As you would expect from a series with 73 episodes and hundreds of main and supporting characters, there are some moments when the viewer starts to wonder where some plots are going... assuming they are going somewhere.
- In the books, Jon immediately releases Ygritte after giving up on executing her, and the two only meet again at the end of the book. In the series, the writers decided to make them spend more time together to develop their romance. Unfortunately, for that to happen, Jon and Ygritte spend an inordinate amount of the second half of Season 2 wandering around in the snow arguing with each other.
- In the books, Theon disappears at the end of the second book and only returns in the fifth book, with his intervening torture by Ramsay being suggested purely through dialogue and flashbacks. Rather than let Theon skip Season 3 and return in Season 4 (which already adapted some events from the fifth book), the show stretches his Cold-Blooded Torture across all of Season 3. This was done mostly to keep the character and actor on-screen, but since many scenes focused on just the torture itself, many people simply got bored and then agonized by the requisite "What horrible thing is happening to Theon this episode?" scenes. George R.R. Martin himself made a point to distance himself from the storyline in his DVD commentary, making clear that the torture scene in his episode ("The Bear and the Maiden Fair") was imported from another script and he didn't write a word of it.
- Due to splitting the third book, A Storm of Swords, into two seasons, Stannis, Davos and Melisandre just hang around Dragonstone, regretting their losses, for two entire seasons (Season 3 and Season 4) after losing the Battle of Blackwater. Even after resolving to aid the Night's Watch, Stannis still spends all of Season 4 gathering funds and doesn't show up until the Season 4 finale.
- As a consequence of the split of the third book, A Storm of Swords, into two seasons, Arya spends all of Season 4 just walking to the Vale with the Hound, doing nothing plot relevant. Then she spends the majority of Season 5 either sweeping floors, washing corpses, getting smacked, or yelling, "Oysters, clams, and cockles!". Then the first half of her Season 6 story is filled by basically an extended Training Montage and watching the same Braavosi play several times before she decides she doesn't want to be a Faceless Man after all. She gets a few neat character moments through all of this, but her overall Character Development just makes a big loop back around to "I want to go home" and except for the Training Montage in Season 6, every cool skill she learns (especially how to change faces) is learned off-screen to make room for Filler, which hardly justifies three seasons away from any central story arc. Especially compared to the first three seasons when she was often on a tangent but was at least still connected with a variety of other characters (serving Tywin, meeting the Brotherhood, searching for Cat and Robb, befriending Gendry, etc.).
- Many found the Dorne plot in Season 5 totally pointless, a sentiment made worse by its scripting of the Sand Snakes, an utterly underutilized Alexander Siddig as Prince Doran, and a plot that ran purely on illogical choices, capped off by a Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending in which the whole thing amounts to Myrcella's Back for the Dead with zero progression for any of the characters involved.
- Brienne and Pod spend the entire second half of Season 5 completely Out of Focus waiting around outside Winterfell thanks to their storyline from books 4 and 5 having been removed.
- Ramsay spends Season 6 basically instigating and then waiting for Jon and Sansa to raise an army to confront him in the big climax. Unfortunately, much like Theon's scenes in Season 3, the writers chose to keep Ramsay on-screen with scenes of repeated atrocities like killing Walda and Osha that just flaunt Ramsay's villainy instead of actually adding to the story. It is revealing that even with these additions, Ramsay disappears after the fourth episode and returns only in the ninth, showing how little he had left to contribute to the story by that point.
- The arc of Jorah Mormont being infected with greyscale and seeking a cure spans three seasons (Season 5, 6 and 7) before ending abruptly with him being easily healed without any repercussions for the rest of the characters or the story at large. This is particularly egregious since Jon Connington was Adapted Out and his bout of greyscale was transferred to Jorah, but in the books the greyscale is a motivation for him to hurry up his plans to see them bear fruit before he dies, while in the show Jorah's greyscale has no impact on his character up until Daenerys orders him to go get cured, and then the ease with which he does so makes the entire subplot of him getting infected completely pointless.
