Re: Last TV show you watched
 

I haven't read the books (I'd prefer to start Martin with stories I don't know, Fevre Dream, Sand Kings and short stories in particular) but it seems to me like the Sandor gazing into the fire moment was supposed to be going somewhere. Could swear there was a few more things that suggested it wasn't all going to be mystery.
The Stoneheart subplot must go somewhere. Perhaps more resurrections?

Was a bit disappointed that Rila Fukushima only appeared once. Why get a relatively famous actress to be glanced at for a minute and then never reappear?

I hadn't heard those particular criticisms of Jon's story but since the show's so popular, there's just a huge variety of criticisms.
Really surprised me that so many taken offense to the very idea of Dany taking a bad turn, but there was a lot of talk of newcomers who just saw this as a costume soap who maybe didn't see the red wedding stuff. I heard employees at supermarkets talking about the show multiple times, so the popularity is kind of stunning.

Re: Last TV show you watched
 

Thing is for the last few years I've been frequenting a lot of the places where the show is discussed (such as the Watchers of the Wall website, the Westeros forums, the ASOIAF reddit, and, of course, reading many of the mainstream episode reviews and so-called think pieces), so I've been exposed to many of the pro and con viewpoints in regards to the series (both the books and the TV show).

Contrary to what most of the fandom thinks I actually think that dropping Lady Stoneheart was a good idea (and I'm not just saying that because I find Beric Dondarrion to be a much more interesting character, both in the books and the TV show). It's bizarre, Martin has critiqued Tolkien for bringing Gandalf back to life because he felt it diluted the impact of his death, then he goes and does the same thing with Catelyn Stark. I mean I can see why they needed to keep one resurrection in there to set it up for when Jon Snow is eventually brought back to life, but... I don't know. I can see fans being more upset if Lady Stoneheart was a more prominent character, but she literally has like 1 page at the end of book 3, 5 or so in book 4, and didn't even appear in book 5. So unless she does a real lot in book 6, so far she has seemed a pretty pointless addition.

I must admit that I do find reading about Martin's struggles with the series to be macabre fascinating in a way. It seems like he was in control of the ship in the 1990's but ever since finishing the 3rd book of ASOIAF the wheels seem to have come off and the story has become kind of directionless.

Re: Last TV show you watched
 

(and yes, for the curious as I read the book series, specifically the trade paperbacks/hardcovers, I kept a running page total for every single character, mainly to satisfy my own curiosity. So, for example, if you wanted to know how many pages that, say, the High Sparrow appeared in for book 4, I could tell you he appeared in a total of 11 pages... or if you wanted to know how many pages he appears in for the series as a whole, I could tell you he has appeared in 15 pages. Some results surprised me: both Tywin and Jaime Lannister, for example, appears in a mere 8 pages in book 2, while Robb Stark only has 9).

Re: Last TV show you watched
 

Wow, is this that a habit with other books or did you do this to come prepared to discussions?

I cant see Stoneheart disappearing. No way is the Stark mum just going to be of no real consequence. I'd guess she'd be pretty important.
As far as I gather, Gandalf is basically the same person when reborn but Catelyn is not just bitter but fundamentally changed?

Keeping her in the show wouldn't have made sense because again, who knows what Martin is planning for her?

Should also say that I think Michelle Fairley was one of the best actors in the series. She gave it a gravitas it didn't have enough of later on.

I think the Alt Shift X youtube channel guy was an intelligent commentator of the show.

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It's hard for me to hone in on specific criticisms of the final season's writing as almost nothing worked properly. The major beats all felt correct to me in theory, and I'm sure the books will hit them, but they felt unearned, boring and flat as the writers aren't talented enough to do them justice and lack Martin's flair for characterisation and structural set-up/pay-off. No quotable lines of dialogue or clever ways of structuring or worldbuilding. Just all very linear and Hollywood cheese. I can't see any of their inventions for the final few seasons going down as Thrones at its best. Dany razing King's Landing to the ground was always going to happen, so I didn't mind it and defended it as an obvious future book element, but Arya ending the White Walker threat felt inconsequential and underwhelming as it didn't mean anything dramatically.

Martin's Sandkings is brilliant. A Feast for Crows is a step down from A Storm of Swords in a lot of ways, but it contains some of his most beautiful prose. I am slightly expecting The Winds of Winter to come out next year and hope he manages to finish this excellent series some day, but Robert Jordan's demise didn't stop me from loving Wheel of Time. I'd really rather have no ending than a terrible one.

TLDR: D & D can't write.

Re: Last TV show you watched
 

Generally I only keep page tallies for characters in books that form part of a series, though sometimes I will do it for a standalone book if it's one that I really care about (such as la-bas by Huysmans). It just interests me I guess to see how much each characters appear in each book. In the case of ASOIAF/GOT it was interesting also to compare how much the characters appear in the books compared to how much they do in the show. Take Euron Greyjoy, for example. While I'm not crazy about how he was depicted (probably more so than for any other character), a lot of people complained he didn't do as much compared to the books. But in fact he's barely appeared in the books at all: he literally only has like 14 pages in book 4 and that's it (though I've heard he appears in one of the book six promo chapters). That's a good example of a character who has gotten a lot of hype from the book readers, but whose actual merit has yet to be really proved. If anything the show has given many of the minor characters MORE face-time. Like Grey Worm has only had 24 pages in all 5 books total, yet has done much more on the show. Of course in some cases the reverse is true: Barristan Selmy has done much more in the books than he ever did on the show, for example.

I find it amusing though that people complain about the bad "sexy" dialogue in the shows when the book series has some howlers as well: in FEAST FOR CROWS alone you have Samwell Tarly's penis being described as a "fat pink mast" and a woman's vagina being described as a "Myrish swamp." He seems to have a yen for wide dark nipples as well because those get a lot of shout-outs. In any event I certainly don't watch the shows or read the books for the stunning dialogue.

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Littlefinger's death in particular was a big letdown. He deserved a much more memorable sendoff.

For all the complaints of the early seasons having the HBO nudity pandering, I think pandering in the last few seasons was a much bigger problem. Or fanservice as some call it.

But as I said earlier, most of the final season episodes did really excite me despite all the flaws because of what had been built up across the series and because it was executed just well enough to cause frisson for me at the big moments.

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I kinda like that one!

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Yeah, I don't think much of the neckbeard fan theories that have been circulating the rounds the last few years but I did like the idea of Littlefinger faking his own death, and for awhile I was convinced that that would be the 3rd "oh ####" moment that Martin told D&D about (I think it's safe to say that Dany razing King's Landing is, in all probability, that moment). I think they were going for a callback to Ned Stark's mistake (going south, where he was totally out of his depth), just having Littlefinger do it in the opposite direction, but it didn't quite work.

Certainly the last season had some epic moments, visually speaking. I liked the Christian symbolism of Beric's last stand, the shot of the 3 dragons fighting above the clouds of Winterfell, thought Varys' execution was well-handled (I really loved the way that Drogon just came out of the darkness; it's probably the most terrifying he's ever looked, which is saying something), and I really think that Cleganebowl lived up to the hype (which kind of surprised me because I wasn't as looking forward to it as a lot of the fan base was). I even didn't mind that Qyburn (one of my top ten favorite characters) was killed by his own creation, because I've always been a sucker for the Frankenstein trope.

I thought the last episode had some great moments as well: the long conversation that Jon and Tyrion have before Jon sets off to confront Dany (which I think may be one of the best scenes in the show's entire run), the great shot of Dany with Drogon's wings behind her, the catharsis factor of watching Drogon melt the Iron Throne (I like how it was dragonfire that created the throne in the beginning and dragonfire that undid it in the end). Brienne finishing Jaime's entry in the White Book was a nice little touch as well.

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Visually? I'm a near tireless cgi hater, so I didn't really dig it that much but I thought King's Landing was looking pretty good.

This made me laugh
HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones - Thread 2. There are a lot of nerds.

There was also a similarly funny drawing of Bran getting his warged crows to carry Arya over the trees to drop her on the Night King.