it also served as a subtle commentry about the importance of adminstrating and diplomancy, Cersai implodes because she isnt actually a very good ruler and is only really competant at political skullduggery. It's a nice counterpoint to earlier books where it was spelled out being honerable or a good military commander don't make a good king either.
The show naturally ignored all the bits about actually running a country being it's less imediatly dramatic which is partly why late series Tyrion sucks since he's really good at it in the books.
and
I don't think she was even good at that. Cersai only survived by being protected by more competent men, plus the sheer idiocy of Ned Stark. On her own she is way too impatient and spiteful to actually manipulate and make complex plots.
It's similar for Dany, who only survived this far due to zealous allies and her dragons. She was a terrible ruler that routinely made the worse choices and got protected by plot armor.
and
She's alright if this was Ck2 she'd be an intrigue 10 vs the Ned 4 and littlefingers and Tyrions 18-21, her big flaw is she cannot calculate differant aghendas to her own because she can't relate to others, has terrible impulse control and her inability to cultivate personal loyalty.
The thing with Cersei is, that she's too impatient and does not understand the motivations of others, both of these issues are made worse by the rampant Dunning-Kruger thing she's got going for herself.
She constantly remarks and ponders that she should have been born Tywin's son, just cause she's so fucking SMRT, while she begs some honorable knight to protect her from Bronn by putting a knife in his back... and then she learns that the guy did not, in fact, just shank Bronn in a dark alley like she requested, but rather rode out to him and told him who sent him, why he was sent and that he demands a duel - which Bronn promptly wins, cause he just lances the other guy's horse and then kills him like a bitch. So Cersei's little murderplot failed -and- she got caught in the process by her target.
She also puts way too much trust into her vagina, like, literally. She thinks, the moment she rolls up her skirt and drops her knickers, whoever is allowed to mount her will become her willing tool for all eternity. The thing is: It seems to work on Jaime, but again: Cersei really sucks at identifying other's motivations or feelings, mostly cause she just transposes her own views on them. She's eager to switch out Jaime for any other useful fool with a dick, whereas Jaime is really dedicated and faithful towards Cersei.
So she whores herself out to Lancel, who sells her out to Tyrion the moment he gets threatened with being ratted out to Joffrey.
And she whores herself out to one of the Kettleblacks (or more? Forgot), who promptly sell her out to Bronn the moment he threatens them. Funny thing about that, she actually thinks that the Kettleblacks are amazing fighters, just cause they look fierce, whereas Bronn remarks on how they are just show-offs who will falter at the smallest threat. Cersei doesn't even stop and think about the obvious: Jaime has never slept with another woman, whereas she's just yet another piece of ass for whichever Kettleblack stuck his dick in her.
Her wondercrotch worked on Jaime (well, not for the reasons Cersei thought), she can't fathom it not working on someone else.
And just to add insult to injury: There's that one female courtier that seduces Cersei to gain her trust - with great success. Cersei never even contemplates whether or not that woman might have any motive for doing her, she's just caught up in lust and severely underestimates the other person. Cersei must have been every spymaster's favorite ruler, she was so easy to read, so easy to manipulate and so easy to outmaneuver. You might as well assume that some would work behind the curtains to protect Cersei from being taken down, just cause she's so handy. Much like that story about the Brits stopping their plans to assassinate Hitler during WW2, cause they figured he'd do more damage to the German war efforts while still alive.
She's capable of pulling off short-term ploys and conspiracies, but she lacks perspective to think ahead more than just the very immediate future.
Giving that bum-priest the powers he requested was a great short-term success to solve some pressing problems, but since he was a filthy bum with pious words on his lips, she never even assumed that he might take advantage of her, after all, she's a super smart schemer, Tywin's trueborn son in a woman's body, smart and beautiful and he's just a smelly old bum. Anyone with half a brain realized that this was going to backfire horribly, after all, the setting of GoT has a giant clusterfuck of a holy war to get rid of the very thing Cersei allowed to emerge with that bum-pope.
Man, I've stopped caring for this stuff so much, can't even be bothered to look up his name... Sparrow? Was that the name they used?
None of this really matters now. The IP's financial viability is dead thanks to that ending and as you say, the WW got BTFO'd so hard that they weren't even the main villains in Season 8, they got swept aside in 2 episodes. You can't really build stakes around their original rise when they've been overshadowed by the famously incompetent Cersei Lannister.
Just .... man. Just think about it. For eight. Thousand. Years. people told each other stories, hunched over, huddled together, with hushed voices, peeking into the shadows out of fear, about the White Walkers. The enemy of every living thing. The great Evil that will descent down from the North one day, wash over the lands and kill every living thing, cover everything with ice, turn every person and animal into its servants, every plant to ice, every lake will be frozen, mountains themselves will be cracking like glass under the intense coldness and no one and no thing will escape...
and it might happen right now as we speak.
And they get outdone by a women in her forties, standing on a balcony, sipping wine and sometimes sharing her bed with some random nobody that she hopes to manipulate into doing her bidding.
Warm orifice > ancient unholy COTF magic to bind winter into human shape and giving him the power to raise and control the dead, huh.
I think it has, but it's different when it happened to Game of Thrones.
In the old days of TV, the Star Treks and the like, shows were made explicitly so that every episode and later on every season was self-contained, while also advancing for the more dedicated viewers. This was the case with children's cartoons when I was growing up. You could watch any Spider-Man episode regardless if you watched it last week and still enjoy it. Thus, even if a show went down the crapper, you could still enjoy several seasons of it. Best example is the Simpsons who, most people will say you should stop watching after season 10, but you should still watch seasons 2 - 7 despite how bad it currently is.
How do you do that with GoT, though? Can you just say "Well, you can stop after season 4 since it goes south after that"?" No, because after the Sopranos hit it big, sequential storytelling for TV shows has become the norm, even for old IPs like Star Trek. If the conclusion is going to be crap, why even care about the earlier seasons? THe only reason to do it is to later on pick up the book series that GRRM frankly doesn't give a shit about anymore.
S8E3 made me so mad, I ditched the show right then and there... and what you just wrote is what went through my head as well. The ending was so fucked up, I can't even take comfort in watching the old amazing things, cause I know it will all be pointless, stupid or tainted in the end. Months went by and I put it to the test, watched some iconic scenes and where they used to entertain me, I was now just sad, knowing how it would all play out in the end. It's surreal, how much the end fucked up even the parts that are genuinely well-done in the show. There's a few scenes in the show that are even better than the book (few though)... and even those I can't enjoy. The books will be the same deal, once George Martin keels over and we're left with either an incomplete bookseries or some terrible mess of a resolution, cobbled together by cheap writers based on notes scribbled down in crayon by Martin before his death.
Test it yourself.
Watch this clip, a clip that most fans remember watching fondly when it first aired. The atmosphere, the dialogue, the acting, the camerawork, the music, everything is perfect... but watch it and tell me one thing:
What does it make you feel
now?
I knew that there were already a lot of changes that happened or events that happen in the book and weren't even feasible in the show such as the Lady Stoneheart arc. But it all just went completely to shit, it seems. They fucked Stannis over so hard, they ruined any good qualities Daenerys had, they ruined the suspense and dread of the Night King and the white walkers. The last season gets the brunt of the disdain but tbh the show started going downhill before that, it was just an acceptable amount rather than "why did I just waste my time watching this".
For a very long time, people accepted the heavy downgrades in storytelling, cause it was still ongoing, there was still potential and still there were glimpses of neat stuff. For what it's worth, I think some of the stuff in S8E2 was great. A sombre episode about people facing a terrible battle with even worse odds, looking for some companionship in the night before the slaughter starts... that was (Maisie Williams sideboob and awkward sex scene aside) one of my favorite episodes... but with episode 3, a lot of shit was undone in such an unsatisfactory manner, that pissed me off so much, I couldn't bear watching any further... and then I heard it got even worse.
Arya uses some Naruto-level weeb-leap, that makes the worst of shonen animu look tame in comparison, swats the Night King down like a fly. Teleporting fleets and magic ballistas, forgetful queens that go crazy when hearing bells, it just goes on and on. So much character developement ruined, retconned and reset. I can't fathom how anyone would greenlight -let alone come up with- this shit.
I know ever since the writers' strike in Hollywood, productions have been a race to the bottom to find the cheapest writers, but man. If this isn't a wake-up-call to start looking for actual quality, I don't know what is... well maybe Star Wars. Disney managed to kill a franchise that would have generated billions of revenue, even if it was just Mark Hamill in his Luke-costume, reading aloud for an hour and a half the phone book of Farmington, Missouri.
The plot armor around Lyanna Mormont was also absolutely fucking unbearable. Throwing zingers around just to one-up those silly men was peak reddit.
I really liked her character, cause damn it, she does have a few nice moments early on, but at some point, you just couldn't overlook that she was the writer's pet and oneliner-dispenser with a full suit of plot-armor, it became so fucking annoying.
What made ASOIAF (and early GoT) so great, was that it had a very gritty atmosphere, where anyone could die for making a mistake. Characters would get punished for behaviour that in other stories would reward them. It was very firmly based on logic and it surprised the audience with some of these things.
Ned wants to warn Cersei, so she can get away without being killed by Rob in a rage when he learns about "his" children - and he gets both Rob and himself killed.
Dany rescues a slave from being raped by her husbands warriors and when she offers to heal Drogo, she trusts her, thinking it would be a quid quo pro - and then it turns out that the slave woman despises Dany and remarks on how naive she is to think the guys that Dany stopped to be the first ones to rape her that day.
Just to name two from early on. No one was safe. Actions had very logical, very brutal consequences. The authors didn't seem to protect their favorite characters.
The writers of the show very quickly established that some characters are immune, though, and that is exactly what GoT should not have been. They used all the cheap tropes, like shock deaths (Stannis' daughter comes to mind), and all that shit that ASOIAF actively tries to avoid. They kept many characters around for being fan favorites, but they gave them nothing to do - Tyrion is the best example.
It was funny to see the lead-up to the leaks on Season 8, but still. Feels to those who spent so long with the show, only to have it piss in their face.