#there are plenty of valid meta writers who believe the show's ending is bad fanfic

[him-e]

"IS CATEGORICALLY NOT THE SAME CHARACTER ENDING, NOT EVEN REMOTELY SIMILAR" I mean, Daenerys being attacked by Sons of the Harpy's then rescued by Drogo is categorically not the same as Drogo being drawn in by the blood of the fighting and Daenerys saving him from being attacked / the audience from him .... are categorically not the same. But the show did that. Why wouldn't the parts of the story they only have bullet points for be further away?

Why wouldn’t the parts of the story they only have bullet points for be further away?

This only works if you assume that the bullet point GRRM gave them was “Dany dies”, full stop, zero context. Can you believe Martin would do that? Why do people assume he would intentionally troll the writers of the show that’s based on his books? What does he even gain by doing this? Also, differences in the endgame tend to stick out like a sore thumb, compared to differences in the halfway plot points, which in hindsight can be rationalized as different roads leading to the same castle—whereas the endgame is either the same or NOT the same.

Also, false equivalence: while show!Daznak’s pit is tonally slightly different than its book counterpart (with, yes, some small but crucial differences, like Drogon not being there to physically save Dany from danger and Dany having to use a whip to tame him, and getting severely injured and burned in the process), the GIST of it is: the fighting pits represent the pinnacle of Dany’s internal crisis and discomfort towards the culture and the “peace” she is supposed to embrace by marrying Hizdahr; while the fighters perform their horror show in the pits, conspiracists attempt to have Dany murdered (it’s subtler in the books but yeah, the poisoned locusts were for her); shit goes down, Drogon suddenly bursts in, Dany realizes it’s the now or never moment where she needs to be a dragonrider or be not, she makes Drogon recognize her, she flies away with him leaving all this mess behind. Even more in a nutshell: Dany cuts the Meereenese knot by choosing her dragon, being a dragon, over politics and *floppy ears* (she has a whole chapter afterwards to intimately process and rationalize this choice, but it’s in Daznak’s pit that she begins to choose “fire and blood”)

And the gist is the same in both show and books. Your point ironically validates mine: if the extent of the show vs books differences re: endgame can be compared to how either canon treated Daznak’s pit differently, then… the show and book ending are essentially the same, bullet-point wise.

Dany dying in (redemptive?) self sacrifice against the Others VS Dany collapsing under the weight of her post-heroic destiny identity crisis, on the other hand, are TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SCENARIOS in terms of plot, character arc, themes, even archetypes and tropes. It’s not just a change of minor, albeit crucial, details, or a botched adaptation—IT’S A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ENDGAME! 

You do realize that in order to have Dany die heroically in the WftD the entire final storyline needs to be radically different, including multiple other characters’ endgames? You can’t just butterfly away an entire final narrative that deals with the main heroes’ failure to cope with a post epic war world. I mean how can you look at this and genuinely think it’s Benioff&Weiss’ work when you have Martin going on record several times with how much he loves the scouring of the Shire in LotR and how he strives to achieve a similar effect? While also criticising Tolkien for not showing what follows up the whole prophesied hero/king trope? You’ve heard of Aragorn’s tax policy, but here’s the rest: 

did [Aragorn] maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? 

You can argue the show’s character development to get there was mediocre at best, or that it intentionally downplayed Dany’s greyness in order to make this twist more shocking, but the endgame in itself, if handled not as a plot twist but as a genuine tragic character arc, is something Martin would totally do.

I could believe the show inverted the order of the Battle of Winterfell and the Battle of King’s Landing when I still thought the latter was going to be Team Heroes vs Cersei, full stop (maybe because they couldn’t find a way to incorporate the KL plot with the war for the dawn so they just resorted to wrapping it up later), but not anymore, since it involves a major character beat for Dany including her endgame (and Jon’s endgame, by extension).