Season 4 was yesterday and Season 5 today. It is a shame what they did to the Dorne storyline. But goddamn Hardhome is a fucking masterpiece
Fun fact. To this day, I have not seen Season 5. It was the season that partially leaked, so I decided I could watch the four episodes at any time, and then I just... never did. I read enough about it though that for a moment I could almost convince myself that I had seen it. Which is why I could watch Season 6 without skipping a beat.
Season 5 is the first season of "mixed bag" for me. The Wall, Tyrion, and Mereen were anywhere from decent to great/amazing, but Kings Landing was meh, Sansa's story execution was not great to say the least, and they completely butchered Dorne. Jaime/Bronn was a fun pairing but that's about all you can say about that
Hardhome is incredible. Dorne was horrendous. Barristan was pointless. Stannis was always kind of bad but this season particularly was a slap in the face to the book. The biggest offense though was the complete cowardice of how they wrote Jon.
Hardhome, Battle of the Bastards and The Long Night are my favorite GOT episodes ever. I know people hate mostly everything about the final season but with The Long Night I got serious chills and felt like that episode was a long time coming epic. It wasn’t perfect but I was immersed. Didn’t even notice how “dark” everyone said it was (the dragon fight sure but everything else seemed appropriate for a battle taking place in the middle of the night)
I'll never forgive them for Dorne. Doran and Areo Hotah were near pointless, and we got no Darkstar or Arys Oakheart. You have to watch Hardhome. It has a couple of some of my favorite moments in the whole show!
Yeah Hardhome is an absolute must watch, top 3-5 episode of the show if not the best. And I agree it sucks how Stannis went out. I think that was the point where they realized okay, we're out of book to follow, and Stannis isn't going to become king, so what do we do? And they had him do a horrible thing and then had his army abandon him. I DID like the "go on do your duty" line though lol. I really can't wait to see how that storyline plays out in the book assuming it gets published. The gut punch at the end of the season is hard to beat too
I went back and revisited the OG leak for the last season. The one that everyone thought was completely wrong until it ended up be almost 100% just reading the reactions on Reddit from it is so hilarious in hindsight. “There’s no way this is real lol”
The cool thing about hardhome is that it happens off page in the books so good on the show for improving upon something.
Looking up, I saw that thread https://www.reddit.com/r/freefolk/comments/bkc8xd/compilation_of_spoilers_for_got_episodes_46/ It's depressingly fun reading these old reactions to the leaks. I've done the same for Star Wars 9 a while back.
I love how even GRRM is now coming out trying to hype up House of the Dragon by saying "Yeah, I had no part in that shit with Game of Thrones at the end... but you should should totally watch this one because I worked on the whole thing!" I'll be curious to see how huge the ratings are for this and/or how long they last.