House of the Dragon Won This Fall Season Just Because of The Rings of Power
HBO's House of the Dragon was generally well-received, even in the most criticism-prone corners of the Internet, though some specific scenes and plot turns caused no small amount of complaints.
That does not mean that there aren't opinions condemning it as a whole – but that does mean that such opinions are likely to gain traction only in places that exist specifically so that contrarians can express themselves.
And one of such opinions is the opinion that House of the Dragon was acclaimed solely because Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, in parallel with which it aired, was so much worse. Logic of this opinion's author goes roughly like this: House of the Dragon was not a good show.
Its plot was slow, convoluted, involved multiple timeskips, which also caused it to skip huge swathes of character development, thus hindering audience's investment in its characters, and it was plagued by a number of really stupid plot turns, mostly caused by deviations from its literary source.
Normally, viewers would have held the showrunners accountable for their bad decisions, as they did with Game of Thrones before. But this time it did not happen, because they had an example of what a really terrible show looks like right before their eyes, so they were willing to forgive House of the Dragon its flaws solely because it was at least not as bad as The Rings of Power.
Notably, even on r/unpopularopinion this take was, well, unpopular.
Yes, by this point there is no question which of the two big fantasy shows of this fall is the superior one. (At least based on their first seasons, everything may change in the future, as the rise and fall Game of Thrones reminds us.) But that hardly would have been a reason for fans, burned by Game of Thrones' finale, to auto-approve House of the Dragon if the latter was not genuinely good. And yes, some of the flaws typically ascribed to House of the Dragon are the same flaws ascribed to The Rings of Power, such as being slow and, perhaps, overtly convoluted, or taking liberties with its literary source.
But The Rings of Power is also commonly criticized for such things as unlikeable or uninteresting characters, poor acting, badly written overdramatic dialogue, excessive amount of plotlines, which get interconnected in extremely contrived ways, and other flaws, which are notably absent from House of the Dragon.