The last season, understandably, is controversial. I just watched it and really liked it. Fans of the TV series who had seen the TV series first and been following since day 1 of the show.... didn't.
Here's where there's a disconnect:
The final season of the show probably felt the truest to the books in spirit compared to any part of the previous seasons. This is a controversial claim, so let me spend some time defending this thesis. George R.R. Martin wrote/writes the books in such a way as to throw us for a loop about the arc of each character - characters disappear and then reappear with personalities we didn't expect. Sudden changes in the context of the setting lead to sudden changes in character behavior. A Feast for Crows shows Jon going from generic fantasy hero and loyal soldier to a potentially stone-faced administrator with a cynically pragmatic view of both workplace and kingdom-wide politics. A Dance With Dragons shows hints that Daenerys might not have a full grip on the power she commands, and ends up revealing a few cracks in her armor - her portrayal at the end of the TV series is one possible outcome of that narrative.
Here is the problem, such as it is, with the TV series conclusion: it is very obvious that Benioff & Weiss, from early on, did not want to do the version of the show that we got (and that was ultimately popular with fans) - the story of the unaired pilot (I'm still salty the performance by Corvus Corax never made it into the final version, but I digress) is very revealing as to this objective. Now, one of the biggest changes in the show is this: the speed at which characters change and progress, and how radical vs. moderate those changes are.
Plenty of TV viewers saw certain elements from the book as shocking revelations when they appeared on screen: Ned's death. Joffrey's death. Ramsay Bolton's gruesome torture of Theon - but all in all, the TV series, when it came to actual changes in characterization, went for a more moderate approach to changes in characterization that was much slower than in the books, in which fewer events were calculated to completely shift our understanding of who a character is, where they're coming from, and what they want. Part of the appeal of the books, to readers, lies in how any sudden event can change a character (and our perception of them) entirely.
So, when we get to season 8 of Game of Thrones, the TV show, Benioff and Weiss finally get the chance to take the kind of narrative approach that would seem natural to fans of the book all along: shift the audience perspective of who a character is with a sudden, shocking change that might make some sense if you go back and read the previous chapters, but that still does not take place in quite as incremental and conservative an approach as the TV series went with prior. TV viewers did not take well to this change, but both the context building up to the conclusion and the way our perspectives are challenged to shift would make sense if the show carried the same narrative context and approach to characterization as the ASOIAF books.
Submitted February 17, 2021 at 07:30PM by LockedOutOfElfland https://ift.tt/37odoY6
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