Board Thread:TV Show Discussion/@comment-5014364-20150614172901

I've been trying to compile a short list of "biggest complaints about the TV adaptation" by Benioff and Weiss.

Emphasis on "short": a major problem is that when we bring up too many minor problems, they drown out complaints about the bigger, less excusable problems.

I.e. you could plausibly explain "we cut Strong Belwas for time reasons", and while reasonable people might defer on this, there is a plausible and simple explanation. Of course, cutting one or two very big characters can be controversial (Arianne Martell?)

But omitting things is one thing - changing things is another. Plus accusations about how they've handled sex and violence in the TV series relative to how the books did. I.e. Martin outright states that Gregor Clegane's men are raping villagers in the Riverlands. Yes, this is a brutal and realistic depiction of war (Martin's complaint was that other Fantasy stories glorified war by ignoring how frequent all of the rape and pillaging was, he's presenting it in a negative light to criticize it). But that doesn't mean a TV adaptation should have a 10 minute long montage of the Mountain's soldiers raping peasant women. This isn't "realistic depiction of brutal reality of war and victims" but "Stuffing a Woman in the Fridge" (as the trope goes) to further the angst of the male characters.

To this end, I really want you to pause and think of only those complaints which are the biggest, things about the adaptation which you don't feel can easily be explained away as due to personal taste, time constraints, or narrative focus.

This is a focus on the hard-hitting punches, you see - the ones they cannot easily defend.

For starters, I made a front page poll some weeks before Season 5 started, on what I felt were the biggest complaints about Seasons 1 to 4:


 * Changing Jeyne Westerling to Talisa, and how her romance with Robb Stark was written
 * Removing most of Catelyn Stark's political agency, to have her focus more on worrying about her children than the political future of the Starks as a whole
 * Note that "the Robb-Talisa-Catelyn subplot in Season 2" is all one interconnected narrative, all mishandled.
 * Padding out the Qarth storyline in Season 2
 * Bad, but no one was that attached to Qarth, the book material was meager, and it doesn't affect later plot elements that much, so I give them a pass.
 * Apparently removing the two other Tyrell brothers, Garlan and Willas (though they never definitively stated they don't exist in the TV continuity)
 * Barely mentioning the Greyjoys since Season 2 (though they didn't do that much in the corresponding sections of the books)
 * Casting reports indicate they're going to start making up for that in Season 6 - though I argue that the Greyjoys were badly underused for THREE SEASONS after Season 2 ended. Why make Yara have a dumb three minute attack on the Dreadfort, which many found laughable due to dogs...when it would be better to send her as an envoy to King's Landing, and have Tywin yell at her, rejecting Balon's terms, and pointing out that Theon was right to begin with:  Balon's entire political plan was idiotic, assuming the Lannisters would reward Balon for doing what he should have done anyway had he remained loyal.
 * Return to Craster's Keep filler arc in mid-Season 4
 * Not killing off Locke by force-feeding his own severed limbs back to him, as was done to Vargo Hoat in the books (because a Lannister always pays his debts!)
 * Not including any of the important prophecies or flashbacks in the first four seasons (though some will appear in Season 5), including barely even mentioning Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.
 * Somewhat addressed at least with Rhaegar in Season 4, earlier it might have been spoilers.
 * Other flashbacks might have been important, OR, characters describing past events to clarify their impact on the present (which is why they stopped mentioning Tysha)
 * Inventing numerous Sexposition scenes with a heavy "male gaze" gender imbalance; mostly random female nudity, without enough for the ladies.
 * The guy that coined the term "Sexposition" himself later clarified that it was only tolerable when it was actual "exposition" during a sex scene to make the exposition interesting, i.e. Littlefinger talking to Ros in Season 1. In contrast, he said, this didn't apply to random nudity - i.e. Neil Marshall revealed that "Adam Friedberg" is a real guy who commanded him to insert randomly naked prostitutes into his episode "for the perverts in the audience".  Sex for exposition and between canon couples is fine, and to be honest since Season 2 it has not been nearly as bad as it was then.
 * Removing the revelation of what happened to Tysha as the real reason that Tyrion kills his father Tywin ("Where do whores go?")
 * This won the poll about worst change in the TV series.
 * The possibility that Arianne Martell might be omitted entirely from future seasons.
 * Didn't win because it's in the future - never say never, we may yet see her.

But there are other things I didn't put in the poll:


 * Removing Lady Stoneheart - I thought they would push her back to a later season, and I'm fine with that - need to space stuff out. But cutting it entirely?  Why?


 * The Jaime/Cersei sex scene in "Breaker of Chains" - it was a camera and editing error that made a consensual sex scene look like rape. No, Benioff and Weiss never intended it to be a rape scene.  The actors and director didn't play it like that at all.  They were polite and waited for Benioff and Weiss to make a statement about it - and after months of waiting, nothing, and even when the Blu-ray came out they avoided making a commentary track for that episode to dodge the issue entirely.  After that - haha - the actors got annoyed, they'd been polite and waited, but now they openly started saying in interviews "we were never told to play that as a rape scene at all".  -I'm not annoyed that the accident happened - after all, that's why they're called accidents.  Had they simply said a week later, "dear god, we never intended it to look like that, we'll fix it in the Blu-ray"...all would have been well. Instead their inept and bizarre handling of the problem is truly staggering:  they became convinced that "if we just say 'we didn't intend it as a rape scene' people will yell at us as rape deniers"...and yes, they would, but....in that case, why didn't it ever occur to you that the time for talk had failed, and that you needed to outright re-edit and re-release the scene?  The result was that they started waffling and even arguing that Jaime raping Cersei would make him a morally grey character, when no, rape is a pretty bad thing.  And it was blatantly obvious that Cersei doesn't react as if she was raped in the next episode.  Plus, the direct was even asked in as many words, "was this a rape scene to make Jaime morally grey?" and he outright said no, it wasn't intended as a rape scene, AND that he had never been instructed to do something to show Jaime as morally grey at all.  Specifically denied what Benioff later claimed.

I didn't include this in the "list of changes" because...it's not really a "change". It isn't a story change, we can tell it didn't happen in-universe, the editing was screwed up and their wacky, belated, and not even well thought out attempts to defend themselves (they didn't bother coming up with an actual cover story, just silence, really)...we're just assuming that HBO will fix it in a later re-release with or without Benioff and Weiss.

Now from Season 5, the complaint is more generally that they shouldn't have tried to stuff all of this material from two books into one season - it wasn't 20 episodes worth of stuff but it was at least 11 to 13 episodes worth of stuff.

Cersei and Tyrion's storylines were very condensed, though condensed very well. But Dorne was the bottom of the barrel and suffered from limited screentime. The idea to send Jaime to Dorne was good, his scenes and Doran's scenes were good - but brief. The Sand Snakes were officially not great and the weakest thing this season - but in terms of writing and in fight choreography and camerawork. Again, camera following Obara as she walks around monologuing? Why? They're the exact lines from the novel, the writers didn't screw that up - and interviews reveal the actresses actually put a lot of thought into their roles -- turns out many of their scenes were cut for time. And dear god the fight choreography in episode 6 -- apparently limited due to fighting in a UNESCO world heritage site. This can be fixed next season though with better scenes for those characters.

Combining Sansa with the Boltons was divisive - I was fully in favor when I thought she'd just be a ward, not have sex with him. I agree with Westeros.org even after that, that this is how Sansa would behave, not Jeyne Poole, and also Ramsay (he's not going into full-on torture mode because she's too valuable).

And they were planning it since Season 2. Time constraints, I get that. Even so it speaks to the bigger problem in Season 5 - maybe they should have spaced this material out a bit more and not condensed so much. Maybe their hands were tied due to the actors' contract negotiations, but NO you can't fit this much story into only 7 seasons. At least HBO is now openly saying they can have as many seasons as they want.

There was also one complaint not so much about Season 5 but in general which came up:

At a time when we're already angry at them about the farce of the Jaime/Cersei scene (not the scene itself, but their utter mishandling of the damage control for it -- "say nothing and wait for the audience to forget it next year"?!?!?) is the accusation that they're relying not only on sex and nudity too much (and admittedly, it was bad in Season 2, but after that fell back to what I'd consider reasonable levels relative to the novels).....is that they are relying on sexual assault as a cheap dramatic effect.

As I said, no, making a 5 minute long rape montage at Craster's Keep was gratuitous - even if this "happened" in the novels (albeit off-screen)...WHY would you do that? It doesn't further the story. It's not depicting the trauma of rape, but using it as a cheap plot point -- it's called "Stuffed in the Fridge" (a superhero in comics found that his girlfriend had been murdered and stuffed into his refrigerator - but it wasn't really about her as a victim, but purely using her death as a prop to motivate his storyline).

Similarly, why was the Gilly/Samwell sex scene introduced by Watch brothers trying to rape her? Yes, they didn't get on top of her or anything and she fought them off as much as Sam, YES it is entirely plausible in-universe as many Night's Watch members are convicted rapers --- but even so, WHY do it except for cheap tension? In the novel the two of them just get really drunk commiserating after Aemon dies, then losing their inhibitions and afraid of death have sex as a life-affirming act. Why move this around?

Above all one complaint is that Benioff and Weiss outright stated that they don't read critics anymore after Season 1. And yes, the minor complaints drown out the major ones.

Even so...you KNEW people were on you about Jaime/Cersei, yet you keep doing this? Even though this was more justifiable (arguably) than that camera mistake, you should have at least paused to consider it.

It's the feeling that they're out of touch, when simply a frank discussion about three or four major complaints might regain a lot of that respect.

But yeah, above all, the Tysha thing. Trying to build up Shae as a cheap replacement just doesn't make sense in-narrative. But above all it's just....you cut OTHER things to make time for that. They thought fans wouldn't find it impactful as Tysha never appears on screen and its all backstory. Well by the same logic so is Jaime killing the Mad King. 