Post your funny pictures here!!! part Deux

[Hydra009]

Me IRL! (pretend it's a different head speaking)

[Hydra009]

[Dark Lightning]

I don't want or need an explanation, but I will say that I don't know who that guy is, I've never seen more than a random blurb on TV (when my wife is watching) of Game of Thrones (which she doesn't even watch, it's just there on commercial breaks), and have seen snippets of the Lord of the Rings movies when my sons were watching. #fossil

[Hydra009]

I don't want or need an explanation, but I will say that I don't know who that guy is, I've never seen more than a random blurb on TV (when my wife is watching) of Game of Thrones (which she doesn't even watch, it's just there on commercial breaks), and have seen snippets of the Lord of the Rings movies when my sons were watching. #fossil

Oof.  That hurts.

The meme format is from the #3 comedy-film Borat, a wacky story of a Kazakhstan native's immigration to the United States, with ensuing cultural misunderstandings.  (He's only familiar with the US through Baywatch)  The film has a second layer of sharp criticism of the US through sarcastic praise and the audience going along with racist, misogynistic, or warmongering rhetoric.

Game of Thrones is basically the fantasy equivalent of the ineptly repainted Jesus painting.  I've never seen so much potential squandered so hard and so unapologetically.

And Lord of the Rings is a 3-film masterpiece whose source material pretty much single-handedly created the fantasy genre as we know it - dragons, magical artifacts, elves, dwarves, orcs/goblins, the epic struggle of good versus evil, etc.  Every last second of those movies is gold.  If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and check it out.  I have yet to meet a single person who saw it and didn't at least somewhat like it.

[Unbeliever]

Yeah, LOTR was wonderful! I wish they'd make a movie from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I enjoyed the hell out of reading that.

[GSOgymrat]

[Hydra009]

My go-to when someone brings up detox is to exclaim "Oh my god!  What happened to your liver?!" with concern.  When they give the expected response that their liver is just fine, then I'm free to declare that a functioning liver is the detox!

[Shiranu]

Given are proximity to the singularity, I wonder how exponentially more common those comics may become.

[Blackleaf]

Oof.  That hurts.

The meme format is from the #3 comedy-film Borat, a wacky story of a Kazakhstan native's immigration to the United States, with ensuing cultural misunderstandings.  (He's only familiar with the US through Baywatch)  The film has a second layer of sharp criticism of the US through sarcastic praise and the audience going along with racist, misogynistic, or warmongering rhetoric.

Game of Thrones is basically the fantasy equivalent of the ineptly repainted Jesus painting.  I've never seen so much potential squandered so hard and so unapologetically.

And Lord of the Rings is a 3-film masterpiece whose source material pretty much single-handedly created the fantasy genre as we know it - dragons, magical artifacts, elves, dwarves, orcs/goblins, the epic struggle of good versus evil, etc.  Every last second of those movies is gold.  If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and check it out.  I have yet to meet a single person who saw it and didn't at least somewhat like it.

George R. Martin also liked to consider his fantasy to be more realistic. LotR is good vs evil. GoT has no pure evil or good characters, but everyone is a shade of gray. LotR has happy endings, while resolutions in GoT may be quite disturbing or sad. The main cast in LotR pretty much have plot armor, while GoT may just kill main cast members unceremoniously, catching the audience off guard.

That is, until you get to the end. Then you've got a war of humans against unambiguously evil zombies, characters with plot armor able to survive against overwhelming odds, and a fairly happy ending, where the zombies are killed, the corrupt government is replaced with a new one, and a compromise is made that makes pretty much everyone happy. Except for all the unnamed background characters who died in an attempt to retain the show's shock factor.

[Hydra009]

George R. Martin also liked to consider his fantasy to be more realistic. LotR is good vs evil. GoT has no pure evil or good characters, but everyone is a shade of gray.

Not everyone.  There are plenty of pure evil characters (Cersei, Ramsay, Joffrey) and a couple of nearly purely good ones (Missande, Samwell)  but yeah, most people are more mixed and torn than is typical in the genre.

The main cast in LotR pretty much have plot armor, while GoT may just kill main cast members unceremoniously, catching the audience off guard.

That is, until you get to the end. Then you've got a war of humans against unambiguously evil zombies, characters with plot armor able to survive against overwhelming odds

Even before the end, you have a character take a massive stab wound and get dumped into a filthy canal and they're fine.  There are indeed quite a few characters who cannot die under any circumstances, betraying the core anyone-can-die premise.

and a fairly happy ending, where the zombies are killed, the corrupt government is replaced with a new one, and a compromise is made that makes pretty much everyone happy.

It's not so much that those things happened, but that they happened nearly effortlessly and basically overnight.  A massive existential problem comparable to global warming and a seemingly eternal cycle of corruption and violence solved just like that.  In a show where nothing happens effortlessly.

[GSOgymrat]

George R. Martin also liked to consider his fantasy to be more realistic.

If by realistic he mean everyone is corrupt and violent, everyone is either a victimizer or a victim, then okay.

[Hydra009]

If by realistic he mean everyone is corrupt and violent, everyone is either a victimizer or a victim, then okay.

To be fair, that's largely accurate to the state of affairs in European medieval history.  If any of us were to time travel to those times, we'd be shocked by how people of those times behave.

[Shiranu]

To be fair, that's largely accurate to the state of affairs in European medieval history.  If any of us were to time travel to those times, we'd be shocked by how people of those times behave.

It's shocking to me that Americans don't seem to realize... a lot of the "real" OG European-Americans (from the N.E. tip of Canada to Portuguese Brasil) came here to escape religious and political oppression; it wasn't until England and France began sending it's industry and military here that the violence actually really sparked off in the North. Latin America... it was pretty terrible from the start and just went down hill.

Imagine if where you lived the living conditions, the oppression, the violence... all of it was so bad, that you were willing to hop on a rotting wooden ship your group could pull up enough money for passage on... then travel for months at sea, with risk of starvation, disease, storm and God knows what all that will knock out likely the majority of your pack...

All based on the word of some guy from a foreign empire that said he discovered some decent land, and there are no European governments there.

I don't know, but for me... I rather not imagine living conditions so bad that would make that option the "nicer" of the two.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Some of the Puritans emigrated to North America because England wasn't repressive enough.

[GSOgymrat]

To be fair, that's largely accurate to the state of affairs in European medieval history.  If any of us were to time travel to those times, we'd be shocked by how people of those times behave.

Absolutely, yet Westeros and Middle Earth are imaginary places with supernatural creatures-- they represent the Middle Ages as much as Twilight represents twentieth-century Washington state, which at least is a real place. What they do reflect is the authors' minds, what they care about, what they have to say, and how good they are at writing and crafting compelling stories.