When did it start falling apart?

The real answer is the end of S2, with the Theon/Reek arc from Clash of Kings was retooled into some shitty Ironborn drama. It marked the first MAJOR deviation from the books and left the story weaker because of it.

>He's watching a series about dragons and magic.
>Finds the weather unrealistic
Huh?

Seasons 1-4 are 10/10 kino
Seasons 5-8 are barely watchable bar a 1 or 2 episodes.

S4 was the last consistently good one.
S5 was real shaky.
S6 and S7 were mostly terrible with a few good moments.
There is absolutely nothing good about S8.

Season 5, minus the door

Last episode of season 3.

While I agree with you that the reveal of the convoluted Theon/Reek/Ramsay arc was handled better in ACoK, it was quite convoluted. I saw season 2 before I read the book, and that storyline (and Shadow Baby Pt. Deux) were needlessly complicated.

There were a lot of issues beforehand, don't get me wrong, but this is the exact point when it completely turned to shit.

Attached: e16445eb3668ca401ad7f712e83bd641.png (1366x768, 839K)

This. They fucked up Cat and Cersei from the very first episode.

When untalented jews decided to adapt it for tv.

In a way, I think the scene of Arya being stabbed multiple times AND falling into a shit filled canal with no real consequences really symbolizes the moment where GoT turned to shit.

Pretty much my exact thoughts

Attached: CF962878-9019-45D9-B5E5-9A902C98C6D0.jpg (1332x1520, 294K)

Why do you hate strong women?

When Tywin died

to me it's been ruined in its enterity:

it took 9 years to watch the fucking show. I lost interest in the story halfway through.

With the years I got bored of fantasy dragon fairy bullshit. the writing of the books isn't even good, it's bloated as fuck and has bad prose.

it translates to a stupid dragons story in tv. fuck I'm really desinterested in it now

First episode

It was salvageable, up about this point. Even the trainwreck that was Season 5 could've been redeemed by some kino King's Landing plotting scenes with an actually good cast like Kevan, Mace, Tommen, the High Sparrow, Margaery etc instead of Cersei sipping wine at a rooftop and Qyburn looking grim.

Attached: sept-of-baelor-GOT-wildfire.jpg (1200x600, 77K)

Season 3 was the only good one

The things is, the cast you mentioned did fuck all before they blew up. S6 KL scenes were all absolute dogshit filler up until the final episode.

When they first went to Dorne.

>Strong women=/= plot armor women
Moron

This

There was clearly plotting going on, its D&D's fault that it didn't pay off. There was Marge's plan, Kevan's plan, High Sparrow's plan etc. Pretty much the entire pre-Season 7 King's Landing cast are more interesting characters than Cersei Lannister ever was, which is why she won't be having much of a major role in the books. Cersei's shtick got old by Season 4, should've been killed off in 5.
Even the most shittiest of storylines can be saved by interesting characters, the show post-Season 6 didn't have any of those, except Euron? Qyburn maybe? And I only say those two because they were living mystery boxes whom we never really learned anything about, save for brief references to their book counterparts.

>She can't survive so many stab wounds!.That is unrealistic!!
You know that this is a series about magic and dragons?

If Tommen didn't kill himself, the King's Landing plot would at least make sense post terrorist attack.

Attached: a978f300964c5510_tumblr_inline_o9et7mySuK1u24h73_500.gif (480x270, 1.8M)

1 frame into the premier

Without Tommen, Cersei realistically would've been lynched immediately after. It would be a Paris Commune tier chimpout.

>You know that this is a series about magic and dragons?
The magic and dragons were barely involved in the plot, minus the occasional instance of blood magic after the first season.

They were seriously running low on good actors past that point.

Season 3 episode 8. The scene where Dany meets the the ambassador from Yunkai, and acts extremely smug and does a 'The Office' look into the camera lense.

Correct answer.

They committed to bastardizing the story when they dropped the Tysha storyline (which totally fucks Tyrion's arc), and confirmed it by dropping fAegon.

>there was a plan
No. There really wasn't. There were hints that planning was going on to fill the screen time, but it was just thoughtless filler leading up to the explosion. The entire KL cast save for Cersei was effectively dead from the beginning of S6.

Season 1 > Season 2 >> Season 3 >> Season 4 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Season 5 >>>>>> Season 6 >>>>>> Season 7

So yeah, it dropped in quality starting season 2 and fell apart in season 5

fAegon is contrived bullshit, too. GRRM doesn't know what he is doing.

Season 4

This was amazing, but what really made it was Tommen’s suicide.

>stannis is supposed to be a great commander
>has literally no formation and doesnt even try to form a pike wall

Without fAegon, Varys' storyline pretty much makes no sense

Anyone not saying Season 2 is an idiot or a showfag.

Start? S5E1. Everything through S4 was perfect for the show and what it was doing. Calm down, bookfags. We all know, so just stop. The pacing, acting, plot elements and internal consistency were as good as any show has ever been.

Starting with S5 they had to find motivations from characters for everything because 4 ends with Tywin dying and his actions drove most of the story after Ned's death. Go watch. Nearly everything between S2 and 4 is tied back to Tywin or a reaction to him. Except Dany but I'll get to that. So without any clever writers you had Littlefinger and Varys waste away while we started focusing on easy to write slop. Jon doing battle, Arya doing fuck all, and so on.

Now Dany was wasted almost from the start. I could see her arc ending in madness and death before S1 was even over but they did almost nothing to get her there. She wastes season after season screwing around NOT showing us strong leadership but never getting called out on her brutal acts and impulsive style because silver cunt I guess. So when she does flip we've had about 3 lines of people actually acknowledging she crucified men, burned them alive, and can't be trusted. And it's from people that chose to follow her AFTER she did them. Of course it rang hollow. But everything else? S5E1 was the first ep that wasn't great.

Season 2 was still good. Sure, some changes were for the worse, but it was still good.

Shit writing and dropping lots of material from the books, deliberately oversimplifying the plot so they could easily end the show. As game of thrones got more and more popular D&D realised they could get away with spewing out any old shit and calling it a day

No, it fucking wasn't. Stop deluding yourself. If you were posting here in the pre /got/ days you'd remember how much we were all pissed here.
>Jaime Lannister: kinslayer
>Cersei whitewashed even further
>Love with Tysha over Shae is my true love now
>no chain
>no peach
>Renly good Stannis bad because Weiss is still butthurt
>no Lightbringer
>Brienne turned into one dimensional YASS SLAY QUEEN
>no Garland
>Robb falls for the first piece of brown ass he sees which makes no sense
>no Westerlings
>no Westerlings plots
>Robb and Talisa marry under the Seven which makes no sense for either character
>no Roose in Harrenhal
>Papa Tywin shit
>no Weasel Soup
>Arya's stupid use of names which is so dumb they have to make excuses for it in season 3
>Jon's plotline neutered
>removes reasons why he spares Ygritte
>removes Qhorin's talk about how he understands Jon
>only Bran is a warg
>Qhorin just getting Jon to kill him out of nowhere, yelling his plan in front of all the wildlings MAKES PERFECT FUCKING SENSE
>"I'll bet you don't know Dagmer's real identity."
>"MAKE HIM PAY THE IRON PRICE!"
>Qarth plotline a shell of itself
>House of the Undying, one of the most important chapters in the fucking books, just glossed over and made shit
>no Belwas
>no Arstan Whitebeard
It was fucking trash, crapped on the book, and was the moment we were firmly on D&D's wild fan fiction ride and never came off. Fuck off.

>So when she does flip we've had about 3 lines of people actually acknowledging she crucified men, burned them alive
None of which is necessarily bad, given the setting.

I want to do a S1-S4 rewatch, but I also can't stand going through all the Mereen scenes, is there a cut that excludes them?

Why did they try to whitewash the Lannisters so hard anyway? They did it for Tywin, Cersei and even Tyrion, who is far from the le moral meme dwarf in the books.

I wonder if Tyrion is really supposed to be Hand in George's intended ending. It seems like he wants revenge against Westeros in the books.

When they focused too much on the White Memers only for them to be killed by fucking Arya holy shit that scene still makes me rage.

This.
Season 5 and beyond were dogshit.
Season 4 had a fantastic storyline with Tyrion and while I really hoped he would live at the time, I now look back and think it would have been better to kill him with a decent send-off to his character. He was too big to kill because audiences adored him but look what happened to him after season 4. He becomes a pathetic character in limbo as if the writers forgot he existed. The final season he was an absolute joke. Wish he died at the end of season 4

I wouldn't be shocked if he was desu. Eyes bigger than the stomach type of situation, ends up trying to fix the damage he wrought for the rest of his life.

I think he should have died in the books and the show. He served his purpose narratively.

They should've had Tywin stay alive and do Kevan's role, then he gets crossbowed by Varys who reveals he's going to be propping up Gendry Baratheon, trueborn son of Cersei and Robert. There, you get D&D's fanfic elements in there and also abridges the characters of Book Gendry, fAegon and Edric Storm so they don't have to pay for new actors.

>Varys knows about Gendry
>lets him go off to the night's watch
Kek

Season 4 when naked ramsy with his weird sexual knife game scars released the hounds, ad there were problems before like Talisa but the real cracks began to show with this scene
was the point of no return

although the year of meming about how Stannis would be revealed to be alive in the S6 opener was a lot of fun

Taking into account fAegon, what are Varys's motivations from the start of the series? How did Viserys and Daenerys factor in?

Season 5 was where I gave up as both a book fan and as a tv watcher. The dialogue and pacing were awful, and in terms of plot they threw out the largest relevant book plot (Stannis) in favour of shoehorning in a minor bookplot which hadn't gotten far enough in the books to have any payoff established, and the changes to both were just awful.
Turns out Dragon Demands basically got to the root of that in his videos. At the time I thought it was just running off a cliff because the tv writers were at the end of the last book material series given broad outlines of what happened in the unpublished books and they didn't match with what they'd done set-up for in previous seasons, and so season 5 was unavoidably shitty because the relatively untalented (but still presumably competent) tv writers were scrambling to salvage something coherent from sudden new information and gaps in plot that GRRM left them. Because season 6 seemed to more or less give John Stannis' original plotline and had okay pacing and plotting in tv show terms, I thought that was it.
In truth it's the tv writers getting a free hand and gratuitously veering off course deliberately because they could after the show became popular enough with season 3 and 4 for HBO to let them have free reign, because that was HBO's style: to give producers as much freedom to do what they wanted without "corporate" meddling. It failed because GoT was an adaptation rather than something D&D made themselves, and D&D were only given the job because even as nepotistic hires they lied about their competency.

>BUT LE DRAGONS
fuck off with this reddit meme

first scene of s07e01 with Arya dabbing on House of Frey. All the other answers are wrong.

actually you're right.. damn
I guess I didn't notice because they were still following the basic plotline which is well written and put together/ I hadn't read the books yet

George didn't have faegon in mind in the first books he came up with that later

HBO did shit like force Bronn down our throats. D&D are the ones GRRM gave control of the series over. D&D ended the series prematurely. HBO didn't have creative control.

Season 2 when there wasn't enough experienced talent to keep the shitshow together.

After they fucked over Stannis.

He for sure had him in mind in ACOK though. Connington and a mummer's dragon swaying on polls to a cheering crowd were already dropped. Along with the questions about the Dornish and their loyalty.

pretty sure George didn't have a whole lot in mind even during the early stages of writing ASoS

>blackfyre rebellions
>bloodraven
>aegon/ golden company
>euron/ victarion and the later ironborn plotline
>dornish masterplan
And probably loads of other things that will end up being crucial by the end of the series,

Season 3 was a bit concerning, but I'd say season 4.

>HBO did shit like force Bronn down our throats.
Really? What else did HBO do as opposed to D&D?
Also Bronn isn't as big a character in the books but he appears consistently and has a plot that advances.
>D&D are the ones GRRM gave control of the series over. D&D ended the series prematurely. HBO didn't have creative control.
I know this/I agree. I think if HBO had more hardasses slapping down D&D the series might have been saved, but not possible after season 5 as it was.

He is a hack, after all.
medium.com/migration-issues/westeros-is-poorly-designed-3b01cf5cdcaf

Attached: 1565993740877.png (472x624, 219K)

ACOK was after viserys and dany, they didn't factor into Varys' plans cause he didn't have plans yet, the plan now is that varys wanted to cause chaos with the dothraki so faegon could save them, but that's pretty dumb

But he had a secret Targaryen/Blackfyre/whatever in his pocket the entire time? Yeah, I am calling bullshit on the fAegon plot.

Plus Illyrio gave dragon eggs to dany for some reason even though the plan was to just use her and viserys and throw them away

this. season 4 was decent but there’s a very noticeable drop in quality. everything else was pretty bad.

Attached: D4292C16-173F-41D5-B14C-07F554D7F211.jpg (800x600, 57K)

Makes sense to me. Robert is a beloved ruler, if Aegon goes against him, he's an invader. But if he's invading invaders, he's a rescuer.
They were literally just decorations.
I'm not saying GURM is perfect. Far from it. But fAegon is a solid plot. Just introduced too late in the game.

Illyrio gave her the eggs after he plotted to sell her to Dothraki, who appear not to have been a part of the fAegon plot at all. Even if Illyrio and Varys didn't expect the eggs to hatch, they could have sold them instead of giving them to Dany for no reason.

The fAegon plot seems like a convenient excuse for Dany to have opposition when she returns to Westeros.

>But fAegon is a solid plot. Just introduced too late in the game.
Then he is not a solid plot. He is a retcon at best, because GRRM realized he fucked up.

Robert's rule is doomed and Varys could easily just encourage the collapse and then have Faegon come in to bring stability. There's a million things like the obvious Robert's kids all being blonde, all make more sense than bringing in a horde. Also makes more sense to just foster Viserys and dany instead of some random kid while letting them live on the streets

It's not a retcon if everything fits. It just has a very bungled reveal.

killing stannis

It is a retcon if it wasn't apart of the original continuity.

There's nothing wrong with Stannis. Or Renly. Tywin has plenty of followers as well. Even if realm falls into chaos, as it did, the people would likely unify against a foreign, unknown threat.
>Viserys and dany
Too close to Aerys. Aegon is one step removed and not inbred, thus more palatable to the masses. He is also probably mostly free of any dragonblood taint that might make him crazy later down the line.
We don't really know what GURM had in mind in AGOT.

Why do mods keep deleting on-topic threads?

Season 5 episode 1
There were book "disconnects" but it was all w/e because shit made sense. Then it turned into a fever dream and by season 7 we were in full "I can't wait to start directing starwars" mode.

Please, explain the Varys, Illyrio, Daenerys, Viserys, fAegon, Dothraki, and dragon egg plot in a way that makes sense.

It is clear that fAegon was invented way after the fact.

After Tommen killing himself out of something Cersei did, actual Cersei would've killed herself too. Tommen was literally the only reason she did anything.

Season 4 is when it went to shit.

It fell apart exponentially with each passing season. So it got about half as good as whatever previous season with every passing season.

All of those people are gonna fight, like they did, after robert dies, the dothraki invading might drive the people to support Stannis or anyone else more so than Faegon who's related to the two people, and that plan causes a bunch of unnecessary death, people uniting behind a strong leader after westeros falls apart makes just as much sense. And the inbreeding doesn't really matter, Aerys was just one madman before him was mostly fine

When Tyrion and Jorah sailed through a landmass roughly the length of the Italian peninsula in like a day or two. The Smoking Sea is a literal sea, not a foggy marsh - that was supposed to be the Sorrows. Littlefinger teleporting everywhere and Daenerys flying ridiculous distances that shouldn't be possible, Jesus fuck I hate being a book reader sometimes. You acknowledge shit like this.

Attached: Valyria_5x05_(4).png (1920x1078, 2.13M)

They aren't deleting GoT threads.

Purple wedding was peak. Hardhome is walking dead meme

Just skip em you dumbass

The Hound vs Brienne fight was the last good fight and the last high moment. Arya laughing at the gates of the moon sealed it all.

Season 4 is when the characters started devolving into shallow caricatures of themselves, the writing dropped in quality, and it became the series of what rather than how or why.

Jon vs that White Walker was good.

The exact moment Tyrion offered Shae diamonds that could buy half a continent and she turned it down.

That's when it went from "sticking to the source material and changing some things but at least with some reason" to "making shit up just to make shit up with absolutely no plan and then forgetting that you made shit up in the first place with the end result being that nothing makes any sense".

>D&D were only given the job because even as nepotistic hires they lied about their competency.
How was it nepotistic and what did they lie about?