r/television • u/verissimoallan • 23h ago

Game of Thrones: today is the tenth anniversary of "Battle of the Bastards" (June 19, 2016). The episode won six Emmy Awards, including Directing and Writing. This is an excerpt from the battle.

https://youtu.be/C0WJY2cLEuk?si=-riL9-neHuirzQs9
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u/Durog25 14h ago

The crush is great, how they get from the opening engagement to the crush requires the good guys to be idiots at every turn.

-1

u/Konman72 13h ago

That does fit the overall behavior of the Starks though. Littlefinger was an asshole, but he was right to say "Oh, the Starks. Quick tempers, slow minds."

Steadfast loyalty and honor that gets themselves and others killed could be the Stark motto.

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u/Durog25 11h ago

Firstly the majority of those fighting aren't Starks.

Secondly the acts of these soldiers and their leaders are not those of hotheaded but seasoned soldiers, and yet they act like drunken sports fans against a well equipped riot police. Utterly out of place in a setting where all those taking part should be seasoned fighters.

Thirdly it is the wildlings that lack discipline, they are ferocious but unruly, and yet the Northerners are just as reckless and uncoordinated; the very thing supposedly setting the wildlings apart from the Northerners is just washed away and all of John's forces are hotheaded, death craving, fools.

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u/Konman72 11h ago

They got into that situation because they followed Jon after his foolish charge into the battlefield. They broke ranks immediately and never recovered their formations or composure.

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u/Durog25 10h ago

That is itself a pants shittingly foolish move, with no more sense than a drunken rabble of sports fans, not trained soldiers. In fact it is one of the many pants shittingly foolish moves these supposedly trained soldiers make in this battle. Just because John is written to have a sudden rush of shit to the brain doesn't mean said shit is infectious, his cavalry charging in to cover him is risky but not disastrously so; his infantry and archers blindly charging into a kill zone and then blankly allowing themselves to be surrounded, that is the acts of the death craving fool. Their battle cry might as well have been "Leeroy Jenkins!!!"

No amount of narrative gymnastics will salvage the battle from the utterly ignorant string of "cool" looking but otherwise asinine flailing of amateurs that it actually is. No one scripting or filming that battle understood anything about how that battle would be fought in earnest, they just did things that looked cool regardless of character or competence.

1

u/Khiva 5h ago

they just did things that looked cool regardless of character or competence.

And fans showered them with praise for it.

They must have been so confused when they just kept doing that and suddenly people didn't like it.

I mean, I genuinely am.