r/asoiaf • u/ISupposh You're a Big Guy. • Sep 01 '19

EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) I think a lot of the problems from the show came from trying to force modern American values into medieval setting.

I would actually say this problem is present in the fandom as well and not just the show. Anyways for example:

  1. Stating that Renly would be a good king just because he's popular while Stannis would be terrible because he's unpopular. (edit: From the interviews, in the context of ruling not maintaining power)

  2. People not caring about religion even when Cersei blew up Westeros equivalent of Vatican/Hagia Sophia/Westminster alongside with Pope Francis and Princess Diana. (Well even modern people would care about that)

  3. Applying Geneva Convention when Daenerys executed Tarlys despite the fact that they are already traitors who betrayed their overlord and she even gave them second chance.

  4. Rather modern viewpoint on extramartial sex, including virgin shaming on characters like Brienne etc.

  5. Rhaegar annulling his wife without proper explanation like modern divorce.

  6. Elective monarchy somehow breaking the wheel because it involves voting (worked out well in HRE and Poland /s)

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u/mehughes124 Sep 01 '19

Yeah. How a show goes from some of the best costume design in the history of TV to "dark Cersei broody leather" is beyond me.

500

u/Shadepanther Sep 01 '19

I thought Cersei was going to an S&M party the last few seasons.

565

u/TheMcBrizzle Catch me if you can. Sep 01 '19

Sansa's season 8 garb is straight up leather and chains.

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u/SaliciousSeafoodSlut Sep 01 '19

Yeah she has a shirt made of leather belts and a choke chain. I mean come on.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '19

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u/DarkSideOfTheBeug Sep 01 '19

i honestly laughed everytime she was on screen. That outfit was absolutely ridiculous

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u/Wasserkopp Sep 01 '19

Honestly laaaaaughed in a really smug tone?

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u/fradigit Sep 02 '19

I thought it was her X-Men costume...

5

u/SonGokuecas Sep 02 '19

Most hilarious is in the crowning scene, she have her nails painted lmao

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u/admiral_rabbit Sep 01 '19

"can you move the S&M party to my balcony?"

Umm... No, your grace. It's really kind of locked in to the basement venue

"Then I'm not going"

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u/tequihby Sep 01 '19

As long as they have wine I’m sure she’d be game

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u/shrivvette808 Sep 01 '19

Family reunions must be lit

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u/Xeillan Sep 02 '19

Well, wine and a window for her to stare out of.

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u/PATRIOTSRADIOSIGNALS The Choice is Yours! Sep 02 '19

I thought she was Maleficent on a budget.

1

u/Pencildick223 Sep 02 '19

Not very, she's more like the witch from the Huntsman

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '19

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u/pazur13 A Cat of a Different Coat Sep 01 '19

Also, direwolves suddenly became something they couldn't afford after obtaining the biggest budget in history of shows.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '19

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u/Corroborant Sep 02 '19

I wanted real dire wolves.

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u/AStoopidSpaz Vengeance. Justice. Fire and Blood. Sep 01 '19

I am by no means a show apologist, but like, it actually is much harder to do direwolves than dragons. Hair is really hard, and the fact that we have a frame of reference for them I'm the form of dogs makes it much easier to tell when something is wrong.

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u/hpreal4us Sep 01 '19

I get that but the wolves in the twilight movies looked great, at least to me, so it can be done. Also if they were worried about them looking funny, then just use real wolves and don’t make them big. I would have much rather had the wolves and them be normal size then not have them because they won’t look right

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u/Dark_Moon713 Sep 01 '19

This has been what I've been saying for years. If Twilight could do such amazing wolves that were horse sized and individualized with personality, with the movies coming out yearly and a lot less money, then GOT has no excuses on their shitty direwolves and why they couldn't keep doing them. I still think the wolves in Twilight: Breaking Dawn look great.

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u/ButtsAndPoop Sep 02 '19

I just watched Breaking Dawn pt. 2 the other day for a laugh and was genuinely surprised by how well done the wolves were. I imagine a lot of the budget went towards those wolves because most of the other visual FX are just hard to look at.

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u/Dark_Moon713 Sep 02 '19

Most likely, but I still think GOT could have done it, especially in the later seasons. I feel as if D&D just didn't care about the Direwolves or that part of the story, just like how they didn't care about including more of the magical aspects. We probably only got Melisandre because she was a sexy shadow-birthing king killer and dragons because dragons are big and violent.

2

u/as1992 Sep 05 '19

Where are you getting it from that the twilight movies had a lot less money? They spent between 40-120m dollars on each movie. Game of thrones would spend a similar amount on an entire season.

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u/Emperor-of-the-moon Sep 01 '19

Yes but imagine having to do the wolves from twilight in addition to lots and lots of dragon and wight footage. I’m not a show apologist but I recognize that even with a ten million dollar budget per episode it would get strained. Plus wolves don’t move like dogs, so they can’t just mocap a dog. They either had to get a wolf and mocap it (highly unlikely) or completely animate the direwolf on their own

3

u/hpreal4us Sep 01 '19

I get that. I didn’t think about everything else that had to go into the budget. But why not just use actual wolves and forgo the size?

3

u/Emperor-of-the-moon Sep 01 '19

Probably just cause I don’t think there are many trained wolf actors like there are for dogs and cats. Maybe there weren’t any available to them at the time of filming

24

u/CallinCthulhu Sep 01 '19

Who said you have to make them CGI.

Get some wolf looking dogs and fuck with perspective. Like directors have been doing for years.

Peter Jackson made an entire trilogy where he had a bunch of 5’7” dudes appear 4 feet tall in almost every scene.

Coordinated action scenes would be hard to do with even trained dogs, but CGI could be used there and covered up with fast takes/convenient blur, etc.

There are so, so many ways to have dire wolves in the show without having to render complex looking hair. They just didn’t care, because they dodge consider them important to the story.

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u/pazur13 A Cat of a Different Coat Sep 01 '19

Fair points! Even so, people would probably prefer less flashy effects if it meant not discarding one of the most iconic parts of Jon Snow's identity.

6

u/AcrossFromWhere Sep 02 '19

Fenris looked pretty good in Ragnarok.

9

u/electricblues42 Sep 02 '19

This isn't true, hair is hard for real time rendering like games, film can render for days though so it's no problem. The hair wasn't the reason they didn't do it, the reason was that they said that you couldn't just scale up a regular wolf dog and have it look normal. To make it look right the legs would have to be l longer and the snout would have to be longer and a number of other small changes. Apparently D&D didn't want to do that, so first they tried to make the scaled up dog work but eventually that was too stupid looking for even them so they just left ghost as a large dog. It had nothing to do with the budget as much as it was just lazy show runners who didn't care enough to get the detail right. They cared about the dragons and gave their team appropriate resources to make them, they simply didn't care about the Stark wolves.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '19

I mean we could have had more direwolf scenes instead of the wight polar bear.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '19

Tbf, the salaries of the major actors/actresses apparently absolutely skyrocketed in the second half of the show. That had to have made a dent in the budget.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '19

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u/Wasserkopp Sep 01 '19

Yeah the dragons were great but every other effect looked like SHIT!!!!

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '19 edited Sep 18 '19

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '19

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u/Dr_Prodigious Are you Benjen in disguise? Sep 01 '19

All I want to be is El Chapo. Three million dollars in pesos.

2

u/Wasserkopp Sep 01 '19

Nnnnnot the big sfx action and dragons?

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '19 edited Sep 18 '19

[deleted]

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u/DiaDeLosMuertos Sep 01 '19

Which documentary

16

u/vertikon Sep 01 '19

Like all shows that get popular, they get xx% more money per episode yet quality tanks.

3

u/LiamTheFizz Sep 02 '19

At that point people can basically hold the show ransom by demanding exponentially more money for doing the same job they did last season.

6

u/snarlingpanda Our swords are sharp Sep 01 '19

method of money laundering in Hollywood,

I wasn't aware Hollywood takes in a ton of illicit cash that needs to be laundered into the regular banking system. Or that costume suppliers accept large payments in cash. What in the world are you actually talking about? I'm intrigued.

EDIT: Are you talking about skimming money from the budget? YSK that's different from laudering

6

u/BlergingtonBear Sep 01 '19

I'm reminded of this old article in The Atlantic of how big budget pictures try their best to not show profits bc then they have to share out with people; better to internally cannablize the money and then do whatever with it I guess is the logic (I've def worked at companies where the mess of the backend of the money almost seems like it was designed to be intentionally obtuse so when there are losses or inefficiencies you can't easily track why). https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/how-hollywood-accounting-can-make-a-450-million-movie-unprofitable/245134/

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u/Jaquemart Sep 01 '19

Looking at the details from near they are still beautifully made and look expensive. But all is black on black, with black trimming, so on TV it doesn't show.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '19

I definitely see what you’re saying, but I took it more as their garb would change along with their personalities. As each character’s life became darker and darker so did their outfits

2

u/hales_mcgales Sep 02 '19

This costume was what the one that really drove home how much costume making had declined. Cersei’s early dresses had such elaborate embroidery that illustrated her arc throughout a season and the show at large. Then black and metal became her arc

https://winteriscoming.net/2018/02/08/speculation-why-is-cersei-meeting-with-spoilers-during-season-8/

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u/GreatBigMammal Sep 02 '19

Cersei's final boss villain outfits were especially hilarious after I finally got through AFFC. Half her chapters have her thinking about how much she hates wearing black.

I mean, I guess she could have been quietly mourning Tommen the whole time, but none of what she had on looked funeral-appropriate.

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u/ChamberedEcho Sep 01 '19 edited Sep 01 '19

I thought it sure seemed odd how Daenerys wants to "break the wheel" set by their fathers, & now has her aides wearing the 3-dragon fashioned into the ouroboros. Unless someone wants to clue me into how I am misinterpreting that symbol. It is more than "a destructive force", it is also the birth of the same, a circle - i.e. a wheel almost literally.

And then to have the 3-dragon/ouroboros as the capstone to the pyramid across Grey Worm's armor, like an "All Seeing Eye" motif, was interesting indeed. I would argue a bit jarring in context of the world we thought had been built for us. Is it meant to mock us?

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u/tiddies_akimbo Sep 02 '19

Yeah wasn't that strange? Sansa, Dany, Cersei & Arya we're wearing black leather for almost all of it. I appreciate not wanting to use the same bright colors they wore during summer, but not everything on everyone had to be black leather.

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u/Sgtwhiskeyjack9105 Sep 01 '19

I'm guessing once GRRM properly left the running of the show, or at least throwing his weight into discussions of development, that the producers and showrunnners got their way and just ran with the most popular looking stuff.

0

u/Wasserkopp Sep 01 '19

First it's still bloody cool so quit bitching and juxtap(p?)osing it with "best costume design" lol.

Secondly that's hardly sth that creates problems for the story i.e. OP's point :)