I normally don’t write about popular TV shows, mostly due to the glut of already existing opinion pieces out there. However, as we near the last episode of the final season, I felt compelled to quickly jot down my analysis of a series I actually followed through from beginning to end, a rare feat in my busy life.
To clear the air: I think so far, the Game of Thrones has offered a conflicted mess of sumptuous cinematography and morsels of gourmet lines, all delivered by a thoroughly brilliant cast. Where the writing fails is not in its hurried resolutions, or even in lackluster character developments, but in its reticence to circumvent the most common high fantasy tropes.
Like The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones has relied on the mundane glory of death to fuel its audience viewership — we tune in each week terrified that our favorite characters will not only die, but die without much consequence. More than the politics, dragons, and palace intrigue, we revel in the adrenaline of watching characters fall, one by one, but oh thank god, not that character — not until maybe next week, at least. And when our favorite heroes eventually make their maker, we are angry, we are sad, and we pick root for another to carry the mantle of “last man standing”. That is why when the White Walkers finally seized Winterfell with all the major protagonists bundled in one place failed to pick off even one of them (sure, a few died, and RIP Jorah, but let’s be honest, we were ready to see him go a season ago), the audience felt robbed of the emotional hurricane that never came.
Such empty highs in the game of “who will die next” can only act as a substitute for a good plot for so long. The best episodes of Season 8 has so far been relatively uneventful ones, where the layered exposition and dialogue overpower the flashy CGI and explosive pyrotechnics. Benioff and Weiss’s strengths have always been in the the raw poetry of their character dialogues, where the slow brewing of exquisite wit and poignant tension allow the two to flex their narrative muscles in a way that is squandered trying to keep pace with the need for mindless action sequences of so much warfare compacted into two episodes.
People stabbing each other and angry men yelling before crumpling into an unrecognizable heap gets boring pretty fast. The over use of Drogon’s fire breathing prowess has also been grossly inconsistent in its efficacy — after episode 5, I was left wondering why they didn’t just sack King’s Landing 4 episodes ago, since apparently, 1 dragon was all that was necessary to force the city to it’s knees. No seriously, the armies did zilch. Imagine if Rhaegar or Viserion didn’t die by dumb spears, respectively. It would have been over in five, with enough time for Dany to fly back to Winterfell and roast the night king’s army twice.
And that brings us back to one of the most hotly debated topics now: Daenerys’s descent into the “Mad Queen”.
Honestly, it was a 50/50 toss up since Dany was given a taste of ruling in Meereen. Throughout her character arc, we have swallowed her sudden acts of petty vengeance up until the point Varys uncomfortably shakes his head and Sam, a character fans actually care about, cries about his family being burned alive. We were fine with her careless execution of rebels, and even more at the roasting of her enemies because hey, we’re in a desert and these people are barbaric anyway. But when we suddenly remember that the consequences of war necessary means that gasp — women and children — more specifically, white women and children, will die, Dany is sudden given the crown of “Madness”.
When I saw the gears turning in her grimace when the belled rang, that was probably the first time this entire season I have empathized with a GoT character’s state of mind. I never liked Dany’s vanity nor her savior complex, but here, I almost agree that the sacking of the city was not undeserved. The people of King’s Landing are fickle and respond to only fear. Cersei underestimated Dany and smugly condemned her city to ruin through the needless execution of one of the show’s only colored character. We knew this was inevitable. We knew this is war. People die.
Civilian casualties have long been regarded as an inevitable consequence of war. Nothing changes when it’s dragons instead of bombs; someone still had to take the reins. I am not arguing for the moral quandaries of the ethics of war — but it is undeniable that every battle in GoT has been intensively personal, and dictated by the whims of the few players on top. If we judged madness purely based on the actions of each character: Cersei blew up her own castle, Arya joined a cult that harvests faces, Jon Snow literally died, Stannis burned his daughter for religion, and Qyburn pioneered Frankenstein technology, objectively speaking it’s hard to argue razing a city instantly equals madness when any other male leader would have done exactly the same without two blinks.
The annoying thing is, every female character that was been built up so far has never been fairly given a chance at the throne. Yes, I was upset when Margery was blown up a season ago, without any real resolution to her story line. Cersei was a villain whose character quirk was drinking wine and ultimately died relying on the strength of someone who’s only redeeming quality was that he didn’t make disabled people jokes. Sansa hasn’t pushed for her claim to Winterfell despite being the only person qualified to do so, deferring instead Bran and Jon. Arya has a deathwish, and now Dany has been, in our mind, label unfit to rule. What is left is the same old bullshit for the troubled male reluctantly taking on the mantle of King, because in the end, a Queen is a queen is a queen. And in Game of Thrones, a queen becoming king is still the highest fantasy the writers cruelly dangled in front of us.