site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

23
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The GoT problem was that the show runners were counting on GRRM to finish the series and wrap up all of his plot lines. They would have only needed to adapt and simplify what GRRM wrote.

GRRM didn't publish enough adaptable material and D&D were left to come up with a conclusion on their own.

HotD is based on material GRRM has already published. It's adapted from about 120 pages from a book on Targaryen history.

So it won't have the depth and twists of the early seasons of GoT but there is a complete arc for the show runners to follow.

GRRM purportedly told the showrunners exactly where the show was going. But because he didn't flesh it out at GRRM levels of detail, the showrunners had to fill stuff in and didn't. Why did Daenarys turn evil? Clearly GRRM told the writers it's because all the people she loves get killed and she suffers a lot. But if he were to actually write it, he'd realize that Missandei getting killed isn't narratively sufficient.

It's the same reason that a lot of "software architect" type people are kind of disastrous - if they actually sat down and wrote code instead of making diagrams and saying "fill in the details", they'd realize where the actual hard parts live.

GRRM could probably have made it work, though maybe 2 books would have become 4. The TV writers couldn't.

GRRM purportedly told the showrunners exactly where the show was going. But because he didn't flesh it out at GRRM levels of detail, the showrunners had to fill stuff in and didn't. Why did Daenarys turn evil? Clearly GRRM told the writers it's because all the people she loves get killed and she suffers a lot.

The showrunners have shown they can fill in Martin's skeleton in the past: S1 had some great non-canon scenes, and there are well-received TV-only plots (like Arya meeting Tywin in S2)

The problem imo is that GRRM's entire plot has spiralled out of his control and he keeps adding new and new plotlines to push things forward. This is fine for GRRM because he explicitly left TV to not have writing constraints. However this is obviously a problem for a TV, even the one with the largest budget ever.

Disclaimer: everything after this is well-worn fandom speculation.

In this case the problems in GoT are likely due to the showrunners - understandably- removing major characters like the alleged surviving Targaryen heir Aegon and his Dornish allies. Why? Cause we'd have to go back to Dorne and explain just how this Targaryen hid for years just like Dany, maybe adding seasons to the show and annoying the audience.

The problem is that roles like this are likely pivotal and its absence explains a lot of weird things.

For one: why Cersei has permanent support despite her actions which are so norm-breaking I can't think of a real-world precedent. In the books, if this happened, Aegon and his wife (lovelier than Cersei) would likely depose her and they'd be the threat to Dany.

This actually makes a lot more sense: Season 7 and 8 basically butchered Tyrion and Varys' characters to provide some justification for why Dany wouldn't just destroy Cersei instantly to much rejoicing (this causes the attendant problem that any/all warnings about Dany going evil aren't credible until she does something ludicrously over the top)

However, Dany's reticence would make sense if she was dealing with a fellow Targaryen pretender to the Throne. She actually can't just roast him. And his existence is the perfect thing that would cause her to be insecure and/or slip up.

I think there's sort of a cascade of problems like this, due to having to deal with an increasingly spiraling Martin plot. A plot that is so dense and complicated and unworkable that Martin literally scrapped a lot of work that didn't go well and hasn't successfully put out a book since Dance With Dragons. So I actually wouldn't be convinced that Martin can do it in two.

As I said:

GRRM could probably have made it work, though maybe 2 books would have become 4.

Fair enough. Then I should say: I'm not convinced that Martin can do it at all (especially given that the "split the books up" was tried for Feast/Dance and we've been stuck for a decade)

"software architect" type people

Could you give more detail? In my (biased) experience, they're normally competentish (if given to trends and overcomplicating things). Generally they've been developing for a decade+ before taking the role, from what I've seen. There are however many PMs or such who misrepresent/get overly stuck to diagrams and i've met some people who managed to become architects without coding at all. At my work, I make architectural mvps with seniors with chunks of the functionality and low effort piping, then tell other juniors how to make everything production ready while seniors work on hard parts we aren't quite sure about.

But fundamentally it's an organizational issue. 10 experts alone could very well be better (and in some projects, I'm able to give parts each to domain experts who write their parts in a week and it's all done (waterfall can work!)). But engineers are normally at the behest of non-tech people coming up with stupid features, who change their minds, or the domain space isn't even properly explored with exploratory test models (so we can't do good engineering practices). But this can be justified, since the tech is supposed to automate away concrete tasks and processes, for people who are paying for it. Path of least resistance etc.

So I'm referring to software architect types who probably are competent, but also aren't doing a lot of coding anymore. The net result is grand plans that often fail, or succeed but overbudget, due to a lot of stuff just getting bogged down in bad ergonomics and day to day tasks that are harder than they should be. As a concrete example, I once worked on an ETL task run by a high level architect plus a bunch of fairly junior folks.

ETL tasks just dragged on, took forever, had lots of errors. One of the biggest errors was simply importing stuff to the wrong column, because the developer actually mapping json -> SQL had to manually map "input field_name -> integer column position in CSV file -> SQL loads the CSV". After about a year of delays due to transposing columns (return [...20 columns...row['foo']['bar'], row['baz'][0]...] when it should have been return [...row['baz'][0], row['foo']['bar']...]), a clever (new) junior dev finally figured out developers should just do return { 'foobar': row['foo']['bar'], ...} and wrote the system to translate 'foobar' -> column 23 by just checking the column order in SQL. Another example would be days added to any ticket just because setting up a testing env is a lot harder than it needs to be.

The key point here is that in neither case did the architect actually spend much time actually doing the task that was dragging on and slowing the project. If they spent a month doing that, they probably would have just fixed it without much notice. And once we got that one clever guy, it did get fixed.

As it relates to this example, from what I've read, GRRM is actually good at the details of writing. But since he's retired from writing, he's put into the "clueless architect" role, and the actual people doing the implementation are just not able to actually fill in the details.

I have only very rarely worked with an architect who is competent. Most of the time, it's someone with little to no experience actually doing the technical work, who gives these high-level pie in the sky statements like "the system will take in lead, and output gold" with no indication whatsoever of how it should do that. Then they dust their hands off, go "OK your turn now" and leave it to the technical people to figure out how to actually make that happen.

I'm not saying competent architects don't exist, I've actually worked with some! But they are very much not the norm in my experience.

I've seen this said before but I don't think it's true. Game of Thrones' problem was that the showrunners started writing their own fanfiction well before they ran out of material. This was made worse by them cutting things that must have seemed, at the time, unimportant, but later led to the last two seasons feeling incredibly unbalanced. The changes start around season or 4 (it's been a while), start getting really bad by season 5, and finally compound to where the average viewer can tell things are very off by the end

By fanfiction I don't necessarily mean fleshing smaller characters out, like Tywin and Margaery — generally this was done well and didn't conflict with anything pre-existing. I'm talking about things like Jaime's storylines after returning to King's Landing being completely different, whatever they did to Euron Greyjoy, and literally everything about the Dorne plot.

An example of cut content is the ignored storyline of Aegon Targaryen landing his armies in Westeros while Daenerys is fucking around in Meereen. He kind of comes out of nowhere in book 5 but it really feels like he should have been there for the endgame in the show. What we had instead is the situation where everyone is against Cersei and the writers have to bend the story in knots to have it be an even fight. A multipolar conflict with Dany, Cersei, Euron, and Aegon all facing off would be much more chaotic and even, assuming this was Martin's intention.

Perhaps the most infamous example of cut content was not including Lady Stoneheart. As I recall, this heavily strained the showrunners' relationship with Martin and led to him distancing himself from the show and depriving it of its most important advisor.

For all the things you can say about the showrunners at least they finished their damn job. I'm more bitter now at how GOT/Martin influenced Attack on Titan's writer and caused him to run that off a cliff too.

This was made worse by them cutting things that must have seemed, at the time, unimportant, but later led to the last two seasons feeling incredibly unbalanced. The changes start around season or 4 (it's been a while), start getting really bad by season 5

Lol, serves me right to write a post about this and scroll down and find someone has put it more succinctly hours ago.

I'll just reiterate: I'm very sympathetic to the showrunners here, despite them usually getting the criticism for this.

It would be one thing if there was a complete series but Martin himself has proven incapable of resolving his own narrative kudzu. He basically spent years on the "Meereenese Knot" problem of trying to get all of the characters in the right place and iirc has dumped more than one version of the story. His last few books only covered parts of the world due to the rapidly proliferating viewpoints.

All of this stuff costs when you're doing a show, in a way it doesn't cost a writer.

I agree with your sympathies especially when it come to cut stuff. On a show you have to cast, build sets, account for the limited ability of your core audience to follow many concurrent plotlines. On a finite budget it’s pretty easy to say “where the hell is this going” to a lot of the book 4-5 plots and cut them, especially when the books don’t have an easy answer to that question.

I’m less sympathetic in cases like Dorne where they built the damn sets and hired actors, just the wrong ones. That felt like the writers just didn’t understand what Martin was doing with Dorne at all and said fuck it, let’s add some girlbosses and put Jaime in it. Give me Arianne back

It would be one thing if there was a complete series but Martin himself has proven incapable of resolving his own narrative kudzu.

I mean, sure. But the problem wasn't just "the writers inherited a thorny plot from GRRM and weren't up to the task of concluding it well". The problem is "the writers turned out to be a failure at basic writing". In the last few seasons of GoT character motivations are all over the place, things regularly happen that make no sense in-universe, and the writers lack even the most basic fucking attention to logical coherency of the story. In the last episode, Jon Snow goes from one scene (and location in the world) to the next in ways that would require him to literally teleport for it to be possible.

I have sympathy for the writers that they inherited an unfinished plot that GRRM himself hasn't been able to finish successfully yet (and may never do so). But my sympathy runs out when they make writing mistakes so large that anyone, even a completely untrained fan like myself, is able to spot them. That's 100% on the GoT writers, and not GRRM.

The problem is "the writers turned out to be a failure at basic writing". In the last few seasons of GoT character motivations are all over the place, things regularly happen that make no sense in-universe, and the writers lack even the most basic fucking attention to logical coherency of the story.

Yeah, but I see this as partly a problem caused by the giant hole left by the aforementioned kudzu when they cut it out.

For example: Varys and Tyrion HAVE to be stupid cause there's no other way to stop Dany from just killing Cersei but this then makes it hard to take their ambivalence about Dany seriously as foreshadowing. All of the political complexity of Westeros has to be removed or Cersei would never last as Queen.

And so on and so on.

I can certainly agree that part of the problem was the writers (foolishly, I would say) choosing to cut points that seemed irrelevant in the books that already exist. But I don't think that was most of it. If the plot had issues but the writers had at least tried to paper over it with a justification, then I could maybe see that being the major problem. But more often, there are problems that they don't even try to paper over it. They are stringing together scenes without even the thinnest veneer of logic for how the world progressed from one point to the next.

Case in point: the S7 arc where Dany loses one of the dragons to the Others. The Others had Jon Snow and his men trapped on an island (which the Others can access easily) for a long time. We don't know how long, but it stands to reason that even as the dragon flies it takes a day or two for Dany to cross the entire continent as she flies to his rescue. Why did the Others not just kill Jon and his men immediately, then leave? They never even attempt to explain that. The fan theory was that the Night King somehow knows that Dany is coming with her dragons, and he wants to score an undead dragon. Fine - how does he know that? Again, not explained (even if that was the intent, which who knows). The whole story just makes no logical sense, and there isn't even an attempt to try to make it work. They just jammed characters into scenes and went "eh good enough".

It's stuff like that which makes me blame the show writers the most. I think a competent writer stuck with difficult material will at least try to make it make sense somehow. They probably won't succeed, but there will at least be a recognizable attempt. The GoT writers didn't even try, which leads one to believe the issues didn't even occur to them - ergo, they must be massively incompetent. And that is a far bigger problem with the latter seasons of GoT than the difficult plot they inherited from GRRM.

Yeah, I can only assume they were under constraints and overmatched since some decisions are so bad, even by the standards of the bad writing on the show (the most egregious might be sending the unarmed into the Crypts of Winterfell). Some of those decisions are the "Somehow, Palpatine has returned" of fantasy: they ring of "it's 11PM and the essay is due, fuck it.". They just didn't have it in them to bridge the chasms and gave up.

I just think a lot of the problems we criticize the most have a much earlier and understandable genesis.

I'm more bitter now at how GOT/Martin influenced Attack on Titan's writer and caused him to run that off a cliff too.

I am morbidly-curious now that you mention this. I've only ever watched the first season of the anime and I left off in the manga when they introduced the anti-human 3DMG. I'm roughly aware that AOT goes to some weird places, and I know from watching Ironmouse that Eren does Some Shit(tm) that was apparently guaranteed to turn the audience against him.

I am morbidly-curious now that you mention this. I've only ever watched the first season of the anime and I left off in the manga when they introduced the anti-human 3DMG

You should watch at least the first 3 seasons; they really are something special.

I should be able to explain what I mean in a mostly spoiler-free way. The creator of Attack on Titan, Hajime Isayama, binged Game of Thrones in 2016 and got really into it, even saying that the ending of his story would be inspired by the show.

There's a point in the story where the themes and style of storytelling vastly shift and not for the better. This coincides with the split between season 3 and the "final season" and there's an easy visual cue to tell when it happened because a different studio took over animating the show. This also coincides with around when Isayama got into Game of Thrones and it started influencing his writing.

I would summarize the original themes of the show (Seasons 1-3) as RAGE, SCREAM, FIGHT. There is something existential coming for you and it won't leave a single one of you left alive. Your 'leaders' think it best if your people quietly went extinct, and as you learn they are far from the only ones... Fight with your lives and with everything at your disposal, even if it means literally turning into your mortal enemy. There are times when good friends have to fight eachother but the mission is never in question because those are the stakes. This and the military imagery gave the show heavy nationalist themes and the series began to be criticized at the end of season 3 once certain interpretations became circulated online. I found it to be extremely refreshing compared to what I'm used to.

The post-GOT era show has heavy Martin themes. War is bad and you'll be heavy-handedly browbeaten for liking the cool parts with the sobering reality of characters you like dying. Morality is very grey all of a sudden. Killing others is wrong, even if they all want you dead... it feels quite incongruent with the earlier themes of the show, even with the story that the author laid out. These themes may sound better to you as you read this but consider that they are kludged onto a work that was saying the exact opposite things for so long. It's a different bill of goods now.

I should elaborate on the storytelling changes as well. Attack on Titan's narrative framing ties you and Eren very closely together. Later this expands so you get the POV of a few other main characters at times, but the important thing is that you and the characters are almost always on the same page. You know what they know, you discover the mystery together. This was the style of storytelling until the shift I talked about, at which point it becomes basically... Game of Thrones.

Tons of characters. You don't follow characters, you check in with them to see where they are with their story. Your relationship to Eren is completely broken as he goes from being the POV character to someone you don't see the inner world of outside of 4 episodes or so. You're catching up with his plans like everyone else is. This is pretty much exactly how Martin does it and the style has its merits... just not on something that did it differently for most of its existence. This is harder to articulate for most people but I think it's why the new seasons are so jarring.

As for the ending of Eren doing Something Crazy — this is certainly where the show was going from the start. His words to a certain betraying friend are downright genocidal in rhetoric. I think in a world without the influence of Martin it'd be framed much differently by the narrative, which would make for some interesting discourse online.

I'm not sure anyone with thematic sense should have been expecting Eren to not go into a bad place. The way it gets there is weirder than the resolution that a super-angry kid who turns into a race of cannibals goes to a bad place when worldviews are shattered.

Western young adult literature it was never going to be.

Oh see I thought that, like many things in AoT, the ending where Erin Does Shit (which I also haven't seen yet) was going to be Evangelion-adjacent.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats