The following essay contains spoilers for the 'Game of Thrones' TV show and the 'A Song of Ice and Fire' series of novels - continue reading at your own peril!
Agree with basically all of this. The muddled and boring slog of the last few seasons, culminating in a largely forgettable finale -- where the major protagonists' choices are not consistent with their character development, so at best people remember it seeming random -- makes the whole show unmemorable. A few people will remember being upset about Daenerys going crazy, but the trouble wasn't that she became another Mad Targaryen, it's that they barely bothered to telegraph at all that that might be happening. There was no tension building, just a bunch of time-killing episodes followed by a genocide out of nowhere. People can point to a handful of things in the plot and dialogue that suggest she's a bit power hungry, but she's generally so passive up to that point that it doesn't come through like a person slowly losing her mind or become psychotically vengeful.
The only part I'd disagree with is that the show needed more time -- they had tons of time the last couple of seasons, they just wasted all of it. I didn't read past book 4 or 5, so I don't remember the Martell storyline, but you put your finger on it with "In the show they’re replaced with nothing." There's *so much nothing* in the later seasons -- endless scenes of walking to nowhere, pouring wine, staring pensively out windows, sitting around a table, drinking again, more walking, more wine pouring, etc. It's like everyone in the show was filmed waiting three years in real time for GRRM to finish his book.
Then we go from 0 to 60 in two episodes to rush through the "finale": a series of anti-climaxes with each major scene deescalating the stakes. First, we defeat the existential threat: the zombie king/ice-dragon/extinction-level climate disaster. Then we meander down the coast for the far less important battle for King's Landing, where it's obvious that Daeny's side is overwhelmingly more powerful, so there's no tension about the outcome, and the show's general message is "everyone is awful and it doesn't matter who rules," so there's no stakes. The protagonist with the least personal interest in Cersei kills her unknowingly and indirectly. Then we wrap up the (imo) pretty rushed and low-chemistry romance between Jon and Daeny with a shiv in a pile of rubble, for reasons that are pretty dubious. (Is it so clear to Jon, given everything he's seen in his life, that she is so much more evil than the next monarch, or the anarchic civil war that is likely to restart when she dies?) Then instead of just ending the show with some dignity where the dragon fries Jon, or we just fade to black, we have a tedious committee of minor characters we neglected for years to elect a new king (Bran being only person in the entire show we still don't hate, but who has turned into some kind of remote, inhuman, Dr. Manhattan-type character). A mess that is easily forgotten, despite its "shocking" twists, because nothing makes any sense.
The Martell storyline is one of the best in the books and it's absence is essentially what ruined the whole shebang. When I say "more time" what I mean is more time to develop that whole other storyline. Characters going against everything we knew about them was another big problem.
Agree with basically all of this. The muddled and boring slog of the last few seasons, culminating in a largely forgettable finale -- where the major protagonists' choices are not consistent with their character development, so at best people remember it seeming random -- makes the whole show unmemorable. A few people will remember being upset about Daenerys going crazy, but the trouble wasn't that she became another Mad Targaryen, it's that they barely bothered to telegraph at all that that might be happening. There was no tension building, just a bunch of time-killing episodes followed by a genocide out of nowhere. People can point to a handful of things in the plot and dialogue that suggest she's a bit power hungry, but she's generally so passive up to that point that it doesn't come through like a person slowly losing her mind or become psychotically vengeful.
The only part I'd disagree with is that the show needed more time -- they had tons of time the last couple of seasons, they just wasted all of it. I didn't read past book 4 or 5, so I don't remember the Martell storyline, but you put your finger on it with "In the show they’re replaced with nothing." There's *so much nothing* in the later seasons -- endless scenes of walking to nowhere, pouring wine, staring pensively out windows, sitting around a table, drinking again, more walking, more wine pouring, etc. It's like everyone in the show was filmed waiting three years in real time for GRRM to finish his book.
Then we go from 0 to 60 in two episodes to rush through the "finale": a series of anti-climaxes with each major scene deescalating the stakes. First, we defeat the existential threat: the zombie king/ice-dragon/extinction-level climate disaster. Then we meander down the coast for the far less important battle for King's Landing, where it's obvious that Daeny's side is overwhelmingly more powerful, so there's no tension about the outcome, and the show's general message is "everyone is awful and it doesn't matter who rules," so there's no stakes. The protagonist with the least personal interest in Cersei kills her unknowingly and indirectly. Then we wrap up the (imo) pretty rushed and low-chemistry romance between Jon and Daeny with a shiv in a pile of rubble, for reasons that are pretty dubious. (Is it so clear to Jon, given everything he's seen in his life, that she is so much more evil than the next monarch, or the anarchic civil war that is likely to restart when she dies?) Then instead of just ending the show with some dignity where the dragon fries Jon, or we just fade to black, we have a tedious committee of minor characters we neglected for years to elect a new king (Bran being only person in the entire show we still don't hate, but who has turned into some kind of remote, inhuman, Dr. Manhattan-type character). A mess that is easily forgotten, despite its "shocking" twists, because nothing makes any sense.
The Martell storyline is one of the best in the books and it's absence is essentially what ruined the whole shebang. When I say "more time" what I mean is more time to develop that whole other storyline. Characters going against everything we knew about them was another big problem.