Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon Did you see the what that guy did in the show with the person at the place with the stuff? OMG it excited my eyeholes!

[Neo]

Anyone else watching HotD (Hot D, as we call it in my house)? What are your thoughts, without giving away any spoilers here...

At first, I found it really hard to keep the people's names straight, especially with the Targaryen custom of reusing historical names. And then trying to tie everything back to the original series' history just proved to be impossible (maybe because it takes place well before most mentions of Targaryen history in the original series).

And then with the time jumps, they would change actors for some of the secondary characters, and that just made it impossible for me to keep track of them. This is why I dislike reading books for something that I haven't seen visually: the only way I can keep a name straight for someone who doesn't have most of the screen time is to associate them to an actor. As the kids age up, their actors are replaced, and then I lose track of which of them did the thing in the previous episode, so I know which one is the douche in the current episode.

Eventually the time jumps stopped, and everyone entered their "final form," and I found myself with a different concern: why can't an episode just end the way the narrative wants it to end? Why does it always have to have some twist, or unexpected outburst, or some cunning deceit? Sometimes, I think it'd be ok to just let the story end on a happy note, so that the next episode can ruin it - especially after an otherwise intense episode.

Maybe this is just what the Game of Thrones brand is. It seems excessive at times to keep doing the trope, especially when it happens so frequently you can just know that "this is going too well, they're gonna ruin it before the credits roll."