#to reduce her to just a pretty object jfc

[the-jam-to-the-unicorn]

And that's why she's a Queen

[cchellacat]

Game of Thrones Finale

Here be spoilers for the last season of GoT.  Turn back now or forever hold you peace.  Trust me, I am not holding my peace, I feel like going to war and breaking a bloody wheel over the back of D&D’s heads.

I knew going in, this wasn’t the ending I had been hoping for, or even expecting for nine years.  After the penultimate episode the writing was clearly on the wall, so I watched this final chapter, ready for crushing disappointment and grief. D&D did not let me down. 

They completed their character assassination of Daenerys with all the clumsy, lazy, pretension and dreadfully written dialogue as one might have come to expect, if they had been paying attention since the start of the season. 

When left to flounder in the seas of uncertainty without the masterfully crafted scaffolding of GRRM’s books to hold them afloat, the writers sunk the whole thing gleefully. I’m absolutely certain they took great pleasure in destroying every logical expectation.

This constant need to justify their own twisted ending and eradicate certain characters development and arcs, left me feeling bewildered and horrified.  The beautiful woven foreshadowing that had been building since season one seemed to be cast aside at the last and replaced with some Frankenstein monster, cobbled together from a need to be “different”  to “surprise”, to be “edgy”  and “subversive”.  

This isn’t how good writing is done.  You don’t change the track of a story just because it’s deemed predictable or because fans guessed the ending. 

The onus then, is on the writer, to follow through and complete the story while still making it enjoyable and intriguing.  It isn’t to upturn the apple-cart and refill with limes.  It’s to take the damn apples and make pie.  Make it interesting, draw the audience in, there is nothing wrong with giving the audience what they want. There is nothing wrong with delivering a satisfying and sensible conclusion.  There is nothing wrong with giving the main character/s a happy ending.

Their fear of cliche, lead them straight into trope hell.  The “face heel turn” of Daenerys from Liberator and Mother to Tyrant and Murderer was sloppy, poorly written and did not have a justifiable history to back it up. 

Do not even get me started on how they killed her.  JFC.  Could they have been anymore obvious about how that was gong to go down?  Talk about cliche. 

Murdered by the man she loves, who loves her and who is also her only family.  We’ll talk later about what they did to poor Jon.  Just for reminders sake though, here she is, held in the arms of the man she loves as he promises her she will always be his queen, kisses her and stabs her right in the heart.  **blood boiling**

Turing Sansa into Littlefinger 2.0 made my inner rage monster scream.  Her transformation from  the “The High Queen”  to “The Chess-master” makes me think the North isn’t in any better hands than it would have been with Littlefinger in charge.  How convenient that none of her siblings will be nearby to notice.  Bran in the south, Jon in the True North and for some inexplicable reason, the girl who spent eight season finding her way home, decides to go gallivanting off into the west on some LotR, knock off elf quest. 

Arya’s end is as unsatisfying as every other one.   She spent years growing stronger, learning to kill, striving to be No-one.  Her whole character arc was about her coming to terms with her loss and recognising that no matter how far she ran, she would always be Arya Stark. 

Then is was her journey home, learning that she could go back, that even changed by war and blood, family meant everything.  Her clarion call, that the “lone wolf dies but the pack survives” has been with her every step.  It’s the message her father taught her, one she held too.  Why on earth would she leave her pack behind? 

What even was the point of having her and Gendry meet again and come together if she was just going to walk away?  I’m not saying a character has to be defined by a romantic relationship, but why bother giving the fans a few crumbs just to spit on it an episode later?  This is clearly baiting of the worst kind.  I’d rather they met as friends and parted as friends than the shit show of having Gendry propose, only for her turn him down.  I mean, she could have learned another lesson with the Hound, that defining your life by revenge and forgetting to live only ends in death.  Her returning to Gendry after that would have made sense.  It would have made sense for her to go build a pack of her own.  But no, that would be too easy.  What shall we do with Arya?  Lets put her on a bus!

He did love her.  Jon was crazy about Dany.  She was crazy about him.  This is the man who puts family first, who lives by his honour.  He is his Uncle Ned come again.  Ned, who lived and died by his oaths.  The only time he broke them was to protect his sisters son, to protect Jon, his family. 

This is why they had to destroy Daenery’s character so completely.  They had to make her the worst villain imaginable to make it look even remotely plausible that Jon would;

1. Break his oath of fealty

2. Murder his own blood.

3. Betray the love of his life.

They had to preserve Jon’s good name, oh yes, because Jon wouldn’t kill her for power or because she lost her temper and disagreed with him.  No.  They destroyed both Jon and Dany with this plot. 

Jon is now Queen Slayer and Kin Slayer and he has broken his word, his oaths of loyalty, his unspoken oaths of love and protection, which she rightly expected from him as her blood and her lover and has been reduced to a shadow of the man he was meant to be, the king he could have been. 

He is cursed by the gods in the eyes of most Westerosi, or he would be if they knew the truth.  After all, look at how the nobility treated Jaimie after he killed the Mad King.  It didn’t matter to them that the King was evil, no, what mattered was that he broke his oath.

Oath breakers are anathema in Westeros. 

So much for a Targaryen Restoration.  Goodbye Iron Throne.  The whole point of Jon’s character was just erased.  Did he defeat some great evil?  No.  Did he overcome war and death and end triumphant on the throne as the last dragon?  No.  There was no point in bringing him back after his death in season six.  Anyone could have went to bargain with Dany and the outcome would have been the same.  Ugh!

Jaime and Brienne.  The love story/redemption arc I was so invested in.  One hand gives and the other takes away.  In the end it seems that Jaime learned nothing, according to the writers that is.  I call bullshit.  Jaime had redeemed himself.  If he had to die, it should have bee while killing Cersei.  The foreshadowing of him being Cersei’s death has been around for years. Cersi didn’t love Jaime, she loved controlling him.  Cersei loved no one but herself.  That was the lesson Jaime was meant to learn.  Thanks so much for taking away eight season of character development and self realisation.

Tyrion got shafted too.  His speech near the end, it was a load of cow dung.  In the end they left Tyrion to be Westeros’ own comic relief.  The Small Council was a bloody farce.  All that scene did was reinforce my belief that nothing in Westeros has really changed.  It doesn’t matter what title you give someone, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Give it ten years and Bron will be the power in Westeros in all but name. 

Now who have I forgotten?  Ah yes.  My Special Mention.

Sandor went out the way he meant to, bringing an end to his brother.  But not before the writers gave him a brief moment with Sansa.  There you go Sansan fans, he called her little bird!  Now shut up and let us kill him in a fiery fall of doom. 

Death by fire, the worst death they could give this man.  He wasn’t a good man, it’s arguable that none of the characters were good people.  However, Sandor Clegane suffered more than most.  He spent his life, angry and bitter, seeking revenge for himself and his sister and father.  I think, if they had to kill him, they could have given the man a better exit than him tossing both himself and his brother into the flames.  It was cruel to make that the only way out, the only triumph he could claim.  I think Sandor should have lived.  He deserved to find a life of peace after all the fighting he did.   It is not poetic or clever to kill a character off with the object of their own fear.  It’s not clever when they do it to a villain, it’s doubly unfair to do it to a hero.  He was a hero by the end.  Sandor deserved better.

Now look, I‘m not saying that in a show like this, that everybody should live or necessarily get the end they deserve, but, they went too far in the name of shock value, leaving no one happy, well, virtually no one. I guess the rabid Sansa fans who loathed Dany are feeling pretty good about now. 

(Yes, okay that was mean, but I got sick of seeing it in my timeline and unfollowed a few people.) 

I was always very much of the belief that Sansa and Dany had more in common than would drive them apart.  I didn’t expect an easy friendship or alliance, but I did expect them to find common ground and be able to build a relationship over time.  Strong women supporting each other is what we need more of on TV.  Not this misogynistic desire to see two strong women fight over a man, which is essentially what they reduced Sansa and Dany too with poor Jon caught in the middle.  

In conclusion...

I feel as though the writers went into season eight with a clear idea of where they had been building and then someone get a bee in their bonnet and posed the question, “Who is the least likely to end up ruling Westeros?”

The answer of course is Bran.  Bran the Broken, how fucking ignorant is that?  How about Bran the Burdened or Bran the Broker or Bran the Benevolent, if you’ve really got such a hard on for alliteration?

So now Bran, who is so disconnected from feeling that he can’t love anyone, sits the Iron Throne and is somehow meant to be a good ruler. 

All that’s needed to achieve this happy ending for the writers?

Goodbye Character development and epic love stories, hello smear campaign, death, destruction and the end of one of my favourite canon ships to ever sail.

Rest in Peace Jonarys.  I believed in you.