And so finishes Game of Thrones as it began, with a ride into the trees beyond the Wall. Loved it.
I’ll probably drone on about it for a while yet, but some initial thoughts.
I thought the finale, and seasons 7 and 8, were excellent. They did a great job of bringing the story to a conclusion in a way that GRR Martin conspiculously hasn’t. They also did a creditable job of delivering a through narrative while GRRM is still off on lengthy world-building frolics of his own. I know he is following a schema he descerns in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings of expanding the narrative then contracting it again (which is exactly the supposed fault the makers of the TV show are accused of perpetrating), but at least Tolkein had the sense to leave his ephemera in appendices or at the bottom of the barrel his family have scraped these past decades.
Were there aspects of the books of which I would have liked to see more? Sure, specifically the religions of Westeros. Am I going to be so pathetic as to get up a whiny petition about it? No. Did I, as someone wrote in a critique I just read, take it as a ‘personal slap in the face’? Hell no. Just as, as Neil Gaiman famously told an entitled fan, George RR Martin is not your bitch, so too with Benioff and Weiss.
I did consider whether it would have been better to include more of King’s Landing and Cercei in the latter part of the show but have concluded it was better from a narrative perspective that they didn’t. First, there is a risk we’d get involved in interminable subplots as in Dorne (in the books) or as we did with Daenerys (in both TV and books). More to the point, keeping the focus on Daenerys and Winterfell this season made the payoff of Daenerys’s antihero’s journey so much more powerful and thereby underpinned the action in the finale.
There are still, of course, people moaning about it on social media as, also of course, is their right. But some of the takes are more examples of that faux technical diagnosis I mentioned in my last post. To address two only.
There is precisely Zero obligation on a writer to deliver ‘fully realised character arcs’ for any character. We are born, we die, we try not to screw up in between. That’s it. If writers want to impose an arc on a character in a story, that’s fine; if they don’t, that’s fine too. And there are some writers who go out of their way to challenge that kind of mechanical thinking; M John Harrison’s Viriconium stories spring to mind. Moreover, as we are neatly shown in the finale with respect to both Jaime and Tyrion Lannister, characters and their roles and importance in events are mutable and subject to the writer of the narrative.
Secondly, there is no obligation on a writer to tie together all the threads and characters into a neat bow at the end. Like ‘character arcs’ that’s not how the world works and it need not be how fiction works either. Things happen; people come and go. For an extended example, have a look at Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin sequence. For that matter go and read the Icelandic sagas
There is a group-think that can take hold in which opinion is asserted and elaborated upon as fact, to the exclusion of any contrary opinion. Works of art or entertainment are subject to immediate reactions either pro or con, but then a further process happens. Works that are universally asserted to be deficient are recognised as having their moments, then become ‘flawed masterpieces’ then finally masterpieces. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is one such, Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner is another. Conversely we can look back at Oscar winners celebrated at the time, and lists of best selling and critically acclaimed writers and think what? Who? In my view, when people come to look back on Game of Thrones the voices of criticism that currently shout loudest will be forgotten.
Finally, given one prominent criticism that the shows have become less satisfying as the narrative has moved away from the ‘sociological’ to the ‘psychological’, I note that despite the destruction of King’s Landing, the death of the Night King, and the selection of a monarch by acclamation, the old order persists and reasserts itself. The wheel has not been broken. That strikes me as an inherently sociological perspective.
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