My overall feelings at the end of S3 are… disappointed, but honestly nowhere near as disappointed as I was with S2.

I think a large part of that is simply that I knew what I was walking into this time. After S2, I had a pretty good idea of the direction the show was taking, so very little of it genuinely surprised me. I was able to accept it for what it was.

That being said, I think I spent a good portion of the season thinking, why would they do this?

Not necessarily in the sense of being angry about every change from the book, because at this point I think it's clear that expecting a particularly faithful adaptation is only going to make me miserable. It's more that there were so many choices where I genuinely couldn't understand what the writers thought they were gaining by making them.

And that's probably my biggest frustration with the show now. It's not even the individual deviations anymore. It's the feeling that so many of them seem to actively complicate the story, flatten characters, or undermine themes that could have been much more interesting if they'd simply been allowed to develop naturally.

There were definitely things I enjoyed this season. There were performances I thought were excellent, individual scenes that worked, and moments where I could still see the version of this story that initially made me so invested in it.

But I also kept coming back to the same thought: why?

Why change this? Why remove that? Why give this character that storyline? Why frame this relationship this way? Why spend so much time on something that ultimately doesn't seem to go anywhere?

Hey so to the people going absolutely nuts over the fact that "episode 6 confirmed Gwayne is gay" I already spoke about this so I don't wanna repeat myself too much so if someone is just now seeing this post and for some reason is curious on my thoughts on the scenes, it's on my blog under this post, putting aside my whole opinion on that scene, let's say it did confirm that he isn't straight, it doesn't automatically mean he's gay, and this is where a whole other issue begins, bc the LGBTQ+ community is supposed to be accepting and loving and just like the name says it's supposed to represent lesbians, gays, BISEXUALS, transgender people, and queer as a whole, but the little (actually not so little) detail that y'all constantly seem to either forget or ignore, is that people are not just gay or straight, they can be bisexual etc. which are terms that even though THEY don't use, we do, we understand, they also understand what it is to like the same gender or both genders, so they might not be able to name it but we can, so the fact that you hear something that to you is hinting at someone's sexuality, and you automatically jump to the assumption that he's gay no other option, and you don't even want to give it any further thought, when with Gwayne specifically, we have no scenes of him with either men or women, so both can be possible, just like it can also be only one of those, but it's just so toxic and borderline biphobic to constantly erase bi people and bisexuality as a whole.

some of y’all will be engaging in witch hunt, accusing writers left and right and then wondering why more and more writers take their works down and don’t share them with you ungrateful losers anymore.

“this fic looks like it was created by ai” yeah that’s because ai was trained on human-made works and it was trained to mimic human-made works.

you claim you hate ai because ai harms real artists, yet you are out there accusing and harassing artists because “their vibes just aren’t right”. at this point, you are the ones who cause more harm — to art and the writing community — than ai does.

you are the ones killing art and writing community, the community you want to “protect against ai”.

so at this point, you’re killing the community faster than ai is. good luck when the community you want to protect has no human-made work left because you accused and harassed genuine artists/writers away and the only things that are left for you to read are actual ai-generated fics.