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The teaser of the US television series 'Game of Thrones' season 8. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)

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It was the winter of discontent across social media this past week as fans of HBO's critically acclaimed fantasy series Game of Thrones shared their reaction to a new trailer for the less than acclaimed eighth and final season on various platforms.

While the show ended its run nearly two years ago, for the 10th anniversary of the hit TV show HBO has been releasing trailers that highlight the best moments from each season. Fans were quick to pounce to a mythical dragon on the trailer for Season 8.

Even as the actual trailer for that final season has been touted as extremely well edited, and it certainly captures the finest moments, there is no denying that it left many fans feeling disappointed and they were quite vocal.

Since being uploaded to YouTube on April 6, the video has been seen more than 450,000 times and with nearly 2,500 comments. If HBO had hoped this would garner new respect they should have thought again. The vast majority either were openly hostile or mocking of the actual season. A common theme among those comments was that the season was rushed and that too many plotlines had been abandoned while bringing the show to a conclusion.

The fact that the video was seen less than half a million times could also speak to how disliked the season was. The GameOfThrones YouTube channel has nearly 4.6 million subscribers – suggesting that many fans simply weren't all that interested in seeing a rehash of the lackluster conclusion to the show.

Meanwhile, many fan videos have already popped up, casting the spotlight on where the show took the wrong turn.

Among these was "The Ruined Legacy of Game of Thrones" from the YouTube channel captainmidnight. While that channel has some 443,000 subscribers, the recent video has been seen more than 252,000 times.

Likewise, the video "Every error in Game of Thrones Season 8," which Culture Vulture Media posted nearly two years ago has also been seen nearly 2.6 million times with many comments coming in just the past week. Clearly fans seem to be more interested in what went wrong with Game of Thrones than taking a stroll down video lane to be reminded of the highpoints.

Winter Fell Flat

On Wednesday afternoon and evening "Game of Thrones" and "Season 8" were trending on Twitter, a reaction to @GameOfThrones' simple post "Winter is coming."

That tweet had been retweeted more than 25,000 times and had more than 135,000 likes – suggesting that there were still a lot of fans who weren't totally down on the way the show concluded. However, among the nearly 26,000 quoted tweets there was still a lot of negativity.

Astead W. Herndon (@AsteadWesley), reporter for The New York Times and CNN political analyst, was among the voices on Twitter who may have summed up what many felt about the final season of Games of Thrones, "if HBO wants me to watch a Game Of Thrones spin off I want a personal apology for season 8. 12 pt font, double spaced, no funny business on the margins"

The YouTube Channel Overlord DVD, which mocks pop culture, went so far as to share an "alternative ending" to the series via a tweet.

Author John Hornor Jacobs (@johnhornor) was also among those who noted that Warner Brothers (which also owns HBO) recently funded a re-cut of the super hero film Justice League. Jacobs wrote, "They gave Zack Snyder 70 something million bucks to 'fix' Justice League. Fix season 8. You could probably do it in three episodes."

If HBO had really thought this might turn things around, perhaps not posting "Winter is Coming" in April as the country recovers from a pandemic might have been wise. But then again, maybe they could just remake Season 8 and make everyone happy.


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HBO Releases New ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8 Trailer and Fans Have Feelings

For the 10th anniversary of the fantasy hit, HBO has revisited the divisive final season. Here's why a remake isn't happening (and one way it eventually might...)

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As part of celebrating the 10th anniversary of the launch of Game of Thrones, HBO has released a new official trailer for the fantasy hit’s divisive eighth and final season.

The trailer is a well-edited clip that refreshes fans on the dramatic highlights and lavish spectacle of the final six episodes of the Emmy-winning series — yet is also stirring up all sorts of feelings among those fans who felt the last season was a massive disappointment.

Here’s the video (which, unlike the show’s normal preseason trailers, is full of spoilers).

Comments on the trailer range from the sincere (“This just makes me sad. A moment of joy. Then sadness”) to sarcastic (“I’m very confident Bran will finally do something epic this season that isn’t just sitting in his chair while the end of the world ensues around him”) to snarky (“‘Our enemy doesn’t tire’ *Tires within one episode” and “‘That’s what death is, isn’t it? Forgetting, being forgotten.’ It’s like they’re describing the enthusiasm and lasting popularity ever since they tanked the show”). 

And, of course, there are plenty of renewed calls to remake season eight, a fan rallying cry that’s been ongoing since the series ended in 2019, and one that seemed to gain additional bullishness after HBO’s parent company, WarnerMedia, released the Snyder Cut of Justice League last month.

So here’s why remaking the final season isn’t going to happen … and one long-shot eventual scenario under which it might.

First, with Justice League, the situation was entirely different – Zack Snyder’s Justice League restored the original director’s vision of a universally derided film and almost entirely employed footage that had already been shot. Whereas GoT season eight was considered a huge success in many respects: It was a ratings blockbuster, it won the Emmy for best drama, and polls suggest roughly half of the fandom liked it (here’s one, and here’s another), which is more than you’d think from reading comments in the media and on social media. It also represented the final chapter in a continuous series with its cast and creative team intact. Speaking of which, the show’s cast has moved on to other projects and key players have said they are not interested in returning to the world of Westeros (let alone doing anything to overwrite their previous work, which they have repeatedly said they’re largely extremely proud of). So there is no current desire for this to happen or, even if there was, a practical path to it happening.

That said, there is one way that, hypothetically, a new televised ending for Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen and others could happen. George R.R. Martin’s final two books in his saga, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, will have different endings for many characters. After both are published, one could imagine HBO being tempted to do something with this new and presumably creatively unique material since the company owns the rights to A Song of Ice and Fire and is working closely with Martin, and has been very aggressively expanding its Game of Thrones universe to make HBO Max more competitive in the streaming world.

Keep in mind many of HBO’s six prequel ideas that are currently being explored are based on very small amounts of Martin’s previously published material. Whereas Martin’s last ASOIAF book, 2011’s A Dance With Dragons, was more than 1,000 pages long. So it wouldn’t be surprising if his final two books topped 2,000 pages total — that’s a lot of content to mine, and is also the sort of ultra-detailed, character-driven road map that helped make GoT a success in the first place. But given that Winds doesn’t have a publication date yet — let alone A Dream of Spring — any such “Martin Cut” limited series, or the like, would be many years down the road, and would likely have a different cast as well. Such a project wouldn’t be framed as replacing season eight, or a corrective or “better,” but simply a different vision of the end of ASOIAF based on Martin’s novels that were not available when the show was being made. And if the idea of an actor other than, say, Gwendoline Christie playing Brienne of Tarth seems like an utterly blasphemous idea, you might be right — but we’re already living in a world where recasting iconic Game of Thrones characters for a new project isn’t hypothetical, but happening (in the form of a Broadway play being developed). So if one considers how much the GoT-verse has exploded in just the past year … who’s to say where it will be a decade, and two more ASOIAF books, from now?

Other “Iron Anniversary” celebrations, by the way, include the release of a Game of Thrones Daenerys-inspired Faberge dragon egg worth $2.2 million.

For now, all eight seasons of Game of Thrones are streaming on HBO Max.

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