By the way, I told you so. About the ending of Game of Thrones, I mean. I had been telling my mates that we would not get the happy ending to Game of Thrones that some wanted (I say “some”, because I wanted it to end badly for our heroes, as befitting both the aesthetic of the show and my own misanthropic tendencies). I’ve just found some proof that I wasn’t merely lying about having foretold key aspects of the ending like everyone else who claimed they “knew all along” how it would end. See my post from September 2017 that I’ve just stumbled upon having forgotten I’d written it. Particularly note my following predictions.
Daenerys dying… Dany going schitz on power / refusing to bend the knee to Jon.
I just think that [a happy ending] would not suit the world that’s been built up. Even if things end “well” (= white walkers and Cersei being killed, some good guys staying alive), I can’t see everyone remaining unscathed. One or more of Dany, Jon, Arya, Sansa have to die, and die horribly.
So I was right about one those characters dying, about Daenerys definitely dying, about Daenerys definitely refusing to bend the knee to Jon, and about Daenerys definitely going mad with power. It was obviously the ways things had been going as Dany had been getting increasingly haughty. This is why I just cannot understand the people who passionately argue that the writers just ruined her character in order to be all twisty; guys, Dany’s arc had been becoming clear for seasons, her ultimate descent being fairly well foreshadowed. What really happened is not bad writing, but that people did want to see the increasingly obvious because this went against their own desires for a Spielbergian ending where Dany and Jonnie have little Targeristarkling sprogs and live Happily Ever After.
I’m not saying the final season or its writing was perfect. I certainly think some of my ideas for the final season, as outlined in that post, were particularly good, and would have been great additions to Season 8. My favourite ideas of my own include:
- The Dothraki go nuts and start raping and pillaging which turns the layfolk against the Dany-Jon biumvirate, perhaps necessitating Jon or Sansa to backstab;
- Ned Stark, or anyone of our other favourite dead characters, coming back in white walker form for an emotional, zombie-esque, ‘I don’t know if I can kill you! I still see the real you in that skelly shell!’ moment of emotional, heart-tugging drama;
- The white walkers taking over and destroying Westeros / the World;
- The good guys win a Pyrrhic victory; Westeros is so ruined by everything that there isn’t much of a world to rule over now. And the weakened Pyrrhic victors, are left open to attack from foreign marauders … just then, some crazy mothers from Essos appear in their ships on the horizon, dun dun dun! End of the world as we know it. End of Series.
But that is a whole other post discussing what I felt was good and bad about Season Eight, and what opportunities I feel the creators expertly delivered on and failed to deliver on. But this post is about something different: about how I WAS RIGHT about Daenerys.
© 2019 Bryan A. J. Parry
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