Now our watch is ended

Crossposted from Dreamwidth

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.

It was out of character for Daenerys to turn evil. No it wasn’t. I must confess Daenerys’s story caught me by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. I was so pleased with myself for spotting how Jon Snow’s arc was following the pattern of a traditional fairy-tale that I didn’t notice that Daenerys’s arc at the same time was following the pattern of a classical tragedy, complete with rise, hubris, and downfall. Her utter conviction in her own goodness – in sharp contrast to Jon Snow’s restless self-doubt – was bound to get her into trouble eventually.

“But she wouldn’t suddenly start burning innocents.” You guys remember 7x04, right? When she burned the Lannister army? Yes, they were enemy soldiers, but they weren’t attacking anything strategic at the time, they were just marching home. Remember the following episode, when she executed the Tarlys to terrify the surviving soldiers into bending the knee? Remember how she justified those killings to Jon and Tyrion as “necessary” in subsequent episodes? Didn’t you find that just a little bit chilling?

Also in 7x04, you may remember Missandei explaining to Jon Snow that, for her Essosi followers, Daenerys was “not our queen because she’s the daughter of some king we never knew. She’s the queen we chose.” But now go back through Daenerys’s scenes throughout the first six seasons and see why, in her own words, she herself believes she deserves the Iron Throne. From the moment Viserys dies and makes her (as far as anyone but Ned Stark knows at that point) the last living Targaryen, it’s all about her birthright. “Breaking the wheel” is a secondary ambition, and not one, when you think about it, that sits well with the idea of rule by birthright.

“But it was too sudden, there wasn’t enough build-up to it.” That’s arguable. I take the point. I think I see what Benioff & Weiss were thinking when they chose to write it this way; it may not have been the best idea or the best-executed one – it worked for me but not, it seems, for others. I think they were trying to make the turn in Daenerys’s character function both as a tragic catastrophe (which has to have the weight of the whole plot making it inevitable) and as a shocking twist (which has to come, if not out of nowhere, at least out of left field, if “left field” is what I mean). That’s a delicate balancing act to pull off.

So why did they make it a twist? Not just for the heck of it. The horror of Daenerys’s final speech to her troops depends on the audience’s guilt for our complicity in her killings up until the end; lean any harder on the hubris, and she’d have lost our sympathy too early for that to work. Now I have a suspicion that that speech was actually written a decade ago, when the series began – Daenerys’s promises of genocidal “liberation” read better as a critique of Bush-era American imperialism than of the Trumpist version, which sees no need to pretend it’s doing any good for anyone but the US. But there’s a more perennial message here, going back at least to George Orwell and Animal Farm: liberation through lethal violence becomes oppression at the instant of its victory.

The whole storyline about Jon Snow being the true heir was wasted. Well, that was kind of the point. Years ago when Jon Snow’s true parentage was a wild fan-theory with an annoying name, I thought it had to be wrong because Game of Thrones didn’t do true heirs and rule by birthright and all that nonsense. One persistent theme of the whole series is that a person’s birth and breeding tell you absolutely nothing about their competence to lead. I thought then that that would be negated if Jon Snow turned out to be the “true heir”, and I think now that it would have been negated if he’d ended up on the Iron Throne.

“Then why make his arc a fairy-tale at all?” Good question! Jon Snow’s encounters with supernatural powers, and especially his resurrection from the dead in 6x02, allowed the show to explore themes of mortality in a way that a mere political tragedy, no matter how grand in scale, couldn’t have touched. Those events willy-nilly shape his story into a fairy-tale structure, and the unexpected inheritance of a crown is part of fairy-tale convention. But why go that far towards fulfilling the convention and then pull out?

What if Jon had been acknowledged as king in the end? Even supposing he refused the crown, I for one would have found that a little bathetic, as I do the climax of Harry Potter; it’s just a bit too cheerful to really pay off the darker sides of the story leading up to it. What if we’d never been led to believe he was Ned Stark’s bastard to begin with? Then he would have been a totally different character and Game of Thrones would have been a totally different story. What if he really had been Ned Stark’s bastard, or Rhaegar Targaryen’s? Then I think we’d have lost a keystone of the show’s critique of heredity-based government – the demonstration that the system can be thrown into utter disarray without any such intention on the part of the person doing the throwing, simply by virtue of the facts of their parentage becoming known.

What Jon’s Targaryen birth actually accomplishes, in the end, is the fatal unbalancing of Daenerys’s moral scales. Remember, her certainty of her own right to rule has rested for nearly the whole show on her birthright as the Targaryen heir. This is her one peaceful means of gaining the support of the lords of Westeros, who owe their positions to birthright and are therefore obliged (however grudgingly) to uphold it; but still more, she makes it the foundation of her sense of self. Jon’s senior claim therefore not only leaves military strength as her sole route to power but undermines her very identity. Her failure to inspire love in Westeros – again in contrast to Jon – meanwhile gnaws away at her self-belief from the other side, whilst also closing off the option of leading a people’s rebellion the way she did in Slavers Bay. Terror becomes her only means of recovering her selfhood.

If you buy that the tragic fall of Daenerys Targaryen was always to be the pinnacle of the series, then the fact that Jon Snow’s true identity led up to that rather than to a coronation shouldn’t come as a let-down. If the show had managed to pull the former off properly, the latter would have come with it. To fix the one would have fixed the other.

We were robbed of a Jon Snow vs. Night King deathmatch! Oh, naff off. Did you also complain when Thor failed to kill Thanos, or when Gollum destroyed the Ring instead of Frodo, or when Luke Skywalker forgave Darth Vader and threw his lightsabre away?

There is an iron law in dramatic fiction that, if you get to hear the characters’ plans, those plans are going to go wrong. This is because – except maybe in oral storytelling – there’s no point in giving the audience the same information twice. The same principle explains why it’s so disappointing when books and movies and shows end by giving you the exact climax they’ve been promising you the whole time: you’re not getting anything new. (This is possibly another reason why I find the ending of Harry Potter unsatisfactory. It would have been better if Neville Longbottom had turned out to be the Chosen One.)

A better suggestion I’ve seen is that the Night King should have been destroyed neither by Arya nor by Jon but by Theon Greyjoy. That would have given the episode a bit of extra thematic depth, for sure: death incarnate defeated by the broken man in final recompense for all his sins and failings. But it would have done so at the expense of robbing Arya’s character arc of what climax she had, which was little enough. We’ll get to that.

The battle with the Dead wasn’t climactic enough. I feel you, I really do. I thought that confrontation was going to be the final climax, as you’ll have gathered from my pre-season 8 musings last time. That was, of course, because I wasn’t reckoning on the tragic downfall of Daenerys Targaryen. I should have known that a story about the struggle between good and evil within the human heart would never end with an external conflict. All the same, it still feels like it was meant to be the climax – like that final shot of Melisandre falling in the snow in the dawn-light was meant for the closing shot of the entire show.

How could that have gone better? They could hardly have had the Battle of Winterfell without the dragons, so it wouldn’t have worked to switch the two events around and put Daenerys’s attack on King’s Landing first. The only solution I can think of would have been to make the Dead more of a problem, make the victory over them at Winterfell only partial, and set things up so that the fall of King’s Landing somehow triggered a second and more devastating attack, leading to the real conclusion. But you’d have had to write the show differently for years beforehand to pull that off.

Well, when I say for years – actually, you might only have needed to change one particular event in the prior season. Up until this year, 7x06 was the most whinged-about episode of the series. Well, I mean, yes, there were plot problems in it that could have done with tweaking, and also they should have killed off one or two more sympathetic characters to keep the stakes high; but the real problem for me was the moment when a whole squad of wights dropped dead just because the heroes killed the White Walker who’d raised them.

Some day I want to watch a show where there’s a monster with a hive-mind that assimilates its victims, like the Dead on Game of Thrones or the Borg on Star Trek, but where they don’t resort to having a Night King or a Borg Queen controlling them all so the heroes just need to take out that one individual and they’ll win the whole battle at once. It’s not just a boring cliché, it makes the monster vastly less of a threat. I mean, imagine if Game of Thrones had had every soldier and knight instantaneously surrender the moment their lord was killed; they’d have been laughed off the air halfway into the first season. So why do writers – writers in general – think it’s any better to nerf their inhuman antagonists this way?

Imagine, instead, that the Dead were banished by casting some kind of magical protection around Winterfell and the North like there used to be on the Wall. Imagine that we found out there was some kind of trigger, but we didn’t know what, that could break the protection and bring the Dead back. Imagine if the trigger turned out to be lots of people dying in one place at once...

Would that have been any better than the show we had? I don’t know. You’d still have the problem of the two climaxes. You’d still have to destroy the Dead before Daenerys could do her “We’ve ‘liberated’ King’s Landing, now let’s ‘liberate’ the world” speech, because a tyrant so self-deluded as to talk like that when there were still zombies killing people around the place would not be much of a threat.

Look how many story threads got built up and then fizzled out. This one is definitely true. I’m not just talking little details like what the spiral patterns meant or who that woman with the mask was in Qarth way back in season 2. Remember where Arya’s story seemed to be going? She was a Faceless Man, remember? She was a super-skilled trained assassin who left the assassins’ guild because she had too much conscience to kill innocent people who didn’t want to die. And she could disguise herself as anyone, provided that that person was actually dead and she could take their face. And she used those skills to avenge the Red Wedding in 6x10 and 7x01, and then we never saw them again.

Well, OK, she threatened Sansa with her Faceless Man training later in season 7, or pretended to for Littlefinger’s benefit, I’m still not sure which. But she never actually used it again. This is why I’m not keen on the idea of taking the Night King kill away from her. Her last human kill was Littlefinger in 7x07, and that was a public execution that didn’t require stealth. Nor did we get any prickly moral questions with Arya, as we did so prominently with Daenerys, about the fact that we’d been persuaded to basically cheer for murder simply because the victims were all bad people. She did, at least, get some closure in her relationship with Sandor Clegane. That was satisfying, as far as it went.

With Jaime it was worse. What exactly was the point of having him survive the Loot Train and leave Cersei and be spared execution and fight against the Dead? It’s not as if he achieved anything in that fight that any other veteran soldier couldn’t have. Mind you, I wouldn’t say (as many do) that his death in the doomed attempt to save Cersei undid all his character development and put him back where he started. Trying to lead your sister out of a burning city so she can turn her back on power and start a new civilian life in Pentos is not at all the same thing as having sex with her and pushing your host’s young son out of a tower window in the hope that he’ll die and not tell her husband about it. It’s the difference between conniving and forgiveness – although of course Jaime never manages to forgive himself.

Still. Euron Greyjoy? Really? Euron should have been brought in a season earlier than he was, if they wanted him for a foil for Jaime, or else left out entirely. And he and Brienne should have had more time together, even if not (cough) together together. That relationship was underdeveloped.

But the most undercooked of the stories was Bran’s. I mean, what even was that? He disappeared for the whole of season 5, for the gods’ sake. We got to see some of the past through him, which was cool, and that’s how we found out about Jon’s true parentage. No complaints there. And he could “worg” into the minds of ravens and other creatures, and nothing came of that. And he could cause effects in the past, albeit without changing the present, and nothing came of that.

And then it turned out that being the Three-Eyed Raven turns you autistic except you actually stop feeling the human connections instead of having the feelings and not knowing what you’re supposed to do about them, which, OK, I’ll take it, but it kind of came out of nowhere. Contrary to Meera’s plaint that “You died in that cave,” this didn’t come on until he got back to the Wall, i.e. Benioff & Weiss didn’t think of it until season 7. I suppose you could call it character development, in that he certainly changed, but it didn’t actually take him anywhere. There was no direction to the change.

And then out of nowhere Tyrion names him King and all the big Lords go along with it. What?!

I mean, hey, if autism is a qualification for high political office now, I’m not complaining...

No. For that to work you would have had to do something completely different with his character from the moment he becomes the Three-Eyed Raven. Throughout season 7 you would have to have him quietly solving problems more cleverly than Varys, Tyrion, and Littlefinger combined, to the point that come the climax everyone was relying on his ideas. It also wouldn’t have hurt if he’d exerted some magical power against the Dead, via his ability to manipulate the past, and if that had turned out to be necessary in the Battle of Winterfell.

How that suggestion fits in with the other plot suggestions I’ve already made is left as an exercise for the reader.

Finally, it’s excellent that the Iron Throne is melted; that’s what I’ve been hoping to see happen to it from the very beginning of the show. And sure, it’s kind of funny that the Seven Kingdoms are now down to Six. And I get that they couldn’t have squeezed a whole bunch of politicking into the dénouement, extra runtime or no. Still, I feel it would have been neater if they’d ended up naming seven new monarchs – Sansa obviously being Queen in the North, Yara Queen of the Iron Islands, and so on – and then declaring that the Seven Kingdoms will henceforth be ruled by majority vote in the Council of Seven or some such.

(Don’t get me wrong. Sam Tarly is right; they ought to be a democracy. But democracy requires a whole electoral apparatus in place that they haven’t even got the beginnings of yet – not so much as a King’s Court or a Council of the Wise. Hopefully Sam, as Grand Maester, will gradually sneak the founding institutions in under the lords’ noses.)

Lots of people have come up with alternative endings to the story in lavish detail. All the ones I’ve sat through make Daenerys not a tragic hero after all, which I think is fundamentally missing the point. I’ve made some forays in that direction myself, as you’ve seen, but as I say I think you’d have to go quite a way back into the past seasons to fix it properly. You’d end up rewriting A Song of Ice and Fire altogether and I gather Martin doesn’t like that sort of thing.

And if you’ve got that sort of time on your hands, you’re surely better off writing your own fantasy series. Seems more fun than complaining about other people’s, anyway.