Alas, it’s over. This show that was a Super Bowl for nerds lo these many years has come to an end. Despite all the criticism it is taking, it’s over and I’m grateful HBO made it. I do think the last two seasons were a bit rushed and some plot points were forced but overall, it gave us a real ending. It didn’t cop out or give us a do it yourself ending. Choices were made and an actual resolution was given.
Jon Snow takes out his boo and Daeny croaks, effectively stopping her from become fantasy world she-Hitler. Drogon is so pissed and just as you think he’s going to burn up Jon, he burns up the Iron Throne instead, pissed that his mother died over a lousy chair.
He then grabs Daeny and swoops off and frankly, if you ask me, Jon Snow was too honest for his own damn good. Instead of admitting to the deed he should have just been all like, “Dudes. Check it out. I was all trying to get up in my girlfriend’s snootch with my iron bone when that damn dragon went crazy and burned up everything and flew off with Daeny so…oh well that sucks but I guess if y’all want me to be king now, I’ll do it.”
Meanwhile, it does seem out of left field that Bran would become king. It was sad that the lords and ladies laughed at Sam’s suggestion of pure democracy, but at least there will be a little bit of thought put into picking the leadership from now on.
While Bran does seem like the least douchiest character and the least likely to use the throne for ill, they spent the last couple of seasons pointing out to us that Bran had become a supernatural being, the mystical three-eyed raven who is above all titles of nobility. He refused to become the Lord of Winterfell for this very reason. There’s sort of a nod to the fact that apparently Bran saw all this coming and was ready to be named king all along and it looks like the realm will be in good hands but still, I don’t know. You can’t just say the kid is a god for several seasons and then suddenly say oh yeah and he can be king too.
I thought the romance between Brienne and Jaime was forced. Those two seemed like, at best, they had a respectful friendship.
It seemed unlikely that the Unsullied would have accepted anything less than Jon Snow’s head on a pike. They wouldn’t have been ok with him just going to the Wall.
What happened to the Dothraki? I don’t recall an answer. Those berserkers are just roaming the countryside, raping and looting I assume. Sorry. Maybe that’s dothraki profiling.
Snow has a better than expected ending. The Watch doesn’t interfere as he leaves and joins the Wildlings. His life won’t be fabulous but at least he’ll be free…free in the cold barren north but free.
Arya will become an explorer. Sansa is Queen of the North. The Stark children really clean up and make out like bandits in the end, all except Jon.
To my surprise, it was actually a happy ending when I expected that everyone would just be totally dead or someone terrible would end up ruling.
Jon and Daeny’s talk about power and Daeny talking about how people who disagree with her are evil is a bit scary and has some echoes to the world we live in today as we have all become so politically divided.
Anyway, I know the show is taking a lot of heat but hey, that means people love it enough to have strong feelings about it. I think it ended well, though again, it does strike me as odd that Bran could be a three eyed raven and king at the same time.
I think I’m the only one who thought the last episode of Game of Thrones was good.
I get it. We all cheered Khaleesi on the past 8 seasons. She was the underdog. She started from the bottom and now she’s here. She suffered every bump in the road and set back and she managed to move across a fantasy continent, free countless slaves and turn enemies into allies and recruit top advisers.
But still…you had to see something like this coming.
First, the show has always had an air of real life or as close to real life a fantasy world can get.
In real life, you hope to be great but then you suffer all kinds of setbacks. Same thing in GRRM’s fantasy world. Yes, you want a person to be good but shit happens.
Khaleesi has been through some shit. Let’s review:
#1 – Exiled as a baby across the Narrow Sea.
#2 – Sold as a sex slave wife to a nomadic warlord by her asshole brother. The wealthy man who took her and her brother in as their guardian allowed this to happen.
#3 – Trusted Ser Jorah. He turned out to be a spy. Eventually, she trusted him again.
#4 – I forget the details but a lot of shit happened in her travelling years. Her husband croaked. The dothraki turned on her for awhile before getting behind her again. Evil dudes tried to steal her dragons. She conquered cities but if she went too soft, bad guys would start shit.
#5 – More recently, she delayed her assault on King’s Landing and brought her Army north to help defeat the Knight King. You might argue she had to do that anyway to save the land she wanted to conquer, but she could have also sent her full army at Kings Landing first, allowed the Night King to destroy the North and then made a stand at them from a strong position in Kings Landing.
Note that her reward for doing so was that the Starks start bitching about how Jon Snow should be king.
#6 – Tyrion and Varys are her chief advisers and yet they are always doing shit behind her back. They think it is for the greater good but they always get found out and exposed as a-holes.
First, I didn’t buy that Varys would go right up to Snow and tell him to be king. Varys is smarter than this. He is the spymaster. He would have orchestrated a coup from behind the scenes if he wanted Khaleesi gone.
But if you count that, plus Tyrion telling Varys about Snow’s claim to the throne which is a big betrayal and then also count Sansa up her ass and the Northmen and Wildlings giving the credit for the white walker victory to Jon and then losing her second dragon (two she lost in the name of protecting the North, a land of assholes who benefit from her protection yet openly talk shit about her) and losing Missandei?
I mean, what was Missandei’s last words? Dracarus. What’s that mean? It’s the word you tell your dragon when you want him to burn some shit. BFF was telling Khaleesi to burn that shit down.
I think HBO has moved these past two seasons way too fast and we deserved a little more development and build up, but if you take a look at all of this, it’s not that unlikely that Khaleesi might just say, “Fuck it. I tried to get these people to follow me out of respect, but they’re all doing their own shit behind my back so I’m just going to set this shit on fire.”
Holy crap, 3.5 readers. What an episode! SPOILERS!
Well, here are my thoughts:
#1 – It’s hard to complain because it was riveting, edge of your seat and really grabbed your attention.
#2 – But I’ll complain anyway. The complaint I keep seeing is wasted character development. Khaleesi has spent 7 seasons being good only to go berserk at the last second. True, I suppose the capacity to snap is in all of us. Her second dragon and best friend were just killed.
Still, the set off of her snap was Varys’ treachery? I don’t know. Seems weak. Then again, I suppose there have been inklings throughout that she might flip out. Her father did flip out and there was always a fear that she might flip too.
Also on character development, Varys was long portrayed as the realm’s top spymaster, like an old fashioned CIA chief. Ergo, it’s hard to believe that he would just walk right up to Jon Snow and tell him what’s what. If Varys wanted Khaleesi out, he wouldn’t have told her boyfriend. He would have orchestrated some kind of intricately detailed behind the scenes coup that left him 20 steps away from it all. He would have had a servant poison the Khaleesi’s soup or something then would have been all like, “What treachery is this? Oh, shit. Our beloved Khaleesi is dead. Oh well, Jon Snow, hate to say it but you’re up now, buddy.”
#3 – I think we have to be honest that the show always promises A then delivers not even B but Z. So we should have never really expected a happy ending where Khaleesi farts rainbows out of her butt.
#4 – There were some payoffs that longtime fans have been waiting for, from the Cleganes finally duking it out, to the wildfire deposits getting burned up to Arya looking to check Cersei off her list.
#5 – In true form for the show, they managed to make you feel bad for Cersei. She’s done some bad things over the years and yet, in her final moments you’re like, “Well, maybe her ass shouldn’t be ate the hell up by a damn dragon.”
CONCLUSIONS:
Snow, Tyrion and Davos all look sad at the side they chose. And there’s still a few episodes left so where this goes next will be interesting.
#10 – The Knight King, because screw ’em all, they waited too long to come together. George RR Martin comes out at the end while munching on a bag of cheese doodles and reminds Republicans and Democrats that the real White Walker is climate change…or possibly Russians. Or weather controlling Russians.
#9 – Jon Snow and Khaleesi marry. Both have major claims to the Iron Throne. They consolidate the claims and the infighting between Khaleesi and Jon over him being King in the North because now they are married so they run it all. No one cares Jon is an Auntie Fucker because it is olden times.
#8 – Cersei beats everyone.
#7 – Everyone dies, no one is left.
#6 – A few seasons ago, Arya made mention of a land far beyond the sea that is rumored to be there but no one has seen it. I wonder if this is like the GOT version of America and people who are sick of the Westeros fighting will leave and start a new nation in fantasy America. I guess this isn’t so much explaining who is king than it is giving a possible ending.
#5 – The Khaleesi, of course.
#4 – Jon Snow, because now he knows it all. (In 5 or 4 that means only one either lived or lived but the other could not rule for some reason be it death or they didn’t get together.
#3 – Bran is the Knight King seems to be a popular theory so if he controls the Knight King then he rules.
#2 – Hodor.
#1 – OK, this is actually going to be my best guess. Jon and Khaleesi either don’t make it or decide that the monarchy has had its day. Either way, wise men like Tyrion and Varys start a democracy.
Also – I could see them giving some sort of flash forward to a steam powered Victorian Age or Modern Age. That would be cool.
Also – none of these and something we didn’t think of.
I was in my early 30s when this show began. I didn’t feel happy about my life at the time but looking back on it, I realize I should have. I guess that’s the thing about getting older – we only realize how good we used to have it when time goes by and things get worse and believe me, they can always get worse.
Still, there was a difference in my early 30s. I was unhappy that I’d gotten older, yet there seemed like there was enough time left to pull a happy life off – find a good job, lose weight conquer some of my health issues, meet a girl and start a family.
In the back of my mind I knew that age 40 was coming for me, slowly trudging my way like a white walker and just like a snow zombie, age 40 could not be bargained or reasoned with, could not be destroyed, it was coming and so I’d better deal with it. (I’m about a year and a few months from it eating my brains now.)
In other words, I suppose I would fit in as one of the characters on Game of Thrones. For seven years, the main characters have been aware that the Khaleesi, Queen of Dragons, was on her way to cross the Narrow Sea and toast everyone to a crispy, golden brown. As it turns out, she’s too nice to do that but they didn’t know that…and we aren’t entirely sure she won’t yet. The Khaleesi is trying to be kind and loving but she definitely has a switch that can be flipped that can make her want to cook you with the help of her big ass reptiles.
By the way, aren’t all the dragon action scenes great? We’ve been waiting a long time for them.
Anyway, like me ignoring the coming of age 40 and failing to get my life in order, the characters all fought over the Iron Throne. King Robert’s brother Stannis and Renley fought each other for it. Robb Stark didn’t want it but just wanted to bring his army to King’s Landing to make the Lannisters pay for killing his father, Ned. Those damn Greyjoys took advantage of the chaos to do some looting and pillaging. The Boltons got in on the mix. Honestly, I lose track of how many people wanted that throne. It was a lot.
But that was the point of the show. All the characters have known that a Khaleesi was coming but…she was so far away…and there were more pressing matters in front of them.
A smaller handful of characters also knew the white walkers were coming. They tried harder to warn people but no one would listen. There’s the rub, I suppose. If you actually see or experience a threat, you’re more likely to try to do something about it.
I’ve always seen the show as an allegory for America. We Americans spend so much time fighting each other over our differences – party lines, racial lines, class lines – we don’t stop to think about what we have in common, or to realize that the only thing we have to stop the outside forces who’d like to see this country burn from getting their way is each other.
The warring families could have set aside their differences and been in a better position to stop the Khaleesi from bringing her dragons to cook everyone up. Alas, they killed each other, decimated the country’s resources and now it’s easy pickens for the Mother of Dragons.
Had they not fought each other, they could have been in a better position to stop the white walkers. Now it may be too late.
Now as I get older, I see the show as an allegory for life. This past decade has moved so quickly and at the time, I felt out of control, powerless to fix things. I knew in the back of my mind that a myriad of health problems would be coming if I didn’t lose weight, that financial problems would come if I didn’t find a better job, that sadness would come if I didn’t find a girl.
Sad to say that by the end of season 7, I’ve only accomplished 1 out of 3. The good job was found and the financial problems are over, so I don’t have to worry about a looming white walker in the form of financial ruin…but…I still have to worry about a white walker in the form of a heart attack if I don’t lose weight…or a fat ass fire breathing dragon in the form of permanent bachelorhood/inability to father children due to old age.
And I guess that’s the moral of the story. We focus on the problems right in front of our faces. It’s too easy to delay the long term problems. “We’ll worry about the fat ass dragon or the evil white walkers when and/or if they get here” we say, rather than take the daily steps that, when done with regularity, build up over time and help us stave off the impending doom.
In short, I could have lost weight low these past seven years. That would have made me a healthier man today and would have made it easier to find a girl (wait I have VGRF but maybe this is the Alleged Man’s brain bleeding through), but I didn’t. Now I fear I may be too late and I might get bitten by the white walker of poor health or be eaten by the dragon of loneliness.
I worry it may be too late for me, 3.5 readers. However, if you are young, take the warning that this show provides and run with it.
In your life, you have your own personal white walker or perhaps, your own personal dragon. Maybe it’s money, or romance, or employment or health or addiction or what have you.
Whatever it is, know in the back of your mind that your white walker of a problem is slowly trudging its way down from the North, ready to eat your brains. Will you assemble an army within yourself to fight it and keep it at bay, or will you wake up one day and find a big chomp has been taken out of your brain and now it is too late?
You know that your Khaleesi of a problem is heading East. Slowly but surely, she’s kicking ass and taking names, growing her numbers and feeding her dragons so they get big and strong, the bigger and stronger to fricassee your oily hide. You’re placating yourself, telling yourself that you are young and have plenty of time before that problem becomes a reality. You’re also fooling yourself. Will you, again, assemble a personal army inside yourself to fight the dragons, or will you wake up one day and find yourself a charcoal briquette?
I can tell you seven years ago, when this show first began, I knew that if I didn’t get a better job, that if I didn’t lose weight and didn’t find a woman, I’d essentially end up approaching forty, feeling like a white walker had eaten my brain or a dragon had burnt me up.
Now I feel that way. Sure, I conquered the financial dragon. I kicked the financial white walker in the gonads. But I ignored the health dragon/white walker and the romance dragon/white walker and now I’m about to be fried and eaten.
Then again, I suppose it’s never really over until a white walker is actually chowing down on your brains or until a dragon has toasted you, so…I guess I’ll pick myself up, dust myself off and give it another try.
You should too, 3.5 readers. Feel free to tell me in the comments what you are going to do to keep your personal white walkers from eating your brains or your personal dragon from roasting you and chomping you up like a chicken nugget.
Remember, “Winter is coming.” That’s been the slogan of the show for seven years. Our own personal winters are coming – be they in the form of a heart attack because we didn’t eat better, or cancer because we didn’t take care of ourselves, or yuck, being that fifty year old in “da club” still trying to score a date because he didn’t pick someone and try to make the best of it when he was younger. Sure, Winter seems a long way away but it will be here soon enough and it will bring zombies…and dragons and apparently, a freaking zombie ass dragon.
What will you do to stave off your personal winter, 3.5 readers?
Sigh. Why must I wait until July for Game of Thrones to come back on the air?
Oh well. This one will be a short one.
Game of Thrones has so many characters – so, so many characters. And many of them are key players. All in all, we’re talking like, hundreds of parts.
I suppose it makes sense in a wide-sweeping epic. Then again, I’ve found that in my own writing, sometimes it is difficult to just keep track of the names of the bit players. If you have a secretary named Janet who gives your hero a key piece of info, you want to make a note of it so you don’t name another character Janet.
Sure, in real life, you’ll probably run into multiple people named Janet. People don’t check to see many Janets there are around you before deciding whether or not to add one more Janet to the mix. But, to the reader, two characters with the same name will be confusing.
Plus, how do you describe all those characters? There are only so many ways to describe a person. At the end of the day, we all aren’t snowflakes. Sure, we all look different and those differences are readily noticeable to the eye but on paper? “He’s old, she’s young, he’s tall, she’s short, he’s skinny, she’s fat” I mean, really…how do you come up with unique descriptions for over two hundred people or more?
YOUR ASSIGNMENT: Can you keep up with all the characters on Game of Thrones? How do you do it? I’ve been watching the show since the beginning and I still just refer to many of the characters as, “The guy who did the thing.” Also, tell me how you keep track of the characters in your stories.
Hey 3.5 readers. The season we’ve waited so long for is finally here. John Snow vs. Cersei vs. the Khaleesi vs. the Whitewalkers.
You know we’ve been hoping that John Snow and the Khaleesi will take shit over and bring Westeros into a new age of peace and prosperity, but given what we know of George R.R. Martin’s penchant for surprises, aliens will probably land and blow everything up right at the end or something.
Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it 3.5 readers?
Season 6 of GOT is over. Done. Finito. In the books.
Let’s talk but beware for like Melisandre’s mystical vagina, this post is dark and full of terrors…AND SPOILERS.
Mostly spoilers.
From a writing standpoint, so many things happened this season that we’ve all been waiting for a long time:
Arya got her revenge.
Jon Snow is King of the North.
Sansa escaped a life of having to go from being tortured by one douche to being tortured by another douche.
One of Cersie’s schemes actually worked.
The Imp is finally recognized by someone who appreciates his brain.
The Khaleesi is on her way to Westeros.
Overall, the kids have grown up and everyone’s either doing or on their way to doing what they’ve been meant to do all along.
So about last night –
CERSEI
She’s long lamented that her lack of a dong has held her back. She has argued many a time that she’s wise and brilliant and if only she were a man she’d be taken seriously.
Well, people be taking her ass seriously now because…holy shit…she done went and exploded the Sept of Baelor.
Took out the High Sparrow, all his little sparrows, probably even the Tyrells though technically we didn’t get full confirmation as to whether or not Margery and Loras made it out or not.
The running joke about Cersei is that her schemes always fail. Not only do they fail but they usually make her problems worse. (i.e. she gives the High Sparrow extra powers to go after her enemies only to have him turn on her.)
Did Cersie know that Tommen would kill himself?
You could argue yes because she did put on her Queenly garment before it all went down.
You could argue no because she had Frankenmountain keep him from getting blown up and historically, though she has been douchey to everyone else, she has been fiercely loyal to her children.
At any rate, her butt is on the Iron Throne.
KHALEESI
I know her name isn’t Khaleesi but I like it better and it is easier to spell.
Didn’t you get goosebumps seeing all those ships and dragons crossing the Narrow Sea?
The long awaited invasion of Westeros is on the way.
Though I have to wonder, when that happens, could the end of the show be far behind? Putting the Khaleesi on the Iron Throne and defeating the White Walkers seems like the final plot points that need to be wrapped up.
THE IRON BORN
Bunch of smelly pirate vikings.
If you ask me, GRRM is way too obsessed with turning his male characters into eunuchs. Spare the balls, George. Spare the balls.
But despite being a eunuch, Theon seems to be on the way toward redeeming himself for his douchebaggery. He’s lost his claim to the Iron Islands, but may do something super heroic, die in battle, or end up as his sister’s chief advisor.
Speaking of…
WOMEN TAKING OVER
Hey. Look. I’m all for women’s rights and shit but Westeros is becoming a total vag-ocracy here.
You’ve got Cersei on the Iron Throne and the Khaleesi about to take the Iron Throne (does anyone think anyone in Westeros is willing to be chomped by a dragon to protect Cersei? Doubtful.)
You’ve got Ellaria Sand ruling Dorne after killing her brother-in-law in a coup.
You’ve got Lady Olena in charge of Highgarden even though she’s like a million years old.
Sure, Jon Snow is King of the North but he’s one of those perpetually depressed hipster emo losers who will probably walk away from it all and turn it over to Sansa.
I’m not saying never have a woman ruler but you know, let’s mix it up and have some peen-ocracies and some vag-ocracies.
ARYA
Checked a big name off her list. Got her revenge.
WHAT’S BEYOND WESTEROS?
There was a brief mention this season that there is land beyond Westeros but no one has ever sailed that far.
I wonder if that will become some kind of allegory to Europeans sailing and colonizing the Americas.
WHAT SAY YOU, 3.5 READERS?
What did you like about this season? What did you not like? What did you want to see and or not see?
Bookshelf Battle 