Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Game of Booooooring

Game of Booooooring

This is going to be yet another unpopular opinion piece, but since the season is over, it's all going to be considered nothing more than white noise anyway. But I have to say, Game of Thrones has been pretty god damn boring. Even the season finale was a snoozer.

Just look at the Game of Thrones finale. It was really disjointed and strange. People keep talking about how the show is laying pipe down for future events, but that's basically the entire show -- laying pipe for future events that hardly ever come and when they do, they only amount to just more pipe being laid down.

I'm not saying I won't watch season 3, because hey, that pipe is already laid down, but what's even the point anymore? You have lost a loyal customer this day, HBO! Or should I call you HBBLOW!

Just think about it, it's a pretty blatant "Oh shit, I bet you want to see the next season of this show now, right?!" Which, I guess is kind of whatever, but that's basically what they did last season, so it's not like they're coming out of left field with it. But I can still be annoyed with it, can't I -- mainly because it's nothing but more pipe being laid down.

It's an endless journey with minimal payoff, and the writing isn't that good. At least not good enough to make the journey satisfying in itself. I got sick of waiting to see five minutes per episode of characters' stories and just went ahead and read the books... Book 3 has one of my favorite lines so far;
"I took her castle and she took my heart."
It's got to be maybe the best line of everything ever written on earth.. God-fuckin'-damn it. At best, it's great if you want a sprawling, low-magic pot boiler and you have really low empathy for women and/or are a man.

I can tell that season 3 is going to be the worst thing ever, especially because that's when Shae "betrays" Tyrion by testifying against him. Everything about that is just going to piss me off, especially the outrage by the nerds on the internet. But hey, you still have to watch the show because you get to see all the really great costumes involved in it.

Maybe it's just not the shows fault. The first book, after all, was better suited for adaptation. The story was pretty well tied together, you had Ned as a sort-of-main character. After that it becomes a real sprawling ensemble thing. Some books don't even have anything about characters you care about. So you end up getting more episodes where each plot line gets a whole two to five minutes to move forward ever so slowly.

The blackwater battle episode this season was probably the best episode, mainly because it focused entirely on the one plot line and maybe four or five key characters, giving everything room to breathe, as well as having one narrative arc and event from start to finish, instead of jumping around like some backwoods tick.

I have to say, it would be better if they did more episodes like that in the future, but I doubt they will because if anything, the plot gets even more sprawling and the characters get even more disparate and separated from one another.

In short, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

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