THAT'S ALL???

HBO wanted that, but the writers wanted to wrap it up this year

HBO wanted more and so did GRRM. It was D&D who were in a hurry.

Sadly, their rushing utterly ruined the final season and ended up diminishing the entire series.

I don't understand why D&D had so much power, they adapted the work of GRRM, most things they came up with sucked. HBO bent they knee to the wrong people!

I still maintain that if D&D wanted to move on, HBO should have told them, "Hey. We're the ones giving you money to do this and if you don't want to keep going...there's the door. We can find any number of other people just as talented, if not more so, to replace you."

Yeah, in my own fantasy version of season 8, I envisioned two more seasons - one to finish the War Between the Living and the Dead, and one to settle who rules Westeros. My imaginary season 9 took a few episodes to finish off Cersei, and then had the conflict between Jon and Dany blowing up into yet another war, instead of being settled with two minutes of polite dialogue.

Instead, we have King Bran, and we don't even know if he's going to be a placeholder who doesn't much care about ruling, or a god-king who's going to rule for a thousand years. That's how much care was put into the finished product.