House of the Dragon - Discussion
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As someone who disliked the last 3 seasons of GoT (to varying degrees), I am enjoying this show a lot. Not perfect but way better than I expected.
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@Smile Season one is a grimdark fantasy soap opera.
Kinda what Dynasty would be like if the patriarch was slowly dying and everyone in the family was ready to get their hands really dirty. Oh, and had dragons.
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I WOULD SURE LOVE TO BE ABLE TO PHYSICALLY SEE WHATâS HAPPENING IN SCENES
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@Roz said in House of the Dragon - Discussion:
I WOULD SURE LOVE TO BE ABLE TO PHYSICALLY SEE WHATâS HAPPENING IN SCENES
The Battle of Winterfell called, it wants its non-existent light sources back.
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@Roz My SO was angrily raging over this and initially wondered if the TV was broken.
I asked her if she really wanted to clearly see a guy macking on his niece.
The conversation was basically done after that.
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@SpaceKhomeini said in House of the Dragon - Discussion:
@Roz My SO was angrily raging over this and initially wondered if the TV was broken.
I asked her if she really wanted to clearly see a guy macking on his niece.
The conversation was basically done after that.
wow donât kinkshame your SO
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@Arkandel I suspect Succession (also HBO) was another source of inspiration.
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Look, letâs face it, Westeros is so fucked up I donât think it matters who they get to sit the Iron Throne.
Murderous lunatic? Immense bloodshed ensues.
Alcoholic burn-out? Immense bloodshed ensues.
Absolutely bonkers religious fanatic? Immense bloodshed ensues.
Nice guy who loves his family and just wants everyone to get along? Immense bloodshed ensues.
Westeronians: Just put a random person on it so you can get back to your main hobby: chopping each other to pieces. Sheesh.
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Monarchies yo.
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@Smile I feel Westeronians would vote in Kanye West as President for Life if they had the chance.
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I gotta say, and it pains me to do so⌠House of the Dragon is easily the better show compared to Rings of Power. It outclassed it so far in just about every aspect with the possible exception of special effects, and even there HotD kept its own.
The characters are so much deeper and nuanced. There are relatively few characters whoâre just unapologetic villains; others act absolutely brutally on occasion but have redeeming qualities, some act through fear and others out of ambition or love. The politics especially are simply on a different level, and the stage theyâre on is considerably more volatile - in that regard the two shows arenât even comparable.
Iâm happy we do have at least two major triple-A fantasy shows around these days. Hopefully when their second seasons hit weâll see them both picking up and getting even better.
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AND the soundtrack. Omg.
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I thought the recent episode was great⌠up until the very end. Without spoilers, it just felt out of place and done purely for spectacle. Great spectacle, to be sure, but it also took me out of the moment and made me shake my head and go: âThis doesnât make senseâ.
Anyway, looking forward to the season finale!
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Honestly, the show is at a stage of I will forgive so much because itâs already waaaaay better than I thought itâd be. And being one of those dorks that read F&B, itâs better than it should be, being based on a fake history book that is very scant on any details. So yeah. Weird spectacle in certain scenes aside, it is amazing.
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@Arkandel said in House of the Dragon - Discussion:
I gotta say, and it pains me to do so⌠House of the Dragon is easily the better show compared to Rings of Power. It outclassed it so far in just about every aspect with the possible exception of special effects, and even there HotD kept its own.
The characters are so much deeper and nuanced. There are relatively few characters whoâre just unapologetic villains; others act absolutely brutally on occasion but have redeeming qualities, some act through fear and others out of ambition or love. The politics especially are simply on a different level, and the stage theyâre on is considerably more volatile - in that regard the two shows arenât even comparable.
Iâm happy we do have at least two major triple-A fantasy shows around these days. Hopefully when their second seasons hit weâll see them both picking up and getting even better.
I agree with your assessment here, but I also feel like thatâs because of one single, simple thing:
House of the Dragon was written about the characters themselves. The whole point of the story is that itâs basically a family drama-slash soap opera, but with fantastical costumes and also here, have some dragons. Relationships, motivations, decisions, consequences⌠thatâs the entire point of the show. They spend very little time on having to explain to us how the world works because you donât really need a whole lot of that information to ground a viewer in setting that amounts to âHere is this spectacularly fucked up family and how they manage to spectacularly fuck each other up, even when they mean well, because power and the pursuit of it are inherently corrosive.â
Meanwhile, Rings of Power is taking what was supposed to be the original foundational mythology of Middle Earthâwhatâs essentially the backdrop to the story in LotR and The Hobbitâand making it the central story. Itâs much harder for them to spend time delving deep into a characterâs emotional state, what motivates them, how theyâre connected to other people in the story, etc. because they have to spend so much time explaining to us what the fuck is going on, who that dude even is, what the thing theyâre chasing is, why thatâs important, how that relates to this other thing from a thousand years ago⌠and worst of all, itâs hard to do that well.
If youâre intimately familiar with the material that theyâre reviewing for the audience, this feels like a giant waste of time that detracts from the interpersonal interactions. If you arenât familiar with the story, all of that is useful for grounding you in the world, but definitely feels like the very extended version of the Star Wars opening crawl. Which is fine for the first few minutes of the movie, but not so much when itâs pretty much the entire first episode of the show.
I was ready to drop after how much time was spent explaining Valinor, because I was wondering if the entire series was just going to be them giving Imaginary History 102 lessons at my eyeballs and this being very boring. Especially because my understanding of it pre-episode was basically "The mythical West where elves came from and were immortal. Elf heaven, or whatever. " After the end of the episode, my understanding of it was âThe mythical West where elves came from and were immortal. Elf heaven, or whatever. There is lots and lots of light and apparently a magical tree.â Not really a great use of time.
I figured Iâd give it one more episode to see if it got better, and Iâm glad that it did, but I still spent way more time going onto fan wikis essentially looking up âWhat is a Valar and why the fuck do I care?â than I shouldâve with the amount of exposition dumping they did.
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@Aria said in House of the Dragon - Discussion:
Meanwhile, Rings of Power is taking what was supposed to be the original foundational mythology of Middle Earthâwhatâs essentially the backdrop to the story in LotR and The Hobbitâand making it the central story. Itâs much harder for them to spend time delving deep into a characterâs emotional state, what motivates them, how theyâre connected to other people in the story, etc. because they have to spend so much time explaining to us what the fuck is going on
As a caveat, I donât want to sound negative about Rings of Power. I liked it, I think it was better than it could have been. It holds promise, and Iâll definitely watch season two when itâs out.
But frankly I think they tried to please both types of viewers and failed to do so. As a hardcore fan I didnât really like the âfanficâ aspects they introduced, and some of the major characters from the Second Age either came off a bit off or their roles were steamrolled over to make the plotâs ends meet. The immense respect someone like Elrond (heâs the freakinâ son of freakinâ Earendil) or Galadriel were owed didnât come off well. The decline of the Elves was replaced by some weird mithril-curing ailment out of left field. Sauronâs manipulations came off⌠well we didnât really see them happen; a lot of it (to me) seemed like massive coincidences rather than meticulously laid plans.
In comparison House of the Dragon invested big time in its charactersâ arcs, and it paid off. Paddy Considine alone⌠damn, that guy turned a walk from one end of a room to the other into a chills-inducing scene. He was so good. The villains, from its merciless brutes to the increasingly paranoid mother trying to keep her kids alive during a succession set a hell of a stage for whatâs obviously going to end in a whole lot of slaughter. In proud Westeros tradition there is at least one theoretically unredeemable dude - who literally murdered his wife on camera - turned into a fan favorite because of the performance.
And the most dubious aspect of the first season (again, for me), the introduction of time-shifts which required actors to be switched, some child actors to be used which is always risky, etc, worked to a good extent - and now itâs over. From this point I donât believe there are more timeshifts planned before the Dance of Dragons officially begins.
Again, not to sound negative about RoP⌠I think itâs Amazonâs fault. They didnât pick Tolkien because they cared for it, they picked the property as a big name that they needed to showcase Amazon Prime, poured money into the special effects and tried to make it a spectacle. And it is one. But it could have been so much better.
⌠At least it wasnât an abomination like Wheel of Time.
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Was WoT bad?
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@Smile said in House of the Dragon - Discussion:
Was WoT bad?
It diverged so much from the source material that I was wondering what I was watching. Donât get me wrong, they did some things well as far as adapting to a TV series was concerned (I rather liked the Aes Sedai costuming, in the end), but several things were⌠Iâm going to say butchered for the sake of being dramatic. I canât really give concrete examples without spoiling things, though.
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The WoT finale was a mess, though Iâm one of those people who thinks the finale for the book Eye of the World was also a mess, so I guess for me it was a wash. Iâm curious where it goes in the second season with a more straightforward book to adapt plus in theory less COVID restrictions on shooting (and in theory no more recasts).
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Iâm trying to not talk about WoT too much because
- Iâll get pissed off.
- I donât want to be the guy who tells people who liked it anyway that they are wrong to do so.
⌠But it was pretty bad.