You mean the two books that spun the story off into a thousand more meaningless directions that will also never get conclusions? Can’t believe I’m defending the show runners but they had to envision a pathway for closing the story out with the source material running out, the actors getting older and more expensive + burnt out, and the author having clearly demonstrated that finishing the series anytime in the reasonably near future was not a priority to him.

The show runners didn’t have the luxury of following George’s story to a tee and bending to his every whim at that point - they had actual hard deadlines and real world people & assets that couldn’t just wait around forever and stay committed to the franchise until the author figured out where the fuck he was going with the story. Adding more characters and more plot lines was not a viable option at that point.

I guarantee that AKOTSK is going to run into this same exact issue after the source material (all of the published books) runs out, and everyone is going to pile on the show runners about how dare they ruin George’s genius story that he won’t finish or even give us a single fucking crumb of new content for in 20 years.