Season 8 is over, and its time to examine where nearly a decade of this show has left us. There is much more to say than I can do justice to in one post, so I'm going to focus on just the things I want to talk about. In the following weeks there internet will be awash in think pieces about Game of Thrones that cover the things I don't address. So, without any further ado, let's dive in:
The Mad Queen...
Welp, time to riot. I'm sure much smarter people than me are going to break down every single Dany scene in the lead up to season 8 to show how this turn to evil was not at all foreshadowed. For my part, I'm just going to talk about it briefly, because the majority of you don't need me to explain why this was stupid.
Instead, I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room: that this turn is likely planned by GRRM for ASOIAF.
As I said above, I'm pretty okay with that. This would be a compelling intrapersonal struggle to center a season of this show around. The problem is that book Dany is unmoored from show Dany. Dany in the show is portrayed as a heroic liberator. Occasionally petulant and unyielding, but someone who on the whole is genuinely concerned with the plight of common people. Remember a couple seasons ago when she locked up her dragons after they killed one child? People who claim this was all set up by Dany executing people are literally incapable of noticing the framing of a scene and just take the text at face value. Good characters routinely execute people in Game of Thrones, and its not portrayed as inherently evil. Additionally, if I had a nickle for every time an episode ended with a triumphant shot of a dragon roaring...
Book Dany is much more morally gray. She shows signs of being unhinged: hearing voices, literally thinking of her dragons as her children, etc. The Dany of the book is much easier to see slipping into "madness" than the Dany of the show. But the show instead takes the whitewashed heroic Dany, then gives her the book plot twist in literally two episodes - undermining 7 1/2 seasons of character development. What's worse is that Dany dies and we abruptly shift to tying up loose ends. Dany is arguably the main character of GOT and her death is treated as if it doesn't even matter.
If you wanted to go this route with the character, you needed to decide on that a long time ago. One of the reasons Alan Rickman's performance as Snape in the otherwise lackluster HP moves is so good is that JK Rowling told him the twist years in advance. It allowed him to give layers to his performance of Snape, and make him a nuanced character rather than the one-dimensional villains the directors wanted him to be. Emilia Clarke had a mere 4 1/2 episodes to foreshadow this, and it simply was not enough time or such a radical departure in how Daenerys has been characterized up to now.
This is another moment where you really feel the effects of a plot change from the books: the exclusion of Young Griff/"Aegon." In the books, Dany will likely arrive to a Westeros where Cersei has been deposed and KL, Highgarden, and Dorne are united under Aegon. The people will love him for having deposed Cersei, and see Daenerys as a foreign invader. Moreover, Dany will likely know Jon is the real Aegon. Seeing her throne on the brink of slipping away, she will have strong motivation to do something drastic and go too far in her quest for power. Instead, the show excludes Aegon and contorts itself to keep Cersei relevant and make her the final villain.
This is where I admit I have never really liked Dany, although that might largely be a factor of her lacking interesting characters surrounding her to interact with for much of the early seasons. That being said, what I do love about her is that she has had one of the more consistent characterizations throughout. While the overall quality of the show took a dip in season 5, she had some of her strongest scenes. One of the more interesting Daenery's plotlines was her figuring out how to govern Mereen. Watching her navigate dealing with the Sons of the Harpy and learning how to govern was compelling and forced her character to grow and compromise. Emilia Clarke was singled out for being one of the weaker actresses in the first couple seasons of the show. However, to her credit, in the years since she has grown into the role and even amidst of this garbage fire of a season brings her A game.
This is all to say, I think its really shitty how they yanked Emilia's career-defining character out from under her in the final season, and I feel really bad for her. Daenerys is a character who is important beyond just the show. She is a strong and well-written female character in a media landscape with precious few. People feel empowered by her story and see her as representing the best of us. I don't normally advocate for the "real world" influencing the writing of a character, but given the importance of this character, I find her ham-fisted turn to evil even more appalling. D&D just straight up take the female heroic icon of a generation and turn her "crazy" over the course of two episodes for no other reason than to have a dramatic finish. Appalling.
Press F for everyone who named their daughter Daenerys or Khaleesi over the last decade.
The Problem of Arya
God, I know I sound like a neckbeard when I say that I really hate Arya post season 4. I also am aware that this is the third female character I have complained about in a row. In my defense, were I to keep going, I would write similar sections about Jon and Bran, but I intend to be basically done with GOT after this. Suffice it to say that examining Sansa and Cersei in such fashion was because the missteps they have taken with both characters have been on full display this season and they were relevant to the episodes I wanted to examine. Additionally, Sansa and Cersei were both two of my characters in the early seasons, and seeing the shell of a character Cersei in particular has become hurts me. I'm going to address Arya here today for my last post because I think she embodies everything that is wrong with the show as it comes to a close.
My pet theory is that people only love Arya because Maisie Williams is awesome IRL. But as for her character after season 4... Well, let's go ahead and get into it. Arya has some of my all-time favorite scenes in Game of Thrones. Her scenes with Tywin are some of the best in the entire show, and watching her and the Hound in Season 4 never fails to bring joy to my heart. The dialogue really crackles, the characters are really strong, and through her we get to explore a lot of Westeros.
Then we go to Bravos....
So, Arya goes to Bravos and tries to become a faceless man. The waif hates her for some reason. Her conflict here seems to be whether she will shed her Stark identity and truly become a faceless man or not. Anyway, she eventually decides to leave the faceless men, and then we get the infamous sequence where she is just walking around Bravos like an oblivious idiot who doesn't have a cult of assassins trying to kill her. She gets stabbed multiple times in the stomach, jumps into a dirty ditch, and yet somehow survives. Anyway, she then kills the waif, and declares she is Arya Stark of Winterfell. Congratulations, we just spent two seasons only for this character to end right back where she started. She also somehow keeps the faceless man powers despite not being "no one."
Fast forward to season 7 ending with the refrain that "The lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Then at the end of Season 8, she leaves the explore the Western Sea.
What.
What was the whole point of her re-asserting her identity as a Stark and that stupid bit about staying in the pack if she was just going to reject it in the end and go off on her own at the end of the show?
Arya is also patient zero for the shows increasing glorification of violence and being a badass. Arya just fucking slaughters people in these later seasons. Early on in the show, every time she killed it was treated as a dehumanizing moment. The viewer was left to ponder the woman she's become, to mourn the loss of humanity she has suffered in her quest for safety. Then the showwriters decided violence and revenge were cool and empowering, and Arya becomes a video game character in terms of her kill count and imperviousness. They also clearly didn't know how to handle a character as strong as Arya. Arya could have ended this whole war just by going down to KL and killing Cersei before Dany burned it down, but D&D decide that would apparently have been too simple.
The worst part is that Arya ends Season 8 having never used her faceless man powers except to kill a bunch of Freys. Whoop-de-doo. What was the point of her being a faceless man again?
If you take out Arya killing the Night King, her character has literally no impact on the overarching story, and that felt unearned and arbitrary. But its not the only arbitrary thing that happened this season...
Bran and the Worst Scene in Game of Thrones History
I could not have made this scene any stupider if I tried. And I'm going to break it down in painstaking detail.
First off, Bran. God what a disappointment. What a waste of a bunch of cool ideas. Neither Bran's ability to warg into animals or change the past had any impact on the final story. His only plot relevance, his payoff for seasons and seasons of traipsing around north of the wall with poor Meera dragging him around, was to be arbitrary bait for the NK and then be appointed King through no agency of his own. D&D could just never decide what the Three-Eyed Raven actually is and what his powers are besides being the "memory of the world" that the NK wanted to destroy. When I read the leaks about this episode, that Bran was voted king by the council, I assumed it would come on the heels of him wowing them with his seer powers, maybe even blackmailing them. But no....his powers are officially worthless.
So, after the most important character in the show dies we fade cut to Tyrion being taken to a council meeting (Shout out to Robin for the unexpected glow up). Grey Worm was supposed to bring Jon, but didn't. This tells us two things. First, instead of lying and saying the dragon killed Daenerys or carried her off after wounding her, Jon admitted to killing her. Second, the Unsullied decided not to kill Jon on the spot and keep him prisoner for some reason. Yara thinks he should be punished too, I guess because she and Dany flirted once.
Anyway, we decide we need a new king. Edmure puts himself forward and Sansa shuts him down. This is one of the few moments I enjoyed this episode, purely because I always wanted Sansa to become a powerful and confident player of the game of thrones. And while I don't like how we got here, I like where her character ends this episode.
And then the scene comes.
The type of scene that writers love and I hate.
Sam suggests that Westeros switch to a Democratic form of government.
GET IT, BECAUSE WE LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY AND WE KNOW ITS OBVIOUSLY THE BEST FORM OF GOVERNMENT! LOOK AT THESE FOOLS LAUGHING AT HIM.
I hate scenes like this for two reasons. First off, they exist purely to make the audience feel smart. There is a similar scene in Titanic, where Rose McGowan is collecting paintings by Picasso only for her asshole fiance to loudly proclaim that he will never amount to a thing.
GET IT AUDIENCE?!?! HOW STUPID IS HE FOR NOT KNOWING HOW IMPORTANT PICASSO WOULD BECOME XD XD XD YOU KNOW BETTER THOUGH.
These scenes are stupid and pandering.
Second - this is a critique from my academic training -scenes like this rely on the implicit Fukuyama-esque notion that democratic governments are the end of history and are the most natural form of government. Without getting too deep into this strain of thought, I think this reasoning is presumptuous and complacent.
Anyway, back to the scene. Tyrion asks "What is more powerful than a good story?" and I nearly puke. This is such a saccharine notion from a show grounded in realpolitik. Remember the scene in Season 1 where Littlefinger coyly teases Cersei with the notion that knowledge is power, then she orders her guards to kill him, stops them, and retorts "power is power?" Yeah, apparently D&D don't.
Anyway Tyrion says that Bran is the best candidate because.....I don't know. IT SUBVERTS OUR EXPECTATIONS. He apparently also gets a vote and says aye. Everyone follows suit, and then Sansa is like: "JK, the North is going to be independent."
I hate this for a multitude of reasons. Let's list them:
1. This plot development is pandering to an audience of Americans who have positive associations with the word "independence." In the world of the show, the North has little going for it but its size and is often dependent on the South for imports of food. This is roughly the equivalent of Montana deciding to go its own way.
2. I love Yara's facial expression at this proclamation by Sansa. "Wait, this was an option?" The showrunners also forgot that Dany promised independence to the Iron Islands.
3. Man, it sure is easy to declare independence after you put someone from your family on the Throne of the Six Kingdoms. The Baratheons really missed the boat on that one.
4. Why would you declare independence when you have a Stark on the Iron Throne? You have more to gain by staying in the compact.
5. What's to stop other Kingdoms from now declaring independence? What makes the North special? You're just weakening Bran's position if you establish precedent that the Seven Kingdoms will no longer remain united.
Anyway, the North is independent in a massive plot development that literally has no reason to happen outside fan service. Instead of raping and pillaging the Six Kingdoms, the Dothraki politely leave along with the Unsullied to go liberate Naath. I guess they forgot about the butterflies. The Night Watch still exists for some reason as a place for "bastards and broken things." Instead of just waiting for Grey Worm and his indeterminate number of Unsullied to leave, Jon goes back to the Wall. What's preventing him from coming back from exile? What about all the people Varys told he was the rightful heir?
The show was weirdly focused on the Starks at the end of the day, making a big production of showing what happens to the three besides Bran. I realize that people like the Starks, because they are the main point of view family for book one. However, the books and show quickly move beyond that to focus on lots of other interesting characters. But at the end of the show, we're apparently focused on the Starks again? I guess they won the Game of Thrones. Bran rules the Six Kingdoms. Sansa is Queen of da Norf, Jon is King Beyond the Wall (I guess?), and Arya is off to find some Native Americans to genocide. Wooo....?
Well, Here We Are
This season was awful and ruined Game of Thrones. I can't even go back and watch the early seasons and fully enjoy them. All that foreshadowing with Jon led nowhere. Bran's plot led nowhere. Jaime's seven seasons of character growth was thrown out at last minute. You can't watch it now without all that knowledge in the back of your head.
People will pile on this season as being where Game of Thrones went wrong, but the problems began years ago. In a sentence, the core problem is that events in the show ceased deriving from the actions and motivations of characters. It took this long for criticism to catch up with the show for two reasons:
1. By season 5 GOT had become a cultural force to be reckoned with and few were willing to critique it.
2. While there was still show left, the pile up of problems was camouflaged. There was still time left to fix the remaining issues, and people gave D&D the benefit of the doubt with the hope that they would find a way to satisfyingly tie it all up.
This season feels rushed and half-baked, and many will be tempted to say that if D&D had written the ten episode season HBO had offered them it would have been good. While I do think it would have fixed some of the problems, the core issues would remain. Its a cliche at this point to single out the writing in Game of Thrones as being poor. But truly, in a show where the acting, scoring, cinematography, effects, and editing have consistently been good, the writing has been the one thing dragging it down. D&D never understood the themes of their own show, and grew increasingly willing to alter or ignore previous characterization if they could get an epic fight or pointless surprise death out of it.
I'll close in saying I hate the fanbases on r/gameofthrones. I have read so many posts to the effect of "I LOVED THIS EPISODE AND IF YOU DIDN'T SEE THE FORESHADOWING FOR THIS YOU'RE DUMB." If you have to argue that the writing is good, it probably isn't very good. And if you feel the need to go online after watching a piece of media, and your identity is so tied up in liking it that you need to bludgeon others into liking it, then you have a juvenile sense of identity that ties your sense of self to the media you consume. I loved Shazam, I'm sure there were plenty of people who didn't. You know what I didn't do after watching it? Go to r/dc and make posts to the effect of: "UNPOPULAR OPINION, I LIKED SHAZAM." I enjoyed it and moved on with my life, and that's what I'm doing now.
Game of Thrones started off as an amazing show, full of complex and nuanced characters who blurred the line between "good" and "bad." It raised the bar for a fantasy series, with excellent dialogue and an expansive and fleshed out world that we're unlikely to see equaled anytime soon. It's a show that I've been a fan of for nearly a decade, and I wish I could end this without a bitter taste in my mouth. Alas, in the words of countless internet edgelords:
"If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention"
Peace.
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