What the F*** happened to Game of Thrones?! 5 Reasons Season 8 was so despised
- Nicholas Ward
- Jun 5, 2019
- 10 min read
What went wrong with Game of Thrones?
As the biggest TV spectacle of our generation winds to a close many die-hard fans are sitting down and with a cold drink and thinking, what the fuck happened to Game of Thrones. By the screening of the final episode an online petition has gathered one million signatures to fire the directors and remake season 8.
So what happened? What turned this once amazing television series into such a mess? As far as I can tell the action is still spectacular, the dragons, or dragon is still dragoning, and Kit Harrington is still goddamned gorgeous.
One of the big selling points of Game of Thrones was the realism. The king gets killed by a boar, the ‘good guy’ gets beheaded by being bad at politicking, and his successor gets ambushed and killed. Good guys are bad, bad guys are good. Despite the dragons and magic Game of Thrones has been renowned for being the most realistic historical drama ever made.
The problems with Game of Thrones started well before season 8, though season 8 was definitely when they hit peak terribleness. The huge world of Game of Thrones began to go off the rails when the DB Weiss and David Benioff stopped following the source material and started desperately tying up loose ends.
5. The Sieges stopped making any sense after Season 6.
Unfortunately for history sieges, were long, and boring, and people stayed behind their walls instead of marching outside of them to stage some weird murder ballet. Looking at you Battle of Winterfell.
There’s two main things Game of Thrones gets wrong about sieges, the first is the length. Every siege in GoT is over quicker than a Dothraki horde running into white walkers. Some sieges were quick bloody affairs through history. Most weren’t. Because unless you vastly outnumbered your opponents an attack on a fortress was dangerous. Really dangerous, and raising new soldiers was difficult. So, armies would camp outside the walls and wait. They’d build towers and ladders, and fortified camps, but on the small chance they actually tried to seize the city/ castle, it was a slow and bloody affair. Yet after season 7, sieges take, exactly how long the plot needs them to take.
Initially the sieges make sense, when the Tully’s refuse to give up the Riverrun taking the fortress is considered impossible, yet 3 seasons later, Casterly Rock falls in ten seconds because the unsullied walk right in. High Garden falls off screen, the siege is passed off by Olenna making some vague reference to her soldiers not being fighters, despite being the second richest family in Westeros.
Look at those losers
Then there’s the weird habit GoT has of marching all the armies out into the open for absolutely no reason, instead of using their heavily fortified position. Sallying forth did exist in the history of sieging, however it was more often used to disrupt enemy siege plans.
The sieges demonstrate the inherent problem with D&D’s treatment of Game of Thrones once they moved past the books. At first sieges took cunning, Theon tricking the Iron Islanders into surrendering, there was a distinction between taking cities, like Kings Landing, and Fortresses like the Twins. But once the show moved past the books, sieges just became plot devices, and the show grew stale. The only reason Casterley Rock was taken was to trap the Unsullied, the only reason High Garden got taken was to remove the Tyrells.
Plot device here plot device there. None of the characters were thinking or plotting, or even fighting back (looking at you the Tyrells).
Our bad
Sieges were completely emblematic of where the show was going. Armies teleporting all over the place with no regard for realism. Just to create traps for the main characters to overcome.
And people forgave that because we wanted the show to be good so badly, even though the first writing was on the wall that the writers were desperately trying to cram stories down our throats with no regard for if they made sense or not. But one unrealistic element in an otherwise great show isn't a death blow. No the problem was the plot devices thickened.
4. That’s not how Balista’s work… like… at all. (But that's not the important part)
The Scorpions introduced in Season 7 were an awesome taste of the level to which Cersei would go to protect her power, and it seemed like there was a tiny glimmer of hope for her deranged little queendom.
In season 8 they are deployed to devasting effect. They set up a classic Game of Thrones conundrum, the dragons have been grounded, are they powerful enough without their dragons to, oh wait they didn’t matter.
After Euron has dispatched the dragon, he menacingly turns on the small fleet and demolishes it with his Scorpions the fleet is wiped out, and the survivors swim ashore. Leaving aside how powerful these canons, I mean scorpions are (why the hell isn’t everyone using them)
In any other season there would have been some daring raid to punch a hole in the ring of Scorpions to allow Drogon in to wreak havoc, or Drogon would have dropped rocks on the iron fleet, or anything, literally anything. Instead they literally just waltz in the scorpions are destroyed literally as fast as they are introduced.
You can’t write these plot devices in make them as powerful as canons, and as accurate as sniper rifles, and then just yadda yadda your way past them without people getting pissed off. They were introduced for no other reason than to kill the second dragon. Then immediately taken out when the plot needed to be advanced.
The problem is plot armour. No Ballista, catapult, or trebuchet is that powerful, which is why naval combat looked nothing like that. Up until the invention of canons Naval combat was an incredibly boring exercise of slow-moving ships chasing one another. Ships could use catapults, which were inaccurate, and slow, or archers, which weren’t going to sink any ships, so instead the way ships fought was to board one another and duke it out on each ship till one won. There were some exceptions to this. The Ottomans for instance used highly trained archers who could keep up massive sustained barrages of enemy ships preventing them from operating. This was so effective it was still used well into the gunpowder age. But other than this, sinking ships was hard. Ballista didn’t cut its.
Now this could have been forgiven, people have forgiven far more in other movies, like explosives in any movie where someone uses a trebuchet or catapult. The problem is these unbelievably powerful weapons are introduced and! They just disappear. Immediately.
This is what a ballista can do by the way.
[url]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQPSxV3gZx0[/url]
Yeah not exactly devastating fleets and dragons is it?
3. The Battles stopped making sense.
Historically Warfare wasn’t particularly deadly for soldiers (and especially not for aristocrats). A 'decimation' is a Roman term, essentially one of the worst defeats you can suffer. It means to lose 1 in 10 men. In other words in a worst case scenario you have a 90% chance of surviving, when it came to it battles were short and bloody but when it was clear someone was going to win, the other side generally scarpered for it. Even if you were taken alive, you probably weren't being hung drawn and quartered, because, much like today people will pay a lot to get their family back alive.
The books and the TV series initially represented this very well. However, as the tv series progressed this became less and less realistic as the show attempted to be more and more sensational.
Now fantasy has purposefully ignored armour forever. Realistic battles with armoured knights would be horrendously boring, because when it comes down to it, armour works. Probably the most realistic scene in Game of Thrones is when Arya tries to stab the hound and he smacks her aside tapping his armour.
So unsurprisingly fantasy has a habit of turning all battles into beautifully choreographed murder ballets. Awesome to watch, even if they’re stupid.
The problem wasn’t with the murder ballet or the people in chainmail getting hit once in the stomach then immediately dying, it was in how the battles started to go. See in the book, no one important really dies in battles, instead they get captured and held for ransom, then executed, or outpoliticed and murdered (murder rates in medieval Oxford are estimated to have been 100x higher than today).
Aristocrats generally stayed a fairly healthy distance from battles, and wore armour, because, armour worked. Now killing a side character here and there in the throws of battle is forgivable, what was less forgivable was the Knights of the Vale teleporting out of nowhere to attack the Boltons.
Firstly it was just a repeat of the Baratheon attack on the wildlings, but second it didn’t make any sense because unlike the wildlings the Boltons were an army, they should have had scouts, and you know, people in towers watching the battle. That was just another little thing that people didn’t notice but as the seasons went on the battles just made less and less sense.
Characters stopped dying realistic and clever deaths and instead HOLD DOOR stab stab stab, or Run Arya stab stab stab. The show devolved from a carefully thought out series, into just. Let's kill all these side characters as fast as we can. Deaths no longer had any thought in them, it just became, put the character this person has an arc with next to them a A) have the good character stab them or B) have them tragically die protecting the other one.
2. What happened to the people?
Throughout season 1 through 6 there is the ever-underlying tensions between the aristocracies, and the lower classes. The Tyrells, the second most powerful family, are beloved by the mob, and the high septon begins using the anger of the people to build a powerbase directly opposed to Cersei. He’s so powerful he can imprison her, the Queen Mother, and no one does anything. Why doesn’t the kings guard walk down and obliterate him? Because the people will revolt. Westeros in Season 1 was a kingdom just recovering from the brutal era defining war of Robert and Rhaegar, when they are plunged straight back into a war by their children. The anger of the people is always there in the background building to something, then the high septon harnesses it and everyone is set for an epic showdown! So many alliances rest on a knives edge and Cersei true to character blows them up! It is one of the stupidest decisions by any character in the series but that is what Cersei is!
Her most defining line in the series up until now was when she threatened little finger “power is power” she says menacingly. This line so perfectly encapsulated her because it’s dumb. She’s someone who’s been raised to think she has a divine right to power. Everything in the series up until now has shown that power is not power, your power rests on money, on influence, information, and the people, but all Cersei sees is her divine right, if she does it then it is right. Blowing up the Sept was brilliantly in character, because Cersei thinks everyone will fall in line. She thinks a city on the brink of revolution, and vitally important alliances on the brink of betrayal will all just sort themselves out if she kills everyone she dislikes, and of course it…. Totally works.
The people of the city have zero mention after this, the vast hordes of plebs who had the aristocrats in fear… go home and forget about it? And the Lannister vitally important allies, the allies who have been doing the fighting dying, financing, and feeding of the war, because the Lannister armies are dealt with off screen.
“Our men were never much good at fighting” Bemoans Allana, the head of the second most powerful family in the kingdom. Keep in mind that this entire situation arose because one of the chief families rose in rebellion. Season 5 was entirely about the importance of keeping Dorn onside, because though they weren’t that important their mountains and deserts kept them safe, and the Stark rebellion could only be put down by bringing one of the more powerful minor lords on side sparking the Red Wedding.
The entire Red Wedding happens because Rob Stark makes a tiny mistake when negotiating with a minor lord and chooses the honorable path over practical path which is exactly what got his father killed. Rob and Ned die because they just aren’t cut throat enough to negotiate the world of court politics. Minor slip ups with no name characters get them killed.
The Arryns just wait it out in the Vale, because of mountains. And the Tyrells, the fabulously wealthy and poweful Tyrells, who have a completely fresh army having been untouched by war collapse off screen.
Now the Tyrells could have been written out, but their utter irrelevance shows how the show transitioned from a show driven by plotters, interesting characters dropped in fantastic situations who then had to think their way out. Into mere plot devices.
1. The series stopped being driven by characters and started being driven by plot.
In season 5 there was a death you’d be forgiven for missing. Barristan Selmy is stabbed to death in an alley without a word. Barristan the Bold, Barristan the Brave, head of the kingsguard. He is apparently the best swordsman in the world, and he just dies. Now at the time people wrote it off as the unpredictability of war, even the best swordsman can be stricken down in a dirty ally. But behind the scenes the death of Barristan showed something much different.
Ian McElhinney the actor who portrayed Barristan, was also a fan of the books, on reading about his death wrote to D&D, saying hang on you sure you want to kill my character like this? This is how D&D responded
That is a video of them essentially making fun of someone who is an important character and a fan of the books, for questioning them. They had no interest in actual character development. Barristan Selmy isn’t the Mountain, he’s not some idiot blundering around blindly trusting in his invincibility, he was head of the Kingsguard for a reason. So why in god’s name was he wandering about, unprotected in a city already in the throws of revolution?
“It just made us want to kill him more”
And that’s what went wrong with Game of Thrones the directors stopped caring what characters would actually do, and just started writing them out for shock value, and for plot. There is a lot people will forgive; magic armour, non sensical battles, access to explosives, all those things could have been brushed aside. The one true sin of Game of Thrones was that it threw away the characters.
The characters drove the world, they reacted as you would expect them to react, and the world responded logically. And then they didn’t and everything went to hell.
Now whether anybody could have tied up the ridiculously vast world of Game of Thrones successfully is anyone’s guess (since George RR Martin won’t). The show buckled under its realism, and the massive expectations that were placed on it, and had we actually tied up every loose end we wanted tied, we would be looking at season 37 the ‘what happened to Hot Pie season’.
Maybe a good ending to Game of Thrones is impossible. Who knows. We’ll certainly not Benioff and Weiss that's for sure.
Comments