I saw an ad for the upcoming House of the Dragon and I was thinking how there was a time when I would've been pumped for GOT related content but that was before one of the best shows ever crashed and burned. I also decided not to give them another dime till GRRM finishes the books (if he ever does). Luckily I read them all between seasons 5 and 6 so I feel really bad for people who read the first one back in the 90s. It is funny but to this day I won't start a fantasy series if it isn't complete. I remember when I read Wheel of Time it felt so good to read a completed series.
Do you blame GRRM or D&D more for how the show ended? I know the Night King isn't in the books like the show (but I bet the books will have a better resolution to the dead). I also have to wonder if wokeness had anything to do with the decline of the show. Arya is one of my favorite characters and I know they claim they had planned for her to kill the night king all along but I can't help but think if the show had been made 5 to 10 years prior that Jon Snow would have had a more substantial role. I get GRRM likes to subvert tropes (in a good way unlike hollywood) but I think at the very least he should've fought the Night King, or him and Arya together, although they seem to not like the idea of men and women working together.
I also wonder if the reaction to Sansa getting raped had anything to do with the direction of the show. To this day I don't understand all these screeching feminists who get so worked up over a fictional rape but can't seem to find any sympathy for victims of ACTUAL sex trafficking. The Song of Ice and Fire is a brutal world. Plenty of men get tortured and attacked but I will never understand why men can be killed left and right but if someone says a cross word to a woman then the screeching harpies show up on social media.
Way back in S6, Ian McShane (who had a remarkably forgettable role as a short-lived & nonsensically pantheistic septon) responded to some pissed off fans that hey, it's just tits and dragons, so why don't they just chill out & get a life? D&D are in that exact same headspace. They didn't take their own show seriously, never had any genuine passion for ASOIAF or fantasy in general (by their own admission they wanted to adapt it b/c of how shocking the Red Wedding was, and that's not even halfway into GoT...) and regularly displayed contempt toward the fantasy genre, the fans and even basic storytelling ('themes are for 8th grade book reports').
Yeah, small wonder that the jackasses who aggressively minimize or remove the fantasy elements to their fantasy show because they think the 'soccer moms' and 'NFL players' they're trying to expand their audience out to can't handle it, can't stick their landing either. (And for all that, Aaron Rodgers has made no secret of how much he hates the ending and how he wished the show had ended differently anyway) Just another sad story of the inevitable happening from handing a decent property off to talentless pieces of shit who look down on its unironic fans and whose ''''writing'''' process is 90% just them huffing their own farts, in a time when we have to deal with so many similar sad stories already.
Anyway, this has basically made GoT into probably the world's most expensive gatekeeping lesson to date. Anyone who thinks the fantasy genre is just 'tits and dragons' so you shouldn't think too deeply as you consoom shouldn't be allowed anywhere near it, if one's attitude is that awful going in I can already tell they won't have anything positive to contribute and whatever opinions they might have about the genre and works belonging to it hold no value, just as I can tell dogshit neither tastes good nor has any health benefit on sight. It'd be real nice if that shallow, disrespectful and frankly cancerous mentality burned right down with GoT itself so it won't be around to destroy the next generation of big-budget fantasy TV in another 30 years in the exact same way, because right now GoT's downfall seems to have rendered the 2020s fantasy boom I had thought would happen pretty much totally stillborn.