How are you enjoying Season 8?

They have a couple of things going for them. No D&D, and at least some of them are drawing from GRRM’s prequel books regarding the Targaryens.

 

There's plenty of good stuff but it isn't quite living up to what I expected from the final seasons (should have been more than one full season to wrap up so much material) of what should have been my favourite all-time show. It looks like I am not going to be satisfied with many of the character resolutions and the overall feeling of things being super-rushed, as I was worried about. As Lip mentioned above though, the visuals have been great.

 

Yeah, I read the first couple and I need to finish them.

I remember one thing really stuck out to me after reading the first book. Even though the first season (still probably the best season overall, IMO) stuck really close to the book, the first time Dany and Drogo have sex, she clearly gives consent in the book. In the show, he rapes her. That really bothered me. Like, if that was the way it was originally written, then fine. But I guess D&D didn't feel being sold off by your ***hole brother like a piece of meat was harsh treatment enough for their strong female lead; nah only rape builds character. That was a stupid choice, IMO. Because that sequence in the book makes Drogo a more redeeming character; you realize that he's less of a brute than other Dothraki. Whereas in the show, he's as much of a pig as any other Khal at the beginning. They eventually fall in love but it still has more of a Stockholm syndrome feel to it.

 

Exactly this. I dont understand how people dont get it.

 

Season 8 ranks in the top 3 of the great disappointments of my nerd life.

They are as follows:

1. Mass Effect 3 ending
2. Godzilla 2014
3. Game of Thrones season 8

 

Deeply disappointed. Feels like they gave a Maserati over to a couple of Yugo mechanics.

 

Started off strong with the first 2 episodes but the last 3 have gone downhill. Im still enjoying it but am disappointed

 

Disappointing seems to be echoed from the fans to the actors.

 

I was disappointed with the white walker threat. I believe they did rush things and didn't properly show that the Ice threat was just as detrimental as the fire threat. Ice being the White Walkers, fire being the dragon queen. I assumed it was about Jon Snow, but perhaps he's the red herring.

The people united to destroy the ice threat behind the help of the fire threat, only to be subdued by the fire threat. Very deep. It should have been longer. Perhaps an entire season devoted to the threat of the Khaleesi, which literally means warlord queen.

The funny thing is, Cersei has done nothing personally against the Starks or the Targaryn's yet she's the threat? Literally before episode 4 and killing Missandei, what did Cersei do to anyone not named the Sparrow or Tyrells?

 

Yeah.. full blown Last Jedi...

 

I collected cast members' comments about the final season or finale script during this past Winter/Spring before season 8 began and this video is fairly in line with most of them.

"You're going to need therapy," Christie says, but she could not confirm or deny Erin's question about whether or not people are dying. "I think just the show ending is going to send all of the world into professional help."

We're Going to Need Therapy After Game of Thrones Season 8

“You should have seen Kit’s face at the read-through!” laughs Clarke, in a long white fur coat. When the entire cast sat down in Belfast in October 2017 to act out the final six episodes in their entirety over two days, Harington had chosen not to read them in advance, she says. So he found out the fate of his character — and all the others — in public.

“His reactions were insane,” says Clarke. “And even for me, hearing it all come together … Everyone was crying.”

Farewell to Winterfell: Game of Thrones cast talks, spoiler-free, about the final season | The Star

Game of Thrones actor Emilia Clarke has said she shed tears while filming her final scenes.

Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen on the HBO show, revealed that she walked around London for “three hours aimlessly” after being handed the script for the upcoming eighth season.

“It might as well have been raining and I would’ve just walked in it not knowing what to do,” she told Press Association.

There were “loads of tears” filming her last words, she said, adding: “That was the moment I realised that alcohol can also be a depressant.

“I was kind of nursing a glass of wine going, ‘I don’t know why I’m not getting any happier from this!”’

Emilia Clarke reveals she cried while filming final Game of Thrones scenes

"Who knows if it will be satisfying for the fans. I think a lot of fans will be disappointed and a lot of fans will be over the moon, I think."

Turner teased Sansa's arc during the eighth and final season, saying, "She kind of takes ownership over who she is and what she stands for. Over the course of the series she’s been completely unaware of what she wants, where she wants to be, who she really is, and at the end of this season, I feel she is the most self-assured character in the show."

Turner said that saying goodbye to Sansa Stark and Game of Thrones was "really bittersweet."

Game of Thrones: Sophie Turner Thinks Series Finale Will Divide Fans - IGN

"I don't think anyone is going to be satisfied [when it ends]. I don't think anyone wants it to end but I'm really proud of this final season,"

Maisie Williams: 'No one will be satisfied when Game Of Thrones ends'

"I don’t know if you can please everyone.” Conleth Hill

“Not everyone’s going to be pleased, because it’s such a big show, and it’s divisive,” agreed Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who plays Bran Stark in the series.

“But I think we have wrapped it up as convincingly and honestly and as cleverly as we could hope.”

“Everyone has a certain expectation, I guess,” added Carice van Houten, who plays Red Priestess Melisandre.

“It’s been building up so much. But [the ending]’s great, as well, it’s going to surprise you.”

“I’m sure people will be moaning about something,” quipped Hill.

“I think everyone would agree in terms of saying they think their character endings are just and are the best way to wrap the characters up,” Hempstead Wright concluded.

“Even if, God forbid, some of them might die.”

Game of Thrones cast tease “numbing” ending: “Not everyone’s going to be pleased”

Kit Harington (Jon Snow) told the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show that he’s "maybe not happy, but very satisfied" with the ending.

“I was very shocked and surprised at certain events unfolding, and then I blubbed my eyes out. I cried.”

"I had theories all along and all of them were wrong," he said. "They were all wrong and I'm quite glad I never told anyone my theories because they were all wrong."

– Late Show With Stephen Colbert

CVH: "It is what it is, and so that’s what it should be. There’s nothing to say about whether I’d change it if I were in charge. In an ideal world we would want Samwell Tarly to be the king and rule the world but unfortunately, that’s not the reality." – Country and Townhouse

Everything The 'Game Of Thrones' Cast Have Said About The Season 8 Finale

Maisie Williams, who plays Arya Stark, told the Sunday Times that she and her mom wrote out who they thought would survive by the time the end credits rolled on the finale of the eight season. And apparently neither of their brackets made it very far.

"I said, 'Let's predict the final series. You call who you think is going to be alive and who you think is going to be dead. So will I.' And we did. And we were both wrong," she said.

Joe Dempsie, who plays Gendry Baratheon, had a similar experience. "At the top of every script there is a cast list for every character involved in that episode. A few of us were tempted to check if we were in the last one," he told the Sunday Times. "Look, Gendry's the last surviving blood Baratheon. He's got to have a pretty strong claim. But I don't even trust the fact that I have the answers in my brain. It feels like you're walking around with a secret that the whole world wants to know."

Even the ‘Game of Thrones’ Actors Get Their Show Theories Wrong

“The things that girl has gone through are just unbelievable and awful,” [Turner] says. Sansa’s was a slow journey toward mastery of her environment; she was always smarter than she might have seemed, with Turner showing us just how acutely she examined her world through crystalline blue eyes.

She was particularly moved when [showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] presented her with a storyboard of their favorite Sansa scene, which happened to be her very last scene of the entire show. Turner already has it hanging at home; no one’s noticed.

This New Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams Interview Adds Fuel to a Big ‘Game of Thrones’ Theory

“I was very shocked and surprised at certain events unfolding,” Harington said Tuesday on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert of reading the final script. “And then I blubbed my eyes out. I cried. I cried, yeah.”

Kit Harington Says He Totally Lost It Over Game of Thrones Ending: 'I Blubbed My Eyes Out'

“All I can tell you is when I read the final episode I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. Because we’ve all conjectured and wondered and been asked over the years, who, what, how, and it’s not ANYTHING you could have guessed. It’s brilliant, so movingly clever.”

“[T]he writers have always known where they want the story to end, they’ve been working towards this from the beginning,”

Read more at: Game of Thrones’ Gemma Whelan on Yara Greyjoy and her new BBC drama Gentleman Jack

Everything The 'Game Of Thrones' Cast Have Said About The Season 8 Finale

Once she finished reading, Christie did the exact same thing her costar Emilia Clarke was doing across the wide sea in London after finishing reading about Daenerys Targaryen.

“I had to go for a very long walk,” Christie says. “A long walk and I did not stop. I had lots of questions. If there’s a character you care about and you feel like they go through some sort of hell you feel protective toward them.”

Yet Christie added that the final season storyline is also hugely satisfying. “There’s something about this story that’s compulsive and essential,” she says. “What [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] have done in terms of this being the final season is masterful. I don’t think there’s any way people aren’t going to want more.”

“This season we see more of Brienne than ever before,” she says. “I’m more involved this season and I’m delighted the character has been learning from everyone she’s been around.

'Game of Thrones' star Gwendoline Christie: 'Every couple pages I thought I was dead'

Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) read the scripts in one late night sitting, stating:

“I turned to my best mate and was like, ‘Oh my God! I gotta go! I gotta go!' And I completely flipped out. Genuinely the effect it had on me was profound. That sounds insanely pretentious, but I’m an actor, so I’m allowed one pretentious adjective per season.”

Game of Thrones Cast Reveal Reactions To Final Season Scripts

Bryan Cogman: “It’s about all of these disparate characters coming together to face a common enemy, dealing with their own past, and defining the person they want to be in the face of certain death. It’s an incredibly emotional haunting bittersweet final season and I think it honors very much what [author George R.R. Martin] set out to do — which is flipping this kind of story on its head.”

"Okay, so I read the scripts this season, and I, in some kind of a daze, walked out of my house. The only thing I took was my keys, and about three hours later I arrived back home, and I still hadn’t taken it all in... I don’t know if anyone’s ready. I don’t know if TVs are ready."

'Game of Thrones': Sophie Turner on the Final Season's "Incredibly Emotional" Ending

 

Mass Effect 3 ending seems like a good comparison here.

 

More than 750,000 sign petition for Game of Thrones season eight remake

 

Whats gonna be funny is if GRRM does the same in the incoming books and have Daenarys become evil.

Im sure he did a better job with forshadowing and development.

 

This seems both an exercise in futility and an expression of spoiled entitlement.

Seems at least 750,000 Game of Thrones fans have something in common with Joffrey.

 

Interesting to see if any actor will ever come out in the future expressing criticism.
I understand at present time they have to be professional about it but I am sure that even if none of them will ever, some people will still construe they agree with the disappointed fans, notwithstanding that there are also pleased fans (like me).

I think we should go back to being critical without resorting only to extremes of best ever or worst ever.
Disagreeing with narrative choices is perfectly reasonable but an audience has by definition no creative input.
All this "outrage" undermines a normal understanding of what makes stories good or bad, effective or meandering, creating a culture of audience's entitlement that in the (really) long term could poison what creative freedom there is in popular entertainment.

By all means, express any criticism in the tone you feel appropriate, harsh or otherwise, but petitions or boycotts are definitely a symptom of a degrading capacity of digesting and managing disappointment.
We are owed nothing, there is enough entertainment product to go find something else to cleans a sour palate instead of demanding to somehow void what one did not like.

Again, harsh criticism is not at all what I am yapping against.

 

I highly suspect the majority of those are bots, especially considering the absolutely unusual speed at which those signature ammassed; obviously there is a real possibility that even more real audience members would nonetheless agree with it, but I doubt that.

No debating that a sizable portion is really disappointed, maybe even a majority of the ones actively debating genre fare online.

Still, casual viewers seem not that disappointed judging by tv shares and ratings: casual viewers drop series a lot more easily than hardcore ones.

 

I would have to see those ratings. The last few episodes of Game of Thrones have not scored well at places like Metacritic when it came to audience scores. Not the be-all-and-end-all of data, I know, but indicative of an overall feeling.

 

My bad, I worded it unclearly: I meant tv share ratings.

 

That petition is ridiculous. I mean, I think this season is terrible, and it's interesting talking about it and debating about how it could have gone. But there are much more important things to take action against.

 

The media is really helping this along. If you Google: game of thrones petition, you will see articles about it from every major newspaper, magazine, etc. ( I read a half dozen or more myself) covering its growing totals and more importantly, linking to the petition web page itself.

 

Yep, that is what I was getting at in my other post, we are losing sight of healthy debate and even worse, normalizing these tantrums.

I would add that now everyone is a critic, while sometimes people should have a tiny bit more respect of the craft of the people working in entertainment, it is an harder job than it looks more often than not.
The rise of internet snark is a scourge, a lot of people misunderstand that for cleverness.

 

Casual viewers drop shows more easily and hardcore ones see things through, but they don’t necessarily sign on for spinoffs if they aren’t happy. GoT is a very hard show to finish, I get that. I can accept non-ideal endings and have done so in other things I’m a fan of. What I don’t forgive is rushing it.