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I mean, why would they cock it up the first time? If you went back in time and told someone after GoT S1 or S2 "this will end up sucking and the show's legacy will be how they ruined it", that person would think you were crazy. Back when GoT started, it was so good that nobody would have believed it could ever turn out so bad.
It wasn't at all obvious from the outset of GoT that they were going to fuck up so hard by the end. And if they do fuck this show up, it certainly wouldn't be clear now that they will do so. Now, maybe they learned their lesson at HBO and this will be great. But for myself, once bitten twice shy. Besides, if it actually is good in the end, then I will still enjoy watching it at that time. I'm not depriving myself of anything, I'm simply putting this off until we can assess the work as a whole.
Fair enough, they certainly might fuck it up. Personally I think it's much less likely than it was for GoT. Baseline probability for fucking up shows that start so great is low, smaller scope, and lessons learned are still my arguments.
But that's not the point. I just don't share the overall sentiment that GoT is not worth watching because they fucked up the last few seasons. It feels like you are substituting the legacy of the whole show for its overall quality.
Stories have endings. The narrative arc that has a identifiable beginning, middle, and end is what defines a given story. In general, stories that have a poor ending are unsatisfying in some way, linked to exactly how the ending was "poor." GoT S8 was widely panned for nonsensical/unexplained plot devices (teleporting armies, for example) that made the story intellectually unsatisfying, and character-arc reversals and betrayals of theme (Jaime's sudden un-redemption arc) that made the story emotionally unsatisfying. That's a massive double-failure.
Let's say I had a book, and told you, "Hey, read this, it's super good, but you'll want to stop after Chapter 15 of 20, the rest of the book's shit," would you want to start the book at all?
I wouldn't read that book because reading is much harder than watching a TV series but I do get your point. GoT is worsened by its bad ending, how can I argue it's not. I'm just saying it's not completely ruined and that I'll rewatch it no problem.
Sure, and if you choose to rewatch it, I hope you enjoy yourself.
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I think the problem is Martin's outline ended up being a very conventional fantasy story, but it hid who the main characters were for a long time. So it looked like something else. People invested in the genre rule breaking early part of the story were always going to be disappointed when the traditional fantasy story emerged.
It also suffered from one of the themes of the book is all the people playing politics are ignoring a slow building apocalypse with little evidence, but the people playing politics are also very popular with the fans of the show which left them in a pretty severe bind, do they kill off everyone in the south who is unprepared (last scene the winter king sitting upon the iron throne before a zombified court as snow drifts across all Westerns) or do they save them with a deus ex machina solution that staves off the apocalypse. Either is going to piss off a lot of fans.
I feel like the problem is that A Song of Ice and Fire breaks genre conventions by not deus ex machina'ing things you expect to be deus ex machina'd. Ned being killed makes total sense, you just expect him to have plot armour. It definitely does get more high-magic/standard fantasy as it goes on, but I don't think that's the problem people have with the ending (whether they know it or not).
But it feels like what the writers took away from that was that what people liked about the show was "That can never predict what's going to happen next!" and made all sorts of nonsensical stuff happen because "subverting expectations is what GoT is about!" I don't envy them running out of GRRM to adapt and having to wing it (even if he gave them the broad strokes, a big part of the work is in the execution).
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