Here is a selection of responses to Game of Thrones that I found on my Facebook feed:
Predictions
...If there's any justice, whoever wins THE IRON THRONE, by the time she or he wins it, won't want it anymore, and will convince the others that in order to free the people from their enthrallment to its power, the throne itself MUST BE DESTROYED, and if there's still a dragon handy, what better way to do that than to MELT IT DOWN WITH DRAGON FIRE...
...I just remembered where I thought GRRM was going with the books, by around book three. One of the biggest developing elements that fell by the wayside. There was evidence in the books that the world of the story was subject to bizarre and extreme seasonal cycles, and what he seemed to be building toward was a winter that would lock most of the lands in snow and ice, lasting for years, devastating food supplies, killing millions. Against this planetary backdrop, the political and personal stories he'd set in motion would play out. I was really looking forward to it...
Reflections
...All right then, I'll admit it. I never watched The Game of Thrones. I never go to see all the blockbuster superhero movies. But their popularity implies that what the public wants is fantasy. Possibly it's confirmation of something Eliot said some eight decades ago: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." Is that truer now than it was then? Has reality become less bearable--too violent, too scary? On the other hand, these fantasies are anything but placid, anodyne and saccharine. Disquieting fact: To make GOT, some 4000 gallons of fake blood were used...
...So... given where they left us at the end of the previous episode, probably the best they could have done? Surprisingly good really. If they'd really sold Daenerys's heel turn—requiring a lot of rewriting back to s7, & more episodes in the last two seasons (its rush was the biggest problem, I think, unless you count the fact that they ran out of books to adapt) — this might have been a good ending, overall (which means GRRM could still pull it off, I think). If my twitter feed is representative (big if, obviously) I'm in the minority here. But I really do think that the problems here (a fair dose of corniness aside) were from the earlier eps, not this one. I think they did well, given 8.5 & before...
...The first ten minutes were chilling and powerful. Grey Worm demonstrates how terrifying it is to have an army of Zealot/Templar/Absolutists at your disposal, and the Dothraki army of wild men and marauders reveal how close everything is to chaos. Tyrion, Jon, Arya, and Davos seemed like the only sane people left in the world. Oh, and it was a great answer to the internet that Dany had not actually gone insane at all. Instead, she had become completely convicted in her absolutism and her belief in her own virtue. Her idea of top down moral good dictated from above was beautifully countered by Jon when he suggested to her that there might be other views of what’s good. This sequence rocked!—all the way through to the murder of the queen and the dragon’s melting the Iron Throne into slag (there was a nice expositional reminder too of what that throne had been made from and what it really represented). A nice touch too that Dany never actually sits on the throne as well. Jon’s conflict was clear—he did love her, and he is not an intellectual. He is there for a reason though, and at the right time, he chooses his Stark family over the Targaryen heritage of conquest and incest. The wheel is broken and Drogon burst of fire shows that he is either wiser than we realized or caught in a double bind and unable to vent his dragon wrath on his own family—thus, the throne is consumed. After that, it becomes a matter of denouement. Samwell got a great laugh when he offers the idea of choosing a king by acclaim (Democracy!) and we are quickly reminded that this is not a civilized or modern world—that dissonance is important in how we read the ending. How wonderful too that Tyrion solves it like a puzzle and becomes the de facto king (administrating a kingdom) while Bran is busy flying about as a raven. Tyrion is where he is supposed to be, and Bronn, Brienne, Davos, and Samwell too. Jamie gets his heraldry recorded nobly by Brienne. Arya goes to the west—as she should. Sanza rules as a glorious but primitive queen, and Jon not only pets Ghost, but he is returned to the place he found true love (“You know nothing, Jon Snow.”).
...So with the usual !!SPOILER!! proviso, this is the first & last Game of Thrones post by someone who was less than obsessive but watched it nonetheless, thought it was the best-LOOKING show ever, admired the stellar cast esp Headey & Dinklage, appreciated the hard-R telling of a fantasy epic (my friend Robert Chancey described it, unenthusiastically, as Harry Potter goes Shakespeare but actually it was more Lord of the Rings goes Deadwood), and was blown away by occasional directorial tours de force (eg Battle of the Bastards), but also found more subplots and sub-characters than one could care about even over the course of a decade. For everyone smarter about this, I have a couple of petty spoiler-ridden questions about last night having to do with the mechanix of storytelling. I thought matters proceeded just fine up till the dragon flew off into the clouds with Dany’s body while Snow looked on, but then: How did everyone know Jon had stabbed her, or indeed what had happened to her at all other than that she disappeared? Were there witnesses hiding in the rubble of that scene we didn’t see? Did Snow in one of his typically tiresome piques of integrity feel compelled to announce to the decimated city from the top of the steps, “Hey, everyone, I just assassinated the queen I’ve been boinking the last two seasons”? And I know Tyrion is a smooth talker, but when -- still a prisoner by command of a queen no longer in command let alone alive -- he’s brought before a council of characters who are suddenly getting along better than they have in nine years for the purpose of some kind of sentencing, doesn’t he talk everyone into the logic of Bran’s kingship rather easily? “Yes.” “OK.” “Sure.” “Why not?” “Sounds good to me.” "Wow, that thing he just said about the power of stories -- who can resist that?" And why is that Grey Worm dude, whose devotion to the queen has been ruthlessly zealous to the point of bloodthirsty just 15 minutes earlier, suddenly acceding to the authority of all these other people to whom he owes no loyalty whatsoever that I know of? I’m personally & painfully aware that endings can be hard to pull off, which means I also recognize writers’ sleight of hand when I see it, and this finale seemed a concoction of facile fast-forwards, fades-to-black and cue-the-musics. If only we could salvage America so easily...
...I will only do this once and only because our own queen of the north returns home today: I very much like -- that is, I think it quite telling and interesting -- that we can imagine a dragon who happily goes on an apocalyptic slaughter of innocents at noon but, by one o'clock, has strong enough emotional and moral boundaries (in anguished, grieving rage) to understand that the man who stabbed his mother in a murderously deceitful kiss actually did the right thing. Moreover, it was the "right" thing because the dragon's mother had committed the crime of urging the same dragon to slaughter. In the (anthropocene? anthropomorphic?) moment, then, the dragon was able to realize that the abstract quest for absolute power (either from the right or left) and its macabre symbols (the iron throne) are to be the true targets. Mass death and destruction are somewhat last week's news.
As Tyrian says, the most powerful things we have are stories. And our stories, right now, are quite telling, if we choose to read them with care...
...Ross Douthat in the NYTimes opinion pages ponders his fantasy-nerd youth anent the the end of Game of Thrones, with many fans and non-fans respond. This was my response: How about fantasy without swords? I can believe that Ross was a fantasy nerd in youth and is still devoted to the tropes, indispensable word we now possess; but Martin's unreal world is boring, surprising only in the way a political novel is: everyone is either a possessor of power, a striver for power, or a victim of power, a sort of Leninist who-whom in another world. If Game of Thrones is an allegory it is an allegory of a world, ours, where nothing matters but personal power or the attachment to power; the limits of the allegory fail the riches of the allegorized world. As a good fantasy nerd you might have read T.H. White's Once and Future King trilogy, where goodness is the measure most often, and striving to be good and do good are the story. Maybe you also read C.S. Lewis, or Mythago Wood, Little, Big, in which wonder, duty, love, humor, and common human connections are at once stronger than and aided by ambiguous powers. I'd like to hear a Catholic thinker and writer ponder that.
