The first three books are legitimately three of the best fantasy novels ever written. It's not unexpected that the show can't live up to that. I think it was a pretty faithful adaption for a while there though. Peter Jackson's LOTR movies were pretty great, they still don't live up to the depth of the actual books. It's similar here. I have complaints in both examples, but generally am pretty happy with what we ended up getting.
Things fell off the rails once they got to aFFC content just like they did in the books. And at this point things are so predictable and the dialogue is so bad that you kind of just have to be along for the ride to get the cliffs notes version of the plot ending. Occasionally in there we get a really entertaining episode like this last one.
Well put. My own gripes are few. Mainly pacing, use of tropes and plot armor (which the show avoided at first, while Martin is very good at that, earning them or else avoiding them), and your standard inconsistencies.
Some of those can be excused as constraints, some could've been handled better. The end result is a durn solid piece of television.
It's funny that the internet has invented such terms as hate-watching and GoT apologizing.
/oh internet you so crazy
One thing that bothers me is the Children.
Nerdmode engaged: They looked one way in season three and now they look like green Star Trek aliens (I like green Star Trek aliens). I don't care if they changed or aged up the actress, but why change the way they
look? Again I don't care if the new children look more like the book ones or not. That doesn't matter. I consider it a question of internal consistency, it's like they don't even care.
I dug AFFC and ADWD a lot, some of the writing in Dance is the best in the series so far, for one the Varamyr intro. The language is expertly structured. It's like poetry or something, though in Dance there's a few parts where it went silly. I'm trying to think of specific examples. There's this part where someone says "fart in your general direction" and it was so obvious that it "un-immersed" me, if you will, it brought me out. Stuff like that. There's a few other bits, I can't remember.
Other than that the books get better writing-wise on several levels, but plotwise it does get a wee bit bogged down, a weeee bit, though I see what Martin's doing.
And for the record, I was going to write a list of several things Cersei has done, but this will do.
lol, if we're going to talk about the books...
She convinces Jaime to (attempt to) murder Bran.
She tries to have Arya's hand cut off, and later tries to convince Jaime to maim/kill her.
Littlefinger suggests that she had one of Robert's side-squeezes sold into slavery and her two bastard children killed.
Rumor is that Sir Hugh of the Vale's death at the tourney was orchestrated by Cersei.
Cersei tries to have Robert killed in the melee, and later actually has him killed while hunting.
Instead of owning up to being a twincester, she has Ned imprisoned, which results in his death - all this despite the fact that Ned was actively trying to keep them from being killed by Robert.
She has a whore beaten as leverage against Tyrion.
She tells the Iron Bank to fuck off, which results in who knows how many deaths due to the economic fallout and chaos.
She allows Qyburn to torture and experiment on people.
She thinks one of her maids is working for Margaery and has her tortured/sacrificed for Qyburn's experiments.
She tries to have Bronn murdered for naming his kid Tyrion.
She has one of the people that tried to help her with Bronn's murder tortured/sacrificed for Qyburn's experiments.
She tries to have Margaery framed for adultery and treason, instead of herself.
Villains can have motivations. She's still a villain in this story.