The books and the tv series are fundamentally different creatures. ASOIAF is GRRM melding his simplistic disdain for the Vietnam war and the Bush adventures (bad people do bad things when they have power) with a pretty overt climate change analogue, which everybody ignores because it isn't an immediate threat to them.
Game of Thrones as a tv production, is sort of a monument to whats wrong with Western Culture in the 2010s. Subversion for its own sake, resulting in an inferior product to the original.
It tries to distinguish itself from past eras by being both grander in vision to what came before but also darker, and more cynical. It's not afraid to offend with sex and gore, and yet at the first sign of real public outcry crumbles like an old woman's hip. Child sacrifice got virtually 0 backlash on grounds of morality, whilst a forced marriage and rape earlier in the season was triggering enough to get all future sex scenes scrubbed and sanitised henceforth.
The stately figures are demonstrably past their prime, and feel like they squandered their youth, while the younger characters have been given a multitude of reasons to be unhappy with the status quo only to have their energies misdirected in the worst of ways. Eventually, the ones that survive to the final series have developed skills to be game-changers in their own right, but the pay-off isn't proportional to their efforts, if it's even there at all.
There's plenty to be optimistic about, and the long-term threats can be tackled constructively, but instead ugliness and nihilism wins out almost all the time, and in the cheapest of ways. And then, because the writers want to chart their own path and reject the tropes of past eras, wind up creating a story that still relies on those same tropes by way of subversive contrast, and is nonetheless inferior for it. Any potential hero that naturally arises over a nigh-decade of constant loss and bloodshed has to be quickly taken down a notch in case the audience is confused the show will have a happy ending. "There are no heroes, that's all folks!" is not a compelling and timeless tale.
It's nearly a case study in why literary tropes became tropes. Because running away from them invariably results in crafting something that just fails to resonate with people.
At some stage, probably when writing season 5, D&D realised the trajectory they've got the important characters on was so fundamentally divergent from their book counterparts, that they could have pitched to GRRM a different ending more befitting them. Instead, they continued haphazardly towards an end goal that no longer made sense, and fans in the final seasons were totally wise to things just happening because the writers demanded it occur. When it should have been, and originally was, an organic consequence of character motivations and the world itself.
D&D? More like TNT haha. They blew this franchise's cultural impact up in the space of about 4 weeks with those final episodes.
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