I’ve bolded the really important word here.
“Apparently”
Because viewers of the show, as soon as it left book territory, started assuming that any two scenes that followed each other, were pretty much seconds or hours apart, even if there was no clear evidence that they were, and where they could potentially have been days or weeks apart.
They also stopped excusing them. If, in the books, basically the same thing happens with the raven, dragons, etc. except it’s well-explained and the time period it happens over is clear, then suddenly people are going to not care about that episode.
I have several criticisms of the showrunners myself. One of them is that they seem to absolutely refuse to use “Six weeks later”-type stuff, and really don’t seem to like clarifying time periods. This was fine when the books were here, because if nerds like us actually cared, we could check the books. But that stopped being a thing.
Another is that they aren’t anywhere near as good at writing dialogue as Martin is. There are plenty of lines S5-8 that are great, but there are also quite a number that are so clunky they barely seem to fit the setting.
A third is that where they have the choice, they seem to prefer flash and flourish to “Makes sense”, but I think that’s a weaker criticism because most of the audience responds well to it.
I actually agree re: frequency, though not really extent.
Examples will take actual effort, and time, and I’m slightly loathe to go do that because I’m concerned that:
A) You don’t actually care that much. That’s not a criticism of you. You probably shouldn’t care. But like, it feels like I’d spending a lot of time for people to potentially go “Meh, who cares…”.
and
B) People will just want to argue the toss over minutiae of the examples, rather than engaging with the general concept.
If I can get assurances on these things, fine. Otherwise just tell me “That’s just like, your opinion, man!”. Because that’s all it is - my opinion. Even with examples it will still be my opinion. The only thing that could really make it even slightly more than that is Martin coming out with the books and similar events happening.
I would say almost every example of stuff people on the internet call “teleporting” is a good example here for my argument, though.
The force-splitting is a good example of what I’m talking about. That’s exactly the sort of thing Martin would explain at length. The show doesn’t really need to explain it, and faulting the show for not explaining it is silly, imho. If that happened in S3, no-one would question it because there’s be a six-page discussion between Dany, Tyrion and Davos about why it was happening, including copious descriptions of gaudy and OTT room and also any food or wine in the proximity. Also somehow it would be slightly sexualized. (I am re-reading GoT now…)
And the literalism you’re applying to off-hand comments in a brief interview designed to be watched by morons (seriously have you watched them since the beginning? If this is the first, you have no context for these things - I’ve watched some before, but had to stop because they were lowering my IQ), is pretty silly. It’s double-silly if you don’t always watch those things, and only watched this one because some outraged poster or website pointed it to you.
It kind of depends on how you feel about the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents. You can go “Well it’s not unreasonable when the objective is to enact regime change in Iraq and kill Saddam, er I mean, put the true queen on the throne of King’s Landing and kill Cersei!” but I can go well “120 thousand Iraqi civilians killed in the invasion alone disagree”. I mean to say Dany is reasonable, is spit in Varys’ face re: “the Realm”, which was being discussed a couple of scenes earlier. They actually made this point pretty well, for once. The only way to take KL by force will basically be to systematically destroy it (“We had to destroy the village in order to save it” - classic justification for this sort of thing).
I’m not saying I wouldn’t burn the motherfucker down too, but I wouldn’t class myself as “reasonable” if I did.
Have you got a better example? Because that’s a terrible example. That’s mistaking a setup that was clearly for the sake of exciting visuals/TV, with a setup that was dumb. It’s also something only about 5% of people would even notice without having it pointed out. Saying that was “dumb”, particularly when no-one has ever offered a workable plan (seriously, describe a plan that could be shot on the same budget, would make more sense on the intel they had, and would offer a chance of survival against a hundred thousand zombies, and would be as or more dramatically effective), and they had very poor intel, seems really like, weaksauce. It’s not like real general don’t make decisions that bad, either. It’s just that if they win it becomes a footnote.
If you can provide examples of characters making actual dumb decisions, I will probably agree, but that wasn’t one of them, and it was a problem for a tiny handful of nerds on the internet. I talk about GoT to people at work all the time. Non-nerds. Not a single one of them was like “Well that was a dumb plan”. All my nerdiest nerd-friends? “THAT WAS A DUMB PLAN!!!”. Hmmmm. Just sayin. It was a dumb plan, objectively, but that’s irrelevant. People talking about how effective it was as an image get it.
We’re nowhere near, say The Walking Dead levels of dumb decisions either, I’d say.
The ambush scene is another example. Most viewers have no problem with it, and if you’re going to call them “morons” or whatever, don’t even. We’re talking plenty of smart people - just not nerds. Personally my brain was like “How the fuck are they firing ballistas that high and actually hitting anything?”. I would have preferred the scene to have them basically fired enough ballistas that hit through sheer luck and volume of fire, and had them ambush maybe from disguised fixed emplacements on Dragonstone itself, but either way it’s not a huge issue.
