The thing about character death is a big one. You get so many books nowadays where character deaths are technically common but, really they just introduce a new random dude and kill them off every now and again. Or kill of a really minor character. They want what GoT has but they aren't prepared to kill off the characters. It's lame.
And usually the guys who die are 1. woman, 2. black or 3. useless/not that clever. Most writers have a strong tendency to ditch those in favor of straight white guys who are kinda aggressive and fuck a lot.
I liked that the character deaths in Got weren't purely for shock value, they also had massive ramifications for the story and surviving characters. That's the lesson I wish other shows would learn instead of just killing characters arbitrarily, having the other characters be sad for a bit, and then continuing on like nothing happened.
For the record, it's worth noting that 'Atlantis' wasn't actually created to be a GoT clone. It was created to be a _Merlin_ clone. BBC's Merlin was a big hit among young British fantasy fans and so when it finished in 2012, the BBC scrambled for something else to fill the gap of 'popular public domain legend retold but everyone's young and british'. These included Atlantis (which was announced two months after Merlin ended with two of the same creators) and The Musketeers, which first aired in 2014 after it had become clear that Atlantis Season 1 was not hitting the same way Merlin did.
I was coming down to comment this very thing. And arguably Merlin wouldn't have been made had it not been for BBC's Robin Hood being the success that it was, inspiring them to dig into other British legends for TV show ideas. If anything, Atlantis felt like a melding of those two shows in its tone and execution, though not as good as either of its inspirations. And it's worth noting that both of those shows tried to get a bit more dark and edgy toward the end, so Atlantis didn't even necessarily steal THAT from GoT. Really the only connecting link with GoT at all was Mark Addy, otherwise I feel like Atlantis is as far as it gets from trying to be GoT. The tone is different, many of the stories are more episodic in nature... yeah, I'm just failing to see it.
Insert comment about how “moral greyness” is most often used as a shortcut to gesture at nuance without actually being nuanced and sort of betrays a naïveté about real-world morality that goes in the opposite direction. I dunno.
When its really interesting, like any decent the colunt of monte christo rip off about how when doing revenge you dig two graves, one for yourself. i kinda have to think of code geass where the main character is a good person but definitly not a hero and the thing biting him re consquences of his actions . He isnt a monster but oesnt have to be to really do harm.
One trend I see in faux moral greyness is something I call InFAMOUS Syndrome. In the game inFAMOUS, your character is supposedly a morally grey anti-hero with electric powers who is constantly faced witrh moral choices, but in practice these choices boil down to a typical hero vs villain morality. The best example of it is the constant stream of parallel evil Supermen, both in DC (Injustice, JL Snyder Cut) and Superman-like figures (The Boys, Brightburn etc). They act as if making a hero like Superman evil is some groundbreaking subversion, but it's still the exact same black and white morality of a saturday morning cartoon, only inverted. A Superman who sometimes makes immoral choices because he feels he has to is more interesting than just "Superman but EEEVUUUULZ". Sadly, GoT ended up falling for InFAMOUS Syndrome as well, notably with the character of Daenerys. It's not that she can't be bad, it's that she was always as nuanced a character as her peers, until she became a perfect hero in Season 8 followed by a sudden shift to cackling maniac.
@@starkillersneed Moral grayness is easier to achieve by not even trying, and, instead, focusing on depicting someone as socially unacceptable to modern day cutures, but also wellmeaning in general.
Mandatory reference at how Blizz guys used the term "morally grey" to justify turning her so far most morally grey character (Sylvanas) into all-out villain territory, while treating everybody who opposed her like some paragon of virtue (despite doing evil stuff themselves, wich of course doesn't come back to bite them). I know it's videogames, and this is about books, movies and series, but it works.
GoT had fantastic wardrobes for the first few seasons, but then everyone suddenly started wearing black, which incidentally does harm to the story, since it is literally the calling card of one of the factions...
GoT is still talked about, but always about how awful it became What died was the praise, rewatchability and cultural weight, no more girls named "Kalesi" Heck, i still love to see videos bashing and dissecting the final seasons
Funny thing that James mentions Narcos as a GOT clone because when I think of a way to explain what made Game of Thrones feel so veroscimil I always end up comparing it to movies and TV series about organized crime, especially drug cartels and human trafficking. Is about how GOT didn't chickened out of having the characters pay with their lives for attempting to do what they think is right... untill it started to chicken out in later seasons
@Joseph Douek Narcos is very historically accurate and both the main DEA members are still alive in real life and contributed to the show. Ever since the assassination of Kiki which was shown in Narcos Mexico which actually did have the main character killed off in the finale, DEA agents were off limits bc the US response could be huge and it wasn't worth the risk even to Pablo. They make this point in ep 3 of season 1. Even the Colonel featured in the show is based off someone who was repeatedly the target of assassination attempts by Pablo and survived incredibly. The show chose to kill off Carillo in season 2 probably to replace him with someone who bore the real name of the Colonel without having to portray the uglier rumors about how far the Colonel went on someone who is still alive and may have objected to being portrayed using rumors. Bc of the historical stuff, Narcos really did feel like no one was safe so I disagree there. The presidential candidate was killed in an airplane (true story) his replacement was the target of several real attempts and survived but there were close calls. Pablo's associates weren't getting killed off for shock value, the los pepes were killing anyone close to Pablo and there was real fear that his family would be killed too. I disagree with his assessment about Narcos being a clone, it was one of the early shows for Netflix that really got a following but it was one of the cheapest shows Netflix ever did with a 25 mil budget person season compared to 150 mil season House of Cards or 150 mil Marco Polo. This wasn't a show that Netflix made to copy game of thrones, it was just a small show that Netflix greenlit along with those other big budget series.
In my opinion one of the key differences the clones will never be able to fix is that the series Game of Thrones is based on "A Song of Ice and Fire" is a very long, complex story written over 20 years, any script written from scratch and put straight to tv will almost certainly not have as much detail and complexity, and do it well. Game of Thrones could only get away with the level of story they told by having someone already spend years thinking about all of the characters, their motivations, how they interact, and everything else. Trying to replicate something like that, writing for a couple years on a script, could get you a couple good seasons at best, as we have seen with many of these clones, but there is no way to keep up writing such a complex story fast enough to put a season out a year.
"My house is currently being possessed by the spirit of a woman I murdered, i mean..." It's Ok, James, we all have our own little secrets to deal with...
What I'd like to see in more media are character "deaths" that aren't deaths. Like what the Hound is in a SoI&F where he's not dead he's in that religious commune thing. More like a character retiring from the narrative than an actual death.
Honestly. It leaves open the possibility for further stories about that character if people so desire. You should never kill a character just because their role in the current story is done.
The Turkish period drama _Magnificent Century_ is probably the best _Game of Thrones_ clone I know of. It's about the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and the plot is largely focused on the politics of his court. It manages to be dark by being pretty unapologetic about the darker side of the Ottoman Empire- for instance the pilot episode shows Suleiman's love interest Hurrem being brought to Istanbul as a slave (Ottoman Sultans reproduced almost exclusively through sex slaves to avoid dynastic entanglements), setting up Stockholm Syndrome vibes when they fall in love. As the Sultan has his own harem there's a lot of sex, and since succession to the throne is determined by fratricide there's a lot of deaths as well.
"There's a lot of sex and deaths" - Lol, as if MC's fades to black were ever comparable to GoT's frequent rawdogging on screen. The Turkish censors would NEVER let MC go as hard as GoT on sex or on-screen brutality... Not that it makes either of these shows any worse, it's just different, is all. I would argue that the more likely inspiration for Magnificent Century were The Rome and The Tudors, also series that take real history and make it "sexy" (MC also takes place in the same period as The Tudors, lol). Magnificent Century is that, but in style of Turkish soap operas, and I agree that it's a good show - even though it does kinda suck as a representation of real events.
Uhh, if I am being honest, I love Hurrem's story and all the woman in power and stuff but it always felt too much like portraying her relationship with the sultan as wrong wasn't the show's intention. Always felt a little too normalizing. As if it's not characters who are ok with these kind of things, but creators of the show. Especially compared to got, where it's pretty clear that while the characters, who grew up with things we consider wrong, don't understand this as wrong, the author does and makes sure to show how such situations can affect a person's mentality
The only GoT "clone" I've seen that really works (and works better than GoT, honestly) is Black Sails. You've got a cast of bastards, because pirates, but they're fun to watch and each has his own version of a moral compass. Plus, the plot actually has structure, because since it's a prequel to Treasure Island, the writers always have an endpoint they're working towards. And that endpoint means the show doesn't overstay its welcome-- it's in and out in 38 episodes, about half the length of GoT, and actually sticks the landing.
@@christianweibrecht6555 well, this is about a clone of GoT the show, so Black Sails is a TV show, but it's absolutely great viewing. However, it also serves as a sort of prequel to the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, which is deservedly a classic, perhaps THE archetypal pirate yarn.
Is Black Sails really a GoT clone though? I know it was mentioned in the beginning of the video, and it does have a lot of sex and violence, but it’s not used as an example for any of the points made later in the video, and lots of things have a lot of sex and violence that aren’t GoT clones. I haven’t seen the whole thing, but it felt more like Michael Bay’s production team doing their own thing with the pirates of the Caribbean than anything else. Like, Michael Bay has always thrown sex, without nudity, into his projects, and maybe GoT allowed him to go whole hog. But it still felt like its own thing, to me.
@@gabrielpadro5589 Do you like pirates? If so, this is one of the best pirate anythings out there. Do you like Treasure Island? Because this works nicely as a prequel to that. Do you like multidimensional characters? This show is full of 'em: Flint, Silver, Rackham, Vane, Bonny, Max, and more besides. The 30-odd hours of story allows these characters plenty of time to grow and change, but it's not so long that things ever spiral out of control or feel like they're treading water. It'll make you laugh, make you wince, and utterly shiver your timbers. And it ends really well, like "make you tear up a bit" well. Because it's inspired by both historical pirates who were myths in their time and a work of fiction, it's a story in large part about the stories we tell and their effects on the world, and there's a lot of depth there. Fair warning: if you're turned off by violence, there's a lot in this show (it's about pirates), and there is an amount of sex that is in keeping with its riotous characters (although less as the show progresses).
Black Sails was really great and avoided many of the downfalls you mentioned i really enjoyded that the thing that were important in the first chapter where important in the last one 5 season after. it really looked like the writters planed better the series
Black Sails is the best series to come out of this popularity train from GoT. It's even better than GoT itself. The plot development, characterization, production ... Everything was almost perfect. You could see not only the passion but also the talent of the scriptwriters. Willing, not to copy (adapt) the excellence of an author, but to plan and structure their series, from the beginning to the end, even when there was not even a second season confirmed. That it's how quality television is made.
@@munken7673 yes that became very boring, knowing that when the show switches scenes you probably wont get to see the characters until next episode. Wich strangely makes it very bingeable
Game of Thrones is a perfect example of why I don't get into a series, be it novels, shows, films, anime, manga, or whatever have you, until they are complete. I don't want to get invested into a story that ends up being a massive disappointment. I'll only dedicate my time to something I know is good from beginning to end, or which has some features that make it worth consuming dispite it's ending (or lack their of (Rip Miura)).
One piece i near thre(relative speaking) ther are cases when you know you see the end soon relative speaking. Some fun is engaging in a community and if you wait till it ends, you miss the bt part there. Its as much about the fan community as the manga really, especially with authors encouraging speculations with forshadowing. Plus not much spoilers. Ther are benefits and a community that is rarely ther after a series ends.
Even Narcos knew when to pull back from the sex in the episodes closing in on Pablo. Some of its stuff was for shock but alot of it was necessary to show how brutal and far the cartels and the men who wanted to take them down would go. Most of the stuff they showed is very accurate to the reality.
@@pearlstar5323 Yes. It was a dramatised documentary sorta. Game of thrones is fantasy. Very diffs. Tho I will admit, I kept calling Javier 'The Oberyn Martell guy' until I got used to the name :p
@@metalman4393 Lol, yeah I feel like a lot of people would call him Oberyn instead of Javi but I actually watched Narcos before watching GOT so I always call him Javi no matter what he's in lol.
I wouldn't call The Last Kingdom a real GOT clone, since it is an adaptation of a successful book series, which started in 2004. Of course the adaptation is influenced by GOT and it wouldn't have been made without it probably. But the problems you named with the story I don't think are mainly caused by GOT.
Exactly. The Last Kingdom is an adaptation product of the success of series with a medieval setting, it is more influenced, I would say, by Vikings than by GoT. Come on, it's to watch the series and see how it was pitched that Uhtred is a new Ragnar. But yes, the problems of the series, comes, in my opinion, thanks to its own nature. They are adaptations, of a season two books, which makes them have to rush certain elements. In particular, characterization. But at the same time, having read the books, I understand why they decided to adapt two books per season. The plot in the books that the series adapts tends to move slowly, being focused mostly on that characterization.
@@NotoriousLightning I know, but while the show was clearly influenced by it and probably was made as a reaction to GOT's success, this seems not to be the case for the books. At least in my opinion. Of course I don't know what influenced Cornwell, but I see few signs for it, besides using real historical events as inspiration and arguably killing characters. So I wouldn't call it a clone, they are not even in the same genre.
@@phanton9983I mean the Worse Witch was written many years before Harry Potter but the more recent Netflix TV show was clearly a rip off of Harry Potter using a different book for source material. And The Vampire Diaries was written many many many years before Twilight but the CW TV show was, while using the books plot points and characters also leaning heavily on being ‘like twilight’.
I wonder what it would be like to combine Star Wars and Game of Thrones together. So Game of Thrones plot formula, lots of violence, and lots of characters, lots of death but Star Wars-like and science fiction setting.
I'm technically a Karen McKarenface then. I never actually wanted them to remake the last season, the problems started way before then, but I did sign a meaningless petition for them to do it, mostly as a way to jointly say fans weren't happy with how the series ended
Most of them are angry that their female white savior turned evil. Thing is Danny always has the potential to be evil - you can tell that in the 1st three episodes she was in. Hell - the only person who wasn't evil was Ned, and look where that got him - minus a head.
@@peterwindhorst5775 Jon's evil? OK. Daenerys spent her first three episodes mostly being effectively a captive. The only person she would have hated was her abusive brother. How despicable of her, to not love her abuser. Yes, Dany talked a big game about burning cities, bla, bla, bla. That's just pretty standard Targaryen rhetoric. Dragons, both using and threatening to do so, are what put her family in power. Aegon the Conqueror used them. Jahaerys subtly threatened Braavos and his own stepfather. Even Aegon V the Unlikely ('Egg'), champion of the smallfolk, tried to get dragons in order to cow the nobles. Good and smart Targaryens threaten dragonfire without needing or intending to follow through. Better to capture than destroy; it's in 'The Art of War'. Daenerys has gone too far in the past, been excessively violent, even needed to be talked down and forced to think before doing awful things... but never without a reason. There was 0 reason to slaughter random people when she had just won everything. In the books, I think we saw her turning point, just not Daenerys post-turning point. While I don't think she's 'just evil' now, she will definitely be more violent, and grow more self-righteous from the start of Winds of Winter to her great crime. In the show, she has continued to be pretty normal by the rules of the universe, killing people for opposing her, but sparing them when they have no direct conflict or when they bend the knee. Until the penultimate episode.
@@JustFlemishMe Yes John is evil. Rape of Ygrette. Multiple betraying the vow of the Knight's Watch. Treason. Letting the wild folk through the wall. Knowingly rigging the election for commander. All in a lawful world would be evil acts.
@@peterwindhorst5775 OK, let me go through this point by point. Also, I assume my defense of Daenerys stands. Charge 1: Rape of Ygritte. Was this in the show? Did I miss it? I recall Ygritte being far more agressive sexually, even being the dominant partner in their relationship; she's constantly taking the initiative. The only time I recall Jon being agressive in that way is this: "I would love to see you in a silk dress. ... So I could rip it off you." And what happens? Ygritte immediately hits back. Right. Daenerys being raped by Drogo happened in the show. Ygritte by Jon, though? Charge 2: Multiple counts of betraying the vow of the Night's Watch. Eh. A good lawyer could get him out of that. _Technically_ the oath doesn't stipulate he can't sleep with a girl, it says 'I shall father no children', which he didn't. He was careless, to be sure, arguably ignored his oath (more accurately interpreted it in difficult circumstances), but didn't quite break it. So sleeping with Ygritte is debatable. Joining the Free Folk? That was a strategic call by Qorin Halfhand that Jon loyally followed. This is also the context in which he slept with Ygritte. (I know, having sex with a hot redhead. Oh, the sacrifices he made. All the same though, in the end, he was ultimately in it to assist the Night's Watch, his primary duty in his sincere interpretation of his vows.) As Lord Commander, he let the Free Folk in. This is entirely in line with the Night's Watch vow: "I am the shield that guards the realms of men." The Free Folk are his fellow men, too. And he needs them to fight the Watch's real enemy: the Army of the Dead. Finally, the two times he left the Watch. First time, he wanted to help his brother Robb. Does that make him evil? And all it took was some friends talking him out of it and he was back within a few hours. The second time... While the vow does say 'From this day until my last day' it also says 'It shall not end until my death'. Normally, those two aren't in conflict, and Jon is hardly to blame for being an exception. Charge 3: Treason. This seems to just be a rephrasing of the second charge, so I refer you to my previous remarks. Charge 4: Letting the Free Folk/Wildlings through the wall. I covered this under the second charge as well. Charge 5: Knowingly rigging the election for Lord Commander. Is this a show thing? If so I will easily concede I missed it. What I do know is in the books, Sam went behind Jon's back to get him elected. Sam rigged the election, not Jon, and against Jon's wishes, too. Adding some closing remarks, while it may be beneath both our dignities to stoop to this kind of technicalities, it is difficult to resist pointing out 'good' and 'lawful' are very different concepts. Besides that, may I ask what makes a 'lawful world'? Because that is now, it seems, relevant to the discussion. Is it a world where laws exist? Or is there a certain standard said laws must be held to? Or are we imposing a certain set of 'laws'? If so, which? Is 'good' best measured by adherence to 'laws'? I fear, then, I must refer you to a third character, whose noblest deed is regarded as his vilest. "They make you swear and swear. Obey the King. Obey your father. Protect the innocent. But what if your father despises the King? What if the King harms the innocent? It's too much. You're going to end up breaking one oath or another." In honesty, Robb and Eddard Stark aren't squeaky clean themselves. Eddard lied to his best friend, his King, his mentor, his wife and his children. Robb broke a promise to Walder Frey. The Starks, however close they stay or however far they stray from their honourable roots, make ethical compromises. Not because they want to, but because their very world forces them to. They can't do everything right the way they want to, so they have to choose.
I think something you indirectly hit the nail on the head on is the power and danger of realism as a fundamental principle of what makes good writing. Think about it. GOT's overall quality came from essentially being a somewhat realistic history lesson. One that looked at the lives of multiple individuals with power during a period in somewhat medieval Europe with a light dose of magic. Overall though, what we got was a passionate array of people who more than less had nothing to their names but their titles, their wits, personality and ambition. What I'm getting at is replicating real life instead of a fantasy setting, at least at first, removes the ability for the author to essentially get high on how cool they think their magic is and throw that around every second. What that means is that they're forced to think about how ordinary people create dramatic and meaningful moments, because at a basis actions and choices fundamentally makeup the story your writing. For example, in the latest critical role episode on UA-cam Laura Bailey's character Fearne stole an amulet from a somewhat random passerby. The Dm Matt had given him a lightly better than average description and basically hinted that this character, even if we might not see him again, was a mysterious figure connected to a story with some heft to it. Fearne just took his damn amulet, which I believe he said was a relic in service to a god, because she wanted to. This made the moment much more interesting and enjoyable, which is a characteristic of Fearne; not through blowing up stuff or sex, but by making choices, Fearne can blow up her friends plan and pretty much carry the show of campaign 3 so far. Getting back on track, realism in GOT allowed Martin to fill his cast with people who developed interesting events from their usage of choices and concerns relative to their position in the rough hierarchy of the world, just like we do and just like every character in a book ever has. We got to look over the entirety of a world flush with people who gave us legendary stories from how Martin essentially had to master what you talked about above: cause and effect. ...in real terms, that's what life is made out of. People and things making choices and the cause and effect of those choices resulting in the reality we live the next day. This is essentially realism in storytelling, and harnessing it is the most basic of basic of ability's and that's why you need it to tell a good story. Mastering how to manipulate it while getting to the endpoints you want is the definition of getting your cake and eating it too. Which book's kind of need to achieve...at a basis? Since you want your story to both appear and end well? Like all good things, it can also have bad end results. Like you said, Martin's biggest problem was that he essentially managed to replicate life, not a story, too well. Life isn't a story and because of that Martin had no way to tie the narrative down because essentially he'd never really made one...not of a kind that can tie itself up in the way all stories need to, at least. If I go any deeper into why realism is necessary and what it is, I'll thank you James for giving me the subject of my newest video.
I definitely think that Black Sails was trying very hard to emulate GOT in its first season, but as the show went on and it became clear the writers were getting less pressure from the network to make their show more like GOT, it got really good. From season two onward the quality of the show skyrockets and continues its high for the rest of the series. It really allows itself to become its own thing and is my favorite show of all time. If you’re reading this you should watch Black Sails.
Did... did James just call The Last Kingdom a GOT clone...? But... The Saxon Chronicles are just romanticized history..... not everything in a medieval setting is copied off of a song of ice and fire.... Edit: also, every issue with tlk mentioned here is exclusive to season 1, which is objectively the worst season. There's another three, much better seasons.
About character deaths: I honestly like having a couple of "safe" characters, especially in longer stories/series, because I can get to know these characters and then I can essentially follow them to the end of the series. Actually I pretty much stopped reading a song of ice and fire after the red wedding (and at this point the show was right when Jon Snow got apparently killed). When it comes to it I read a very long running Science Fiction short novel series called Perry Rhodan that essentially has 5 "safe" characters that are really too impmortant to the overall plot to die. What they do different that the "game of thrones knock offs" that are talked about here is that other characters can still become important for a decently long time (more than a whole season at times) before they are sorted out (which doesn't even need to be death. Could be ritirement because the main 5 are (relatively) immortal while most others are not for example). They did however kill an essentially "sixth safe" character (and fake killed two of the other ones a few times) not too long ago. And sometimes they kill potentially interesting characters really quickly while keeping pretty boring characters around too long.
@Diewott1 Yes but I read the third book at the same time as Jons death happened in the series and since EVERYONE talked about it I got spoilered of course.
Yeah, I feel like there should be a few characters with enough plot armor to at least last them until the final act. They can all be fair game from there on out.
I wrote a "book" once about killing off characters. Basically, a drama starting on a hike. Some dude seems to be a shady fugitive, there's a hint of romance with a serious underlying problem between two other characters (likely incest), who wanted to escape society for a while, etc. And they all die in a mud avalanche at the second page. Then there goes automatically generated depiction of the scenery made with a lexical tree day after day, after day for 150 pages. A story stops if the main character dies. What's left is a different story. If there's no overarching theme, then the character should not be main one anyway
You are spotnon anout the character death trend. One of the worse offenders in this is Stranger Things which often bloats it’s cast of core characters in a new season just enough to make you care (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) so they can kill off that ‘main’ character while saying there will be charactet death, instead of killing any of there core characters. While not a GoT clone, it’s obvs the same theories at work.
How to make a vague aSoIaF “inspired” book: 1) make a fantasy world. Original? Pffff, just copy britain and/or germany and france but call it different names. 2) have “noble houses”. Thats it, just have that. 3) make it a “no fantasy, fantasy world”. Even though the point of SoIaF was that the world did have magic it just wasnt common. 4) have a complex history, but dont have the good natural dialogue based exposition. Just have a ton of exposition. 5) have POV switches. That character gets a POV chapter, that character has a POV chapter. The *villain* gets a POV Chapter. *EVERYBODY GETS A POV CHAPTER* 6) make a really basic plot but mire it with a bible’s worth of “political” dialogue 7) sex. Sexy sex. Sex. 8) be “”envelope pushing”” have rape, assault, extreme violence, torture. But dont be smart just have it happen.
"No one talks about this anymore" = "This show no longer has the buzz it had when it was currently running and dominating the zeitgeist". I mean, things end, people move on.
1-6:11 - Also know as the Redshirts. 2-Just like the beginning of Suicide Squad 2. 3-Ok, I laughed at the "fuck that show". They take it a little too literal, I guess... 4-Probably the budget was the main obstacle on those situations. This is one of the reasons I think Elantris would be a great fantasy story on television, the producers only need to used special effects to make the Seons and the magic spells (Aons). 5-Well, even in a world where witches are real, it still possible to wrongly condemn a normal people of witchcraft, so... Yeah, he still could blow up everything. 6-Hell, even Legend of Zelda knows better of Medieval times than some show... 7-You're an irishman who hates brits? You don't need to explain anything else.
To be fair, at the beginning of the Suicide Squad they also killed off Cpt. Boomerang, who was one of the mainc characters in the first movie and as far as I know, one of the fan favorites
I think you are the only person ever to mention The Bastard Executioner other than me. From episode one it was clear it was a cash in on the GOT craze.
Same here. I love Roman history, studied Latin at university, translated Tacitus and read about every cheesy Roman Empire novel there is. This show is dope. They speak so much Latin.
The death thing reminded of "Homestuck". In that series, a lot of characters die. However, the protagonists always come back. The only characters who stay dead are minor characters.
i haven't watched the video yet, but i'm uncomfortable that you had the chance to call this video 'game of clones' and didn't... it would have been so punny :'0
Exactly ... The biggest sin of that series, which for me breaks the immersion, is that I do not believe, not for a second, that the Uhtred of the last seasons is +40 years old.
@@JMTgpro yeah, but can you really blame them? Both recasting and silly make up are poor choices. For me suspension of belief works well enough in such cases.
@@davidesguario2151 I would have preferred it to be look changes, I don't know, hairstyles, beards, gray hair ... They would not necessarily have to be false wrinkles. But as they do now, they seem frozen in time.
I think you made a brilliant point at the end about how GoT does seem to be this unfocused mess that struggles to produce the feeling of progress as a whole across its many different plotlines. It makes me think back to Brandon Sanderson's framework for how people consume fiction: "Promise, Progress, Payoff". And thats part of why, say what you might say about him as an author, I have just as much faith that he will finish his epic huge mega arc series as I do that we will definitely never see Song of Spring or whatever the book after Winds is from GRRM.
This is a good video. Even GoT fell victim to essentially becoming a 'GoT clone' by the end. Like all the other examples, once they ran out of Martin's material, you could tell that the rest was written by, essentially 'Hollywood writers,' who only know how to tell one type of story. The sociological storytelling style that made the series (both books and TV) popular disappeared completely by the final season. Wanted to say though: there were TONS of ASoIaF clones written in the wake of Martin becoming uber-popular in late 90s/early aughts. You just don't remember them because almost all of them were fucking terrible. I'd say Martin (along with Steven Erikson, to a lesser extent) had a big part in 'mainstreaming' the style of dark, brutal fantasy that became grimdark, and a lot of the stuff we're still getting to this day. No, he definitely didn't invent any of the tropes he used, and he wasn't even the only person writing in that genre at the time. But I think he's a LOT of what shifted the trend away from LOTR/D&D clones and various retreads of the Hero's Journey, and toward 'lots of people die horribly; nasty, brutish, and short; also lots of sex and probably some rape too' in mainstream fantasy.
The Last Kingdom is based on a series of 13 books that go from Uhtred being about 7 to 80+. He's a stupid asshole in the first 3 or so books, and he (and everyone around him) fully acknowledges it. He gets wiser as he matures, but remains kind of a loveable asshole for the entire series. The show condenses a lot of book material, but I love the adaptation, it's really good, and David Dawson was awesome as Alfred. The main point of the book series was to show the creation of England - from almost all of Saxon kingdoms being conquered by Vikings in 860-870s to kind of united England after King Aethelstan wins the Battle Of Brunanburgh in 937. Uhtred and his adventures are writer's way to tell this story. These books aren't the best Bernard Cornwell ever wrote (that's still his Arthurian trilogy), but they are still a very enjoyable read. And they made me read about English history.
ok I have to contest Black Sails being a GoT clone. Like yeah they tried the whole “tits and violence” thing in season 1 but they quickly realized nobody liked that and seasons 2-4 are completely different and the writing is amazing it’s my favorite show now
Great video, I never bothered checking the clones, so it was interesting to learn what they tried to do. I would definitely love a GOT x YA dystopian video, I also really enjoy your longer videos, don't apologise for them :)
Well GoT inspired itself from the War of the Roses (30 years lasting civil war about the english throne). So if a book series nowadays also take this as inspiration (many charakters, intrigues, deaths) is it a GoT clone?
For a while, science fiction TV shows have had this problem too. How many shows came out which tried to capitalize on the success of Battlestar Galactica in the 2000s and early 2010s? Even going back to Star Wars and further, it's universal. Whenever TV executives see something successful, they immediately want in on the action. Even now, you have shows like Star Trek Discovery trying to cash in on the success of The Expanse. The cycle continues. Speaking of The Expanse, I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Leviathan Falls.
Terminator is basically the only instance I can think of where the sex scene was genuinely relevant to the plot and didn't just feel like mindless fanservice
oh yeah, a few other Game of Clones tropes: * The sets look like they got hit by about 5 haboobs/duststorms per day - yet everyone is surprisingly clean. * Even if fantastical creatures (Be they based off of real extinct animals or not like Dire Wolves) exist? They mysteriously RARELY encounter humans even when humans start encroaching on their territory. * Everyone looks like supermodels despite that they're all fucking their cousins (or even their siblings) and/or are the products of incest. * Only the Maester-err I mean Scholars or the off-brand Witcher knows about any mythical creatures that plague our local villages. * People in power are absolutely depraved and insane - yet nobody thinks "Maybe we oughta overthrow them". Even in real life, people who were THAT insane often had to ward off assassination attempts or try to avoid getting "accidents." * Things like sexism and racism are okay because "That's the way things were back then" - but it's okay to say "But it's FANTASY!" when you include other anachronisms like people using rapiers in the 12th century or potatoes in Europe.
I actually liked Marco Polo. But yes it was very unfocused. It should have been the story of two Empires crashing, but the show went out of his way to push Marko Polo as the main character. He isn't the Khan is the main character. And you know what you could still have Marco around as a POV character, but he should have been the chronicler, not the I know Kung Fu guy. There are some many elements in that show: characters, plot, themes and moments that deserved a better show.
I agree, it should've been focused on the history of Kublai Khan, the foundation of Great Yuan and the decline of the Mongols as they start getting defeated. In addition, Song was severely weakened at the time, so really it shouldn't have been as big of a focus as it was in the series. What deserved more screentime imo was the Mongol Succession War between Ariq and Kublai. Irl, it was a great war involing the whole Mongol Empire while in the series it's just a dispute which is solved with a duel. One of the best part of the series was Benedict's performance imo, which was great and believable and Kublai's characterisation was wonderful. It was a pretty good series, but it had the potential to be much better imo.
this is interesting! though I wonder why black sails was mentioned - I feel like it only really fits one of these categories, but that could just be me. Great video as always!
So uh, fun fact, in the medieval days they had primitive birth control. Leatherskin condoms. Herbs and plants that could avoid pregnancies, but well, we know how the Church handled that! Hahaha… hhh
The big problem with the books is that a lot of it is really just filler or build up and the books as of now stop just before the next climax of any important storyline or just as they become important (Brienne bringing Jaimi to Lady Stoneheart, the battle of slaversbay, the Maester have an anti magic conspiracy). Part of the problem is that Martin aparently just enjoys exploring this world, which is way most of his characters are on endless roadtrips. Another actually good GOT clone is the second Apocalypse. Although this series make GoT look tame in comparison and trying to explain the plot makes you either sound scizophrenic or requires the audience to have read the Silmarillion and Dune so they understand your vocabulary.
I was screaming at the screen when you talked about The Last Kingdom. The Last Kingdom was based on its own book series released before ASOIAF, and actual history, and Martin credited Bernard Cornwell as his inspiration. The author even rejected the comparison between TLK and GOT. Most of the comparisons you make don't even make sense. 1. "Only side characters die". Yeah, not shit, it only stars one protagonist, not an ensemble cast of protagonists like GOT. It has a completely different structure from ASOIAF. This is like complaining why Mando lives in The Mandalorian or why Guts lives in Berserk. 2. "Why did they kill off Uthred's lover at the end of the first season? Must be shock value. Dunno, haven't seen Season 2." LMAO. 3. There are like two sex scenes, maybe one nude in each season. Watch Vikings's nudity and compare it to The Last Kingdom. This is as tame as it can get with this premise. 5. None of the examples you brought up was unambiguously evil. Mildreth (the first wife) tells Uhtred he has an evil inside of him that needs to be exorcised and is actually gleeful that he was humiliated by being made to grovel in public (crawl on his knees), which ripped at Uhtred's core. Mildreth was becoming more "pious" by the day (as evidenced by Hild) and the pagan Uhtred was becoming more unacceptable to her and she let him know it. Mildredth was entirely unsupportive of Uhtred so I don't think he was feeling the love. Regarding the raids, Alfred essentially stitched Uhtred up by not telling him the wife chosen for him owed a large ongoing debt to the church, which Uhtred inevitably discovered he was obliged to take on. He was desperate to get coins and needed a way to get them fast. Not to say his raiding was just but I can understand Uhtred's anger and impetuousness kicking in at the injustice. Also, Uthred's raiding has a direct consequence in the very same episode. 7. The whole show is about Uthred struggling to figure out where he stands in the changing tides of history. He is being ripped apart from inside because he is half Anglo-saxon and half Dane, sometimes he acts like a Dane with Saxons and as a Saxon with Danes which drives the core conflicts and the themes. Hell, you even described it as "Some Viking dude wants to defend the Saxons from the invaders". Yes, THAT'S THE STORY. Also, even if your points are valid, none of them were due to the showrunners trying to chase GOT's success. They are from the books, the half of them released before GOT.
Agreed I liked this creator but no longer sure if I do. TLK is a great series and the nuance of the characters between Utrid and Alfred is better than literally every relationship in Game Of Thrones
People don't get that Uhtred is a hotheaded young man just trying to make it in a cutthroat world. He learned the hard way when his father was killed before him, he watched the Danes execute Northumbrian kings, and then his own uncle tried to kill him and later killed his new family. Why the fuck would he be a paragon of virtue? He has to LEARN to be a good man. It's called a character arc, James.
Sure, without GoT we wouldn't have Wheel of Time or The Witcher, but on the other hand, without GoT we wouldn't have The Shannara Chronicles. So, you know, grain of salt.
It's also weird how so many of these shows have their female characters constantly suffer. Sure, women didn't have equal rights in the past, but they weren't constantly being abused/raped/murdered/married off to pedophiles either. Rapists also faced much harsher punishments than today; they'd often be castrated or executed or killed by the victim's family. Fertility was paramount, because about half of all babies died before adulthood, so women's health was very important. Preteens and teens are much more likely to die during pregnancy, so most marriages happened when women were in their 20s. If they were married off young, they stayed in their parents' home until they were old enough to safely consummate. C-sections weren't a thing unless the woman was already dead; midwives and doctors would sometimes cut the baby into pieces if it wasn't coming out, because a healthy fertile wife was much more valuable than a baby who had a 50/50 chance of survival to adulthood. I really don't see why they need to cram in all this rape and pedophilia. It's not accurate or comfortable to watch, so why include so much of it?
Damn I can’t believe you slammed the last kingdom so hard I actually love that show 😅 also Uhtred was a horrible person in season one that was part of his development that he actually calms down in later seasons so that’s a bit of a hollow criticism.
Absolutely hated whenever Uhtred would cartwheel over a shield wall and win the battle with his massive dong, like, we get it, he's the biggest, sexiest, badass christendom, but he doesn't need to dragon shout all the bad guys away every few seconds for me to remember.
I wouldn't even say I hated the show, I actually enjoyed a lot of it, but it definitely wasn't because I thought the main guy was cool and interesting.
The thing about character death is a big one. You get so many books nowadays where character deaths are technically common but, really they just introduce a new random dude and kill them off every now and again. Or kill of a really minor character. They want what GoT has but they aren't prepared to kill off the characters. It's lame.
And usually the guys who die are 1. woman, 2. black or 3. useless/not that clever. Most writers have a strong tendency to ditch those in favor of straight white guys who are kinda aggressive and fuck a lot.
@@smuu1996 Eh idk about the clever bit. They never live long enough for you to judge their intellect.
@@poankiyu7664 Fair enough.
This is what motivated my low casualty count policy as an author.
thats was a problem whit aot i thibk in the start. allot of death but all of them are boring npc.but its was fixed
To be honest, the worst GOT clone was the later seasons of GOT
“The story had no structure” is so helpful oh my god
I liked that the character deaths in Got weren't purely for shock value, they also had massive ramifications for the story and surviving characters. That's the lesson I wish other shows would learn instead of just killing characters arbitrarily, having the other characters be sad for a bit, and then continuing on like nothing happened.
For the record, it's worth noting that 'Atlantis' wasn't actually created to be a GoT clone. It was created to be a _Merlin_ clone. BBC's Merlin was a big hit among young British fantasy fans and so when it finished in 2012, the BBC scrambled for something else to fill the gap of 'popular public domain legend retold but everyone's young and british'. These included Atlantis (which was announced two months after Merlin ended with two of the same creators) and The Musketeers, which first aired in 2014 after it had become clear that Atlantis Season 1 was not hitting the same way Merlin did.
I was coming down to comment this very thing. And arguably Merlin wouldn't have been made had it not been for BBC's Robin Hood being the success that it was, inspiring them to dig into other British legends for TV show ideas.
If anything, Atlantis felt like a melding of those two shows in its tone and execution, though not as good as either of its inspirations. And it's worth noting that both of those shows tried to get a bit more dark and edgy toward the end, so Atlantis didn't even necessarily steal THAT from GoT.
Really the only connecting link with GoT at all was Mark Addy, otherwise I feel like Atlantis is as far as it gets from trying to be GoT. The tone is different, many of the stories are more episodic in nature... yeah, I'm just failing to see it.
Oh Merlin my english teacher ( i'm italian) made us Watch some of the episodes of that
Insert comment about how “moral greyness” is most often used as a shortcut to gesture at nuance without actually being nuanced and sort of betrays a naïveté about real-world morality that goes in the opposite direction. I dunno.
When its really interesting, like any decent the colunt of monte christo rip off about how when doing revenge you dig two graves, one for yourself. i kinda have to think of code geass where the main character is a good person but definitly not a hero and the thing biting him re consquences of his actions . He isnt a monster but oesnt have to be to really do harm.
I call it "Shame of clones" from now on.
One trend I see in faux moral greyness is something I call InFAMOUS Syndrome. In the game inFAMOUS, your character is supposedly a morally grey anti-hero with electric powers who is constantly faced witrh moral choices, but in practice these choices boil down to a typical hero vs villain morality.
The best example of it is the constant stream of parallel evil Supermen, both in DC (Injustice, JL Snyder Cut) and Superman-like figures (The Boys, Brightburn etc). They act as if making a hero like Superman evil is some groundbreaking subversion, but it's still the exact same black and white morality of a saturday morning cartoon, only inverted. A Superman who sometimes makes immoral choices because he feels he has to is more interesting than just "Superman but EEEVUUUULZ".
Sadly, GoT ended up falling for InFAMOUS Syndrome as well, notably with the character of Daenerys. It's not that she can't be bad, it's that she was always as nuanced a character as her peers, until she became a perfect hero in Season 8 followed by a sudden shift to cackling maniac.
@@starkillersneed Moral grayness is easier to achieve by not even trying, and, instead, focusing on depicting someone as socially unacceptable to modern day cutures, but also wellmeaning in general.
Mandatory reference at how Blizz guys used the term "morally grey" to justify turning her so far most morally grey character (Sylvanas) into all-out villain territory, while treating everybody who opposed her like some paragon of virtue (despite doing evil stuff themselves, wich of course doesn't come back to bite them).
I know it's videogames, and this is about books, movies and series, but it works.
Don't forget to strip medieval settings of everything interesting about it. I hate these brown leathery costumes So much.
Yeah, we need more colour!
Dress those people like they did in the illuminated manuscripts! :D
@@johannageisel5390 I saw plenty of reenactors in historicly acurate clothes and they look amazing!
GoT had fantastic wardrobes for the first few seasons, but then everyone suddenly started wearing black, which incidentally does harm to the story, since it is literally the calling card of one of the factions...
i hate leather jackets in the old west. Its fucking hot they never wore leather jackets!!!
You think medievil peasents barely surviving a winter invested a lot in colors so they get to look like circus clowns?
GoT is still talked about, but always about how awful it became
What died was the praise, rewatchability and cultural weight, no more girls named "Kalesi"
Heck, i still love to see videos bashing and dissecting the final seasons
Funny thing that James mentions Narcos as a GOT clone because when I think of a way to explain what made Game of Thrones feel so veroscimil I always end up comparing it to movies and TV series about organized crime, especially drug cartels and human trafficking. Is about how GOT didn't chickened out of having the characters pay with their lives for attempting to do what they think is right... untill it started to chicken out in later seasons
To be fair, medival royals and noble houses were essentially just mafias that controlled huge territories
Also it really fits the director's, José Padilha, style like in his previous movies Elite Squad 1 and 2.
@Joseph Douek Narcos is very historically accurate and both the main DEA members are still alive in real life and contributed to the show. Ever since the assassination of Kiki which was shown in Narcos Mexico which actually did have the main character killed off in the finale, DEA agents were off limits bc the US response could be huge and it wasn't worth the risk even to Pablo. They make this point in ep 3 of season 1.
Even the Colonel featured in the show is based off someone who was repeatedly the target of assassination attempts by Pablo and survived incredibly. The show chose to kill off Carillo in season 2 probably to replace him with someone who bore the real name of the Colonel without having to portray the uglier rumors about how far the Colonel went on someone who is still alive and may have objected to being portrayed using rumors.
Bc of the historical stuff, Narcos really did feel like no one was safe so I disagree there. The presidential candidate was killed in an airplane (true story) his replacement was the target of several real attempts and survived but there were close calls. Pablo's associates weren't getting killed off for shock value, the los pepes were killing anyone close to Pablo and there was real fear that his family would be killed too.
I disagree with his assessment about Narcos being a clone, it was one of the early shows for Netflix that really got a following but it was one of the cheapest shows Netflix ever did with a 25 mil budget person season compared to 150 mil season House of Cards or 150 mil Marco Polo. This wasn't a show that Netflix made to copy game of thrones, it was just a small show that Netflix greenlit along with those other big budget series.
You mean when GoT became a clone of itself and gave all the main popular cast plot armor 😂.
In my opinion one of the key differences the clones will never be able to fix is that the series Game of Thrones is based on "A Song of Ice and Fire" is a very long, complex story written over 20 years, any script written from scratch and put straight to tv will almost certainly not have as much detail and complexity, and do it well. Game of Thrones could only get away with the level of story they told by having someone already spend years thinking about all of the characters, their motivations, how they interact, and everything else. Trying to replicate something like that, writing for a couple years on a script, could get you a couple good seasons at best, as we have seen with many of these clones, but there is no way to keep up writing such a complex story fast enough to put a season out a year.
Your point is maybe best exemplified not by one of the clones, but by the actual later seasons of GoT itself.
@@swagromancer exactly
That is an amazing point.
"My house is currently being possessed by the spirit of a woman I murdered, i mean..."
It's Ok, James, we all have our own little secrets to deal with...
We all cope with the trials of life in our own way 🤷♂️
Psst, is was the other james natalie, dont blame james
Speak for yourself. I’m still bitter about the noodle incident
What I'd like to see in more media are character "deaths" that aren't deaths. Like what the Hound is in a SoI&F where he's not dead he's in that religious commune thing. More like a character retiring from the narrative than an actual death.
this is usually done so they have an excuse to bring back the character later if they needed. Tv tropes calls this "put on a bus"
Honestly. It leaves open the possibility for further stories about that character if people so desire. You should never kill a character just because their role in the current story is done.
The Turkish period drama _Magnificent Century_ is probably the best _Game of Thrones_ clone I know of. It's about the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and the plot is largely focused on the politics of his court. It manages to be dark by being pretty unapologetic about the darker side of the Ottoman Empire- for instance the pilot episode shows Suleiman's love interest Hurrem being brought to Istanbul as a slave (Ottoman Sultans reproduced almost exclusively through sex slaves to avoid dynastic entanglements), setting up Stockholm Syndrome vibes when they fall in love. As the Sultan has his own harem there's a lot of sex, and since succession to the throne is determined by fratricide there's a lot of deaths as well.
Didn't the two shows start around the same time?
magnificent century started 2 months earlier that makes GoT a MC clone
@@akbas58 Hot take, I love it
"There's a lot of sex and deaths" - Lol, as if MC's fades to black were ever comparable to GoT's frequent rawdogging on screen. The Turkish censors would NEVER let MC go as hard as GoT on sex or on-screen brutality... Not that it makes either of these shows any worse, it's just different, is all.
I would argue that the more likely inspiration for Magnificent Century were The Rome and The Tudors, also series that take real history and make it "sexy" (MC also takes place in the same period as The Tudors, lol). Magnificent Century is that, but in style of Turkish soap operas, and I agree that it's a good show - even though it does kinda suck as a representation of real events.
Uhh, if I am being honest, I love Hurrem's story and all the woman in power and stuff but it always felt too much like portraying her relationship with the sultan as wrong wasn't the show's intention. Always felt a little too normalizing. As if it's not characters who are ok with these kind of things, but creators of the show. Especially compared to got, where it's pretty clear that while the characters, who grew up with things we consider wrong, don't understand this as wrong, the author does and makes sure to show how such situations can affect a person's mentality
The only GoT "clone" I've seen that really works (and works better than GoT, honestly) is Black Sails. You've got a cast of bastards, because pirates, but they're fun to watch and each has his own version of a moral compass. Plus, the plot actually has structure, because since it's a prequel to Treasure Island, the writers always have an endpoint they're working towards. And that endpoint means the show doesn't overstay its welcome-- it's in and out in 38 episodes, about half the length of GoT, and actually sticks the landing.
Are the books worth reading?
@@christianweibrecht6555 well, this is about a clone of GoT the show, so Black Sails is a TV show, but it's absolutely great viewing. However, it also serves as a sort of prequel to the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, which is deservedly a classic, perhaps THE archetypal pirate yarn.
Is Black Sails really a GoT clone though? I know it was mentioned in the beginning of the video, and it does have a lot of sex and violence, but it’s not used as an example for any of the points made later in the video, and lots of things have a lot of sex and violence that aren’t GoT clones.
I haven’t seen the whole thing, but it felt more like Michael Bay’s production team doing their own thing with the pirates of the Caribbean than anything else. Like, Michael Bay has always thrown sex, without nudity, into his projects, and maybe GoT allowed him to go whole hog. But it still felt like its own thing, to me.
I have heard of Black Sails now and then and as someone how does not watch TV very much would you recommend it to me?
@@gabrielpadro5589 Do you like pirates? If so, this is one of the best pirate anythings out there. Do you like Treasure Island? Because this works nicely as a prequel to that. Do you like multidimensional characters? This show is full of 'em: Flint, Silver, Rackham, Vane, Bonny, Max, and more besides. The 30-odd hours of story allows these characters plenty of time to grow and change, but it's not so long that things ever spiral out of control or feel like they're treading water. It'll make you laugh, make you wince, and utterly shiver your timbers. And it ends really well, like "make you tear up a bit" well. Because it's inspired by both historical pirates who were myths in their time and a work of fiction, it's a story in large part about the stories we tell and their effects on the world, and there's a lot of depth there.
Fair warning: if you're turned off by violence, there's a lot in this show (it's about pirates), and there is an amount of sex that is in keeping with its riotous characters (although less as the show progresses).
Black Sails was really great and avoided many of the downfalls you mentioned i really enjoyded that the thing that were important in the first chapter where important in the last one 5 season after. it really looked like the writters planed better the series
Black Sails is the best series to come out of this popularity train from GoT. It's even better than GoT itself. The plot development, characterization, production ... Everything was almost perfect. You could see not only the passion but also the talent of the scriptwriters. Willing, not to copy (adapt) the excellence of an author, but to plan and structure their series, from the beginning to the end, even when there was not even a second season confirmed.
That it's how quality television is made.
The only problem i had with Black sails is all the side switching all the time But still a great show.
@@munken7673 yes that became very boring, knowing that when the show switches scenes you probably wont get to see the characters until next episode. Wich strangely makes it very bingeable
Game of Clones
Sounds like a clone wars sequel with rogue clone commanders becoming warlords due to their military expertise vs. loyalist clones
Episode II - Attack of the Thrones.
"It's shockingly difficult to show clips from these shows without getting demontized."
LMFAOOOOO
Or getting fucking shut down
The funny thing is not even the writers of the show understood how to write good character death by the end.
Game of Thrones is a perfect example of why I don't get into a series, be it novels, shows, films, anime, manga, or whatever have you, until they are complete. I don't want to get invested into a story that ends up being a massive disappointment. I'll only dedicate my time to something I know is good from beginning to end, or which has some features that make it worth consuming dispite it's ending (or lack their of (Rip Miura)).
Well, if noone got into a series that is unfinished no series would get to be finished.
@@loczek1965 true.
Hah! That's why the only shows I've ever finished are Breaking Bad and Cowboy Bebop xD
One piece i near thre(relative speaking) ther are cases when you know you see the end soon relative speaking. Some fun is engaging in a community and if you wait till it ends, you miss the bt part there. Its as much about the fan community as the manga really, especially with authors encouraging speculations with forshadowing.
Plus not much spoilers. Ther are benefits and a community that is rarely ther after a series ends.
@@loczek1965 fortunately I'm not everyone.
Point 7 is, well, on point. GoT is worldbuilding disguised as a novel - rather masterfully, but that's still what it is, as in, a disguise.
Nobody tell this guy about Lord of the Rings
@@cam4636 LotR is a linguistics lesson disguised as an anthology of British culture
Or maybe it's a novel masterfully disguised as worldbuilding...
Eh, i find ASOIAF's worldbuilding kinda weak actually. It's the characters that are what's really the strong point.
I was thinking, that's the reason why ASOIAF can afford to kill main characters like that - because the story is ultimately about the _realm._
It's a bit of a stretch to call Narcos a GoT clone. Death and sex sure, but A very different thing overall.
Even Narcos knew when to pull back from the sex in the episodes closing in on Pablo. Some of its stuff was for shock but alot of it was necessary to show how brutal and far the cartels and the men who wanted to take them down would go. Most of the stuff they showed is very accurate to the reality.
@@pearlstar5323 Yes. It was a dramatised documentary sorta. Game of thrones is fantasy. Very diffs. Tho I will admit, I kept calling Javier 'The Oberyn Martell guy' until I got used to the name :p
@@metalman4393 Lol, yeah I feel like a lot of people would call him Oberyn instead of Javi but I actually watched Narcos before watching GOT so I always call him Javi no matter what he's in lol.
It's not even set in the Middle Ages, or a kingdom. Hell, it is more similar to Breaking Bad than GOT.
Walking Dead preceded GOT so how did it steal the idea of killing off major characters?
I wouldn't call The Last Kingdom a real GOT clone, since it is an adaptation of a successful book series, which started in 2004. Of course the adaptation is influenced by GOT and it wouldn't have been made without it probably. But the problems you named with the story I don't think are mainly caused by GOT.
Exactly. The Last Kingdom is an adaptation product of the success of series with a medieval setting, it is more influenced, I would say, by Vikings than by GoT. Come on, it's to watch the series and see how it was pitched that Uhtred is a new Ragnar.
But yes, the problems of the series, comes, in my opinion, thanks to its own nature. They are adaptations, of a season two books, which makes them have to rush certain elements. In particular, characterization. But at the same time, having read the books, I understand why they decided to adapt two books per season. The plot in the books that the series adapts tends to move slowly, being focused mostly on that characterization.
GoT was released in 1996, bucko.
@@NotoriousLightning I know, but while the show was clearly influenced by it and probably was made as a reaction to GOT's success, this seems not to be the case for the books. At least in my opinion. Of course I don't know what influenced Cornwell, but I see few signs for it, besides using real historical events as inspiration and arguably killing characters. So I wouldn't call it a clone, they are not even in the same genre.
@@phanton9983 Martin was inspired by Cornwell. He literally credits him as inspiration.
@@phanton9983I mean the Worse Witch was written many years before Harry Potter but the more recent Netflix TV show was clearly a rip off of Harry Potter using a different book for source material. And The Vampire Diaries was written many many many years before Twilight but the CW TV show was, while using the books plot points and characters also leaning heavily on being ‘like twilight’.
I wonder what it would be like to combine Star Wars and Game of Thrones together. So Game of Thrones plot formula, lots of violence, and lots of characters, lots of death but Star Wars-like and science fiction setting.
Look into more space operas
Watch The Expanse
That's a good idea
So Dune basically?
It already exists. It's called Battlestar Galactica
Don't you dare say that the Winds of Winter will never come out. Let me have my one small hope. 😭
😂😂that bastard don't understand how long we been waiting.
It's still coming. It's on its way.
@@NobodyHere951 People have been saying the same thing about Jesus for about 2000 years. So I guess there's no "too long".
Never coming
Second! Your videos are great to listen to while cleaning and you have improved my creative writing!
Don't think I didn't notice the Calvin and Hobbes reference with that "Noodle Incident" line
I'm technically a Karen McKarenface then. I never actually wanted them to remake the last season, the problems started way before then, but I did sign a meaningless petition for them to do it, mostly as a way to jointly say fans weren't happy with how the series ended
Most of them are angry that their female white savior turned evil. Thing is Danny always has the potential to be evil - you can tell that in the 1st three episodes she was in. Hell - the only person who wasn't evil was Ned, and look where that got him - minus a head.
@@peterwindhorst5775 Jon's evil? OK.
Daenerys spent her first three episodes mostly being effectively a captive. The only person she would have hated was her abusive brother. How despicable of her, to not love her abuser.
Yes, Dany talked a big game about burning cities, bla, bla, bla. That's just pretty standard Targaryen rhetoric. Dragons, both using and threatening to do so, are what put her family in power. Aegon the Conqueror used them. Jahaerys subtly threatened Braavos and his own stepfather. Even Aegon V the Unlikely ('Egg'), champion of the smallfolk, tried to get dragons in order to cow the nobles. Good and smart Targaryens threaten dragonfire without needing or intending to follow through. Better to capture than destroy; it's in 'The Art of War'.
Daenerys has gone too far in the past, been excessively violent, even needed to be talked down and forced to think before doing awful things... but never without a reason. There was 0 reason to slaughter random people when she had just won everything.
In the books, I think we saw her turning point, just not Daenerys post-turning point. While I don't think she's 'just evil' now, she will definitely be more violent, and grow more self-righteous from the start of Winds of Winter to her great crime. In the show, she has continued to be pretty normal by the rules of the universe, killing people for opposing her, but sparing them when they have no direct conflict or when they bend the knee. Until the penultimate episode.
@@JustFlemishMe Yes John is evil. Rape of Ygrette. Multiple betraying the vow of the Knight's Watch. Treason. Letting the wild folk through the wall. Knowingly rigging the election for commander. All in a lawful world would be evil acts.
@@peterwindhorst5775 OK, let me go through this point by point. Also, I assume my defense of Daenerys stands.
Charge 1: Rape of Ygritte. Was this in the show? Did I miss it? I recall Ygritte being far more agressive sexually, even being the dominant partner in their relationship; she's constantly taking the initiative. The only time I recall Jon being agressive in that way is this: "I would love to see you in a silk dress. ... So I could rip it off you." And what happens? Ygritte immediately hits back. Right. Daenerys being raped by Drogo happened in the show. Ygritte by Jon, though?
Charge 2: Multiple counts of betraying the vow of the Night's Watch. Eh. A good lawyer could get him out of that. _Technically_ the oath doesn't stipulate he can't sleep with a girl, it says 'I shall father no children', which he didn't. He was careless, to be sure, arguably ignored his oath (more accurately interpreted it in difficult circumstances), but didn't quite break it. So sleeping with Ygritte is debatable. Joining the Free Folk? That was a strategic call by Qorin Halfhand that Jon loyally followed. This is also the context in which he slept with Ygritte. (I know, having sex with a hot redhead. Oh, the sacrifices he made. All the same though, in the end, he was ultimately in it to assist the Night's Watch, his primary duty in his sincere interpretation of his vows.) As Lord Commander, he let the Free Folk in. This is entirely in line with the Night's Watch vow: "I am the shield that guards the realms of men." The Free Folk are his fellow men, too. And he needs them to fight the Watch's real enemy: the Army of the Dead. Finally, the two times he left the Watch. First time, he wanted to help his brother Robb. Does that make him evil? And all it took was some friends talking him out of it and he was back within a few hours. The second time... While the vow does say 'From this day until my last day' it also says 'It shall not end until my death'. Normally, those two aren't in conflict, and Jon is hardly to blame for being an exception.
Charge 3: Treason. This seems to just be a rephrasing of the second charge, so I refer you to my previous remarks.
Charge 4: Letting the Free Folk/Wildlings through the wall. I covered this under the second charge as well.
Charge 5: Knowingly rigging the election for Lord Commander. Is this a show thing? If so I will easily concede I missed it. What I do know is in the books, Sam went behind Jon's back to get him elected. Sam rigged the election, not Jon, and against Jon's wishes, too.
Adding some closing remarks, while it may be beneath both our dignities to stoop to this kind of technicalities, it is difficult to resist pointing out 'good' and 'lawful' are very different concepts. Besides that, may I ask what makes a 'lawful world'? Because that is now, it seems, relevant to the discussion. Is it a world where laws exist? Or is there a certain standard said laws must be held to? Or are we imposing a certain set of 'laws'? If so, which? Is 'good' best measured by adherence to 'laws'? I fear, then, I must refer you to a third character, whose noblest deed is regarded as his vilest. "They make you swear and swear. Obey the King. Obey your father. Protect the innocent. But what if your father despises the King? What if the King harms the innocent? It's too much. You're going to end up breaking one oath or another." In honesty, Robb and Eddard Stark aren't squeaky clean themselves. Eddard lied to his best friend, his King, his mentor, his wife and his children. Robb broke a promise to Walder Frey. The Starks, however close they stay or however far they stray from their honourable roots, make ethical compromises. Not because they want to, but because their very world forces them to. They can't do everything right the way they want to, so they have to choose.
@@JustFlemishMe ua-cam.com/channels/ni4MJAf7XfS159w3_vWlRw.html for more info on danny and john
I think something you indirectly hit the nail on the head on is the power and danger of realism as a fundamental principle of what makes good writing.
Think about it. GOT's overall quality came from essentially being a somewhat realistic history lesson. One that looked at the lives of multiple individuals with power during a period in somewhat medieval Europe with a light dose of magic. Overall though, what we got was a passionate array of people who more than less had nothing to their names but their titles, their wits, personality and ambition.
What I'm getting at is replicating real life instead of a fantasy setting, at least at first, removes the ability for the author to essentially get high on how cool they think their magic is and throw that around every second. What that means is that they're forced to think about how ordinary people create dramatic and meaningful moments, because at a basis actions and choices fundamentally makeup the story your writing.
For example, in the latest critical role episode on UA-cam Laura Bailey's character Fearne stole an amulet from a somewhat random passerby. The Dm Matt had given him a lightly better than average description and basically hinted that this character, even if we might not see him again, was a mysterious figure connected to a story with some heft to it.
Fearne just took his damn amulet, which I believe he said was a relic in service to a god, because she wanted to. This made the moment much more interesting and enjoyable, which is a characteristic of Fearne; not through blowing up stuff or sex, but by making choices, Fearne can blow up her friends plan and pretty much carry the show of campaign 3 so far.
Getting back on track, realism in GOT allowed Martin to fill his cast with people who developed interesting events from their usage of choices and concerns relative to their position in the rough hierarchy of the world, just like we do and just like every character in a book ever has. We got to look over the entirety of a world flush with people who gave us legendary stories from how Martin essentially had to master what you talked about above: cause and effect.
...in real terms, that's what life is made out of. People and things making choices and the cause and effect of those choices resulting in the reality we live the next day. This is essentially realism in storytelling, and harnessing it is the most basic of basic of ability's and that's why you need it to tell a good story. Mastering how to manipulate it while getting to the endpoints you want is the definition of getting your cake and eating it too. Which book's kind of need to achieve...at a basis? Since you want your story to both appear and end well? Like all good things, it can also have bad end results.
Like you said, Martin's biggest problem was that he essentially managed to replicate life, not a story, too well. Life isn't a story and because of that Martin had no way to tie the narrative down because essentially he'd never really made one...not of a kind that can tie itself up in the way all stories need to, at least.
If I go any deeper into why realism is necessary and what it is, I'll thank you James for giving me the subject of my newest video.
Well said. I am writing it down, Senpai! (Lol)
Fearne is Ashley Johnson’s character iirc lol
but REAL people are illogical and random... so mother theresa eating babies certainly makes sense.
To write an actual *story* in such an environment is possible, but would require starting from the end rather than from the beginning
@@georgethompson1460
Is eating babies better or worse than gathering people together to sit around them and enjoy watching them painfully die?
I know it's a got clone but black sails changed my life
And just like a good clone it could sail on it’s own. In fact it might be the one that did it best even better then the original
I definitely think that Black Sails was trying very hard to emulate GOT in its first season, but as the show went on and it became clear the writers were getting less pressure from the network to make their show more like GOT, it got really good. From season two onward the quality of the show skyrockets and continues its high for the rest of the series. It really allows itself to become its own thing and is my favorite show of all time. If you’re reading this you should watch Black Sails.
Did... did James just call The Last Kingdom a GOT clone...? But... The Saxon Chronicles are just romanticized history..... not everything in a medieval setting is copied off of a song of ice and fire....
Edit: also, every issue with tlk mentioned here is exclusive to season 1, which is objectively the worst season. There's another three, much better seasons.
Most of his pints he made are also awful. Like he literally didn't pay any attention.
Despite season 1 being the worst and far from the quality of other seasons. It's still pretty good.
About character deaths: I honestly like having a couple of "safe" characters, especially in longer stories/series, because I can get to know these characters and then I can essentially follow them to the end of the series. Actually I pretty much stopped reading a song of ice and fire after the red wedding (and at this point the show was right when Jon Snow got apparently killed).
When it comes to it I read a very long running Science Fiction short novel series called Perry Rhodan that essentially has 5 "safe" characters that are really too impmortant to the overall plot to die. What they do different that the "game of thrones knock offs" that are talked about here is that other characters can still become important for a decently long time (more than a whole season at times) before they are sorted out (which doesn't even need to be death. Could be ritirement because the main 5 are (relatively) immortal while most others are not for example).
They did however kill an essentially "sixth safe" character (and fake killed two of the other ones a few times) not too long ago. And sometimes they kill potentially interesting characters really quickly while keeping pretty boring characters around too long.
@Diewott1 Yes but I read the third book at the same time as Jons death happened in the series and since EVERYONE talked about it I got spoilered of course.
Yeah, I feel like there should be a few characters with enough plot armor to at least last them until the final act. They can all be fair game from there on out.
Martin has killed so many characters that he doesn't even know what to do with a song of Ice and Fire anymore, may well have given up.
I wrote a "book" once about killing off characters. Basically, a drama starting on a hike. Some dude seems to be a shady fugitive, there's a hint of romance with a serious underlying problem between two other characters (likely incest), who wanted to escape society for a while, etc. And they all die in a mud avalanche at the second page. Then there goes automatically generated depiction of the scenery made with a lexical tree day after day, after day for 150 pages.
A story stops if the main character dies. What's left is a different story. If there's no overarching theme, then the character should not be main one anyway
To be fair, The Last Kingdom books were quite violent to begin with.
It says something when the show has to tone down the gore to keep its rating. The books were gory, violent, and pretty disgusting
You are spotnon anout the character death trend. One of the worse offenders in this is Stranger Things which often bloats it’s cast of core characters in a new season just enough to make you care (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) so they can kill off that ‘main’ character while saying there will be charactet death, instead of killing any of there core characters. While not a GoT clone, it’s obvs the same theories at work.
How to make a vague aSoIaF “inspired” book:
1) make a fantasy world. Original? Pffff, just copy britain and/or germany and france but call it different names.
2) have “noble houses”. Thats it, just have that.
3) make it a “no fantasy, fantasy world”. Even though the point of SoIaF was that the world did have magic it just wasnt common.
4) have a complex history, but dont have the good natural dialogue based exposition. Just have a ton of exposition.
5) have POV switches. That character gets a POV chapter, that character has a POV chapter. The *villain* gets a POV Chapter. *EVERYBODY GETS A POV CHAPTER*
6) make a really basic plot but mire it with a bible’s worth of “political” dialogue
7) sex. Sexy sex. Sex.
8) be “”envelope pushing”” have rape, assault, extreme violence, torture. But dont be smart just have it happen.
"No one talks about this anymore" = "This show no longer has the buzz it had when it was currently running and dominating the zeitgeist". I mean, things end, people move on.
1-6:11 - Also know as the Redshirts.
2-Just like the beginning of Suicide Squad 2.
3-Ok, I laughed at the "fuck that show". They take it a little too literal, I guess...
4-Probably the budget was the main obstacle on those situations. This is one of the reasons I think Elantris would be a great fantasy story on television, the producers only need to used special effects to make the Seons and the magic spells (Aons).
5-Well, even in a world where witches are real, it still possible to wrongly condemn a normal people of witchcraft, so... Yeah, he still could blow up everything.
6-Hell, even Legend of Zelda knows better of Medieval times than some show...
7-You're an irishman who hates brits? You don't need to explain anything else.
To be fair, at the beginning of the Suicide Squad they also killed off Cpt. Boomerang, who was one of the mainc characters in the first movie and as far as I know, one of the fan favorites
The petition was a joke, and back then a deserved one.
I think you are the only person ever to mention The Bastard Executioner other than me. From episode one it was clear it was a cash in on the GOT craze.
i really liked barbarians, this is probably the first time i hear anyone talking about it lol
Same here. I love Roman history, studied Latin at university, translated Tacitus and read about every cheesy Roman Empire novel there is. This show is dope. They speak so much Latin.
Narcos is a GOT clone? Nah it probably has some GOT influences but it's not a ripoff.
"The Noodle Incident," Calvin and Hobbes still lives!
The death thing reminded of "Homestuck". In that series, a lot of characters die. However, the protagonists always come back. The only characters who stay dead are minor characters.
I remember loving the last kingdom books back in middle school but the show bored the hell out of me. Same with Sharpe.
i haven't watched the video yet, but i'm uncomfortable that you had the chance to call this video 'game of clones' and didn't... it would have been so punny :'0
Missed opportunity for Game of Clones
My favourite example of GoT clone is the later seasons of game of thrones 😁
I wanna hear about the Noodle Incident tho
When good writing brings in sex, it’s a huge part of the plot and a minuscule part of the screentime
The Last Kingdom has its problems, however, its character development is pretty solid and it's still a fun show
Exactly ... The biggest sin of that series, which for me breaks the immersion, is that I do not believe, not for a second, that the Uhtred of the last seasons is +40 years old.
@@JMTgpro yeah, but can you really blame them? Both recasting and silly make up are poor choices. For me suspension of belief works well enough in such cases.
@@davidesguario2151 I would have preferred it to be look changes, I don't know, hairstyles, beards, gray hair ... They would not necessarily have to be false wrinkles. But as they do now, they seem frozen in time.
Holly shit, GoT seasons 5-8 fulfil all of those criteria.
Why does every time I click a random interesting video it's this guy.
I think you made a brilliant point at the end about how GoT does seem to be this unfocused mess that struggles to produce the feeling of progress as a whole across its many different plotlines. It makes me think back to Brandon Sanderson's framework for how people consume fiction: "Promise, Progress, Payoff". And thats part of why, say what you might say about him as an author, I have just as much faith that he will finish his epic huge mega arc series as I do that we will definitely never see Song of Spring or whatever the book after Winds is from GRRM.
This is a good video. Even GoT fell victim to essentially becoming a 'GoT clone' by the end. Like all the other examples, once they ran out of Martin's material, you could tell that the rest was written by, essentially 'Hollywood writers,' who only know how to tell one type of story. The sociological storytelling style that made the series (both books and TV) popular disappeared completely by the final season.
Wanted to say though: there were TONS of ASoIaF clones written in the wake of Martin becoming uber-popular in late 90s/early aughts. You just don't remember them because almost all of them were fucking terrible. I'd say Martin (along with Steven Erikson, to a lesser extent) had a big part in 'mainstreaming' the style of dark, brutal fantasy that became grimdark, and a lot of the stuff we're still getting to this day. No, he definitely didn't invent any of the tropes he used, and he wasn't even the only person writing in that genre at the time. But I think he's a LOT of what shifted the trend away from LOTR/D&D clones and various retreads of the Hero's Journey, and toward 'lots of people die horribly; nasty, brutish, and short; also lots of sex and probably some rape too' in mainstream fantasy.
The Last Kingdom is based on a series of 13 books that go from Uhtred being about 7 to 80+. He's a stupid asshole in the first 3 or so books, and he (and everyone around him) fully acknowledges it. He gets wiser as he matures, but remains kind of a loveable asshole for the entire series. The show condenses a lot of book material, but I love the adaptation, it's really good, and David Dawson was awesome as Alfred.
The main point of the book series was to show the creation of England - from almost all of Saxon kingdoms being conquered by Vikings in 860-870s to kind of united England after King Aethelstan wins the Battle Of Brunanburgh in 937. Uhtred and his adventures are writer's way to tell this story. These books aren't the best Bernard Cornwell ever wrote (that's still his Arthurian trilogy), but they are still a very enjoyable read. And they made me read about English history.
So when is James anarchist Game of thrones copy is coming?
Ask ur mum
@@JamesTullos dead
@@Snp2024 Cool, your mom is a literary agent? I have a proposal...
ok I have to contest Black Sails being a GoT clone. Like yeah they tried the whole “tits and violence” thing in season 1 but they quickly realized nobody liked that and seasons 2-4 are completely different and the writing is amazing it’s my favorite show now
MY BOY GETTING SPONSORS 🙏🙏🙏🙏
Great video, I never bothered checking the clones, so it was interesting to learn what they tried to do.
I would definitely love a GOT x YA dystopian video, I also really enjoy your longer videos, don't apologise for them :)
Watch the first episode of the Last Kindom, it was not a clone.
Let me guess: was this Jennifer woman you "accidentally" stabbed the ghostwriter of the fourth to ninth Maximum Ride books by any chance?
Well GoT inspired itself from the War of the Roses (30 years lasting civil war about the english throne). So if a book series nowadays also take this as inspiration (many charakters, intrigues, deaths) is it a GoT clone?
I can't believe you missed "without GoT there wouldn't be WoT
He said it
@@Ancksunamun150 thats true?
@@Ancksunamun150 He said "Wheel of time" not "WoT" that's the missed opportunity.
@@Aviv704 Oh I didnt get it xD my bad
You are wrong, „the Sandsnakes“ (or rather Doran and Arianne) are totally relevant to the plot, at least in the books.
this gives me hope for the Wheel of Time show. There's a story structure, but also strong character work.
Yeah but the last kingdom is actually real good. Don’t hate on it.
Vikings is not a game of thrones clone. It was an awesome vikings show.
black sails became great once it steped away from the GOT influence
For a while, science fiction TV shows have had this problem too. How many shows came out which tried to capitalize on the success of Battlestar Galactica in the 2000s and early 2010s?
Even going back to Star Wars and further, it's universal. Whenever TV executives see something successful, they immediately want in on the action.
Even now, you have shows like Star Trek Discovery trying to cash in on the success of The Expanse. The cycle continues. Speaking of The Expanse, I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Leviathan Falls.
Terminator is basically the only instance I can think of where the sex scene was genuinely relevant to the plot and didn't just feel like mindless fanservice
Watchmen (graphic novel and debatably the Movie) is another I can think of
I think even if it takes place in a real setting it should have fantasy elements, Why not make Pablo Escobar a wizard it will be neat
oh yeah, a few other Game of Clones tropes:
* The sets look like they got hit by about 5 haboobs/duststorms per day - yet everyone is surprisingly clean.
* Even if fantastical creatures (Be they based off of real extinct animals or not like Dire Wolves) exist? They mysteriously RARELY encounter humans even when humans start encroaching on their territory.
* Everyone looks like supermodels despite that they're all fucking their cousins (or even their siblings) and/or are the products of incest.
* Only the Maester-err I mean Scholars or the off-brand Witcher knows about any mythical creatures that plague our local villages.
* People in power are absolutely depraved and insane - yet nobody thinks "Maybe we oughta overthrow them". Even in real life, people who were THAT insane often had to ward off assassination attempts or try to avoid getting "accidents."
* Things like sexism and racism are okay because "That's the way things were back then" - but it's okay to say "But it's FANTASY!" when you include other anachronisms like people using rapiers in the 12th century or potatoes in Europe.
Ah, the infamous “noodle incident”. One of the best bits of an amazing verse. Excited for ‘The Mysteries’, J ?
Nobles sometimes have a sort of plot armor irl because no one wants to kill someone if they can ransom them for money
How is Narcos a clone of GoT? It's a biographical movie, not a fantasy.
I actually liked Marco Polo.
But yes it was very unfocused. It should have been the story of two Empires crashing, but the show went out of his way to push Marko Polo as the main character. He isn't the Khan is the main character. And you know what you could still have Marco around as a POV character, but he should have been the chronicler, not the I know Kung Fu guy. There are some many elements in that show: characters, plot, themes and moments that deserved a better show.
I agree, it should've been focused on the history of Kublai Khan, the foundation of Great Yuan and the decline of the Mongols as they start getting defeated.
In addition, Song was severely weakened at the time, so really it shouldn't have been as big of a focus as it was in the series. What deserved more screentime imo was the Mongol Succession War between Ariq and Kublai. Irl, it was a great war involing the whole Mongol Empire while in the series it's just a dispute which is solved with a duel.
One of the best part of the series was Benedict's performance imo, which was great and believable and Kublai's characterisation was wonderful. It was a pretty good series, but it had the potential to be much better imo.
Great video! Congratulations but you forgot the most egregious of all GOT clones...
GOT itself (seasons 7-8)
this is interesting! though I wonder why black sails was mentioned - I feel like it only really fits one of these categories, but that could just be me. Great video as always!
You totally forgot about the Witcher tho. It's also kind off a got clone. It just came out after got
"Jennifer... This isn't your home anymore!"
So uh, fun fact, in the medieval days they had primitive birth control. Leatherskin condoms. Herbs and plants that could avoid pregnancies, but well, we know how the Church handled that! Hahaha… hhh
If campfire had an app I would use it I need something like that
Can you do a video on how to do urban fantasy!
Young Grif showing up made me audibly say why in a library
The big problem with the books is that a lot of it is really just filler or build up and the books as of now stop just before the next climax of any important storyline or just as they become important (Brienne bringing Jaimi to Lady Stoneheart, the battle of slaversbay, the Maester have an anti magic conspiracy). Part of the problem is that Martin aparently just enjoys exploring this world, which is way most of his characters are on endless roadtrips.
Another actually good GOT clone is the second Apocalypse. Although this series make GoT look tame in comparison and trying to explain the plot makes you either sound scizophrenic or requires the audience to have read the Silmarillion and Dune so they understand your vocabulary.
I was screaming at the screen when you talked about The Last Kingdom. The Last Kingdom was based on its own book series released before ASOIAF, and actual history, and Martin credited Bernard Cornwell as his inspiration. The author even rejected the comparison between TLK and GOT.
Most of the comparisons you make don't even make sense.
1. "Only side characters die". Yeah, not shit, it only stars one protagonist, not an ensemble cast of protagonists like GOT. It has a completely different structure from ASOIAF. This is like complaining why Mando lives in The Mandalorian or why Guts lives in Berserk.
2. "Why did they kill off Uthred's lover at the end of the first season? Must be shock value. Dunno, haven't seen Season 2." LMAO.
3. There are like two sex scenes, maybe one nude in each season. Watch Vikings's nudity and compare it to The Last Kingdom. This is as tame as it can get with this premise.
5. None of the examples you brought up was unambiguously evil. Mildreth (the first wife) tells Uhtred he has an evil inside of him that needs to be exorcised and is actually gleeful that he was humiliated by being made to grovel in public (crawl on his knees), which ripped at Uhtred's core. Mildreth was becoming more "pious" by the day (as evidenced by Hild) and the pagan Uhtred was becoming more unacceptable to her and she let him know it. Mildredth was entirely unsupportive of Uhtred so I don't think he was feeling the love.
Regarding the raids, Alfred essentially stitched Uhtred up by not telling him the wife chosen for him owed a large ongoing debt to the church, which Uhtred inevitably discovered he was obliged to take on. He was desperate to get coins and needed a way to get them fast. Not to say his raiding was just but I can understand Uhtred's anger and impetuousness kicking in at the injustice. Also, Uthred's raiding has a direct consequence in the very same episode.
7. The whole show is about Uthred struggling to figure out where he stands in the changing tides of history. He is being ripped apart from inside because he is half Anglo-saxon and half Dane, sometimes he acts like a Dane with Saxons and as a Saxon with Danes which drives the core conflicts and the themes.
Hell, you even described it as "Some Viking dude wants to defend the Saxons from the invaders". Yes, THAT'S THE STORY.
Also, even if your points are valid, none of them were due to the showrunners trying to chase GOT's success. They are from the books, the half of them released before GOT.
Agreed I liked this creator but no longer sure if I do. TLK is a great series and the nuance of the characters between Utrid and Alfred is better than literally every relationship in Game Of Thrones
BASED
People don't get that Uhtred is a hotheaded young man just trying to make it in a cutthroat world. He learned the hard way when his father was killed before him, he watched the Danes execute Northumbrian kings, and then his own uncle tried to kill him and later killed his new family. Why the fuck would he be a paragon of virtue? He has to LEARN to be a good man. It's called a character arc, James.
Game of Clones.
Sure, without GoT we wouldn't have Wheel of Time or The Witcher, but on the other hand, without GoT we wouldn't have The Shannara Chronicles. So, you know, grain of salt.
This is the smoothest brain video I've seen in a while
funny how a lot of this applies to the final season too
Your hate for the last kingdom is super unwarranted
black sails was good tho
How exactly is Young Griff, the man who is ahead of Daenerys in the line of succession, irrelevant?
It's also weird how so many of these shows have their female characters constantly suffer. Sure, women didn't have equal rights in the past, but they weren't constantly being abused/raped/murdered/married off to pedophiles either. Rapists also faced much harsher punishments than today; they'd often be castrated or executed or killed by the victim's family.
Fertility was paramount, because about half of all babies died before adulthood, so women's health was very important. Preteens and teens are much more likely to die during pregnancy, so most marriages happened when women were in their 20s. If they were married off young, they stayed in their parents' home until they were old enough to safely consummate. C-sections weren't a thing unless the woman was already dead; midwives and doctors would sometimes cut the baby into pieces if it wasn't coming out, because a healthy fertile wife was much more valuable than a baby who had a 50/50 chance of survival to adulthood.
I really don't see why they need to cram in all this rape and pedophilia. It's not accurate or comfortable to watch, so why include so much of it?
This review is not fair to Vikings.
Loved this video james!
Im weirdly addicted to your voice
Damn I can’t believe you slammed the last kingdom so hard I actually love that show 😅 also Uhtred was a horrible person in season one that was part of his development that he actually calms down in later seasons so that’s a bit of a hollow criticism.
I can't discuss it or recommend it after season 8.
It was my favorite show for years but I doubt I'll ever watch it again.
Absolutely hated whenever Uhtred would cartwheel over a shield wall and win the battle with his massive dong, like, we get it, he's the biggest, sexiest, badass christendom, but he doesn't need to dragon shout all the bad guys away every few seconds for me to remember.
I wouldn't even say I hated the show, I actually enjoyed a lot of it, but it definitely wasn't because I thought the main guy was cool and interesting.
Really enjoyed this video.