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>> The show was absolutely amazing when it could follow the books. The definitive show everyone talked about. The moment the books ran out it started to go downhill. And when they couldn't easily extrapolate from the books the show fell apart completely. The showrunners and writes for the show weren't good enough to make Game of Thrones on their own. No offence, but that takes a lot of skill and luck. They were good enough to adapt it though.

George R.R. Martin is still underrated, even given his success. He wrote for television for a long time and structured his novels more like seasons of TV, with each chapter serving as an episode. This is part of the reason for their popularity. Martin is also a once-in-a-generation genius of character, structure, and plot - a self-evident truth that is rarely spoken aloud because genre fiction is "not literature."

The creators of the GOT show really never even realized that they were adapting something carefully, painstakingly honed by a genius craftsman. They really figured they could just keep throwing in dramatic, violent twists and we wouldn't know the difference. In that light, it's shocking that they even made the first seasons as competently as they did.

> George R.R. Martin is still underrated, even given his success. He wrote for television for a long time and structured his novels more like seasons of TV, with each chapter serving as an episode.

It was never intended for film or TV. It was almost intentionally unfilmable.

“I had worked in Hollywood myself for about 10 years, from the late ’80s to the ’90s. I’d been on the staff of The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. All of my first drafts tended to be too big or too expensive. I always hated the process of having to cut.” When he took up novel-writing afterward, he recalls: “I said, ‘I’m sick of this, I’m going to write something that’s as big as I want it to be, and it’s going to have a cast of characters that go into the thousands, and I’m going to have huge castles, and battles, and dragons.”

https://ew.com/article/2011/04/04/game-of-thrones-hbo-george...

Sure. He structured it the way TV shows are structured, in ways that novels are not usually structured. But that doesn't mean he was imagining it would be made into TV.

So glad I wasn't the only one to catch the contradiction with Hardin.

Also we seem to be saying that Hardin and other individuals (e.g. the woman who was tossed off the colony ship who narrates sometimes) are very special, which is also totally counter to the most important themes of the book.

Now I've only watched to the 2nd episode. But there are _some_ very special people in Asimov's universe. I'm withholding judgement on who that pregnant woman might be, or who her child might become... it's a detail left mostly unsketched in Foundation & Empire, and might turn into an interesting tale.

> Hardin is now a "warden"!? Literally, the character with one of the most memorable sayings in all of literature "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" is now all about violence. That's nothing less than a betrayal of the source material.

They even pissed on the source material by having Hardin's father remind her of the saying and have her explicitly dismiss it.

GoT isn't like Foundation at all, though. Game of Thrones had plenty of action and tense character moments that all happen within a relatively short period of time (within the character's lifetimes/generations). Foundation is about decades of time so adapting it directly like they could with GoT isn't really possible, imo.

Also, we don't know yet but, for all we know, Hardin might learn what the meaning of that saying is by making the very mistake it's cautioning against. After all, in the show, the line was given to her father who then follows through on his plotline (trying to be vague, here). So maybe it's not a betrayal of the source material as much as it is going a bit further back to establish why Hardin keeps that saying. Considering Goyer was involved with Man of Steel and felt like it was pivotal to establish Superman's "no-kill" rule as a result of being forced to kill, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a similar beat of character growth here.

`No one learned anything from Game of Thrones.`

I actually find GoT later and dumber episodes most re-watchable. I imagine it is hard as hell to film shows that are both smart and cinematic. Nolan seems to be the only one who can consistently accomplish this

Not to mention that the acting for Hardin is terribly awful.