I agree with some things you are saying, but not others. If you\'re saying Only the Creator Does It Right with A Song of Ice and Fire, I\'d counter that both A Feast of Crows and A Dance of Dragons are poorly paced books with plot points that meander around characters I don\'t care about. I shed no tears that the utter waste of page space, Quentin Martel, was never adapted to the screen. Dorne was poorly handled in the TV series, but it was just boring in A Feast of Crows. So many things were happening in A Dance of Dragons its amazing to see how little the plot progressed in any direction.
I disagree with your assessment that book Arya is any better or worse than TV Arya. Between the unending training sequences and the bratty attitude of acting like she knows better, the only thing the TV series is guilty of is simply showing the results of how these points would manifest, a \"cool\" serial killer. There is no foil or story branch that exists that would divert the direction from this result.
Oddly enough, I understood why Brienne went after Stannis rather than attempt to save Sansa. Brienne liked Catelyn, but she primarily swore loyalty because she would take any alternative that would allow her to remain a knight without serving Stannis. Its dumb that she was somehow able to teleport to the exact place where Stannis would be badly injured, but I certainly understand why she would want to kill him over saving a stranger that may or may not be alive. Given that she\'s not anywhere close to helping either daughter in the books, I can cut her some slack.
Book Sansa is also a cold and pragmatic, choosing to poison a kid for the sake of power, all while living under the thumb of Littlefinger. How the Vale could cross paths with any other plot point is something I can only guess at, but Martin\'s tendency to keep every character as far away as possible from any other character makes it hard to envision any believable plot in which all characters cross paths, especially not at the snail pace of the last two books. Sansa might have replaced Jeyne Poole in the TV show, but its not like she suffered any worse a fate than Jeyne. My gripes stem more from the fact that hardened Sansa did little more complain in most situations. She complains about the Vale knights not respecting her, and does little to change the situation. She complains about Daenerys being untrustworthy, and then does whatever she can to antagonize a force that is crucial both to the White Walker war and the campaign against the Lannisters. She declares autonomy, when she owes both her success and survival to many forces outside the North. She is cold and senselessly antagonistic even though the plot is supposed to build her up as an effective politician.
Aside from those aspects, I mostly agree. I think D&D hated the supernatural elements of the series. They didn\'t seem to be experienced in handling these elements and often avoided them whenever possible. I would still throw some blame at Martin for procrastinating exposition regarding these elements. Martin loved to tease these elements but very reluctant to give them center stage and as a result, there was very little concrete involving lore for the White Walkers. Jon abruptly becomes a piece of furniture, Daenerys becomes irredeemably evil, and Bran is some weird ghost king dude.
^ I feel I should elaborate: as always, I\'m working against a character limit, and there\'s so much more to my misgivings - I didn\'t even have space to mention my complaints about Varys the whitewashed, or Davos the plug and play advisor, or Melisandre\'s missing chapters, or... well, you get my point.
My problem with Arya isn\'t merely a matter of the creator does it better or that she turns into a serial killer - it\'s that the tragedy is siphoned off in favor of superficial \"what a badass\" moments that would have been more believable if performed by, say, an entire house. Nobody mourns the loss of the old Arya; nobody misses the sense of fun or any kind of happiness unrelated to mass slaughter; There\'s no sense of her losing anything other than limitations - even though the Faces are supposed to poison those who still have a sense of self, and as it\'s made clear, Arya still has a sense of self.
With Brienne, meanwhile, I can understand her behavior... or at least I would have, if D&D had been able to get over their biases and stick to the themes of the show. Game of Thrones had a running them of how revenge never solves anything and how all actions have consequences; Brienne should have experienced regret, guilt, or maybe even failed to save Sansa. But no, she gets to eat her cake and keep it, even gloating to Davos and Melisandre... and it\'s all because D&D cannot leave their personal biases at the door, particularly when it comes to Stannis. I recall there was even a point in which they claimed that he was burning people alive in his first scene - when he was really burning the idols of the Seven.
As for Sansa, I would have mentioned the pointlessly antagonistic part if I\'d had more space... but my problems with the rape plot are less to do with the level of suffering involved and more to do with how stupid it was. Sansa spends nearly four seasons being tormented by a psychopath; then it\'s teased that she might finally able to take charge of her life and become someone new, clever, and empowered... and then a season later, it\'s right back to tortureville with the already overexposed Ramsay the Bore for another season of the same old thing. Yawn. Oh, and Littlefinger deciding to throw the key to the North away on a guy who hunts women for sport; I\'ve heard all kinds of excuses for this idiocy, and they\'re all stupider than the last. The only reason why Littlefinger would do something so wasteful and asinine would be due to an advancing case of neurosyphilis.
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Like watching a Lamborghini being fed through a mincer
Game of Thrones is a glorious meatball sandwich that - at the stroke of midnight - turns into a slice of buttered cardboard.
It is the magnum opus of sheltered plutocrats without ambition or imagination.
It is a monument to fantasy-free fantasy.
It seems incredible that it ended so poorly: it had good actors, good scripts, and good characters. It told a story of the fall of a heroic family, the re-emergence of magic, the growing irrelevance of politics in the face of the apocalypse...
But then Dan Benioff and D.B. Weiss got bored and started ramming in their own warped ideas. I can't objectively say when the point of no return occurred, but I would argue that D&D’s personal tastes were beginning to undermine the narrative long before the book material ran out - as early as season 4, in fact.
D&D liked gratuitous rape scenes (sometimes without even realizing that they'd made them). They liked lines like "bad pussy," meandering voyages, pointless mysteries, and characters like Arya and Bran pulling incredible skills out of their rectums with barely any training ever being witnessed.
They despised the supernatural, giving least priority to Bran, hastily shoving the Lord of Light out of the story as soon as they could, and seemed annoyed to even focus on the White Walkers at all. The dreaded Long Night was vanquished in a single episode without anyone in the South noticing, and the apocalyptic warning of "Winter Is Coming" was reduced to just another slogan.
They sanitized the Lannisters to the point of boredom. They gleefully villainized Stannis, even deciding it was better for Brienne to take revenge on him rather than save a rape victim. They made Brienne into a gloating oathbreaker who couldn't stop a one-armed man escaping Winterfell. They made Jon into a boring monotone lump of meat. They transformed Loras Tyrel into a gay stereotype. They made Daenerys into a monster via shallow foreshadowing, zero effort, and an explanation that changed from one featurette to the next.
They looked at Arya's tragic descent into madness, and chortled, "COOL!" then transformed her into a superficially "cool" serial killer. They looked at Sansa's efforts to scheme and deceive while retaining her humanity – and cried "BORING!" then arranged for a rape plot to "harden" her into a heartless robot who never achieves anything without the aid of Littlefinger or Bran - and possibly the script.
In the wake of D&D's uncontrollable biasgasm, the viewers have been left with a series that ultimately says nothing, aspires to nothing, ignores societal implications, lauds villains as heroes, and dismisses anyone who wants to achieve justice, equality, or some change to the status quo - from Robb to Daenerys - as either foolish or irredeemably evil.
And in the end, the only fun that can be found is in ripping the series to bits - in critique, in parody, and in fanfiction - and in that respect, Game of Thrones still has value... of a sort.