I've never watched or wanted to try GOT because I know how brutal it is (I can handle brutality on IWTV and TLOU, but GOT seems heavier), but I know how everyone hated the last season to the point it became an expression to not have things go as bad as GOT and all that. D: Eventually I changed my mind at least about a few seasons because there are actors whose catalog I want to check out (like Pedro and Jacob, for example) and they were there... But it's more for them than the show itself, so I'm still dreading it. š
But I still want to finish the books first, theeeen I'll go through TV shows, movies and other stuff. Also, I believe I'll be able to finish Blood and Gold today. š
Eh, I mean, if it helps, by season 8 the emotional stakes are nil because by that point it's just actors mugging valiantly as they say words that are meaningless because the plot has been reduced to a bunch of poorly connected flashy trailer moments š
Themes, as showrunner David Benioff famously said, are for eighth grade book reports. Seasons 1-3 are great, or at least appear to be, but after seasons 5-8 you can tell they didn't really understand what was good about the source material. They blew their load with the Red Wedding and increasingly lost interest because of the perceived dearth of badass moments after the third book. I have literally never been hurt so badly by a TV show and I live in terror of it happening again, lol. Pedro Pascal is showstopping as Oberyn Martell, and Jacob Anderson was a great Grey Worm, but the latter is kind of tainted to me because GW in the show was in large part only present during its decline, and his arc was a show-only creation.