I have HBO Max (plan on cancelling once I see all the older shows I want to see) and I don't care to see House of the Dragon considering it is based on a show that will go down in history for one of the biggest crash landings for a popular show. As much as I blame GRRM for most of the issues with Game of Thrones and can't believe HBO would even work with him again, I did enjoy the Ice and Fire books (along with some of his sci-fi). I was wondering if the Fire and Blood book is worth the read if I can find a used copy of course.
Also, I'm surprised they don't tell these actors/actresses of these shows to shut up. These women droning on about how it is all about feminism really make me want to tune in I tell ya.
At least before the first power narrative took over GOT you had some equality of evil characters with men and women being bad
You know a show is not worth watching when the marketing and the actors are only talking about how empowering it is and how women are finally the ones who "rule".
TBF: the ones who crashed it into the ground were the showrunners. They wanted to wash their hands and be done with it faster. You can tell already in the penultimate season that they were kinda done. Stuff feels rushed, some stuff makes no sense. And then the final season gave it the final push. GOT will go down in history as one of the worst endings to a cult series phenomenon, it could've been one of the if not the most influential series but they had to fuck it all up because they were done with it and wanted to finish it faster. IIRC: HBO even gave em another season if they needed it.
Still think the signs were on the wall when characters like lady stoneheart did not appear.
Gotta disagree that D&D are solely or even mostly to blame for the last couple seasons of GoT, tbh. They may have rushed it and made up a boatload of nonsense, but they only signed on to adapt Martin's work, not create a partially original one of their own. They did skip over a lot of stuff from the last two books as well but to be frank, like 80-90% of AFFC and ADWD is unadaptable filler that wouldn't make good television. (A fifth of AFFC is just Brienne meandering around the Riverlands, looking for a character the readers know isn't even in the same kingdom and accomplishing basically nothing of importance to the narrative)
And for all that, even if D&D had painstakingly adapted every page from those two last books in the series to stretch GoT out to twelve or thirteen seasons (with the latest season airing this year)...Martin STILL hasn't published Winds of Winter yet as of 2022, nevermind Dream of Spring. Yeah, we can't forget the next book isn't even the last in the series lmao, and realistically he's probably going to need an eighth or even ninth book to have any hope of satisfactorily wrapping up all the new plot threads he just introduced in AFFC/ADWD without rushing the narrative as badly as D&D themselves did. I honestly wouldn't be able to blame anybody for wanting out at that point (the showrunners and actors would've been working on GoT for even longer than Andrew Lincoln had on The Walking Dead by then), and GRRM's inability to finish his work means it wouldn't even matter all that much if D&D had found some eager volunteer to hand GoT off to.
As for HOTD, I'm just looking forward to how the 'yas kween slay' crowd will react to the ending to the Dance of the Dragons, which Martin already wrote fairly extensively about in The World of Ice and Fire and now the Fire and Blood books. Either they're going to melt down as hard as Dany stans did after S8 or Martin's gonna have to radically change his ending, in which case he'd further demonstrate that he no longer has an ounce of confidence or creative integrity and I'd lose respect for him that I didn't even know I still had.