Game of Thrones Season 8: The Death of Hope

I'm not going to swear an oath I can't uphold. When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies.

- Jon Snow (GoT, Season 7, "The Dragon and the Wolf") 

Countless takes have been written about Game of Throne's final season, Season 8, since the final episode aired on May 19, 2019.  That said, my outrage is still fresh, and I have a perspective that I have not seen entirely covered elsewhere.

As any fan of A Song of Ice and Fire knows, George RR Martin was and is still working on the sixth novel in the series, The Winds of Winter.  There is no official ending to the series, and there may not ever be.  Therefore, many fans of the novels took solace in the fact that Martin's intended ending would appear, in some form, in Season 8.  Flash forward to May 19, 2019, and the collective riot nearly took down the Internet (though actually the riot began the week before, after the episode, "The Bells").  Bran Stark on the Iron Throne was an ending very few foresaw and almost no one wanted.  Even if that aspect somehow worked, the show writers would still have to answer for a toothless Jon Snow, the de-humanizing of the Starks, and the last-minute evil turn of Daenerys.         

Whether this was the ending Martin intends remains unknown.  If so, I don't doubt that the details leading to that ending would be far different.  That said, if he conceived of Bran as a passionless ruler to serve as an antidote to rulers who were too zealous in exercising their beliefs, then he must have done so during a time when such cynicism had little cost.

The Good Old 90s...

The first ASOIF installment was begun in 1991 and published in 1996.  Therefore, it is likely the first concept of the ending was formed in the 1990s, a time of relative peace and prosperity in many parts of the world.  The Berlin Wall had fallen and Germany reunited.  The Soviet Union was no more, and Russia was taking tentative steps toward a democracy.  The internet had created an economy that was on fire.  One would think that this would lead to collective reflection, with vows to right the wrongs that remained.  Instead, a lot of people's attitude in the 1990s approached a sort of malaise.  There were no obvious wrongs to stand against anymore (like communism or the Soviet Union), so what else was there to believe in?  How can you take a stand against poverty when everywhere you looked, there were jobs?  The cracks existed, but since they were hard to see, the prevailing attitude was was fat, happy, and silly.  We won history.  Now what?

Hand-in-hand with this weightlessness was cynicism.  It both formed in response to the weightlessness and was a variant of it.  "Everything sucks and everyone is phony, so why bother to believe in or do anything?"  You could see this attitude in the television show, Daria, where the title character sure knew what she hated, but rarely took concrete steps to make things better.  A teenager myself during that time, I recall that the prevailing attitude was that passion and great causes were behind us, that we would never get to fight in a world-shaping war or protest in the streets for civil rights.

A primary example of cynical 90s entertainment, Reality Bites.

The weightlessness and cynicism could be felt in much of the existing entertainment.  You had films like American Beauty that seemed to embody both, as well as popular reality series like The Real World, which prized egotism and conflict over good story telling.  Even quality entertainment was not immune, with The Simpsons famous for its cynicism (though managing to maintain a lightness and a heart), as well as South Park (which had neither).  Everything was great, yet everything sucked.  The future looked bright, yet also decadent and empty.

In this atmosphere, it would not be out-of-place for George RR Martin to experiment with fully deconstructing the fairytale ending.  What if the "good guys" turned out to not be so great?  What if the kind, noble princess turned out to be a self-obsessed monster?  What if the best ruler was someone no one saw coming, whose view of the world was calm, cool, clinical... cynical?

Yes, it would have made sense for Martin to develop this ending during the 1990s.  However, it made no sense at all in 2019.

So What Changed...?

The Game of Thrones Season 7 finale aired in August 2017, and soon after, show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss sat down to brainstorm Season 8.  The year 2017 could not have been more different from the 1990s... unless it were 2020, that is.  In addition to the other chaos from the past 20 years (two elections where the popular vote loser "won" the presidency; a catastrophic terrorist attack; invasion of a country that never attacked us; and an economy that came close to being the Second Great Depression), by 2017 the world was reeling from the presidency of Donald Trump.  

The petty meanness, the racism, the sexism, and the sheer callousness toward any person who did not worship him filled many with despair.  Large-scale protesting became a regular feature, as millions of people filled the streets to protest his administration from January 2017 onward.  People wanted hope, and love, and looked for heroes in a landscape of endless darkness.  

Enter Game of Thrones.  No piece of entertainment seemed better poised to deliver that ray of hope, as its characters had been on a similar dark journey.  For season after season, Game of Thrones detailed the horrors done to the protagonist family, the Starks.  Beheadings, betrayals, death and exile, not in spite of the Starks being honorable, but because of it.  Ned Stark's belief in the truth led to his refusal to support a king who was not Robert Bartheon's son by blood.  Robb Stark's belief in true love led to his wedding the woman he loved rather than one of Walder Frey's daughters.  (Book Robb Stark was even more virtuous: he wed Jeyne Westerling after taking her virginity so that she would not be dishonored.)  Both died horribly because of it.  Yet it was not simply the Starks who suffered from the cruelty of King Joffrey and the terrible people he enabled.  All of Westeros, in one way or another, was shredded by war, roaming bandits, and poverty.  The show featured so much awful, senseless killing.  Not just of the good, kind characters (see Shireen Baratheon), but also people who had the audacity to be vulnerable during that violent time.  This included quite a few women, and Game of Thrones was not shy about featuring acts and attitudes of blatant misogyny.      

What was more, the misery seemed to pile on without end.  Stannis Baratheon came close to invading King's Landing and deposing King Joffrey -- but no, Tywin Lannister and the Tyrell army appeared at the last minute to repel him!  Tywin Lannister got the Freys to turn on the Starks and enabled Roose Bolton and his monstrous bastard Ramsay to rule the North through even greater cruelty and fear.  By Season 5, I began to question why I was still watching.  The show runners did not just present the violence and cruelty of the time period: at times, they seemed to revel in it.  

The show went from centering this guy...

... to these guys, and the evil never skipped a beat.

At some point, maybe as early as Season 3, it dawned on me that the show runners' favorite family was not the Starks, but the Lannisters.  That is not totally surprising, as each of the Lannisters was fairly complex, and Tyrion was a fan favorite.  However, this infatuation with the Lannisters seemed to extend to the show runners adopting their myopic point of view.

So why did I keep watching?  Because eventually things had to turn, right?  The "good guys" could not lose forever, because that would go against every story ever told throughout history.  The terrible misogyny would be turned on its head, because working her way to Westeros was an abused woman who had risen to become a powerful queen.  George RR Martin might like to deconstruct fantasy tropes, but even he had to pull back and present a story that was recognizable to his audience.  There are no stakes in a story where the good guys always lose.  Very few people want to hear a story where the lesson is that there is no hope.      

And indeed, in Season 6 it seemed like things were turing around.  Jon Snow was brought back to life after being killed for (again) doing the right thing.  His and Sansa's combined forces beat Ramsay's, and Ramsay died a terrible karmic death.  Arya defeated her nemesis, completed her training in Essos, and vowed to return to Westeros.  Daenerys defeated her nemeses -- the slavers and the Dothraki khals -- and ended the season staring hopefully out into the horizon from a ship deck, as after a lifetime in exile, she was finally going home.  No one expected her arrival to be smooth, or for the ugliness to cease (see, e.g., Cersei blowing up AN ENORMOUS SEPT FILLED WITH PEOPLE, INCLUDING HER DAUGHTER-IN-LAW), but many of us believed that the scales, tilted toward nihilism for so long, would finally be righted.     

Unfortunately...

The "unfortunately" is that the show runners lived in a world separate from the rest of us.  They didn't see the widespread despair around them, or they just didn't care.  How else to explain a final season that was so monumentally tone deaf?   

Daenerys and the Starks engaging in a final uplifting battle would have been cliche, but it would also have been the only satisfying way Game of Thrones could have ended.  They did not have to live happily ever after -- most viewers expected some of them to die.  However, the ending should have been a sound repudiation of the prevailing order of cynicism and violence, of misogyny and selfishness.  It should have demonstrated that there was beauty and power in truth, in kindness, in hope.  The show runners might claim that the events of the finale "broke the wheel" and renounced the old order, but in fact, they endorsed it.

Let's Start With Daenerys.  

Prior to Season 8, she could be hot-tempered and imperious, and was not above meting out violent punishment without fully considering the consequences.  But her vengeance side was balanced by a desire for fairness.  Daenerys listened to her (mainly male) advisors and made decisions with an eye toward creating a better world -- decisions that often did not benefit her personally.  

Two key examples occurred in Season 7.  The first came when she chose to listen to Tyrion (now her Hand) and refrain from riding Drogon to the Red Keep to burn out Cersei at first opportunity.  This would have been the fastest, surest way for her to become the Queen of Westeros, yet Daenerys did not want to her new people to fear her as "Queen of the Ashes."  The second came when she listened to Jon Snow about the White Walker threat and not only put aside her campaign to retake the Iron Throne, but even made temporary peace with Cersei Lannister for the purpose of combining their forces.  Daenerys could have easily taken the Iron Throne and then turned to face the White Walkers, and it probably would have benefitted her more to do so.  Instead, she chose to listen to the advice of men she trusted. 

And yes, "trusted" is a key word.  Daenerys believed that Tyrion and Jon acted from the same basic impulse for fairness.  She assumed that their advice came from wiser, more rational minds than her own, only seeing too late how much of it was terrible.  It was unintended commentary on how often women are taught to ignore our own instincts and just assume that men know better simply because they act more confident.        

Most importantly, Daenerys was the only major character in Game of Thrones who envisioned a better life for all people.  While other characters plotted, cheated, and murdered for their own gain, she acted on that vision as she moved from city to city in Essos to free the slaves.  A better show would have respected her goals while asking difficult questions about how she would achieve them, or if their world would allow them.  Instead the show runners decided that Daenerys's goals were too scary, and that her daring to dream big meant that she was incapable of moderation or of altering her approach.  She was a megalomaniac who would kill innocents the moment they failed to kiss her ring, and she must die. 

Iconic shot of Daenerys at the beginning of her campaign to free the slaves.

What they did to Dany was such an insult not only to fans of the show, but dare I say, to all women.  This was a show that paraded naked women around so casually that it became a meme.  Two naked women having sex was used to "spice up" a heavy exposition scene.  Daenerys herself was forcibly undressed by her brother, who then ogled and caressed her breasts, before later being raped by her new husband in just the first episode.  

After Daenerys gained power, she was subjected to scrutiny that no similarly situated male character faced.  Others have pointed out that even Jon Pure As Snow did terrible things like kill a child.  But only Daenerys was treated as the dangerous one, as someone who needed to be controlled.  Despite the fact that when Dany dismissed the sage male advice and followed her instincts, she was largely successful.  

Before drafting Dany's final scenes, the show runners could have taken stock of the social climate.  The previous year, Hillary Clinton had been denied the presidency, despite winning millions more votes than an opponent who bragged about assaulting women.  Countless women were devastated at this turn of events and what it said about the role of misogyny in the United States and elsewhere.  The first Women's March took place in January 2017, and featured millions of women and men marching around the world to promote human rights and equality.  David Benioff and D.B. Weiss could have read the room, realized that Dany's mission was very much in tune with the current climate, and decided: "You know what?  King Bran just won't work.  We'll change it."  After all, they had gotten rid of Lady Stoneheart and "Faegon" Targaryen, as well as radically reshaped the Dorne plot line because it "just didn't fit into the show."  Why couldn't they do that with an ending meant for 1995?       

Instead, out came Dany the Unstable Maniac, a person who did not exist until the second-to-last episode of the series.  The show runners took the one person who dared to dream of a better world and obliterated her.  They did not simply have her fall short of her goals, but made her do something so despicable, viewers would feel ashamed they had ever supported her.  

Daenerys going crazy because of bells, and I just can't...

Then, to add insult to injury, the show runners demonstrated how little they cared about average people in the final scene of the series.  As the assembled lords discussed who their next ruler should be, Samwell Tarly suggested they consider trying democracy -- only to be laughed off the stage.  Now it's true that a Westeros in ruin may not have been well positioned to transition to democracy, and it would not be out of character for powerful lords to dismiss it.  But it was not a bad idea per se, and should not have been raised and dismissed in the space of an eye blink.  Had the show runners cared at all about the people having a say about their rulers, they would have had Bran or Sansa or Davos say: "It's worth thinking about."   

But the show runners never cared about addressing good governance in any meaningful way.  Only about delivering their "cool" unexpected ending before moving on to their next project.    

How are Confederate and the next Star Wars going, by the way?

* And yes, I know the jerks have a nine-figure Netflix deal as consolation.

That Brings Us to the Starks.

On the surface, their ending would appear to contradict my premise.  The "good guys" won, with Bran King of Westeros, Sansa Queen in the North, Jon with his preferred life among the wildlings, and Arya exploring "west of Westeros."  Yet how they got there was so cynical and unpleasant, it sapped any pleasure I might have otherwise felt for them.

First, Bran was not Bran.  The boy who had a better story than anyone else essentially died when he touched the weirwood tree in the Season 6 finale.  At that point, his personality was consumed by whatever took over, never again to reemerge.  So that little boy who followed Ned to watch him behead a Night's Watch deserter, who ruled Winterfell while Robb was away, who fled toward the Wall with Rickon and loyal friends, no longer existed.  No one knew this except for Meera Reed, who for some reason never told anyone.  Yet other than the occasional odd look, none of the Starks seemed to question why he was so cold and detached. 

Maybe because other than Jon, they had become emotionally dead inside as well.  I'm not saying that after the amount of trauma Sansa and Arya faced, they should have shaken it off and acted as if everything was fine.  It would be understandable if they had trouble trusting even members of their own family.  However, the show presented their cold cynicism as a positive attribute, hard-won "wisdom" from years of war.  In Season 7, Sansa told Jon: "You have to be smarter than father. You need to be smarter than Robb.  I loved them, I miss them, but they made stupid mistakes and they lost their heads for it."  

Yet was that really true?  Even if Robb was short-sighted to marry his true love rather than a Frey (a marriage arranged by his mother), it is hard to argue that he should have foreseen everything that followed.  The Freys would have been angry, and may have broken off the alliance, but violate the ancient "guest rights" in the worst way possible?  They were still a lower house in the Riverlands, surrounded by the Tullys and their loyal bannermen.  Though they might have wanted to ally with the Lannisters, their plans could have easily gone wrong.  And what if Robb did marry a Frey daughter?  Based on Edmure Tully's marriage, we know it would not have kept him safe.  In that sense, Robb did the wise thing marrying for love, as someone who loved him was less likely to betray him.

As for Ned, his actions may have been somewhat naive, but viewed without a lens of cynicism, were they really stupid?  After he learned the truth about Joffrey's parentage, he took steps to protect himself and his family.  He arranged a ship to take his daughters back to the North, made arrangements to get the gold cloaks on his side, and got Robert to proclaim him regent in his will.  Should he have anticipated that Sansa would spill his plans to Cersei, or that Cersei would brazenly shred Robert's will in front of the court?

Trust the advice of this guy?

Furthermore, would his outcome have been better if he had followed the "brilliant" and "clever" schemes of Renly Baratheon or Littlefinger?  Renly's plan to seize control of the royal children seemed doomed to failure.  Cersei would have been viewed (rightly, for once) as a victim, and Tywin Lannister would have raised armies across Westeros to get them back.  Littlefinger's plan for Ned to serve as regent to King Joffrey might have bought Ned time, but Joffrey being a crazed tyrant, probably not for long.  If Joffrey did not turn on Ned for some perceived slight, Tywin likely would have.  Therefore Ned was quite right to avoid Renly and Littlefinger's schemes, risky as his own was.  If he had any weakness, it was underestimating Cersei's ruthlessness when cornered, which would place him in the esteemed company of Olenna Tyrell.

All this is to say that in adhering to honor and decency, Robb and Ned were not as stupid as the show would like us to believe.  In the books, these qualities paid off by instilling deep loyalty in most of the Stark bannermen.  For every Roose Bolton, there were more like Wylla Manderly, who proclaimed: "They killed Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn and King Robb.  He was our king!  He was brave and good, and the Freys murdered him.  If Lord Stannis would avenge him, we should join Lord Stannis."  

In A Dance With Dragons, the Manderlys and the hill clans were willing to go to great lengths to free Winterfell and rescue "Arya" Stark.  Yet in the show, these same lords (with the exception of "badass" Lyanna Mormont) all despised the Starks for being weak and stupid.  Because cynicism good.  Doing the right thing bad.  

So Sansa triumphed not by being kind and decent, but by being steely and wary of other people's intentions.  Arya triumphed not by being loyal and helpful, but by being a ruthless, vengeful murderer.  It was heartbreaking to watch these two women interact with the world years after Ned's death.  They could scarcely interact with each other in a normal way, though I blame a lot of that on the show runners' inability to write women at all and why the hell couldn't they have hired a single woman writer for the final seasons?  That said, the scene that hit me hardest was not Arya's reunion with Sansa, but her reunion with Jon.  Their parting in the first season, where he gave her Needle, was one of the series' rare sweet scenes.  Their reunion in Season 8 started well, but then Arya quickly returned to her dead-inside monotone, warning Jon not to forget that protecting the Starks came first.   

Arya reunited with Jon after more than seven seasons.

In "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," where different characters paired up and shared their feelings, what's notable is the scene that never took place.  There was no scene where the Starks all gathered and shared their feelings about being a family again at long last.  But then, why spend time on characters who had been apart for years when you could have a scene with Tyrion and Jaime, who saw each other just last season?  

When the Starks finally gathered in the fourth episode of Season 8, the only person to show any human feeling was Jon.  In the midst of Sansa's snotty coldness and Arya's cold deadness and Bran's... whatever the hell that was... I almost expected him to cry out: "Who are you people?!  I don't recognize any of you as my family anymore!"  It is only fitting that his big reveal about his parentage was left off screen, so we did not see the other Starks "react."

Despite not being Ned's son or Robb's brother, Jon held their values the strongest until the end.  He was a loyal "brother" of the Night's Watch who risked his life repeatedly to do the right thing, including bring the wildlings to the south side of the wall so they wouldn't become fodder for the White Walkers.  The quote at the beginning of this piece, at the time it was spoken, felt like a much-needed shift in the wind.  King Jon/Aegon VI might have been a predictable outcome, but it also represented real change.  After seasons of "fuck your feelings" and brutality, finally there would be a king capable of empathy.   

The show runners could have used the aftermath of the White Walkers' defeat to explore how Jon intended to build a better world.  Instead, they made Jon look like a dupe.  With no agency or point of view of his own -- despite learning that he was Aegon VI, the rightful Targaryen ruler -- he first ambled after Daenerys, bleating "You are my queen," before falling prey to Tyrion's persuasions to kill her.  Then after killing Daenerys (who by then had become literal Satan), Jon's reward was banishment to beyond the Wall.  Meanwhile Tyrion, the one who convinced him to kill, and who either orchestrated many bad things or stood by while they happened during the show's run, got the comfy chair as Hand of the King.

The one part of the ending I did like was Sansa, Queen in the North.  Though many fans predicted it, the scene where she sat on her new throne was still satisfying.  However, even that was not as satisfying as it could have been due to the rest of the ending being so terrible.  Sansa got the North after all of her efforts, but her do-nothing younger brother got the other six kingdoms of Westeros.  As a result, intended or not, Sansa's gain felt like a consolation prize.  Meanwhile, she couldn't even enjoy her triumph with her family by her side, as Bran was in the south, Jon in the far north, and Arya taking a ship out west for some reason.  Given how long they were apart, and how much they yearned over the years to be together, they sure could not wait to get away from each other.

The Starks in the series finale.

One final word about Bran.  The ending could have been salvageable had the Bran Stark of the first six seasons become the king.  That Bran was a sweet, vulnerable person to whom the audience had some emotional connection.  There might have been some pleasure in watching that boy become king, in seeing whether he struggled with it or felt excited, or both.  Instead a cynical robot who was not really Bran took the throne.  This Bran could see everything, including the future, and with those powers arguably manipulated events from the time Daenerys first appeared in the North.  At the very least, he sat back and let Daenerys commit genocide on King's Landing.  Yet this is the person Tyrion felt would be best to serve as king, a cynical, emotionless... monster.

So indeed, by choosing to go with King Bran, the show runners were not opening up Westeros to something new: they were giving it more of the same.

Overall...

When David Benioff and D.B. Weiss said that Season 8 would be "bittersweet," many thought that meant losing some beloved characters while having an uplifting ending.  Long-anticipated moments included Bran bravely sacrificing himself in the Battle of Winterfell (which would not have ended the War); Sansa and Daenerys learning to trust each other after initial wariness; Jaime or Arya killing Cersei during a final battle at King's Landing, or Cersei having a last-minute change of heart and sacrificing herself; and a final "Hell Yeah!" moment where the good guys triumphed, followed by reflection on how they got there.  

Based on the episodes leading to Season 8, the series seemed headed in this direction.  In Seasons 6 and 7 alone, the Starks regained Winterfell, Dany won the Battle of Meereen, Arya triumped over her adversary and sailed home, Bran finally arrived south of the Wall safely, and Jaime finally broke from Cersei.  Furthermore, why wouldn't Dany and Sansa have found common ground over their past sufferings?  Why wouldn't Bran, who swore off being Lord of Winterfell because he was the Three-Eyed Raven, have seen his destiny as thwarting the Night King?       

Would this have been predictable, even cliched?  Possibly.  Would King Jon and Queen Daenerys on the Iron Throne be predictable and cliched?  Maybe so.  But there is a reason some story developments repeat so often that they become cliched: because they work.  They represent the logical end to what they story has been building toward over time.  A story development can be predictable, yet entirely satisfying, if it is done well.  To be done well, the story must have a clear grasp of its characters and its history.  

King Jon and Queen Dany would have felt forced if they were side characters shoved into the spotlight at the last minute.  That was a reason King Bran failed so miserably.  Jon and Dany as end-game rulers would have worked precisely because we had watched their growth, struggles, sacrifices, and bravery for more than seven seasons.   We had also watched Westeros be ravaged by nasty, brutal people for just as long, and the time was right for rulers of kindness and empathy to finally take center stage.  

*Sigh*

That did not mean suddenly everything would have been perfect.  A very George RR Martin ending, in my book, would have been Jon or Dany growing disquieted as they realized the magnitude of the disaster past rulers had left them to clean up.  Nor would it have meant that the more problematic parts of their characters were hand-waved away.  However, the show would have ended with the feeling that things were moving in the right direction at long last. 

Instead, the ending of Game of Thrones was ugly, cynical, and made no sense.  It was the wrong ending for 2019 in every way possible.  In fact, it was the wrong ending in any era, including the cynical 1990s.  That is because at the end of the day, people want their stories to take them on a journey with a satisfying story arc or character arc.  Game of Thrones provided neither. 

Which is a shame, since it would have taken so little to create a satisfying ending, one that felt like a tonic at the time it aired, one that fans could have taken with them into the even darker days of 2020 and beyond.  Life could be dark, but you did not have to give in and become part of the darkness.  That could have been Game of Thrones's ultimate legacy.  Now there is no hope that it will ever be.