The idea that the show hasn't experienced a decrease in quality over the last 3-4 seasons just doesn't pass the smell test for me,
@Dachs. I mean I admire your effort to pretend like it's always been like this, and you can point to isolated instances of issues in s1-s4 without a doubt (as well as issues in the books I'm sure, haven't read them) but to me it's painfully obvious that these issues were not nearly as salient or as hard to explain as they are now.
It's fairly rude to accuse me of conducting this discussion in bad faith for apparently no reason when the simpler and more obvious explanation is that I actually, genuinely believe it and don't need to "pretend" anything.
I don't think that they constitute "isolated instances" at all; they formed
crucial moments in the first few seasons. Take the quotation from Akka, "magically killing whatever is needed to prevent the logical crushing of Lannister forces when it should happen". That is literally direct from
A Clash of Kings and Season 2. Renly Baratheon amasses a colossal army, in the neighborhood of 100,000 (a silly number, but let that go) from the Reach and most of the Stormlands. He politically and militarily outplays both Tywin and Stannis and makes a bid for Robb's aid. Even without it, Renly possesses the military might to annihilate every other army fighting in Westeros, and the road to King's Landing is virtually unguarded. Buuuuuut he is undone by a magic demon baby created by Stannis and Melisandre that murders him in the night and causes the disintegration of his coalition. Meanwhile, Tywin spends most of the season ineffectually defending against Robb's armies in the Riverlands from Harrenhal (another brainless decision from the ostensible military genius of the continent), then packs up and leaves for King's Landing to try to beat Stannis' fleet to Blackwater Bay. His land army makes much better time than Stannis' fleet, which is utterly incomprehensible (the "teleportation" mentioned), and arrives shortly after the Baratheon troops, just in time to save the city and wreck Stannis' bid for the throne.
This is literally the foundation of the story of the war for Westeros in the second book. It is not an "isolated instance". It is an increasingly absurd series of tricks to get the incompetent Lannisters out of the deep hole they've dug themselves: the exact thing about which Akka was complaining.
My previous post had a litany of similar things. Martin's greatest and most iconic moments, the execution of Ned Stark and the Red Wedding, were set up by having characters uncharacteristically act like complete idiots in
previous seasons. (Well,
more complete idiots. Really, the only important people who weren't obviously morons in the first several seasons were Varys and Tyrion. And Varys mostly got away with it for not having an obvious motivation for awhile, until his Daenerys allegiance in the show/his Young Griff allegiance in the books.) And part of the reason that the more recent seasons have struggled is because Martin flung his characters to the far corners of the world and made it difficult, if not impossible, to bring them back together in a satisfying way. I didn't come up with the "if the third act doesn't work, the problem is usually in the first act" thing. Billy Wilder did.
None of that means that I think that the current showrunners are particularly competent or effective. Their early additions to the book story, like their mutilation of the Dorne plot, were awful. They have been willing to ignore characterization more readily than in the past; their arcs for some characters (particularly Jaime) have been terrible lately. And while Martin was bad about things taking time and distance being a thing, the past several seasons have been worse. Part of that is trying to pull everything back together quickly, which I acknowledge and understand as a valid concern and an issue often borne of Martin's own errors, but it still strains belief and makes the show harder to enjoy.
I think the difference between Now and Back Then is that the showrunners have exaggerated many of Martin's worst tendencies as an author. Where you see a steep decline in quality I see one that is decidedly less steep, and I'm more willing to place blame on things from the first part of the series than you are.