I quite honestly can't be driven to care about Game of Thrones.
It's like sports. I may acknowledge it, and even like parts of it, but it has no staying presence in my mind.
Likewise, except for the "like parts of it" part; despite being a longtime HBO customer almost all of my exposure to it has either been secondhand or too brief for proper judgment to be passed.
"like parts of it" is stretching it a bit, honestly.
Joffrey's an amusing punching bag and "You know nothing, Jon Snow" amuses me.
Besides that, all I see is terrible people being terrible to each other, screwing over the common folk and 'nice' people in the process, and I don't care one whit if the north wall falls and the land gets swamped in eternal winter.
i tried reading the first book, game of thrones, andven though i got within about 20 or 30 pages of the end i couldnt be assed to finish it it has the same stupid problems as vast swaths of fantasy. overlong descriptions of everything and characters who fail to act like actual people and instead keep bursting into laughter at really banal and mystifying things
The Mysterious Ballerina and her Tree Stump Ghosts
Ironically I think my biggest problem (alongside many many other ones) with Game of Thrones is that it goes too far in the opposite direction than most fantasy series I've read.
I mean, in others you're following a small group of characters in this big world that you never really explore because of the focus on the quest. In Game of Thrones you're seeing all this political intrigue across the huge world and whatever, but, you know, shouldn't someone be looking at that whole undead coming to life in the north thing? The corpses rising up that's in like the first scene of the show? Isn't this all a little bit pointless if they, you know, attack?
I've seen a lot of people praising it for 'not really being fantasy' and great if that were true, but the whole dead coming back to life and causing neverending winter thing we're not looking at seems a pretty big thing here
Some of my problems with Game of Thrones (or at least, the way the fanbase presents Game of Thrones):
IT is presnted as being an accurate reprsentation of the middle ages; and it almost completely ignores religion's near-constant presence in medieval life. I mean, religion was absolutely central to medieval life, it permeated everything they thought, perceived, and did. It was as central to their society as the ability to remember things that happened more than one day ago is central to modern society. Taking religion out of a medieval society is like taking all economics out of modern society (like, if there was a machine that printed money so everyone was rich and could buy whatever they wanted).
Look, so, prostitutes. You have to have prostitutes, apparently, because a world without them is unbelivable to a modern audience. But delete the cobblers and cordwainers, erase the street cleaners and the candlemakers, and oh, it's still believable. It's just such a modern "shoes come from the store" mentality.
Black people are not present in Game of Thrones anywhere near as much as they were present in actual Medieval Europe. Let's perpetuate the "there were no black people in England until well after the victorian era" thing. (seriously, there's a psych episode where they say that there were no black people in England at the time of Jack the Ripper, so it would be "historically inaccurate" to write in a black character for Gus to play in a play about Jack the Ripper, "unless he was from Jamaica".).
A lot of other fantasy has these problems (read: basically all of it, including my beloved The King's Shadow, which gets only the presence of religion righ), but Game of Thrones is held up as being "OH YEAH THIS IS REALLY WHAT THE TIMES WERE LIKE. THIS IS THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE".
Also, in the very first episode, Lord Stark beheads a guy in front of his son (Stark's son, not the guy's son). This is terrible! Kid's gonna get the wrong idea! Sean Bean shows very poor form in this beheading, making the stroke seem to all come from the arms and wrists; when a real beheading come from the legs and back. With a sword of that size, you should to take a step forward and bend your knees. TAKE SOME EXECUTING LESSONS, YA DOOF. Seriously, Stark, your kids are watching, do it RIGHT.
I also have more subjective issues, but I've been told on several forums that my subjective issues with Thronesgame are stupid and stem from me being an uptight prude. A molly mormon or sam seminary.
Basically, my problem is with the fans, and with specific fans who were kind of obnoxious (to be fair, I am also obnoxious).
Also, poor beheading form. Seriously, Sean Bean. Is this what you want to teach America? IS THIS THE WORLD YOU WANT YOUR KIDS TO GROW UP IN??!!
I want to say that old-timey political intrigue is the most boring thing, but there was actually some interesting stuff that happened, at least in the 1500s or so. The whole business with the Anglican church getting created, for one thing, and the three-pope schism.
It's just that the way they do it is so boring. Real political intrigue didn't get people killed back in the day. Well, executed, yes, but not by murdering your way through fancy dinner parties. You had to be clever about it because rampant violence would get you castigated for being cruel towards your fellow Christian.
For a genuine (and non-nihilist) attempt to defy the Nietzschean hegemony one should turn to another highly successful animated film, Ice Age (2002), which reads as an ideological rejoinder to The Lion King. Here too we have a literal blond beast, the prehistoric tiger Diego, a ruthless predator who reluctantly joins Manny the mammoth and Sid the sloth, in a journey through the icy wilderness, which confronts us with a compelling image of our own age of ice-cold, survival-of-the-fittest global scene. Diego begins to melt down in a scene which deconstructs one of the greatest anathemas of our, Nietzschean, times: the herd. Diego’s life is saved by Manny, who puts his own life on the balance. Astonished, he asks for an explanation for such altruism and gets the terse answer: “That’s what you do in a herd. You look out for each other.” To which Sid the sloth – himself a triumphant vindication of one of our age’s most reviled specimen: the (poor) freeloader – immediately adds: “I don’t know about you guys, but we are the weirdest herd I’ve ever seen”. Ice Age attempts to transcend the Nietzschean branding of the herd as a locus of mediocrity, anonymity and cowardice. The herd in the film, by contrast is composed of three distinct but equally valued personalities, that complete and enhance each other, providing much-needed solidarity, aid and affection, to go through the harsh winter of social Darwinism. As Sid declares, after outsmarting a larger predator: “Survival of the fittest? I don’t think so!” As against The Lion King’s insistence on eternal, sacrosanct hierarchy, Ice Age challenges the alleged laws of natural order of rank. As if to spite Hibbs-cum-Nietzsche, it stubbornly refuses ‘to distinguish between higher and lower’. Beyond the fact that the herd admits no such distinctions – its premise being equality in difference – the powerful master of the natural world, Man, the supreme hunter, is taught a lesson in compassion by the three brutes, who return to him his lost baby.
I love this post, and I love this essay snippet.
Panurge, whwere did you get this? OR did you make it up yourself? Either way, it's amazing.
Your item arrived at our USPS origin facility in CLEVELAND, OH 44101 on April 13, 2015 at 6:17 pm. The item is currently in transit to the destination.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
well I'm no Duck Dynasty fan either but it just seems like there is almost nothing my conglomerate can crank out that the elusive Heaper demographic loves unless it's on Cartoon Network on second thought I'm okay with that except Cartoon Network's never been as big or as loud as Disney or Nickelodeon (though Nickelodeon seems to be dying)
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
I generally don't like dystopic fiction and while I thought the movie was okay and the story acceptable if read as a fable, I also don't like it's enormous success and many, many imitators.
I'm watching Logan's Run, and I have to wonder: Just how common of a reactionary fantasy was the "enforced youth" thing, anyway? The movie was changed quite a bit from the book, which seems to have a definite "them damn hippies want us all to die at 21 like them, don't they?" feel to it (I haven't read it; I probably should).
It's funny that Kirk Cameron tried to prove there was a God using a banana, because the Amazing Atheist single-handedly gave proof that there is no God using a banana!
Okay, I was wrong. The Slaughterhouse burger wasn't insulting, but his logic is.
Though he does seem to believe that the only reason livestock species are so numerous are because of human cultivation for food comparing the numbers of pigs and cows to the number of wolves and lions. He also suggests that making lions into livestock will successfully increase their numbers. Someone skipped BIO 102 in college.
PREY SPECIES BREED MORE OFTEN BECAUSE THEY'RE MORE LIKELY TO DIE FAST, YOU PEDANTIC NERD! THAT'S WHY MOST CULTURES ON EARTH DON'T EAT CARNIVORES AS A MAIN FOOD SOURCE; THEY DON'T BREED QUITE AS FAST. APEX PREDATORS TYPICALLY HAVE THE LOWEST POPULATIONS BECAUSE THE ENVIRONMENT CAN'T SUPPORT TWO BILLION WOLVES DOING THEIR WOLF THING ALL OVER THE WESTERN UNITED STATES!
AND FOR BLOODY SAKE, FINISH THAT MONSTROSITY OF A BURGER! IF YOU'RE GOING TO EAT MEAT, AT LEAST DON'T WASTE IT! IT'S EXPENSIVE, YOU INGRATE!
Scooby-Doo and Shaggy both enjoy these. Not to be confused with the other trope "Scooby Stack".
In many of the newer cartoons, however, these sandwiches never contain meat, since voice actor Casey Kasem (who did Shaggy) became a vegetarian and insisted that all his characters eat vegetarian, too. (Although it wouldn't be terribly out of character for Shaggy anyway. In early cartoons he would eat hamburgers, tacos, and pretty much anything else, meat or veggie.) Interestingly, Kasem's favorite kind of sandwich is apparently eggplant.
Wasn't there a bit in the newest Scooby Doo series where their favorite burger joint is replaced with a vegan place, to their sick disgust?
Comments
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I mean, in others you're following a small group of characters in this big world that you never really explore because of the focus on the quest. In Game of Thrones you're seeing all this political intrigue across the huge world and whatever, but, you know, shouldn't someone be looking at that whole undead coming to life in the north thing? The corpses rising up that's in like the first scene of the show? Isn't this all a little bit pointless if they, you know, attack?
I've seen a lot of people praising it for 'not really being fantasy' and great if that were true, but the whole dead coming back to life and causing neverending winter thing we're not looking at seems a pretty big thing here
IT is presnted as being an accurate reprsentation of the middle ages; and it almost completely ignores religion's near-constant presence in medieval life. I mean, religion was absolutely central to medieval life, it permeated everything they thought, perceived, and did. It was as central to their society as the ability to remember things that happened more than one day ago is central to modern society. Taking religion out of a medieval society is like taking all economics out of modern society (like, if there was a machine that printed money so everyone was rich and could buy whatever they wanted).
Look, so, prostitutes. You have to have prostitutes, apparently, because a world without them is unbelivable to a modern audience. But delete the cobblers and cordwainers, erase the street cleaners and the candlemakers, and oh, it's still believable. It's just such a modern "shoes come from the store" mentality.
Black people are not present in Game of Thrones anywhere near as much as they were present in actual Medieval Europe. Let's perpetuate the "there were no black people in England until well after the victorian era" thing. (seriously, there's a psych episode where they say that there were no black people in England at the time of Jack the Ripper, so it would be "historically inaccurate" to write in a black character for Gus to play in a play about Jack the Ripper, "unless he was from Jamaica".).
A lot of other fantasy has these problems (read: basically all of it, including my beloved The King's Shadow, which gets only the presence of religion righ), but Game of Thrones is held up as being "OH YEAH THIS IS REALLY WHAT THE TIMES WERE LIKE. THIS IS THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE".
Also, in the very first episode, Lord Stark beheads a guy in front of his son (Stark's son, not the guy's son). This is terrible! Kid's gonna get the wrong idea! Sean Bean shows very poor form in this beheading, making the stroke seem to all come from the arms and wrists; when a real beheading come from the legs and back. With a sword of that size, you should to take a step forward and bend your knees. TAKE SOME EXECUTING LESSONS, YA DOOF. Seriously, Stark, your kids are watching, do it RIGHT.
I also have more subjective issues, but I've been told on several forums that my subjective issues with Thronesgame are stupid and stem from me being an uptight prude. A molly mormon or sam seminary.
Basically, my problem is with the fans, and with specific fans who were kind of obnoxious (to be fair, I am also obnoxious).
Also, poor beheading form. Seriously, Sean Bean. Is this what you want to teach America? IS THIS THE WORLD YOU WANT YOUR KIDS TO GROW UP IN??!!
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead