Dave Fixes Game of Thrones

So, I doubt this post will age well, but it satisfies an intellectual itch I have right now.

I'm not linking this page to anyone. If anyone finds it and reads it, congrats, you are among my blogs most faithful.

This is my attempt to quickly rewrite Game of Thrones to have a more satisfying conclusion. Two caveats before I begin:

1. I will change as few details as possible, and try to respect the showrunner's characterizations and desired conflicts where I can.
2. I'm going to paint a broad picture, and not focus too much on fleshing out details. With this in mind, I'm not going to pretend my version fixes all problems or is without its own. However, Ihope it illustrates a narrative path that could have had less problems to begin with, with successive rewriting cleaning up my version and making it more coherent.

Without further ado, we begin where things really started going off base:

The Light of the Seven

The Sept of Baelor sequence plays out exactly as it did in the show, with one exception: Kevan Lannister is not there. Cersei watches it blow up, drinks wine, Tommen commits suicide. Cersei sees her son's dead body, realizes what she has done, and slowly descends into hysterical laughing/crying. She is now the mad queen. Kevan realizes what she has done, has her ushered away to the dungeon/house arrest. With nobody to sit the Iron Throne he and Jaime become defacto regents in Cersei's stead. The rest of Season 6 plays out as written.

Season 7

A Plot: Dany shows up in Westeros, and many of the same beats of her trying to balance out conquering and ruling through fear/being a benevolent ruler play out. We see her struggle, fuck up, and there is always an intimation that she's another Mad King waiting to happen were it not for advisors at her side. She makes decisions about who to ally with and who to fight, and suffers consequences for these. Euron comes to her and offers his fleet for his hand in marriage which she rebuffs, and Euron becomes a mini-antagonist for the rest of the season, seeking independence for the Iron Islands out of spite and harrying her efforts to conquer the Seven Kingdoms. Kevan and Jaime are the other mini-antagonists and lead the Lannister/KL resistance to her, you can even have them score victories like taking Highgarden. Maybe Euron attacks Dragonstone or Oldtown at some point. You get the picture. Jaime meanwhile is trying to come to terms with his sister's madness and figure out his place in all this. Similar beats to season 6 can play out in terms of Jaime getting lords in the Reach to defect, maybe Edmure Tully appears as a loyal Lannister vassal, etc.

By about the mid-point, Dany takes KL and goes on to subdue most of the resistance to her rule. However, she refuses to sit the Iron Throne until she actually rules all seven kingdoms. The plot tension doesn't come from if she will rule the Seven Kingdoms, but rather what kind of ruler she will be and what sacrifices and decisions she will make along the way.

B Plot: Jon goes to Dragonstone, and many of the same beats play out as far as an awkward developing romance between him and Dany. You can have the same conflict of whether or not Jon will kneel, alongside his attempts to her to recognize the threat of the Others. She is irritated by his refusal to kneel at present, but he's not actively opposing her, and she kinda likes him, so he remains by her side for quite some time as she goes about trying to subdue the Seven Kingdoms. Maybe being around Jon encourages her to be a more merciful leader to try and impress him/win him over. The culmination of this arc comes when Jon hears the Others are besieging a section of the wall (maybe Eastwatch), and he begs her to bring her dragons north and stick a cork in the bottle before it can get away from them. He promises to kneel and hand over the North if she does stop them. Still doubting the Others are real, but seeing the opportunity to consolidate her rule at last, she agrees. Jon remains consistent with his characterization of wanting to stop the Others at all costs.

C Plot: Tension at Winterfell. But this time its not between the sisters because that was dumb and forced for the sake of the audience. Littlefinger is Lord of the Vale, and he clearly doesn't care about Sansa more than as means to an end (as shown by his letting her slip into Ramsay's clutches). Make him want to be Warden of the North, and secretly working behind her back to bring these only recently reconciled Northern Houses over to his side. Sansa is ostensibly one of the smartest characters in the show and has never really got a chance to show it off. She also studied under some of the finest manipulators and politicians there were in KL. Have her beat LF at his own game, and secure Winterfell for the Starks through political maneuvering. Jon won the battle for the castle, let her lead the Starks to victory in the political battle. At the end of the season, it should be clear to the audience that Winterfell is under the Stark banner through her efforts. This is the home that she once wanted desperately to leave and now is determined to keep. Sansa has truly become the Lady of Winterfell and Warden of the North while Jon was away.

Season 7 Finale

I actually like the story beat that Dany loses a dragon, as it gets at her sense of safety and invulnerability and gives her visceral stakes in the War for the Dawn - she's lost something.

Let's keep that plot beat. They try to stop the Others. They can't, Dany loses a dragon. The wall comes down - not with a dragon, the NK has some other way to do it. Maybe he has an artifact weapon or something like that. Maybe Arya has a side quest this season trying to prevent him from acquiring it. Bran could send her on it, Brienne and Pod could go with her.

Anyway, Jon and Dany retreat south, Jon kneels, incest sex, basically keep all the plot points. The season ends the same way with the Others marching south.

Season 8

Winterfell is a weird place to fight the Others, it's a forbidding Castle to take, to be sure, but once the Others are past the wall. they could honestly just ignore it if they wanted and keep going south. Let's play with that.

The tension in Season 8 should not be: "are we going to team up to fight the Others?" but instead "how are we going to fight the Others and what sacrifices are we going to need to make to defeat them?" Jon and Dany are both like: yo, let's abandon Winterfell and fight them south at this continent's natural bottleneck: Moat Cailin. We can bring all our allies from the south there and try to keep the Others from reaching the south of Westeros.

Meanwhile, Sansa is not thrilled about Jon bending of the knee, and is not going to abandon Winterfell after fighting so hard for it last season. She fights with Jon, say's he can't understand because he's not a Stark, etc. In the end, her and most of the northern lords elect to hole up in Winterfell. Jon gave up his kingship to get Dany to fight the Others, and now he has lost the loyalty of much of the North and his cousin. This actually gives Jon and Sansa something to fight over rather than the milquetoast conflict they have now.

And just like that, you have this season's B plot: The siege of Winterfell. We really needed a multi-episode siege in this show at some point. There's nothing saying that the Wights can inherently pile on each other and climb walls a la World War Z. Maybe castles present an actual problem for the Others. At any rate, the Others encircle the castle and we have a siege and can have lots of siege plotlines (running out of food, maybe an Other figures out a way into the Castle and Arya/Royce, whoever can fight them).

The A plot is Jon and Dany trying to rally everyone together to fight the Others at Moat Cailin, and get everyone who they can out of the North in time. Don't have a Battle for the Dawn, have a War for the Dawn. There are easy set-pieces you can generate out of this. Maybe Jon leads troops up north to escort civilians heading south from White Harbor, they get attacked by the Others and have to fight a battle that they lose etc. The point should be that there is a steady drumbeat of human losses both on and off screen, ramping up the tension and increasing the desperation of the main characters. Maybe Dany refuses to send her dragons out anymore after losing the one and Jon and her have a conflict where he argues people are dying as she hoards her trump card.

In the background, you have the entire north to have C plots for other characters to go on missions to try and secure miniscule advantages versus the Others, get people out, etc. Maybe Sam, Arya, Tormund, etc. are engaged in an effort to uncover secrets about the Others and find a way to defeat them. Maybe they are seeking a powerful artifact. Maybe Euron heard about a secret weapon in his travels and they have to compromise with him to get access to it. Maybe an elite team of named characters has to spend a couple episodes questing into a zombified north to try and find something/someone. Meanwhile, Tyrion heads south and schmoozes with southern lords to get them to aid their fight versus the Others. Dany's choices come back to bite her in the ass or make her quest easier.

Season 8 Finale

Season 8 finale is at Moat Cailin. Not the most cinematic location, but appropriate. Big final battle of everyone they have managed to assemble. They fight. Oh what, the Children of the Forest are back!? What, they flood the neck again just like they did back way back when to help carry the day.....

You get the picture.

Fun bonus idea: The CotF actually flood the neck and cut off the North from the rest of the South. At the end of the show Dany decided the North has earned its independence. Sansa becomes Queen in the North, etc.

Anyway, I'm going to avoid getting too specific, I just want to focus on overarching ideas/themes/character arcs. I think this structure keeps the focus more on the shows underlying theme, while still having satisfying arcs for each season. At the end of the show, our heroes prevail through grit, luck, sacrifice, supernatural assistance, and secret knowledge about the Others gained over the course of the last couple of seasons. I know in my heart of hearts what inevitably defeats them is going to be inherently a little silly, but there's no reason to think it can't be less silly than what we got.

Alas, this blog post will forever be nothing more than a dream of spring.