I just finished season 1. I don't understand the hype. I liked it and the cast is fantastic but so far I think that the plots, arcs, and dialog aren't anything special. Imdb says there are nine noble families. Nine? That a silly amount of stuff to keep track of. I feel like I'll need a conspiracy theory like board with red string so I can keep track of everything. But that's more of a commitment than I want to make.

And I was surprised that there's some formulaic stuff make reddit and reddit-like audience cheer. The fucking scenes seem almost funny to me. They are so fake and wooden. I assume the wolf dogs are in the books but in season 1 - they seem less scary and more like a cool plot device.

At Imdb it has a rating of 9.2/10 • 2.2m. I can't believe it has millions of ratings but it's still above 9. I think the series is has an effectively higher rating than The Sopranos which is 9.2/10 but it only has has 1/5th has many ratings.

  1. How can it be so highly rated?

  2. What would you rate the series as a whole?

  3. Why do people love this series so much?

  4. Is season 1 typical of the series? Worse? Better?

  5. How do you rank the seasons best to worst?

  6. Is there more dialog that needs subtitles? I don't like that at all. I don't want to read subtitles for a fantasy series.

  7. Is the finale even worse than The Sopranos'?

  • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    First of all, you have to keep in mind that Game of Thrones season 1 came out in 2011. Its plot might not seem that special today, but that's partially because in the 12 years since its release, everyone and their mother tried to imitate its success and we got bombarded with PreStIgE TV at every corner.

    At the time, fantasy shows where still much more Tolkien-esque, and Game of Thrones was not just "dark and gritty", it was realistic. It was a show about politics & intrigue when every other fantasy story was more about slaying the big dragon to save the village. It was a fantasy story where actions had consequences, nobody had plot armor, when Ned Stark died at the end of season 1 it was a real shock for many viewers because he was the protagonist, surely somebody was going to save him at the final hour?

    It's also like with Lost, the show's appeal tanked insanely hard after the finale came out, even for the first seasons. Because in the last 2 seasons, the "actions have consequences" aspect that really made the show work initially was just completely shot into the wind. The things that the previous 6 seasons slowly worked towards were just pissed on by the writers and replaced with phoned in anime resolutions. It was, by far, the worst ending and the worst dip in quality in any show I've ever seen, and that includes Lost. During the first seasons, everything that happens is a consequence of what happened before, which made it very fun for attentive viewers to speculate and theorize over, when a big twist happened it made sense in hindsight, there was a lot of information but there was always that reassurance that everything would make sense in the end, the many plot threads would eventually come together and form a satisfying big picture.

    I know a lot of people who were huge fans of the show when it aired, myself included, and none of us has ever rewatched it, even the good parts. The finale retroactively killed everything that made the show good. I'm still mad about it.