#i gave up on actually doing my work to do this bc i am so eepy today

[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.

[hella1975]

so there's a reason my new job got back to me so quickly about my application and that's bc it's an absolute fucking shambles like actually perfect timing for me to decide to rewatch the bear bc i have never more felt like ive been thrown into a broke on-its-knees establishment trying to crawl its way up the ladder where i am somehow a godsend to them. my old job was crazy and shambolic in the sense that the industry is just Like That but this one?????? insanity. every 5 mins i am questioning what im doing with my life. ive already had a walk-in fridge moment

[zecoritheweirdone]

first art post of the new year!!! granted, i don't share my art here that much anyway, but– shhh.

hehehehhhooo,, here's something i've been working on for 'bout a month,, albeit not consecutively– took a few,, very very long breaks in between working on this,, but i managed to finish it in the end! am i satisfied with it? .......ehhhh? not completely, but if this took any longer, it might not have seen the light of day, so like. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

anyway,, made a little poster for my favorite fic, tommyinnit's services for villains, vigilantes, and various other vagabonds, by @scorpionoesit!!! it's really really good,,, and i've always wanted to make more art for it,, so i decided– poster! at least,, that's what it's mean to resemble,,, dkdmkdmdkd.

i will freely admit,, i'm... not the biggest fan of the fan-made logo i tried to design for it,, feels a bit boring, and could definitely have used a bit more pizazz, something to make feel more like the fic itself(what does that mean? you figure that out),,,, but– again, steam was running low,, dkdnksjs. graphic design is my passion. i do also have other complaints, but i'm afraid i already punched my one-use self-critique card,, oh well,,, dkdnkxjdkd.

regardless,, even with the flaws only i can really see,, this still turned out pretty okay!! hope you enjoy it, mx. scorpio and mx. alibi!!! and i hope everyone else has a wonderful new year!!!!

[natreads]

I got a job as a bookseller!!!

[skitskatdacat63]

Orb...

+ process kinda

[macroglossus]

being evaluated for adhd by having one of those full psych evals that last like two hours. scared frightened etc.... last time i took it i lied extensively bc i was 13 and thought they might tell my mommy if i said i had suicidal thoughts. and i still have a habit of lying to therapists bc i'm embarrassed......... AGH idk. what if i take it and they tell me that the reason im Like This is bc im genuinely just weird and shitty and not bc im mentally ill at all. SCARED

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[bibleofficial]

need you to know i genuinely enjoy your blog - part of what makes it great is that its clear that you go outside and party and fuck!! so many people in this website just don’t fuck 🤧

omg !!! ❤️❤️❤️ don’t replicate my sin u will go to hell

[c0rpsedemon]

going from "i like ayaka but i'm going to pull for her brother instead bc i already have a cryo sword user + i want to replace my barbara w a 5*" to ayaka's biggest wanter and a ride or die barbara stan who doesn't even use ayato. every day i regret my decisions made during 3.5

[somelazyassartist]

I get the feeling I'm gonna really enjoy DMing because one thing about me is I love talking and I love describing things in way more detail than needed. Like as a player I'm always kinda worried about being too flowery and taking up too much time describing what my characters do and coming off as pretentious but as a DM it's like huzzah!!! It is my job to describe scenes and plot setups and the way NPCs move and act to give the players enough detail to get a sense of all their options and to get a good read on other people's intentions when talking to them!! This is great!!!!!!

[exopelagic]

okay facing consequences of my actions

[seagullcharmer]

attempting to teach myself to sew. successfully made something that looks like pants

[howdomaddie]

nine eight people you would like to get to know better

ahhh thank you @elmelloill for the tag, i am so excited to have a chance to do a tag game again. hm, not unlike lev's sentiment, i feel like i know most of the people im gonna tag but i want to share in the fun :D you don't have to and if i didnt tag you but you still wanna do the thing then!!!!!! do it!!!!! (i couldnt think of 9 people im SORRY) @knightofkestrels @feelingwhimsy @whatnowllamapeople @jess-jessitiz @here-queer-jointpain-severe @sevennbees @imthepunchlord @kerrtesy

a lot more than three ships: UH hm. let me think

so technically (aside from catboy ot3) all ships are rotating in my brain at all times, and it kind of depends on what thing i've become re-obsessed with at any given moment. i am on a duo of fire emblem and ace attorney eras all over again, so chrobin (both robins), ike/soren and klapollo are all on the brain. also ryukita for persona 5 since we started replaying that one recently. also flynn/yuri from tales of vesperia bc they're a very fun dynamic i like chewing on. rowan/graha/estinien just. lurks at the back of my mind at all times klhgkjh

first ship ever: percy/annabeth from the pjo books, i think? thats the oldest i can remember, bc i got into the series in middle school. for other not-first ships, i think roughly around then i was also just dabbling in ds games of all kinds. i definitely read the pokemon special/pokemon adventures manga and shipped red/yellow, and then protag/keith in the second pokemon ranger game. i wrote....so much fanfiction back then...

last song: if we're being technical it's a lofi mix i have on for work (link to my work playlist here if you want it) but otherwise, it's been XIV/genshin/star rail OSTs and a mix of ok goodnight/casey lee williams the edge and fall out boy's so much for stardust album, though really it's the first two songs

last movie: UHHHHH i think the most recent indiana jones movie? my dad took me for my birthday last month, hehe. NO WAIT IT WAS BARBIE the barbie movie was good

currently reading: unfortunately i dont read books all that much any more, and mostly the same for fics. i guess this is the time to give me book recs?

currently watching: well, nothing really TV show wise, though i was hoping to maybe start a rewatch of the first few arcs of fairy tail. we'll see. i mostly watch youtube nowadays, and usually it's a combination of channels. playframe happens to be my favorite (nice and varied playthrough content, but also just a really nice husband/wife duo that plays things together and with their friends). i also enjoy studson studio since i want to do more diorama building and he's the one that got me interested in it :)

currently consuming: ough sweet tarts and a ginger ale technically speaking, im like a zombie at work today and hoping the sour and bubbly will keep me awake @_@ but i did have a nice yoghurt and croissant for breakfast (i promise i eat normal meals and i just happen to be snacking rn fldkjgh)

currently craving: the comfort of my bed bc i have an extremely terminal case of sleepy bitch disease

[mildmayfoxe]

OK i just got all my sticker club mail done & out of the way. might clean my room some now

[pepprs]

meant to post abt this yesterday and ik it’s kinda mean but i think the counselor i have rn is the worst one ive ever had possibly even worse than (or tied w) the one i had over the summer who kept ending our sessions well before the full hour was up when i was going thru a horrible time and kept spending the sessions mostly talking abt herself and her own problems. actually no now that i write that out she was probably the worst (though she was one of the warmest / nicest and our personalities meshedreally well so i feel bad saying that she was the worst). but the one i have now is so…. lke idk. my experience w the worst counselor made me rly want to work w a clinical intern again bc i wanted someone who would like. actuallytake things seriously and give me the time i was paying for and spend all of it talki ng abt the things i was paying to talk abt and draw from the most recent / cutting edge info instead of entirely personal experience (WHICH AGAIN I FEEL SO BAD ABT BECAUSE. my work is all abt healing each other by sharing things like that and i realt did like her but it just wasn’t appropriate i guess bc it was a counseling relationship!) but my current counselor is so… rigid and restrictive. like i think he is trying too hard to apply what he’s being taught and he seems like nervous and talking out of his ass and he masks that by taking up SO much space and spending like 3 minutes responding to every one minute i talk and literally like strongarmimg the convos and deciding what we’re going to talk about and moving us on to a new topic abruptly before i feel ready to move on and like taking time out of our sessions to do paperwork / admin stuff so he doesn’t forget later (and a lot of the time i think he’s doing it while im talking bc i see his eyes moving around his screen and the light on his face like he’s not even listening to me). and it fucking sucks. i want to crack him like an egg so bad and make him realize it doesn’t have to be this way but i know that’s not my responsibility and in our session last night i basically gave up trying to create enough space for myself and just let him steer things bc i was having side effects and it was just rly unsatisfying

[mintjeru]

targeted advertising (it's working)