Go ahead and spoil Game of Thrones for me

Cafe Society
1

I haven’t watched the series or read the books. I might someday but I’m not all that worried about spoilers.

But I live in 2019 America. I’m aware the show exists and I hear people expressing opinions about it. And the opinions strongly seem to be that the show went downhill in its final season.

What happened? What was it that upset so many fans? Explain it to a non-viewer.

To start out, I’ve picked up the following:

  1. The pacing was off. Some people apparently feel that too much was packed into the final season.

  2. Daenerys/Khaleesi, a character on the show who many viewers liked, turned evil.

2

That’s pretty much it unless you want an actual summary of a complicated eight season show.

3

King Robert Baratheon’s three children aren’t his. They were fathered by the queen’s own twin brother.

Prince Joffrey Baratheon hired the assassin to finish off Bran Stark.

Ned Stark is executed when he tries to stop the queen’s bastard from taking the throne.

Ned Stark’s bastard Jon Snow was really his nephew and was the true Targaryen heir.

Petyr Baelish (“Littlefinger”) persuaded Lysa Arryn to poison her husband, Jon Arryn, which set off the entire crisis that plunged Westeros into civil war.

Lord Walder Frey and Roose Bolton betray Robb Stark and murder him, his pregnant wife, and his mother Catelyn Stark at what becomes known as the Red Wedding.

Olenna Tyrell poisons King Joffrey at the Purple Wedding.

How’s that for a start?

4

To expand just a bit, one of the problems seemed to be the showrunners ran out of George R.R. Martin’s published source material a couple of seasons ago (there are supposedly at least two more books in the series yet to be written and published). So, though they had ample input from Martin himself about what specific plot points they were meant to hit and how the whole thing ended, their execution seemed rushed and clumsy. Yes, the pacing was off and the character of Daenerys especially (“Khaleesi” is a title, like “Queen,” not a name) took a turn that seemed abrupt. Foreshadowing was there, and is indeed throughout the novels, but the televised sequence didn’t allow room for the character turn to seem authentic.

Which was indeed part of the first part of your inquiry; once Benioff and Weiss (the showrunners) got past the (sometimes glacial) pace of Martin’s novels, their own storytelling careened forward, as they had a number of story beats to hit in an abbreviated final two seasons. The change of pace was welcome at first (in the penultimate season), but this season seemed like they were rushing to cram in the end points Martin had given them for the characters, and very little of it seemed “earned” or maybe even plausible.

Martin’s novels will no doubt flesh out many of the plot points touched on by Benioff and Weiss, with the added benefit of the way he writes his chapters as POV from major characters. That part also didn’t translate well to the screen, and viewers were left with much less information than readers as to the characters’ states of mind or interior motivations. Such is the peril of page-to-screen adaptations.

5

Quasi-medieval world. Many vie to rule it. There are legends of an existential threat (white walkers commanding an army of risen dead), largely scoffeed at, but guarded against anyway.
The current king, who is king because the previous king is offed, dies in a hunting accident - possibly arranged by his wife. This wife made babies with her twin brother, passing them off as the king’s.
King’s buddy (a ruler of a significant chunk of the land) finds out about the shenanigans, and is offed.
Hunting-accident king’s son is offed, to enjoyment of the watching public. Everyone now wants the throne, intrigue, battles, homicidal weddings are had. Many people are offed.

Meanwhile, across the sea, the believed-dead daughter (bdd) of king-prior-to-hunting-accident-king goes from near-slave to ruling cities, partly by metaphorically giving birth to no-shit dragons (3). Dragons burn shit.

Hunting-accident-king (hak)’s wife (hakw) gets into some issues with local religious movement, and is brought low, but in the end burns them and big chunks of the main city. Her last remaining child commits suicide, giving her an even bleaker outlook on life.

Bdd crosses the sea, with armies and dragons. The existential threat is proven real, but hakw will not help deal with it. Bdd, however will. Existential threat is fought at hak’s dead budy’s castle, and ended by hak dead buddy’s youngest daughter, because she has become a super ninja shapeshifter assasin in the mean time.

Hak dead buddy’s bastard son, (hakdbbs) who was main guy dealing with existential threat for years, turns out to be not his bastard son, but actual heir to the throne, ahead of Bdd. But since he believes a deal is a deal, and he promised to support the bdd (with whom he has had cqrnal relations and dragon joyrides) as rightful queen in return for help with the existential threat, he has no desire to assume his rightful place. This upsets his buddies and family, who like him better than bdd.

They decide to off hakw (and have bdd become queen, or sort shit out later, depending on character’s viewpoint). In the process, bdd and her last remaining dragon commit mass murder against the civilian population, for reasons argued about incessantly on-line. Bdd holds a speech, in a setting straight out of a Leni Riefenstahl wet dream, telling everyone she is going to continue liberating chunks of the world by making many people dead. This is disconcerting to hakdbbs, who kills her while kissing her. He is sent off to a sparsely populated part of the realm, but his youngest half-brother, who had the power to astrally travel in space and time and take over animal minds, but did nothing much with this power, is made king.

Somewhere in there, a very soulful little person kills his dad while on the shitter, a cynical knight errant turns out to be the most morally consistent character of the show and dies while killing his big brother, some quasi-vikings are less awesome at boating than you would seem, and many,many more people die than can possibly related here.

6

Thank you Isosleepy for the write-up using descriptive names of the characters, instead of their given names. i have a hard time keeping track of which name goes with which face. Frequently I’ll read a review or a synopsis and have to to a Google search on a name to see a picture of the character. The descriptive names are more meaningful to me, but by the end of the reply some of them, such as hakddbs, would be great character names in and of themselves.

7

A medieval fantasy soap opera that was very interesting, dramatic, with twists and turns fizzled out in a dramatic fashion with few twists and turns in an uninteresting way.

8

The original USP was that the writing tended to avoid some of the tropes of popular TV and movie drama. Motivations were subtle and complex, people were not one-dimensional goodies or baddies. Few characters could be assumed to have “plot armor”. If people did dumb things, they might face severe consequences, their apparent dramatic importance or goodness might not save them. Viewers faced genuine uncertainty about plot developments - not in the sense that random things would happen, but because it seemed that little was prohibited from happening by the usual “rules” of popular drama.

In the last couple of seasons, after GRRM’s writing ran out, these qualities were lost. Although the special effects were incredible, the writing reverted to many of the usual lazy tropes of fictional drama, like a lone figure inexplicably surviving the onslaught of hundreds of murderous enemies for no apparent reason other than the fact that he’s a “goodie” with plot armor. The writing was just bad, much of the earlier complexity was just ignored, many major plot elements were left unexplained, or were explained in ways that made little sense. People behaved with utterly implausible levels of stupidity or unexplained inconsistency in order to further desired plot developments.