This post blends Game of Thrones with deep Philosophy cuts. Pretty on brand content for Bobcat Territory, I know. We’ll change it up and write about Pong sometime soon, don’t worry.
—
<Beware Spoilers>
Dragonstone, the first episode of Thrones Season 7, ends with a profound scene in which Daenerys sets foot on the sands Dragonstone island. The moment’s depth, however, is nowhere to be found in the pages of the episode’s script, which begins as follows:
“Everyone gets out of the rowboat. DAENERYS walks on ahead. She kneels down and presses her palm to the sand, then stares up at the castle and walks further down the beach. The others follow. “
Casual viewers of the show might have a surface level appreciation of how much this landfall means to Dany, as they all too well remember her tangled in a Mereenese Knot for seasons on end, and recognize she’s been wanting to return to Westeros for a very long time. Yet that level of understanding would not do the moment justice, as it glosses over a lot of additional the-screw-turns coloring:
- Dany was not the first Targaryen to use this island as a foothold from which to launch a conquering campaign of the mainland. Instead, that was Aegon the Conqueror, from whom Dany directly descends, who did it ~300 years earlier.
- Dany was born on Dragonstone. In fact, her moniker of Stormborn (the first of many titles, titles, titles) arose because she was born amidst a wild storm that raged against the shores of the island.
- Her mother died on the island during that childbirth.
- That same mother was pregnant during the sack of King’s Landing, and had to flee from the capital to Dragonstone just to save the lives of herself, her son (meh), and her unborn daughter
- Dany was ultimately smuggled away from the island shortly after her birth, as soldiers garrisoned there were conspiring to murder her in her infancy
Now, you didn’t have to (and might not have) know(n) all this to enjoy Dany’s moment on the sand, but knowing all of it certainly enriches your experience of it; it converts your appreciation beyond a “Sweet! She made it!” interpretation into something with real acuity.
This is just one example of what made Thrones such a compelling world for obsessives to explore. It wasn’t just the shocking deaths or groundbreaking battles; rather, it was this ability to not only create this rich historical tapestry, but to also construct a narrative whose beats so rewarded you for being a student of that history. Other off-the-cuff examples include:
- The Hound’s history with fire makes his Trial by Combat against Beric so much better.
- The fate of his brother and father makes Ned’s heading south at the behest of a King is so much more ill-conceived.
- Whispers of the Mad King knocking up Tywin’s wife makes the Lannister patriarch’s hatred of Tyrion all that more complex.
I’m not saying that you had to be this student of history – Thrones was fun whether you paid attention or not, – but it established that if you were you’d be better off. It taught you to care, that the more you invested the greater your return.
That’s really the root cause, I believe, of what caused so many fans to feel sour about the last two seasons. It wasn’t just that we were watching a show where not all the pieces mattered. Plenty of good shows are like that. It’s instead that Thrones first taught us that they did matter, and then all of a sudden decided against that.
—
There’s a straw-man argument I heard espoused by critics – meta-analyzing the general reaction to Thrones’ sendoff – paraphrased along the lines of “people dreamt up all these wild possibilities for what could happen, and are now bent out of shape because the ending didn’t play out in any of those ways.” Broken down, these are really two theories:
- As a story draws to a close, possibilities – something which people loved about Martin’s world – shrivel up. There can only be one ending.
- Fans had identified specific, tinfoily outcomes as the only proper way to end things – Jaime killing Cersei, for instance. The fact that events played out differently was unacceptable.
While the first is true, I don’t find it a plausible explanation for why viewers had a negative reaction. Playing this string out would somewhat imply that no story can satisfyingly end.
While I think the second is at least partially true as well, I certainly don’t find this a plausible explanation either. And it doesn’t resonate, I would argue, because at its core it misapplies, or perhaps underestimates, the concept of Possible Worlds – defined by that wikipedia page as: “For each distinct way the world could have been, there is said to be a distinct possible world.”
Strawman #2 from above is essentially claiming that Thrones obsessives had decided (on Reddit?) among themselves on there only being certain possible worlds remaining in Benioff & Weiss’ universe – only specific outcomes that were acceptable based on the established series of events. And while I suppose this is true, it also seems to suggest that there was some sort of defined, itemized list of possible worlds the showrunners needed to choose from.
This is not how people value narratives. Nobody saw the Red Wedding coming. I never would have predicted HardHome in a million years. Those are now some of the series’ best moments. And what made those so resonant is that they took place in worlds we didn’t realize ahead of time were possible, but that clearly were in hind sight.
Ned Stark being decapitated is a great example. Illyn Payne actually swinging that sword was thought a possible world midway through Season 1, but that was simply because our understanding of what was possible was conflating the traditions of storytelling with the actual rules of it (Tangent: in a way, this was Hume’s problem with induction; just because something has always happened before (in this case, the protagonist survives until the end) doesn’t mean it always will). After we recovered from the shock, though, we can see our understanding of what was possible was just being clouded by a posteriori assumptions rather than logic the story had established. In hind sight, it made even more sense that Ned died than it would have if he survived.
Seasons 7 and 8 were so frustrating because the events we were watching crossed that line, violating not our house-of-cards assumptions but rather the actual logic the show had established. These weren’t worlds – ones we only mistakenly thought were impossible – actually manifesting; instead, these were worlds that, based on the logic the world had established, actually should not have been possible, yet manifested nonetheless.
This is fine for other shows, that didn’t teach their audiences to study that internal logic. But for a show that did, wrapping up in a way that violated so much of that logic was a tough way to go out.