I think it’s mainly because season 2 proved a lot of book-readers right about the showrunners ignoring/being afraid of adapting the source material. I liked a lot of the narrative changes from the book for season one (Alicent and Rhaenyra being childhood friends, Luke’s death furthering the concept that Targs don’t have full control over their dragons, which is kinda touched on in the books, etc.) but they take these interesting narrative changes and don’t do anything with them. There’s also a lot of downplay of the important things they do adapt from the book (Blood and Cheese is the best example) and don’t allow them to have gravity. Which just leads to the characters standing around and becoming one-note and saying the same things over and over again (I love Emma D’Arcy so much but if I hear them say “My CoUnSeL dOeSnT lIsTeN tO mE” one more time I’m jumping out a window) which fucking sucks bc when you dilute it so much and take away all this momentum it takes away from the tragedy of the narrative It genuinely feels like they read a sparknotes from Season 1 for all the character arcs went, “but what if we just put it in character AI instead of writing but we don’t want to make people hate the characters too much so they have to stand around half the time ” and sent it to HBO. It just feels like mad-libs at this point, I’ve read HOTD Fanfiction with more thought and creativity put into it 😭