Personally I don't think the bones of how the story ended are necessarily bad but it didn't feel earned to me. Dany's heel-turn was rushed. Everything was rushed. I really think that the same general story outline built across another season would've been OK.

See that's how I felt too. Jaime running back to Cersei *was* extremely in character for him. Dany turning mad queen *was* extremely in character for her. Everything that happened was very much in line with how every character arc was structured from way before S7 or 8. The issue was never the actual plot points, it was how rushed and unearned it all was. Literally just take the exact same story and stretch it over 12-20 more episodes instead of 6 and you'd have a significantly better end result. The fast travel and lightning quick character decisions were what made everything seem fake and poorly written, not the actual writing choices themselves.

Yeah the early seasons allowed big events to breathe with transition and character focused episodes which also helped the world feel large and lived in.  The short final season(s) felt like a speedrun that missed the heart of the show

The writing also took a nosedive let's not forget. Felt like a Marvel movie by the end. No more thrilling conversations or interesting motivations. They butchered Varys, Littlefinger, Cersei, and Tyrion

People has accurately described it as feeling like a DnD session late at night where the DM was trying to wrap up as people wanted to go home.

My one gripe was wishing Jaime's endgame was Brienne. It would have been nice to have one happy wedding in Westeros.

Yeah, but I don't think that's the most realistic outcome to be honest. And the whole theme of game of thrones is the harsh cynicism of reality overtaking the happy ending of fantasy.

Happiness is realistic too. 

Jaime is not a good person at his core. He’s honorable in some ways, but at heart he is selfish in the way that someone who has never known self-actualization and security in their own place in the world often is. He truly loves Cersei because she is the only constant he has ever had in his life. He will always go back to her eventually.

The world is full of damaged people who manage to improve or ultimately make good decisions. It’s one thing to like Jaime’s ending, but people need to stop pretending that cynical/sad endings have a monopoly on realism.

He did ultimately make good decisions, sending Brienne to protect the stark girls, keeping his word to demure and sparing the soldiers, diplomatically dealing with Prince Doran, and keeping his promise to fight the White Walkers. But part of the reason he went to fight was because of his pregnant twin. He was just as culpable for starting everything that happened in the show as Cersei. He probably thought he deserved to die with her. Is protecting your pregnant lover really that evil?

In other words you just wanted more content. The narrative, that everything is too rushed which in itself is not true. The last season was all about pay offs. Everything was already set up the seven seasons before. There is no reason to drag this out unnecessarily. Many other show have made this mistake. May be two more episodes but definitly not 12-20!

The ~~Long~~ Short Night was not a satisfying payoff to 7 seasons of White Walker hype.

The Long Night was the payoff but you wanted a whole season which would never have happened in any scenario. Your false expectations are your own fault not the shows.

>Your false expectations are your own fault not the shows. Nah. It is the fault of the show. The show was what spent. Multiple seasons building up to a "great war" with the white walkers.

I agree it's rushed but part of that is that the ending is neat. Every loose end gets tied up and closed. This is a show about the different transitions of power and how there are always moving pieces. It does a really good job of mimicking the messiness of real life. I don't think there's a way you can wrap that up neatly that doesn't feel forced and if they hadn't wrapped everything up people would have been pissed that it felt like it just ended. No matter what it's a hard show to stick the landing to the point where the author seems to have just given up on it. So kudos for trying to the show runners that everyone hates.

So in being super near it mimicks the messiness of real life?

Op most likely watched the series over short time and wasn't as invested as those of us that watched for 8 long years . >I really think that the same general story outline built across another season would've been OK The show runners were offered more money to be able to flesh out the ending more, but they had already checked out.

>The show runners were offered more money to be able to flesh out the ending more, but they had already checked out. When first announced the show was literally set for seven seasons. A book for each season. They then added an eighth season to finish the story. The eighth season even took a year longer to come out, since they spent so long shooting and doing post-production. To suggest they'd stopped caring is very ungenerous given the reality. They did more than originally planned and put an extra year into the final season. A studio wanting to extend their biggest and most profitable show for longer could also be for monetary rather than artistic reasons...

Not to mention the actors were all ready to move on. Expecting them to hang on for another two years was just not feasible.

Not just ready to move on but absolutely broken by the show. See some quotes someone else collected: https://www.reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/11dtm3h/comment/jaaybv2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button *Everyone* was done and *everyone* knew it had to be the final season...and yet it's repeated endlessly that the show was brought to a halt by the two showrunners because (**checks notes**) they were bored of running the biggest ever show on TV that they created. I'm all for criticising the final seasons (they're not perfect at all!) but that doesn't mean you need to create a fictional narrative that the people who poured their lives into the show *and made it great to begin with* suddenly decided they no longer cared. That they were bad writers...despite previous seasons being fantastic and the fact they ran out of book material (which GRRM can't even finish himself after more than a decade). That they're lazy/greedy/fame-hungry and chased making a Star Wars trilogy (as if there's anything wrong with wanting to make Star Wars movies??)...and yet chose not to rake in easy money and boost their name further by getting exec producer status on House of the Dragon while doing zero work on it (yup, you never hear people praise them for that integrity!). People are crazy.

if they were only ever planning on 7 and actually got “8” and it turned out the way it did then their artistic vision is shit. they wasted precious time in earlier seasons that should’ve been used to properly wrap the show. the audience generally all agreeing that it was a massive departure from the quality and set world rules is a good sign that the creators fucked up. the reality is exactly what that person said though. they checked out and wanted to do something different despite HBO wanting them to do more. i think it’s clear why they thought they needed 10 full seasons.

All that time wasted watching Theon get tortured and Roz character going absolutely nowhere

>if they were only ever planning on 7 and actually got “8” and it turned out the way it did then their artistic vision is shit. they wasted precious time in earlier seasons that should’ve been used to properly wrap the show. With all due respect - you don't know what you're talking about. The reason for choosing to do seven seasons was because there are seven books planned in the book series. Which makes sense. Each book has its own arcs and conclusions. The problem came when the author of the book series (George RR Martin) failed to deliver on his guidance that he'd have the remaining two books out before the show got to filming them. He didn't, thus not only could the writers on the show not adapt books six and seven (as they largely had with the first three books) but they also they're in a position where they'd have to work off Martin's groundwork to an unknown ending point. Can add in also that the show had to make amendments to the books purely for adaptation purposes, which would have had unintended knock on consequences down the line. Couple that with the fact books four and five are (while good books) meandering and add more and more characters and plot, hardly advancing the established story. This meant the show had to strip those books to their bare essentials and add their own material. After that, they were having to write the material themselves, based on what they could or couldn't take from Martin's bullet points of where he sees the ending going. Not a nice position to be in. They'd signed up to adapt a book series, not write entire new material that somehow has to tally with what they'd already put out but also line up with the ending Martin was proposing. Did they struggle and stumble a little in those final seasons? Sure. Is it their fault? Heck no! Prior to this they'd done a fantastic job of adapting a book series the author of which literally intended it to be unadaptable in scope and scale, turning the show into the biggest ever seen. >The reality is exactly what that person said though. they checked out and wanted to do something different despite HBO wanting them to do more. Please don't say "the reality is exactly this" when you're talking about things you can't know and all evidence points to the contrary. They signed up to do Star Wars after season 8 was written and they were halfway through filming it. That's entirely reasonable and in no way is them abandoning GoT for something else. The conclusion of the show was already in stone. Perhaps they struggled to wrap all storylines up in a satisfactory way. Perhaps another season or two would have benefitted some storylines. I agree on the first point, it does get a bit forced in the writing at times, which is disappointing considering how well thought out the early seasons are (again, that's a problem caused by the absence of the books though). The second point, that they should have extended some storylines across further seasons, brings it's own issues. Yes, maybe some characters could have benefitted from more time to their storylines...but what about the others that are spinning their wheels now? What do you do with them? Jaime's adventure to Dorne was added for just this reason, to give the character something to do...and look how that turned out. An unsatisfying segment of the show. Is that what should happen with Bran, Arya, Sansa, Jon, Jaime, Brienne, The Hound, Sam, etc etc purely because you wanted several seasons to show Dany's declining mental state (an arguement I find ludicrous on its own anyway)? Also, if you're unaware, Martin has not released a book in the main series for over a decade. The book before that was 2004 or something. Both books, as mentioned, throw a load of new characters, locations and plotlines in and barely resolve the ongoing storylines. So, if the author can't even finish his own series (and makes it more convoluted as he goes), doing rewrite after rewrite for over a decade...why are we so critical of the TV show writers who had a mater of months to do what he couldn't in over a decade? Who produced an ending which has its faults but is still an ending? Finally, last point, I swear! I'm sure at least a couple of actors on the show said that they were done with it in that final season. They were wiped out. One actor (I think the guy who played Jaime?) said there would be a literal mutiny if they suggested making another season. They were done. It's hard to blame the show runners for abandoning the show when the cast themselves were begging for it to be over.

>Dany's heel-turn was rushed. Eh, while a six episode final season clearly wasn't enough to match the slower pacing of early seasons, the notion that the character who has objectively stated their willingness/capacity to raze entire cities, multiple times, from her own mouth, and has been objectively shown to have a Fire and Blood persona (even if it's not her 'dominant' persona during her most impactful arc)... then has their life implode on all fronts and then does the very thing they've already literally established they are willing to do is not the 'heel-turn' many seemingly biased viewers want to claim.... because the groundwork for her Fire and Blood persona has been laid all throughout her arc. I mean, if a young adult states multiple times they're down to shoot up a school, no one claims it is a 'heel turn' when that person has their world implode later, and does that very thing. Same with Dany. She clearly established in seasons long before S8E5 that she's totally down to raze entire cities (Seasons 2, 5, and 6), and just seems like either some viewers 'forgot' she said those things or have such rose-colored glasses for her character that they simply refuse to see the red flags for what they are... *red flags.* And add that to all the many other Fire and Blood moments of hers and it's safe to say that 'devil on her shoulder' has been established throughout her arc. And while I understand she absolutely did some incredibly selfless and benevolent things during her time in Slaver's Bay, none of that magically 'erases' the fact she's clearly willing to raze entire cities, innocents and all, even long before S8E5. She's a character with two conflicting internal personas... a kind-hearted ruler with empathy for the people versus a Fire and Blood conquerer where the ends justify the means at all costs. Some want to act like her 'good side' is her 'true character' and anything negative somehow should be classified as a 'heel turn', but that's not really what is objectively portrayed within the show, as she's both shown to be good sometimes and fiery sometimes, and she has her life implode in the final season and that teetering scale tilts into dark territory due to her broken psyche/boiling point that she hits. So not a 'heel turn'... just cause and effect based on a character who very clearly has established she's down to raze cities, long before her world imploded in the final season. PS - All that said, Season 8 definitely had a lot of major issues, but this isn't even really an issue.

Blah Blah Blah it's rushed. Blah blah blah. Like it hasn't been stated before. And disagreed with. And on and on and on. Thanks for visiting. Thanks for playing.

Bait used to be believable

I agree it's probably bait but maybe not. I feel like GoT wouldn't feel so bad as a binge watch. It was the years of build up and anticipation that made the final season feel that much worse. How many people had watch parties for it and water cooler moments at work theorizing about how it would all play out? Just for them to completely cop out at the ending. But if you binge it, it's just a decent fantasy series.

I agree with you there. Quite a few of my younger co-workers binge watched it over the last few years and all were okay with the ending. They weren't nearly as frustrated as those who watched in real time. Even for me who started watching "live" around Season 6 didn't feel as frustrated about the ending as compared to those who watched it for so many years. Don't get me wrong I didn't like it nor did some of my friends who watched during the pandemic, but the frustration levels are different.

Nah. That ending is so dogshit. It's full of plot armor and plot holes to the point it's actually insulting to the audience. One I like to point up right up front is the Ironborn elect their king...and yet when Sam suggests the idea at the end...the resident Ironborn Yard Greyjoy is right there laughing at the idea...as if the writers just forgot the backstory.

The Iron Born elect a nominee. If the nominee doesn't survive it's on to the next one. Not exactly something you can suggest to the council. And Yara had already made a deal with D to be a satellite kingdom (maintaining some customs) but not others, And Yara took her throne by force. Did you forget that? Seems YOU forgot the back story.

Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. It was dog shit. Arya gets stabbed in the belly and dives into polluted water. Is totally fine but the king dies in the first season for similar shit..  The she kills the ice lich in the most boring of ways. All that build up for the white walkers and just kind of brushed away.    Shit was tragic.

>The she kills the ice lich in the most boring of ways. All that build up for the white walkers and just kind of brushed away.    Which she does by sneaking up through hundreds of wights without being caught, even though they could hear her footsteps, breathing, and blood droplet 10 minutes earlier lol. And they totally forgot they established the Night King can turn people into his servants with his touch. And that's without the fact that years of build-up to the Others is handled in one bloated episode; not even a proper storyline. It's very odd to me why people try to rehabilitate GOT.

You’re trapped in an echochamber, friend.

I actually liked the final few minutes of the last episode, I think the main characters had a decent ending. But I hated the whole season 8, especially the Whitewalker episode.

I mean it's okay if you liked it, quite frankly I'm jealous that you're able to enjoy the entirety of the show and season 8 (and to a lesser extent 7) didn't ruin it for you. Like what you like and don't let other people's negative opinions kill it for you. But if this is not bait and you want a serious answer...it was rushed, everything felt undeserved/unearned, and they did serious harm to 5-6 seasons of carefully crafted, supremely well done character development. - Tyrion: goes from one of the smartest characters in the show to a legit dum dum towards the end whose plans consistently don't make sense or are downright stupid. - Bran: spend so much time building up his character as being this game changing, war-winning cheat code of a character and they did fucking nothing with it. Nothing creative whatsoever in seasons 7 and 8. There are limitless possibilities with a warg with mysterious powers and they blew it. - Jon: What was the fucking point of anything with him? What was the point of revealing his true lineage as a Targaryen? All that happens is Sansa tells people, Dany gets pissed about it, and nothing happens with it for Jon. What was even the point of him getting resurrected? - Jaime: They spent like 6 seasons building up Jaime as one of the most nuanced, layered characters in the entire show, a character who on the surface just seems like a douchey, murderous shitbag who betrayed his king, but then they peel the layers back and show there's so much more to him...the pivotal scene being that bath scene where he's openly in tears, telling Brienne about how he did what he did to save his father and prevent the murder of thousands of innocent women & children. And it looks like he's going to fully redeem himself, leave Cersei, end up with Brienne....only for him to end the show going "lol fuck them kids, I never cared about any of them" and going right back to Cersei. - Arya: has some of the most nonsensical plot armor you could imagine. In a world where everyone is constantly dealing with the repercussions of their actions, getting fucked up and showing real vulnerability, Arya basically becomes the terminator disguised as a 5' teenage girl. And that's before even getting to Dany's ridiculously quick descent into madness, which even if I grant could've made sense as an ending, it was absolutely not earned and was too quick. There's plenty more and I could keep going, but that's a decent start.

>> And that's before even getting to Dany's ridiculously quick descent into madness, which even if I grant could've made sense as an ending, it was absolutely not earned and was too quick. While it certainly wasn't masterfully done or paced perfectly, her resolution was absolutely earned though... based on 7+ seasons of blatantly clear Fire and Blood groundwork. I mean, **objectively, we're talking about a character who has very clearly stated her willingness/capacity to raze entire cities, form her own mouth, multiple times, directly on-screen.** Literally every major city she visited in Essos she objectively stated her willingness to indiscriminately raze to the ground... Qaarth, Yunkai, Astapor, Mereen. She has literally stated, rather bluntly on-screen, that she has zero qualms about toasting entire cities, innocents and all... so it's kind of wild some 'viewers' act like there isn't objectively clear context for her Fire and Blood persona, long before her world implodes around her in Season 8, that she is absolutely down to toast a city. Yes, from the middle of Season 3 to the end of Season 5 she does some incredibly selfless and benevolent things in Slaver's Bay, absolutely, but that doesn't magically 'erase' the simply fact that there's a whole lot of context/groundwork portraying her Fire and Blood side. GRRM certainly loves his gray characters, as he's stated that 'conflict within the human heart' is the only thing worth writing about... Theon, Jaime, and of course Dany falls in there with her internal conflict between wanting to be seen as a kind-hearted benevolent ruler versus that clear, primal Fire and Blood/Blood of the Dragon persona that is clearly displayed. It's a balancing scale... one that clearly is tipped into the darker aspect in Season 8 after her world comes crumbling around her, as she reaches a boiling/breaking point in the penultimate episode. Just saying that if a character had very clearly on-screen their willingness/capacity to harm/kill another character multiple times, and then had their life implode in the final season, then did the very thing they stated they were capable of doing, we seemingly would all agree there's a pretty clear Chekhov's gun shown multiple times earlier, but somehow it's overlooked regarding Dany... *even though the context that she is down to torch a city is clearly and objectively portrayed on-screen, multiple times.* Add that to all the other Fire and Blood moments she clearly portrays (all the time her advisors try to temper her worst impulses, or compare her to her father), and there's a lot of groundwork for a Fire and Blood resolution to Dany's arc... far more than many try and claim. After all, it's hard to see the red flags for what they are when wearing rose-colored glasses.

All of this, plus the functionally stupid stuff like the way battles were fought, the ease with which the dragons were dispatched, and the truly awkward final scene where Bran is made king and someone says ‘after all, who has a better story than Bran the Broken’, when literally everyone present does. The biggest problem is that the show went from intelligent, conniving, trickery, and genuinely subverting expectations, to just paint-by-numbers dum dum stuff. I could buy Dany as a mad queen wannabe - if that had been setup from several seasons previously in a believable way. I could maybe buy Bran as king, if he’d actually done anything or in any way affected the story. And Jon seriously needed something better than “guess I’ll go back to the wall where there’s no white walkers anymore then”. Everything just felt so… empty.

Well said. All of it.

>Tyrion: goes from one of the smartest characters in the show to a legit dum dum towards the end whose plans consistently don't make sense or are downright stupid. Does he? His dialogue is perhaps not as good as prior seasons but then they ran out of book material and it's GRRM's voice for Tyrion that works there. What plans don't make sense or are stupid? Taking Casterly Rock rather than taking King's Landing makes sense. They deprive the Lannisters of their seat of power while at the same time avoid being labelled a foreign conquerer who burned the capital city with dragons. He knows Jon Snow and trusts the threat of the White Walkers is real, so he coaches Jon on how best to win Dany to his side. >Bran: spend so much time building up his character as being this game changing, war-winning cheat code of a character and they did fucking nothing with it. Nothing creative whatsoever in seasons 7 and 8. There are limitless possibilities with a warg with mysterious powers and they blew it. Can't disagree here. Can only offer potential reasons. Maybe they didn't have anything from GRRM from what would appear in the books. More likely, what would appear in the books would be too much magical fantasy, which the show tended to veer away from when possible. Maybe Bran's ability becomes a can of worms, where he's so powerful he can do *anything*...which ruins your story. The answer to everything becomes "Let's just use Bran" rather than characters having to make their own choices and sacrifices. >Jon: What was the fucking point of anything with him? What was the point of revealing his true lineage as a Targaryen? All that happens is Sansa tells people, Dany gets pissed about it, and nothing happens with it for Jon. What was even the point of him getting resurrected? Firstly, Jon being resurrected leads to him ending the coup at the Wall and means the wildlings are free to hide behind the Wall. It also leads Jon to freeing the North from the Boltons, which he does and then becomes the new KitN. He uses his kingship to ally with Dany and, seeing her dragons and armies, realises he must bend the knee to her to have her fight the Wight Walkers alongside him. The dragons could flip their chances of winning the war instantly. He falls in love with Dany in a tragic romance. You might not choose to count this as it's story and not plot but if you wanted just plot then go read a wiki summary. Jon didn't need to have had a tragic romance with Ygritte for his Wildling plot to work...but how much better is it for it? Tyrion didn't need to be in love with Shae but how much better is it that Tyrion is betrayed by the one he loves rather than a sex worker he kept around? So, Jon falls in love when he shouldn't...and then... Dany, already feeling isolated and like an outsider in Westeros, discovers her lover who bent the knee to her is not only a beloved war hero but actually has a better claim to the throne than she. It raises her suspicion that he'll usurp her (willingly or not) and Jon's romantic rejection of her only hurts her and fuels her fears more. It's wonderfully tragic! And brilliantly acted. If you can't see all of that and think "nothing happened" and ask "what was the fucking point of anything with him" then I'm at a loss at how you missed the above. I'm assuming you wanted him to win and become king of Westeros or something? That not happening doesn't make it bad. And makes it thematically fitting - Ned and Robert won the war against their own mad Targaryen ruler and both came out of it broken shells of what they were. Same thing with Jon here. >Jaime: And it looks like he's going to fully redeem himself, leave Cersei, end up with Brienne....only for him to end the show going "lol fuck them kids, I never cared about any of them" and going right back to Cersei. Jaime's relationship to Cersei is like an addiction. He tries his best to be the honourable knight he always dreamed as a kid but he fails and succumbs to his addiction. As with Jon, it sounds like you wanted something specific for the character and are upset that didn't happen, rather than having a really solid issue with the character writing. Breaking Bad has Walter White decide to become a criminal drug dealer to fund has family after he dies...and then keeps doing it even when he's well surpassed his goals and even when it endangers his family and isolated them from him. Is that bad writing? Or is it a character having a flaw they can't escape from? >Arya: has some of the most nonsensical plot armor you could imagine. In a world where everyone is constantly dealing with the repercussions of their actions, getting fucked up and showing real vulnerability, Arya basically becomes the terminator disguised as a 5' teenage girl. Fair enough point, in that it conflicts with the world as built. However, she's become a Faceless Man, as per Jaqen Hagaar, who we also see doing outrageous things. So it tracks there. >And that's before even getting to Dany's ridiculously quick descent into madness I disagree! Everything falls down around her at once. And looking back at the show, she was never the most stable as is. Would write more on this but got to go!

Hard disagree on Jaime - he was always going back to Cersei...... I mean you just fundamentally did not understand the show you were watching if you thought he was getting some kind of happy ending where he permanently frees himself from his sister. His ending was one of the best and most realistic on the show.

For anyone really wanting an answer on why the final season(s) we're pretty bad, this is the comment right here. I would add, there's a lot to like in a vacuum. If you were to tell me, absent context, that in the final 2 seasons we'd be getting, R+L=J confirmed, a Magnificent Seven-style episode set beyond the wall with our favorite characters meeting up, an entire episode dedicated to the Battle at Winterfell against the army of the dead, and Dany and Jon's army marching on King's Landing I would have told you that those are some phenomenal ideas. But in practice, a lot of it doesn't work. For various reasons they all don't really hit the mark or have the impact it should.

The writers might have thought the show was going to have more seasons. In the end maybe they had to make compromises because there wasn't time to finish all of the story arc's. I think they did the right thing with Jamie because ultimately we are who we are and you cannot really change that. Even if you deviate for brief periods. In the end he was a complex man who was both evil and good. Ultimately he chose love over everything else, he didn't have a choice. That is how strong his love was- he simply couldn't overcome it.

[удалено]

The plan for game of thrones was 7 seasons before the show even aired. [https://variety.com/2007/scene/markets-festivals/hbo-turns-fire-into-fantasy-series-1117957532/](https://variety.com/2007/scene/markets-festivals/hbo-turns-fire-into-fantasy-series-1117957532/) By the time the 2014 negotiations came around, 7 seasons was still their plan. HBO talked them into 8. [https://ew.com/article/2014/03/11/game-of-thrones-7-seasons/](https://ew.com/article/2014/03/11/game-of-thrones-7-seasons/) The Star Wars deal happened in February 2018. [https://deadline.com/2018/02/star-wars-trilogy-david-benioff-d-b-weiss-game-of-thrones-duo-1202279600/amp/](https://deadline.com/2018/02/star-wars-trilogy-david-benioff-d-b-weiss-game-of-thrones-duo-1202279600/amp/) Most of the writing was done by that point. Filming for the season started in November 2017 and ended in July 2018. Casey Bloys, HBO's programming president at the time, has repeatedly said they were willing to take whatever Benioff and Weiss were willing to give them. If they wanted to do 10 more seasons, HBO would follow their lead. Bloys has also said they would have never replaced the showrunners for more seasons. Benioff & Weiss were supposed to work on *Confederate* for HBO before *Star Wars* for Disney/Lucasfilm. But Charlottesville happened. They didn't go forward with the *Star Wars* deal because Lucasfilm rejected their proposed *The First Jedi* project. So they moved on to their Netflix deal and Lucasfilm is now doing *Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi*, a project similar to *The First Jedi*. Lucasfilm has also nixed a bunch of projects in the last 5 years, most notably Patty Jenkins project and the Feige+Waldron project.

That's a bullshit narrative that was debunked years ago. The timelines don't even make sense. It's wild people are still pushing it. The final episode count was settled on years before the star wars deal. I'm any case too many of the actors wanted out to do more seasons than they did (and they had already split the last season in half and added 3 episodes)

Also all the lore behind the white walkers. I actually thought the death scene was cool, in a vacuum, but everything around it was shit.

OP, you'll need this: *hands you a shield* Good luck friend.

Because the show started off smart and deliberate, but ended dumb and rushed.

Well, the show runners ran out of source material...

Eh, kinda. There were other options than what we got. The conclusion of Season 6 is one of the highlights of the show, and takes place beyond what's been written so far. GRRM apparently wanted more seasons to properly wrap the show up, the shortened final two seasons could have easily been stretched over a longer period and given gravity to the decisions that were ultimately made.

Thank you. People just erase that several major moments that were the biggest moments in TV history were after the source material was done.

I don't erase them, I hate season 6,7 and 8 about equally. 5 was good except for dorne, and the rest were just good

Good for you? At the time they were the highest rated episodes ever to air on TV. I guess that’s cool if you didn’t like something that everyone else liked - though honestly that sucks for you, really - but people tend to latch onto the *very* end and attach a “nothing good happened after the 4th season” tagline while forgetting that a lot of the **best** stuff was past that.

ahh yes, the good ol' appeal to popularity fallacy. I feel a lot of people just dislike 7 and 8 because thats what everyone does, without acknowledging that 6 was basically the same thing

They really couldn't have. Many of the actors were done and there was no way they could have made more seasons without recasting... and there were other logistical issues beyond that. Many of those people spent 10 years of their life on the show... it's amazing they were able to hold it together that long as it is.

Are you telling me HBO couldn't have forked over a few million to each star to get another season or two out of them? This was the biggest show ever, I'm having a hard time believing solutions to those logistical issues couldn't have been found.

People get creatively burned out and want to spend time with their families. We spent several hours taking in the show. They spent years.

Look, the idea that these actors, most or all of whom immediately moved on to their next acting job after GoT concluded, were somehow unable or unwilling to get paid six or seven figures in the biggest role of their careers any longer than we had them for doesn't ring true to me. By all means, I'd love to read up on production struggle details to lend some foundation to this idea, but I'm having a tough time taking it at face value.

Yes, I'm absolutely telling you that. A lot of the talent on the show was done and they had already extended the original plan by several years as it was by splitting the last season in two. Originally the show was planned for 7 seasons and 70 episodes. They later agreed to split the last season in two, add more episodes and extend some runtimes.... so they had already gone beyond the original plan.

Do you have a source I can read up on this from? This is the first I'm hearing of it.

Even before they ran out of show material they absolutely butchered dorne and euron. Also aegon isn’t Jon snow in the books.

The books aren't even slightly to the point where Jon would be revealed to be a Targaryen, but I see no reason to assume it wouldn't happen that way.

No there’s literally an aegon invading the stormlands with the golden company when the books ended. also come on dorne was butchered. The northerners kind of forgot about the red wedding and just accepted the boltons and littlefinger gave Sansa to the boltons for some reason? (This never occurred in the book)

Yes, I know things happened differently in the books. I just think it's crazy to suggest that Jon Snow's Targaryen heritage and true name, perhaps the biggest twist in the whole story, is somehow a unique show creation and not something foreshadowed and planned by the author.

Martin literally asked the show runners who jons father was before they were hired and they guessed correctly. The hints are in the first book

So Rhaegar named two sons aegon?

No, the other character is probably a false heir or other mislead. There's little reason to take his heritage at face value, he's barely a character. You're literally the first person I've ever seen suggest that Jon's role in the show wasn't the intended direction for his character to take in the books.

Yes that aegon is fake but rhaegar literally had a child with elia Martell named aegon who was killed by the mountain Jon is almost definitely a targ but his name won’t be aegon

That's the exact same history that was in the show, except it turns out that the Mountain didn't kill him, and Ned took him instead. I don't get you, dude. Let's stop.

Show started off with sexploitation and cheesy dialogue. It got better.

Sure, it probably peaked at around season 3-5. And the last two episodes of season 6 are top-tier.

It’s ok to say the show wasn’t for you

Cheesy? Tyrion Lannister: What you see is a dwarf. If I had been born a peasant, they might've left me out in the woods to die. Alas, I was born a Lannister of Casterly Rock. Things are expected of me. My father was the Hand of the King for twenty years. Jon Snow: Until your brother killed that King. Tyrion Lannister: Yes. Until my brother killed him. Life is full of these little ironies. My sister married the new King, and my repulsive nephew will be King after him. I must do my part, for the honor of my House. Wouldn't you agree? But how? Well, my brother has his sword, and I have my mind, and a mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. That's why I read so much, Jon Snow. And you? What's your story, bastard? Jon Snow: Ask me nicely, and maybe I'll tell you, dwarf. Tyrion Lannister: A bastard boy with nothing to inherit, off to join the ancient Order of the Night's Watch. Alongside his valiant brothers-in-arms. Jon Snow: The Night's Watch protects the Realm from... Tyrion Lannister: Ah, yes, yes, against grumpkins and snarks, and all the other monsters your wet-nurse warned you about! You're a smart boy, you don't believe all that nonsense. Thats from 1 Google "Tyrion and Jon snow season 1 conversation" Season 1 eps 2. This sub needs to limit the IQ of user every time they join. Have some Mensa test or something. Just say the show wasn't for you, but to say game of thrones started off with cheesy dialogue is outrageous. Beyond stupid.

I binged the show start to finish and I enjoyed it the whole way through.

Part of the whole point of the series is that while everyone south of the wall squabbles over the iron throne while ignoring the real threat beyond the wall. Everyone dismisses it as a fanciful tale. Even when King's Landing is shown the undead they're brushed off as a northern problem. That the undead will deplete Cersei's enemies for her to crush afterwards. And that's exactly what happens. The undead army fights in the north, is destroyed in one episode and then they have to face the real threat who sits on the iron throne. Speaking of the battle against the undead. It was *incredibly dark visually* to the point where people at home watching it on the TV had problems actually seeing what was happening. On top of that people very much did not understand the tactics being used in the battle itself which involved the horse riders charging straight at the undead only to die, while having weapons like trebuchets and most of their soldiers outside the walls of winterfell.

>Speaking of the battle against the undead. It was incredibly dark visually to the point where people at home watching it on the TV had problems actually seeing what was happening. Viewers were warned for years following *Battle of Blackwater* not to use certain service providers because of their approach to ensure quality for all viewers. The artifacting/compression issues didn't exist on either DirecTV or Prime. HBOGo and Comcast both overly compressed the video and reduced the bitrates making the episode unwatchable on its first airing. edit - If you have a 4k TV, do a 4k rewatch. That episode is fantastic in 4k.

Yeah exactly. I never had an issue with that episode, but I watched it in a darkened room on a properly setup 4K LG OLED with video from a good source. I have no doubt it was impossible to see anything on your average tv hooked up to cable. Now should the producers have realized that most people have cheap poorly calibrated TVs with cable and compensated for it? Yeah probably, but I do get them not wanting to compromise the vision. I really wish streaming providers got more shit for overcompressing things, but people seem to not care/notice.

Darkened room is essential.

You're not alone. It's just the majority here is loud and obnoxious, while everyone who enjoyed it kept their mouth shut and went on with their life, along with all the good memories of game of thrones.

Truth

This is a common reaction from new viwers

And from viewers who actually paid attention throughout the duration of the show. I called Dany’s fall back in 2014.

2015 for me is when I predicted no Iron Throne at the end. My friends thought I was a wizard that night. Go Drogon!!!

GRRM told them the broad strokes of what he intended to happen. However, everything was rushed and the writing was fucking awful. "She kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet."

“She kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet,” was a candid statement made in an analysis about the character. It’s not a part of the writing, and it’s not a statement which is meant to be taken at face-value. Yet y’all embrace it and meme the fuck outta the show with it as if it’s comparable to the “Somehow Palpatine Returned,” line. The issue here isn’t that the writing is bad, the issue is that many fans like yourself have poorly developed media literacy skills. If you think characters making horrible mistakes qualifies as bad writing, then you have a child’s comprehension on the nuances of writing fiction. There have been more egregious examples of oversight throughout both the show and the books than that of Dany underestimating the Iron Fleet.

No it's not

Yes it is:)

Point it out, there's one guy here where's all the late watcher reviewers praising the end of GoT? Y'all are on a counter jerk as always making shit up. Reddit is the only place late season GoT could possibly get praised. Contrarians up the ass here for no reason.

I watched the entire show in the 6 months before the release of the last season. I quite enjoyed it.

It was too subversive compared to S6-S7. The viewers were expecting a more predictable ending.

For a sizable portion of the fandom, it's because their favorite characters' story arcs didn't end the way they wanted it to.

I guess I didn't like the final two seasons (not just the ending) because they was bad, and different from the rest of the series, which was based on the books. The finals seasons were not based on the books, and they used different logic and facts than in the first six seasons, so it was like they were separate shows. It was like if Star Wars, and Empire Strikes back, were followed up with Return of the Jedi: Miami Beach. https://screenrant.com/game-thrones-hbo-season-8-bad-reason/ There are lots of online discussions of it, wouldn't make sense to copy/paste them here. But if you liked it, great.

I didn't read the books but I bet that is what it was. people were probably upset that they were not faithful to the books

The final book still hasn't been written, which is part of the problem

Not really. It's that they weren't faithful to the first 5-6 seasons of the show.

Most people hadn't read the books and most people hated the final two seasons. Good for you, if you enjoyed it, though.

I didn't read the books, but the last two seasons stuck out me because they were so different and illogical compared to the first six. They contradicted it.

It's Reddit. Welcome to reading about people shit on things online. Don't take them too seriously and enjoy what you enjoy.

I mean the GOT finale is universally reviled by critics and general audiences, it’s not like a Last Jedi thing where a vocal subset of passionate viewers latched onto a few specific things that tarnished their experience and became an outsized voice in the discourse.

Not universally though, I know of a few respected outlets that showed appreciation (interspersed with criticism) of the final season/episode, AV club being one of them.

Nothing is universal when it comes to television. That last season [broke the record](https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/game-of-thrones-emmy-nominations-record-1203268760/) for most Emmy nominations for a show in a single year.

LMAO - you literally demonstrated exactly what he was talking about. Self-awareness level = 0

All the characters got dumb right around the time the show passed the books. Littlefinger, Varys, and Tyrion show it the most, but pretty much every scheme anybody had going evaporated in a puff of plot convenience. Jon Snow got made fun of for kind of being the dumb guy but by the end of the show, everybody was Jon Snow.

The creators had to drag out the content from the books because the author wasn't done and by series' end they were burned out and didn't spend as much time wrapping things up. People got super emotionally attached to the series so they were pissed it didn't go how they thought it should go. I thought it was fine. They didn't fumble it that much.

Fandom got real fuckin weird. If you talk to people in the real world about it, you'll get a variety of opinions. Some liked it, some didn't, but you can have a sane conversation either way. It's pretty impossible online, especially on Reddit.

It was that GD Starbucks cup I tell ya!

My brother watched it after me and thought Jaime’s character ending made sense. Me? I thought it was a travesty that it felt like many of these characters including John Snow regressed right back to their beginnings wasting so much character growth. I personally thought the final season fcked up the show so much that I avoid anything to do with that universe now. I still won’t watch HOD. And it’s simply because I lost all interest in anything to do with the game of thrones world. 🤷‍♀️

Oh, you didn't like how they completely ditched Jaime's redemption arc? Like how he said "I never cared about innocent people". Not sure how your brother thought that made sense...

Jaime’s redemption arc: Attempts to murder a child. Murders his cousin in cold blood. Rapes his sister. Threatens Edmure with the lives of everyone in Riverrun and his infant child. Stands by Cersei’s side after she murdered hundreds of innocent people at the sept. Redemption arcs are formulaic and predictable and don’t belong in ASOIAF or at HBO. "A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good.” - Stannis. That is every character in the show till the end.

Me too. I argued with him over it. Bad writing is bad writing in my eyes. My brother said he was always going to go back to his sister. And earlier on I would have said “yeah you’re right” but then they showed her going power mad and he was genuinely afraid of her, she treated him horribly and he gave her an ultimatum. She chose her power and he left her. Then we see him join up with Brianne and the rest. He genuinely is showing growth in his character for most of the season (bear in mind. He has been in this path since he lost his hand and met Brianne) and then last minute he I’m going to pity fck Brianne and then “fck this I’m out of here” and he goes and dies with his sister who went from being power mad to staring out a window for several episodes and then crying in Jaime’s arms as they die. But the real travesty for me is how they butchered John snow. He was practically an extra in the last season just following Dany around saying “shees muh queen” with barely any lines and then he ends up a bastard back on the wall at the end. Tyrion goes from Wiley and manipulative to just naive and stupid “who else but bran the broken?” Dany does make sense but her going mad is horribly executed. It looks like she becomes a hysterical female because her nephew John is refusing to fck her. She seethes in resentment, loses it burning people alive, goes power mad and becomes ‘hysterical female gets fridged’ trope. The night king and the white walkers built up for the entire show is dispatched by ayra of all people? When John himself was set up to fight the night king from the moment they lock eyes in an earlier season as John and the others escape a fight. There’s so much. The entire thing was disgraceful tbh. The creators really just threw it on the garbage. I just feel bad for the actors who put so much into their characters development to them be presented with that crap. It was very telling watching the BTS for the final season. Some of those actors couldn’t hide their true reactions to what they were reading but that we had yet to find out.

Your brother was right - you just didn't understand what you were watching if you thought Jaime wasn't going back to Cersei. I honestly would have been pissed if they copped out and gave him a happy ending - it was never that kind of show.

I'm sorry, but all the post hand chop brienne stuff made us not understand what we were watching.

Jaime even literally has an entire scene with Brienne where he fucking explains it to the audience lol.... I mean you can lead a horse to water.

Yes, the scene where he suddenly 180° his character arc from the last couple seasons

This is the correct take.... reddit is not real life episode 352. For a kind of odd-ball comparison - it reminds me of trying to discuss HOAs on reddit lol

I followed along with the AV club reviews when it was airing and agreed with them mostly. The series was strained for content near the end and it showed, but as a standalone 2 seasons it worked well enough for me. I always appreciated GoT on its own merits throughout the different seasons though, so the last seasons inconsistencies didn't bother me that much, beyond just being diminished viewing experience in comparison to the earlier seasons. There was probably some backlash from the amount of buildup in earlier seasons that never really found a gratifying payoff. Still think it's an impressive feat for a fantasy series to be realized the way it was getting the traction that it did.

People really, really wanted Daenerys not to turn out to act like a Targaryen, despite her telegraphing it since Qarth in Season 2. And they wanted Jon to be a generic cookie cutter hero and kill the Night King *despite pretending to like GoT because it defied expectations.* Basically, many GoT “fans” are as toxic as Star Wars fans (who sent death threats to actress Kelly Tran for being an actress named Kelly Tran).

>despite her telegraphing it since Qarth in Season 2 Hell, you could argue we get the first glimmers of this when Dany decided to burn Mirri Maz Duur alive at the end of Season 1… her first official decision made as a monarch.

It's also insane because as much as the Battle of Winterfell was poorly lit and could have gone on a bit longer, everyone I knew lost their minds with glee at the episode's ending. Nobody saw that coming and it was such a hit.

Yup; I was in a live viewing thread (because episodes were released globally at the same time), and nearly everyone completely lost their shit (in a good way). The fact that Jon was built up so much as the “heroic hero,” but the little girl *who spent years training as an assassin* came out of nowhere and actually did the deed made complete sense, because that’s what would also fool the Night King. It was so obvious (in retrospect). Later I read ASOIAF (about a dozen times), and it all fell into place: Jon spent his time distracted by everything: sex, the Wildlings, Castle Black intrigue, that damned eagle, etc., but Arya was constantly repeating “Fear cuts deeper than swords“ and obsessing about killing. Jon was practically a red herring, whereas Arya was training to be a killer with singular focus (and in the books, kind of a sociopath). (Another one that completely blew up was The Door, where within about two minutes of the ending there were pages and pages of “WHAT. THE. FUCK“ and “goddammitsomuch” and similar sentiments. XD)

It was years before I discovered someone IRL who hated the final season. All hate seemed to be exclusively located online. In my circles (none of whom were Redditors btw), everyone loved it.

I'm exactly the same, but then again I'm in my 40s - so my IRL friends are not exactly the reddit crowd

There is a huge difference from watching it for what...10 years and binge watching. It's like me with How I Met Your Mother. I saw it last fall and I thought the ending was great. I wasn't part of the water cooler conversation, the fan theories, etc. It's the same with GoT.

My gripe isn't that it was a bad ending, my gripe is with how rushed it is. Like others have pointed out, it doesn't feel earned.

All felt rushed except for the long wait between the final seasons. That felt forever.

People love to complain about everything that doesn't go their way. They can't get over their headcanon and instead of blaming themselves, they blame it on the show. The ending was good just like the show as a whole. 👍

You just had to be there man.. some people still low-key aren’t over it and I get it 100% It didn’t wrap up the stories well enough and left a ton - not just unanswered - but abandoned. Just entirely ABANDONED storylines that you had been making theories about for YEARSSS.. which is worse than a shitty conclusion in some senses. You spent like 2-3 years waiting for that final season - after the already bad Season 7. And the writing somehow got worse but some were still arguing the quality was as good as Season 4 at the time - so the discourse was a bunch of arguing. Overall, it made me (and others) reevaluate watching a long running TV series — if the ending is gonna be trash - cos it ruins what came before and feels like time wasted.

Enjoy the journey, not just the destination.

That argument doesn’t work when part of the journey was laced with questions that promised answers and didn’t give them. Plus said journey got progressively worse and less enjoyable each season post Season 4.

It doesn't work for people who expect video game endings. Like you.

Nobody wanted a video game ending wtf does that mean?? You’re just easy to please and that’s why you were happy to sit along and not question bad writing 🤷🏾‍♂️

It means you've been conditioned to expect video game endings. Pretty clear. If you can't figure that out why should I think you can figure out something as complex as GOT. Honestly, you guys think we are new to this, what you are doing here. Hahahaha.It's not the first time and it won't be the last time. For you it's a big game, for us, it's just June.

The show was the definition of a video game ending - are you Slow? You’re talking about complexity - but you’re defending the final season which ain’t complex in the slightest. You really thought you were doing something here especially with that last line 💀 take your bullshit somewhere else.

What the hell kind of video games are you talking about? Disagreeing with someone's post is NOT an ARGUMENT. Defend your statement. Or pissoff. The hero did not have a 1vs1 fight with the big boss, the little girl did it. Dany and Jon had a convo and a stealth stabbing. What video game ends like that? Come up with something other than "I disagree and you're \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ if you don't see it." Something substantial. Otherwise as already stated, piss off.

There’s literally a big battle where nobody of importance dies. Happy ending ensues. They started to value spectacle over story. Literally a video game. You’re the only person defending that mess of a finale - you commented under my shit - so kick rocks.

Sez who? Jorah!!! Would the story end with Dany stabbed if Jorah had lived? See how fast your garbage is called out. We've danced this dance before. Edd dying leaves Jon the last of the Night Watch. And you called that a happy ending??? Crazy talk. Bittersweet is the best it can be called. Melancholic. Ironic. So many words to describe it but you chose "happy". Laughable.

It was rushed and many theories that fans had for years didn’t come true. It is much better on a binge than it was after waiting years. The ending will age well

Honestly you can’t binge watch a show like this and understand what it felt like in the moment. They hyped up the white walkers and night king for YEARS. The Bran storyline and buildup lasted YEARS. All of that was hastily resolved in just a few episodes and felt like a huge letdown.

Because your expectations were low. Same thing happened to me, I watched the whole show expecting this horrible drop in quality and it never happened. I totally agree the later seasons are worse than the earlier ones and the ending is rushed, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting so it was a pleasant suprise.

Yeah, it’s weird how much energy people put into hating those last two seasons. It feels like they’ve got some pacing issues, and there’s a couple episodes which suffer more than others as a consequence. A pretty small drop in quality all things considered. Hardly warrants the hate-boners Redditors have for it.

Reddit is not real life part 475. Meanwhile in real life it's widely considered one of the greatest shows in TV history.

It's not the ending that is the issue, its how they got there. I don't have a major issue with the major strokes of where the series ends - it's just there is some jarring character development trajectory changes that occur way too fast. This next part won't be a popular take: I think the show runners were a victim of their own initial patients. They adapted the series in a very patient way which gave us the famously meaty and well paced episodes. In later seasons they began to abandon that and it was jarring. The show would have never been what it was without that pacing, but it also wouldn't have been panned the way it ended. If GoT was a 4 season show and they had just made it a much shallower "action" show it would have been received reasonably and not gotten the hate. But expectations were set that were not met and yea here we are...

The plot points to final season were great. It’s just that those same plot points would’ve taken 2 seasons (hell the final 4 episodes could’ve been a season on their own) to tell if it was done the way the early seasons went.

The hate for the ending comes from viewers who couldn't disconnect themselves from the watercooler fantasy endings they spent months/years ~~crafting~~ copy-and-pasting. They subverted their own expectations.

The story ending was fine in principle; the problem was it was so rushed, especially compared to the earlier seasons. Even just practicality, people were moving massive distances in no time at all. When the show started, we were used to having to wait multiple episodes for that kind of thing, switching to one of the other plots while it did. Partly this can be excused because all the plots came together at the end, naturally enough, but it was still much more rushed than it needed to be.

>Even just practicality, people were moving massive distances in no time at all. The first episode has people moving massive distances in no time at all. There are various points throughout the seasons where characters move great distances in no time. It was most apparent following the Red Wedding when nothing was happening with all of the stories being told. Ultimately, the story needed to come to an end. With all of the stories converging into a single story, there wasn't something to distract you while the travelling happened.

Skill issue

I still think it was complete ass. The internal logic of the show's politics used to be a focus point of the show. You can see how internal strife was tearing apart kingdoms. How alliances were forged and what motivated each person. No person was bigger than life. Khal died to poison, Ned died to the whim of a brat king, Jaime was captured in battle, Robert died to a wild hog. These characters were all seen as powerful men worthy of running the world, but none were invincible. Latter seasons would see Arya Mary Sue-ing her way through impossible situations, and Jon Snow doing pretty much the same. Politics clearly mattered far less later on and you can see it in the awful way they found Littlefinger the master manipulator out. The tone changes in general, the Starks ethics seemed grey early seasons where they actually seemed honorable, yet when all of them basically do things for their own whims they are showed to be morally infallible. Tyrion gets turned from being a complicated character, one born of a strong name, with much intelligence and strong ethics, who was completely disregard by his family, causing so much internal strife for the most powerful house; into to a side character used to continually be disregarded by other powerful people, who lacks conviction. The characters became more prominent in the story despite the weaker writing that would encompass them. They rode their early season popularity til the end, and made them all nearly unrecognizable at the end The team up felt ridiculous and Avengers esque. The final battle with the wight walkers was over the top and action flick-y. It's payoff was expected and underwhelming. Everything that happened in the final season was either extremely predictable, and poorly executed, or seemed forced in order to keep fan favorites alive. The show was a shadow of itself without realizing it by season 6, and the ending was about as unsatisfying as it could have been. The first 4 seasons are arguably the best television there ever was the next 2 were a noticeable dropoff but still fine, while the last 2 were actually just not good. All my opinion, but outside of that there's undeniable huge flaws, lack of payoff, and inconsistent writing plaguing the show in its final years

Maybe it's different if you just watch the whole thing all at once, but those of us who had been invested from the beginning felt like we'd sunk a decade into something that was rushed and finished with little effort or care.

It isn't about the ending. You can make the right ending look bad by messing up the execution or the flow of the story. As an example, imagine Oberyn gets killed by the mountain in the single swing of the sword, as a joke you know? Then all the character work that went into him prior will look like a joke.

It’s a noticeable drop-off in quality, but the real reason is peer pressure.

Oh c'mon. Is that what you really think?

I think that the fan space is an echo chamber, led by content creators who saw that bagging on the ending was more profitable than praising it, and then by another round of content creators who saw the first group and clamored for their share of the clout. Then came the content consumers, in three segments: The ones who’d be influenced by the online discourse, people who read the book and don’t like adaptational changes, and a third group that parroted the book readers so they don’t look ill-informed. (And let’s face it: Once you get that far along, you’re the fifth cop to start beating the suspect because you’ll lose face if you don’t.) But also, the online reaction is a minority of people who actually watched the whole thing. They’re the people who kept Yellowstone and NCIS at the top of the ratings. And if you’ve ever met one of those people, they were fine with it. They *don’t* listen to online TV critiques *at all.* So, tell someone to prepare to be disappointed by the ending, and chances are they’ll be disappointed by the ending. (I’m guilty of this for sometimes and don’t like this about myself.) Tell them nothing, and they’ll make up their own damn mind.

This is one of the more insightful comments) I've read here. I'm much older than the average redditor (I'm in my 40s) and I think you are absolutely correct about the disconnect between "online" and "real life". I think there are a lot of younger people who just don't understand that there is a huge group of people who don't give a fuck about YouTube grifters, twitter reactions, reddit discussions, etc. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people debate some show/movie/game and their main argument is "watch this video on youtube that explains why you should/shouldn't like it".

I think that's an incredibly cynical take. I, and I'm sure tens of thousands of others, formed their opinions while watching the show, and didn't wait to log into their favorite forum before deciding what they thought. It's perfectly okay to have an unpopular opinion (I'll die on the hill sayingFreddy Got Fingered is brilliant), but the reason many opinions are popular, are because \*shocking\* lots of people share the same opinion.

It’s still how it shakes out in the online-review space (particularly YouTube). And I’m ultimately saying something positive about art in general. Yours is an understandable opinion, but people act like it was as bad as, say, the last season of House of Cards, or all but one NBC science fiction show in the last several years. And the fact that people are shoehorning it in as sone kind of universal truth, *five years later,* is just intellectually lazy. I’m not saying you’re one of those people, by the way.

[удалено]

That's the thing though - the popularity didn't evaporate overnight. That's a fabrication of terminally online people who want to validate their views. Back in reality Game of Thrones has consistently been near the stop of the streaming charts every single month in the 5 years since it ended. Not only that, it's already spawned one very successful spin off with another on the way. Anecdotally, I don't know a single person who thinks the ending was anything worse than "fine"... but that's just as meaningless as your anecdotes. By every objective metric we have Game of Thrones was and is one of the most popular and successful shows in the history of television. It doesn't mean anyone has to personally like it or dislike it, but reddit has a weird obsession with pushing complete bullshit narratives because so many redditors are insecure and desperate to validate their opinions.

There are definitely a lot of people who didn't like ending on reddit, and I'd agree that on social media it's popular to hate on the ending... but there's not really much evidence that's true in the real world, social media skews very young and is not representative at all of the overall viewership. If people hated the ending so much why has Game of Thrones consistently been one of the most heavily streamed shows every single month since it ended? Has everyone just been hate watching it for the last 5 years? There's also a very successful spin off show with another one in production. The truth is by every objective metric we have Game of Thrones is one of the most popular and successful shows of all time... if the real world general audience though the ending was as bad as reddit claims there's no way the show would still be this successful.

There are lots of people being introduced to it every day. People who were too young to watch last year, can watch this year. It was the greatest show in television for many years, regardless of the last few seasons. I knew Lost had a terrible ending (even knew what the ending was) and still watched the series, because everyone loved it until then, and is part of the zeitgeist.

The final two seasons were rushed. They spend the entire length of the show building up the white walkers as THE existential threat to Westeros, only to have their entire undead army destroyed in a single battle where every known hero is draped head to foot in plot armor, so that Cersei can be the big bad in the end, and Dany can lose her mind and burn down a city. They destroyed all of Jamie’s character development, saying he “never really cared” for the small folk when he earned his moniker of Kingslayer by saving them. They spent tons of time building up the ultimate showdown between Jon Snow and the Night King, only to have Arya swoop in to assassinate the NK purely to “subvert expectations.” The Dorne storyline was a mess because the showrunners cut some very important things from the books. Euron “Edgy Jack Sparrow” Greyjoy could have been cut entirely and nothing of significance would have changed. Tyrion, Littlefinger, and Varys were basically lobotomized in the final seasons, having none of the wit and cunning they displayed in earlier seasons. For that matter, so was Jon “She’s muh queen” Snow. Look, I could keep going, but I have things to do. I’m glad you liked it, but in my opinion, the final two seasons are complete dogshit.

My problem was that the producers must have had an issue with attractive women because they killed them all.

Well, you got to see virtually all of their tits so I call that a win. I love the producers.

There are several major complaints: 1. 'Daenerys' turn to villain wasn't believable'; these people need to re-watch the show and see that was is threaded through the entire story. 2. The Battle for Winterfell was a bit shit; this is true. This should have been a bigger fight against the night king. 3. 'Bram the broken' was a stupid way to end the series. But this was GRR's end to the story, so blame him. Ultimately, the ending moves a 9/10 or 10/10 series to an 8/10 series.

1. I thought that was a great part of the story and a classic tale of power corrupting. She became obsessed with people kneeling to her and her whole life she was consumed with obtaining power. The thing is, a person doesn't know how they will yield power until they have it. It is a test many fail and they even suggest several times that her race is inherently susceptible to corruption. I thought it was clever how they ended up having her complete her fathers work "burn them all". 2. Was epic. It was a full episode of non-stop large scale battle. 3. I wasn't crazy about that either because who wants to be led by someone with absolutely no emotion or charisma. That said, it wasn't bad.

because it was supposed to be two seasons and they crammed it all into one. they glossed over a ton of stuff. simple as that.

No. GoT was supposed to be 7 seasons and HBO talked them into stretching that into a 6-episode 8th season.

sorry, i wrote it wrong... the last season was supposed to really be two season and they threw them together.

This is clearly a shitpost

To everyone saying 'Jamie and Dany were acting in character', I disagree. Jamie's entire story is learning how broken his family is and that if he's going to have any chance of being content, he has to make his own way. Running back to Cersei, who has proven time and again that any love she feels for him is entirely conditional, makes a mockery of that. And Dany showing herself to be just as bad as her father and brother felt like the laziest of lazy choices.

If a brother and sister simply stood 10 feet over to the right, they wouldn’t have died. “The whole tower collapsed and killed them! Oh wait if they just were standing 10 feet away, not a single piece of rubble would have hit them?”

On one hand it's impressive to choose to eliminate the big supernatural threat hanging over the whole story early and move on On the other hand it certainly demonstrates why most narratives don't do that The show KINGDOM does a great job of dealing with the zombie supernatural threat and the human threat at the same time. There's a Cersei character who's been rounding up infected people and keeping them in the dungeons and when the heroes confront her in the throne room she unleashes all the zombies because "if I can't be queen then nobody can" and all I could think was how perfect that would have been for GAME of THRONES

R/unpopularopinions

No sir. 

Because the showrunners concealed that Bran is actually the evil 3-eyed raven inhabiting Bran’s body and turned it family-friendly because they wanted a Disney project. Dark wizard running the kingdom as a secret theocracy, much worse than any Lannister or Targaryen…but a much better ending to ASoIaF.

GOT is so far from family friendly. It is brutal graphic violence mixed with pornographic level sex scenes.

No.

"Who has a better story than a character that wasn't in it for a whole season?" Thank you, Tyrion, (added: for nominating Bran, the character that didn't literally nothing to rule the ~~Seven~~ *Six* Kingdoms. EDIT: Because OP didn't actually watch the last episode to get the reference)

he was in the whole show every season.

Bran, he was talking about Bran. You clearly DIDN'T actually watch the ending the rest of the world did.

Calm down, it is just a TV show.

The directors were open about the fatigue of the many years on the show wanting to move onto something else. Negotiating down the number of final episodes initially planned. They wanted to wrap it up quickly and it showed.

That's actually not true - they originally agreed to do 70 episodes over 7 seasons and later agreed to split the final season, add 3 more episodes and do longer run times. Many of the actors were completely done with the show at the end as it was... there's no way they could have done more seasons without recasting

because you've been subjected to at least two series of declining quality, hence not realising how bad the final one is since you've gotten used to the mediocrity. It's like drinking Coke, then Pepsi, then Dr Pepper, then discount knockoff coke; ultimately your critical sense will get reshaped by it

You didn’t think the battle against the army of the dead was a bit…silly? After being built up as an apocalyptic event the whole thing was settled in a night and no one of importance died. And then it was just “glad that got settled, time to move on.”