I have mixed feelings about the show but essentially everything in this strikes me as wrong
1. Characterisation
Remember in the books, when Tyrion almost raped Sansa (who is twelve) on their wedding night before changing his mind? Or when he raped that sex slave in Volantis? How he repeatedly thinks about how much he wants to rape Cersei? Or when he threatens to rape and murder Tommen just to get at Cersei? Well, show Tyrion would never do that. He is Such A Good Guy. Tyrion is GRRM's favourite character. He's also quite clearly D&D's favourite character. The difference being that in the latter case, every other character on the show has to warp to accommodate him. Daenerys literally gets kicked out of her ADWD plotline so Tyrion can take over and show off how Awesome he is and how much better he is at ruling. Sansa kneels at her wedding, destroying one of her strongest acts of resistance in the books all for the sake of Tyrion not looking bad. He's such a good guy, why WOULDN'T Sansa kneel for him? God, what a bitch. And, lest we forget, Tyrion is the Abe Lincoln of his time. He's also the most famous dwarf in the world, and he is The Gift.
You seem very upset that the books aren't the TV show.
Plot and writing
Even people who still like the show admit the writing is pretty awful. And it really is. Nothing makes sense. Ellaria decides to avenge Oberyn by... murdering his entire family. And no one seems to have any problems with a bastard woman taking over Dorne?
Because the writing is so bad we actually have a very good understanding of why she did this. She announces to the king that she is murdering him because he sat idly by as Oberyn's sister was raped and murdered, and as Dorne's stock in the world declines.
Arya is a hot fucking mess. She kills the Waif, who hates her for no apparent reason, and this makes her no one?
The Waif hates her because she feels, probably correctly, that Arya is not worthy of the invitation to train. Jaqen explains what happens after that: the Many-Faced God (i.e. Death) had a kill stolen from him, and the kill must be repaid, it seems unimportant to their philosophy who the kill is. Again, this mostly seems a projection that you like their philosophy in the book better than in the show. And it's not really clear that Arya is in any """"official"""" capacity "No One", rather that she mastered the skills required to quit and go on her own. If someone drops out of school 3 years in, they don't get a degree, but that doesn't mean it's surprising that they have enough knowledge to go do a job. If you're asking why Jaqen doesn't try to kill her for leaving, that seems to be a loose end, but not one you expressed in your rant.
Stannis getting annihilated by Ser Twenty of House Goodmen, then deciding to burn his daughter because they've been without food for like a day, even though he's the man who survived the siege of Storm's End by eating book leather and rats for A YEAR?
I have no idea what any of this is about but the show pretty clearly motivates Stannis (and his wife's) actions by their religious fervor and delusions of grandeur. It's also pretty clearly articulated that Stannis in some regards rejects his daughter because of the greyscale. He is a bad father and a bad man. It's not exactly confusing what goes on here, and even during the burning his wife realizes what a grave transgression it was and how they've lost sight of what's important
Robb deciding to say fuck it to his marriage vows and marrying Talisa because YOLO (as opposed to doing it for honour, which creates a parallel with Ned, hmm, it's almost like this is a THEME or something) which leads directly to the deaths of him, his wife, his unborn child and his mother. Nice one, Robb. I could go on.
I have no idea what you're talking about here, but the show pretty straightforwardly motivates him as doing whatever it takes for love, which is a motif that is recurrent in the show: Brienne; Jaime; and Jon. Making a character have less connection to Ned and more to other characters thematically isn't a right or wrong decision, it's just you're mad that the show isn't the books.
Every character has a jetpack and Westeros exists in a warp that distorts time. This is the only explanation I can think of for the timeline. Yara goes from the Iron Islands to the Dreadfort in less than a season, even though this would require sailing around the entire continent, but Gilly's baby is still a baby and Myrcella has been in Dorne for years! Littlefinger is a most industrious teleporter, zipping from the Eyrie to Moat Cailin to Mole's Town in a matter of days, apparently. Sansa and Jon's walking tour of the North takes months, presumably, but Cersei's trial is "in a few days". And Jaime got all the way from Dorne to King's Landing, but Doran has only just received news of Myrcella's death?
This attempt at a coherent timeline makes for fun reading.
Almost all of this seems based on maps in the books. The world is smaller in the show. There are occasional instances where continuity gets whacky, particularly with respect to Littlefinger and Varys, but you seem very upset that the TV show doesn't go into as much geographic detail as the books.
"Themes are for eighth grade book reports," an actual quote by David Benioff
ASOIAF is a very thematically cohesive body of work. Themes of identity ("Theon, my name is Theon, you have to know your
name"), themes of family and love, the intersection of the personal and political, so on. Game of Thrones dislikes themes, because according to the showrunners, who have Masters degrees in Creative Writing, themes are for eighth grade book reports. No, I will not stop quoting that, because it will never stop being stupid. It's almost like Jon and Dany's ADWD arcs are direct parallels to each other or something? And that Sandor as the gravedigger is finally at peace? That Cersei is a foil to basically every major female character, like Sansa, Dany, Arianne, Catelyn, Arya, and Brienne? Brienne and Jaime's arcs in AFFC also parallel each other, as both struggle with questions of what it means to be a knight, and what the true meaning of honour is, and with their place in the world - Brienne as a woman who does not conform to gender expectations, and Jaime as a disabled person. In the show Jaime's disability is mostly forgotten (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau had to point out to D&D that Jaime might have trouble fighting now that, you know, his sword hand is chopped off) and Brienne is just a murdering brute who doesn't seem to question herself at all. The show's themes consist of "revenge is good!". Sansa sics dogs on Ramsay, Arya brutally murders people, Brienne abandons Sansa to kill Stannis yet faces no repercussions for this decision, and all of these are portrayed as good things. Even though they're actually kind of disturbing.
There is a lot here, but lots of themes exist in Game of Thrones. From the outset, Ned Stark executes a traitor--one that we sympathize--for honor. This sets up Ned as an honorable person, and the value and costs of honor are a theme that the show engages with repeatedly. Consider the execution of the traitors against Jon Snow. A perverse karma: that cruelty happens to good and bad alike is also a feature of the show. We see bad people be punished and cheer, but we equally see unfair and despicable acts of cruelty. Brienne repeatedly engages with her gender, both in totally over the top exposition dialogue sequences and in how she carries herself. How many times does she have to correct people about not being a knight? This season featured an entire bottle episode about the Hound whose primary theme was an examination of whether it is possible to escape the trauma inflicted on one by one's upbringing (the show answers a pessimistic no). The show's politics repeatedly have a hoist-by-ones-petard quality: Cersei takes action against Margaery, and the same action has her swept up by the sept. Ditto the Red Wedding. Ditto basically every story, including the origin story of the White Walkers: in their efforts to control men by creating White Walkers, the Children of the Forest are destroyed by their creations. The shift from a Machievellian realpolitik where all political actions are motivated solely by power to the nuance of making the world a better place expressed by both Dany and Tyrion mirrors the shift from pre-modern Divine Rule of Kings to the prescriptions of modernity and liberal thought. Dany's takeover of the Khal mirrors Muhammed's takeover of Bedouin Arabia. Just because you miss this stuff doesn't mean it's not there. Sorry.
No, Dany, Arya, Sansa, Brienne and Ellaria brutally and remorselessly murdering people is not "empowering". Violence isn't empowering. Violence is just violent.
Every serious examination of violence, including rape, motivates and grounds it in the expression of power; and every serious examination of power, including political power, motivates and grounds it in the expression of violence. You would be laughed out of a room of anyone with ten brain cells if you claimed that violence and power were not connected. That the show is also pornographic in its depiction of violence and much of it is thematically unearned is a problem, but you badly miss.
Then there's the Dothraki, who are admittedly problematic in the book as well, but this is taken up to eleven in the show. Dany burns down their most sacred temple with all their khals inside and instead of killing her they bow to her, because those savage brown people know their place.
This is so explicitly a metaphor for Muhammed's taming of the Bedouin Arab world it isn't funny. The rules and guidelines of Islam are all clearly and cleanly read as a historical response to divisions in the Bedouin world: Why is Islam so hung up on the sanctity of Allah and his name? Because of idolatry and multitheism in the Bedouin world. Why does Islam have such specific rules about marriage? Because even though they seem premodern, they replaced sexual conquest and slavery from the pre-Islamic Arab world. And like Danaerys, Muhammed subdued the Bedouin world through conquest and violence, not merely preaching and conversion. Modernization processes (or development processes if you rather) is sometimes organic, and it is sometimes through violent conquest. Your desire to see this through a racial lens misses and obvious and nonracial historical metaphor. Even the horses are a 1:1 metaphor.
And Tyrion whitesplaining to Missandei and Grey Worm in Meereen, fucking kill me. When Missandei told Tyrion he didn't understand what it was to be a slave I fucking cheered. You go girl. Tell that condescending asshole.
You seem to view this as racist, but you correctly observe that Tyrion's privilege is addressed and problematized in the show. A show engaging with imperialism is not the same as a show being imperialist.
And then in season 6, the gay man gets tortured and scarified with religious iconography before getting blown up.
Yes, because the church's hypocritical and abusive moral code causes a pogrom across the city, one that ultimately ends in violence to all parties.
Oberyn and Ellaria, both bisexual, live in a fucking brothel. In the book, Oberyn makes an offhand comment about them "sharing a beautiful blonde", but they also have four young children together and are doting parents. But no, those crazy brown bisexuals amirite.
However the books write these two, the show writes them as libertines and hedonists. This is both a historical thing and something present in the modern world. The show doesn't slut shame them and they are given ample opportunity to explain their philosophical views on love, sex, possession, jealousy, and pleasure. That they happen to be what appears to be southern Italian or north African seems wholly unimportant to their portrayal. I guessed that Dorne was supposed to be Majorca or maybe Crete geographically and the people were somewhere between Sicilian and Moroccan. I'm not an architect but visually the setting made me think of Islamic Spain. Is there a racial stereotype about people from that part of our world and unchained sex? To me libertinism and hedonism seem more to be an indictment of historical cultures like late Rome or post-revolutionary France. Do you have a different read of history?
Ableism. Jaime, Jaime, Jaime. He stops a sword with his golden hand! How wacky.
This is totally bizarre. Modern dis/ability studies and standpoint theory typically reconceive "disability" as diversity: that each person has something to contribute, and while we require respect and awareness of disability, we also need to allow the disabled to forge their own paths, and recognize that to the extent that disability shapes someone, it also gives them a valuable and different perspective. This is true for everything from studies of autism to studies of intellectual or physical impairment. Certainly it would be eye-rolling and ableist if this was a Captain Planet 1980s Liberal Superpower thing, but that's not at all how the show portrays it. In that particular fight, Jaime tries to catch the sword out of reflex, as we see several characters (including the Hound) throughout the show do. It's a risky gambit that comes with great chance of injury, but can provide the character the opportunity to counter and go for the kill. At the moment Jaime grabs it, there's a Wile E. Coyote moment where he's off the cliff but hasn't realized he's going to fall yet. Jaime and his aggressor alike are not expecting what happens. Jaime quickly capitalizes on the opening, showing his tactical skill in spite of the fact that he's a weaker swordfighter than he once was. Moreover, above you complain that Jaime's disability is insufficiently relevant to the show--but when would it be relevant if not combat, and how would it be relevant if not a scene that primarily demonstrates Jaime's diminished capacity as a swordsman?
And Hodor, because disability can't just be, it has to have a reason behind it. I know this is taken from the books
This is a thematic statement about a recurring thing in the books where the elite, the nobles, and the strong use and discard the weak and ordinary. Hodor is a peasant kid growing up in the circle of nobility. He is loyal and wants to help. And in the end, due to time loop shenanigans, a little noble just now understanding the burden of leading makes a choice to sacrifice Hodor's entire life. It also recasts Hodor as a tragic figure: the person we once thought was simple but happy in fact suffered from being locked in his entire life, knowing the fate that would one day befall him. Poignant.
This is an extremely bad blog rant and I have no idea why the thread was left open because there is essentially no argument made here, it's just an enormous info dump about book canon combined with some recycled Vox thinkpiece rants about social issues in Game of Thrones.
The show is not an amazing show for so many reasons (pacing, plotting, overly literal interpretations of the book, boring combat setpieces, stale writing, sexposition, too many characters, too much moving the pieces around the board, inconsistent characterization being passed off poorly as nuance) but almost none of them have anything you raise here.
