HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones - Thread 2. There are a lot of nerds.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/e3/75/a2/e375a267fc3d8d14986aaab42f79d4a3.jpg

How long will it take Euron's 40 men and their families to make a thousand ships do you think?

Once they have built the ship factory and assembly line I reckon they could knock out around 50 a day? Give or take a weekend or two they should be good to go in a month.

Maybe he wants them to make model ships?

It reminded me of that bit in Vikings where the lead guy was like "fuck it lets go OVER THE CLIFF with our boats!" and next thing you know theyre in Paris.

Iron Islands seem pretty light on trees, and you'd think their obsession with boats (and habit of losing battles) would have further depleted their forests. So tack on a few more months of gathering supplies, or a few more years of growing trees.

Anyway, Oliver Reed in "Baron Munchausen:"
http://www.chud.com/articles/content_images/106/BARON/bmReed.jpg

The Iron Islands are supposedly a quite big landmass all in all, so there should be a lot of trees. But they've never made particularly sense to me. They are poor areas, sparsely populated, and there really aren't that many trade routes nearby they can raid. It's as if the people of the Hebrides decided to try and conquer Scotland. Like, how?

Maybe Bran can travel back in time and tell them to plant extra trees.

tormund mostly reminds me of pirate steve from dodgeball

There aren't many trees in the Hebrides either.

I have a crazy fan theory regarding the Iron Islands, so bear with me here. I believe that they're subtly implying there are even MORE men and trees somewhere off screen. If my theory is true, they'll have at least double the 40 men shown on the screen or more, and if the tree part is true as well they'll be able to build those ships after all. I wonder if Yara and Theon knew about this or if they were placing their bets on it taking hundreds of years for 40 men to build 1,000 boats out of imported wood. If so, hoooo man they're in for a BIG surprise!

I'm not sure Euron literally meant 1000 ships. I doubt they even have room for all that.

I was also hoping Euron would just drown or fail ridiculously.

We've been a bit short on hubristic chumps lately so he's a very welcome presence, especially as they Iron Islands have been 100% tedious every other time they've appeared.

I like Euron, but I wish there were more opportunities for him to say "brutha" like he did in his first scene. the whole "lets just rebuild our fleet while they get a few months (at least?) head start" thing is odd though.

Actor playing Euron was also in that c4 show about a stag weekend where a bunch of lads and the stag went to shoot stags on a stag hunt. Can't remember the name of it.

100% treeless more like. Xp

xpost I was sooooo hoping he would drown, to keep with the contemporary comedy beats of this season. Would have been too conspicuously hilarious for the show to pull off, though.

"Drink! Drink deep of the Drowned God! Let him into your lungs! Accept the salt until your blood turns saline! Breath! Drink and breathe, and die, so that you might live forever!! And now ... rise again!"
...
(clears throat) "And so I say ... rise again!!!!"
(Nudges his motionless body with his foot)
"Aw, shit. Where are Yara and Theon?"
"They fled, my lord, along with all of our boats and our legion of invisible extras."
"Dammit! Fucking Kingsmoot, I thought this shit was supposed to work. Well, I guess it was worth a shot. Now let's build some boats!"

I think the lack of trees on the Iron Islands means that someone used them all to build a 1000 ship fleet and is hiding it in their bathtub

"Now build me a bathtub! The biggest bathtub the world has ever seen! The Iron Born will be a joke no longer!!!!"

I quite like the scenes there, it's a pretty cool place. I liked the bridge scene.

theyre all so depressed and bitter and wear drab clothing

The Ironborn parts were the mitigating factors in this. Got some neat unintentional Hillary v Trump vibes off those scenes, plus Euron is hilarious - part psychotic Amsterdam hosteler, part overenthusiastic skydive instructor.

Part Live Schreiber as Sabertooth!
http://static1.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_super/3/33572/1011696-sabretooth_08.jpg

Liev, gah. Stupid computer.

Euron Swanson more like

next GoT theater play should be "Euron First" (parody of Who's On First)

What a crap episode.

The last couple episodes have been my favorites in quite a while. Though not particularly well-structured or clever, they've catered to my sympathies and no one got raped. Loved Dany's immolation of the chest men. Loved her moist-eyed reunion w/ the woeful Ser. Loved Hodor doing that, Sansa getting all steely, and Theon enjoying a moment of relative dignity (however fleeting). I'm beyond glad we're out of that dismal old Sydow tree and hope soon to see the last of the Faceless Men. Glad too that that the Iron Throne is finally at least considering a response to High Sparrow's coup. Hate that smug fuck almost as much as Ramsey B.

But yeah, all criticisms otm. Uncle Spouty's "now run off and meet me back here tomorrow with a thousand ships" business was comedy. Esp as the Iron Islands have always been presented as A) barren, and B) basically uninhabited. Was so hoping he'd stay drowned. And Sansa's continued gullibility is such lazy writing.

I'm not sure where this Iron Islands presented as barren stuff keeps coming from. They've merely only depicted the shore and castle areas, maybe a port as well. Otherwise it's not that far-fetched to assume there are non-barren sections...

The Ironborn are just hilarious. The whole lot of them are absolutely deluded in their station.

I'm not sure where this Iron Islands presented as barren stuff keeps coming from.

comes from what we've seen, inc the little model in the intro. of course it's possible that the iron islands also contain trees, factories, cocoa pebbles, etc.

I don't remember the exact image in the intro model but I'm sure it focuses on the iconic castle with peripheral towns/villages not necessarily emphasized. I had more of an issue with the criticism that the 40ish men surrounding Euron are for some reason the only or majority of people still on the island after Theon & Yara flee.

criticism hinging on the idea that*

Trees actually do well on the Iron Islands and we get almost offended when people say otherwise – as stupid as that sounds.

https://wowair.us/magazine/trees-in-iceland/

From awoiaf -

"The Iron Islands are small, barely-fertile rocks with few safe harbors. The seas around the islands are stormy, frequently wreaking havoc with their considerable force."

I think since the beginning of the show they've skimped on crowd scenes, CGI or otherwise, to a degree that has let many scenes feel strangely underwhelming. I think if you watch the show and just assume there's another couple hundred people in any scene that seems like there should be more people, it makes more sense.

but the iron born will just go steel the wood to build ships right? that's what they do.

Who wood they steel from?

i hope they find some hair conditioner on their travels

Windy salty air does that to hair.

wood steel iron throne

what is dreads may never die

xpost

I think since the beginning of the show they've skimped on crowd scenes, CGI or otherwise, to a degree that has let many scenes feel strangely underwhelming. I think if you watch the show and just assume there's another couple hundred people in any scene that seems like there should be more people, it makes more sense.

pretty much this. When I watch this show I just imagine that everything is happening on a grander scale than what is actually depicted. Basically just like when you watch Star Trek or similar shows you just have to assume that there are more than 12 people living on the planet they are currently on.

I think it has been stretched thin for certain scenes in an even more visible way this season, even though I believe the budget is now huge. like certain scenes just feel really cheap and weak, and they're not helped by bad acting or crappy functional writing. Whenever Dario appears or basically anywhere sandy it becomes a bit sort of stock or something. like certain locations have no real character to them and no chance for you to feel any affinity to them - they just kind of appear. i think the show generally has more weight when people are in dark medieval-type sets, or in the ice and snow near the wall. all the sunny or desert places and costumes and characters have a pretty cheesy feel to them.

not slating the show, i like it fine. i just think you can see the joins sometimes as they try to tell so many stories all at once.

Maybe I'm just better at ignoring this stuff than other people. I mean I definitely noticed the Star Trek-like sets when Dario and Jorah were in Dothraki City, but it doesn't really affect my enjoyment of the show. Same thing with the Iron Islands, if they say there's enough people and wood to build a fleet of ships I just assume that it's true, I don't need a shot of a huge crowd and a forest.

^^^^^^

yeah it doesn't really affect my enjoyment of the show either. it's just kind of amusing, like isn't it possible to balance the budget a bit. i guess not, what would i know?

but they prob shouldn't be wasting money on rehiring sean bean to play a clown version of himself when they can't even afford a picturesque desert.

That stuff gets worse the newer the setting is to us, and the fewer characters there are there. Winterfell and King's Landing and Castle Black all feel like reasonably fleshed out places to me, whereas Dorne might as well be a garden and a prison and Mereen is like one oversized throne room and not much else. Some of the actors definitely suffer from that 'walk onto the scene like you're in Final Fantasy' thing - Dario and Grey Worm especially.

The city where Dany was hanging in S2 was pretty cool though.

I think it's also that a lot of the time they're filming in genuine historical sites with limited time and scope for world-building. That doesn't really explain the Iron Islands though.

but they prob shouldn't be wasting money on rehiring sean bean to play a clown version of himself when they can't even afford a picturesque desert.

― japanese mage (LocalGarda), Wednesday, May 25, 2016 12:01 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know what they were thinking. Powerful scene though.

reading about the logistical and project management requirements of "directing" a show that is being filmed in five completely separate locations at once was terrifying. I need to find that article again

It doesn't seem that hard to me to hire a couple of hundred locals to dress in rags and stand in the background as opposed to like 5 guards with spears or clubs like extras in a cheap opera. It's an expensive show, and I understand the limitations, but the production design and in particular sense of scale is paramount to an all epic all the time show like this. Every location seems to have been reduced to an underpopulated one-room set. If they can offer thousands of snow zombies just standing there, let alone cheesy crawl on the ceiling movie zombies, they can sure as hell throw in a couple of more dudes at the wall or washing their dirty rags in the background or whatever. Especially since if anything the epic scale and whatnot seems to have decreased as the budget has gone up. Maybe they need more money to keep the actors around? Maybe they thought they'd be able to cast a real dragon and, unable to find one, were shocked at the cost of CGI dragons that are integral to the story?

I dunno, I get it, and I still haven't descended into hate watching this at all, but at the same time, I'm having trouble with it. The mitigating positives are getting less apparent to me than the pervasive silliness and incoherence and solemnity in face of same.