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Lol, serves me right to write a post about this and scroll down and find someone has put it more succinctly hours ago.
I'll just reiterate: I'm very sympathetic to the showrunners here, despite them usually getting the criticism for this.
It would be one thing if there was a complete series but Martin himself has proven incapable of resolving his own narrative kudzu. He basically spent years on the "Meereenese Knot" problem of trying to get all of the characters in the right place and iirc has dumped more than one version of the story. His last few books only covered parts of the world due to the rapidly proliferating viewpoints.
All of this stuff costs when you're doing a show, in a way it doesn't cost a writer.
I agree with your sympathies especially when it come to cut stuff. On a show you have to cast, build sets, account for the limited ability of your core audience to follow many concurrent plotlines. On a finite budget it’s pretty easy to say “where the hell is this going” to a lot of the book 4-5 plots and cut them, especially when the books don’t have an easy answer to that question.
I’m less sympathetic in cases like Dorne where they built the damn sets and hired actors, just the wrong ones. That felt like the writers just didn’t understand what Martin was doing with Dorne at all and said fuck it, let’s add some girlbosses and put Jaime in it. Give me Arianne back
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I mean, sure. But the problem wasn't just "the writers inherited a thorny plot from GRRM and weren't up to the task of concluding it well". The problem is "the writers turned out to be a failure at basic writing". In the last few seasons of GoT character motivations are all over the place, things regularly happen that make no sense in-universe, and the writers lack even the most basic fucking attention to logical coherency of the story. In the last episode, Jon Snow goes from one scene (and location in the world) to the next in ways that would require him to literally teleport for it to be possible.
I have sympathy for the writers that they inherited an unfinished plot that GRRM himself hasn't been able to finish successfully yet (and may never do so). But my sympathy runs out when they make writing mistakes so large that anyone, even a completely untrained fan like myself, is able to spot them. That's 100% on the GoT writers, and not GRRM.
Yeah, but I see this as partly a problem caused by the giant hole left by the aforementioned kudzu when they cut it out.
For example: Varys and Tyrion HAVE to be stupid cause there's no other way to stop Dany from just killing Cersei but this then makes it hard to take their ambivalence about Dany seriously as foreshadowing. All of the political complexity of Westeros has to be removed or Cersei would never last as Queen.
And so on and so on.
I can certainly agree that part of the problem was the writers (foolishly, I would say) choosing to cut points that seemed irrelevant in the books that already exist. But I don't think that was most of it. If the plot had issues but the writers had at least tried to paper over it with a justification, then I could maybe see that being the major problem. But more often, there are problems that they don't even try to paper over it. They are stringing together scenes without even the thinnest veneer of logic for how the world progressed from one point to the next.
Case in point: the S7 arc where Dany loses one of the dragons to the Others. The Others had Jon Snow and his men trapped on an island (which the Others can access easily) for a long time. We don't know how long, but it stands to reason that even as the dragon flies it takes a day or two for Dany to cross the entire continent as she flies to his rescue. Why did the Others not just kill Jon and his men immediately, then leave? They never even attempt to explain that. The fan theory was that the Night King somehow knows that Dany is coming with her dragons, and he wants to score an undead dragon. Fine - how does he know that? Again, not explained (even if that was the intent, which who knows). The whole story just makes no logical sense, and there isn't even an attempt to try to make it work. They just jammed characters into scenes and went "eh good enough".
It's stuff like that which makes me blame the show writers the most. I think a competent writer stuck with difficult material will at least try to make it make sense somehow. They probably won't succeed, but there will at least be a recognizable attempt. The GoT writers didn't even try, which leads one to believe the issues didn't even occur to them - ergo, they must be massively incompetent. And that is a far bigger problem with the latter seasons of GoT than the difficult plot they inherited from GRRM.
Yeah, I can only assume they were under constraints and overmatched since some decisions are so bad, even by the standards of the bad writing on the show (the most egregious might be sending the unarmed into the Crypts of Winterfell). Some of those decisions are the "Somehow, Palpatine has returned" of fantasy: they ring of "it's 11PM and the essay is due, fuck it.". They just didn't have it in them to bridge the chasms and gave up.
I just think a lot of the problems we criticize the most have a much earlier and understandable genesis.
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