#I feel like they would totally tell us

[m-for-now]

Headcanon that Leo has the song "Honey, i'm good" in his distraction working playlist and whenever it comes on, he refers to Festus as the "somebody at home" when that line comes on and him and Festus just have a nice little time enjoying a silly little song

[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.

[kazoosandfannypacks]

You're my rival. Of course I think you're pretty.

[minty-sweet-art]

Congratulations you made it to the wedding between me and Kaufmo (aka my 100 day anniversary officially simping for Kaufmo)

Happy July 1st (art fight is haunting me) (side note I ramble in the tags)

To start of let’s watch several silly CapCut edit before getting into the wedding art

⚠️❗️WARNING FOR LOUD SCREAMING/SOUNDS❗️⚠️

Thank again @leafryoworks for the offer of letting me use one of their Kaufmo art for an edit

Original art post by leafy link here

Now that the edit are over you can have a silly terrible Terrible doodle as well. (I can’t bring Kaufmo amazing ness justice with my art but I try. Also I had no idea what to do for poses help)

Didn’t put Kaufmo in a black and white tuxedo because the color are apart of his charm(I was lazy)

We had to change wedding officiant to ( @saytrrose/) kenji rose because kinger couldn’t take Jax and gangle interrupting anymore. (They called dibs after all)

And of course can’t forget to our friends leafy. It’s like I can still hear them now.

(they just have school this week so they couldn’t see the post until this Weekend) imagine having school you nerd/ /silly /joke

Oh and also

Kaufmo gallery update: 520

Thank for viewing my silly wedding post about Kaufmo. I will continue to simp for a clown like a loser.

And remember everyone

Live laugh Kaufmo <3

– Sincerely Kaufmo simp 

[silusvesuius]

this tree from my new drawing looking goated afffffff 👑👑

[marrfixated]

(More thoughts and drafting! Some weird formatting I know but it was all one block in my notes)

Emma is doing just fine. Average. It’s really not so bad.

She’s just been dealing with a lot of change. And with too many things not changing.

Which is… an odd thing to struggle with.

Because she likes change. Daunting challenges. The unpredictable. Doing new things every day and never being scared of them. And she likes independence.

She had thought so, at least.

After the show, she had been hit in the face with just how… isolated she was. She had only had two friends before the first season, but she had left them behind. Her mother wasn’t doing the best, and she didn’t have any nearby family.

She found herself laying in her bed in the middle of the day most of the time, scrolling through her contacts and old conversations.

Or scrolling through her comments on TikTok.

A few weeks ago, she had tried some stunt involving a motorcycle and an inflatable pool. She probably wouldn’t have messed it up if her hands weren’t trembling.

(She had forgot to check the breaks, and wasn’t sure if they were working.)

(They were.)

The blood dripping down her face and the gash in her lip didn’t sting as much as it did watching the video.

She looked ridiculous, and she probably always did. It was better when she had someone else to do it with. Maybe she was losing her touch.

She didn’t post the video.

She turned back to dancing instead, which did feel less embarassing, despite the constant mocking feedback. Sure, the jokes were “funny”, but she didn’t care about any of it. She didn’t feel the rush, she wasn’t planning every day, and she wasn’t known or loved for anything.

Except for what she lost.

And, the show, to an extent.

-Ugh, she misses the show. She shouldn’t, but as stupid as it sounds, she really did. She missed doing crazy things and talking to people. Having a chance of winning. Beating everyone. Being cheered on. It wasn’t always great, but at least it was something. She misses doing something.

And she really misses Bowie. She missed Bowie, but she knows better than anyone that she can’t go back to that. They just- have better things to do now. He probably does.

He’s got Raj- which is great! And she’s happy for him! She’s happy for everyone. For Wayne, however he’s doing, for Julia, despite everything.

And Caleb. For having Priya.

Emma is jealous that Bowie gets to have someone.

Emma is jealous that everyone else gets to have someone.

Emma is jealous that, unlike everyone else, winning the show probably wouldn’t have made her any happier.

She isn’t sure what would.

[marcsnuffy]

Using Lorenzo and Charles' interviews as reference, I'd love to see any assumptions of what Kaiser and Ness would answer here

[camzverse]

wish some of u were into typology id love to know how youd type some fnaf chars so bad

[twinknote]

i have a feeling my mom (who has acted extremely upset + sympathetic about me sweating profusely in my shitty 80+ degree room) is going to tell me that they can’t help me replace my 20+ year old ac unit for $250, even tho they are about to pay Thousands of dollars to replace their central ac bc clearly her needs are more important than mine (when one of my worst and most impactful symptoms is heat intolerance, which makes me dehydrated and even more dizzy and fatigued and i’ve been getting dehydration headaches even tho i’m drinking almost a gallon a day)

[fictionadventurer]

All the tour groups in Springfield should be very proud of me for how well I refrained from sharing all my fascinating Lincoln facts.

[princesscallyie]

Me when I'm listening to the most stupidest story about my mom giving my brother $1500 for a down payment for a 2nd car while his in the shop for a deer hitting him and him losing the nonrefundable $1500 cause he drove 2 hours away to a scummy dealership and he didn't get approve for enough credit from the bank

[dontbadgerme2233]

there is a hole in my soul in the shape of a cowboy hat and cowboy boots

[thebigqueer]

maybe the reason im so upset about it isnt cuz she broke up wme but because all that waiting over the summer just feels so worthelss now. like i know we couldnt talk as much or be around each other as much but i was waitingall summer like when we get back all we'll do is be together!!!! all of the 'new relationship syndrome especially now that its long distance' stuff will be fixed when we get back!! but were over and theres no chanec of fixing it because were over and its just like what if we waited what if we just figured it out for another few weeksand see where it went form there

[lloydfrontera]

the webtoon may have left out a lot of things but they did yassify the orcs which is the funniest thing to me right now

*sigh* they did yassify the orcs <3

now i want to see what they'll do with the sirens and whether i should be excited or worried lmao

[dmclemblems]

I think your understand of Claude has been warped by DimiClaude fan fics. Claude doesn't like Rhea in Houses and wants her out of power and says as much at the beginning of Verdant Wind and you even gain support points with him if you ask him if he hopes Rhea is dead versus if he hopes Rhea is alive. Claude doesn't stop wanting Rhea deposed because he spent an extra year in the Academy.

lmfao bruh i have never once read a dimiclaude fic that involved rhea or even mentions rhea/how either of them feel about rhea, how are you gonna tell me my perception of him is warped by something i've never even read? don't go blaming people's enjoyed ships as a scapegoat just because you don't like someone's discussion about a character. that ship and my opinion of hopes claude/his feelings on absolutely anything have nothing to do with each other.

do you do that to everyone? assume you know what they read and what kind of fandom stuff they engage with? assume that people read fanfics and that somehow it makes them forget canon? 'cause it's pretty haughty.

have you read like, any of my posts/asks? i've pretty explicitly discussed that he doesn't like rhea or her in power. that's very different from personally murdering someone. i also never said his year at the academy had anything to do with his feelings toward rhea.

i don't even read that many fanfics so that's quite a bold faulty assumption. not sure what you thought assuming what i read was going to accomplish, and for that matter, i'm not sure what you thought insulting every dmcl writer out there was going to accomplish by implying they all write "warped" versions of him. what the fuck does dimitri have to do with claude's feelings about rhea?

surprise, nothing.

[johndonneswife]

someone really should be talking about how difficult it is to plan a wedding - a gay wedding - when both of your families fucking suck