[dudul]

You are totally allowed to subjectively enjoy something that is objectively bad.

As surprising as it may seem, the art of writing has rules. Setting up character arcs, payoffs, hero journey, etc. These have been around for literally thousands of years. These 2 episodes are objectively poorly written.

[mola]

It's an episodic tv show with full season story arc. I think there's still some time before you can really judge the narrative structure in this case. As far as aristotelian narrative "rules" go the first episode seem to follow a classic aristotelian tragedy. A high born hero, set on a course of her own destruction. Anyway these rules are not really set in stone, over these past few thousands of years we aquired a multitude of narrative structures and plot devices. Of course Hollywood is obsessed with money and risk aversion so we tend to mostly see the most formulaic "classic" narratives.

BTW, I'd also claim that original tolkin narratives are not very good if you strictly judge them by these rules. The generous use of Deus ex machina to solve the plot climactic moments is just cringy.

[stonith]

We have no idea if character arcs and payoffs are well set up in the first two episodes because we haven't seen if anything is paid off or resolved later. It's been a while but I remember the first season of Game of Thrones being similarly slow and ponderous to start with. I enjoy the slower pace, it suits the scale of the conflict and it suits the source material which never felt like it needed to hurry along.