It is a very funny vid but nevertheless I’m able to shrug off or explain the majority of the criticisms away. I’m not sure that anyone has said “this final season does the show justice”. Everyone has some gripe with it, including me. You can dwell on those gripes, or not. If you didn’t enjoy it, that’s fine - your experience is only properly perceived by you.
If I may speak / muse generally, I do think in life it’s far easier to criticise than it is to praise. It’s just human nature to want to unravel the works of others. Heck, it’s what many of us do for our day jobs (including me). I think it’s also far more enjoyable to criticise things than it is to praise them. By criticising, you ‘defeat’ the object of criticism and in a way, become superior to it. This is true for all things in life and all people experience and enjoy criticising in the same way.
I do however think that people enjoy being critical of things far too much, for the wrong reasons. By being critical of popular things, the object of criticism expands to those also experiencing the same object, and some of those people are also defeated, enjoyably. Some posters in this thread are absolutely guilty of this. You are tipping into this territory with your comment that “I guess some people have really low standards”. Well, consider us defeated, if that’s enjoyable to you *shrug*
If you can shrug off or explain the criticisms away, go for it, rather than trying to describe to me your definition and breakdown of criticism. It's pretty simple. If you don't like something, you'll criticise it. The "criticisms" raised in that amusing video are 100% accurate, so I'm not really sure how they can be explained away. The points he makes about the plot is how they actually happened in the show, and it's amusing because it's just so bad that they happened. And even despite this, many have said that they're satisfied with the way the ending was done. I, however, just don't get this and it's not unreasonable for me to say that this must come from these people having lower standards, because quite honestly, if you cared about the characters and cared about their stories being finished off and not simply forgotten about, you'd feel the same way that I feel about this season.
It's not really about defeating anyone; that's not my intention here. I am invested in the books, and I was invested in the TV series and this final season was supposed to take all the major threads from previous seasons and expand on them to finish the show off. Instead of doing that, it's left huge holes in the stories of central characters, and made most of them out to be witless buffoons, conveniently forgetting about what they're capable of, and their past experiences. Nobody realised the dead in the crypts would be risen during the battle of Winterfell. Nobody. We've got a bunch of really clever individuals (as demonstrated in past episodes) preparing for the battle, and this doesn't come up? Peter Dinklage said himself that it's stupid that nobody realised that, because they just would. We've got these same clever people preparing for the battle. We know they had plenty of time to do this because we had loads of filler in the first two episodes (although season 8 has shown that time can simply be bent so who knows what the actual timeframe really was). The battle tactics of previous battles were so much better than the tactics used at Winterfell, so even though the armies were again commanded by mostly the same people, somehow the tactics are inferior and instead we get something for cinematic show, with loads of forces wiped out and then somehow, a few episodes later, they've multiplied again? Right, ok.
The Night King doesn't matter. At all. The buildup from season one is simply dealt with in a rushed episode and that's all we get after that. Dany goes mad within a few minutes and literally goes against everything she's ever stood for, burning innocent people in the city that she's won. Cersei is killed by a building with Jamie at her side (works well given that he was actually becoming a good person). Arya is back to being a frightened little girl again, and somehow finds a magical ethereal horse in the rubble of the city. The scorpions on the ships and ramparts can't kill one dragon because they're not buffed for accuracy anymore. Bran is made king at the recommendation of Tyrion, a prisoner. Bronn, a greedy sell-sword, is made master of coin. Jon's heritage is ignored (whilst Sam and Sansa look on). There are so many issues with these final episodes, but we're just nitpicking, right?
I'm really not moaning here, and I resent it when people play down these issues as such and we then get told that it simply needs to be forgotten about. I have watched this show since the first episode. I was invested in it. Invested in the characters, invested in the stories of those characters, and then it turns out in the end that you might as well have had no fleshing out of any characters because they've just gone against everything you've ever known about them. Those people not understanding our disappointment are the ones that I'm saying have low standards. Because when you look back through everything (and I've not even gone into proper detail nor listed everything wrong with S8) it makes a mockery of the entire TV show. I just hope the books end up being better, but who knows whether they'll even be finished.
I'm so hoping that the Wheel of Time TV series will do a better job than GoT did. It's certainly better fantasy.
