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The real reason fans hate the last season of game of thrones

  • Metadata
  • Summary:
    • GOT failed in the end because it shifted its rare sociological way of telling its story into a psychological one - dominated by hero's/anti-hero's' internal motivations and not something bred out of the society that it is in
  • Notes:
    • The mainly talked about reasons for why the show declined in quality were
      • New and inferior writers
      • Shortened season
      • Lack of source material
      • Too many plot holes
    • Fundamental issue is actually a ==shortcoming of our storytelling culture - we don't really know how to tell sociological stories==
    • When GOT was at its best, the show was a **sociological **and **institutional **storytelling in a medium dominated by the **psychological **and the individual
      • Sociological vs psychological
      • Institutional vs individual
    • George R. R. Martin was adept at creating characters that seems to be molded by the institution and evolves in response to the broader setting
    • When David Benioff and D. B. Weiss ran out of source material they steered the narrative thread to a more psychological and typical style popular in Hollywood
      • This type of writing is common because it is the most natural way of telling a story
    • However, the narrative change was not the sole problem because despite changing the style D&D was also not good at the new style
      • plot holes
      • convenient plot devices (Arya ex machina)
    • The pull of GOT was the fact that ==the story can kill major characters without losing the thread of the story==
      • There is no singular powerful main character to build around
      • No single narrative
    • In sociological storytelling, each character has their own personal agency but they are entangled in the world of webs that also affects their choices and growth

    • "Should you kill baby Hitler?" is not a true dilemma because a different demagogue would have taken his place in between the two bloody world wars because the society would have pushed for one

    • Fundamental attribution error is a [[Cognitive Bias]] where we assign too much importance to the individual as the locus of agency and that also plays a role to why Hollywood tend to produce stories which are individual based
    • Hallmark of sociological storytelling is ==if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character and imagine us making similar choices==
      • Not just empathy, but actual understanding because we can justfiy the evil doers actions
    • A similar show in this vain is The Wire
    • If told correctly, Daenerys' descent into madness would have been a strong and riveting story
      • However, it became ridiculous because her actions were indefensible
      • They kept the story but not the story telling method
    • The psychological and internal genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change