Let's Read A Song of Ice and Fire

[Legato Endless]

Catelyn says about Walder Frey that some men take their oaths more seriously than others. What nobody present seems to understand is that Lord Frey takes seriously those oaths which benefit him, not the rest of them. Robb doesn’t seem as good at the leadership thing as he does in the book.

It's kind of a wash. Show!Rob has a better innate grasp of diplomacy, so he's more able to make decisions on his own. But because the decision making is being funneled through one person he's also more liable to complete disaster. He doesn't really listen to anyone and has no real impulse control, brashly courting disaster. It'd almost make for a clever commentary on the ups and downs of concentrated leadership in the vein of Frederick the Great, but I'm cynically more liable to believe it's due to the show's strange zero sum game of on screen competence.

[factotum]

It's kind of a wash. Show!Rob has a better innate grasp of diplomacy, so he's more able to make decisions on his own.

Show!Robb is a few years older than the book version, of course. People forget that the book version was only 16 years old when he died, so him being not great at diplomacy isn't too surprising!

[Aedilred]

So sadly true. You might have some disagreement or whatever with the show early on, but early on, indeed it is pretty good. They slowly become out of whack, either because they're high on success and what they thought as the reason of it, or because the difference with the books and an actual author's writing is mounting and mounting and they can't just ignore it anymore or any combination of those and more factors.

In fact, that might be an interesting let's watch on its own, to see and document the show's descent into shenanigans.

I have to agree. The first season is really, really good, and there's a lot to like about the second season too. Critically - and this is not the case from about season 3 onwards - when they write extra scenes into the show that aren't in the book, they work. Robert and Cersei, Robert and his Kingsguard, Jaime and Tywin, Jaime and Jory, Littlefinger and Varys... these are things that aren't in the book, but they mostly fit seamlessly with the stuff that is. PoV aside, they feel like they could have been in the book, for the most part. Season 2 did a pretty good job of consolidating Arya's story and gave us some great scenes in Harrenhal between two characters who never really met in the books, and fleshing out a character we normally only see from a distance without compromising them. But there are also some duds, and the Ros subplot becomes increasingly irritating. There's a decline in subtlety from the end of the first season onwards, and that's a large part of why I lost patience with the show and stopped watching.

Not that the infamous brothel-training scene in season 1 where Littlefinger monologues his evil plan was great, to be honest. But that stood out like a sore thumb in the first season, whereas by seasons 3-4 I think it would have appeared pretty normative.