Idk what streamer you use, but for me I’d just set Apple TV to SDR and turn off match content so it should source the SDR file. I do think, like all things, it probably looks best on an OLED. But the 900h is a damn good tv, and things look great on it. Very much an issue on the shows end. My hope is OLED technology will be cheaper in a few years, I don’t think I’ll be upgrading until it does or if my tv outright breaks. .

I hadn’t considered that! HDR is really misunderstood, and so many people abuse it in an attempt to capture that low contrast Fincher look. It gets especially brutalized in streaming. I actually have the exact same tv, too! Haha. 85”, pitch black room, fine tuned settings and it looked so bad.

Especially if I watched something good before hand, there were a few times where I went from a Lost rewatch to this and it was like I had downgraded my TV.

I am surprised you didn’t see many comments. Especially after episode 7 there was a big discussion. I actually think they tweaked later episodes, as they had more color and contrast than previous ones.

I’m so glad to hear this because it speaks to a lot of the frustrations I’ve had with the show that I always get downvoted for expressing.

I think the finale actually works on an emotional level more than most other moments in the show because we’ve seen the rivalry between the cousins occur many times now. The tension has been built, so when he walks into the court we feel it immediately not just because of “oh they’re both here trying to convince this king” but “oh they have literally been at each others throats since they were kids, and there is a personal rivalry between them”

> Aside form “less war hungry than Daemon” I can’t really think of any personality characteristics I’d ascribe to her in the finale. Like I would shed some context for some reason to care about any of these people.

1000x this! So many of the characters are only understood through their actions as they relate to the plot. But we need to see them in moments that have nothing to do with it.

When you watch a show like Andor, you get so many details of characters that add emotional context to their actions. There’s a villain who appears in only one episode, but we get a scene of him preparing for a ceremony with his wife and kid. His clothes don’t quite fit him anymore because he’s gotten fat, he’s dismissive of his wife, and hard on his son. It’s nothing to do with the overall story, but his presence throughout the rest of the episode is changed dramatically because we see underneath the surface just a bit. There is SO little of that in HOD.

Ya I think this is very true. When I said it was Pro-Rhaenrya, I meant that they started the show with her, and ended it with us hanging on to her emotional perspective. But that doesn’t mean they do a good job of making it her show, like you said the engagement of character stuff is only plot level. And since she’s the main character, it means everyone else is even more surface level.

I never knew Alicent was in love with Criston until reading an episode with the actress. The show never talks about it, but it’s a huge part of why the actress says Alicent feels so upset about Criston sleeping with Rhaenrya. Similarly, the actress said that Alicent is insecure because she knows Rhaenyra is the better mother, but that’s also never really showcased since we rarely see them as mothers unless it’s important for the plot.

Ya the season finale really had me wondering about a lot of the choices. It is so clearly a pro-Rhaenyra show, which is fine, but that really makes me wonder why didn’t spend more time seeing a lot of these events from her perspective and getting more down time with her, her father, the Strong who she had an affair with, and her sons. If it’s ultimately a show about motherhood, which I think it is, they really should’ve trimmed things down and worried about building out other characters later, or cutting down ones who weren’t ultimately that relevant.

I’ve quoted you directly. I’m not putting words in your mouth.

> You inferred (incorrectly), I didn’t imply any such thing.

You can say this, it doesn’t make it true. Your response to someone saying it’s a 10 hour act 1 with the promise of the good stuff coming later was to point to the source material rather than defending the season on its own terms. The implication there is that adherence to the source material structure precludes the show from criticism about it being all set up.

> There are plenty of people who haven’t read the book and still enjoy the show despite having no idea what percentage of the story has been told.

Well, clearly the other commenter doesn’t. Anecdata is useless. It’s a popular show, I’m not denying that. But that doesn’t make the criticism invalid.

> You don’t need to know that we’re in act 1 to appreciate the story.

Of course that’s the ideal. But that’s not necessarily the experience of everyone. I’m not going to bat for the other commenter anymore, but your defense that the show is following the source material has nothing to do with their complaint that it was all buildup. Whether other people who are unfamiliar with it enjoyed it is also irrelevant.

Nah, the season as a whole had a lot of intangible sludge and that episode was the worst of it but certainly not the full extent. Many scenes were low contrast, smudgy, and dark. Definitely some good looking moments, but my point is that it’s not the high level of prestige the other viewer was saying it was. Other shows look much, much better.

It was episode 7

It definitely depends on setup to the extent of how bad it is, I have a very high end setup and could see everything. But it still looked bad and was poorly done in comparison to other nighttime sequences in other shows and movies.

> Like, you know it’s based on a book, right? Meaning anyone who’s read it can easily see how few chapters were used to make season 1. It is very much act 1.

The implication of this is that if you’re familiar with the source material and know the story then it works because it’s only adapted a small part. That’s irrelevant to the other users complaint that it was all setup without a satisfying enough narrative in its own right.

You shouldn’t have to be familiar with the source material to appreciate the show, and the show shouldn’t adhere to the structure of the book. Different mediums require different plotting. I think it’s fair to say that they could’ve made this season a stronger story in its own right, rather than as one big prologue.

> I don’t care that much about anyone

So much of the show is super hurried and you rarely get time to just be with characters and see their relationships develop. The last episode was scrambling to develop Rhaenrya’s relationship with her son, and it made it extra obvious that he was gonna die because the show is so plot focused. They should’ve either ironed out a better prologue and just jumped into the dance of the dragons, or had a longer season/bigger buildup.

Sorry, I just don’t get how you can praise the cinematography as “bespoke” when it was so dark and inconsistent that there was a huge backlash after one episode that people literally couldn’t see what was happening. They have a lot of room to improve on that front

> If you can show me in the source material somewhere that states that humans and elves can survive a pyroclastic flow that burns between 200-700c I’ll take back my statement.

It’s fucking fantasy dude. People do and survive the impossible all the time in the source material. Tolkien was not concerned about scientific accuracy of the heatwaves of a volcano, and neither should you be in a show that opens with elves in thin armor marching in a snow storm in sub-freezing temperatures.

> And if you think the Tolkien estate is upset that LOTR made 3 billion dollars you are sadly mistaken.

Well, I don’t think, and I never said it. What I did say was they didn’t like the interpretation. Christopher Tolkien very publicly said that Jackson’s movies made the stories into big action films and that he did not care for them. Go look it up.

> Also.. Seriously.. A leaf woke up the Balrog? Really? Not hundreds of dwarves mining an epic kazad dun… A fucking leaf?

I don’t know why everyone reads things so literally. It’s exactly like the scene at the end of An Unexpected Journey with the bird tapping on the mountain and Smaug waking up. Even if you are set on reading it as “the leaf woke up the balrog” It’s deep beneath the mountain in a sealed lair, that would not be hearing the work of the dwarves above. This is presumably the first thing that’s entered the lair and it immediately senses it.

> The Tolkien family is OK with that?

Yup!

I LOVE that the way you scrutinize the source material accuracy is through the most pea-brained, cinema-sins, wookiepedia nerd fixation on physics and believability. Not the spirit of the work, not the prose of the writing, not anything that a person should take away from a book. Tolkien’s writing is not fixated on inner world rules and physics. We must’ve read totally different books if that’s what you’re worried about in the adaptation.

I don’t think most of the shows critics have. If you genuinely cared about source material adherence the first and foremost issue would be everyone isn’t breaking out into song every few minutes. Although, even on that front, the show has done a decent job. They actually gave the orcs a song!

> rape the source material

Y’all are really still saying this, huh?

By the way, Tolkien’s family hated Jackson’s movies and said they failed the source material. The show, on the other hand, had their direct involvement and got their blessing.

If y’all don’t like the show that’s fine. But quit hiding the bullshit source material adherence, especially when praising Jackson’s films which changed tons of shit.