User blog comment:The Dragon Demands/Worst changes made by the TV series/@comment-5014364-20141217190916

...some of these changes were, as I said, "in the past" and not too bad -- Season 2's filler stuff was later admitted to be not great and they got better about it by Season 3, Qarth was never going to be great and wasn't that much of a stain on the show in the long-term, etc.

The Season 5 changes might turn into "major unforgivable and unfixable flaws" but I can only judge those once I see them and we know more.

Of the past changes, I supposed I consider "Robb/Talisa/Catelyn" as one big tapestry of failure because it was an entire subplot. It DID get somewhat better in Season 3. When Robb did more book things like with Karstark. But the overall lack of agency for Catelyn was bad. The love story between Robb and Talisa was the worst written romance I've seen since Attack of the Clones (through no fault of both actors). Once they got past the "falling in love" stuff and were just "yup, we're married" they were better in Season 3. But overall, it seems like they just didn't want to blame Robb for things or show him as a flawed leader -- they needed Brynden to flat out chastise him for marrying Talisa as politically disastrous and not easily defensible. They MIGHT be able to fix this a bit if they have a character in a later season point out that Robb ultimately got both himself and his men killed through this.

The gender nudity imbalance can be fixed in later seasons and the memory of worse offenses will fade - I mean they have made Olyvar a recurring character.

But I will be campaigning for 10 years for a later release to just overdub the Jaime/Cersei sex scene in the sept; their attitude seems to be "ignore the problem and it will go away" - which is actually the proper response for "don't feed the trolls"...but when EVERY major news outlet from Entertainment Weekly to YahooNews is commenting on it, ignoring it is no longer a viable option. You need to "fix it in post". So I'm annoyed about this "disastrously bad and misleading camera direction", but at least there is some faint plausibility that it can be "fixed" in a re-release a decade from now.

So that's two major complaints: fix Jaime/Cersei (ongoing issue about a re-release), and Robb/Talisa/Catelyn, which wasn't that great but kind of ended by Season 3 anyway with their deaths (and again, which wasn't nearly as bad in Season 3). Most fan polls agree that Season 2 was probably the weakest, or perhaps, most "disjointed" season (it had great moments interspersed with others that even the writers acknowledged didn't work well).

Third standing complaint is Tyrion/Tywin/Tysha. Baffling and absurd. My hope is that....GRRM told them things about future books that we don't know. And Tysha is still alive. So maybe if Tyrion later does meet Tysha in a future book, they had some idea for "we'd rather that this be the actual Tysha reveal". That some knowledge they have about what happened to Tysha, of which we know nothing, influenced their decision...though even then, I'd still strongly disagree with leaving it out as a reason for Tyrion killing Tywin. It's just this utterly shocking betrayal...and to hear just how flippant Tywin is about it:
 * Tyrion: "Where is Tysha?"
 * Tywin: "I don't know where your whore is."
 * Tyrion: "Say that word one more time and I will kill you.  Where is my wife?" (long pause)
 * Tywin: "Wherever whores go." (twang goes the crossbow).