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It's in season 5, when they really diverge from anything in the books, that it takes a nosedive.

Dance of Dragons was a weak entry in the series and it showed. By then, it was pretty clear GRRM didn't want to write the main characters anymore and was working up entirely different stories in the margins. Getting away from the source material was Good Aktuly.

Genuinely enjoyed the first seasons of both. Good acting, good directing, good set design, good pacing, good intrigue... and the fucking costumes in GoT. Every season they got better.

But so much of what was good in these series was the investment of a ton of time and effort and genuine love of the source material. Once that fell away in the later seasons, the shows just collapsed in on themselves until they were nothing but self-referenced tropes. Season 8 of GoT sucked because it was so obviously and disastrously rushed. It was clear the showrunners didn't want to do this job anymore, and it gutted the end product.

Avatar: The Last Airbender was great because of its filler and slice-of-life episodes

Which seem like they should have been fairly cheap to film and edit, too. You don't need a ton of money to make The Warriors of Kyoshi or The Waterbending Scroll, but they add so much to the relationships between the characters and their personal arcs that they can't just be condensed or skipped.

There's definitely some fat to be cut. Particularly in Season One, its clear Nickelodeon demanded a certain amount of formulaic "And now Aang has to win a big fight again or the kids will get bored" plot that was more about selling action figures than pacing out a story. But one of the remarkable things about the series was how this otherwise droning repetition in kids' shows gave service to a larger and more interesting overall narrative.

The cost so fucking much to make and yet look like total dogshit. The special effects and post-production on Cowboy Bebop, for instance, looked worse than what I've seen on YouTube fan films from ten years ago. There's no way that thing cost several million an episode.

Same with One Piece. The props and costumes look like they fell straight out of an anime convention. The directing was mid at best. The camera work felt amateurish. And they clocked that at $144M for the season. Where was all this money even going?

I'm living in the alternate universe where its Thomas Wayne who was forced to watch Bruce murdered by Wojacks and now wages an eternal war in which he's strapped up with the most insane emojis you've ever seen.

They WOULD tho. Come down to Texas and you'll find a huge contingent of libertarians who want MORE cops and MORE identification cards and MORE checkpoints. They just want all this shit to be outsourced to private contractors who are nominally independent of (but ideologically in lockstep with) the state bureaucracy that mandates their existence.

Its all a three-card monte of profiteering, policing, and persecution. The libertarian's ideal form of government is a private far-right militia that can threaten the state bureaucrats with a coup at any moment, if their profits are ever threatened.

You're implicitly describing an Afro-Futurist Soviet Union but if you follow this to its ultimate conclusion your weirabo friends won't let you in the club anymore.

Also very bizarre that you've decided to unify South Africa but leave off Angola, Madagascar, Zambia, and the Congo.

It gets worse, as they start leaning into the Gay Panic Defense. There's an escalating series of assertions that being trans or advocating for trans people constitutes some kind of violent act. You get a bunch of naturalist fallacies and conspiracies about Communist brainwashing, and pretty soon even acknowledging trans people exist is a form of assault.

Americans attempting to leave the Middle East

Panicking every time the clock strikes "4:20" because I know what that means.

Again, this seems like a pretty blatant contradiction. Not that it matters to a bunch of Settlers. But from the Unaligned perspective, it seems glaring.

They had to stop him before he did a China Social Credit Score Disinformation Doublespeak.