Danerys going crazy should have been set up YEARS in advance. She spends the first 7 seasons doing everything she can to avoid needless suffering and talking about how she's going to "break the wheel."
Then, over the course of only 3-4 episodes in Season 8, D & D flip her switch from "good" to "evil" like the Krusty the Clown doll and she slaughters an entire city. This is not "character growth." This contradicts everything we've been shown about her character.
Honestly a huge amount of people overlooked the red flags with Danerys, because reasons. The final flip to full on crazy was poorly done, but there was a history of violent and cruel outbursts.
True but each of those times her violent outburst felt grounded. Character A does a very bad thing to Danerys, and she reacts. It made sense to her character. Kings landing didn't, because the people of Kings Landing cheered her arrival. Cersci was not popular and about to fall anyway, Danerys could have had what she wanted, Westeros and the love of the people.
To make her turn work Cersci needed to fall before Danerys got to Westeros and someone likable is on the Iron throne. Now the people want to hold onto their new monarch who saved them from Cersci or have Cersci turn likable. She had a rough start but through experience becomes a good leader only to have Denarys dethrone her. Something other than RING THE BELLS.
If they were extremely accomplished at one thing, it was throwing away almost a decade worth of character and story development for basically every surviving character in the show, which is honestly impressive
The probable crazy switch for Dany in the books is fAegon. She's all busy in Mereen, meanwhile fAegon is out there taking Westeros from Cersei and fixing stuff.
When she finally gets her shit together and goes to Westeros along with the Iron Fleet and Mr. Cthullu, the liberator card doesn't work because no one needs to be liberated so she goes nuts. All the pride, violence and idolatry in her arc makes sense.
In the show she was just replacing Cersei. No one likes Cersei, she'd still be a liberator. We'd need Jon unseating Cersei while trying to unite Westeros before Dany arrived for it to make sense. All we got as a trigger was a scene where she was sad because the members of the patriarchal society she just arrived in with three giant fire lizards don't want to drink with her.
Clone Wars did a great job portraying Anakin's gradual slide. There was nuance and plenty of exposure of the good parts of his character. His friendship with Obi-Wan was in evidence. His relationship with Padme was believable.
The fact that post-pubescent prequel-Anakin was ever trusted by anyone is at best evidence of how the dark side clouds perception.
In the prequels, from EPII he continuously felt like someone who should clearly be a Sith being shoehorned into being a Jedi. His friendship with Obi-Wan existed in name only, and his "romance" with Padme was in fact not a better romance than Twilight. (And that's saying something.)
OG fans waited decades to see Vader's backstory, and what we got was about the least rewarding most hamfisted and uninteresting portrayal of that backstory that could have been achieved. Decades of fan appetite regarding that backstory, possibly the only time such a thing has been maintained in the history of cinema, or likely will be again, and Lucas gave us Jar-Jar, cringe dialog, limp acting, and endless CGI.
D&D royally fucked up with GoT, but using the prequels to shine a light on that reads like something from The Onion.
The whole point of it is that whatever you described...
It's only a matter of degree though, at best. The three movies OP refers to were absolute shit in their own way. OP could have done a like to like comparison with Clone Wars and GoT and had a meme that made much more sense.
Meanwhile, I think there's a credible argument that the prequels (you do know what I'm describing, right?) are not in the slightest better than the last season of GoT (if we ignore their contribution to the meme-o-sphere), making OP fairly weak, and in an almost Onion-like way.
He's openly homophobic/transphobic. He refuses to debate his peers but sees nothing wrong with making his positions look artificially superior by choosing unprepared college students as his opponents, making up statistics to support his claims knowing that said opponents won't have the data to disprove it off the top of their head, and simply editing out the times that his opponent does manage to correctly oppose his argument (allegedly).
Recently even his political constituents hate him after he whined at Daily Wire for, what he calls, treating him unfairly with a $50 million dollar contract. And to completely top off the shit-sandwich, there's video evidence of him abusing his wife and she claims that he made physical threats.
Even after all that I'm sure I'm missing something lol
they think shocking effect just for the sake of shocking is great, and always works for GoT.
NOPE.
Dany the compassionate and kind, snapped just in 1 episode to become his father, burrrn them all.
Jaime whole character arc become waste that he came back to Cersei after post nut clarity with Briene.
Jon Snow, the Ice and Fire, the prince who was promised, Azor Ahai, simping for muhh qweeen, yells at zombie dragon, while Arya stab the big bad Night King like it was just random villain.
Varys, Littlefinger, and Tyrion, those who always playing 4D chess, become so dumb that it hard to watch.
and the most shocking of all: "and who has a better story than Bran the Broken?" like what the fuck man, I thought Bran story become much sinister and dark that he is the Bran of All Time (Bran the Builder, Bran that become Night King, and other Bran, etc). Like, also why bother create a story about the connection between him (as three eyed raven) and the Night King, psychic bond between them when he wargs, etc. and no, it's just "Westeros now are adopting Democracy, and Bran is the leader choosen by the council" thing.
Star Wars is a simplistic naive story where every single character is either good or evil. There's no character complexity whatsoever. The main reason the original trilogy was so successful is because they were very well made movies made in a time when well made movies hadn't even been done yet. Star Wars raised the bar of how good a movie should look and feel. But the story is trash.
The main reason the original trilogy was so successful is because they were very well made movies made in a time when well made movies hadn't even been done yet.
plucked from poverty and slavery, despite his mother remaining helpless, by a Jedi that was a part of an order that ultimately saw him as an unscrupulous means to an end of maintaining their power
he felt as though he could make a bigger difference than he was allowed if stated order relinquished their attempt at controlling him
this feeling was vindicated by his mother's torture and subsequent death
had his previously instilled beliefs challenged by two men he respected
incredibly strong motivation to go against the Jedi's wishes to save the one person he valued more than life itself
I think a lot of people got a bad taste in their mouth with episode 1 and they couldn’t look past it. I saw all three in the theater and I enjoyed them all, but the whole Gungan / Jar Jar thing makes episode 1 the weakest for me by far. The whole tone of the movie feels like it was aimed at a much younger audience, even compared to episodes 2 and 3.
Which is bizarre to me, since you have to imagine the core audience for those movies were middle aged people who saw the originals as kids.
Still, nothing is worse to me than episode IX. I’d watch a Jar Jar spinoff before I’d watch that again.
Which is bizarre to me, since you have to imagine the core audience for those movies were middle aged people who saw the originals as kids.
These are the people they needed to draw in, but the real audience was their kids. They wanted to create a new generation of Star Wars fans, and they knocked it out of the park.
Obi Wan was the main character of the prequels but they kept thinking it was Anakin. Messes up the framing of a lot of events particularly in the first movie. By the third one I think they figured that out, but it has plenty of other problems even though the narrative focus was better.
I was 12 when Revenge of the Sith came out and back then I would have agreed that Episode 3 was the best of them.
However, as I grew older it changed and nowadays I think Episode 1 is the best written of the prequels and the dialogue is much more cringe in Episodes 2 and 3.