How Losing Travel Time Killed Character Arcs [Game of Thrones Review]
And what is my heart’s desire?
Vengeance. Justice. Fire and Blood.
Hey guys!
So I’ve made a few videos in the past talking
about season 8 of Game of Thrones. But truth
be told issues do start even earlier than
that. And I want to talk about one issue that
happened over and over again, especially
in the later seasons of Game of Thrones.
And that is: fast travel. Here we go!
(music)
Guys you like the shirt? It’s uh…
it’s appropriate for this episode.
Yep, just like fantasy games
like Skyrim and the Witcher,
it appears that in the world of Game of
Thrones, once you’ve already been to a location
you can just fast travel there and
you know save yourself a lot of time.
This trend in the show first
became really apparent at the end
of season six of Game of Thrones.
In the episode Winds of Winter,
Varys seems to go within the span of one episode
all the way from Mereen to Sunspear and back.
And while it is cool to see him posing with
the rest of the guys as Daenerys plans to
invade Westeros, it really begs the question
of how the heck is he moving this fast.
Now before I
it, I want to do a quick shout
out to everyone who subscribed and
commented and viewed all the videos.
Guys it feels really good to have you here thanks
for all your support and yeah… if you haven’t
joined in yet um… feel free to jump in uh…
we’d love to have you as long as you’re cool.
Let’s take a quick segue into talking about how
big the world of Game of Thrones actually is.
So this is a map of Westeros and Essos,
the two continents in Game of Thrones.
And they are big. Big, big, big, big, big. And we
don’t know fully what the scale of this map is,
but we do know one thing and that’s that
canonically the Wall is 300 miles long.
So using the wall as a yardstick – or in this
case a league stick – we can actually measure the
distance between various locations in the world
of Game of Thrones. And this puts the distance
between Mereen and Sunspear to be over 2400 miles.
So just to think about how far apart that, its
that is basically the distance between New York
and Los Angeles. Or for you Europeans out there,
that’s basically the distance between
Lisbon, Portugal and Moscow, Russia.
And they’re not traveling with modern
day technology. They are using old
old medieval technology. In modern times, the
fastest wind wind-powered boat that exists today
is charted at going at over 65 knots. But they’re
not using super high-speed competitive sailboats,
they’re using old-timey frigates. And these
frigates will be capped at around 15 knots,
which would put the travel time that Varys
would have to do as over five days assuming
that he had the right winds blowing him along.
Each way. At his back. In both directions!
I mean not likely right but I mean this is okay,
because despite the fact that
these scenes were cut together
we don’t really have proof that these are meant
to happen days apart and for all we know these
scenes could have happened any amount of time
in between them and so maybe this is all fine.
Eastwatch.
Guys, I could talk about this episode by itself
for like 45 minutes. Literally nothing makes
sense in this episode. I mean when they take out
the first White Walker, why does only one white
survive? Why did the Night King just not end
everything in one step by just killing Drogon,
instead of showing off for your friends and aiming
for Viserion? And for the love of god, what even
is this plan? Why do they think sending the
dead down to King’s Landing is going to get any
support? Does no one here remember that they sent
a dead hand down to King’s Landing in season one?
But, but that’s not the point of this
video. We’re not going to talk about that.
We’re going to put that aside.
In the episode Eastwatch, the fellowship of main
characters get stranded in the north above the
wall. And they need to send a message down to
Daenerys Targaryen in order to get her to fly
back up with her dragons and bail them out that
means that Gendry is gonna have to run all the
way back down to the wall to send a raven
to fly all the way to Dragonstone and then
Daenerys is going to have to hop on her dragons
fly back up to where they are and pick them up.
And this is absolutely insane.
Just the raven part in and of itself is god dang
impossible. The distance between Eastwatch
and Dragonstone is more than 1800 miles
comparatively the fastest speed recorded for
a raven is under 50 miles per hour. This means
the fastest raven in the world, going in
a straight line between these two points,
would take over 36 hours to make this flight. And
all of our main characters north of the Wall are
just going to get massacred, because there’s
literally no hope for help to come in time.
And this isn’t even factoring in the running time
– the amount of time Gendry would need to take
to get down to the wall, or that Daenerys would
need to take in order to fly her dragons back up.
It makes literally no sense!
I’m okay. I’m calm, I’m calm, I’m calm,
I’m calm. I’m not mad, I’m not mad.
But where do I get off? I mean Game of Thrones is
a fantasy world. I mean there are flying dragons,
people being brought back from the dead, there’s
witches, there’s magic there are zombies. I mean
these could be magic teleporting ravens; the
dragons could actually be supersonic jets; and the
Night King might have some deep entrenched magic
that forces him to aim at the furthest target.
Why am I trying to bring
math and physics into this?
And the reason is simply because it actually
does matter. See, we get down to season 8 of
Game of Thrones and suddenly there’s a big
change in the way the world progresses.
Events that should take place weeks or months
apart are happening almost simultaneously.
In one episode, our characters are up in
the north in the Battle of Winterfell,
and in the very next episode they’re already
back down in Dragonstone. And this cuts out
so many moments that we needed to see in
order for the conclusion to make any sense.
One of the scenes that really bothers me
about the end of Game of Thrones is Arya
and the Hound talking in the middle
of the Red Keep. And in this moment
the Hound convinces Arya to
give up her plight on revenge.
But guys, they’ve been riding on horseback all
the way down the King’s Road from the North.
This is a multi-week long journey, have they
not talked about anything in this entire time?
They literally would have rode past
the Twins. The hound would have had
questions about what the hell happened to all
of the Freys. And this doesn’t even come up?
Well, let’s talk about other stories
that we completely missed out on because
fast travel was so god damn apparent in
this final season. Let’s talk about how
Sansa managed to become well respected
in the North, finally getting the title
as queen because of how smart and good she
was as a ruler that we really never saw.
Let’s talk about how Brienne dealt with
having succeeded in her mission to protect
the two daughters of Catelyn Stark and the
new discovery that Gendry is now the Lord of
Storm’s End – the kingdom to which Brienne now
belongs to as Tarth is a part of the Stormlands.
Let’s talk about what Bran told Tyrion. A
story that must have been really interesting
and compelled all the seven kingdoms to learn
about the importance of the three-eyed raven.
Hell it must have been a good
story, after all it seems to be
a story that Tyrion thought was so
important it got him nominated to be king.
And who has a better story than Bran the Broken?
And there’s Daenerys, where we spent no time
talking about how she felt about the death of
the Viserion, the death of Ser Jorah Mormont, the
death of Rhaegal and then the death of Missandei.
The slow reveal of how the Seven
Kingdoms dealt with the discovery
that Aegon Targaryen was still alive. Flushing
out these plot lines and giving them more time
to breathe would allow us to make more sense of
Daenerys eventual turn on the people of Westeros,
deciding that there was no love for her
there and deciding to destroy King’s Landing.
Instead, because of the fast travel that these
characters were doing over and over again
these changes, these character arcs, came
out of nowhere leaving us with a sense of
“what is going on” and “where did this come from”.
It’s not like the point of Game of Thrones
was to shock and surprise us, right?
I said well what what do I do with that what do
I do with that yeah these people have guessed the
secret that I’m gonna reveal in book six. People
have already guessed that here and book two is
just out… you really have two choices there:
you can ignore it and proceed with your plan
despite the fact that some
people know where you’re going,
or you can get all panicky and say “oh my god
they’ve figured it out, I can’t let that be I’ll
have to change it, I’ll have to go in a different
direction” and I think some writers do that.
It almost felt like the writers had somewhere else
to be, and were just trying to get out of there. I
think it stands to say that if there had just been
more breathing time in the last couple seasons,
season seven and season eight of Game of Thrones,
if they threw more episodes in – where really
not much had to happen just characters talking,
interacting, really dwelling on moments past to
give those moments time to breathe – we would
have felt that the ending that Game of Thrones
provided would have been earned and deserved,
instead of the way we all feel about it now.
But anyways guys, that’s just what
I think. Let me know what you guys
think in the comments down below and
I’ll see you in the next episode.
Bye!
