I am still not over how spectacularly that TV series imploded into nothingness.

agentwiggles · on Jan 9, 2023

I just started House of the Dragon a few days ago. I was a huge ASOIAF fan and followed GoT pretty obsessively, so I was kind of surprised that I had basically no interest in House of the Dragon when it first came out.

I was talking to my wife about the show and had the (somewhat obvious in retrospect) realization that I was hesitant to watch HotD because of how horrible GoT mangled the story. The best seasons of Thrones were the seasons which closely followed the books - around season 5 the series really started to go off the rails. It was still fun to watch, but lost some of the initial magic as soon as it didn't have the books to use as a plot template. And by the time it made its way to the final two seasons, it was pretty clear that there was going to be no righting of the ship in the amount of time they had left.

Even with that being the case, it was absolutely impressive how badly they managed to flop the landing of the series. The last season was wildly disappointing to me. And in fact, I think the TV series poisoned my love of the books to some degree. I'm pretty skeptical that GRRM will ever finish and some of the plot points of the end of the TV series seem so wrongheaded to me that I'm not sure how George could ever land the books more successfully.

HotD has been entertaining enough so far, although a bit slow for my taste. We'll have to see how things shake out over the next few years, but at least now my expectations are pretty level.

mcdonje · on Jan 9, 2023

I don't get the hate for the ending. I think a lot of the criticisms missed the point. Everyone wanted a person who was consistently going mad over the course of the story to take the throne.

muffinman26 · on Jan 9, 2023

I think the disconnect here is that first few books/season of A Song of Ice and Fire set up the reader/viewer to expect a downer ending. They are engaging specifically because they break conventions by killing off so many of the protagonists.

In a traditional story a happy ending is satisfying because it fulfils expectations, but in A Song of Ice and Fire the 'happy' ending manages to leave the viewer hanging because it breaks the implicit promise of the first few seasons. I fully expected (and wanted) the series to end with the last human dying as the dragons face off against the White Walkers.