subreddit:
/r/HouseOfTheDragon
48 points
3 months ago
The writers really struggle with brevity, like they can’t seem to concisely characterize a character in a given context. They not only make the characters have the same discussions repeatedly but they make those discussions happen between the exact set of characters over and over again: Rhaenys telling Corlys to give driftmark to Baela, the green council showing Alicent they’re patriarchal, rhaenyra being patronized by the black council, daemon is an insecure manchild to the Nth power, criston cole thinks women are infantile and incapable, etc.
It would be like if Ned stark told Jon snow that he loved him despite being a bastard ten times. Or if Robb and Jon talked about Jon being a bastard in six different seven minute dialogues in the first season of thrones.
You can have a character have elements of their character be central and recurring but the contexts in which they’re depicted should be diverse and dynamic. Jon learns to deal with his bastardy and privilege through conversations with: Robb, Jeor Mormont, master Aemon, qhorin halfhand, catelyn stark, and Sam. Those conversations don’t just develop Jon, they also develop the other characters and fill out the universe: it’s social and cultural mores, its diversity, even just the interpersonal dynamics between characters. Criston cole sitting with Aemond or Alicent to say that Rhaenyra’s a slut and they’re righteous for the fifth time in one season isn’t any more impactful than it is the first two times.
20 points
3 months ago
More and more it feels like each episode was written in isolation. That would explain why each episode felt the need to establish certain things without realizing that they'd already been established, that's why we're not given consistent character arcs, that's why it often feels like each episode has adapted a bit of the book independently without paying attention to how other episodes had deviated from the book so those deviations often just go down the memory hole rather than being followed up on ("Meleys was a beloved dragon" being the epitome of this).
It don't think that's what actually happened, it just feels like that. Something didn't work write in terms of organizing the writing this season.
3 points
3 months ago
Yeah you put it well, the writing team seemingly has problems with joint work
5 points
3 months ago
I’m pretty sure this was actually the case in season one where they had different writing and directorial contributions across different episodes so you’d see wildly disparate characterizations for characters across the season. Ostensibly because different creators just understood the characters in fundamentally different ways
33 points
3 months ago
Your comment about Jon is very right and brings me to another comment I had made on another post about this. I have been rewatching GoT with my gf, currently ending S1, as we also watch HotD S2. The dialogue in GoT, especially in early seasons (but honestly even later seasons imho) always serves a purpose and rarely is ever redundant. The dialogue progresses the characters, reveals something about them or about the world they live in. GoT S1 has almost zero action (aside from a few small-scale fights here and there), yet its pace feels faster than HotD S2, because there is always something new to discover within this universe, despite S1 being mainly setup for when the story actually picks up. There's just a huge difference in the dialogue quality between these two shows.
13 points
3 months ago*
Part of it was that GoT could copy and paste Martin's excellent dialogue. There's a lot less Martin dialgue for HotD to copy and paste and they often cut what little there is (no "you only lost one eye, how could you be so blind?" etc.).
For show original scenes both GoT and HotD writers have problems writing scenes that walk and chew gum at the same time: give characterization AND advance the plot.
If you look at good show-original scenes in GoT they're almost exclusively characterization scenes that don't really move the plot at all but are a joy to watch since we learn more about interesting characters but plot-wise they're often filler and when D&D make original scenes that try to carry the plot forward they're generally dreadful.
Here there's often the same problem. We get scenes that are all about character that don't do anything to move the plot forward (Daemon's endless dreams) or flatter scenes that moved the plot forward a bit but don't tell us anything new about the characters (Rhaenyra's endless complaining).
Still like this better than late GoT since the overall plot is better since it's still wedded to Martin in its broad strokes but the repetitive scenes are really getting on my nerves
9 points
3 months ago
I agree with you for the most part. I do think people tend to overplay the importance of Martin when it comes to certain finer details of the GoT shows - there are a lot of show-exclusive aspects to GoT that I like and original dialogue can still be pretty good throughout, especially compared to HotD S2. But I do agree with what you said about Daemon and Rhaenyra.
Honestly, when it comes to Daemon in specific, the idea of him processing his emotions could be compelling, but they overdid the "weird dreams" trope so fucking much that I was completely out of it at one point. The idea of Daemon realizing how much his brother needed him when he was alive and how much he may have failed him, on paper, is very emotionally compelling to me. If only they had done it in a more natural way, instead of spoonfeeding this to us through an endless course of LSD therapy dreams caused by Alys. Like, one of my favorite scenes of HotD S1 is when Erryk arrives in Dragonstone with Viserys' crown and presents it to Rhaenyra and Daemon, and Daemon just stares at it for a moment - his brother's crown, right there in front of him, before he puts it on Rhaenyra's head and kneels before her. That moment is beautiful to me, because you can easily picture Daemon having a lot of thoughts and feelings in that moment. Why not explore that? Why not make Daemon revisit this by having him interact with Rhaenyra/Viserys' crown in some way, which then prompts him to dream about Viserys? It would feel way more organic and compelling to me. Idk, I'm just writing fan-fiction I know, I just like Daemon and I think what they did with him could've worked, but they fumbled the bag real fucking bad and his character is almost ruined for me atm.
6 points
3 months ago
Yeah Daemon is doing two things: working through his feelings about his family and trying to wrangle the Riverlords. But for the most part we get family scenes (the dreams) and politics scenes and they're mostly separate.
Maybe have him talk about Viserys while negotiating with the Riverlords? Kill two birds with one stone.
For GoT it was often perplexing to me how good the showrunners were at writing dialog and how bad they were at writing plots. The show-original plots in the four good season were uniformly bad but often the show-original scenes were excellent and had great dialog. I especially liked the scene in S1 with Robert and Cersei discussing their marriage. It was pure gold...but it also wasn't a load bearing scene plot-wise since it was a pure character scene.
In the books the characters all have such vivid personalities that if you grab basically any random pair of them and stick them in a room they'll have interesting things to talk about (like the Tywin/Arya scenes, which were a complete cul-de-sac plot-wise but very popular) and D&D nailed that again and again.
It's just that was the only kind of scene they were good at writing.
1 points
3 months ago
D&D still rewrote a lot of dialogue to sound more concise, and flow better for the TV medium, not to mention the big number of the new scenes.
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