The Most Upsetting Game of Thrones Death Was the Show Itself

"The core of Game of Thrones’ appeal was always its comfort with horror and terror. In its earlier, stronger seasons, the series often felt more like an adaptation of an ancient text than anything modern. It ignored contemporary Western liberal notions of morally and politically acceptable storytelling (especially when it dealt with gender relations, racism, colonialism, and the white-savior complex, which approached Tarzan or Conan levels of cheerful obliviousness), but it was equally uninterested in giving the audience the neat and life-affirming closure that it seemed to want from all other fantasy and science-fiction franchises, whether it was Star Trek or Star Wars, Doctor Who or James Bond, Marvel or DC. On Game of Thrones, as in life itself, the rain of death fell on the just and unjust alike. There was an ominousness to the violence that would’ve seemed even more wanton and sadistic if the show hadn’t channeled that George R.R. Martin–esque feeling of events’ being subtly finessed by the whims of unseen gods. It was a 21st-century series in terms of its technology of production and distribution, but the sensibility was primeval. Watching it from week to week was the closest that modern Western viewers have gotten to the experience of reading the original Grimm fairy tales, where Jack the Giant Killer would cut open a giant’s stomach and replace it with a sack of hasty pudding, or folktales like the early French version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” where the girl climbs into bed with the wolf and is eaten. The end.

 

These jolts of horror, whether focused on individual or collective agony, were an artistic through-line linking the post-Martin version of the series to its original incarnation. But the narrative infrastructure that used to grow organically out of Martin’s concern with societies and their leaders fell away, and what was left was a bottom-line-driven imperative to be Game of Thrones™, with the characters serving as pegs around which pyrotechnic and melodramatic flights of fancy could be woven. A Hiroshima- or 9/11-level atrocity was well within the narrative bandwidth of this series, where rulers regularly did awful things for ignoble, often irrational reasons and civilians suffered and died as a result. Dany repeatedly said that she wanted the throne, was perfectly willing to burn her enemies and their societies to the ground to get it, and would settle for being feared if love was not an option. When viewers argued about whether this was something Dany would or could do — and whether her rapid descent into genocidal rage affirmed the series’ arguable misogyny and played into stereotypes that critic Mo Ryan summed up as “bitches are crazy” — it spoke to a failure of process that had affected the structural integrity of the art.

When the aftershocks of the finale fade and we get a bit of distance from the whole thing, it will become apparent that Game of Thrones itself unwittingly became the victim of an ironic and agonizingly protracted Game of Thrones ending. The show had all the money in the world and could’ve taken a lot more time in production — and demanded a lot more of the audience’s time — than it did, and that might’ve corrected some of the problems that plagued it during its second half.  "

 

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