I just finished season 1. I don’t understand the hype. I liked it and the cast is fantastic but so far I think that the plots, arcs, and dialog aren’t anything special. Imdb says there are nine noble families. Nine? That a silly amount of stuff to keep track of. I feel like I’ll need a conspiracy theory like board with red string so I can keep track of everything. But that’s more of a commitment than I want to make.
And I was surprised that there’s some formulaic stuff make reddit and reddit-like audience cheer. The fucking scenes seem almost funny to me. They are so fake and wooden. I assume the wolf dogs are in the books but in season 1 - they seem less scary and more like a cool plot device.
At Imdb it has a rating of 9.2/10 • 2.2m. I can’t believe it has millions of ratings but it’s still above 9. I think the series is has an effectively higher rating than The Sopranos which is 9.2/10 but it only has has 1/5th has many ratings.
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How can it be so highly rated?
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What would you rate the series as a whole?
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Why do people love this series so much?
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Is season 1 typical of the series? Worse? Better?
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How do you rank the seasons best to worst?
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Is there more dialog that needs subtitles? I don’t like that at all. I don’t want to read subtitles for a fantasy series.
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Is the finale even worse than The Sopranos’?
1 - Some of the appeal of the books is present in the series, specially early seasons, so there’s that. More cynically, it’s probably the first instance of medieval fantasy prestige TV (I know there was other stuff like Pillars of the Earth and whatnot but those didn’t have the HBO brand) so there was some novelty to it. Borrowing from Lindsay Ellis, it’s “hot fantasy that FUCKS”. It’s juvenile as all hell and eyeroll inducing but it was key to marketing it to general audiences.
2 - decent 7 while it was running because of the whole social aspect and no hindsight of how shit it was going to get, light 3 now, and a 0 if you’re in any way averse to gratuitous violence/sex.
3 - I think the appeal of the books that transfers to the series is a) some of the characters and b) the politicking.
The problem with the characters is that they get flanderized to all hell later on, or sometimes it becomes clear the showrunners didn’t really understand them, or at least didn’t know what to do with them. But still, some of them are compelling, even if they are fucking assholes.
I think the core appeal of GoT though is seeing an inflection point in the history of this fictional world. Not because there’s wars going on, but because characters like Jon and Daenarys (not coincidentally fan favorites) are struggling to surpass the “might makes right” world they live in, and sometimes succeeding. Also because of the growing presence of supernatural shit. It gives this feeling of this new world peeking in and all the promise and terror that comes with this kind of change. The show fumbles both os these aspects REALLY hard later on though. That’s because it bought into the “dark fantasy” meme and played down the supernatural aspects (nerd shit) and made a U turn back to the status quo (the last few episodes reek of liberalism).
4 - Typical to early seasons in some ways in the sense that it borrows heavily from the books, but the focus shifts to war stuff so there’s some distinction there.
5 - it’ been a while since I’ve seen the series, but seasons 1-4 are pretty decent, 5 is okayish, 6 was pretty bad and 7-8 are atrocious.
6 - Dunno, not a native speaker. I was fine with subtitles off most of the time though.
7 - Haven’t watched The Sopranos yet, but GoT has probably one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen.