I ask this because the other day my oldest brother who is a total normie (plus in his teen years he was busy with one lady after the next while in my teen years I was researching UFO cases, reading sci-fi and buying classic rock and RnB records) was telling me about The Boys and was shocked that I wasn't watching it. I told him that I have some of the comic book and they are fine but that at this point I am just so sick of deconstruction or subversion.
I have the the Watchmen comic by Alan Moore and his life views aside it is a great comic. The only problem is that it spawned to this day so many "what if super heroes were bad" or "dark and gritty side of super heroes" stories. My two worst cases of these modern trends are the Last Jedi because I think Rian Johnson is a typical hollywood douchebag who thinks you aren't smart if you don't appreciate his movies and I question his motivations because I don't think he would give a beloved female character the "Luke treatment". Another example would be Ayra killing the Night King in Game of Thrones because while I enjoy her character in the books I can't help but think that their motivation was girl power and to say "well everyone expected Jon to fight the Night King" is a terrible reason to not do it.
Some good examples off the top of my head are Yoda in Empire Strikes back because it was an interesting surprise to see a little green guy after hearing about a great warrior/Jedi master, but there was a lesson there. Also, in the first Ice and Fire book or Game of Thrones season 1 I didn't see Ned Stark being executed because I thought he would be the main character throughout. Granted there is a pretty sad lesson there about the consequences of doing the right thing and being honest.
What are your examples?
Regarding Ned, there were theories he never actually died because:
His death takes place in an Arya chapter and she's is too far away in the book to make him out clearly, the TV show drastically cuts down the distance from the statue of Baelor to where Ned is
Ned has been in the Black Cells for weeks so even those who know him barely recognise him
None of the peasants attending even know who the fuck he is so anyone could be put infront of them and they'd believe it was whoever they were told, a concept that gets repeated with Jayne Westerling pretending to be Sansa
But GRRM isn't likely to ever publish the next book let alone the last one so even if this was going to be an actual thing it's far, far too late now for anyone to care.
Plus a lot of people don't even pick up on how some PoV characters are intentionally written as poor narrators that give incorrect accounts over and over, like most Sansa chapters.
That is true. Or how certain chapter names are different but the same person. I never heard that theory about Ned but it’s very interesting. Like you said t getting WOW would be a miracle at this point let alone ADOS