I remember seeing the HBO promo trailers and advertisements for Game of Thrones when it was starting in 2011. At the time I didn't start it because I was watching other shows (not anime - I wouldn't get into anime at this point for another five years) and just wasn't particularly interested in picking up a random fantasy show I didn't know much else about other than that it was based on a book series. I had never read the books. Nothing about the trailers especially stood out or grabbed me. But I started watching it right before the second season started airing in 2012. By then I guess there was more leaking of content from it onto the internet, I had seen one or two out of context clips, the infancy of its pop culture saturation trickling in, etc., so I became intrigued. I remember watching the first few episodes, then was traveling most of the year and didn't have access to a television so didn't watch most of the second season weekly, but finished it shortly after I returned home. Then I watched every subsequent season (the third season on) weekly as it aired until it ended in 2019.
What they did to the last seasons, beyond butchery - there are hardly words potent and punitive enough within the English language to adequately describe it. One of the worst betrayals of the viewership and an entire audience and fanbase of all-time. Certainly all-time in the history of television and maybe in all modern fiction as well. Just atrocious. But it cannot sully what came before. I still place Game of Thrones in my Top 10 TV Series of all time, at rank #6, just below The Sopranos and above Avatar - The Last Airbender, in a list in which I include both mediums of live action and Western animation/cartoons (but exclude most anime with the exception of one series due to its length). I just state explicitly the exclusion of seasons seven and eight from being part of that (especially season eight).
There were already some missteps and wasted or sloppily handled areas of the relaying of the story in seasons five and six. Definitely some instances of noticeably weaker writing there than what preceded it in the pinnacle of its writing in seasons 1 - 4, but there were still enough well-written enough individual scenes and movements which were emotionally resonant great payoffs and imparted that proper epic cinematic feel that I truthfully didn't care (examples of fantastic episodes and moments which made these seasons worth it would be the last two episodes of season six - BotB and WoW). Whereas with seven and eight (eight in particular), it just became too pronounced and atrocious so as to no longer be an occasional nuisance or distraction but led to total derailment.
Shingeki no Kyojin, I have a much less extensive experience with. When I began watching anime in the autumn of 2016, I watched six series from that September until the end of the year. It wasn't until 2019 I began watching series more regularly and back to back (and 2020 for some seasonals), so between all of 2017 and 2018, I only watched a small handful of series. Shingeki no Kyojin was one of those series in the summer of 2017. I liked various aspects of the first season well enough and some of its ideas and potential, but I became frustrated with the series as a whole and dropped it halfway through the second season, never to return. There I have left it. |