<<<Obligatory Spoilers warning. Imma gonna talk about errrthang>>>

OK.

I think I’m ready.

I’m finally ready to talk about the last season of Game of Thrones.

I’ve been really emotional about this guys.

Yes – I realize that was *so* three weeks ago.

Yes – I realize that the online petition to have them redo it is at over 1.6 million signatures.

I realize all that, its just taken me a good while to process the 3 mile long train wreck that the greatest TV show the world has ever seen, managed to devolve into in such a short period of time.

I am one of the many for which this TV show was much more than just a show. I was a book reader of this series when it first came out 20ish years ago. A buddy at work let me borrow his copy of “A Game of Thrones” when he found out I was a fantasy reader. After I finished, I promptly went out and bought the three published works that were available at the time. These characters and this story carried me through a really rough season of full time work/full time college/4 hours of sleep a night. These book characters already felt like old friends and when a high production value TV show came along it felt like watching your old friends finally make it in the Industry.

THEN to see the world catch fire and fall in love with the characters you’ve loved for so long?! That is the ultimate nerdy validation. Game of Thrones is to book nerds what the Marvel movie popularity has been to comic book nerds, what both of us have wanted our entire lives – an invitation into the main stream.

Game of Thrones had everything in place to be a standout show not just in scope and popularity but in the ever-present tendency for visual versions of written works to fall short of the quality of the source material. Game of Thrones went a bit away from the books and even past the books but they did it so well (at that juncture) that I didn’t mind. I was on board, I went with it. I trusted them! I trusted the show runners, David Benioff & D.B. Weiss. They seemed to get it and had the means to truly pull it off.

But, by episode 3 of season 8, I started to have this sour feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was beyond excited that the Night King was dead and that Arya got to throw the final blow. I felt like that was a win for Feminism and all of us Aryaites but underneath all that surface excitement, it felt wrong. It was a strangely familiar wrong feeling to but it took me until episode 6 to figure it out; betrayal. Not the violent, loud, Dynasty-plot-twist kind of betrayal, it was the quiet, creeping, kind of betrayal. It felt familiar and horrible and then it hit me – this feels like a break up.

I needed a metaphor. I can only understand thehe scale and type of these kind of feelings through metaphor and then it came to me: Game of Thrones is the dreamy college boyfriend who failed to launch.

Game of Thrones is the amazing boyfriend you had that made all your college love life dreams come true. He was the handsome, interesting, athletic, dynamic, ambitious, charming guy that swept you off your feet and you thought, truly, was the one. He was the one that you thought will be the best and your last. You graduate college together, you start your entry level jobs together etc and slowly but surely you start to see that while you’re growing into an awesome adult he’s stuck watching old football tapes or playing too many video games and he’s not getting serious about moving to the next level. So not only do you have to break up with him but you also have to grieve the future you imagined for you two together.

Up until season 8, Game of Thrones was on track to redefine the experience of storytelling. It married intelligent, complicated characterization, and writing to epic level production values and world-building. It was supposed to redefine everything about TV shows and was 100% on track to do so but then the fizzle finally came and the sonorous question is “What changed? Why? What happened?”

Why did the writing go from the best in the industry to After School Special quality within the space of a season?

Why did the character arcs they spent the good part of a decade crafting just suddenly become the plank of wood on which the producers decided to practice their Riverdancing?

Why? Why? Why?

So many whys – all I have is my conjecture. I have no inside information, but as an intelligent observer and someone who has been in and out of a classroom in almost every roll possible for the last 15 years, I have a few thoughts. I’m sure there was a lot of burnout happening at every level of production. I’m sure some of the senior writers had taken very generous job offers elsewhere before the end of the show. Even Benioff & Weiss are neck deep in their next project, planning the next Star Wars movie, but what I think the true mortal sin was that imploded season 8 was that Benioff & Weiss, B&W if you will, drank the Kool-Aid.

I think they saw their bank accounts start hitting 7 figures and had the Star Wars deals rolling in and had HBO writing them blank checks for their show and the millions of sign-waving fans all over the globe and they internalized it all. They chose to drown in the fame. It is a cruel irony that most, if not all of the best Art that’s around is typically created when there are stark limits to work in and a deep hunger from which it comes. If you don’t have any kind of hunger: for fame or financial stability or validation from your peers or family, to do something no one has done before etc. If none of that is in play, I think your relationship with your muse desperately suffers and that’s what I see here.

I think they stopped asking the right questions. I think they started to think what would wow the fans and cause the biggest splash instead of honestly digging down into their hearts and asking where do these characters truly need and deserve to go.

It doesn’t make ANY kind of sense to spend seasons and seasons building up Arya as a magical assassin just to have her perform the biggest act of her character, nay the show, as regular Arya, and to accomplish it with a bit of athleticism, fighting skills, and barrels of luck, no real flexing of the assassin she it. But it would make a splash with fans.

It doesn’t make any sense to spend seasons and seasons building up the conflict with Jon and the Night King just to have Arya fly out of nowhere to magically kill him by chance while Jon is screaming at and having a dance off with an ice dragon on the other side of Winterfell. Jon is the one who brought the reality of the threat of the Night King to literally EVERYONE’s attention. There is a pre-face off between Jon and the Night King at Hardhome that is one of the best gauntlet throws I have ever seen on a screen, and yet B&W just let it fall to the floor like a peanut shell at dive bar. There should have been an incredible fight with Jon with Ghost and a flaming sword and the Night King but no. Nothing. We got 10-on-the-vault Arya (who I still LOVE, don’t get me wrong) and it just doesn’t feel right.

It doesn’t make any sense for there to be a seasons long redemption arc for Jamie just to have him piss out at the last minute right after he really starts being true to his actual feelings and building a character of quality by fighting for what he believes in and having the courage to move on in love and choose someone who is good for him and believes in him. Brienne deserves so much more than him going fluttering back to Cersi with no explanation besides the fact that “he’s not a good man”. What. The. Hell. Was. That? I’m still mad. Brienne is (no pun intended) heads and shoulders one of, if not THE, best characters in the whole story and they just use her as a punctuation mark. It’s not right.

And then the rolling dumpster fire that is Dany’s time line…. Oh man – the absolute stupidity of having a character go crazy just because it’s been rumored that that’s what goes on in her family sometimes, is insane. Dany, from the start, was a portrait of mercy and justice. She was brutal sometimes but she was measured and managed to keep the big picture in mind. She had good people around her, sure, but they weren’t the sole reason she was who she was. She very often listened to what everyone had to say, then did what she wanted and it was the unequivocally the right thing to do. The gods flipped a coin when she was born and she was decidedly not crazy for 99% of the story. It is beyond lazy writing to just say “Woah…. and then she went nuts because she had hurt feelings because she was a girl and her bff died and she couldn’t handle it”. She watched her beloved husband die a very slow death and then had to finish him off herself, she lost a child, lost Jorah a few times, broke up with Dario (who I believed she genuinely cared about), watched her brother die, watched two of her dragon children die and seemed to manage the grief all right, nay thrived despite it and managed serious character growth but somehow being in King’s Landing negated all that charcter? Cersi killing her bff was what flipped the switch? Please –  They might as well have had Tyrion wake up at the end of everything and go “Oh – wow. It was all just a dream!” Blah. It still draws a physical reaction of anger and disappointment from me. Dany was a goldmine of storytelling potential but they turned her into a trite PMS metaphor and it truly breaks my heart.

The list could go on and on but my heart can only take so much in one sitting.

Needless to say – I hope the Creative zeitgeist will not lose the lesson: do not drink the Kool-Aid no matter how pretty it is. Stay loyal to the characters and story that made you and do justice by them, not by anyone else. They are your primary responsibility; not the fans, not the producers that employ you, not the actors that are animating the characters, not anyone else. Do right by them and everything else will fall into place.

The cartoon series The Last Airbender is probably the best example I can think of where not one single character ball was dropped. Everyone grew together, grew to be better, accomplished their goals, and did it as a team. If you need an emotional and writing cleanse, I’ll point you in their direction. Don’t be deterred by the fact that it’s a cartoon, it’s amazing and it won’t let you down like GoT did. It is the boyfriend that got the good job, moved out, started cooking and eating vegetables, outlined his investment portfolio, went to Tiffany’s and leveled you both up. Those show runners got it and it shows.

I have every hope that the next great book-to-screen project will have learned the lesson. Don’t be GoT. Stay the course. Take care of the characters trusted to you and they’ll take care of you.