I was honestly intending for my last post on this topic to be, well, my last post on this topic. But then I realised I hadn’t actually talked about the political situation at the end of the series.

Oh, but before that, one other totally unrelated thing that’s bugging me. A lot of people are comparing the death of Qyburn in episode five to Frankenstein being killed by his own creation. Except … I mean … I’m pretty sure that Frankenstein isn’t killed by his own creation. Doesn’t he die of exposure at the North Pole? Like I seem to recall that’s up there with “the creator not the monster” in terms of fairly commonly known things about Frankenstein.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. The weird link I made in my head that took me there was that people keep making throwaway comments about Qyburn’s death being Frankenstein-like, and I keep going “hang on, wut?” And I keep tripping up similarly over people’s responses to the political resolution we’re offered for Westeros at the end of S8E6. Because they tend to fall into two categories: “this is a step towards democracy, which while incremental is a step in the right direction” and “this is too small a step towards democracy, which means it doesn’t go far enough in the right direction.”

And people sort of toss this into their discussions like it’s a given—they just blithely refer to the situation as “quasi democratic” when it’s … not. People also sometimes make throwaway references to Magna Carta which … well … it’s sort of a complicated document and something people talk about in the abstract a lot more than the specific. And if we assume that the Song of Ice and Fire is supposed to be roughly analogous to the Wars of the Roses (roughly 1455-1485) then we should be well past the era of the Magna Carta (1215-ish depending on which version you’re talking about). Not that it’s particularly clear what the laws of Westeros even are, especially with reference to the kinds of things that real social reform would require in a medieval setting which is … not of interest to the general public. Magna Carta, for example, includes such thrilling clauses as “All fish-weirs are in future to be entirely removed from the Thames and the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea-coast”, and “There is to be one measure of wine throughout our kingdom, and one measure of ale, and one measure of corn, namely the quarter of London, and one breadth of dyed, russet and haberget cloths, that is, two ells within the borders; and let weights be dealt with as with measures”. Plus some parts of Magna Carta were deeply regressive, like  “no man is to be arrested or imprisoned on account of a woman’s appeal for the death of anyone other than her own husband.”

The problem we have here is essentially that Game of Thrones very effectively challenged the fantasy tradition of treating monarchy as an unproblematic system of government, but never really did the groundwork for exploring how it could be replaced. And this isn’t because the show was rushed, it’s because the show always kind of had its cake and ate it on the whole “monarchy is shitty” thing. Varys rather sanctimoniously wonders “why is it always the innocents who suffer when you high lords play your game of thrones” but the show isn’t really interested in what’s going on with the smallfolk, or really with the machinery of governance at all (also it is fucking called Game of Thrones). Dany’s “Break the Wheel” rhetoric is actually a perfect encapsulation of this—both the characters and the show only ever really pay attention to the commoners when they’re making grand abstract points about freedom, but that’s not what makes a kingdom better. What makes a kingdom better is somebody sitting down and saying “you know, it’s pretty annoying that ordinary people don’t have standardised weights and measures for things they use in their daily lives”.

And of course we aren’t going to get that. Nobody would watch a long-form fantasy TV show in which after a long and bloody civil war, a climactic battle against death itself, and the destruction by dragonfire of a major city, the highlords gather together and say “this is terrible, we must make certain that nothing of the kind ever occurs again, and also I HAVE SOME STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT FISHING WEIRS.” So instead we get a set of slightly peculiar markers that are designed to signal progress to a modern audience by pushing buttons that we ourselves associate with modernity in ways that would be wholly different in a Westerosi context.

We start off with Sam’s attempt to full on invent democracy, which is laughed down by the assembled lords. And that whole sequence feels misjudged to me. For a start, I know there was a time skip but we’re at most a couple of months away from the complete destruction of the capital and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Now isn’t the time to be cracking wise. And the whole way the idea is introduced just feels massively metatextual. The framing is that we, the audience, are supposed to know that full participatory democracy is the “right” answer but that the lords of Westeros are too backwards to realise that. This ignores … so much. I suppose there was no Athens analogue in the World of Ice and Fire (which is somewhat facetiously known in the fandom as “Planetos”) so it’s not like in the real world where democracy would be a very well documented phenomenon. But why doesn’t Yara Greyjoy stand up and say “actually, that’s how we do it in the Iron Islands” (following the real model of Nordic countries, the kings of the Iron Islands are elected at something called the Kingsmoot, which is a much bigger deal in the books than in the show where, like, ten people show up to it). It’s not like anybody voices any of the thousands of very reasonable objections one could have to participatory democracy in a world where communicating from one side of the kingdom to another takes months, where most people are illiterate, where wealth and landowning are still entirely hereditary and, let’s not forget, people are still allowed to maintain private armies.

They eventually settle on the idea of a king being chosen by … well it isn’t really clear and obviously isn’t clear to the actual people present at the actual event (Davos even expresses uncertainty about whether he gets a vote) but essentially a small clique of powerful noblemen. And actually that is at least a fairly reasonable and stable system in the sense that, going forward, it can be fairly easily defined: give one vote to each of the constituent kingdoms except the Crownlands, and you have a nice small electorate who you can bring together fairly conveniently. Basically they transition the kingdom from a hereditary monarchy to an elective monarchy, which is … fine in a sense. Except that the show frames this change as (a) a step towards democracy, which it isn’t and (b) a clear improvement on the previous system, which it also isn’t.

I’m going to start with point (a). One of the biggest mistakes we make (and we make it because it is made so easily) when looking at history (disclaimer, I am a world away from being a historian) is to view it as having a single clear trajectory. You start with all the power in the hands of one king, and then you gradually transition that power to the nobility, then the middle classes, then the working classes, then you get universal suffrage by way of a single clear path with no deviations. The thing is, that isn’t actually how it works. Some monarchies have very centralised power, some are very decentralised, some democracies are actually deeply unjust (Athens had, like, a lot of slaves as for that matter did the early USA) and some monarchies are actually quite progressive. It’s especially noteworthy that the big selling point Tyrion pitches for the new Westerosi government is that it eliminates dynastic rule, but there’s no indication that dynastic rule is at all the problem with Westeros.

I’m not particularly pro-monarchy, I think it’s at best an irrelevance and at worst a symbol of entrenched inequality. But every year the Economist magazine (through the EIU, the Economist Intelligence Unit) publishes its annual Democracy Index, in which it rates the strength of democracy in every country in the world and it’s really interesting to notice that four out of the top five countries have a hereditary monarch (Norway, Sweden and Denmark all have their own, and New Zealand still recognises the Queen of England as its head of state) while none of the five least democratic countries do (unless you count the Kim family in North Korea, which wouldn’t be totally unfair).

Point being, moving from hereditary monarchy to elective monarchy doesn’t actually make the Seven Kingdoms any freer or more democratic, it just slightly changes the kind of feudalism it operates under.

Even worse (and bringing us to our part b) it arguably changes the kind of feudalism it operates under to a type of feudalism that will exacerbate Westeros’s main problems. We’ll ignore for the moment the whole supernatural angle (the show certainly seems to want us to) and assume that Bran isn’t going to suddenly become the God Emperor of Dune but that instead the system is going to work roughly the way Tyrion says it will: Bran will be king, but on his death the High Lords of Westeros will come back to the Dragonpit and choose a new king from amongst themselves.

This is … kind of a recipe for disaster? My inspiration for the post was a twitter thread from Brent Sirota of NC State University laying out in detail why, if we assume the War of the Five Kings is nominally the War of the Roses it follows that what Westeros really needs is actually a far stronger centralised monarchy. Robert’s Rebellion and everything that followed came about (much like the real Wars of the Roses) happened because individual noble families got powerful enough that they could challenge the monarch, and that led to decades of strife and chaos. I mean think about it—how can it ever be a good thing stability-wise for the king to be profoundly in debt to one of his own subjects (for those who haven’t recently rewatched the first series, remember that the crown owed the Lannisters millions).

What I found particularly interesting about this analysis was that, when it popped up on reddit one commentator, by way of rebuttal, posted the following quote from George R. R. Martin himself:

“The Kingdom was unified with dragons, so the Targaryen’s flaw was to create an absolute monarchy highly dependent on them, with the small council not designed to be a real check and balance. So, without dragons it took a sneeze, a wildly incompetent and megalomaniac king, a love struck prince, a brutal civil war, a dissolute king that didn’t really know what to do with the throne and then chaos.”

 And this leads to a fascinating tension of duelling authorities. On the one hand you have a legitimate historian with real-world sources and on the other you have the person who designed the world. Being a fully paid-up death-of-the-author type, I’m very much of the opinion that GRRM’s interpretation of where the Targaryens went wrong is no more valid than anybody else’s but I do think it’s fascinating that Sirota draws attention to the “weird Americanism” of the way we are invited to rally behind Dany’s abolitionist agenda, while Martin himself sums up the problems with the Targaryen regime using the characteristically American language of “checks and balances”.

Also, looking at that quote afresh, I can’t quite tell if it’s meant to be sarcastic. Because “…it took a sneeze, a wildly incompetent and megalomaniac king, a love struck prince, a brutal civil war, a dissolute king that didn’t really know what to do with the throne and then chaos” actually describes a really long sequence of events so (especially with the quote out of context) it’s hard to be sure exactly what point Martin is making. Because I suspect tipping most medieval societies into chaos would have required way less than two wildly incompetent monarchs with a civil war in the middle.  Hell there was a civil war in England so chaotic it’s literally called “The Anarchy” and that was precipitated entirely because a drunk guy rammed a boat into a rock.

I think what I’m inching towards here is that A Game of Thrones was really good at challenging the fantasy genre’s well-documented bias in favour of “rightful kings” but might have fallen foul of the genre’s somewhat less well-documented bias in favour of decentralised power. I don’t want to give too much life to increasingly outdated stereotypes of the genre, but there’s still a strong tendency in fantasy for “bad” societies to be very centralised and monolithic (your prototypical dark lords and evil empires) while “good” societies tend to be more of a loose confederation of autonomous bodies (see the rebel alliance in Star Wars or the Last Alliance in Lord of the Rings). Much as I loved Sansa’s ending in the TV series, I do think it’s interesting that “independence for the North” is seen so unambiguously as a positive outcome, rather than as a complicated state of affairs that could easily be either desirable or undesirable depending on your perspective. #StrongerTogether.

Because Sirota’s very much right on this one. It’s easy for a modern audience to get behind “freedom” or “liberation” as heroic agendas. It’s much harder for them to get behind “centralisation of power in order to create stability that will ultimately benefit the common people by enabling them to go about their lives without being disrupted by the squabbling of the baronial classes.” And it’s still harder for them to get behind “standardising the quart and making minor changes to the management of rivers.”

And as a result, the series does end on a peculiar note of cognitive dissonance. We are invited to view the institution of elective monarchy (or weirwood god-emperoroship, the jury is still out on that one) as an unambiguously good thing, even though all it’s really doing is—as one article I read pointed out—codifying the Game of Thrones for perpetuity (it’s suddenly way easier to murder and politic your way onto the throne). It’s particularly weird when coupled with the destruction-by-dragonfire of the throne itself, which is one of those big bits of symbolism that might just be symbolic in a vacuum rather than symbolic of anything. I mean … yeah the spiky chair is gone, but the Iron Throne was never the One Ring, it’s not the object itself that is inherently corrupting, it’s the endless jockeying of the noble families for power. An endless jockeying, incidentally, that they have now (entirely on the say-so of a confessedly incompetent man in handcuffs) enshrined into their new system of government.

Taking a step back (sorry, I overuse that phrase), I can’t help but think that part of the issue here is that while the show does a good job of challenging the fantasy cliché of just and rightful kingship, it actually does quite a bad job of correctly articulating the problems with monarchy. Obviously it’s right in broad strokes—heredity is a bad qualification for leadership, just because your father was good at governing that doesn’t mean you will be, it’s very easy for somebody with unquestioned power to oppress people—but I think it’s very wrong in the specifics. Many many years ago, one of the earliest conversations I remember having about A Song of Ice and Fire was with a friend who was disappointed by Jaime’s chapters in A Storm of Swords, because he felt that revealing his backstory with the Mad King made him significantly less morally ambiguous. As he put it, “would you murder a man you had sworn to protect if he had proven himself a cruel tyrant” is an interesting moral question, “would you murder a man you had sworn to protect if it was literally the only way of stopping him from actually blowing up a city and actually killing an actual million actual people” is rather less so. Although the series pays lip service to the idea that monarchy is inherently unjust and that there are no truly good kings, it presents its bad kings as so scenery-chewingly, city-immolatingly, casually-mass-murderingly terrible that it’s hard not to view its real problem with monarchy as a lack of insurance against individual bad rulers, rather than a more structural problem with a society that treats some humans as inherently more worthy than others.

In this framework, the move to elective monarchy is exactly the right play, because it probably does mitigate against the possibility of getting a monarch who will decide on a whim to burn the capital to the ground (which isn’t as far as I know a problem real-life monarchies had particular trouble with). But it does kind of leave the whole of the rest of feudalism in place and curiously unexamined.

Basically the end of the show turns the Seven Kingdoms into the Holy Roman Empire. An institution, it should be noted, that was actually ruled by a single dynasty for nearly three centuries. This is … fine. But it’s still just another turn of the wheel.

So I’ve got an idea for a fantasy TV series.

At its core, it’s a tragic love story between a man who believes himself to be the bastard son of an honourable but naive nobleman and the daughter of the mad king who that honourable noblemen overthrew.

He’s pure-hearted but has to balance his inherent desire to do right against the harsh realities of the world in which he lives. She’s idealistic but driven to the point of ruthlessness, and constantly struggles with her hereditary disposition towards insanity, her supernatural affinity for fire, and the legacy of her abusive history which has trained her to believe that she can achieve greatness only if she follows a path of violence and terror.

They come together and each is immediately drawn to the other’s sense of purpose and honour. He tells her about the terrible existential war they must all fight against the very concept of death itself and she in turn tells him of her vision of a freer, more just world without slavery or tyranny. But as they fight alongside one another we see signs that she may be more her father’s daughter than we ever suspected, and when a mysterious seer tells them that he is not the bastard son of a nobleman, as he thought, but instead the true heir to the kingdom she has been raised to believe is hers by right a wedge is driven between them. This, combined with the sudden deaths of her most trusted advisors ultimately, inevitably, and horrifically leads to her embracing the worst and darkest parts of her nature, burning cities and innocents until at last, the nobleman’s bastard is forced—for the good of all the realm—to kill the woman he loves with his own hands, knowing that it will mean his own death or exile.

I’d want this story to unfold over about eight seasons of television to do it justice.

Oh, and I think I’d really want to make sure the two main characters don’t even meet each other for the first six years.

And I know it’s a cheap shot, but genuinely, this right here is the problem with season eight of Game of Thrones. Yes, it feels rushed. But it doesn’t feel rushed because it was told in thirteen episodes instead of twenty, or because they cut out Fake Aegon and made Euron Greyjoy a shallow dudebro instead of a creepy Cthulhu wizard. It doesn’t feel rushed because Dany left Meereen too soon or we didn’t get Lady Stoneheart. It feels rushed because the story we’re getting the conclusion to in this season is the story that—as I understand it (and again I have no inside information here)—George R. R. Martin told the showrunners was the heart of the series all along, which is the doomed love story between two characters who spent 75% of the show on separate continents. It’s like Romeo and Juliet only the entire Capulet family spends most of the play in China and the balcony scene is at the end of act four.

And yes to an extent I’m showing my romance bias (in that I’m billing this complex multi-viewpoint fantasy epic as “essentially a love story”) but what we’ve just seen in the final episode only really makes sense as the emotional culmination of a story that is fundamentally about Jon and Dany in a way that the show has never really been, and which the books might wind up being depending on what happens in The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring.

Side note: my personal pet theory is that GRRM has actually finished the manuscript for The Winds of Winter but is sitting on it not because of some weird secret deal with HBO, but because he’s spent ten years trying desperately to think of a title that begins with an indefinite article, because otherwise he knows that having the series go “A Game, A Storm, A Clash, A Feast, A Dance, The Winds, A Dream” will haunt him to his grave.

Umm … I should also stress that this is a joke. GRRM has spoken fairly recently about how much he hates “secretly finished the books” theories.

But seriously, I would not be able to cope with having one book out of seven that began with The instead of A.

Where was I? Oh yes, romance bias.

The narrative, structural and emotional climax of this episode—and therefore basically of the entire goddamned series—is when Jon Snow embraces Daenerys, tells her “you are my queen, now and always”, kisses her and then stabs her in the heart. Leaving aside for a moment the yicky gender politics of Dany’s story getting reduced to how sad it is that Jon had to kill his girlfriend (maybe he and Tyrion can form some kind of club) this would be a fucking amazing scene if it was the culmination of an eight year arc centred on this exact relationship. It feels really hollow as the culmination of an eight year arc that was mostly about completely different people, most of whom are now dead.

As I look back on Game of Thrones the more convinced I become that it was always going to be impossible to end effectively, because—appropriately enough for a show that built its reputation on its depiction of a complex five-way battle for a throne—it was really about five different shows intermittently at war with one another. Incidentally I fully admit that I picked the number “five” here purely to rhyme with the war of the five kings, but I’m pretty sure I can get there. Let’s go:

1. It was an adaptation of the books. I mean obviously.
2. It was also in a lot of ways a fantasy soap opera. In that it was just about a bunch of characters hooking up, doing slightly random things, and generally having personal drama with no end in sight.
3. It was the Henriad or if you prefer I Claudius. That is, a vast and epic story covering huge movements in a continent-spanning empire following a sequence of ups and downs across multiple rulers.
4. It was a heroic fantasy about a nobleman’s bastard and a queen-in-exile.
5. By the end of the series, it was very much about itself and its own legacy (which is why we get actual characters talking about Gendry rowing and Kit Harrington being short).

Now the thing about these different styles of story is that they have large areas where they are compatible. Mashing up a serious political drama with a soap opera gives you the West Wing, for example, and obviously a heroic fantasy story about kings and queens and kissing and stabbing will always have elements of political drama to it.

The problem, though, is that smooshing up all these disparate narrative styles together introduces tensions. Tensions that are much better resolved in written fiction than in a TV show (although I suspect these tensions are also part of the reason that Martin’s writing has to be so intricate and painstaking). For example, a soap opera really relies on following characters day-to-day, because emotional plots about love and friendship make most sense when they’re unpacked in something close to real time. But stories of dynastic politics and ancient warfare need to take place over a much longer time scale, and it’s very awkward to try to mash the two together. You can see bits of this creeping into the season very early on, like the way that we meet the pregnant Gilly in season 2 and Young Sam is still a babe-in-arms in season 5, despite the fact that Daenerys’ dragons have gone from tiny wyrmlings to city-wrecking monsters, the War of the Five Kings has basically ended, Bran Stark has clearly gone from a ten-year-old into a creepy teen, and the Others have … okay they’ve mostly been standing around looking menacing.

The problems become even more acute come the ending, because you suddenly have to end each of these five distinct stories, and they each demand a different ending reached by a different path. Jon stabbing Dany in the heart is a fitting ending to the heroic fantasy about the nobleman’s bastard and the exiled queen, but we barely saw that story on screen. Bronn getting made Master of Coin for no clear reason is a fine ending for the weird fanservicey show-about-a-show that we saw so much of in seasons seven and eight, but it’s borderline destructive for any sense of historical realism. I can just about see giving him Highgarden because, frankly, he’s kind of right when he points out that all noble families started off with some murdering bastard, but why also put him in charge of the realm’s finances? As a throwaway joke it would be fine, except that the show also needs to provide a fitting ending to the fantasy political drama, and again “transition from hereditary monarchy to elective monarchy and put an unexpected person on the throne” is a perfectly fitting ending for that (and one that has interesting shades of Claudius’ ascension to Emperor at the end of I Claudius) but again it isn’t set up by the foregoing episodes (which were suddenly trying to tell the epic fantasy story almost from a standing start) or paid off by the following scenes (which were trying to tell a meta-story about how much we love the Game of Thrones supporting cast).

Side-note. Very famously, one of GRRM’s inspirations for writing his very detail-oriented, very political fantasy about a believably realised medieval world was getting to the end of Lord of the Rings and finding that Aragorn’s reign is blitzed through with “he ruled wisely”. His comment on this ending is well known to have included the line “what was his tax policy” (I should probably add that this makes more sense in context). And apparently King Bran the Broken’s tax policy is … to put a shiftless self-serving mercenary in charge? I mean it almost works as satire. But only almost.

There is so much that could be said and has been said about the Great Council scene. Like why is Tyrion suddenly calling all the shots despite his being literally in chains? Why is Grey Worm not pushing any kind of agenda here (I mean to be fair, the answer to this might well be “because he was a slave soldier conditioned from birth to blindly follow orders and the person who bought him just died without giving him further instructions” but that assumes you’re following the much darker “Dany the slave owner” interpretation which I don’t think the show supports even given that she goes evil in S8)? Why after eight years of ceaseless war and conflict does everybody just finally agree on a plan proposed by a man many of them hate?

Also, pet peeve alert: Tyrion’s big speech revolves strongly around the importance of stories. And with the possible exception of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, I have always hated professional storytellers using their role as professional storytellers to tell stories about how important it is to tell stories. It always feel like I got somebody in to redecorate my living room, and they responded by coming into my house and painting “interior designers should be better paid” all over the walls.

Because I love a spurious analogy, the whole “get everybody together and suddenly we all unanimously agree to make Bran king” scene reminded me a whole lot of that one bit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There’s a scene where Roger and Bob Hoskins are handcuffed together, and Bob is trying to saw through the chains to get them apart, and then Roger pulls his hand out of the handcuffs so he can help with the sawing. Which prompts the exchange: “wait, you could have done that at any time?” / “Not at any time, only when it was funny.”

That was pretty much how I felt seeing all the Great Lords of Westeros sitting down and resolving their bitter differences with a single five-minute conversation. Like, seriously, guys. You could have done this at any time. These characters don’t know they’re in a series finale. Yes, some truly apocalyptic shit has happened and yes you can make a reasonable case that pretty much everybody here is sort of allied now (the Riverlands and the Vale have strong ties to Sansa, the Crownlands are basically out the picture now King’s Landing has fallen, the Stormlands are run by a blacksmith’s apprentice who is clearly in way over his head, and … also Brienne and Davos are here for no reason?) but come on. If it was this easy to solve your problems you should have solved them years ago. And why is it only the North that asks for independence when Dorne and the Iron Islands have always had a strong tradition of seeking self-rule? Why are the two kingdoms whose primary loyalty is mostly to Sansa specifically (the Vale, the Riverlands) not asking to join Sansa’s kingdom in the North rather than Bran’s in the South? Why is nobody bothered by what seems to add up to a Stark coup?

Also, really petty point: why do they change the name of the Seven Kingdoms to the Six Kingdoms when there weren’t actually Seven Kingdoms in it to begin with? There are actually still eight kingdoms in what’s left of the Seven Kingdoms even without the North (in case you’re counting: The Vale, the Riverlands, the Iron Islands, The Stormlands, the Crownlands, the Rock, the Reach, and Dorne).

Anyway, it is what it is.

I want to address a couple of final points before I (probably) stop talking about this show forever. Firstly, and very quickly I want to address the scene where Brienne updates Jaime’s entry in the White Book. I’ve seen some people argue that this is a problem because it makes her story subservient to his, and I … I don’t actually agree with this. Obviously for a lot of people the show gets no benefit of the doubt on gender issues, especially after its two most prominent female rulers wound up being severally mad and useless (yes there’s Sansa but she was never technically in charge of the North until the show ended) and I completely see where those people are coming from. But I do think it’s doing the scene an injustice to frame it as making Brienne’s story about Jaime’s rather than bringing their stories together in a nuanced and poignant way. Because showing Brienne updating Jaime’s entry in the book actually has two purposes. Most obviously, it shows how she thought and felt about Jaime, and highlights his character growth through the series. But more subtly, it shows that Brienne is now in charge of updating the White Book, which is specifically the duty of the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. So not only is she paying a final tribute to the man she loved, but she is doing it in a way that signals the completion of her own journey in a way that has nothing to do with him. The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, let’s not forget, is the embodiment of chivalric honour in the Seven Kingdoms, and Brienne getting that job is a massive deal.

The other thing I wanted to talk about is Bran. I sort of feel that I did the Dark Dany thing to death over the last two posts (although I will point out that—as other people have highlighted in other takes—that the fact her speaking a foreign language is used to signal how evil she’s gone is kind of problematic, even if it is clearly supposed to echo the Nuremberg rallies rather than people talking foreign on the subway, although now I think of it echoing Hitler for cheap villain points is also … not great). But since King Brandon came kind of out of nowhere, I’ve not really touched on it at all and … well … I do gots some opinions.

Like Mad Queen Dany, I do think that King Bran is probably a GRRM inclusion, but there is probably nothing that highlights how different the approaches to the specifically fantastical elements of the story are between the books and the show than its framing of the Three Eyed Raven (in the book the Three Eyed Crow or possibly just The Last Greenseer—there’s no indication that the three-eyed-bird thing is actually a formal title in the book) ascending to the throne of Westeros.

In the TV show, Bran becoming king is almost a meta-level ending. Bran is history. Bran is stories. Bran—with his ability to see anything, to spool forwards and backwards throughout the history of Westeros—is in a very literal sense the viewer. He is all of us.

In the book, Bran is tied to an ancient prehuman supernatural force that has an unknown agenda and might have been dicking with everything in Westeros since before the show began.

I wrote in my review of episode three that, when viewed in a certain light, Bran’s actions were fucking cold. He knew from the outset that the only way to win was to bait out the Night King. He used himself as bait, sure, but he also used the entire assembled army as a misdirect. I mentioned in my original post that they could theoretically have got the same result by sticking Bran in the Godswood, putting Arya in the tree and sending everybody else south to save lives, but that presumes that the Night King wouldn’t have spotted that for a trap, which he might well have done. But this again turns Bran into a Machiavellian sociopath. He willingly sacrificed thousands of people’s lives just so that the Night King wouldn’t suspect that he was being lured into an Arya-shaped trap.

And it gets worse. It’s Bran who confirms to Sam that Jon is the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna and who insists that Jon has to be told right before the battle and right after Sam finds out Dany burned his father and brother. Like in retrospect it looks a lot like Bran was deliberately trying to turn people against Daenerys right from Episode Two.

And it gets even worse. Because remember that Bran had a montage of past and future events in the weirwood tree in S6, and that montage specifically includes a shot of Drogon’s shadow flying over King’s Landing. So there is a good chance that he knew that Dany would burn down King’s Landing. The charitable interpretation of this is that he knew that Dany would destroy King’s Landing if she became queen, and was trying to prevent it by making a last-ditch effort to support Jon. The full balls to the wall evil interpretation of this is that he knew Dany would go evil if she began to suspect people were plotting against her, and deliberately chose to stoke her paranoia at the worst possible moment, sparking a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of King’s Landing, the death of Daenerys, Jon Snow’s disqualification from the succession and the Three Eyed Corvid’s being crowned king of the Seven (well really Six, well really Eight) Kingdoms.

After Tyrion’s impassioned if a little self-indulgent speech about how important stories are, he asks Bran if he would be willing to be king.

Bran’s reply: “Why do you think I came all this way?”

All this way from Winterfell to King’s Landing? Or all this way from a ten year old boy falling from a window to the omniscient wizard-king of the Seven Kingdoms?

There are a fair few people pointing this out already. But if you want to go full tinfoil hat, this goes super deep.

Oh, and I should probably add that I’m going to go off on some really obscure lore stuff here, and I’ve picked up a lot of that from a lovely YouTube channel called In Deep Geek in which a guy with a really soothing voice talks about these kinds of obscure bits of Thrones lore (he’s also very neutral, which I like—a lot of reaction videos are quite angry about this season, and IDG’s recaps tend to be very specifically factual and tied to the deeper worldbuilding stuff).

Anyway Bran is called to the North by his visions of a three-eyed-raven. In the TV show this is … just kind of Max von Sydow, but in the books it’s specifically a man named Brynden Rivers, called Lord Bloodraven, the bastard son of Aegon IV Targaryen (seriously these Targaryens get everywhere) and a terrifyingly efficient spymaster. He was a one-eyed sorcerer, a warg and eventually the Last Greenseer—basically like Littlefinger and Varys rolled into one, except he could also do actual magic. He has been manipulating events in the Seven Kingdoms for decades, he was heavily involved in suppressing the Blackfyre Rebellion, he’s a creepy manipulative magic spy who lives in a tree. He also might have driven Euron Greyjoy mad and turned him into a creepy cthulhu wizard pirate (in the books he’s very specifically called Euron Crow’s Eye and his sigil is a single red eye, and bloodraven has one eye, which is red and … like I say this gets tinfoily).

Add to that the fact that the show makes it fairly clear that Bran isn’t entirely Bran—he’s this sort of weird ancient gestalt consciousness, possibly made up of all the previous three-eyed ravens, one of whom is definitely a manipulative bastard. And many of whom might actually be Children of the Forest—beings that not only aren’t entirely human but which actually fought a war against humanity and indeed by show-canon created the White Walkers as a weapon against the First Men.

Basically there’s a pretty good set of evidence that not only is Bran Stark not Bran Stark, but there’s also pretty good evidence that the Bran-Stark-Entity is a fundamentally bad person, and possibly one implicitly hostile to humanity. Whatever you think of the politics of it, there’s a pretty strong case to be made that Tyrion just talked all the surviving lords of Westeros into crowning a quasi-human gestalt consciousness with profound ties to the very beings that created the White Walkers.

And you know what. It gets squirrelier.

Every single thing that happens in A Game of Thrones ultimately stems from Robert’s Rebellion, which ultimately stems from the “abduction” of Lyanna Stark by Rhaegar Targaryen. This took place because they’d formed some kind of connection at the Tourney at Harrenhall. The tourney at Harrenhall took place during something called the year of the false spring, which is when the harsh winter that erratically plagues Westeros went into abeyance for a year—just long enough for a large tournament to be orchestrated ostensibly by a man named Lord Whent but probably actually by Rhaegar Targaryen—before Winter came back in earnest. There’s a reasonable fan theory that some kind of supernatural force with the power to see the future and control the seasons was dicking with the weather specifically so that this tournament could come about, so that Rhaegar could meet Lyanna, so that they could run off together, so the war could happen so… something.

Throw on top of that the fairly well respected fan theory that Lyanna Stark originally came to Rhaegar’s attention because she disguised herself as a man and entered the tournament as “the Knight of the Laughing Tree” in order to avenge one of her father’s  bannermen, who had been badly beaten by some squires, and that the bannerman in question was Howland Reed, whose son is Jojen Reed who accompanies Bran on his journey beyond the wall, and whose family it is strongly hinted has hereditary greensight (having greensight, confusingly, being a slightly distinct set of powers from being a greenseer) and may therefore also have been manipulated into position by Bloodraven, or by some other ancient power of the Old Gods and the North. And I should probably break that sentence up, but … well … I think we’re squarely in long run-on sentence territory here.

Anyway, all this means it is possible that every single thing that happened in A Game of Thrones, going back well before the start of the first book or first episode, was actually part of an elaborate supernatural scheme designed to undo the centuries-ancient injustices perpetrated against the Children of the Forest by manipulating the Seven Kingdoms into a chaotic civil war followed by an apocalyptic battle between actual ice and fire, all of which was prodded through Bran’s visions (sent by some source we never truly learn the nature of) into an outcome that devastated the human kingdoms of Westeros and led inexorably to his appointment as king. A king, it seems reasonable to assume, who will rule in accordance with the mysterious visions that he is being sent by an ancient and mystical prehuman force.

Tl;dr—the whole eight-season arc, and all of its backstory, might be part of a millennia ancient battle fought by the primordial spirits of the land itself against the invading tide of humanity.

Which … well first of all that might be totally wrong. And as a reading it’s only lightly supported by show canon (while also not, if I’m honest, being especially supported by book canon, and occasionally involving cherrypicking from the two) but I think it does highlight something interesting and important about fantasy fiction, and especially about how fantasy fiction translates to television.

The Dark Bran theory, along with all the various theories about Azor Ahai, the Faceless Men, the Doom of Valyria, the Lord of Light, Maggy the Frog, Wargs, direwolves, the secret origins of dragons and their ties to the blood of old Valyria, brindled men and eyeless wyrms rely on an attitude to fantasy fiction which it’s very easy to forget is extremely uncommon outside of habitual genre readers.

There’s a line in one of the NYT articles about the Game of Thrones finale which made me realise how disparate attitudes to this kind of thing are amongst fans. It ran as follows:

            This was a Shakespearean saga about power, blood and loyalty, we once told our skeptical, fantasy-averse friends. Not some show about dragons and wizards.

            And then in its final episode, a dragon committed the story’s most potent symbolic act and a wizard was put in charge.

 Which … is a bit dismissive, but it is reflective of the feelings of a surprising number of people. And the thing is I’ve always kind of known that there are large segments of the public for whom fantasy elements are a turnoff, but I’ve never quite realised how stark the difference is between the turn-off crowd and the turn-on crowd until I started looking at critical responses to A Game of Thrones. Because for every person who’s embarrassed that a wizard wound up being king of Westeros, there’s somebody who’s narked that they didn’t go into more detail about how exactly the weirwood network worked. For everybody who’s upset that the Iron Throne was destroyed by a giant fire-breathing lizard, there’s somebody who’s upset that the show didn’t sufficiently engage with the question of how that fire-breathing lizard was connected to the Targaryens or explore the question of whether dragons might be the result of Valyrian blood magic combining humans, wyverns and the firewyrms that tunnel beneath the fourteen flames.

 Because my writing and my reading both hop around between genres, I think I might be more aware than many of how much of an acquired skill reading in a genre is. Some time last year I finally got around to reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series (I know, I know, what have I been doing with my time?) and it genuinely took me a while to gearshift back into fantasy mode and remind myself that if I wanted to have any hope of understanding what was going on I had to really pay attention to how Allomancy works. And that was a shift I could make fairly easily, because I am a giant fucking nerd and Sanderson’s mathematically elegant system of magical metals (each pushing or pulling on either the internal or external manifestation of some fundamental principle, and forming pairs containing one pure metal and one alloy) is exactly the kind of thing I enjoy thinking about. But taking a step back it’s also fairly easy for me to realise quite how many people there must be for whom the idea of what-a-particular-sort-of-person-can-do-by-swallowing-a-particular-bit-of-metal being a fundamental aspect of your enjoyment of a story is wholly bizarre and alien.

 I said in one of my early GoTS8 posts that Benioff and Weiss were seen in some quarters as being almost ashamed of their show’s fantasy elements, and that NYT article gave me a little glimpse into why they might be acting like that. A Song of Ice and Fire is from a particular school of fantasy that invites you not just to experience the story but to live in it, to speculate about what R’hllor really wants, to wonder what the precise limitations on the powers of the Faceless Men are, to think in detail about prophecies that are scattered across dozens of chapters across multiple books and to scour histories and visions for hints of secret truths and revelations.

 I am not even joking when I say that there are fan theories about Cersei’s eventual fate in the books that hinge on the question of whether a particular term in High Valyrian is grammatically gendered or not.

 To your average TV viewer (and I very much don’t mean that as a pejorative term, as I say all genre reading is acquired), this is a completely bizarre way of consuming a story. So of course the TV show never dove deep into Bran’s greenseer powers or the possibility that his ascension to the throne could be the culmination of a secret plot by the Children of the Forest. And of course they had defeating the White Walkers boil down to “kill the leader and they all die” because for most people doing lengthy research into the one weakness of an otherwise unstoppable enemy and relating it to the mytho-history of its creation and the motivations of the transmortal mystical force that drives it is … like … the opposite of compelling television.

 Looking back, I’ll repeat what I’ve said several time throughout these posts (although perhaps not often enough). The Game of Thrones TV show is a remarkable achievement. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it could never be perfect. In fact perhaps in its later seasons it could never even be good because it reached the point where it really was trying to do something literally impossible—trying to wrap up a dozen different stories at once, all of them subtly different in tone and style and even to some extent genre, all requiring different types of ending and all while trying to appeal to an audience half of whom really want to know more about dragon-lore and the internal politics of the Citadel and the other half of whom really want a traditionally paced story with character beats and an emotional payoff and are just a little bit embarrassed to be watching a show with dragons in it.

 It didn’t always succeed, but you can make a reasonable case that even when it failed, it failed magnificently.

 And now its watch is ended.

 Valar Morghulis.

I didn’t get around to writing a full post about Russian Doll, but my title for that post I didn’t write was going to be the infinite potential of episode six. Because basically I liked the series, but I found the ending a bit of a letdown, and then I realised that the reason I found the ending a bit of a letdown was because nothing could possibly have lived up to the infinite potential of episode six—that point in the eight-to-ten part miniseries where it has confidently established its premise and you’re seeing clearly for the first time all the thousands of possible fascinating places it could go to.

Then it goes to one of them, and no matter how good it’s been, you’re always slightly pissed at the wasted potential of the others.

The problem with Game of Thrones was always going to be that it spent the best part of a decade living in the infinite potential of episode six, and no ending would ever live up to everything that could have been. And of course there absolutely were abrupt changes in the style of the show between series six and seven—it got a whole lot less detail-oriented and a whole lot pacier, and I very much had mixed feelings about this because on the one hand it did make things a lot less plausible but on the other hand I was really pleased that they were finally moving in the direction of wrapping things up. Because while at the start of the show the lavish, leisurely pace was something you could genuinely luxuriate in, there came a point where I’d watch a season when it released on DVD or whatever streaming service I was using and just be really impatient for it to start … going somewhere. Which it … kind of didn’t for a long time.

I’ve not really gone back to S7 since it first broadcast and what’s weird about it in light of Season 8 is that it feels at once rushed and still … kind of full of filler. In retrospect, it sort of feels that only two things really matter at the end of this show: the defeat of the Night King and Dany’s descent into the role of Mad Queen. Everything else is just so much groundwork.

Given which … really very little of S7 actually contributed to that goal. I mean neither did much else that has happened, but given how rushed it feels, it’s noticeable that it spends so much time setting up new things that go nowhere. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that the characters spend a lot of time doing things that don’t actually especially advance their goals but which do advance the plot in quite large and abstract ways, mostly involving things that happen by accident while they’re taking the actions that don’t advance their goals.

The most obvious example of this is the plan to go north of the wall and capture a White Walker in order to convince Cersei to join the fight against the army of the dead. This takes up a significant chunk of the season between its proposal in episode 5, the journey itself in episode 6 and the parley with Cersei in episode 7 (yes, that’s only three episodes, but three out of seven is more than 40% of the season). This winds up being extremely important for advancing the plot but for reasons that are utterly tangential to the protagonists’ stated goals in going beyond the wall in the first place. It’s on this journey that they find out killing a White Walker destroys all the wights it raised, and Beric Dondarrion speculates (correctly, but with no evidence) that destroying the Night King will destroy the entire army of the dead, but they weren’t going north to look for information about how to destroy the army of the dead, they were going north to capture a wight to take to King’s Landing to prove to Cersei that the undead army was real. Which they fail to do. And of course this mission leads directly to the death of Viserion, which leads to the Night King getting a dragon, which leads to the wall falling, so this plan does actually move the White Walker plot forward in a substantial way, but that plot movement has nothing to do with what Jon et al are trying to achieve.

Similarly they do make an effort to find a way to destroy the army of the dead in this season—by sending Sam to Oldtown—but this leads to absolutely no new information about the problem at hand, but does lead to Gilly of all people finding a crucial piece of evidence about Jon Snow’s parentage. So again, the plot payoff is totally unrelated to the thing that’s meant to be happening. And by the way we’ve not really had much payoff from Jon turning out to be Aegon Targaryen yet either except that it made Dany go a bit madder.

The more I think about it, the more I think that being “rushed” isn’t the real problem with the ending of this series. The problem is that there’s a fundamental disconnect between the stories that have been set up in the first six seasons and the stories that need to be paid off in the final two. People complain that the Night King got eight seasons of buildup and was then taken out in a single episode, but I don’t actually think that’s the problem. The problem is that the Night King didn’t have any real buildup at all—he had eight seasons of foreshadowing but there was never any real organic movement on his plotline. By the start of season seven we know virtually nothing about the White Walkers that we didn’t know in literally the first episode—they’re kind of scary and they raise the dead. I mean yes there was the Night King himself, and the implication that they were created by the Children of the Forest as a weapon in their wars against the First Men when they arrived in Westeros and started cutting down the weirwoods, but (a) that’s not a huge amount for six years of what’s supposed to be a major plotline and (b) at least some of what I just said about the Children of the Forest is based on book canon and YouTube videos.

Dany’s psychological degeneration is a similar issue. It’s basically necessary for the story that she be a sympathetic character right up until she goes evil, because she’s so disconnected from the rest of the plot that if she wasn’t somebody we could properly root for we’d get deeply bored of her chapters. But again, this means that her eventual turn in season eight can only ever be foreshadowed rather than actually built up to. I argued in my last post about this series that she’s been basically a terrible person going all the way back to season one, but there’s not really been any escalation in that (when people argued prior to S8E5 that Dany was going full Mad Queen, others counter-argued quite reasonably that the worst thing she’d done recently was execute some people—the flaw in Dany’s arc here is really that the worst thing she does is when she crucifies people in season four, but that’s very early on and she kind of gets better after that not worse).

Complaints about the ending of Game of Thrones tend to come in two flavours, which can broadly be summed up as:

• This sucks because it isn’t what GRRM intended, Dany will stay good and the final battle will be against the Night King, but Beinoff and Weiss changed it because they’re hacks.
• This sucks because while it is what GRRM intended, the show is doing it wrong because Beinoff and Weiss are hacks, and the books will do it much better.

I don’t think either of these criticisms are correct or fair. I do think that the overall shape of the ending of the series roughly matches the overall shape of the ending that the books will eventually have. I don’t think Arya will kill the Night King in the books—the showrunners basically said that was their call—or that there will even necessarily be a Night King, but I’d be amazed if the book series didn’t end with the threat of the White Walkers being wrapped up fairly early and Dark Daenerys being the final villain. And I’m not necessarily suggesting that the books won’t ultimately bring things to a more natural-feeling conclusion, but I suspect that the problems B&W are having wrapping things up effectively stem less from their being talentless greedy hacks who don’t care about the source material as from structural elements of the story that Martin is clearly also having to deal with.

Specifically, the issue seems to me to be that the ending of this story is so radically different from the beginning that it isn’t at all clear how anybody could ever make the two join up in a satisfactory way. Somehow the story needed to transition from a detailed political drama about human motivations and petty rivalries spiralling out of control and unleashing chaos into a mythic supernatural conflict grounded in prophecy and destiny, and then finally into an epic and tragic struggle between doomed lovers torn apart by fate and hereditary insanity.

Those are three completely different stories, they don’t entirely fit in the same series, and there’s no real way to transition from one to another without alienating people who were on board with the first type of story but not at all at home for the second (when I read the books, for example, I was well up for the politics but not especially interested in all the Azor Ahai, Prince Who Was Promised stuff, but by contrast there are a bunch of people who freaking loved the Azor Ahai stuff and feel understandably cheated that it went nowhere in the show). It’s like trying to combine Casablanca,  Saving Private Ryan and Fantastic Beasts II, the Crimes of Grindelwald into one gigantic mega-movie—sure they’re all technically taking place at around the same time and, when you think about it, sort of in the same setting, but they don’t quite fit together.

I increasingly think Jon and Dany’s romance is a good example of this (and look, I actually got around to referencing something specifically from season seven in my season seven post, go me). A lot of people (including me, in my post on this subject last year) have complained that Jon and Dany have zero chemistry, which in hindsight I think is a little unfair. Kit Harrington and Emilia Clarke are both talented actors, but they’re working against a lot of baggage that makes it very difficult for their relationship to pop onscreen.

Most obviously, there’s the comparison to Jon’s relationship with Ygritte. I’ve already made the joke about Kit Harrington and Rose Leslie having so much chemistry that they actually got married in real life, but there’s a serious point to be made here—Jon/Dany doesn’t just suffer in comparison to Jon/Ygritte because Jon/Dany is lacking, it suffers because Jon/Ygritte was unusually strong, even by the standards of convincing TV romances.

And of course once again, a lot of people also insist that J/Y is better than J/D is because Jon/Ygritte was written by George R. R. Martin, while Jon/Dany was written by Benioff & Weiss who are bad hacks who can’t write. Which again I think is unfair. I’m not denying that J/Y is well written and well presented (in both the books and TV show), but I think it’s important to remember that Ygritte is only in the books as a romantic interest for Jon, and it’s much easier to write a romance between two characters when one of them has been specifically designed to be romantically interesting to the other than it is when both of those characters have been independently established for six years of television or a series of books longer than the bible. Ygritte’s attraction to Jon could never have felt out of character for her, because prior to meeting Jon she literally doesn’t exist, and Jon’s attraction to Ygritte could never have felt implausible because she’s there for him to be attracted to. By contrast, making it feel natural that Jon and Dany—two characters who we have known for the best part of a decade but who have known each other for eight minutes—would fall so epically in love that they both make a series of terrible life-ruining mistakes for each other (Dany abandoning her ambitions to fight somebody else’s war for a people who don’t believe in her, Jon signing up to be complicit in a war crime) is a much bigger ask. The problem isn’t that it’s “rushed” the problem is that doing it in a way that isn’t rushed would take not just a few extra episodes but a few extra seasons. Seasons that would need to be justified by the inclusion of whole extra subplots, which would only exacerbate the problem of people feeling cheated when those plots, once again, had no relation to the main storyline of beating the White Walkers and Dany going Mad Queen.

To put it another way, the “more seasons/episodes would fix everything” argument is grounded in the infinite potential of episode six. We look at the current ending, and we see that it feels unsatisfying and we think to ourselves “if they’d just let these last two seasons be ten episodes they could have done this so much better”. But that’s because we aren’t imagining real episodes, we’re imagining hypothetical episodes that nebulously solve problems and improve things without actually having to think through the details of what those episodes would actually involve.

As an example, a lot of people think that Daenerys’ final turn would have been more plausible if they’d kept the Young Griff plotline, in which Varys suddenly reveals out of nowhere that he’s been grooming this guy to be the perfect king since day one, and he invades Dragonstone with the Golden Company claiming to be Aegon Targaryen. The current internet consensus (there isn’t really a consensus, but more than one person has said it, which is as close to canon as these things come) seems to be that this would mean that instead of Dany fighting Cersei for control of King’s Landing she’d be fighting Aegon, who the people of Westeros would love on account of how Varys trained him to be this brilliant king, and this will make her whole “the people love you but they don’t love me” arc more plausible, so it will make total sense when she burns down King’s Landing. I’ve even seen people who thought the whole “fake Aegon” thing just seemed like an unnecessary complication and unhelpful padding when it first came out in A Dance with Dragons saying that they now see in retrospect why it’s actually a vital part of the series’ dramatic arc.

Now I’m not going to make any judgements about how plausible this arc will wind up being in the books. I suspect it will work better than it does in the show because getting Dany’s PoV will really help and there will be more space to explore how it all works. But I’m deeply sceptical that having some guy pretending to be Aegon Targaryen on the throne rather than Cersei would be the magic bullet for the show that people are suggesting it would be. Most notably, the effect that people seem to think Fake Aegon is necessary for (having Dany fighting a relatively united Westeros under an at least plausibly popular monarch so that it makes sense for her to be seen as a foreign invader and to resent it) could just as easily have been achieved by cutting out the bit where Cersei blows up the Sept of Baelor, and having Margaery and Tommen ruling when Dany arrives, without the need to introduce yet another major character viewpoint well past the halfway point. Dany’s turning evil doesn’t seem implausible because she’s fighting the wrong enemy, it seems implausible because they’ve pushed “Dany is a truly good person” so hard for so long, even while they’ve also shown her behaving tyrannically.

The Season Seven sequence which most typifies this issue is the bit about halfway through where Jon and Davos talk to Missandei about Daenerys and she gives them the “she is the queen we chose” speech. And … boy does that not look good in retrospect. I mean people have pointed out that Jorah Mormont’s arc is pretty dark when you realise how much shit he went through for Daenerys, right down to getting his redemptive dying-for-the-woman-he-loves sequence, only for it to turn out two episodes later that letting her die would have been unambiguously better for everybody. It’s even worse for Missandei, who spends five seasons having Dany’s back in a really problematic way, then dies in chains, only for Dany to turn out to be nothing like Missandei thought—and constantly told other people—she was.

And this is … like … this is not okay. Because while it’s tragic in a vacuum, the show has really traded on the authenticity points which Dany gets from having people of colour and former slaves on her side. Missandei and Grey Worm are what allow Daenerys in seasons three through six to read not merely as a self-styled liberator but as definitely being an actual liberator. Missandei is a pretty strong contender (alongside Brienne and possibly nobody else) for the only uncomplicatedly good person in the entire series. And she truly, passionately, believes in Daenerys. And yes you could do a revisionist or deconstructionist reading where she basically has stockholm syndrome, but firstly that’s really problematic because it denies the agency of the only woman of colour on the show and secondly it’s just … I mean it’s clearly not how it’s supposed to come across. Missandei constantly stumps for Daenerys and we are never invited to even consider the possibility that she has been deceived.

The other crap-we-have-to-wrap-this-up plotline that gets a lot of flak in season seven is the whole thing with Arya and Sansa in Winterfell. And … I actually liked it a lot more on rewatching right up until the end. Unlike, I think, a lot of people, I found it fairly plausible that Arya and Sansa would each have difficulty recognising that the other had changed so much since they were children—they’re neither of them even remotely the same person they were in season one, and there’s not really any reason for them to trust each other other than the fact that they’re family. I mean for fuck’s sake, Arya literally has a bag full of peeled faces in her room, that is not the sort of thing that inspires trust. I don’t even particularly think Littlefinger was wasted; although he’s a cool character I think it can be far too easy to lean on the “scheming character who does seemingly random things for inscrutable motives” plot device. It always seemed fairly clear to me that he never really had a plan per se (like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica). The “Chaos is a Ladder” speech was cool, but it was practically the show hanging a giant lampshade on the fact that Littlefinger’s actions were always more about creating surprising plot twists than any coherent attempt to pursue his own self interest in a meaningful way (yes he winds up Lord of the Vale, but he does that by the cunning masterstroke of marrying a woman who has always wanted to marry him, he didn’t need to plunge a continent into war and murder a king first). I just really wish that the show hadn’t been so focused on providing surprising twists and revelations that it bent the plotline to breaking point just to preserve the wholly absurd courtroom scene where they all pretend Arya is on trial when really Littlefinger is. I mean why? Why? The reveal comes after two sentences, and the whole thing would have worked fine if we’d just seen on camera the point at which the girls decide to trust each other, rather than having them continue to try to fake out the audience even in private.

And that is … perilously close to being all I have to say about Season 7 of Game of Thrones. It was a short season, and many of the complaints that were made about it at the time (rushed storytelling, lack of attention to detail, the goddamned supersonic raven thing in Beyond the Wall which is probably the worst episode in the history of the series) seem a little redundant now Season 8 is out and is … even more so in every regard. And so many of the other plotlines seem pointless—Dany takes Casterly Rock but the Lannisters have abandoned it (okay, the gold mines are tapped out, but castles have strategic value, they’re not just a resource node in an RTS), Olenna Tyrell gets to be Queen of Shade one last time, Drogon fries the Tarlys. But almost everything we see is either faking out something that doesn’t happen (the Golden Company being a threat to Dany’s army, Cersei sending her troops north, Sansa and Arya falling out) or hinting obliquely at something that does (Bran giving Arya the dagger, Dany burningating prisoners, Varys beginning to alienate Dany), but there’s no possible way to know which is which and were it not for the fact that we knew they were working from a nearly-thirty-year-old outline, no especial reason to trust that the showrunners weren’t deciding which plot threads were real and which were fake more or less on the fly.

The more I think about it, the more I think the real issue here isn’t so much “bad writing” (a diagnosis that makes me flinch every time I see it—people are always quick to diagnose it and seldom clear about what they actually mean) or “rushed storytelling” as an increasing fixation on surprise to the extent of all else. People are complaining that nothing was set up, but the truth is that everything was set up, including a bunch of things that didn’t happen. It was absolutely set up that Arya would kill the Night King, and that Jon would. And that Dany would. And that Bran would. It was set up that Arya and Sansa would turn on each other. And that they would support each other. It was set up that Daenerys would go mad, and that she would be a truly just ruler who had the clear-eyed and sincere support of society’s most vulnerable and would be opposed only by nativists, racists and reactionaries. It was set up that the White Walkers were a generic zombie army with a single weakness, a metaphor for climate change, and misunderstood woobies who Never Asked For This. It was set up for the prophecies to matter, and for prophecy to be the proverbial sword without a hilt.

Part of the problem here is the show feeling forced to keep fans guessing to keep the hype up to keep ratings up (and sure they’re getting a lot of hate, but the old saying about the existence or otherwise of bad publicity has a lot of truth to it). Part of the problem is that Martin created a story so epic, complex, sweeping and compelling that it’s borderline impossible for anybody to bring to a satisfying conclusion, especially while also fulfilling the demands of a network television show.

But an enormous part of the problem is the infinite potential of episode six. The last two seasons of Game of Thrones were disappointing for a lot of people. But when you’re comparing what you actually got to all the things you could possibly have had, how could they ever be anything else?