May 2, 2019

I-was-wrong-about-Game-of-Thrones (kind of)

(No real spoilers here, but if you wanted to see what happened this week, you've already seen it.)

I posted this on Instagram a few weeks ago:


And all of that is true. Characters were all killed. Storylines moved incredibly slowly. I actually had a few of the books but had no desire to even attempt them once I saw the direction the show was going. It would take a whole season for anything to happen! It was being dragged out in an unnecessarily painful way.

So I stopped watching. Probably when we moved to Colorado (season 4?). I remember my brother visiting and watching it all while he was there and I had no idea what was going on because I was just behind and I didn't care. Scott never stopped caring about the show but he was deployed during each spring in Colorado, so he never watched it on schedule and we didn't watch it together. I would never watch it by myself. I always just ask questions the whole time. What I don't like about the show is how much backstory you absolutely have to remember in order for it to make any sense. So it's not even that I'm asking questions because I don't know; I'm trying to clarify my own thinking because this show has been on for-freaking-ever at this point.

Last week, Scott decided he wanted HBO to watch Game of Thrones so he added it to Hulu and we watched the first two episodes and then the third episode with the battle scene the other night. I had every intention of doing Pilates and writing a blog post while it was on, but I couldn't stop watching. Some mentioned that the quality of the darkness/filming was poor simply because this was the epic battle scene and we should've been able to see it clearly. Producers/creators defended this because they wanted it to look realistic and I agree with that. It wasn't that difficult to tell what was happening. It wasn't meant to look like the battle scene in Narnia, for instance. Plus, this was the long-sought "night is coming/winter is coming" moment: it needed to be dark. 

I still think the show is highly overrated for what it's become, but there was something about the battle episode that just brought it all together. Literally, all of the factions of people coming together was actually kind of heartwarming. I cannot believe the slowness of some of the episodes that it took to get to that point, and that's why I stopped watching in the first place, but it is what it is, I guess?

We spent most of the episode this week analyzing the battle plan and the tactics they had taken. I found this to be interesting. And Scott reminded me of little things like how only Dragon Glass/Valyrian steel and fire can kill white walkers and how Arya was hiding in that library because she'd dropped her Dragon Glass.

He also had to remind me what Bran was doing, why he was doing it, etc. Bran's storyline is definitely a slow one. And Daenerys is still professionally useless, save for the dragons. Also, Jon Snow trying to sneak up on the Night King: I haven't laughed that hard in awhile. 


However, the award for Most Useless in general appears to go to Sansa. I don't care enough to dig into what she's been up to for the last few seasons. 

Maybe the lesson that we can take from this is that you, too, can skip multiple seasons of the show, have someone remind you of key details during the most climactic scene of the last 8 years, and you can still understand how everything wraps up. 

I suppose the next thing we'll have to catch up on is Homeland, because that's something else I'll only watch if Scott is around to watch it with me because, again, everyone seems to have died in the last few years and that's usually when I start to lose interest in a show. 

3 comments:

  1. I actualy am not caught up on this season (though I see everyone everywhere talking about it) because Im rewatching with Danny. I am however excited for it all and love it. Its a brilliant show but I also like that its ending. Too much more and it would lose its interest.

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  2. I've never watched an episode!

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  3. I liked the books (though they took f.o.r.e.v.e.r. for me to get through) and was a little disappointed that the series didn't follow the books ... but there was A LOT of info to try to include. I haven't seen any of the the past couple seasons, but spoilers don't bother me. Waiting for this season to finish airing and then I'll probably get HBO for a month's free trial and binge. I have to be careful though - when I binge a show or a set of books, I tend to start using phrases from the books/show and that can get awkward.

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