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At its best Game of Thrones never subverted expectation

posted 6 years ago by arflexit (2376)
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During seasons 1 through 4 and in some cases season 5, this show (and books) never truly subverted expectation. What it did was play on certain archetypes and tropes and gave us what we SHOULD HAVE BEEN expecting all along. This is why even though we were not expecting it, things like Robb, Ned, Oberyn, etc all dying like they did, when these 'unexpected' events happened it was satisfying and made the show great even when it was something we hated seeing happen, ie Red Wedding. Everyone walked away saying "We should have seen that coming". This was great writing.

the last seasons, especially Season 8, did not leave this same feeling. Things started happening for the sake of them happening and it seemed to go out of its way to undermine the expectations set up by the story and the characters up to this point, ie Dany's sudden turn and targeting innocents not just enemy soldiers, Varys basically committing suicide by committing the most obvious treason ever, Littlefinger begging for his life after being caught with no plan, etc. Instead of saying "we should have seen that coming" we all walked away saying something like "what the hell was this nonsense I just watched"

[–] gater (199) 6 years ago

I thought the show started to go downhill at the start of Season 7 - Dany and the writers didn't seem to know what to do. And every bit of advice from Tyrion was wrong - I think he should be known as Tyrion the Traitor, he advises Dany to attack Casterly Rock instead of KL. He went along with the plan the bring a dead guy to Cersei - nearly everything he advised her to do was the opposite of what she should have done - he frees his brother, he cries over his sister - his true loyalties were exposed. He even convinced Jon to kill Dany which saved his own ass. So did Tyrion really think Dany needed to die? or was it that he knew how stupid Jon was, and could be easily manipulated.

[–] arflexit (2376) 6 years ago

The quality began to dip a bit by the end of season 4. Season 5 was pretty obviously the real start though, though there was enough redeeming content to keep it good even if not great. Though season 7 was nearly completely directionless in terms of plot and the story suffered greatly for that, I actually liked enough of the individual scenes in season 7 to like it better than season 5 and 6. Though admittedly those scenes have very little coherent connection. For example, though the journey beyond the wall was nonsensical beyond belief and literally everyone of them should have died as punishment for being so stupid, I actually like most of the individual interactions that took place that episode.

Yeah with Tyrion, he was either stupid or it was part of his plan. I wonder if in some way Bran and Tyrion began to conspire with each other at the beginning of season 8. If they were, they were brilliantly evil and it would have made the end of the series far more interesting.