And so we reach the final episode of Game of Thrones.
Predictions are foolish at this stage, but Daenerys’s next move should be quickly to eliminate any potential opposition or rival. Of those, only Sansa and Tyrion seem bright enough to work that out. I suspect D’s vanity will mean she glories in her triumph for too long. Trust no one (per Petyr Baelish).
Also, Daenerys was given her dragon eggs by Illyrio Mopatis, perhaps as an outrageously ostentatious wedding gift but perhaps also for a reason and, although that subplot has been largely lost from the series as it followed the rise of Daenerys, it hasn’t been entirely lost. Specifically, it was carried via Melisandre and, to some degree, Bran as Three-Eyed Raven. So, as well as the playing out of realpolitik, I expect something of that to play its part in the final.
The tedious controversy about episode 5 continues to rumble on, including a ludicrous petition to have HBO remake season 8 in the way entitled idiots would like it to be. Two excellent pieces I’ve seen attempting to rebut the controversy have been by James Cooray Smith in the New Statesman and Adam Roberts on his blog.
The James Cooray Smith article is here: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv-radio/2019/05/fans-reaction-game-thrones-reminder-no-one-owes-you-story-you-want
The Adam Roberts piece is here: https://amechanicalart.blogspot.com/2019/05/game-of-thrones.html
A paragraph in the New Statesman piece that rang bells with me is this one:
This is probably the reason so much fan criticism takes the form that it does. Just as “the death of the author” is used merely as cover to talk extensively about authorship while ignoring anything the author might say, discussion of television indulges in faintly ludicrous fan argot about the difference between “plotting” and “pantsing” (don’t ask), and deploys “deus ex machina” to mean “I was unpleasantly surprised”, pretending that there are rules about how stories must play out, rather than simply conventions about how they do. This faux-technical diagnosis is simultaneously couched in ethical terms, an attempt to condemn mere storytelling decisions as morally unsound as well as practically inept, asserting them to be objectively wrong in two senses.
It’s the faux technical diagnosis that resonates. It’s as though thousands have downloaded a pirated copy of an MFA Creative Writing For Dummies and missed the bits about unreliable narrators and misdirection. I’ve seen this a lot over the last few years, at any rate since Ben Aaronovitch commented on a review of his Peter Grant novels. It was the fall out from that contretemps that brought both the ‘death of the author’ trope and a sense of the depth of ‘fandom’ entitlement to my awareness. It was also when I started to think that fans are great but fandom is fertile ground for toxicity.
More about this another day, but for now I want to put on record that I have enjoyed Game of Thrones throughout its TV run and will miss it when it’s gone. I also want to stand against all the voices saying the writing has been bad in seasons 7 and 8; I do not think that is true at all.
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