Welp, I Thought Game of Thrones Ended Just About As Well As It Could Have Done

I’ve lost weeks of my life to Game of Thrones. Twice over, in fact. Once, when I discovered the books, in Harbin, China, at a time of year when temperatures routinely drop to -30 (that’s -22 of your American Fahrenheit) and few things are as appealing as retreating under the duvet in an apartment superheated by Soviet-style communal coal-powered boilers and mainlining several thousand pages of good old-fashioned storytelling.

Then a second time, when I finally braced myself to watch the TV series, having remained adamant it couldn’t possibly be as good as the original. And, perhaps in more moderate doses, a third time, after I persuaded my spawn into watching the TV series with me. Between that and reading the reviews, the pre-match analyses, the shameless speculation on sites such as Winter Is Coming, and even lists of the real world Game of Thrones shooting locations, plus writing a few stories on the topic, I must have spent several hundred happy hours immersed in the Seven Kingdoms. And, yes, I could probably have learnt a new language in that time. Your point is?

Anywise, when the decision was made to wrap the entire thing up in six episodes of season eight – long after the series overshot George R R Martin’s books – I was on tenterhooks. It’s not easy, to put it mildly, to land as many disparate threads and geographies as the writers were wrangling. Whole hosts of awkward meetings and greetings – Daenerys with Sam, whose father and brother she exterminated with dragonfire, Jaime with Bran, last encountered during that unfortunate defenestration in Season 1 – had to be negotiated. Long-lost characters such as Melisandre had to be reintroduced to an audience less obsessive than me. And, as none other than Stephen King observed on Twitter, that shit is hard to do.

Now, since over 1.6 million absolute weapons have currently signed a petition to remake Game of Thrones Season Eight “with competent writers” – because, lord knows, only D-list amateurs get hired to write $15million-an-episode telly and any numpty with a keyboard could do WAY better – I appear to be in a minority.

But I thought the writers, and everyone involved, did quite phenomenally well. Not least in resisting the temptation to leave Cersei and Euron dominating a devastated Westeros. We owe them, in fact, an immense debt of gratitude for spending the big end of a decade creating so much epic entertainment.

People who are cross about Game of Thrones seem to fall into two main camps. There are the Night King fanboys, generally male, who wanted the culminating battle of good and evil to come at the end of the season, and good to triumph, preferably with a firm, manly and heterosexual hand. (Because if there’s one thing we’ve learnt from Game of Thrones to date, it’s that good can be relied on to triumph over evil…)

And then there are the millennial feminists, generally female, who feel that Daenerys’ character arc had not been clearly enough signalled by her crucifying and burning alive her opponents plus about ten bazillion references to the family tendency to insanity and her father’s attempts at mass murder by arson. And that, further, the loss of her identity as rightful ruler and her lover simultaneously, the slaying of two of her dragon “children” and both her longstanding counsellors before her eyes, and her betrayal by two other counsellors was not sufficiently a motivating cause for her to go absolutely apeshit with her nuclear dragon.

To both of these schools of thought, I say:

Let’s start with dear Dany, who, let’s face it, had she been male and a minger would have been rumbled ages ago. Game of Thrones is, for a show set in a version of medieval Europe, positively replete with strong female characters, many of whom (Sansa, Arya, even Yara) make it through to powerful, positive endings. (And, yes, yes, I know there were some hardass bitches in medieval Europe, but Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of Castile did rather stand out in a crowd.) To cry misogyny because Daenerys goes full White Saviour on dragonback is just plain misguided.

Relatedly, there is a distinction – and not a particularly delicate one – between “I wanted a happy ending for this character and didn’t get one” and “the writers don’t know how to construct a plausible story arc”.

Now to the Night King. Game of Thrones is not, primarily, a zombie flick. It’s about power and the corruption it entails, and many other things, but 28 Days Later it is not. Therefore the ice zombies needed to be eliminated. And, when a chick who has spent most of the last few seasons literally training with a succession of stone-cold killers, that is – for the crusty sock brigade who somehow missed those character developments – entirely, 100% appropriate.

Finally, as to King Bran, and the happily ever after Kings Council, with Tyrion, Ser Brienne, Ser Bronn of Highgarden, and the rest? Sure, the writers COULD have gone full literal, and ended on a bleak picture of starving Westerosi stumbling across a ravaged, wintry landscape full of rapey Dothraki, hungry eunuchs, leaderless northerners and, of course, one very, very cross dragon. But, let’s be honest now, I don’t think any of us would have liked that very much. I thought flashing forward to a happily ever after ending – not incidentally justifying Bran’s ongoing and rather irritating presence in the series – was about the only option to tie up those dangling loose ends.

And, yes, I am waiting with bated breath to see how GRRM brings his own ending in. He is currently promising his long-awaited sixth book in the series, The Winds of Winter (and, god, no I haven’t read the prequels – The Silmarillion is exhibit A here as ever), as early as July next year. And perhaps, now the TV series is done and dusted, that will happen. We can dream, right?