GoT - Is Over, Post Your Drogon Sightings

Dom said:

So, 5 days with the way they just skip all elements of time and space now?

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We need someone to edit in 45 days worth of Khaleesi flying on her dragon. Bring back the immersion of how important the travel time is.

Dom said:

Nah, too much work. A montage would be more fitting. Have the camera move slightly to the left from a scene in Winterfell to a scene of Jon & Sam high-fiving in front of the Iron Throne like a scene out of Naked Gun. After all, who needs plot consistency or the situation to have any weight to it? I mean, this shit works so well for the Transofmers movies, and everyone knows just how much they're the pinnacle of storytelling.

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Perhaps if Dany had a cool catch phrase like "Roll Out" and 80's music existed in Westeros, it would make a little more sense to have the traveling montage.

Or they could have had Tyrion explain the movements on their model map beforehand and assumed people had the barest bit of intelligence to put it together. Hmmm...

i look at it this way. no matter what happens, i dont give a fuck, because its the final season and whatever happens has no important ramifications. whether this one dies or that one lives, whether this one becomes a king/queen or that one does. its all going to be over in a handful of episodes. dany, jon, sansa, tyrion or whomever, if they become queen/king its gonna be for maybe an episode or less. Cersei gets the last laugh.

Dom said:

Cool. Where was the scene where Tyrion explained how Pod could reach Dragonstone in time to get her to Roll Out! in time to save Jon & Crew before they froze, starved. or died of dehydration. I'm assuming this scene also explains how slow moving medieval style ships are suddenly speedboats and horses move like Shadowfax from LOTR.

Who needs pacing when you have plot magic!

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I don't think they needed a scene to explain how Pod got to Dragonstone...since it was Gendry. As for the ships/horses, it's almost as if it took time for the Lannister army to raid Highgarden and drive their entire wagon train of gold/grain/food to King's Landing. Something that will travel far slower than Dothraki on horseback/ships/Dany on her dragon.

Dom said:

Yeah, I got them mixed up. I'd feel bad if either of the characters actually mattered in the show. The boats & horses I was talking about would be the ones Gendry used while traveling after reaching the wall.

To just get my grievances with this shit out of the way:

GoT worked for two main reasons. Great world & building interspersed with awesome holy shit moments. They ran out of the former when they ran out of book material and only had the latter, at which point the show became just an endless series of cool moments. There was more than enough cut from the books that could have served as world/character stuff to be filler for the travel shit in the last season. I don't want 45 minutes of Dany having her period ontop a dragon. I want more scenes of the hound being a monk. I want Lady Stoneheart. I want more of Sam becoming a maester, or any of the other large numbers of shit they cut.

If you're fine with a show just skipping all over itself from moment to moment and across entire seasons just to get to the point, ruining any sense of cohesive pacing across the series, then power to you. But I want better, and expect better from the same people that made the amazing earlier seasons.

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Dom...he wouldn't have used any boats or horses after getting back to Eastwatch. They'd just send a raven. He didn't actually travel all the way back to Dragonstone.

I guess I don't need to see scenes of the Hound being a humble carpenter building houses to the Seven. Ian Mcshane essentially redeemed him and that's enough for me. The only good thing Lady Stoneheart might be for me is furthering the Brienne/Jaime story in the books. The character herself is a waste compared to getting more of Beric like we do on the TV show. But that's just my opinion.

Personally I think all of the "time jumping" is just nitpicking shit people who know the show has gone beyond the books and want more of Tyrion having a mental dialogue about turtles for a few chapters worth of content. But again, that's just my opinion.

Dom said:

We have differing opinions and wants for the show, and that's fine. But I want you to consider what Pharmakos just pointed out: They built up a style and world that worked in a specific way, and then completely shifted gears and headed off in another direction in the third act, leaving people such as myself standing around with our dicks in our hands wondering who shut off the porn. The shift was so drastic that it's like a show that dropped their showrunners and brought in a new crew to finish it off. They made the worst mistake you can make when your show/movie/book is dependent on immersion within the setting: You break the own rules you set for it.

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The point he made isn't really a full point though. Slow travel is important earlier in the series when war is actively going on and you're seeing places for the first time. Also things of importance happened on the way. At this point in the story, we've been waiting for ages for there to finally be some end game battles/movement by some of the major characters. We don't need to see much of the countryside all over again. They touch on such things briefly like when the Hound is with the Brotherhood and they come across the one house where the Hound and Arya had been previously. They show it's winter with the snow, and the Hound buries the body. We don't need to rehash every single inn and hamlet along the way. Arya finds Hot Pie and hears from him that the Starks have retaken Winterfell, thus turning her from traveling to King's Landing to going back to Winterfell to reunite with her family. That was actually important, so it was worth seeing.

The formula hasn't really changed, simply the urgency with which events are pacing. I'm sure there are people that would have liked to have seen Bronn fixing broken wagon wheels as the Lannister supply train traveled back to KL from Highgarden...but that's not "the formula". It's not anything important nor are we getting extra character development from that. We already know Jaime has promised him a castle/wife/prestige and hearing him moan about fixing wagon wheels instead of having that already is a waste of time.

Also I'm going to point out again...it's a little ridiculous we had someone thinking Gendry actually ran/swam/took a boat all the way from beyond the Wall to Dragonstone and didn't just get to Eastwatch and told them to send a raven to Daenerys.

The travel time issue was more of a symptom than the core problem, which was that the the tone of the series changed over time. It started off with well written characters doing their thing according to their motivations and occasionaly having spectacular clashes as a result. It turned into making the characters do whatever was needed to connect the spectacles together.
Littlefinger in particular was changed from a brilliant schemer to a buffoon.

Dom said:

Why do you think ravens played a part in it? Who would have been handling the ravens? Even if somehow a raven trained to fly to Dragonstone remained, it's a huge distance away from Eastwatch. I'm just spitballing this range, but glancing at a map of westeros and it's probably 2000 miles. Not only would the raven have to get there in time to give the message to Dany, but Gendry would have had to make it to eastwatch on foot by himself without rest, and Dany would have had to fly back up the same distance. All of this before they froze or starved or died of dehydration (provided they couldn't melt/boil the snow)

It's utter nonsense. Dany saying "I had a premonition and flew up here on my own using my dragon's superspeed" would have made just as much sense.

It's hand-waving concrete setting stuff away just to keep the plot moving, which is the area of talentless hacks.

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Why do I think ravens played a part in it? Jon literally says "Run back to Eastwatch, get a raven to Daenerys" when he sends Gendry back. Eastwatch was the only other manned fortress by the Night's Watch. When Gendry gets there, he literally says to Davos "We need to send a raven" and Davos says to "get the maester".

It is a huge distance, 2k miles probably is a decent estimate. GoT ravens aren't like real world ravens though, they're more like carrier pigeons or faster, I'd assume. I'd guess the dragons can make the flight back even faster. All of that is exponentially faster than Gendry literally LOL traveling on foot/swimming/by boat all the way back to Dragonstone, btw.

They knew they were going North of the Wall for who knows how long to find a wight, so I'm guessing they packed some provisions. Considering Beric/Thoros still able to light their swords on fire, I'm guessing they would be able to melt some snow if needed too.

Duh, druid teleports

Just feels like complaints about hand-waving from the show are coming from people who either didn't watch or didn't actually pay attention to basic plot points on the show and are the ones doing the only real hand-waving, making up some alternate show reality that never actually happened.

pharmakos said:

The North of the Wall episode is the only real glaring example of fast travel gone too far, IMO. It's a situation that they simply couldn't have survived in if there had been a realistic timeline set with the rules from the early seasons. The rest of the fast travel? Eh, so what if Varys crossed the Narrow Sea twice in what looked like a few days. It wasn't really an urgent situation. Surrounded by an army of undead and the only help you can muster being even multiple days of FLIGHT away tho? Yeah that's just a bit much. And even some of the people that make the show have said in interviews that they probably flubbed things a bit too much in that episode.

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I read some articles that basically had some people mathing it out as 2 daysish flight to Dragonstone to get the message across, then at worst 2 back (although that's assuming dragons fly only as fast as ravens do). Also they figured the time needed for the lake to refreeze/freeze up enough for an army of the dead to walk across it would be about similar to that time. Now who knows if all of that is sound...but it's certainly not Gendry traveling 2k miles from the Wall to Dragonstone like apparently some people were thinking. 4 days with some provisions and the ability to melt ice/snow isn't that crazy.

pharmakos said:

The North of the Wall episode is the only real glaring example of fast travel gone too far, IMO.

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I'LL BUILD A FLEET OF 1000 SHIPS, AN IRON FLEET

Poof, there's a fleet and it's already sailed right where it needs to be for an action sequence as season seven begins. Euron have all that timber up his ass did he?