Exactly this. The simple fact that one poor decision can result in permanent consequences that reshape the entire narrative and having it all make sense was a luxury many of us took for granted.
Euron “Deus Ex” Greyjoy in season 8 is probably the most egregious example of how the show runners failed to live up to this concept in the later seasons. Failed to live up to…no, that’s not right. It’s more like they took a wet nasty shit all over this concept and made it abundantly clear that Martin had left the building and the show runners just couldn’t be bothered to give a damn about the quality.
The battle of Winterfell was a mix of the best of GoT with the worst. It was extremely disappointing for a show in which you always felt as if every character was in danger to go to the lengths it went to completely wrap their characters in the most ridiculous plot armor. Show all the main characters in the front line rallying the troops, show the entire front line getting fucking deleted by the undead, show all the main characters miraculously alive ten seconds later. Fucking Sam spent the last 45 minutes of the episode on the ground covered in zombies, perfectly fine at the end. It was the more blatant use of the “show character in danger just for them to be completely fine” trope done OVER AND OVER AND OVER the entire episode. Avoiding pitfalls like that was literally what made Game of Thrones stand out for a decade and it was thrown out the window for cheap thrills. It did look amazing though.
I think the timing of the departure of Ty Franck from GRRM’s employment (to become half of the duo that wrote “The Expanse.”) is interesting when compared with the GoT books’ publication history. I would never say that Franck wrote those books instead of Martin, but I do think his assistance helped make the early books the great pieces of fantasy deconstruction that they are.
‘James S.A. Corey’ writes Leviathan Wakes in 2011. A slew of books followed.
Also in 2011, “A Dance With Dragons” (ASOIAF Book 5) came out. We’re still waiting for number 6.
It was the stupidest punishment in the history of punishments due to the fact that they destroyed the reason for the Wall and Night’s Watch to exist in the first place. No more walkers…no more Wildlings…probably no more wildlife of significant size. Continuing the Night’s Watch was about the dumbest thing season 8 had to offer.
As far as the rest of the season goes it was obvious they were in a rush to finish things. Stuff like Varys betrayal, discovery and execution that before would have been a season long plot line was done over three scenes in a single episode. Frankly I think the last season does get too much hate compared to much more awful season 7 and both where the results of seeds planted long before. I doubt the conflict with the Tyrells, something that was set up and built on since early season 1 will end with “and then Cersei blows all of them the fuck up and everyone is fine with her staying in charge after that” in the books. Ditto the Dorne plot, or the sparrows or the brotherhood without banners or all the other wonderful stories they simply got tired of telling and threw away in the most idiotic of ways.
Re, Arya, I would have loved it if she took the face of one of the dead. Say, when she was getting chased through the library. Then, disguised as one of the dead, she sidles up to the Night’s King and shanks him. Shows her training being necessary for her to get to that point in space and time. Instead of that “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Mary Suuuuuuue!” leap we got instead.
The first couple of seasons were amazing television.
Another thin is that HBO failed to capitalize on the franchise. They should have had a follow-on series ready to start this year but instead I think the earliest we’ll see anything is in 2022.
Basically what BeagleJesus has been saying. The show was good so long as the no-talent hacks in charge were held to the books. Once the books ceased to be in play their natural stupidity and incompetence bloomed forth, giving us the most inane final season ever imagined.
Needless to say, I think the OP is quite, quite wrong in their evaluation of the show. The show-runners should have been flayed, their families sold into slavery to the Martians and their very names erased from History.
The Martinesque resolution to Arya’s story that I always favored was that a few episodes into the season where she returns to Westeros, we discover that the person we think is Arya is the waif wearing Arya’s face, and that Arya was killed by the waif in that fight in the darkness - as she should have been. The waif came back to Westeros posing as Arya to kill Arya’s enemies, as part of the internal logic of the death cult of the Faceless Men. (But obviously you couldn’t drag that reveal out too long, so Arya would have been out of the picture well before the final battle.)
That bit gets a pass from me because it was bold as fuck and it was the impetus for Tommen’s death. And I thought Tommen’s death was a pretty powerful scene all things considered.
With many long-running series, the last season is the last season because the show deteriorates. You’re muddling cause and effect in noting that the later parts often tend to get panned.
By the actions as seen on the screen, Arya was the correct winner of the battle. I’ve closely watched to see if the waif actually had fought in the dark previously and she had not, that I had seen. It was always a one-sided match with her unblindfolded versus the blindfolded Arya. So Arya was better at night fighting than she was. Now, one could consider it a shoehorned plot to have it work out that way in the first place, but once the setup is set up, the results of the fight are accurate in my opinion.
As others have said, my big issue was that the character motivations stopped making sense + too much deus ex machina. GoT was great because 1) it built up great, complex characters, and then 2) it let the characters themselves determine the plot. All of the “twists and turns” were simply GRRM setting up a situation, and then asking himself what the characters would actually do in that situation. It felt like he himself had no preconceived outcome. That’s why it felt raw, and real, and messy – it didn’t matter who you were rooting for or what you wanted to happen, what happened is just what was going to happen and you (the viewer) just had to accept it.
You can take pretty much any plot point in the 2nd half of S8 and rip it apart by showing how it doesn’t make sense in the show’s own context, but the most egregious is, of course, Bran becoming king. One of the central themes of the show was that power is messy, fleeting, and loyal to no one. The Westeros that we spent nearly a decade learning about would NOT roll over and accept a Stark with barely an army as king. This is not a continent ripe for a democratic uprising. There would have been 100 people vying for power in the vacuum that Jon Snow created and there would have been another decade of war over it.
I’m okay with Bran ending up as King, just not for the lame reason given: he has “the best story.” I mean, the guy has a superpower that allows him to see anything and everything and control beasts. Such a great story that he spent a full season off camera and then, whenever something interesting was happening in Season 8, he just worged out after uttering some cryptic words, but then never actually did anything or provided any insight. Almost as if the shows writers didn’t know how to write for him, so they just tried to play him up as too far beyond caring to do anything.