The later seasons of Game of Thrones are divisive to say the least, but their most criticized aspects can often be traced back to the earliest episodes, which got most fans hooked in the first place.
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Use of shock value
- Three scenes from the show's later seasons got considerable criticism for their use of Gratuitous Rape, which many viewers found to be in poor taste. First there was the scene in Season 4 where Jaime forcefully has sex with Cersei right next to Joffrey's corpse, with the creators being inconsistent on whether it was rape (even though the scene was fully consensual in the book). Then Season 5 had Sansa's brutalization at the hands of Ramsay Snow (which happened to a completely different character in the book), and Gilly's Attempted Rape by the Night's Watch (which wasn't in the books at all). But signs of this trend could be seen as early as the first episode, where Khal Drogo outright rapes Daenerys on her wedding night, even though the book's version of that scene had him simply arousing her until she consented (albeit with Questionable Consent due to her age and the underlying circumstances). This scene also got some criticism at the time, but it was quickly forgiven due to being a relatively minor change compared to the later ones, and because it was used to show the character development of Daenerys from a weak young girl to a strong leader. Many of the later seasons lack any reason for it beyond simply being "dark and edgy".
- The series has always teetered on the brink of Torture Porn, with frequent depictions of brutal executions and punishments that sometimes push the boundaries of good taste. Even Season 1 raised a few eyebrows with an extended scene where a would-be assassin is punished for an attempt on Daenerys' life by being stripped naked and forced to march behind her rider column until collapsing from exhaustion. But many critics thought the show really crossed the line with the treatment of Ros the prostitute (who's brutally killed offscreen by Joffrey and gets a gratuitous camera {{pan}} up her naked corpse) and Theon Greyjoy (who is tortured and castrated by Ramsay Snow over the course of multiple episodes). Not only were those later scenes extra-unpleasant to watch (even by Game of Thrones standards), they were also conceived entirely for the show; Ros' death didn't happen at all in the books (since Ros was a Canon Foreigner who didn't even exist in the books), and most of Theon's torture was just implied in the books—while the show depicted it in stomach-churning detail.
- It's become something of a running joke that the show includes so much tragedy and human cruelty that even its biggest fans sometimes find it hard to watch. The thing is, though, it was generally easier to tolerate in the earlier seasons because the writers at least played fair and allowed the tragic storylines and depraved characters to develop organically — so it never felt like they were just tormenting the audience for the sake of it. The infamous "Red Wedding" is a good example: sure, it was tough to see the Starks betrayed and massacred, but it still felt like a fitting climax because it made sense; Robb's Honor Before Reason mentality had long been established as one of his defining traits, and it was well-established that the Lannisters had a talent for buying loyalty. Even Joffrey's sadism (as over-the-top as it could be) wasn't that unbelievable, since it was made clear that Tywin and Tyrion were the ones really running the show, and Joffrey's cruelty served a purpose of showing the problems in King's Landing. But compare all of that to the later seasons, when the Boltons become the unchallenged rulers of the North, even though it was never made clear how they were strong or respected enough to command that much influence. Where Joffrey was a chilling portrait of a budding sociopath enabled by his powerful family, Ramsay Bolton is practically an outright serial killer, making it a bit less believable that he could handle ruling an entire kingdom by himself.
Use of character mortality
- Though the first season set the tone in regards to character mortality, with the death of Ned, character deaths seemed to go up rapidly after the show gained a reputation for them, and even more so after the showrunners ran out of published material and started to make their own (in Season 6). In later seasons, major characters died
Once an Episode, with many coming Back for the Dead, leading up to accusations of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring. - Starting in Season 5 when the show began to overtake the books, they started killing off many characters who weren't yet dead in the books. They got some confirmations via Word of God (most notably Shireen Baratheon) but some like Ser Barristan, Osha, Rickon Stark, Myrcella, and Doran were considered a bit anticlimactic or done just for the sake of it. This actually happened back in Season 3 with Talisa Stark - who is killed in the Red Wedding - when her book counterpart Jeyne Westerling survives. This one worked because the character disappeared from the narrative afterwards in the books anyway, and in the show the character wasn't too well liked.
Character arcs
- As Lindsay Ellis points out, Pandering to the Base was a major issue with the series even in its glory days; it was just easier to tolerate when it mostly affected minor plot developments rather than major storylines that developed for years. In particular: many major characters' arcs seem to have been influenced less by what made sense for the narrative, and more by how much the audience seemed to like them, which led to problems down the road when the conclusions to those arcs were reached and no longer made sense for their characters. This was an understandable pitfall for a series with one of the biggest and loudest online fandoms in the history of television.
- Tyrion Lannister's arc was an early example of this. In both the show and the novels, he's presented as a clever, charismatic antihero who—while undeniably flawed—is generally one of the more good-natured nobles from the Great Houses. But when audiences fell in love with the character thanks to Peter Dinklage's performance, the writers often seemed to downplay many of his less sympathetic traits (like his ruthlessness, his manipulativeness, his attitude towards women and later his vindictiveness) in favor of making him a straight-up hero. Among other things, this led to his romance with Shae being re-imagined as a genuinely loving relationship, rather than a (slightly creepy) contractual affair between a sex worker and her wealthy client who pays her to pretend that she loves him. And while this decision wasn't necessarily bad on its own, it ultimately led to problems when it came time to adapt Shae's death in Season 4—an important plot point that couldn't really be Adapted Out without affecting the rest of the narrative. Since the showrunners apparently wanted to avoid making such a popular character too unsympathetic, they changed the story considerably; so while the books have Tyrion strangling Shae to death in a fit of jealous rage after he finds his father buying her services, the show has her betraying Tyrion at his trial, with Tyrion later killing her in self-defense after she tries to stab him. Many fans and critics took issue with the resulting story for being inconsistent with both characters' established characterizations, but most were willing to forgive it.
- People weren't so forgiving when it came to the final episodes of the series, where Daenerys Targaryen's arc finally had to be brought to its long-awaited conclusion. Much like with Tyrion, the writers apparently picked up on how popular Daenerys was thanks to Emilia Clarke's performance, so the preceding seasons generally portrayed her as somewhat more sympathetic (and, at the same time, more war-like) than in the books. As a result, while the books generally depict her as the highly ambitious heir who starts out wanting to rule the Seven Kingdoms because she believes it's her birthright, but gradually gains experience, doubts herself, and comes to care about the smallfolk, the show spends about six straight seasons showing her as an unambiguously heroic Warrior Princess who wants to "break the wheel". There was nothing initially wrong with this change—but it led to major problems when the writers ended the series with her massacring thousands of innocent civilians in the siege of King's Landing, strongly implying that she was Evil All Along. The inconsistent writing wasn't exactly worse than in Tyrion's arc in Season 4, but it was harder to forgive when it was in a hugely important plot point in the series finale.
- Another criticism is the overuse of characters the producers liked (or the characters whose actors they liked) or whom were popular with the fandom. As a result, "sassy" characters like Sandor, Bronn, & Olenna were given way more screen time than their book counterparts, especially past the parts where their characters had ducked out of the story. But this was easier for critics and viewers to accept since the characters in question were more morally gray characters who were both entertaining enough on their own merits to feel worth seeing often and possessing of enough comparatively likeable traits to make it easier for audiences to stomach continuing to see them around. Unfortunately, the same could not really be said for the much more controversial choice to allow similarly extended presence in the narrative to be given to Cersei, a more morally black character who ends up practically never facing any true lasting consequences for her actions and also being left with virtually nothing of further real importance to do (there were many jokes about Lena Headey being paid lots of money to look out a window while drinking wine in the last two seasons) until her "sympathetic" death in the penultimate episode, by which point a lot of viewers and critics felt that she'd already well overstayed her welcome.
- Tyrion Lannister's arc was an early example of this
Use of fast travel
- Season 7 was much criticized for being inconsistent about the size of Westeros and frequently distorting travel times for the sake of drama. The climax of "Beyond the Wall" is often cited as the moment that finally killed Willing Suspension of Disbelief; in order for Daenerys' climactic Big Damn Heroes moment to happen, Gendry is forced to send a message for help across the entire continent, and Daenerys is forced to fly back across the span of the same continent after receiving his message—all in the span of maybe 24 hours. As fans have noted, this was a problem in earlier seasons too. In Season 1, Catelyn sails from Winterfell to King's Landing in just one episode, managing to arrive before Ned. Most notably, Littlefinger regularly popped up all over the Seven Kingdoms whenever the plot required it, sometimes even traveling through war zones with surprising ease, to the point where fans started to joke that he secretly had a jet pack. Most people were willing to overlook that, though, since it led to plenty of compelling moments of character interaction, and wasn't usually a case of breaking the plot to save the main characters from certain death. It strained credulity a bit more when the Sand Snakes seemingly teleported from the docks of Sunspear to the harbor of King's Landing, and later when Varys somehow managed to travel from Sunspear to Meereen (crossing an entire ocean) just for the sake of a single dramatic moment in the finale.
- Season 7 also made more noticeable the show's use of Easy Logistics, which was there from the beginning. While Robb Stark having to marry a Frey daughter to cross a river was a major plot point, in general there are lords able to raise up armies of tens of thousands of men and move them around a continent at will. Daenerys gains a force of some 8000 Unsullied warriors and 5000 untrained boys that are not yet Unsullied, yet she is able to march this force through a desert and take city after city without a single mention of supply lines or who's running any of the logistics. Starting in Season 7, however, the Easy Logistics became so blatant that it was impossible to ignore.
Use of plot armour
- Many fans complained about the massive amount of Plot Armor the characters got in the final seasons, more specifically in the already criticized "Wight Hunt" and the Battle of Winterfell, where minor characters were killed with impunity whereas the main characters survived near-certain death, but these begun as early as Season 4, where Yara attempted to rescue Theon. Ramsay fended 20 Ironborn hardened killers while shirtless and without armor, and the only reason he wasn't killed off was because the plot needed him to survive until the Battle of the Bastards, despite Yara and others having the option of simply attacking him when they got the chance or grabbing Theon and running from there. Later in Season 6, Arya was stabbed in the gut nearly ten times and then flung into the sewer by the Waif (effectively a death sentence in the semi-realistic Medieval European Fantasy setting of the show), but she was hale and hearty after a little trip to Lady Crane and back to fighting condition in no time, despite major characters in early seasons being outright incapacitated or dead with less severe injuries than what Arya got in that episode (for example, Arya's father Ned was rendered bed-ridden for weeks after a Lannister soldier stabbed him in the leg in Season 1).
- The controversial Battle of Winterfell in "The Long Night" had many problems that were actually present in the more acclaimed Battle of the Bastards back in Season 6. One example was the characters grasping the Idiot Ball so the antagonistic force could gain the upper hand as means of raising the tension. Similarly, characters having Plot Armor was also present in Battle of the Bastards, with Jon surviving many scenarios that should have killed him. Viewers were more forgiving of the Battle of the Bastards because it was visually impressive and exciting which made it stand out back when large-scale battles in the series then were far and few between as a result of budgetary constraints. The Battle of Winterfell, on the other hand, was easy to criticize due to the lighting notoriously making it hard for viewers to even praise the visuals and intense action scenes. Ironically, the flaws highlighted in the Battle of Winterfell caused fans to reexamine the Battle of the Bastards with a more critical eye.
- The show's version of Euron Greyjoy is derided by many for being an Invincible Villain whose main purpose is to constantly triumph over the protagonists just as they were on the cusp of victory. Many of the flaws in Euron's writing had roots in his predecessor Ramsay Bolton. Examples of Ramsay being an Invincible Villain include his battle with Yara's Ironborn and winning despite wearing no form of protection, killing his father Roose without suffering any consequences even though such an action is taboo in Westeros, and having much of the North on his side despite acting like an Ax-Crazy tyrant who constantly mistreats them. Many were more forgiving towards Ramsay as he still had to face some consequences of his actions, with his petty torture of Theon and mistreatment of Sansa costing the Boltons important political hostages and leave him and the Bolton forces as a whole with a low supply of allies that would ultimately end up biting Ramsay in the ass by the end of Season 6. It is also all the more cathartic when Ramsay finally gets his comeuppance when Sansa feeds him to his own hounds, ensuring that his Karma Houdini Warranty has expired. Euron, unlike Ramsay, suffers absolutely no consequences whatsoever. Even his death at Jaime's hands, in addition to being less of poetic justice due to not being at the hands of a person he has particularly wronged, sees him die with smug satisfaction, robbing any sense of catharsis the audience might have had at seeing his downfall.
Others/Mixed
- Daenerys's much criticised storyline in Season 2, in which she spends most of the run time in Qarth demanding "where are my dragons?" was actually one hurled at the very book it was adapting. In A Clash of Kings, her chapters are viewed as pretty weak, with the only mild glimmer of hope being her visit to the House of the Undying providing foreshadowing for many important events that would happen in later books. However, as criticised as these were, she was still only in five chapters and the sequences were not that long. The show however, in the hopes of capitalising on Daenerys being Season 1's Breakout Character, resorted to egregious use of Padding to feature her in every episode except "Blackwater" - so the arc padded out the already meandering source material with an extraneous subplot about her dragons being stolen, Doreah making a Face–Heel Turn and Irri being killed off.
- The tendency for the show to take a subplot given to a female character in the books and either cut it or reduce its importance in favor of some of the other, male characters, often by killing her off or putting her in a Damsel in Distress situation. While the shift of focus from Catelyn Stark to her son Robb in the first few seasons was more understandable due to the shift from the POV format of the books and she was still given plenty to do, later seasons saw the removal or altering of several important subplots such as the almost complete removal of Selyse Baratheon, eventually resulting in her death by her own hand in Season 5; killing off Talisa Stark in the Red Wedding in Season 3 while her book counterpart survives; the complete removal of Lady Stoneheart, with the Brotherhood Without Banners still under Lord Beric Dondarrion and the responsibility of the BWB as the resisting force in the Riverlands removed. This extended to gratuitously killing off the Canon Foreigner Ros at the hands of Joffrey, solely to establish how evil Littlefinger is and have him voice one of his pompous monologues, and shifting Sansa Stark's story arc from becoming Littlefinger's Bastard Understudy to that of her friend Jeyne Poole from the books, which results in the controversial rape by Ramsay Snow. One episode even changed an anecdote about Doran, Elia, and Oberyn's mother, the Unnamed Princess of Dorne, to being about their father instead, erasing both Dorne's equal primogeniture and the political importance of the woman who was, during her life, the only female ruler of one of Westeros' regions.
- The more lenient critics of Season 7-8 note that many of its controversial moments (the White Walkers being abruptly dealt with, Jamie returning to Cersei in spite of his Character Development, Daenerys' Face–Heel Turn, etc.) actually fit the series being a Genre Deconstruction, subverting audience expectations. The difference was then it had the intricate writing to make those developments come off as logical, realistic results of decisions that the characters had made, while here it came off as contrived (discarding previous characterization) in order to force the outcome the writers wanted. The reason instances like Ned Stark's death or the Red Wedding were unexpected was that it didn't seem likely that the series would kill off main characters in such a fashion, even though it made perfect sense in-universe and served a narrative payoff as the consequences for their actions. Most of the plot twists in the seventh and eighth season were "unexpected" because they were laughably implausible, inconsistent, out of character, or had no narrative force behind them. An example of the twists of this is Battle of the Bastards in season 6 and the Battle for Winterfell in season 8, where ultimately the Big Bad of the battle is not beaten by Jon Snow as viewers expected but by someone else. In the case of the former, however, it was Sansa getting her revenge on Ramsay in a satisfying conclusion after all the hardships he'd inflicted upon her, and she killed him in a manner that made sense for the setup and her character (and while Jon didn't kill Ramsay, he did get to defeat him). The latter, however, has Arya killing the Night King on very flimsy foreshadowing and in a fairly absurd fashion. This was despite Jon and the Night King being set up as almost rivals since Season 5, alongside it being one of the main motivations of Jon for years of his life, while Arya had nothing connecting her to the Night King aside from her being good at killing things and him needing to be killed. Meanwhile, while Jon did get some closure with Ramsay, his contribution to the fight with the Night King was memetically summarized as "screaming at a dragon," which didn't help in a season that was already infamous for not giving him a lot to do.
- The series always seemed to have trouble with the supernatural elements in the books, which led to a lot of magical elements being Adapted Out: Euron being a warlock, the Horn of Winter, Lady Stoneheart, etc. These omissions were forgiven by most fans at the time, since they were fairly minor elements that could be safely squirreled to the side or justified in different ways, and some of the magical elements that did make it in at least fell into Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane. However, it became a major problem in the eighth season, when the major supernatural elements that the show did keep (the White Walkers, the Lord of Light, and the Three-Eyed Raven) ended up amounting to almost nothing. Bran's Story-Breaker Power just results in him telling Jon Snow something that never really affects the plot, the White Walkers turn out to be a massive Anti-Climax Boss, and the Lord of Light has no resolution whatsoever. Even the dragons—supposedly intelligent, willful, and powerful—end up being little more than attack dogs until Drogon's rather abrupt show of intelligence results in him sparing Jon's life and melting the Iron Throne. The show's clumsy handling of those concepts just became harder to ignore in the final episodes when they were forced into the spotlight, and suddenly the story hinged on the writers having to deliver on them.
- The later seasons were frequently criticized for almost totally disregarding their own world-building, and nothing having believable consequences on the setting. Stand-out examples include retconning the Tyrells into being so weak the Lannisters can easily defeat them offscreen, the Lannister gold mines turning out to have run dry years ago, Euron's Iron Fleet appearing out of nowhere and being able to appear anywhere it needs to be, and Cersei facing no consequences for blowing up the Great Sept of Baelor. As can be seen on the Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole page for the show, however, the show almost always ignored G.R.R. Martin's established world and rules (that they'd ostensibly copied wholesale) whenever it suited the plot, and if one pays close attention to maps and timelines, Robb Stark's entire war in the north makes little sense. Back in earlier seasons, though, this was easier to miss with all the different factions competing for power as well as screen-time, and arcs generally still ended up in the same place as they did in the books. This disregard for world-building became less logical discrepancies in a compelling story and more blatant Ass Pulls once they were able to actually effect the plot on a wider scale, since the source-material had run out. It didn't help that so many of these moments benefited Cersei - whom the show needed to keep on after she lost almost everything due to her replacement in the books being Adapted Out and Lena Headey's star power - and so became Diabolus Ex Machinas.
- Yara and the Ironborn are a precursor to characters infamously dropping their goals and acting contrary to their nature. For context, in season 4, Yara and her 50 best Ironborn infiltrated Dreadfort in order to rescue Theon, but after Theon told them he was Reek and Ramsey subsequently came into the area and attacked them, Yara and the Ironborn left Dreadfort and claimed he was dead. While questionable when taking into account the Ironborn's usual nature as raiders who are very slow to give up and always willing to fight to the death to get what they want, this wasn't much of an issue at the time because Reek being left behind allowed him to still be present for at the time yet to be adapted moments from the books in which he still needed to be present at Winterfell and the Dreadfort as Ramsey's prisoner, but later seasons heavily leaned into out of character moments for shock value with justification that was at best flimsy and at worst nonexistentnote . And since these didn't even have the justification of having happened in the books thanks to the show having overtaken the published book material, critics and viewers were far less willing to ignore the glaring character personality u-turns that contradicted everything about their character from before.
