'Games of Thrones' petition to remake final season nears 500,000 signatures
***WARNING: SPOILERS THROUGH SEASON 8, EPISODE 5 OF ‘GAME OF THRONES’***
Nearly a half-million petitioners at Change.org are ready to mount a dragon and burn the final season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” to the ground, very similar to what Daenerys Targaryen just did in the most recent episode, “The Bells.”
That decision — both by Dany and by the writers and show-runners — seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to fan criticism of the show’s final run.
A Change.org petition with a goal of 500,000 signatures, “Remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers,” was getting pretty close. It had garnered 459,612 signatories as of Thursday afternoon, and you could literally watch that number tick upwards by the minute).
“David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have proven themselves to be woefully incompetent writers when they have no source material (i.e. the books) to fall back on,” the petition’s text reads. “This series deserves a final season that makes sense.”
Criticism of the eighth season has been swift and, in many cases, merciless, with longtime fans upset over inconsistency, the way time and travel is dealt with, character decisions and just about every other aspect of the show.
Here at the Trib, the “Thrones’n’at” panel has certainly had its fair share of criticism, primarily with the way the show, and particularly events that would normally take a full season to play out, have been compressed as the final two seasons were shortened from the typical 10 episodes, first to seven and this year to six.
Even shooting feature-movie-length episodes hasn’t stemmed the tide of fans savaging various elements of each week’s episode.
Critics seem to have gotten more vocal once the show began to outpace the source material, George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” series. Martin has been working on the series’ sixth book, “The Winds of Winter,” since 2011, when the fifth book of the series, “A Dance with Dragons,” was published.
The final episode of the series will air Sunday, May 19.
Click here to view the petition.
Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.
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