If you're wondering why the latest season of Game of Thrones has left viewers with a sour taste in their mouths, then Twitter user Daniel Silvermint has the perfect explanation for you.
Don't worry, there are no spoilers to be found here!
Before we begin, we should remind our readers that the seventh and eighth seasons of HBO's hit show were heavily truncated to 13 episodes over two years.
Although HBO offered to give show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as much time as they needed to finish the story, the two men turned down the offer.
They were understandably exhausted.
For one thing, writer George R. R. Martin had failed to meet his deadlines for the publication of The Winds of Winter, the long awaited sequel to A Dance with Dragons. There's no telling when––if ever––we'll get A Dream of Spring.
This problem left Benioff and Weiss with no material to adapt after Season 5, so Martin provided them with rough outlines.
As the critical and public reaction to this season has shown us, they've proven much more successful at adapting existing material than writing fresh material from bullet points.
But it's a bit more complicated than that.
Enter Silvermint, who explained why this final season has been so unpalatable to so many fans of the series.
He explains the differences between plotters and pantsers...
...and explained what this has to do with Game of Thrones...
...and how that hurt Benioff and Weiss when they ran out of books to adapt. It gave us the Game of Thrones "bucket list"...
...and that changed the course of the show as we once knew it.
Alas.
But what does this mean for the finale?
And it all makes sense.
There's one more episode to go before it all ends, and we'll be armchair-critiquing its merits for a long time to come.
@jaketapoer/Bluesky
@BillAckman/Twitter