sooo..... i didn't really keep up with the whole "giving my immediate thoughts after each episode of A Knight of the Seven Nine Kingdoms" thing. didn't feel like it, wasn't sparking joy, sorry if anyone was looking forward to them. that said, now that the season is over, i would like to share some musings on the show as a whole
off the bat, i want to say i really enjoyed this show. while i love the hot mess that is HotD, AKotSK is a better told story. this is unsurprising given that the former is adapting an in-universe history book that only freaks like me would enjoy while the Dunk and Egg stories are among the best things GRRM has ever written, but it's worth saying. a lot of what i will go on to say are criticisms, so it's worth clarifying these are coming from the perspective of someone who thought the show was overall quite good.
to give this a little bit of structure, i'm going to focus on things that have been changed from the short story to the show, starting with changes i like and going from there.
one of my favorite changes is the palpable disdain this show seems to have for the Targaryens. Fossoway's rant when he's drinking with Dunk and Lionel's disparaging comments in the final episode really highlight this, but actually my favorite example of it is the stinger at the end of the final episode. because of course Maekar did not have enough introspection to see the merit in Dunk's argument. he's a Targaryen. he thinks the Targaryens are superior to ordinary people despite all evidence to the contrary.
i'm also fond of Rowan, the sex worker who marries Raymun Fossoway at the end of the season. she fills a vital role as a voice for the common people, and her comment about how her and Dunk are both there to sell their bodies was quite resonant.
a change i found notable but have no strong feelings about at the moment is the way the flashback in episode 5 changed the timeline a bit. in the short story, Dunk is taken in by Ser Arlan much younger, which is a fairly minor change, but the fact that we see Dunk looting a battlefield (presumably the redgrsss field) pushes the blackfyre rebellion significantly more recent than it was in the short stories. i'm reserving further judgement on this front until the next couple of seasons, which will adapt short stories in which the blackfyre rebellions take a much more central focus.
one change that i found enjoyable but was probably bad for the story as a whole is the prominence of Lionel Barratheon. the original short story was very much about how Dunk does not fit into this world of knights and nobles. he is at a disadvantage every moment because he is not like them, but this is why he is the one to intervene when a common-born dornish woman is assaulted by a prince of the realm, and in the end it is decided that Egg would be better off with Dunk specifically because Dunk is not like the upper class. Dunk being friendly with Lionel almost from the jump undermines this. no one will vouch for Dunk? why not ask Lionel, he'd probably do it. who will fight for Dunk in the trial? probably Lionel will (and does, but Dunk never considers this). Dunk spends much of the story hoping he can convince some lord to take him into service, and Lionel insists upon it but Dunk inexplicably turns him down. so many holes result from this change; however, i cannot be mad about it because Daniel Ings is so fun to watch.
what i can and will be mad about is how the scene where Dunk first meets Baelor was changed. everything about this scene has been made worse in the show. in the book, Dunk walks in on the meeting without any knowledge of who the princes are and Baelor remembers Ser Arlan unprompted, asking questions of Dunk to confirm he is who he says he is before vouching for him after Dunk has figured out who he's talking to. in the show, Dunk is spying on the conversation, knows who Baelor is immediately, and specifically seeks out Baelor's confirmation of his knighthood. these changes affect Baelor's characterization slightly in ways i don't love but would be fine with, but they have a much larger impact on how we see Dunk. the idea that Dunk would be bold enough to approach a prince and ask this favor of him, assuming Baelor would in fact remember Ser Arlan rather than being surprised to find that out, once again undermines the idea that Dunk comes from a fundamentally different world than the knights and lords and princes do. this is my least favorite scene in the whole show (worse even than the shitting scene at the beginning, though it's close) and it baffles me because there are plenty of other things to demonstrate that the writers knew what they were doing and knew what the themes were supposed to be and yet they did this.
that being said, i liked the show and i can't wait for season 2
