Everytime new S3 leak is revealed I'm like WTH... genuinely this tv show doesn't makes any sense...
It's a curse that has and probably will always plague the "A Song of Ice and Fire" franchise for the rest of the days.
Edge Lord writing.
People involved in the franchise, especially its writers, are so hung up on the nihilistic setting and values of Westeros that they often use it as a crutch for shallow and performative character writing. They're not actually trying to write up to the characters in the world of GRRM, they're trying to write to the expectations of the franchise's reputation that people come to expect from it.
Therefore, rather than trying to write something different or deeper on a personal level in terms of characterization they just lean on shock-jock value and come off as university level sophomoric edge lord writing.
"Fuck you, Dad! It's Game of Thrones, but with queer themes and feminist dogma repackaged. Look how edgy I am, I took gender studies and applied it to a multi-million dollar franchise that I'm gonna kill! I'm so fucking cool!"
The truth? Condal is talented but he's not good enough to run a show. When they left him alone he fell apart, he choaked when it mattered most. He's a good staff writer on someone else's vision. But he's shown that he doesn't have a vision of his own. If he did, he wouldn't have a wildly unqualified ideological hack like Sara Hess running roughshod over him and actively ruining the show with decade old outdated and out of touch social political bullshit.
I've talked to people who've seen four episodes and saw some dailies for later episodes and they said that Season 3 is just stale. It's trying to pretend to be something its not. They think they're making Game of Thrones for a modern audience. But they're not talented enough to match GRRM's character building because they care more about their message than an actual story or believable characters. It's a show written by people that have no life experience beyond being in Los Angeles and trying to break into show business.
Just like on Tumblr, you'll have Sara Hess acting like being queer is somehow comparable to life and death struggle or war veterancy.
I'd say that Sara Hess is a ideological hack that doesn't belong anywhere near Genre - she doesn't understand it and she doesn't like it. But Condal, in some ways, is worse, because he's got some talent but he lacks enough of it to be good enough to be where he is.
And so you get what we have in Season 3. Good to mediocre cast - Emma D'Arcy is just an okay actress, she just ... fine - put together with wildly inferior writers that are straddling the line between their personal political bullshit and maintaining the facade of the Edge Lord branding of Game of Thrones.
The result is a fairly bad show gilded with Dragons going pew-pew and stand out acting performances by the likes of Tom Glynn-Carney, Matt Smith, Fabian Frankel, and Ewan Mitchell.
