Game of Thrones: The Cool is Not Enough

Kristin Devine

Kristin has humbly retired as Ordinary Times' friendly neighborhood political whipping girl to focus on culture and gender issues. She lives in a wildlife refuge in rural Washington state with too many children and way too many animals. There's also a blog which most people would very much disapprove of https://atomicfeminist.com/

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70 Responses

  1. North says:

    Zomg that link! It burns! Especially considering that the written portion of GoT (and the good portion of the show that was faithful to it) hinged very heavily on the enormous difficulty of taking a well manned castle with a large army. Riverrun and Storm’s End both held out for months in the beginning of the show and nailed down enormous armies in grueling sieges but Winterfell fell in the course of an hour to an army that literally was barely capable of strategy beyond “shuffle at the walls”.

    And if anyone wishes to say “oh but those were magic zombies!” let us not forget Highgarden which was heavily manned, impeccably provisioned, girdled around with massive walls and was fully aware that Jaime Lannister advancing on them with a Lannister army (queue Lady Olenna looking anxiously at them miles away from atop her towers) and yet fell without even a single minute of explanation as to how this feat was accomplished. The corpse of Tywin Lannister pops up to say “Hey son, this magic seige cracking pixie dust of yours would have been handy a couple years earlier in the Riverlands yo.”

    The teleporting of massed armies over distance, the theft, burning and magical resurrections of entire forests of wooden ships and the sheer intel that the bad guys were routinely furnished boggles the mind. Did Ramsay have a CIA drone team monitoring his enemies movements? Did Cersei and Euron have spies in place with CB radios or something to inform them of where the fleets and air forces of their enemies were headed? What the hell?

    Great article Kristin.Report

    • Kristin Devine in reply to North says:

      GREAT POINT about Winterfell. I can rant about the Winterfell battle for hours but hadn’t even considered that aspect of it.

      The Highgarden thing is made even worse by then the installation of Bronn as the lord of Highgarden and all of a sudden he’s the most powerful man in Westeros, with money and resources galore. Do they expect us to believe that Highgarden was easily defeated but somehow wasn’t completely destroyed in the process?

      I’m like, if Highgarden was so powerful, why did it fall so easily considering the Lannisters had been really decimated by several big losses along the way?Report

      • North in reply to Kristin Devine says:

        Exactly. It’s.. barely.. conceivable that the Tyrells wouldn’t have fared well in the field. They had a lot of soldiers but not a lot of commanders and the soldiers were green whereas the Lannister forces were very very experienced with very seasoned commanders so, maybe, in an open engagement the Tyrells, despite having overwhelming numerical superiority could have lost.

        But sieging Highgarden? You don’t need to be seasoned to shoot arrows, throw rocks or push ladders off walls. Jamie Lannister shouldn’t have been able to take High Garden at all, let alone quickly. No matter how much more experienced his soldiers were. By the time Daeny showed up on her dragons Lady Olenna wouldn’t have even have been running low on grapes. She could have toasted marshmallows off the walls of High Garden while the Mother of Dragons burned the Lannisters in their trenches.

        But oh no, it’s only cool if the good guys are desperate and the odds aren’t in their favor so we need magic mumble mumble something to eliminate High Garden.Report

        • Kristin Devine in reply to North says:

          Great point about the alliance with Dany as well. And the Dornish, who could have come over the mountains and pinched the Lannisters between them and Highgarden.Report

          • North in reply to Kristin Devine says:

            Quite so. Heck, a quick google search reminds me that High Garden has river access to the sea. Without naval support you -couldn’t- siege that castle. There’s literally no explanation as to how Jamie Lannister took the castle. It showed Olenna fretting as she looked at his army coming on and then next scene Jamie walked into her room and she asked sadly if her people even put up a fight.

            It’s like you said: Benioff thought the scene where Olenna says “tell Cersei, I want her to know it was me” would be cool. So they simply handwaved every step in between away so that the scene could occur.Report

            • Kristin Devine in reply to North says:

              Yes, as if her people – after seeing the Lannisters imprison (by manipulating the church) and then explode the beloved Margaery and Loras, would have just laid down arms without a fight at all. They would have wanted to destroy the Lannisters from revenge and probably would have been willing to fight to the bitter end to do it. If not, that should have been set up SOMEHOW.

              And you know what, the thing that sucks is, that was a cool scene, and I liked it. But honestly what was even the result of it? did anything change? It just seemed like a will of the wisp of no consequence whatsoever.Report

              • North in reply to Kristin Devine says:

                It was a cool scene but, honestly, let’s give credit where it’s due: to the exquisite and incredibly skilled Diana Rigg who made the character and also sold that scene.
                In narrative and writing terms it was utter garbage. It is a testament to Diana Riggs’ skill that she could spin that straw into gold. Which just feeds back to another of your points: the initial casting was very well done.Report

      • In the books (though this is inadequately fleshed out in the show IMO) Renly Baratheon is dangerous because he has the men and resources of Highgarden courtesy of Loras Tyrell. 80,000 men, and supposedly that was only what Highgarden could SPARE. That’s why Stannis had to resort to magic, because he could never have beaten Renly otherwise thanks to Highgarden.

        No effin way could Jaime easily stroll into Highgarden with the Lannister armies after fighting Robb Stark, Stannis, and the Brotherhood (who had been harrying the Lannister army for years by that point)Report

        • North in reply to Kristin Devine says:

          Yes, exactly, like in the books the general understanding was that if Highgarden made common cause with any of the Lannisters other foes the Lannisters would be finished. Catelyn rode across the whole Kingdom to treat with Renly for that exact reason.Report

  2. Michael Cain says:

    I have visions of Benioff and Weiss in a meeting with the assistant writers before starting the last two seasons and telling them, “Here’s the outline. The Starks win. The Lannisters lose. Most of the rest of the interesting characters die or wander aimlessly away. Keep Tyrion because Dinklage’s fans will kill us otherwise. There’s a huge budget for effects. We won’t see you much because we’ve got new projects. Carry on.”

    Despite James K’s arguments about what A Song of Ice and Fire was going to be, I think George R. R. Martin has written himself into a corner: the books have been so successful that the publishers are insisting he deliver the tropes the readers want.Report

    • I would love to know what’s going on in GRRM’s head right now. I fully believe that SOMETHING has upended his apple cart. Whether it’s corporate meddling, fan service, or as some speculate, the opposite of fan service, where he wants to flummox the fans and give them nothing they want so ends up having to rewrite the entire thing whenever a fan theory predicts something he had planned, I don’t know, but it’s obvious the dude has hit some sort of wall and can’t get over it. I understand writer’s block and nerves about living up to expectations but this feels different to me.

      As for Benioff and Weiss, I’m sure you know this already Michael but for those who don’t, my research seems to indicate they only ever saw GoT as a means to an end – it wasn’t a property they particularly loved, and clearly did not even understand the appeal of it. They were very possibly being given a chance at the Star Wars universe and so they rushed through the last few seasons of GoT so they could work on that, but then in a delicious twist of irony did such a poor job of GoT that they ended up losing their shot at Star Wars too. Then, as if we all didn’t know already they saw GoT not as their end game but as their fallback plan, they tried to come up with a GoT spinoff and everyone was like “nah”.

      Dudes blinded by ambition into making stupid short sighted decisions that cost them everything. IDK it’s almost something GRRM could have written.Report

      • North in reply to Kristin Devine says:

        I think we’ve seen this before. Robert Jordan suffered the exact same thing with the Wheel of time. It’s, in my opinion, the opposite of corporate meddling. It is terrible terrible freedom!
        When the author gets past a certain level of popularity the corporate suits say “What he does works, whatever he says goes” and that means the editors are suddenly neutralized or powerless. There is no one on the phone saying “Robert/George do you need to add these new characters? What is the point of this new plot wrinkle? I know this new area/culture is cool but how do they advance your overarching story?” So every notion the author has simply goes into the story.
        You see this in both Martin and Jordan’s later books. New characters and developments multiply but every new character and avenue you add has to be advanced as the entire story advances. It’s like adding more and more sleds behind the same team of dogs. Martin and Jordan can still write as much as they can write but now everything they write they have to say “Oh how does this impact all these new angles?”: the story goes slower and slower and writing it becomes more and more miserable. Also now that they’re rich and famous the allure of new, fresh stories sings in their ears- shorn of the very complexities they added. They don’t need to do it to make their next mortgage payment.

        Robert Jordan died before he finished Wheel of Time. The suits and his estate brought in a ghost writer. The first thing they did was shear off, like, all but a few of the unimportant newer characters and then wrote the story to a close. It sucked.

        I fear George is going to follow the same bleak path. I suspect he genuinely hates writing on the core novel set now.Report

        • InMD in reply to North says:

          Once something becomes a hit that makes money it’s hard to keep it from becoming a vehicle. That can manifest in a few ways from suits making money to creator vanity to other creative types using it as a means for their own ideas and advancement. None of these are incompatible with creating something good but once that happens it becomes easy to lose sight of the actual quality of the end product.Report

        • Kristin Devine in reply to North says:

          It is so hard for me with those two because they came along in my life right when I was formulating my thoughts on writing. Each of them taught me a huge amount about writing both in their moments of perfection, but also in their excesses. I am not a dummy but I literally cannot track in my brain some of the stuff that happens in the books, GoT in particular (Jordan was better at letting you get to know the extraneous characters, IMO, while Martin just basically expends a paragraph laying out some sort of genealogy that I tend to skip over just like those chapters in the Bible where everyone is begatting everyone.).

          That’s been one of the nice things about rereading it since I watched the show, I can follow the secondary characters better. But portions of the GoT books are very nearly unreadable to me because I’m just like, “yeah yeah yeah, Glovers and Cerwins and Umbers, but what is happening to Sansa right now”Report

        • Michael Cain in reply to North says:

          A few years back it was reported that David Weber had some serious health problems. Rather than pressing on in his previous style, he wound up both the then-current Safehold saga and the main line of the Honor Harrington books in short order. In both cases, there was a jarring change of pace.Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

            Wait, he finished them? Maybe I can finally read them.Report

            • For certain values of “finished.”Report

            • JS in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              Yeah, the Safehold books ended…real quick. Then he wrote another, which ended on a cliffhanger?

              And I dug the Safehold concept. The story was a bit contrived in order to hit the particular mechanism Weber wanted to write (“What if there was a world war that basically captured the technological development from about 1600 to the early 1900s over the course of the war?). Which is admittedly ALSO the Honor Harrington books, but that’s “space analogues”.

              It’s shoehorned into a single generation of people for dubious reasons, but if you turn off certain parts of your brain and just go with the flow, you get a fun little ride through the evolution of a few hundred years of war — specifically the invention of “stuff that explodes reliably and the cool explosive things we can do with it” (it starts with unreliable gunpowder and musket-loaders and more or less ends with land mines, WW1 era rifles, etc)Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to JS says:

                I got through book for of Safehold, I think, before I started to tire of it. I had heard he had at least 4 more books planned for the series (maybe more) and I decided the payout wasn’t worth the effort.Report

              • JS in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Depends on how fast you read. To me they’re the sort of thing I read when I’m tired and, more specifically, want to be able to put down the book at bedtime.

                Weber is very much, to me, beach reading. Mindless, enjoyable enough to pass the time, but not engrossing enough that I won’t put it down if anything comes up.

                In short: I never pick up a Weber book and end up reading to 3:00AM unless I’m literally working the night shift. Nor do I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t want “I wanna see some stuff blow up, and sometimes 85 paragraphs about a specific type of gunpowder that is probably like..75% right?”Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to JS says:

                Back in the days when I had to do lots of business travel, before smartphones and tablets or even laptops were common, I always carried an “airplane novel.” Thick, paperback, easy-to-read prose, plot moved right along, didn’t require lots of thinking. Sanders’ Deadly Sins books, early Tom Clancy, Stephen King, the first batch of Honor Harrington, lots of others. I think I found Game of Thrones because I was looking for something waiting for the plane to load. Before I started thinning the book shelves in anticipation of downsizing, I had a fairly embarrassing number of these.Report

          • This is why very-longform writers should endeavor to make every individual storyline somewhat stand alone, just in case it cannot BE wrapped up for some reason.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to North says:

          See also David Weber and his Harrington books, or the Safehold books.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kristin Devine says:

        Fan service over everything is yet another internet borne disease.Report

        • The best thing in the world to me as a viewer is when the writers don’t give me what I want, but give me something better. I don’t know why so many other people prefer the fan service angle of it. :/Report

          • That resonates with me. I’m in the 3d season of Breaking Bad (please no spoilers!). At first, I didn’t like it, because I wanted Walter White’s descent to be more gradual instead of, basically, killing a guy in the pilot episode.

            But….I like the show in a way I didn’t think I would from the pilot. It probably wouldn’t be the same show, or as gripping (for me) if they had written the story I wanted them to write. (That said, Walter White’s evil seems a bit too matter of course and sui generis to be believable to me, and that still bothers me a bit.)Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          It’s possible to make it “fan service”. It’s also possible to make it “paying the debt I owe”.

          When we’re talking about spending one’s entertainment dollar and even more precious entertainment hour or three, it’s important to spend that money and that time on something that doesn’t make you say “I could have just watched Freejack again.”Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to Jaybird says:

            Producers of entertainment don’t owe the fans anything more than a well crafted and entertaining story.

            Anything for the fans is great, but has to be take a backseat to telling a good story.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              And the lady who writes something that will get you to say “wow, this was so good, I’m going to buy it for my friends so they can enjoy it too!” will sell more copies than the guy who writes something that leaves you saying “I am sadder but wiser, like that guy at the end of Rime of the Ancient Mariner” will have fewer fans and it’ll be tougher to move product.

              I mean: I went from watching people tell me “JAY YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS SHOW!” to watching people tell me “Ugh, just avoid it.”

              I’ll avoid it. I mean, I still have Freejack over there on the shelf.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Jaybird says:

                How does any of that relate to fan service?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                It has to do with the whole issue of “one woman’s happy ending is another woman’s pandering”.

                I am 100% down with being opposed to deus ex machina endings to the play where the mayor shows up, pardons the protagonist, and then he officiates a wedding to tie up the main sub-plot. Aristotle complained about that back… not at Civilization’s dawn, really, but at the time of Civilization getting a cup of coffee.

                So I’m not demanding a happy ending no matter what.

                I’m demanding an ending that is satisfying enough to get me to say “I’m pleased to have done *THIS* instead of *THAT*.”

                Because, you know what? I’ve got Quantum Leap right over there and I can just watch that again and if your show ain’t better than Quantum Leap, why in the hell should I watch it?Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Jaybird says:

                Perhaps we having different working definitions of fan service?

                For me, fan service is injecting characters, settings, relationships/conflicts, or McGuffins (or other plot elements) into a story because fans would enjoy it.

                Done well, fan service is a treat.

                Done poorly, it damages a property.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I was reading “fan service” as “trope delivery” rather than something like including Tom Bombadil in the director’s cut.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird says:

                Bombadil was just a long (silly) way to introduce a blade. Even when I was in high school and reading it for the first time, I was all “Chekhov’s gun. If you’re going to spend that much time and effort getting that blade into the story, it better be important later.”Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain says:

                I liked how Bombadil didn’t give a dang about the ring. Picked it up, said “ooooh, you guys are in the middle of something really interesting! Good luck with that!” and gave the ring back without a moment’s hesitation.

                It pointed out that, yeah, there were still parts of the world that were there before this silly ring business and will be there after the silly ring business is resolved. And humming a merry tune.Report

              • Brent F in reply to Michael Cain says:

                I’ve been following a guy who is going through Tolkien’s notes to reconstruct how he wrote the thing and that isn’t the case at all. Tom Bombadil is there because at that point in the story the hobbits need to be rescued by somebody because they’re neophyte adventurers. There was numerous iterations of who does the rescuing.

                The sword being important in book three is an example of the author taking the opportunity to backfill what you previously wrote to make a more cohesive whole.

                One thing reading about this that suprised me and I think is instructive is that as complex and detailed Tolkien’s worldbuilding is, the worldbuilding comes from fulfilling story needs and elements and histories come as needed to fulfill story beats. He didn’t imagine a world then wrote a story in it, he wrote an story and crafted the world it would take place in on the fly.Report

    • James K in reply to Michael Cain says:

      For what it’s worth I think you’re right about GRRM being stuck in his writing, I think that’s why the last season is so choppy. Martin can’t figure out how to get everything lined up for the end while maintaining the coherency of his setting an characters. Weiss and Benioff didn’t care about that and didn’t have time so they just forced it to fit.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Does Han have closets full of matching clothes on board the Falcon somewhere?

    I have five pairs of jeans that are identical. Each was purchased at the same exact time.

    I am wearing my favorite hoodie as I type this. I look down at it in sadness and wish that I had four more upstairs in the closet.

    I think about Han owning multiple identical outfits and think “smart, I should do that” rather than something that nobody would do.

    For what that’s worth.Report

  4. The show’s quality crashed as its special effects budget increased. This is not a coincidence.Report

  5. “This is where I part company with Mike about the Rule of Cool.”

    I don’t think you are parting company with me. We’re still on the same rope! I absolutely agree. As I said in another post, I’m willing to suspend disbelief. But with the new Star Wars or the New Trek or other things, I see no reason why I *should*.

    And 100% on Abrams. The Hobbit movies suffered from this as well: a focus on cool moments at the expense of plot.Report

    • North in reply to Michael Siegel says:

      Not to mention they took a tiny single children’s book and stretched it out over three fishing movies. No human would survive that kind of turn on the rack. It was a crime against literature and three absolutely garbage movies too.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to North says:

        The Desolation of Smaug struck me as something that was going to be awesome and it had some seriously cool stuff and then they said “COME BACK FOR THE HUGE CONCLUSION!” and the third movie took 10 minutes to kill Smaug.

        And I still had 2 hours left.

        Yep, those are 5 armies, alright.Report

        • North in reply to Jaybird says:

          I can’t say anything nice about any of those three movies. I really can’t. It’s probably a personal failing but I consider them entirely bereft of merit from root to branch. Desolation of the Dragon? You mean the Desolation of the Wyvern right? Grah!Report

          • Jaybird in reply to North says:

            The first two weren’t *BAD*. They were okay.

            I mean, if you want *AWESOME*, you have to go back to Rankin-Bass. But I didn’t find the first two movies particularly baffling. “Oh, they put some cool Silmarillion stuff in here!”, I thought. “Poor Radagast.” “Dang, they’re sure giving Handsy the Orc a lot more screentime than he deserves…”

            And then the third movie came up and it just kept going forever.Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to North says:

        “Not to mention they took a tiny single children’s book and stretched it out over three fishing movies.”

        Which was actually in keeping with Tolkein’s plans for The Hobbit; when he realized how popular The Lord Of The Rings was, he started working on an epic re-write of his earlier work, with the goal of changing both style and scope to match his trilogy, adding character appearances and direct tie-ins rather than vague allusions that were retconned into being references. (People convinced him that this wouldn’t be very popular so he settled for rewriting Riddles In The Dark.)Report

    • Yes we are in agreement, please forgive me using you as a jumping off point in that way!!Report

  6. This post reminds me of an older movie (from the 1980s) called “The Principal,” starring Jim Belushi. One of the scenes that the directors probably thought was supposed to be cool was when the principal (Belushi) rode his motorcycle up the stairs, into the school entrance, and down the hallway–to save a teacher who was being assaulted by a student.

    Ick.

    I mean, the movie was already mediocre (in my opinion), but that motorcycle scene didn’t sweeten the deal. I suppose it’s technically possible for someone to ride a motorcycle like that. But I just can’t believe anybody would.

    I haven’t watched GoT, so I can’t really comment on that.Report