They changed half the cast almost arbitrarily and I spent the first 20 minutes being like :jesse-wtf: trying to figure out what happened.
Apparently there was like a 15 year time jump or something but most of the characters that didn't change actors look pretty much the same.
Anyway, the show remains very mid, but this bugged he hell out of me. I kinda feel like they went through all the trouble just so they could have a young looking actress get mostly nude in the first arc. Either that or some galaxy brain scheme to save on labor costs.
My understanding is that the showrunners initially wanted to start the series right after the timeskip, and show everything that we've seen so far in flashback and/or just allude to it in dialogue, but GRRM insisted that they do all of the prelude stuff like normal episodes which is what resulted in the strange pacing so far.
:picard-annoyed: what a fucking weirdo. finish your damn book and stop making other mediums based on your books fucked up ya dweeb
He's never gonna finish it lmao. I think he's just straight up lost interest - should have stuck to his original plan of making it a trilogy.
This makes sense... Once I figured out what happened I was like... Why the hell wouldn't they just start the show when they were older?