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I've seen this said before but I don't think it's true. Game of Thrones' problem was that the showrunners started writing their own fanfiction well before they ran out of material. This was made worse by them cutting things that must have seemed, at the time, unimportant, but later led to the last two seasons feeling incredibly unbalanced. The changes start around season or 4 (it's been a while), start getting really bad by season 5, and finally compound to where the average viewer can tell things are very off by the end
By fanfiction I don't necessarily mean fleshing smaller characters out, like Tywin and Margaery — generally this was done well and didn't conflict with anything pre-existing. I'm talking about things like Jaime's storylines after returning to King's Landing being completely different, whatever they did to Euron Greyjoy, and literally everything about the Dorne plot.
An example of cut content is the ignored storyline of Aegon Targaryen landing his armies in Westeros while Daenerys is fucking around in Meereen. He kind of comes out of nowhere in book 5 but it really feels like he should have been there for the endgame in the show. What we had instead is the situation where everyone is against Cersei and the writers have to bend the story in knots to have it be an even fight. A multipolar conflict with Dany, Cersei, Euron, and Aegon all facing off would be much more chaotic and even, assuming this was Martin's intention.
Perhaps the most infamous example of cut content was not including Lady Stoneheart. As I recall, this heavily strained the showrunners' relationship with Martin and led to him distancing himself from the show and depriving it of its most important advisor.
For all the things you can say about the showrunners at least they finished their damn job. I'm more bitter now at how GOT/Martin influenced Attack on Titan's writer and caused him to run that off a cliff too.
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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I am morbidly-curious now that you mention this. I've only ever watched the first season of the anime and I left off in the manga when they introduced the anti-human 3DMG. I'm roughly aware that AOT goes to some weird places, and I know from watching Ironmouse that Eren does Some Shit(tm) that was apparently guaranteed to turn the audience against him.
You should watch at least the first 3 seasons; they really are something special.
I should be able to explain what I mean in a mostly spoiler-free way. The creator of Attack on Titan, Hajime Isayama, binged Game of Thrones in 2016 and got really into it, even saying that the ending of his story would be inspired by the show.
There's a point in the story where the themes and style of storytelling vastly shift and not for the better. This coincides with the split between season 3 and the "final season" and there's an easy visual cue to tell when it happened because a different studio took over animating the show. This also coincides with around when Isayama got into Game of Thrones and it started influencing his writing.
I would summarize the original themes of the show (Seasons 1-3) as RAGE, SCREAM, FIGHT. There is something existential coming for you and it won't leave a single one of you left alive. Your 'leaders' think it best if your people quietly went extinct, and as you learn they are far from the only ones... Fight with your lives and with everything at your disposal, even if it means literally turning into your mortal enemy. There are times when good friends have to fight eachother but the mission is never in question because those are the stakes. This and the military imagery gave the show heavy nationalist themes and the series began to be criticized at the end of season 3 once certain interpretations became circulated online. I found it to be extremely refreshing compared to what I'm used to.
The post-GOT era show has heavy Martin themes. War is bad and you'll be heavy-handedly browbeaten for liking the cool parts with the sobering reality of characters you like dying. Morality is very grey all of a sudden. Killing others is wrong, even if they all want you dead... it feels quite incongruent with the earlier themes of the show, even with the story that the author laid out. These themes may sound better to you as you read this but consider that they are kludged onto a work that was saying the exact opposite things for so long. It's a different bill of goods now.
I should elaborate on the storytelling changes as well. Attack on Titan's narrative framing ties you and Eren very closely together. Later this expands so you get the POV of a few other main characters at times, but the important thing is that you and the characters are almost always on the same page. You know what they know, you discover the mystery together. This was the style of storytelling until the shift I talked about, at which point it becomes basically... Game of Thrones.
Tons of characters. You don't follow characters, you check in with them to see where they are with their story. Your relationship to Eren is completely broken as he goes from being the POV character to someone you don't see the inner world of outside of 4 episodes or so. You're catching up with his plans like everyone else is. This is pretty much exactly how Martin does it and the style has its merits... just not on something that did it differently for most of its existence. This is harder to articulate for most people but I think it's why the new seasons are so jarring.
As for the ending of Eren doing Something Crazy — this is certainly where the show was going from the start. His words to a certain betraying friend are downright genocidal in rhetoric. I think in a world without the influence of Martin it'd be framed much differently by the narrative, which would make for some interesting discourse online.
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I'm not sure anyone with thematic sense should have been expecting Eren to not go into a bad place. The way it gets there is weirder than the resolution that a super-angry kid who turns into a race of cannibals goes to a bad place when worldviews are shattered.
Western young adult literature it was never going to be.
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Oh see I thought that, like many things in AoT, the ending where Erin Does Shit (which I also haven't seen yet) was going to be Evangelion-adjacent.
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