Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Life is turning out rather for the worse; I really do not want to make it until late spring of 2026, but the odds of me achieving that are quite high. I am so happy – no, really. Real life sucks; I swear an oath upon it. Next?
Well, ‘Knight’ had its’ S1 finale last night, so we
are going to talk about it, but in a roundabout way, I suppose. First stop –
the A.I. It is not going to take away jobs from humans because humans make it,
and does only what humans programmed/designed it to do – make pictures, or
stories, or etc. There is a story about how people had A.I. make Brad Pitt
fight Tom Cruise, and now Hollywood is huffy – but because the people in
question are Chinese… yeah, Hollywood will deflate even more rapidly than how it
inflated.
As I wrote before, A.I. has its’ flaws – you often
need to be precise with your instructions to it to get exactly what you want,
(and sometimes, not even then). Otherwise, you are liable to get something else
entirely – it might be bad, it might be good, but it will not be what you
wanted, and that is the point. You need to know what you want to get what you
want, for otherwise? You do not need to start the process, what you will get
will be something else entirely. Of course, you might have no problems in
working with the new result, (it’s called a compromise when you’re dealing with
other people rather than A.I.), but it doesn’t apply to everything, and, again,
when it comes to A.I., it’s either your job, you get paid, and so you don’t
really need to get emotionally invested in your A.I. works, or it’s not, and you
are emotionally invested, and-
Where were we? Ah yes, RPG. An RPG – especially the
3.5 D&D generation and the like – is not unlike an A.I. – you need to
design the characters, the obstacles, the setting, the lair, the traps, etc. You
need to be precise and accurate in your designs too, or else you will fail and your
‘tenure’ as a DM is over.
Again, an RPG is a luxury good – it needs to be
demanded and desired, or else it is over, done, as Pathfinder (2nd
edition) shows – this franchise is dying, however, slowly – people just aren’t
buying enough of its’ products to sustain it, so it cuts down on the released
product, but there’s even less of it for people to buy and to spend their money
on; Pathfinder’s income diminishes further… you get the gist. Where does it
leave the ‘Knight’?
As it was written before, ‘Knight’ is positioned
between the other HBO Westeros TV shows… and an RPG. When he was writing the
ASOIAF book cycle, Mr. Martin had one agenda… no, wait. In ASOIAF, the end game
is the return of the rightful dynasty, the Targaryeans, in the characters of
Jon and Dany. GoT did not do that, so it ended badly – though that was only one
of the reasons. However, GoT and ASOIAF are two different aspects of the same
franchise, and since then both HBO and Mr. Martin himself moved onto the Targaryeans
proper – ‘the House of the Dragon’.
…HoD is returning to the screens only in the summer
of 2026, so all is still I the air, but the point is that for Mr. Martin, the Targaryeans
are just ‘fire and blood’, and HBO does it’ best to do so with its’ TV shows. If
that is a good thing is debatable, but the point is that when ‘Knight’ didn’t have
any of the Targaryeans, (and Egg was undercover, cough), it was just an RPG –
Dunk went here, Dunk went there, Dunk succeeded on Diplomacy checks, Dunk
failed on Bluff checks, etc. It is not bad, but it is generic – and then Egg’s
adult relatives arrived, and the plot accelerated like a spurred-on horse;
suddenly there is death, and drama, and the Blackfyre rebellion – fun. Well,
fun for the fans of Mr. Martin, HBO, and Westeros at least – and ‘Knight’ does
not ask for more. Ser Dunk, who is still a hedge knight, or rather – a landless
knight; legally, he is a noble, sort of, but in reality? He is right there with
the proletariat; his status is not higher than that of Bronn (the one and only),
who is a man-at-arms instead, (technically). Still, Egg is now his official squire,
(I think), the other Targaryeans appear to like him, and Aerion (who right now is
not as bad as GoT’s Aeris was), is sent to Essos instead. Overall, it is not a
bad place where he is right now.
…Ok, right now he is between yet another Targaryen
HBO drama on one hand, and a generic fantasy RPG/TV show on the other. However,
hey, ‘Knight’ is not pretending to be more than that either. Its’ first season
made it an OK show at least – better than real life, which just sucks.
This is it for now. See you all soon.
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