#conspiracy is all the same actually :|

[watermelinoe]

i think it's kind of offensive to try to make holocaust denial about trans people but idk

[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.

[batsplat]

OT3: casey stoner/his neuroses/the concept of valentino rossi that mostly exists in casey’s head

y'know I have this casey stoner... idk what it is. thematic mind map (literal), let's say, that I like fiddling with and adding things to when the mood hits me. and it does always strike me just how many of his struggles during his careers and issues with the sport can in some way be linked back to the valentino rivalry

casey's sense of isolation? super valentino related. casey's feelings of cultural alienation in a paddock dominated by europeans? even when it's not really related to valentino, casey is the one linking those two things together. casey's issues with other riders not being respectful enough on track? very obviously repeatedly about valentino. casey's discomfort with the performance and entertainment-related aspects of the sport? more valentino. casey feeling treated unfairly by the manufacturers, the media, the marshals, the fans.... keeps coming back to valentino. casey's mystery illness really shouldn't be as relevant to the rivalry as it is, but somehow through this combination of public discourse and whatever comparisons casey's brain is cooking up at any moment in time... there valentino is again

one of the most charming things about valentino's feuds is that in each and every single one, both participants end up being deeply weird about each other? just keep knocking off these banger quotes about the other where you read them and go. hm. what's going on there then. I don't want to make it sound like I think casey is the worst offender with this (not when marc and valentino have their whole thing going on, bidirectionally)... but I do think he's the most susceptible to conflating his valentino issues with like... everything else that was going on in his career. to the extent where his alienation with the sport as a whole, his extreme disillusionment from everything related to motogp, really cannot be meaningfully disentangled from the valentino rivalry. at times it feels like, to casey, valentino literally is the sport. and that's the thing casey dedicated his whole life to!! which means you do inevitably end up regularly going 'wow there's a lot to unpack'. add in a dash of neuroticism...

and yeah you're so right anon!! the neuroses are what end up creating the version of valentino that mostly exists in casey's head, a version that casey is just a touch obsessed with. I always think it's interesting how aware casey is that he doesn't know valentino as a person - and to the extent casey does know him, he gets on pretty well with him... but valentino the person isn't all that relevant to him. it's valentino the character who matters - and can you even really know a character? in the end, all casey can do is rely on his own understanding of that character, as imperfect as it is. and, well, in a way casey is trapped with that character forevermore. if one man comes to embody a sport to such an extent and if that sport has been your life's work, how can you not be a little bit trapped? as he tries to make his peace with the sport and his experiences within it, so too has casey settled on a narrative of valentino that helps him make sense of it all... a very specific understanding of his rival that casey has shaped in his mind and still trots out now when he sells his own version of events to the media. casey learned from valentino, casey learned to be a little more like valentino, casey learned to fight valentino with his own tools, casey tells himself a story of that fight. he still continues to do so - and in the end he will never be entirely free of valentino

[uptownhags]

Have been in California for several days on my second vacation in 12 years! This is literally the only thing in my life that has turned out as planned since 2019! It is small in the grand scheme of things, but I stg this healed me!!!!!

[hindahoney]

The only people who benefit when black people and jews are divided are white supremacists

[mrs-luigi-vargas]

I know I'd decided to only write one more bowuigi fic aside from the one I'd already written but I can't stop thinking about the idea of Bowser repeatedly kidnapping Peach for relationship advice and Peach getting so fed up with him about it that she tricks Luigi into being her body double so that Bowser kidnaps him instead and they can talk like Actual Adults instead of using her as a third party to vent to all the time

[kaoharu]

wait no hang on. this is a terrible post and theory but send post

[aeide-thea]

truly just SUCH a typical tumblr experience but like.

Familiar Tumblr Name makes a post that's like: 'you know how fast fashion perpetuates itself by selling us clothing that gets dingy and grody really fast, so we have to replace it yearly?'

me: uh, no, actually—historically i've found that the few fast fashion pieces i acquired long outstayed their welcome, and were perfectly wearable long after i was heartily sick of them! but go on, i guess

FTN: 'let me tell you about this traditional domestic wisdom (implied: that's been lost because of, uh, capitalism) that will fix this problem (that you, too, definitely have) for you!'

me, googling: okay so this residue that FTN said was somehow a Fast Fashion thing is apparently generally caused by like. fabric softener and/or hard water. using discount detergents that skimp on active ingredients. using too much detergent so it doesn't wash out. letting your bedding go too long between washes. letting your washer go too long between cleans. etc. anyway. lots of specific factors here, many of which may in fact not apply to you in particular!

but like. why get specific when instead we could assert You Know This Problem, Right? This Lost Traditional Wisdom Will Definitely Help You Personally!!

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

As I now read that the state or federal government intentionally murdered dozens of people with a wildfire in Hawaii, I am once again wondering whether there is such a thing as a natural disaster or a genuine catastrophe in the minds of terminally online people who think everything was done by Them

And like

Every single time? Nothing bad has ever just happened? And it’s never incompetence or neglect? It’s always malice? It’s always because They planned it?

[fazcinatingblog]

I think I had a dream that Mason Cox had a girlfriend and I don't know why my subconscious would send me something like that and

[ettadunham]

being on tumblr during us elections is wild. my dash is always filled with posts about how if you don't vote to those democrats you're the scum of the earth, etc, and like... yes, i do understand harm mitigation, i really do, and i respect the logic behind the mindset, but the hostility towards even the faintest idea of someone expressing their political beliefs any other way is still wild.

[powerfulkicks]

fucccccckkkkkk i really need to write that octet video essay that's been percolating in my head for years

[hauntingblue]

NAMI HAS TAKEN ACTION!!! LETSGOOOOO

[july-19th-club]

i think this is the absolute longest its ever taken me watching a show to get to an episode that really made me say like oh this is good i loved it. but ive gotten all the way to season two episode nine of bones before that happened. and yet i watched a full thirty episodes going 'eh, it's okay, i wouldn't turn it off' before getting to one that really rocked my shit. like usually if it takes that long i give up so theres gotta be something in the water. unclear what tho more research is required

[triedpklove]

excited for arcsys to make more money off of transphobia because they realized they can just make every new woman they add to the game have the same model as bridget which in turn causes a new wave of bridget discourse on the interwebs and thus fills their pockets with money because bad press (in this case transphobes constantly talking about bridget) is still press. I'm so tired.

[mattzerella-sticks]

The idea of 'The Sovereign' and this storyline in Wonder Woman by Tom King reminds me of Hydra Captain America and the Secret Empire by Nick Spencer.