[jammies]

I haven't said much as I didn't catch up to the current episode 'till last night. I'm disappointed. It could have been so much better.

The problem is incoherence and a lack of plausibility. "Plausibility in a fantasy setting? LOL!" Yeah, well, good writing does not violate its own previously established rules, nor does it create new rules at whim outside a coherent structure that supports those new rules. Even in a fantasy, the world, the events, and the characters need to relate in plausible ways as informed by the rules of that fantasy: they might not conform to *this* reality, but they should conform to *a* reality.

This incoherence has happened much more frequently in the last two/three seasons, but the most glaring example is the already-exhaustively discussed ballista vs dragon debacle. That simply could not happen the way it was portrayed. When it happened anyway, onscreen, it jarringly took me out of the story with its objectively bad writing, as bringing down a dragon could have been done any number of other ways that would coherently fit into the world and story, and still served the same narrative purpose.

Such jarring moments are rife now. I won't bother enumerating them, as they have been discussed over and over, but they are there, often, and every time one happens and I notice, it takes me further out of the story. Eventually I am completely out of it and wondering why I am even watching when I am constantly being annoyed instead of invested.

Finally, this isn't needless nitpicking, this is recognizing stupid when you see it. That is a valuable life skill anyone would do well to cultivate.