HBO tried to make the line go up by cutting two episodes off the second season in the midst of the writer's strike. Like no exaggeration, the season 2 finale ends in a way that makes it immediately obvious two more episodes were supposed to exist. They were simply truncated along with the all the payoff for many of this season's character arcs and plot lines.
One of the writers even made a statement that an eight episode season wasn't their decision. Unfortunately the news of that must have hit them too late in production to fully accommodate that in the writing.
Except on all the subreddits for this show, the prevailing opinion amongst dipshit redditors is that the writers are cutting book events to make time for LGBTQ asoiaf fanfiction.
While that'd be based if true, it's not. Like wtf? Do these people live in a different universe? Are they watching a different dragon show? Redditors ain't alright, man. These people watch the enshittification of media in real time, and their lack of media literacy results in them going on queerphobic witch hunts and throwing wild assignment of blame at anything but HBO and capitalism.
Isn't it also a finished book? So anything queer was written by Georgie himself. It's like LotR having non-whites...people are Jackson film casuals where the Nordic aesthetic was a conscious choice by the filmmakers. The books are vague enough Aragorn was Native American in the animated film from the 70s lol.
They did the same shit with The Witcher. Even Star Wars had this happen "Nooooooo stormtroopers can't be black! They're clones!" Luke talks about joining the stormtrooper academy in a New Hope. Stormtroopers being clones was the retcon.
I'm pretty sure it's written with the conceit that it's a historical document, rather than in the style of a traditional novel, so the granularity isn't at a level that necessarily includes secret love affairs, and even some elements that are included could theoretically be character assassination in universe by a biased historian.
Like one character in the book is noted to have died after falling off her horse, and in the show she is murdered on screen by another character.
I believe they've also changed some things (folding two characters into one, making characters more or less influential, etc), which, to be clear, isn't a value judgement, I think that is often a good idea for an adaptation.
Mushroom only tells the truth, especially when he says his dick is as big as his head.
The showrunners aren't following the book very closely at all. They're just kinda adding their own plotlines, character relationships, characterization, etc, and using "well the book is an unreliable history" as an excuse as if the book didn't give three competing narratives and enough information for a reader to figure out what's probably true and what's definitely not. They've taken it from "here's an unreliable history, puzzle it out" to "this history is unreliable, so let's just write whatever we want."
Also in the final episode
cw sexual violence
There is a really awful scene where a character talks about all the abuse she suffered, and the other character responds by making out with her. This was not in the book, there is nothing like it anywhere in the book, none of the three narratives have it make any sense, and it was in fact an unscripted scene that the actresses just wanted to do.Haven't watched the show but the book was pretty good and the show ruined some of the most impactful scenes.
Also Philosophy Tube plays a pirate who has been changed to a trans man with a cuckold fetish and gets way too much screentime. It was very confusing.
Also she didn't like the idea of playing a pirate that does horrible things and comes from a society where slavery is the norm...being a bad person. She had the writers make it clear that all those wives are fully consenting when their pirate lord husband pimps them out. Can't have a bad guy be a bad guy.
Edit: oh! And when she's introduced, a character literally asks her if she's a philosopher. Like real on the nose.
Abbie is REALLY trying to break through
Also also! The book had a crossdressing (male) pirate captain in it, and it would have been so so cool to make her a trans woman and have Abigail play her! Say that the east has alchemical hrt and trans people and that Racallio was just slandered by ignorant historians! He even hated slavery! It was a perfect chance to show imperfect history, but instead they made admiral Lohar kinda confusing.
I really like the gamo books but this is not a good adaptation.
The story is that the Stormtroopers as an organization grew out of the Clone Troopers, but started recruiting normal humans after the Order 66. Not that it really matters.
The Rohirrim speak the irl mercian dialect of Old English. Tolkien was for sure going for Germanic which is close enough. My Black Elf issue in rings of power isn't that everyone isn't white, it's and this is mostly the proto Hobbits and men, elves can be pretty reasonably explained, that it's done kinda at random. Like in an entire town of white dudes there's 3 black charscrers. Where are the other black people then? Do these people have family? Are they from somewhere else either recently or ancestral? Big part of Tolkien non LOTR middle earth stuff has a great deal to do with the movements and mixings of different cultures over a vast span of years and by the second age thousands of years of migrations and cultural exchange has happened and could be reflected in the diversity of the casting. It could be made to blend very well with tolkien's world building. It reflects more on the show being super lazy in that regard pretty much across the board more than anything.
The two gay ships people are having a meltdown over don't happen in the book. In one case the relationship between the two characters is very different and both ships likely wouldn't be depicted whether they occurred because the book is written as a history text book, with a biased author pulling from biased sources.
The book is based on is a historical book written years after the events, with contradictory relates. For the war the show is adapting, the main sources are a maester and the queen's buffoon. Also, this second season were something like 20 pages of the book, where only 3 relevant things are mentioned, blood and cheese, the dragon fight in rook nest and the dragon seeds. Basically everything else is made up by the showrunners.