I’ve been catching up with season 2 and honestly it’s not half bad. It has cut out the worst shitty (often gross and misogynistic in nature) excesses of the original show while still retaining most if not all of the great character writing and great dialogue that the first four seasons of GoT had.
There’s all this great early GoT style political intrigue retained to it as well. All of these lords and ladies and queens and kings are just terrible, awful people for most of the runtime while we’ve been getting increasing focus on how badly the very concept of monarchy forces the dirty laundry of one inbred family with pet nukes to take shape and brutalize not only the slowly starving smallfolk of King’s Landing, but also the smallfolk throughout most of the surrounding empire.
The Lords of the Seven Kingdoms all exist in this web of familial ties that ensures their ultimate class solidarity, eventually dragging most of the continent into dragon war the aftermath of which resembles that of atomic bombs. Now we find two desperate peasants given dragons because Queen in Exile Rhaenyra needs to find someone capable of vibing with Vermithor and Silverwing, the second and third largest war dragons in existence. She ends up burning to death dozens of claimed Targaryen bastards to do this by locking them all in the Dragonmont and letting the dragons sort the rest. She watches this happen with bored disinterest, in contrast to the horror on her face when her highborn Queensguard Steffon Darklyn dies in a previous attempt to claim the dragon Seasmoke.
[Brief Spoilers for book events in this paragraph]
spoiler
In the book, after Hugh Hammer and Ulf White risk their lives to be her attack dog dragon riders, they never receive the kind of social elevation you’d expect for the people with the largest dragons on the continent. Rhaenyra does not want to deal with the political fallout of there being legitimized Targaryen bastards with bigger dragons than those of her sons, whom are also legitimized Targaryen bastards. Thus Hugh and Ulf plausibly retain some amount of class solidarity to the average smallfolk’s plight and betray Rhaenyra to declare themselves Kings. I’m hoping the show has them join some Riverlander anti-Targaryen guerilla movements once they see the kind of atrocities they are expected to commit.
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I won’t watch it because they wasted my time with GOT. Started off interesting but then it kept following lame ass characters I don’t care about, then they botched the latter seasons and I just stopped watching.
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I watch every episode the day it airs and enjoy it but think its kinda mid
there’s no sympathetic characters like in GoT which makes it a lot less accessible to the average person who isn’t a hardcore fantasy nerd. why should I care which incestuous freak monarchist gets to sit on the throne?
but at the end of the day I like watching CGI dragons burn people alive, and the most recent episode was the best one yet
I quite enjoy HOTD, the part about Rhaenyra looking horrified at Steffon Darklyn being killed over the other dragon seeds is probably in part to classism but also I think after
spoiler
Addam of Hull claims seasmoke
she is far more fanatical in her belief that it can work.
Looking forward to further fanatic turn next season hopefully
I really like Aemond and Aegon, they are such little shits. Could do with less Matt Smith in an unconvincing wig tripping balls in a castle.
I like the overall tone better than Got’s, there are fewer scenes of two really clever guys monologuing at each other.
I know I’m weird for this, but I wish it was like 15 % more about economic reasons behind the war, like trade routes and tariffs. Basically just make it into a Real Robot anime, it’s already most of the way there.
I am so sick of the dream sequence scenes. They just aren’t intriguing at all and waste so much of the runtime.
Who cares I’ll keep watching that garbage
I watched the first like 4 or 5 episodes of season 1 and gave up after the 3rd time jump in as many episodes.
Yeah it made me rapidly stop giving a shit and I had no compulsion to keep watching after that point.
If it helps, that’s the last one lmao. It’s definitely inelegant and lost a solid portion of the audience
please spoiler tag the last paragraph lol, my eyes skimmed over it before I realized it was a spoiler
edit: there’s a button to spoiler tag text. It’s the diamond with the exclamation point
I’m so sorry, wrote this sleep deprived and got a little lazy. I’ll fix it.
speaking of sleep deprived errors, I said “second paragraph” but I meant to say “last paragraph”
I’m having a good time. Unless HoTD’s ending is as bad as GoT, I’d say I probably prefer HoTD by a bit. GoT’s highs are pretty high, but the lows are really low. HoTD feels just much more evenly balanced by comparison.
Already hype for the 3rd season of HoTD.
I like it! Nothing will recapture the magic of GoT S1-4 but this is about as close as we’re gonna get, and I expect it’ll have a decent ending this time.
I posted so I wouldn’t accidentally delete my essay, I’ve not taken out any spoilers that might be in here. Read at your own risk.
This little snippet has me hoping for a peasant revolt that takes place after the season 8 finale, as they still bring the realm into ruin by still allowing corruption to continue. Because as I’ve seen snippets of hotd, it deals with rhaenyra navigating (poorly, but she’s young and wants what she wants) around misogyny that surrounds the crown. While her being representative of a brutalizing lineage that uses ultimate force to ensure it’s existence, her rule had it remained uncontested, probably would’ve ushered in more progressive thinking, but because of immediate self interest (allicent/high towers in general) its scraped and those who are unworthy(aemonds older brother, who only got his position from being born first and was undeserving and I think died from a skirmish or something, again haven’t actually watched) or are believed to be ( wahmen) are barred from upward mobility or ousted. I suppose that even if aemond is self serving, he at least wanted the crown AND could actually rule compared to his brother, he’s still inexperienced and ignorant in areas. But yeah. More themes with battling internalized and external misogyny between female characters to show how movements can struggle when only the short term is considered, they discussed slavery but not sure if they delved into racism much or my
ass didn’t notice it, be fun(ny) to see them explain class consciousness without directly stating it or upsetting their corporate masters, more challenging blood rights (much in the way that rhaenyra has by legitimizing Targaryen bastard dragon riders [which are still Targaryen technically so still got some Naruto ass genetic ability/ built different narrative device. I get that g.o.t. deals with magic and a fun way of doing that is by using different lineages having different abilities, but then what of those without eugenic powers? Are they destined to be ruled? If it’s handled in a manner like dark souls, with the ‘powerless’ attacking and dethroning god, then maybe. Otherwise
] showing (crudely) that one doesn’t need to be an ordained highborn to ride a nuke.) to challenge the imposed hierarchy, more representation of the sexual spectrum, and just tackling more topics that challenges ‘inherent’ hierarchy, elitism, tribalism etc.first season was a wonderful surprise that genuinely elevated the source material, with Paddy Considine putting an amazing performance as King Viserys. Second season …eh, it made some weird choices, but it’s nowhere near as bad as Game of Thrones got.
Checked out of dragon slop before dragon slop one’s first season finished. I started re-reading the books when the show came out and realized all the characters I cared about died and everyone else was a wretched asshole. I sincerely dislike Martins writing, not because there’s anything technically wrong with it, but because the story he told is so self indulgently cruel, pointless, and miserable
I’m enjoying it so far!
spoiler for the book and show
I’m very intrigued by the smallfolk angle in the show, and how they’ll deal with the atrocities perpetrated by the dragonseeds
spoiler
I’m very intrigued by the smallfolk angle in the show, and how they’ll deal with the atrocities perpetrated by the dragonseeds
See, I genuinely think the show is taking a different more positive direction with Hugh Hammer and Ulf White. After betraying both the black and green Targaryen factions, they are described as possibly some of the most evil men to ever be given sudden, overwhelming power, and they use it to commit some of the worst atrocities throughout the dance save for perhaps Aemond’s genocidal campaign in the Riverlands.
However, in the show Hugh Hammer is this genuinely honorable and brave working class guy desperately trying to get his wife out of poverty after their little daughter dies a preventable death due to this ongoing succession war.
And Ulf White just seems to be this silly little guy who tells wild stories in pubs for free booze and occasionally shoplifts, nothing like the vile, evil shit we hear of him in the book.
This kinda makes perfect sense. Fire and Blood is a history book written 200 years later by a Maester of the Citadel in Old Town, the seat of the Hightowers. Hugh and Ulf are the two characters in this story the book would be the most rabidly biased again, and I believe the show recognizes this. Excited to see where they take it.
Trueeee I hadn’t even considered that, despite my discussions with my partner focusing heavily on the difference between a historical narrative and a tv show retelling
After suffering through the last 2 seasons of GoT I’m not watching it.
If it were that level I wouldn’t have gotten past the first episode lmao
