Works where you were surprised to learn you were in the minority of viewers

[Ramza00]

I feel the need to underline the whole Mirri Maz Duur plot line and the words she said to Dany in response to Dany’s questions “why”

will likely be relevant with the end of the books if Martin ever graces us with another 0 to 3 books

The end is often but not always written in the beginning with the genres of tragedy and horror

[Errorname]

Gotcha. I'm even less qualified to opine on this specific instance, then, since all I know about the fandom is they turned hard against the show at the last season or two.

I find this one particularly egregious, because unlike something like Rey where I can at least see the logic even if I don't agree, show!Daenerys not only gets the same sort of treatment as her peers but is also easily the character the finale judges the most harshly

I feel the need to underline the whole Mirri Maz Duur plot line and the words she said to Dany in response to Dany’s questions “why”

Yeah, I don't fully disagree that Daenerys's chapters are generally not as engaging as other parts of these books, but I find the assertion that she's just up against strawmen kind of baffling. Like I guess if you're sort of glazing through her chapters to get back to the stuff you like I can see how you might think that, but I don't think it at all holds up to any serious analysis.

[Metastachydium]

Do you think it is unrealistic for an unmarried royal who is rapidly amassing power and followers to have suitors?

And calling unwanted sexual objectification by older men who want to take advantage of her a harem is certainly a take.

Now you're doing it again. What I said about Xaro based on a vague recollection of the books is incidental to the point I'm making (which is why I didn't even bring up the whole "everybody wants her so much even the prostitutes of enemy cities dress up as her" from the series, besides the obvious reaosns why I didn't bring it up). Sticking mainly with the series that I remember better (sorry, I don't feel like touching the physical books now; they are very big and if I drop them on me I might get hurt or die!), your cherry-picker counterpoint hardly applies to Drogo or Jorah or even that sleazeball Daario, to not even touch Jon here. And that's before we get into how many people start immediately worshipping her every time she does something dramaticlly violent (Drogo's funeral, after Yunkai, when she kills all those Dothraki leaders…)

We can further compare her case to characters of a similar profile (young(ish) attractive females with political advantages attached). Margaery (someone very deliberate and intelligent, coming from the richest family with the numerically largest army in all Westeros) has three marriages or almost marriages, one to a guy who's not into women, one to a sadistic psycho she needs to work hard to play, and one to a kid she's manipulating expertly because he doesn't know better. Sansa (increasingly the last member of the Great House (previously) controllinga very large, strategically importyant and politically difficult province, and as such routinely deemed a valuable asset by various factions) gets an almost-marriage to the psycho above who doesn't want her and another guy not into women, an arranged marriage to a conventionally unatrractive guy (meant to punish them both, which is felt by both), one to another psycho sadist who just wants to go psycho sadist on her, plus too creepy older guys one of whom kinda gaslights her into reciprocating, but is really more into the memory of her mother. Then we have Cersei, with an arranged marriage to an older fat drunkard she hates, an arranged almost-marriage to one of the guys not into women, two gross incestuous relationships and something weird with a violent dumbass clown she holds in contempt but keeps around for political reasons.

Beyond how all three of them are far better rounded and more interesting characters than Daenerys for a whole host of unrelated reasons… I find it hard to believe you can't see who's the outlier here, by a wide margin.

I question your takeaways from stuff like Mirri Maz Duur or the entire Meereenese plotline.

Mirri Maz Duur is something of an exception, yes, but she goes way disproportionate on her specifically. As for Meereen, I maintain that the anemic "complications" that just quietly go away, barely explored (I could have added the Mossador thing there, although that's not only framed as a "stupid ungrateful peasants don't appreciate what the new governance is doing for them", but I also feel like that's, for a change, halfway correct) before (Show!)Daenerys burns something big, declares she won and everybody cheers (again, this is not even S7/8) are not the game changers you make them sound like.

I'd also say that all Martin's main characters are playing into classic villainous archetypes as well as heroic ones. Jon is a resentful half-brother to the rightful heir,

(Also, outside fan speculation, so far that's exclusive to the Bad Seasons from the show. Or do you mean all the puppy-eyed musings about what makes a true Stark?)

[Zevox]

Ah, here's another one I thought of for myself: my favorite Legend of Zelda game is Skyward Sword. When it first came out and I finished it, it was the first time I'd truly felt a Zelda game had surpassed Ocarina of Time, and after replaying it and Ocarina years later, I found I still very much feel that way. It captured the sense of epic fantasy adventure better than any other Zelda since Ocarina, it had fantastic dungeon design (particularly in the desert region with the localized time-travel element being very cool), great boss fights, and I even felt that the way they'd used the motion control element to add a puzzle aspect to many enemies' basic combat, requiring you to strike them from the right angles to be effective, was very appropriate for a series that so heavily involves puzzles to begin with. Pretty much everything I love about Zelda was in the game in spades, and my criticisms are few and fairly minor.

But that does seem to be quite a minority opinion. Most of them time when other people talk about the game I see them griping about the motion controls - which I felt worked quite well, especially compared to most other attempts to integrate such controls into series not originally designed for them during the Wii era - or the story, which really baffles me, as I find the story quite good by Zelda standards (which aren't admittedly aren't high, but still). The release of the Switch version which now lets you play without motion controls doesn't seem to have moved the needle either. Even seeing someone else bring it up as one of the better games in the series is rare, much less it being anyone else's favorite, and it does genuinely baffle me why so many don't seem to feel it's at least a darn good Zelda game, regardless of what anyone's absolute favorite may be.

[Precure]

I think Xykon and his villain speech ("power is power") is overrated. In fact, I found him a pretty boring character and villain. He was only interesting when he was human.

[Bohandas]

I liked Simcity Societies but apparently no one else did

[Errorname]

And that's before we get into how many people start immediately worshipping her every time she does something dramaticlly violent (Drogo's funeral, after Yunkai, when she kills all those Dothraki leaders…)

Yeah, I have no idea why witnessing someone pull of a genuine miracle might inspire some devotion.

your cherry-picker counterpoint hardly applies to Drogo or Jorah

Her marriage with Drogo is something she learns to survive and there's a reason he has to die before she can actually self-actualize. I'd agree that Jorah gets sanded down for the show to make him more attractive, but I think that's for the benefit of Jorah far more than it was for Daenerys. The show is sympathetic to Jorah as a dogged nice guy whose affections are not returned, but he's quite creepy and controlling in ways the books are more honest about. He's not a good dude and his attraction to Daenerys is not an endearing quality.

I find it hard to believe you can't see who's the outlier here, by a wide margin.

I do not actually think Daenerys is an outlier, unless you think her own abusive brother or treacherous unrepentant slavers are particularly dreamy.

As for Meereen, I maintain that the anemic "complications" that just quietly go away, barely explored (I could have added the Mossador thing there, although that's not only framed as a "stupid ungrateful peasants don't appreciate what the new governance is doing for them", but I also feel like that's, for a change, halfway correct) before (Show!)Daenerys burns something big, declares she won and everybody cheers (again, this is not even S7/8) are not the game changers you make them sound like.

Season 5 and 6 are also bad seasons! I'd also dispute that the problem is that the complications are "anemic", the problem with Meereen in both book and show is that it's a nigh-unsolvable quagmire. It is a subplot that bit off way more than it could chew in terms of complexity and subject matter. George still hasn't solved it, and D&D's solution was to just throw up their hands and leave.

(Also, outside fan speculation, so far that's exclusive to the Bad Seasons from the show. Or do you mean all the puppy-eyed musings about what makes a true Stark?)

When does Jon display any resentment or ambition in the bad seasons? Honour and duty is all there is to him by the end of the show.

[Precure]

Yeah, Mary Sue is a meaningless term. It's a strawman (strawwoman?) of fanfiction OCs since beginning.

[Liffguard]

1)Backstory is by and large unnecessary and showing it more so.
2)I have a theory that Star Wars caught fire originally because it left so much for the public to fill in with their own imaginations, and explaining all of those things, as you said, makes the world smaller than we can imagine, shallower and cheaper.

Cory Doctorow's lates blog post talks about this.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

I think Xykon and his villain speech ("power is power") is overrated. In fact, I found him a pretty boring character and villain. He was only interesting when he was human.

Xykon's a simple character, but a necessary one. He's interesting in the way people are forced to react and deal with him. In that sense, he's less a character and more like a force. He does have one interesting quality developed over the comic, though: It's hard to tell just how much his ineptitude is genuine and how much is a put-on. It's clear that he's sharper than he acts.

I think you need characters like that in any good story. Not everyone needs multifaceted personalities and deep introspective development. Like the straight man in a comedy routine, you need some static pillars that others can work off of.

My own contribution to the thread, The 13th Warrior. One of my favorite movies and I was the only one in my family who enjoyed it in the theater. I still watch it from time to time and love it. Still pains me to see it listed as one of the biggest flops and most disappointing films ever made.

Oh, and Forspoken. Certainly has flaws, but it's a significantly better game than the reception it got. I largely blame this on meme-rot that came about because of the marketing poisoning opinions before anyone had even played it and gamers generally being media illiterate and unable to understand subtext in writing.

[Zevox]

Oh, and Forspoken. Certainly has flaws, but it's a significantly better game than the reception it got. I largely blame this on meme-rot that came about because of the marketing poisoning opinions before anyone had even played it and gamers generally being media illiterate and unable to understand subtext in writing.

Oo, yeah, that's a good one. Forspoken is not a great game - I was definitely hoping it would be better - but it's not the garbage pile that general internet discourse would have you believe. The combat is fun, the mobility is fun, and the main character is pretty well-written. Has more than its fair share of flaws to go with that, which can make it hard to recommend to someone who isn't interested in fairly specific things about it, but the general discourse about it online is so mired in nonsense from people who clearly didn't even play it that you're unlikely to even hear about those.

[Peelee]

My own contribution to the thread, The 13th Warrior. One of my favorite movies and I was the only one in my family who enjoyed it in the theater. I still watch it from time to time and love it. Still pains me to see it listed as one of the biggest flops and most disappointing films ever made.

One of my closest IRL friends in our friend group discord server was renamed due to his talking up how good 13th Warrior was. So you're not alone!

Also i should really watch that sometime.

[Precure]

Xykon's a simple character, but a necessary one. He's interesting in the way people are forced to react and deal with him. In that sense, he's less a character and more like a force.

I don't really have a problem with his role in the comic. It's just that I don't find him cool or charismatic as many fans.

My own contribution to the thread, The 13th Warrior. One of my favorite movies and I was the only one in my family who enjoyed it in the theater. I still watch it from time to time and love it. Still pains me to see it listed as one of the biggest flops and most disappointing films ever made.

The 13th warrior is an awesome movie, a very unique setting and plot.

[runeghost]

The 13th Warrior[/I]. One of my favorite movies and I was the only one in my family who enjoyed it in the theater. I still watch it from time to time and love it. Still pains me to see it listed as one of the biggest flops and most disappointing films ever made.

You're definitely not alone. I love that movie. One of my top ten, easily.

And perhaps I'm dating myself here, but...

Hudson Hawk. I though the crazy, over-the-top off-beat humor worked, and I loved it. Everyone else I went to see it with BitD was apparently expecting a Die Hard sequel, and loathed it.

Somewhat similarly, I adore The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I'm neutral on Andrew Dice Clay as a stage comedian, but that was a quirky off-the-wall movie that I thought worked quite well. I won't call it a masterpiece, but it was fun, and I rewatch it every couple years. It was a critical and financial flop, and apparently everyone hates it. And I really don't get why. Sure, it's not The Godfather or Star Wars, but not every film needs to be.

Most Final Fantasy games. I played FF-X first, and loved it, but all the others (both before and after) seem like shallow retreads of the same formula... and people seem to love them all equally.

And on the dislike side of the aisle, Terry Goodkind and his "Sword of Truth" series in particular. Some people seem to really like him, other seem to find him acceptable generic fantasy. I think it is the absolute worst extruded fantasy product I've ever read. And I have a read a great deal of it. (To be clear, I read the first book in the series and threw it away once I was done to make sure no one else ever read that copy. It was that bad. According to reviews, the others in the series are like that one, but moreso. I have not been tempted.)

[Mechalich]

And on the dislike side of the aisle, Terry Goodkind and his "Sword of Truth" series in particular. Some people seem to really like him, other seem to find him acceptable generic fantasy. I think it is the absolute worst extruded fantasy product I've ever read. And I have a read a great deal of it. (To be clear, I read the first book in the series and threw it away once I was done to make sure no one else ever read that copy. It was that bad. According to reviews, the others in the series are like that one, but moreso. I have not been tempted.)

The thing about the Sword of Truth series is that it's an allegorical polemic using a fantastical setting, like Narnia. However, unlike Narnia, where the allegory represented the strongest cultural element in the Anglophone world at the time it was published, the allegory the Sword of Truth is making is considerably more obscure (though not so obscure that I can't let xkcd handle explanations), especially to the fantasy-interested teenagers and college students who are likely to pick it up and, by carefully keeping the main villains off the screen for quite some time, Goodkind cleverly hides the really obvious bits for quite a few books. Also, Goodkind is a pretty good polemicist and is especially good combining seemingly subversive 'edgy' content, all the weird sex and torture stuff, with a very typical outcast power fantasy, in a way that had/has considerable appeal to mostly male teenagers who aren't successful in traditional areas - Richard's initial success coming from his ability to miraculously pierce the BS that runs his world rather than any specific skill at arms or magic or whatever (this is common, pretty much every 'gamelit' protagonist who uses some kind of system exploit to achieve ultimate power is doing exactly the same thing, making Sword of Truth actually comparatively subtle).

Considering how successful that the straight-up polemic in this zone has been, it should not really surprise anyone that a cleverly designed fantasy version of the same would be effective.

[Zevox]

Most Final Fantasy games. I played FF-X first, and loved it, but all the others (both before and after) seem like shallow retreads of the same formula... and people seem to love them all equally.

Oh yeah, Final Fantasy as a series in general would qualify for me too, albeit for quite different reasons. I was a fan of JRPGs as a genre long before I played my first Final Fantasy, with the GBC remakes of Dragon Quest 1-3 possibly being my first RPGs period, and Tales of Symphonia holding the crown as my favorite game of all time for a little while in the aughts. But aside from a couple of spin-offs I don't really count (Crystal Chronicles and Tactics Advance), I didn't play any Final Fantasy games until much later, when I picked up a PS2 in 2008 (my family had bought mostly Nintendo consoles while I was young, aside from going with a Sega Genesis instead of a SNES). You'd think with FF being the most popular JRPG series out there I'd have quickly become a fan - it's certainly what I expected - but not so much.

First I played FFX, which I found good enough, but nothing great. I played Dragon Quest 8 around the same time and liked it more, for comparison. Then I tried X-2, and while I liked the in-battle class-change concept, immediately disliked the weird turn-based-but-not-really combat system, where you got your turns only after a certain amount of real time passed (the ATB system). I had no idea at the time that's how most of the series worked, so I was in for a rude awakening when I went and tried other games, only to find nearly all of them using some form of that. I wound up playing 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, and 13; I didn't even finish 7-9, found 4 and 12 decent but nothing more, found 13's gameplay okay but the story laughably awful, and would honestly call 1 my favorite of that whole bunch just because I can appreciate a simple old-school dungeon crawler, and it doesn't have the ATB system.

Final Fantasy didn't actually impress me until very recently as a result. 7 Remake and Rebirth are actually great games IMO, and 16 a pretty darn good one. But even with that, I could only say my opinion of the series a whole is mixed, and much lower overall than my opinion of other major series in the genre, which is bizarre for the most famous and popular example of one of my favorite genres of video games.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

If you ever want to play the other FF games, and I think 5 sounds like it'd be your jam since it contains the most complete class system before FF Tactics, make sure to check out the options. Every ATB entry in the series has an option to switch the game from "Active Battle" to "Wait" mode, where the battle pauses entirely when a characters turn comes up. Essentially, it turns the game into a fully turn-based RPG again.

[Errorname]

Cory Doctorow's lates blog post talks about this.

I can't speak to his specific Furiosa criticisms having not seen it yet, but it feels unpersuasive to me, or at least incomplete. Creative choices always have trade-offs, and adding anything to a story requires collapsing the space for implication and inference. If we label that trade-off as something innately bad or unsatisfying we are making an argument against art.

And that trade-off is at least sometimes justified. There's a reason we make finished movies instead of having the final state of production be a pitch or a script. The argument that a lot of genre writers overfocus on lore and backstory isn't untrue, but it's easy to overcorrect.

Oh, and Forspoken. Certainly has flaws, but it's a significantly better game than the reception it got. I largely blame this on meme-rot that came about because of the marketing poisoning opinions before anyone had even played it and gamers generally being media illiterate and unable to understand subtext in writing.

I think a massive amount of it is presentation. A lot of the clips I've seen would have been utterly inoffensive as offhand barks that fired off in a gameplay section, but because they play in a cutscene where the only thing you're doing is watching a single character emote to nothing at all it feels sloppily paced and draws a lot of attention to the dialogue.

[Rynjin]

Negative: Bioshock: Infinite is a game I considered meh at best when it came out, and could not for the life of me comprehend why so many people praised it to no end when it came out. I think people who weren't avid sci-fi watchers didn't realize that "quantum" had already been a pseudo-science buzzword meaning "magic" for like 20 years at that point? So people thought the plot was a lot "smarter" than it really was.

Public opinion seems to have caught up to this opinion and gone the opposite direction (there is a nuclear hatred for that game in some people's hearts now that I...ALSO don't get), but it was much-belove don release.

Positive: Since somebody mentioned the Sword of Truth books, I'll throw in The Legend of the Seeker tv series, which even as someone who had read the books at that point I thought was better. The only good book in that entire series is the first one, and The Seeker captures those fun elements and then runs with them instead of tossing them aside for Gary Stu-protagonism turned to 11 and hamfisted political rants I recognized as being awkward and forced even as a young teen.

People seemed to dislike the show for some reason? I dunno how those books ever got a fanbase big enough to care that the series got the hatchet treatment.

[Mechalich]

People seemed to dislike the show for some reason? I dunno how those books ever got a fanbase big enough to care that the series got the hatchet treatment.

The Sword of Truth books have sold ~25 million copies, putting the series roughly on par with the Outlander novels and ahead of well known stuff like Redwall, Shannara, and Percy Jackson, and easily in the top 20 of fantasy series/novels all time.

Even considering that a lot of people, such as myself, who read significant amounts of the series eventually soured on it (at the time, moving on to Sword of Truth was one of the standard 'what to do after you've caught up with the Wheel of Time' suggestions, which in hindsight was some brilliantly evil marketing), there's still enough people out there who genuinely are fans of the books to form a highly vocal group who were annoyed that the books didn't get a 'real adaptation.'

[GloatingSwine]

If you ever want to play the other FF games, and I think 5 sounds like it'd be your jam since it contains the most complete class system before FF Tactics, make sure to check out the options. Every ATB entry in the series has an option to switch the game from "Active Battle" to "Wait" mode, where the battle pauses entirely when a characters turn comes up. Essentially, it turns the game into a fully turn-based RPG again.

Strictly speaking Wait doesn't pause when a character's turn comes up, but when you're selecting an ability or target. If you sit on the basic command menu without doing anything time progresses.

[pita]

people still think that Jimmy would have turned around and stopped scamming if only Chuck had believed in him for some reason, despite several things in the show explicitly showing us that that would never happen. Maybe one day...

I mean, there is a version of the timeline, I think, where Jimmy remains fairly crooked but doesn't go full immoral piece of **** who cares about no one. There is none where he stops scamming, because we see him running scams basically constantly from the very first episode, but I do think part of the tragedy of Better Call Saul is that the defining moments in it were points where people could have chosen to do the right things and instead chose to do the petty thing they knew they would regret, and these things add up (and by "people" I do mean "pretty much everyone"). This opposed to Breaking Bad, where Walter could have basically stopped at any point, he just needed to be king, because he was a man who constantly felt small next to others and needed to outdo them.

[Peelee]

I do think part of the tragedy of Better Call Saul is that the defining moments in it were points where people could have chosen to do the right things and instead chose to do the petty thing they knew they would regret, and these things add up (and by "people" I do mean "pretty much everyone").

I disagree. What, exactly, was "the right thing" for Chuck to do? Take Jimmy into his law firm, accepting what he knew to be a massive liability, just so Jimmy could have what Jimmy wanted?

[Trixie_One]

I absolutely believe that if there had been more books, there won't be so this all theoretical at this point, but if there was then Dany was absolutely going to burn King's Landing.

Back when s8 had just finished and the online asoiaf fandom hadn't yet fallen into inchorent rage, full on denial, or depressed acceptance there was some really good analysis to be found about how there's actually quite a bit of foreshadowing in the books that Dany does have a bells theme going on that's going to play a part when she goes full burn em all. People were mixed if Connington's backstory is also part of it, but apparently there's enough mentions for Dany to make it interesting even if you ignore the Connington chapters. You also got a lot of excuses along the lines of 'oh, but Tyrion will manipulate her into it, and/or won't mention the wildfire caches which will contribute to how bad it will be' but personally I figured that rather robbed Dany of her agency too if he'd have gone that way if the blame was entirely on Tyrion.

Interestingly you did see some small green explosions happening in the background when Dany goes on her rampage in the show that nobody comments on so I suspect that episode was very much based on Martin's rough concept for her arc where they will play more of a part.

[Zevox]

If you ever want to play the other FF games, and I think 5 sounds like it'd be your jam since it contains the most complete class system before FF Tactics, make sure to check out the options. Every ATB entry in the series has an option to switch the game from "Active Battle" to "Wait" mode, where the battle pauses entirely when a characters turn comes up. Essentially, it turns the game into a fully turn-based RPG again.

Oh, I always used that. It does not change things meaningfully however - while opponents won't take a turn while you're taking yours if it's on, their atb gauge still fills, so the mechanic still punishes you for taking your time thinking, or even merely navigating the menus insufficiently quickly. It's a mechanic that combines the worst of both turn-based and real-time combat IMO, giving you the time pressures of real time gameplay but none of the action and excitement, and the menu-based combat of turn-based without the ability to take your time and think comfortably.

And I don't see how having a class system would make 5 more to my liking. I liked the novelty of changing classes mid-battle in X-2, but overall I prefer my JRPGs with characters who have defined playstyles suited to their character over ones with a class system generally. If I were to try one of the older FFs that I haven't, it would probably be 6, since a friend of mine counts that as his second favorite game of all time and will sing the praises of its story any time the subject comes up, so I'd at least get a good conversation piece with him out of it, even if I wouldn't at this point expect to like it as much as he does. But even that I doubt I'll do.

[Darth Credence]

In regards to GoT, the thing that I was most different from everyone else was not thinking, in the episode The Bells, that Dany did the obviously wrong thing.

She was attacking King's Landing, controlled by Cersei. (The same Cersei who had planted a bunch of explosives around the sept and blew them all up when she got her enemies there.) Suddenly, the bells ring, indicating that King's Landing was surrendering, and she could land her last dragon and come take over.

Would you have believed it, as Dany? Would you have thought, 'yep, we won this, everything is OK'? Or, would you have thought, 'hmm, maybe this is a final trick by Cersei, and if I accept this surrender and land, I'm going to end up dying here and Cersei wins'?

I know that I would have thought trap. I could have seen the next episode showing it was a trap, and Dany was correct, or showed that it wasn't and Dany killed people who shouldn't have died and was therefore unfit to rule. But the idea that everyone immediately accepted that it was a true surrender and Dany not accepting it just meant she was bloodthirsty rather than wrong did not, and does not, make sense.

To be fair, I was pretty checked out of the show by then and may have missed some things, but I don't think I missed anything that would lead me to trust Cersei in any way.

[GloatingSwine]

I absolutely believe that if there had been more books, there won't be so this all theoretical at this point, but if there was then Dany was absolutely going to burn King's Landing.

Sure, though I very much doubt it was going to be "because the bell chimed for madness o' clock".

The quasi-magical true heir from obscurity is, as I have noted previously, sufficiently established as a fantasy and courtly romance trope at the point that GRRM started writing that Discworld had already parodied it at least twice. The Song of Ice and Fire version of that is very much likely to turn out to be a brutal conqueror taking what's theirs by force not the hoped-for restoration of just rule.

But that ain't what the show did, because themes are for eighth grade book reports. It's not just about what happens, it's about why it happens and how you get to it happening.

[Metastachydium]

Yeah, I have no idea why witnessing someone pull of a genuine miracle might inspire some devotion.

Yeah, my ten thousand buddies and I do that a lot whenever someone murders people horribly with advanced weapons. (Also, there was no miracle in Yunkai, just a one-sided loody battle.)

Her marriage with Drogo is something she learns to survive and there's a reason he has to die before she can actually self-actualize. I'd agree that Jorah gets sanded down for the show to make him more attractive, but I think that's for the benefit of Jorah far more than it was for Daenerys. The show is sympathetic to Jorah as a dogged nice guy whose affections are not returned, but he's quite creepy and controlling in ways the books are more honest about. He's not a good dude and his attraction to Daenerys is not an endearing quality.

Like I said, I don't remember the books quite that well, so I won't get into that bit, but in the series, yes, she is very much fond of them both, and the rough phase with Drogo, even, lasts for all of a day or so.

I do not actually think Daenerys is an outlier, unless you think her own abusive brother or treacherous unrepentant slavers are particularly dreamy.

Again, in the face of the full list for her and the closest analogues in terms of profile, I find that a very baffling conclusion.

Season 5 and 6 are also bad seasons!

Disagreed, although their Touched by Daenerys bits really do get stupid. (I consider the scene where the Reach and Dorne decide to ally with her and explain their rationale for that actively worse than nearly anything in the last seasons.)

I'd also dispute that the problem is that the complications are "anemic", the problem with Meereen in both book and show is that it's a nigh-unsolvable quagmire.

And yet, the "conflict between former slaves" thing comes up once and is never mentioned again, the "dragons are eating people" thing just quietly solves itself and… Um… That leaves the "reactionary terrorists" thing which is a bunch of strawmen with eminently questionable tactics scoring a total of two S7/8 style victories that don't make much sense and achieve even less in the grand scheme of things. Oh, and there's the siege thing resolved in, like, two minutes, I guess. (Admittedly, the book gave that one more love.)

and D&D's solution was to just throw up their hands and leave.

…with the implication that Danerys renaming the place and burning a few more people (mostly save soldiers, for an extra bit of funny) was a ringing victory that solved the problem. Rising orchestral tune, sail into the sunset triumphant.

When does Jon display any resentment or ambition in the bad seasons? Honour and duty is all there is to him by the end of the show.

Ambition… Maybe not really. He really is feeling uncomfortable around D. after a while, though, and the show, at least, never makes a big deal out of him being half-sibling with Robb as last season factions build him up against Daenerys. Maybe Sansa, but that's not about ambition and resentment either.

Hudson Hawk. I though the crazy, over-the-top off-beat humor worked, and I loved it. Everyone else I went to see it with BitD was apparently expecting a Die Hard sequel, and loathed it.

"My name is KitKat. This is not a dream." (How can one dislike Hudson Hawk?)

And on the dislike side of the aisle, Terry Goodkind and his "Sword of Truth" series in particular. Some people seem to really like him, other seem to find him acceptable generic fantasy. I think it is the absolute worst extruded fantasy product I've ever read. And I have a read a great deal of it. (To be clear, I read the first book in the series and threw it away once I was done to make sure no one else ever read that copy. It was that bad. According to reviews, the others in the series are like that one, but moreso. I have not been tempted.)

Until around now that I saw people post all the statistics on how well it sells, I firmly believed that was probably the least controversial opinion conceivable. Goodkind's work should somehow be added to the official definitions of the word bad. You did the world a great service disposing of that book.

Positive: Since somebody mentioned the Sword of Truth books, I'll throw in The Legend of the Seeker tv series, which even as someone who had read the books at that point I thought was better. The only good book in that entire series is the first one and The Seeker captures those fun elements and then runs with them instead of tossing them aside for Gary Stu-protagonism turned to 11 and hamfisted political rants I recognized as being awkward and forced even as a young teen.

Now, that, on the other hand, is where my surprise over being in the minority comes in: Wizard's First Rule is probably the worst of the lot. Worse even than Soul of Fire or Naked Empire, and that's a feat. It's the book that introduces such mainstays as Confessors, Mord-Sith, villains cartoonishly bad enough to sacrifice children in overeroticised ways, and randomly outlaw fire just so that the Toxic Masculinity Good Guy Savages have a good excuse for Morally Justified Cannibalism… In terms of tossing things aside, it has the highest ratio of random wordbuilding elements forgotten by Goodkind five pages after he introduced them of all books. It's entire second half is one prolonged non-consensual BDSM session I still don't know how or why I soldiered through. Even the freaking prose is more purple in it. No, it's not the almost charming only readable installment. It's the low point.

[Batcathat]

I remember when I was maybe 13 or 14 and had read a lot of the big name fantasy series when a friend of mine recommended Sword of Truth. It sounded like something I might like, so I read the back of the first book and thought "Eh, maybe later". I feel like literally everything I've heard about the series since then has validated my decision not to read it (I think it's safe to say that "later" will never happen in this case).

[Metastachydium]

I remember when I was maybe 13 or 14 and had read a lot of the big name fantasy series when a friend of mine recommended Sword of Truth.

Why did you have Chaotic Evil friends?!