At first this article reads like your typical anti-piracy screed. It rants about how 10x more people watched GoT illegally (confusing them with lost sales) and ends with how downloading movies can get your credit card stolen.
The middle of the article however, destroys the author’s case.
Time Warner (owning company of HBO) CEO Alan Bewkes stated in 2013 how becoming the most illegally streamed show in history was “better than an Emmy” and that torrenting ultimately led to more paid subscriptions.
“We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years—people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.”
The CEO of Time Warner, who knows more about the finances of his own show than ForeverGeek writer Tom Llewellyn, championed piracy and said that it brought them more subscribers rather than nearly destroying the show as the article claims.
Needless to say, Tom forwent a rebuttal in favor of writing how you can get malware from downloading it…
Anti-Piracy Propaganda: 0 Truth: 1
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
That they threw away all the rules they established before like traveling now took 0 hours and soon. All of this because the last book wasn’t written yet so they had to write some story themselves and failed miserably.
I remember people knew the ending due to leaks about a year ahead of time and claimed it was all BS since it was so ridiculous. We were all wrong
I went from avoiding leaks to a few episodes in not caring and read the leaks and laughed. Then joined freefolk to laugh at the show as it aired, which made it a much less miserable affair than it would have been. A nice season long The Room roasting for the show.
Watching it straight up would have been pure torture.
HBO told the show runners(D&D) they could take as long as they wanted to finish the series. D&D had just landed jobs at the helm of a new Star Wars trilogy so they were eager to wrap up Thrones and start raking in that Disney cash. They made the last season shorter than other seasons, it sucked and they ended up losing the Star Wars deal.
Sweet sweet justice.
Considering the star wars stuff that’s been coming out, if you told me they were responsible for it, i’d believe you
Give Andor a try, thats the one show I really liked out of the stuff Ive seen so far, after that the only other show Ive been into is the Expanse(non star wars), after the first season
I can second the recommendation for Andor. Used to love Star Wars, lost all interest in it after the new trilogy (although rogue one was alright) and finally got around to watch Andor which I really loved.
Come on, Rogue One is one of the best Star Wars movies of all time.
It was a cool movie with amazing scenes and it made A New Hope make more sense (explained why the death star had a design flaw.) But I found all the characters really forgettable and it just didn’t give me a satisfying emotional payoff.
Rogue One Spoiler
All the main characters just died and I didn’t really care 🤷♂️
What ever happened to the D&D Star Wars trilogy?
They lost the deal for it, after how badly received the end of GoT was. Then again, the new SW trilogy managed to be shit entirely without their help.
Yeah, Disney rejected them to protect the trilogy, and then managed to completely destroy the trilogy between two and half directors, and both Disney and Lucasfilm constantly interfering with the screen writing. Episode 7 might have been derivative, but without Episode 8 kneecapping all of the plot setups, followed by Episode 9 kneecapping all of 8’s plot redirections, it would have at least been fun.
I mean, being honest, the prequel trilogy was mostly not great. But it was fun enough that people still love it. The sequels are so disjointed that it’s just hard to enjoy. Proof that even with all the money in the world, anyone can still fuck up.
I read an essay where the author argued that in the first few seasons, the GRR Martin material, World events happened and the characters were forced to adapt and react.
Once the television writers took over, the dynamic flipped so characters’ actions forced the World itself to change and react, which is apparently how most television writing works since television writing revolves mostly around characters.
That’s a pretty inelegant way to explain it, sorry, but I think the idea feels pretty accurate to me. There is a definite point where you can tell when the staff writers have to start plotting for themselves.
I do think that sums it up pretty well, and as other have said, the last season had a “I don’t want to do this anymore, lets wrap this up vibe” and to make matters worse, they completely abandoned so many plots that you thought had a point to them. To me it felt so obvious that during the fall of kings landing, Cersi should have flipped out and Jamie should have killed her. History repeating itself. Maybe that was just too predictable for them to actually do it, but all the character development up to that point was the perfect setup for it and they just dropped it altogether.
You could build a museum of horrible decisions and fill it with the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Whether you watched it or not, the show was a cultural touchstone, and the ending retroactively ruined everything that came before. Many shows have started well and ended poorly, but I’d argue that GoT was on pace to be an all-time top ten series, and there was absolutely nothing good to say about how it ended. Bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, sloppy editing, poor visual design, it was both rushed and too slow, and nothing made sense. If you paid someone to deliberately fuck up everything about the show, they would not have been as effective at it because it would have been obvious.
A surprising amount went wrong.
While there are a sea of complaints, the biggest for me was that all of the characters stopped having internal logic. Take Jamie, he had a character arc moving from a vain knight avoiding responsibility and having an incestuous relationship with his sister, to having depth, showing that he was wracked with guilt for breaking his oath to help people. Falling in love with a woman for her character and who she was. Being responsible and honorable again. Then the last season came around and he dropped all of his growth to be with his sister.
It’s like D&D decided that there would be a cool scene of him dieing with Cersi and didn’t care how he got there.
Tldr; the whole 6 first season they set up the table for some really juicy stuff and in the last season, some side quests were either ignored or fast-tracked to fit in 1/3 of an episode. Realistically, you had content for at least 3+ more seasons. But since GRR Martin is so slow to write his books (I don’t blame him, just pointing out the obvious), the producers of the show had to cut corner and take huge liberties that didn’t make any sense
Compare it to this… Watching a highly rated chef come up with the most amazing sounding and looking dinner meal over the course of a few hours. You are anxiously awaiting to take a bite and salivating for that moment. When you finally get served your plate and get to that scrumptious first bite, the biggest wave of disappointment hits and you lose your appetite.
I don’t know how else to explain it
The dish comes out and it’s Spam topped with Kraft singles.