My problems with GoT are NOT that they are failing to provide a live-action illustration of aSoI&F, it's that even by TV standards, their storytelling is crap. The books are relevant insofar as they show much better directions for the characters and storylines. They show where things are headed, and how the showrunners fail, because they adapt part of the storyline but don't seem to get the rest. Why adapt Ned telling Arya about the importance of family and unity, if the real lesson is that she's a lone wolf? Why have Ned give his sons a lesson in the importance of doing justice and the importance of punishment versus cruelty, if they are going to have his daughters torture or poison people and smirk about it? Why adapt a prophecy flashback for Cersei when you've already changed her story to invalidate the prophecy and never even address it?

And yet, we have the assurances of the showrunners that they know how it's going to end. So it's not like they have been flailing and trying to make up material. What they decided was that Sauron & Saruman or the Dark One or Arawn or Voldemort were not the real bad guys of the story, and they got them out of the way to make the climax about Denethor or Couladin & Elaida & Arymilla or Magg or Draco Malfoy. Even when they had the books to go by, they changed things to make it "more exciting" and stripped any moral relevance or idealism from the story in favor of spectacle, gore and nudity. Instead of making Brienne's story about heroism, it's about killing people and instead of her relationship with Jaime to be about helping one another to be true knights, it's about them hooking up. Brienne actually leaves a woman in mortal peril, in order to hunt down & behead a dying man for revenge for a usurper. And the show doesn't notice that they are filming Brienne & Ramsey murdering wounded men in close proximity, or what that might say about either. Her victim, Stannis, the guy who is redeemed by his choice to put the kingdom ahead of his gratification? Nah, he's not attractive or witty or LGBTQ-friendly so we're going to punish him for killing the guy who was and change his story to be about how badass Ramsey the Rapist is. A snowfall that requires Stannis to burn his daughter to stop, isn't enough to keep Ramsey & a few "good men" from burning ALL Stannis' supplies. Sansa, who is good and kind and smart, and makes people do the right things, even Joffrey, no, she's stupid and needs to be raped to toughen up. They excuse their brutality with the claim of realism and then have the least realistic battles in the history of ever, and flip the rules and mores of their society whenever it suits them. Today, a woman can't sit on the Small Council, but tomorrow, Olenna Tyrell can negotiate with the Hand of the King shushing her son, the actual Lord Paramount, Councilor and Warden of the South. Today, Randyll Tarly can make his wimpy son take the black under threat of death, because his word goes, regardless of how much his wife loves their son, but tomorrow she can dress him down in front of that son, their daughters and a foreign dinner guest and he rolls over. Today, a woman has no choice but to let her husband rape her and tomorrow a woman can blow up the clergy and central religious site in the realm and claim the throne with no legal right. Instead of showing a woman threatening her rival's power by doing good and gaining popularity through image politics, they decide to make her a sexy temptress, without thinking that they are basically showing her sexually manipulate an immature teenager into turning against his family. None of this is excused or explained by not having a pair of fantasy novels to read.