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The final season of Game of Thrones has been the subject of a lot of criticism lately,
and I know I'm probably just beating a dead horse at this point, but I've had a lot of
thoughts on the episodes following my original video, and I wanted to discuss it.
First and foremost I think the biggest issue of this season, particularly in the final
two episodes, is the handling of many different character arcs.
I've seen time and again people try and claim that fans are just disappointed because we
didn't get what we wanted, that it's impossible to bring a fitting conclusion to such a massive
story in a way that satisfies everyone.
That these are just two writers who were doing the best they could in a less than ideal set
of circumstances, including the ever-increasing demands of an incredibly complicated shooting
schedule that covered multiple filming units across several countries with dozens of actors,
some of whom who signed on to do the show as children; not to mention the biggest challenge
they faced of having to now write the story they were only meant to adapt when the show
had outpaced the books.
All of which is fair, but I don't think that means the show is above criticism, nor are
the showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
I think that the reason any story resonates with an audience is because of its characters.
The ones we root for, the ones we love to hate; regardless of where they rest on the
spectrum of good or evil characters are what give meaning to a story.
The best stories are the ones that feel entirely driven by these characters, and the choices
that they make.
When the hand of the author becomes invisible, and every sequence of events feels inevitable.
The only way to maintain this is through consistency of character.
So if a character will go through a significant change throughout the story, it has to be
earned.
Breaking Bad for example, planted the seed for Walter White to become Heisenberg in its
very first episode, but still spent season after season slowly carving him into the villain
he becomes.
Through an examination of his choices in pivotal moments and their significant and often far-reaching
consequences.
That sort of character and consequence driven story is what Game of Thrones was known for,
but with a much bigger scope that we'd ever seen in television before.
Three separate storylines occuring simultaneously with dozens of POV characters and hundreds
of other minor characters, with fully fledged out backstories, personalities, and motivations;
that remained consistent while still evolving as the events unfolded.
Each of our major characters had their own separate narrative arcs that felt like they
were building towards something, but nearly all were betrayed in the final two episodes
of the series.
Let's start with the biggest and most dissapointing.
"I've been a cynic for as long as I can remember.
Everyone's always asking me to believe in things; family, gods, kings, myself.
It was often tempting, until I saw belief where got people, and yet?
Here I am.
I believe in you."
"Jorah make them stop."
"You cannot claim them all princess."
"I can, and I will."
"If you want to sit on the throne your ancestors built you'll have to win it, that will mean
blood on your hands before the thing is done."
"The blood of my enemies, not the blood of innocents."
"You take a babe from its mother's arms, kill it as she watches and pay for her pain with
a silver coin?"
"You don't need Yunkai Khaleesi.
Taking the city will not bring you any closer to Westeros or the Iron Throne."
"How many slaves are there in Yunkai?"
"200,000.
If not more."
"Then we have 200,000 reasons to take the city."
"I know what Cersei has told you.
That I've come to destroy your cities, burn down your homes, murder you and orphan your
children.
That's Cersei Lannister, not me."
"How can I rule Seven Kingdoms if I can't control Slaver's Bay?"
"You're a Targaryen.
You're the Mother of Dragons."
"I need to be more than that."
"I will not let those I've freed slide back into chains."
"Sometimes it's better to answer injustice with mercy."
"I will answer injustice with justice."
"They can live in my new world or die in their old one."
"I fought so that no child born into Slaver's Bay would ever know what it meant to be bought
or sold.
I will continue that fight here and beyond."
"You're the Mother of Dragons."
"I don't want another child's bones dropped at my feet."
"I know what my father was, what he did- I know that Mad King earned his name."
"I am not my father."
"No your Grace.
Thank the Gods."
"We should hit King's Landing now.
Hard, with everything we have, the city will fall within a day."
"I'm not here to be Queen of the Ashes."
"They won't obey you unless they fear you."
"But you have a gentle heart, you would not only be respected and feared- you would be
loved."
"If we attack King's Landing with Drogon and the Unsullied, and the Dothraki, tens of thousands
of innocents will die.
Do not become what you have always struggled to defeat."
"Cersei's followers will abandon her if they know the war is lost.
Give them that chance.
If the city surrenders they will ring the bells and raise the gates.
Please, if you hear them ringing the bells, call off the attack."
"Little children burned!"
"I tried to make peace with Cersei."
What?
"She knows she has won this war, it's in that moment when she makes the decision to make
this personal."
"Ultimately she is who she is, and that's a Targaryen and you know she has said repeatedly
throughout the show 'I will take what is mine with fire and blood' and in this episode she
does that."
Okay, so let's unpack that.
They're right, there are scenes you can point to that show Daenerys as anything but merciful.
Where the line between guilty and innocent becomes blurred.
But that's always been a part of her character arc, balancing her vengeful nature for her
enemies, and her genuine desire to help the innocent.
In some form or another, every major character has been forced to deal with this same moral
dilemna, but Dany has always seemed to take great care in her decisions.
"How many men did your army kill taking Winterfell back from the Bolton's?"
"Thousands."
"We both want to help people, we can only help them from a position of strength; sometimes
strength is terrible."
When she seized Astapor, she did so without harming a single innocent.
When she seized Yunkai, Mereen; blood was shed, but the blood of slave masters or those
who committed treasonous acts punishable by death, and something for which the precedent
has been clearly set by several other notable characters.
Nowhere does she ever show a desire to hurt the innocent, in fact she will go out of her
way to protect them, even when it means risking losing her supporters
"No more reaving, no more raiding, no more raping."
"That's our way of life."
"No more."
Everything we see of Daenerys throughout her journey shows that while she does have this
vengeful side, she has a grace that few others possess.
She's more than just a Targaryen who will take what's hers with fire and blood, and
the show has demonstrated this countless times throughout her journey in Essos, but even
upon reaching Westeros, with the Iron Throne finally within her grasp, she puts it on hold
to help Jon defeat the Night King and his army, even at great personal cost.
So what were the writers justification for Dany's descent into madness?
"If Jon hadn't told her the truth, if Cersei hadn't betrayed her, if Cersei hadn't executed
Missandei, if all this things in a different way, I don't think we'd be seeing this side
of Daenerys Targaryen".
Except for the fact that that doesn't make any sense.
Betrayed, by Cersei?
Her enemy?
There was a time when she was betrayed by her closest friend and advisor, and still
maintained her sense of self and human decency.
She's lost friends, she even lost the man that she loved and their unborn child, but
that didn't make her shed her humanity.
Even when the slave masters rose against her time and again, she never resorted to burning
the city to deal with them for the same reasons she consistently said she wouldn't storm King's
Landing "I'm not here to be Queen of the ashes."
And even after losing one of her dragons, shot down right in front of her, she still
understood the difference between the enemy and the people.
So why is it that, in a city full of thousands of innocent people?
Who she knows live in fear of Cersei, just like the slaves and their masters across the
sea.
The same sort of people we've seen her defend throughout the entire series.
Why, after the surrender of soldier and civilian alike, does she burn everything to the ground?
It's not like the people turned on Daenerys and forced her hand, it's not like Cersei
was locked away and the only way to get to her was through killing everyone in her path.
The battle was over, they had won, Cersei was right there for the taking but instead
she went out of her way to commit genocide.
The same woman who once locked her children away because of one innocent life needlessly
lost now inciterating children by the thousands without a hint of grief; unleashing terror
and destruction worse than what gave the Mad King his name, while all being absolutely
unneccessary to secure the throne.
You can't just undo seven years of character development to shove characters into the plot
points you've constructed, storytelling doesn't work that way.
And it wasn't only her character arc that was completely mishandled in the final two
episodes of the series.
Varys, who had previously demonstrated above all else a knack for survival, always living
to fight another day for the good of the Realm, all but slouch over and accept his fate without
so much as a fight.
Jaime, who had pushed further and further away from his sister as he found he still
had a sense of honor, leaving her for good when she decided to play politics with the
end of the world only to return to her right before the end?
And Cersei?
She once destroyed the Sept of Baelor to avoid a trial, but with an army and a dragon storming
her city she just sits back and watches it happen?
Jon, who put honor and truth above all else sacrificing every one of his core values to
follow a psychopath and even continue to defend her after she committs unforgivable sins.
"Cersei left her no choice."
"The moment the gates fell the battle was over."
"She saw her friend beheaded, she saw her dragon shot out of the sky..."
"And she burned down a city for it."
There are plenty of other things about these final two episodes to pick apart, like the
scorpions being shown as insanely accurate dragon destroyers in one minute and completely
useless dragon fodder in the next.
Or Euron being the sole survivor of the Greyjoy Fleet who just happens to swim ashore at the
exact moment Jaime arrives.
Not to mention the upgraded plot armor that kept Arya alive through burning streets and
buildings collapsing directly on top of her.
Or we can talk about the failure to deliver a conclusion to many of the shows more mysterious
storylines, like that of The Three Eyed Raven, The Lord of Light, the Faceless Men, and so
on.
But the biggest reason these final two episodes completely fall apart is because of how the
writers handle the characters, specifically Daenerys.
Because as George R.R. Martin has said many times, the characters are everything.
"Characters are the heart of all stories.
I don't care if you're writing science fiction, fantasy, horror, or mainstream story, literary
fiction, mystery novel, historical fiction; it's all about the people who inhabit it,
it's all about the characters.”
The showrunners traded in nuanced storytelling for bombastic big budget action, and sacrificed
just about every single thing that once made the show one of the best that television had
to offer.
It's why I've barely said anything about the finale, because after the disaster that was
the show's penultimate episode, I couldn't find myself caring about a single thing that
happened at the end.
Once you've thrown away every bit of character development that the audience has spent years
investing themselves in, how is any of it supposed to matter?
It feels like they got the broad strokes from George, and knew Dany was going to turn mad
but had no idea how to justifiably get her there, so as a result her and every character
surrounding her feel like completely different people than we've come to know.
But when you look at the facts, how could it have happened any other way?
George R.R. Martin is a voracious reader, combining a wealth of literature and history
that pays homage to the great fantasy writers of all time, as well as pulling from dozens
of historical periods to create a living breathing world at a time of war, told through perspectives
on every side of the conflict, where deep moral questions are explored and every consequence
reverberates into the surrounding world.
A place with a complex lineage for every major house, an internal fictional history that
spans thousands of years, with religion and culture and politics woven together to create
a world that feels as real as our own, albeit with dragons.
David and Dan?
Were just fans of the books, that saw the potential for a great TV series.
And say what you will about them as writers, but as showrunners they're the main the reason
the show ever reached the heights that it did.
It obviously had great source material to rely upon but they still had to make it all
come to life.
By bringing together an incredible cast and crew that could make these characters and
these places as vivid as our imagination.
Which, make no mistake, is no easy task, and for better or worse they will always have
my respect for that.
But they also used to show real talent as writers, they wrote the vast majority of the
show's episodes, including when it was at an all time high.
And while they had the guidance of George helping them out for a good chunk of it, they
still had to adapt the text to the screen which is no small feat, and they made plenty
of changes to the story and the characters that showed a strong understanding of the
source material, even making changes that George supported like the expansion of the
character Bronn.
I think that's what's so disappointing about this final season, one can't help but wonder
what went wrong.
Surely they could have gotten more seasons if they had wanted, surely they could have
wrapped up other storylines sooner, or dropped some altogether to give proper time for Daenerys'
turn.
Or maybe it would have been best not to go for that twist at all, but instead move on
with a conclusion that would have made sense given the groundwork the show had lain.
And I mean, if David and Dan were in such a hurry to get working on their Star Wars
trilogy, why not pass the torch to someone who still had the passion for the show?
It feels like many fans of the show know more about its characters and history than David
and Dan, so why not at the least hire consultants?
And not just consultants concerning Westeros but the real life history that inspired it?
To get the dialogue sounding more period appropriate, to ensure that there was still a level of
historical believability that the show carried throughout the majority of its run.
With the amount of money pouring into the show, they certainly could have brought on
any and all of the help that one could need so it almost feels like it was an issue of
ego.
It was their show, and they were going to finish it when and how they damn well pleased.
And that's that.
No amount of petition signatures is going to change anything, the season is what it
is and that's all we'll have as far as closure until inevitably someone remakes the show
in a few years, or if George can ever finish the books.
The word disappointment doesn't even come close to describing how I felt about this
season, and judging by the ratings of the final few episodes, and even feedback from
the cast itself, I can see that I'm not alone in feeling this way.
So what else can I say?
It's never easy to say goodbye to a show that we love, but I guess I'm choosing not to see
it as a goodbye, I'm going to wait patiently for George to finish the books, and in the
meantime I'll stay busy watching the next best thing on TV.
Thanks for watching.