What would a specific example be? Most of the events that happen have roots in actual human history. Red Wedding, flaying people, etc are things that have actually happened.
I am sad to say that one in fact sees this dissonance all the time. Modern day soldiers will typically have a strong devotion to their country and (at least claim to) have a strong devotion to the values of that country. Yet overseas, they will in depressingly large number commit attrocities that violate any law or value of the civilization they come from. And I am not just talking about the US here. The same holds for my own country. In the 50’s, the Dutch committed some horrible crimes of war in Indonesia. I am not a sociologist, so I am not the person to reflect on why this is so commonplace, but the fact of the matter is that it is commonplace. A blind devotion to a country, culture or leader is in fact very often combined with sociopathic behaviour. So often that one might in fact argue that blind devotion is in fact part of that sociopathic behaviour. But again, as is obvious from my nickname, I am not a sociologist, so what do I know grin.
EDIT.
removed off-topic post so as not to get this thread even more off-topic
now back to talking about the VFX.
It amazing how far along this has come, those dragons look just about as good as the Nazgul’s mounts in the first Lord of the Rings movies.
Hmm, for my taste this thread is too much focussed on the story/characters…
(which are great by teh way and the show is of course a success because of its depth and adult themes…) but on a site like this the breakdowns themselves are the fascinating part…
the above shots are interesting… I wonder if tehy had stand ins for the fights and then made a clean plate (not shown in teh above breakdown) or just did a lot of rehearsing and had the actors fight nothing for the final shot… in most film breakdowns for stuff like this they would have the standins and take the hit on digitally removing them…
also the skeletons are great and fluid… i wonder if they used motion capture and if so how they got good sync with the real actors? or if they just had animators do the work so they could get good sync? (or a combination of teh two)
amazing the amount and quality of shots on a tv show, although an expensive one!
also great to see the shift of actors that used to do theatre and vanity projects to mainstream tv, certainly good for viewers!
offtopic and perhaps hypocritical of me given my opening line) there’s a certain cycnical formula to HBO… lots of swearing, graphic violence and regular sex scenes to excite the dads in the audience!) personally i think it’s great that we get tv for adults that isn’t as censored as it used to be and can play to what used to be the sole realm of film…
I don’t watch GoT but the visual effects are superb from what I’ve seen in the VFX reels and making-of’s.
I’d actually like to talk physics with you some day :yes:
I have some alternate views on the universe that in the past have made people yell at me with off topic pyramid quoting. Regardless, to clarify… to say a thing and not do a thing when no one is watching is one type of behavior. To say a thing, believe that you are indeed doing that thing when in reality you are still not is a second type of behavior. These are the phenomena that you are referring to when you talk about the atrocious behavior of people in wartime. I was talking about yet a third kind of behavior that does not actually exist in the human condition. It can only seem real through the venue of stylized story telling where you can mix and match traits of human kind and create a facsimile of the real thing. The end result is not actually realistic even though the audience may be fooled into thinking so through the magic of storyline immersion.
But don’t tell a die hard fan that… or they two will tend to yell at you with off topic pyramid quoting 
As for the VFX side of the show, the show itself is arguably as visual as the big budget movies like Gladiator in 2000. VFX has come incredibly far when we can see this caliber of graphics in a television series. When I was a kid I watched every sci-fi show and old sword and sandle series that came out. The graphics of Farscape and Hercules the legendary journeys were laughable in comparison. Farscape in particular had a very big budget for it’s time being that it was one of the flagship shows launching the Sci-Fi channel. It literally looks like Blender Internal.
Every now and then I think about how advanced Blender would seem to the VFX industry in the year 2000. I marvel that I now have access to software on my PC that is leaps and bounds beyond what the VFX industry had access to when I was in highschool building computers with 700mhz processors. And it’s free… :eek:
What a time we live in.
Indeed, the vfx shots for many shows are beautiful nowadays compared to big budget shows in the past. Farscape indeed had a big budget, but don’t forget that Farscape had a lot of practical effects and puppeteering, which are quite expensive as well! I still miss Farscape btw…
There are however also vfx shots nowadays that are painfull to watch. For instance, in episode 8 of season 1 of the Blacklist, there is a shot of a plane exploding which is embarrassingly bad.
But back to the vfx of GoT. I am not sure whether I said this already, but there used to be a great presentation online that two guys from Pixomondo gave at FMX 2012. I can’t find a link to it anymore. Does anyone know where to find a link. It was a truly great presentation. They explain how they make the shadow creature, the dragon and over 300 environments for season 2. They talk a lot about how to create these vfx shots with the short timelines in the production of a television show.