The end of Thrones is a watershed moment for the way our society engages with art. Much of it boils down to viewers interpreting their own discomfort over the show’s failures.īut was Game of Thrones ever a show about fostering satisfaction? Was its aim to make people feel good? It’s hard to watch Burn Gorman as Karl Tanner lord over the rape of Craster’s wives, or the City Watch murdering infants in their beds, and say that it was pure escapism. The complaints, by and large, feel typical to the “Peak TV” era: the uproar you’d expect from the sort of people who’ve interpreted Emilia Clarke’s traumatized, brutal Daenerys Targaryen as a one-dimensional message about girl power anger that such and such a character “deserved” some specific ending they didn’t receive.

The series’ ending unleashed a seemingly bottomless geyser of fan discontent ranging from mile-long Twitter threads to an honest-to-God petition for HBO to remake the eighth season from scratch.

It’s a world that will surely see misery again before too long. The dragon - an avatar of war capable of leveling any city in Westeros - is still out there, too. Game of Thrones leaves all that to cleaner, lighter fiction.Īnd just in case it still feels too cozy, we see characters we’ve come to love over the years sneer and laugh at the idea of democracy, still secure at the apex of the feudal system that’s been ripping their country apart since the days of the Long Night 8,000 years ago. No locked-in golden age, no heroic promised one to wear the crown, no satisfaction at seeing people good and bad receive their karmic sentences. What’s left is a council of misfits, a wise and peaceful king, and a broken kingdom remade a little different, perhaps a little better, than before. The throne, over which so much blood was shed, melted to slag the queen who never got a chance to take it for her own killed in its shadow the dragon that set fire to tens of thousands at her command flying away into the falling ash toward no-one-knows-where. Weiss’ Game of Thrones left us: the messianic king-who-wasn’t, Jon Snow, riding out of Westeros in company with the Free Folk to bring life back to death’s frozen domain. Imagine, growing from out of the ashes of Sauron’s dominion, tender blades of green grass. Imagine if Lord of the Rings ended with Aragorn riding out into the abandoned wastes of Mordor, his crown forsaken, his throne left to an uncertain fate.

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