So everyone’s angry with the way Game of Thrones ended. Some people are being very rude about it. I gather someone’s started a petition to have the final season rewritten, and presumably to have watched Game of Thrones in the first place these people have to be over the age of seven. I haven’t heard for a fact that Dave Benioff and Dan Weiss have received death threats, but with all the entitlement and nerd-rage fizzing in social media right now it would be more surprising if they hadn’t.
I’m not completely happy with it myself, mind you. There are some things that I think went wrong, and I’ll get to some of those. I’m also aware that quite a few of the things I’m OK with a large number of other people aren’t, and I don’t feel like picking fights for no reason. But I feel the sweeping judgements people have made about Benioff & Weiss’s writing competence are unwarranted, especially considering how well they did for so many years before this. Also, you can’t watch anything Thrones-related on YouTube now without screeds of whinging in the comments, and it’s getting irritating.
Everybody’s saying the last season was “rushed”, and that’s true to an extent, but I don’t think it’s the root of the problem. The problem is that there’s a difference between advancing a narrative, which Benioff & Weiss have been doing solidly for years, and resolving a narrative, which they’ve just had to do without assistance from their source material. You can advance a story indefinitely given starting premises and a reasonably realistic imagination; but realism won’t resolve it for you, because reality, not being a story, never gets resolved.
Which may or may not be the underlying reason for the source material problem. It’s been eight years now since the last Song of Ice and Fire book came out, and George R. R. Martin has stopped making promises about when The Winds of Winter is due. And there’s at least one more book to come after that one. Supposedly. Apparently Martin gets a lot of personal remarks about his age and health in this context, which I think is uncalled-for. I think Martin could live to be three hundred years old, and fill a bookcase with A Song of Ice and Fire, and it would still be no nearer ending. I have seen no evidence that the writing of A Song of Ice and Fire is a process with an end-point. Seven-part stories don’t have whole new protagonists appearing and plot arcs blossoming in Part V.
I gather Martin wanted the show to run to ten seasons, and Benioff & Weiss pushed for seven, and what we ended up with – eight, with the last two shortened – was the compromise they settled on. It certainly did feel rushed, but I don’t know that lengthening seasons 7 and 8 out to ten episodes each would have fixed that. I think the series as a whole could have done with one or two less subplots; most of the Sand Snakes and Euron Greyjoy threads in particular could have been dropped without too much violence to the overarching story, and then we’d have had a bit of breathing room to resolve a few other things. (Bear in mind that Benioff & Weiss already cut a bunch of subplots out completely, to complaints from book fans.)
Now I’ll move on to the main specific complaints; some I agree with fully, some partially, some not at all. Here I really do need to cut for spoilers.
