I had read the books and played games, and while I knew the storylines I still kept getting a bit tangled in the timelines. But then again the books with their short story format also jumped around. So while some things were obvious as different times, some things were only apparent in hindsight, even if I had some frame of reference that the average viewer would not have. So I think it HAD to be purposeful, because it was confusing even to me, but I only realized HOW confusing it was in the last episodes.

Yeah, ASOIAF was my favorite series and I was so excited (and scared) when the show was announced. At the time I only knew one or two other people in real life that had actually read the books, and this show made my DAD read them. And he doesn't read fantasy. Anyways, I was scared they'd butcher the characters and turn them into caricatures. The show improved some characters (Oberyn and Davos were show favorites of mine and I did not care for them in the books) and made others worse (book Jon >>> show Jon, Mance Rayder) and some I feel were perfectly cast (Jaime, Cersei, Tywin, Tyrion, Jorah). Plus the show gave us that badass Mormont child leader. She's the best part of the last seasons.

Anyways, while the show had book source material it stayed great. And when it started "spoiling" the books for me my resentment and anger (at GRRM, whether that's fair or not) totally did contribute to my less charitable opinions on the storylines. I had wanted to read these, not see the dumbed down version with missing character arcs try to wrap it all up. And it was so underwhelming because the expectations were high AND I was bitter and predisposed to not be happy about it no matter how good it was. And it did end up being... not great. Maybe in book format we'd have had enough story added to make the ending work, but we didn't have that here. But there's no way objectively that it's 2/10. I'd say 6.5/7. But if our expectations were for 10/10, then 6 or 7 feels like a huge letdown. As big of a letdown as if a 6-7/10 average show had a 2-3/10 finale.

I feel like The Witcher was confusing on purpose though with the timelines, it's like they wanted you to always be wondering "wtf was that about"