrimp emotions