And Now Our Watch Is Ended
Game of Thrones is dead and gone – and I have a lot of feelings.
I first fell in love with the series on June 13, 2011. Social media melted down that Monday morning after THAT TERRIBLE THING happened the previous night at the end of the show’s ninth episode. Though I didn’t know what specifically happened, my take-away was clear: I needed to watch this new show immediately. So I binged it and tumbled headfirst into the glorious, maddening, treacherous, heartbreaking, soul-stirring world of Game of Thrones.
For eight years, I lost myself in Westeros. For eight years, I consumed Game of Thrones, celebrating triumphs and bracing myself for the next tragedy. For eight years, I rewatched season after season and found new treasures every time. For eight years, I parsed dialogue, character arcs, and plot points as I, like everyone else, speculated about how the game would end. Ramin Djawadi’s score swept me away; Miguel Sapochnik’s battle scenes gutted me; and production designers transported me to another world.
After all the cheering, mourning, speculating, raging, and obsessing, Game of Thrones is now over.
My relationship – yes, this has been a relationship – has been tumultuous. At its best, the show was thrilling in its intricate storytelling and masterful in its characterizations. At its worst, it was messy, rushed, and frustrating, especially as it ultimately failed what it set out to do: subvert our expectations about fantasy stories. I revel in the brilliance of what the show was and mourn all that it could have been.
In its heyday, Game of Thrones thrived on character-driven drama, not cinematic spectacle. Characters were the sum of their choices. Lines between “good” and “bad” were blurred. Even the “baddies” were developed so you could understand how their villainy stemmed from their humanity. I followed a bastard outcast who rose above his circumstances; an abused young woman who reinvented herself as a protector of the downtrodden; shrewd power-players who gained leverage through honeyed whispers and clandestine politicking; embittered queens; knights in distress; empowered damsels; and a savage septuagenarian who breathed more fire than a dragon.
My favorite parts were scenes in which characters simply spoke to one another. I got lost in evocative monologues and sparring dialogue that revealed layers of humanity. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (Season 8, Episode 2) was a swan song in this regard, as characters reveled in their humanity at the end of the world. Like Jenny of Oldstones, I “never wanted to leave.”
Ultimately, the show became a victim of its own ambition.
When you truly love something, you wrestle with the bad as fiercely as you cling to the good. You challenge it to be better because you know how great it can be. This last season has been a sobering reminder of this: the once-great Game of Thrones became a shell of its former glory. What I once loved about Thrones became the very thing that it stopped taking seriously: character development.
Ultimately, the show became a victim of its own ambition. It swapped intimacy for medium-defying spectacles, pumping more and more money into ever-larger set pieces and orchestrating shocking twists as its viewership increased. As the seasons became shorter and the episodes became bigger, the quality of its storytelling decreased – characters were manipulated to fit plot points without any development; scenes were cut to make way for more spectacle; and dialogue became sparser. That’s why Jon and Daenerys’s love affair worked in theory, but not in the moment – the flames of their passion never lit up the screen since the show took it for granted without developing it.
Perhaps the biggest loser in this transition from storytelling to spectacle was Daenerys Targaryen, one of the show’s protagonists. As I’ve previously written, Daenerys’s heel turn was a storytelling failure that highlighted the show’s eleventh-hour problems. The show used other characters to tell us Daenerys was becoming tyrannical rather than show us. Her “snap” decision to burn King’s Lading rather than accept its surrender fit the show’s anti-war themes; but it did so at the cost of character, since it was difficult to fathom how a hitherto protector of innocents suddenly slaughtered them. Though it didn’t adequately develop her darkness, Thrones foreshadowed it so heavy-handedly that the more interesting narrative choice – and the best way to “subvert expectations” – would have been for Daenerys to accept the city’s surrender. Thrones also went against its own themes to frame Daenerys’s turn as inevitable: genetic determinism, not individual choice, uncomfortably won out. The gendering of her dark turn was also too overt to ignore: Thrones relied on old, lazy tropes about women and power to make Daenerys unhinged.
Thrones‘s gendering of Daenerys’s darkness evidenced a larger issue: the biggest demon I’ve had to wrestle with on the show has been its problematic gender representation. The writers repeatedly employed gender stereotypes, objectified the female body, relied on sexposition, and treated sexual trauma as a way to develop characters. To be fair, this is the show that gave us Cersei Lannister, Brienne of Tarth, Catelyn Stark, and Lady Olenna Tyrell. But it never really understood women, viewed femininity with suspicion, and gave female characters only a quarter of the dialogue. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the story ultimately was about two “mad queens” fighting over the kingdom. By the show’s logic, Cersei and Daenerys both had to die. Worse, one of them had to be put down like a mad dog at the hands of her virtuous lover who restored the balance – and the patriarchy. This wasn’t a bold, new story at all – Thrones merely rehashed the same old story about women and power: ladies go crazy with it! They aren’t suited to have power! The way to correct their ambition is by returning things to the way they were!
Was I expecting a feminist fairytale? No. But I wasn’t expecting a show that tries to subvert our expectations to be so, well, predictable. Instead of shaking up our notions of women and power, Thrones ultimately served up the same old stereotypes.
The show transformed Daenerys – always more of a Napoleon – into a fascist autocrat at the last minute.
Thrones also failed the very questions it posed. The show claimed to be a political drama masquerading as high fantasy but its politics became undercooked as it sprinted towards the finish line.
The writers could never really figure out Daenerys’s politics, and she again became a victim – this time a victim of the show’s undeveloped political themes. Thrones wants to position Daenerys as a personalist dictator in the vein of European, Asian, and Latin American Communist autocrats. It wants to use her arc to say leaders betray their own ideals – power corrupts everyone: all revolutionaries are the same; they’re in it for their own power, and they gain followers through cults of personality. Okay, that’s an interesting idea. But Thrones couldn’t connect the dots to get there. Instead it pushed Daenerys from protector-of-innocents-who-wasn’t-always-single-minded to power-hungry-dictator-who-uses-the-language-of-revolution-to-justify-her-own-authority in a few episodes.
The show puts forward a muddled analysis of power and politics. Daenerys’s final turn as a vaguely fascist dictator was jarring: she suddenly went from a Napoleon to a Hitler. Napoleon isn’t Hitler; by equating them, the show reveals its sophomoric, one-dimensional idea about politics and history. Thrones conflates all forms of centralized authority. Similarly, it suggests Daenerys’s burning of slave masters pushed her down a slippery slope that resulted in her eventual attack on King’s Landing. According to this simplistic view, all forms of political violence are the same and equally terrible. (Yet, Jon’s assassination of Daenerys is presented as a virtuous, self-sacrificing act – political violence is okay if you are taking out a “mad queen.”) The problem? This is a reductionist take. All forms of political violence are not the same: Toussaint Louverture’s Haitian Revolution or John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry were not Stalin’s purges or Mao Zedong’s culture wars. By framing Daenerys as a tyrant who uses hollow revolutionary rhetoric to consolidate more authority, the show makes a disappointingly shallow argument about the nature of power. It states rather than convinces; concludes rather than develops; preaches rather than shows.
This is the show’s endgame: after shoehorning Daenerys into the theme that the pursuit of power corrupts everyone, Thrones reinforces the wheel that the Mother of Dragons sought to break. Tyrion – whose terrible advice backed Daenerys into a corner and contributed to her downfall – suggests an elected monarchy. He proposes Bran Stark as king, since power should go to someone who doesn’t want it – and Bran supposedly has the best story to bring people together. Bran’s response? “Yeah, I came here for this.” So much for power going to someone who doesn’t want it. Bran’s new administration – headed by Tyrion who fails up as the new Hand of the King – essentially runs the country. Sansa is apparently exempt from the show’s theme of the corruptive nature of power when she succeeds in becoming Queen in the North and Brexits out of the Seven Kingdoms. Brienne becomes the token woman on the Small Council.
In merely playing at politics, offering half-baked answers to the questions it posed, and settling for the same old order, the show “kinda forgot” what it was trying to do it the first place.
Ultimately, the show endorses reactionary, oligarchical, and patriarchal politics with the wheel firmly in place. Daenerys’s revolutionary dream ended with her. This isn’t a problem per se. But it is a curious move for a show that trumpets its own exceptionalism: how are our expectations subverted when the wheel still turns?
I don’t think the showrunners really understood what they were trying to say – and that’s a major problem. Nor do I believe they fully grasped the devious implications of King Bran’s ascension. Thrones explicitly frames his election as a victory for the “good guys.” But having an all-seeing, all-knowing king basically turns the government into a surveillance state. Bran is the Three-Eyed Raven: if he knew Daenerys would burn King’s Landing and did nothing to stop her, he is complicit in her crimes. His interest in tracking down Drogon also hints that he may use the dragon as his personal weapon.
In merely playing at politics, offering half-baked answers to the questions it posed, and settling for the same old order, the show “kinda forgot” what it was trying to do in the first place. In the words of Kit Harington, how “disappointing.”
Do we judge a show – especially one that has always had an endpoint – by how it ends? Should we remember Game of Thrones for its flashes of brilliance in the early seasons, or for the inorganic manipulations, muddled politics, and lazy storytelling that framed its endgame? To quote Tyrion, “Ask me in ten years.” I don’t have any answers yet, and maybe I never will. But like a relationship that ends, it’s hard not to look at the good moments through the lens of how it ended.
Loving something also means letting it go. It means taking something from it, stitching it onto your heart, and letting its truth pump through your veins.
I choose to embrace a truth that Game of Thrones once taught me: for better or for worse, every human is the author of his or her own fate. The characters taught me this – the characters that captured my attention, earned my sympathy, and demanded my support. It’s the characters that made this show great, and I will go on believing in them. I chart my own path with the clear-eyed conviction of Brienne, who dispensed justice with purpose; the un-silenced tongue of Lady Olenna, who protected her family with fierce resolve; the determination of Arya, who never let the world define her; the willpower of Sansa, who never let the world break her; and the uncommon strength, firebrand conscience, and empowered self-sufficiency of Daenerys Stormborn, who was bold enough to envision a world different from the one that saw her as chattel to be bargained away.
These characters may be gone, and the show that birthed them may have ended, but I carry them with me, now and always.
What is dead may never die.
Photo Credits: HBO
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