At first this article reads like your typical anti-piracy screed. It rants about how 10x more people watched GoT illegally (confusing them with lost sales) and ends with how downloading movies can get your credit card stolen.
The middle of the article however, destroys the author’s case.
Time Warner (owning company of HBO) CEO Alan Bewkes stated in 2013 how becoming the most illegally streamed show in history was “better than an Emmy” and that torrenting ultimately led to more paid subscriptions.
“We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years—people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.”
The CEO of Time Warner, who knows more about the situation than ForeverGeek writer Tom Llewellyn, championed piracy and said that it brought them more subscribers rather than nearly destroying the show as the article claims.
Needless to say, Tom ignored this in favor of writing how you can get malware from downloading it…
Anti-Piracy Propaganda: 0 Truth: 1
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
That they yhrew away all the rules they established before like traveling now took 0 hours and soon. All of this because the last book wasn’t written yet so they had to write some story themselves and failed misserably.
I remember people knew the ending due to leaks about a year ahead of time and claimed it was all BS since it was so ridiculous. We were all wrong
For a secound i forgot we are talking about Game of Thrones and not Star Wars Episode 9.
I went from avoiding leaks to a few episodes in not caring and read the leaks and laughed. Then joined freefolk to laugh at the show as it aired, which made it a much less miserable affair than it would have been. A nice season long The Room roasting for the show.
Watching it straight up would have been pure torture.
A surprising amount went wrong.
While there are a sea of complaints, the biggest for me was that all of the characters stopped having internal logic. Take Jamie, he had a character arc moving from a vain knight avoiding responsibility and having an incestuous relationship with his sister, to having depth, showing that he was wracked with guilt for breaking his oath to help people. Falling in love with a woman for her character and who she was. Being responsible and honorable again. Then the last season came around and he dropped all of his growth to be with his sister.
It’s like D&D decided that there would be a cool scene of him dieing with Cersi and didn’t care how he got there.
It was hilarious to see Tyrion find them with a light dusting of bricks on top. Comedy.
The show reached a point where they’d surpassed where the books were in the narrative and things fell apart. The political intrigue, backstabbing, and subversive nature of the story was done away with in favour of forcing plot points through to get everything wrapped up, with no consideration made on why those characters would act in the way they did.
Everything
Tldr; the whole 6 first season they set up the table for some really juicy stuff and in the last season, some side quests were either ignored or fast-tracked to fit in 1/3 of an episode. Realistically, you had content for at least 3+ more seasons. But since GRR Martin is so slow to write his books (I don’t blame him, just pointing out the obvious), the producers of the show had to cut corner and take huge liberties that didn’t make any sense
The best way to summarize it is the writing lol. And they tried to rush plot points way too fast.
And the plot points they decided to skip earlier in the season stuck out like a sore thumb. If you read the books and knew where they left off, you could see how those elements fit into the ending and made it a ton better.