Game of Thrones, the hit HBO soap opera based on the books by George R.R. Martin, has finally reached its long-awaited conclusion. The song of water bottles and coffee cups is over.
Legions of fans are outraged over what they see as a tremendously disappointing final season, but is the ending really that bad?
In my opinion, yes. Although it’s not as awful as some truly loathsome endings I’ve seen, the ending of Game of Thrones feels about as half-baked as you can get.
Underwhelming finale aside, was Game of Thrones even that great to begin with? The pacing, while not as slow as Naruto, still moved at a snail’s pace. Each character merely personified a political concept or position as opposed to being a literal representation of an imagined person, which is a huge problem in a story that claims to be a gritty character study.
It was always a show that thrived on our belief that it was building to something amazing. In the end, it didn’t deliver.
The Characters of Game of Thrones
Since Game of Thrones claims to be a character-driven show, I’ll start with the characters. Truth be told, they’re mostly bland, inconsistent, amoral, or (more commonly) some mixture of the three. Even were they not, there are so many of them that the story can’t focus on one character long enough for much development. A central protagonist in Game of Thrones is basically on par with a minor villain in a better-focused story.
Most of these characters are just names and faces that serve as decoys so fans will have a harder time predicting deaths. The side effect of this is that a lot of screen time is devoted to background characters—screen time that could have served to make the story’s actual characters more interesting.
This results in a show that commits the cardinal sin of being boring. Few of Martin’s characters are worth talking about, and fewer for any length of time, so I’ll try to be brief. We’ll start with the books’ first point-of-view character: Bran Stark.
And lest you assume I don’t like the show just because it kills and tortures its characters, may I just say that this is precisely why I don’t care for Doctor Who despite some standout episodes over the years. There are only so many times the Doctor can lose everything before I lose interest. Alas, I dislike Game of Thrones and the books it’s based on for entirely different reasons.
Bran Stark
Our introduction to the story comes to us through a young boy called Bran Stark. He’s from a rich family just like all the other main characters: the second-youngest son of a lord. At the beginning he seems like a particularly generic child character.
That is, until he catches the queen consort having sex with her twin brother, who throws young Bran out of a tower window and cripples him for life. Now he’s a generic child character with a disability. Conveniently he’s got Soap Opera Amnesia, which has erased his memories of everything leading up to his injury and nothing else.
When Bran’s home castle of Winterfell is occupied by a traitor, Bran flees with his younger brother (not important), a man called Hodor who suffers from a mysterious brain injury, and an assortment of other unimportant side-characters.
Along the way, Bran learns he’s something called a “warg,” which for some reason doesn’t mean he’s a giant demon wolf like the wargs in both Norse mythology and Tolkien’s legendarium. But Bran’s not just any warg—O, no! He’s the warg Chosen One, referred to as the “Three-Eyed Raven,” with the power of time-travel. Yes, I said time-travel! Time travel! Moving on…
Hodor
Bran’s many Chosen One powers include the ability to take over the minds of animals. He can’t do it with humans, but because Martin apparently considers developmentally impaired people to be sub-human, Bran can take over Hodor’s mind. This he does, because our hero thinks of Hodor as little more than a tool to be used however he sees fit.
We later learn that Hodor’s disability is actually Bran’s fault; Hodor’s like this because of a time-travel accident on the Chosen One’s part. And of course Hodor’s entire life has been in preparation for when he must sacrifice himself for Bran. Does anyone else see a moral issue with this?
The Three-Eyed Raven
After several seasons, Bran finally reaches the previous Three-Eyed Raven, an old man who lives in a tree. There they begin Bran’s training, which will turn him from a bland Chosen One to an utterly emotionless husk with time-travel powers.
When he finally reunites with his almost-as-boring family, Bran couldn’t give a crap. It’s the same when he remembers the circumstances of his injury and then comes face-to-face with the man who crippled him: Bran doesn’t really care and even considers him a good man.
Ned Stark
Bran’s father Eddard “Ned” Stark serves as an obvious stand-in for Edward of York, because Game of Thrones was inspired by the Wars of the Roses. Sadly, George R.R. Martin thought it was a good idea to name his characters as thinly-veiled analogues. Is Eddard Stark’s story going to be similar to Edward York’s? As far as I can tell, not really.
Ned Stark comes across as dim-witted and callous, except when it’s plot-convenient for him to act otherwise. Actually, that’s a good description of most of these characters.
Ned’s backstory involves a war during which his best friend seized the Iron Throne of Westeros from a tyrant, that same friend refused to punish war criminals, and Ned’s sister died giving birth to the true heir to the throne. Knowing that his best friend King Robert would kill Ned’s nephew were his identity revealed, Ned wisely decided to hide his identity.
Less wise was Ned’s moronic cover story: that the child was a bastard resulting from Ned’s own infidelity. This leads Ned’s wife Catelyn to hate the child despite forgiving her fake-cheating husband.
He could have said something like, “a lowborn soldier died saving my life, and I swore I’d raise his son,” but then that wouldn’t have led to the boy growing up abused at the hands of a wicked stepmother.
Stark Children
Ned has a bunch of children apart from Bran, only some of whom are important. Really, the most interesting thing about Ned is that he’s portrayed by Sean Bean, who’s clearly the best actor in this thing, even if his performance here is less engaging than one might expect based on his other work.
Child Murder: The “Honourable” Thing to Do
After his son Bran gets pushed from a tower, Ned betrothes his daughter to the psychopathic Prince Joffrey and goes to the city of King’s Landing to solve the attempted murder of his son. He discovers that all King Robert’s supposed children are actually Queen Cersei’s inbred bastards by her twin brother.
Knowing that his best friend would immediately kill all those children if he knew, Ned warns Cersei to get out of the city before he tells Robert about their true parentage.
Because the reader needs to learn that in real life you have to be willing to kill innocent children, Cersei uses this opportunity to orchestrate her husband’s murder. As a result, Cersei’s eldest son Joffrey has Ned executed. This leads to The War of the Five Kings, which I’ll not recount in detail, as it’s quite boring and not all that important.
Jon Snow
Speaking of long-lost heirs to the throne, we have Ned Stark’s nephew Jon Snow, so named because “Snow” is what they call all bastards in the North. Jon’s dream is to succeed his father as Lord of Winterfell, but he can’t because (as far as anyone knows) he’s a bastard.
While Ned, Jon, Bran, and a few others ride home from an execution, they discover a huge direwolf (the Stark family crest) that’s been killed by a Stag (the family crest of House Baratheon, whom the Starks are allied with). They discover a litter of pups still alive, and Ned’s first impulse is to kill them right in front of the horrified Bran.
Jon points out that there’s one wolf for each of Ned’s children, and because Ned’s superstitious when the plot needs him to be, Ned decides to give each of his children one pup as a pet. This is to have surprisingly little significance as the story goes on.
Night’s Watch
Since Jon can’t inherit Ned’s title, he falls back on Plan B. You see, north of where the Starks live lies a giant wall of ice called the Wall, which once served to protect the continent from a horde of ice zombies called the White Walkers and their leader the Night King.
Nowadays the Wall is more of a prison colony for rapists and murderers, and Jon wants to join this Night’s Watch, as they’re called. He does exactly that shortly before his cousin Bran wakes up unable to walk.
Samwell Tarly
When he arrives at the Wall, Jon befriends some of his fellow Night’s Watchmen: Samwell Tarly—the Wall’s resident Samwise Gamgee rip-off—and Pippin Took Pyp. Martin has even admitted this was intentional, so it wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t shower Tolkien with so many backhanded compliments.
We learn that despite having a job where they need to avoid being seen in a snowy landscape, all the brothers of the Night’s Watch wear black uniforms. Smart move, people! Smart move!
Lord Commander
Jon goes undercover as a “Wildling” and has a brief fling that won’t be particularly important. When he gets back to the Night’s Watch headquarters at Castle Black, a half-unconscious Jon shouts in his best Elijah Wood impression:
“Pyp! Sam!”
Jon Snow doing his best Elijah Wood impression
A few battles ensue, and Jon is elected Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. Unfortunately for Jon, he makes the decision to allow refugees into Westeros and winds up getting assassinated.
He’s quickly resurrected, however, and despite eating a bowl of soup in much the same brooding manner as usual, Jon suffers surprisingly few ill effects. He uses his own death as a loophole to get out of the Night’s Watch, and then all the lords of the North choose Jon as their king.
Whether Jon Snow is an exiled bastard, the head of a monastic order, or a resurrected king, he’ll still do whatever is convenient for the plot. And no one can say it’s out of character because he barely has a character, just like the rest of these wretched husks.
Sansa Stark
If there’s one type of character the audience can get behind, it’s got to be the teenager who thinks they’re better than everyone else and treats people like crap, right? Well, meet Ned’s eldest daughter: Sansa Stark. She bullies her younger sister Arya and doesn’t seem too concerned with her brothers’ well-being either.
The story begins as Ned’s friend King Robert visits him to arrange a marriage between Sansa and Joffrey, Robert’s eldest son. Joffrey acts like a jerk the whole time while Sansa fawns over his good looks, and then after a slightly convoluted series of events, King Robert orders that Sansa’s pet wolf be killed so his wife Queen Cersei can have her pelt.
Ned, always the loving father, offers to kill the wolf himself. He does exactly this, although strangely he refuses to hand over her skin and never presents any proof of the deed, so why he even bothered to kill the wolf in the first place is beyond me.
What the queen wanted was the wolf’s pelt, and I’m pretty sure that—from her perspective, at least—refusing to give it to her would be just as much a betrayal as not killing the wolf. This is never brought up, as far as I can remember.
Despite all this, Ned and Robert are still best friends and Sansa’s still in love with Joffrey. This plot-line changed nothing, and I’m almost tempted to think that it was a late addition.
I wouldn’t be much surprised to discover that Sansa’s wolf was originally supposed to die of an illness, because this death has pretty much no impact on Sansa or anyone else. You’d think that Ned, at least, would think that killing his daughter’s destined familiar might lead to her death, but no. No one takes the wolf omens seriously, and what do you know! Nothing comes of them anyway.
Abused
Sansa only figures out that her betrothed is a psychopath when he kills her father, and during the next few seasons it seems like every man in the city of King’s Landing wants nothing more than to molest her.
Suddenly we’re meant to see Sansa as sympathetic, as with any other soap opera. A man named Sandor Clegane even climbs into her chambers one night with intent to rape her.
On a whim Sandor changes his mind and instead forces her to sing at knifepoint. This causes Sansa to fall madly in love with Sandor. Eventually Sansa is forced to marry the queen’s younger brother Tyrion, and shortly thereafter the two of them are framed for King Joffrey’s murder.
Sansa flees the city and is promptly married to another psychopath, who successfully rapes her this time. The scene is, as you might expect of this trash, shot from the rapist’s perspective so as to titillate the very worst of Game of Thrones’ male viewers.
We later learn what has been hinted at all along: that Sansa’s character arc is about how being repeatedly beaten and raped makes her a better, stronger person.
Sansa eventually escapes her tormentor, which involves one of the show’s many examples of deus ex machina, with two other characters appearing out of nowhere to save her. They then travel to the Wall and join Sansa’s cousin Jon in preparing for the White Walkers’ invasion of Westeros.
Daenerys Targaryen
Don’t let the actress fool you. She’s meant to be thirteen years old!
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a thirteen-year-old girl with a name whose spelling barely resembles its pronunciation is angry that she’s being forced to marry a non-white man.
We’re told she would have been fine with marrying her abusive brother Viserys, who’s apparently molested her many times, but marrying a dark-skinned “savage”? No way!
Let me just remind you that this was written from the ’90s to the present; there is no excuse for some of this bullshit.
Daenerys Targaryen is the product of centuries of compound inbreeding, and like most of the inbreds in Game of Thrones, the book described her as stunningly beautiful. And the actress who plays her doesn’t look like any of the photos I’ve seen of inbreds, either.
As far as I can tell, Emilia Clarke was in her twenties when the show started, because HBO couldn’t legally shoot sex scenes with a child actress. This doesn’t stop the book from heavily eroticizing numerous scenes of child molestation.
Speaking of which, Daenerys is married off to the leader of a nomadic tribe, who immediately rapes her on a beach. She almost immediately falls in love with him.
Mother of Dragons
On her fourteenth birthday, Daenerys finds out she’s pregnant with her husband’s child. To her horror, however, she suffers a soap opera miscarriage just as her husband dies of an infection.
Daenerys’ subsequent suicide attempt results in her wedding gifts, three dragon eggs, hatching. Daenerys decides to raise them as her children so they can serve as her own personal super-weapons.
Slave-Trader Pedophile
Through all of this, Daenerys’ closest friend and advisor is a slave-trader pedophile named Jorah. Jorah Mormont is actually a spy, but he switches sides when he falls madly in love with this fourteen-year-old girl.
Despite Martin’s insistence that child marriage is realistic, most of the characters in Game of Thrones regard pedophilia in much the same way as most modern people do: as something disgusting.
That is, apart from the fact that most of them are themselves pedos. That being said, the story seems to want us to root for Jorah here.
The White Saviour of Game of Thrones
Now armed with three dragons, Daenerys sets out to rid the world of slavery. She does this by buying an army of slaves, freeing them (though she still kind of treats them like slaves), and conquering city after city so she can bask in the admiration of freed slaves, who call her “Mother.”
Game of Thrones portrays all the non-white natives she conquers as ignorant savages desperately in need of a white saviour to teach them the difference between right and wrong. Daenerys’s campaign against slavery winds up glorifying her a lot more than it vilifies the true horrors of slavery.
Queen of the Natives
After conquering numerous dark-skinned nations and killing their leaders, Daenerys is finally ready to invade Westeros with her loyal army of non-white supporting characters.
Daenerys gains loads of allies through loads of boring meetings before finally meeting face-to-face with her nephew Jon Snow, and the two of them begin yet another of the show’s incestuous relationships.
Tyrion Lannister
At last we come to the main character Tyrion Lannister. Tyrion is sleazy and cynical, among other things, and he exists mainly as a mouthpiece for the author. As a result, his cynicism and disinterest in “doing the right thing” are both consistently framed as good.
Almost every word out of Tyrion’s mouth represents Martin’s fantasy about what he would say were he as witty as he wants to be.
Unfortunately I can’t understand most of what he says, because the New Jersey-born actor Peter Dinklage’s “British” accent makes Dick Van Dyke look like a master of accents à la Scottish actor David Tennant.
Tyrion’s is by far the worst attempt at an accent I have ever heard in a TV show; Dinklage stumbles through each syllable like he’s never heard English spoken before. I think this was one of those times when they should have just let Dinklage use his real accent; Game of Thrones would have been better for it.
Faramir, But Smaller
Aside from being one of several mouthpieces for Martin, Tyrion is probably also a rip-off of Faramir from The Lord of the Rings. Both had mothers who died when they were young, causing their respective fathers to become distant at best.
Each grew close to his older brother, their father’s favourite who preferred fighting to books. Both, in contrast to their brothers, had a preference for books and lore. And both had fathers who treated them horribly, culminating when their fathers each tried to kill them.
Tyrion’s Backstory
I’ve just summed up most of Tyrion’s character, but just like most of the characters in Game of Thrones, he’s a truly horrible person when the plot needs him to be. Through a convoluted series of events, Tyrion once participated in a gang rape on the orders of his father Tywin.
When Tyrion later finds his favourite prostitute in Tywin’s bed, Tyrion somehow manages to strangle her despite his professed lack of physical strength. Of course, Tyrion being a designated hero, the author goes out of his way to justify as moral everything his hero does.
Every character either thinks Tyrion is great, is bigoted towards him because of his size, or otherwise hates him for reasons beyond his control—whether because of his dwarfism or his parentage.
In any case, Tyrion is presented as being in the right. All his traits—albeit traits we only hear about and rarely see—are things like loyal, honourable, and the like.
Even when Tyrion does the same hideous things as other characters, the story insists that it’s “not his fault.” He always has something witty to say and often acts as the author’s in-universe avatar.
Hand of the Queen
Tyrion is forced to marry Sansa Stark, and even though he really wants to have sex with this underage girl, he refuses to rape her. Despite all the times he has raped women, we are meant to see him as a great guy just because he refuses to rape a main character.
After his father convicts him of King Joffrey’s murder, Tyrion kills his father and heads off to join Daenerys and her armada. His goal, we’re told, is to eventually rape and murder his evil sister Cersei. Remember that we’re meant to like Tyrion…
Cersei Lannister
Ned Stark’s best friend Robert beats and rapes his wife. Can you guess who the villain of this story is? Well, it’s his wife! Robert, on the other hand, is portrayed as a loveable fool whose heart is mostly in the right place.
Robert’s wife Cersei is universally considered evil by the author and pretty much all the characters. Granted, she occasionally does things that are almost cartoonishly evil, but if anything she’s less evil than the other characters the rest of the time.
It’s worth pointing out that Game of Thrones frames King Robert’s crime of raping and otherwise abusing his wife for more than a decade as less heinous than Cersei’s crime: making her abuser into the worst thing a misogynist can imagine being: a cuck.
The Prophecy
Cersei Lannister is Tyrion’s evil sister, who is supposedly more power-hungry than anyone else. She’s the product of cousin-incest, and when she was young she began having sex with her own twin brother Jaime. If anyone can be bothered to remember it, it was Jaime who pushed Bran out of a window at the start of this mess.
Cersei once went to a fortune teller who revealed that she would become queen, that she’d give birth to three children destined to die before she did, and that one of her two younger brothers would grow up to kill her. This causes Cersei to treat Tyrion like garbage, even more than she did before.
Game of Thrones’ Evil Queen
After killing a bunch of random children, orchestrating the murder of her supposedly-a-good-person husband, and many other despicable acts, Cersei fails to save even one of her children.
Cersei does, however, inherit the throne from her youngest son, at which point she takes her inevitable place as the Evil Queen of the story.
Catelyn Stark
Neither Ned Stark’s wife Catelyn nor their eldest son Robb are particularly important to the story. In fact, the only reason I chose to mention them at all is because of the most famous scene in Game of Thrones: the Red Wedding. But let’s start at the beginning.
Catelyn Tully was betrothed to Ned Stark’s brother, but when he died she was married off to Ned himself. Somehow she found time to fall in love with him, though I can’t think when that might have happened amidst Robert’s Rebellion.
Despite not resenting Ned for supposedly cheating on her, Catelyn loathes Jon for being born. It’s made absolutely clear in the book that Catelyn wouldn’t have cared how many bastards Ned fathered as long as she didn’t have to look at them.
In any case, she reserves all her hatred for the infant and prays for the gods to kill Jon. When Bran’s in a coma, Catelyn refuses to let Jon say goodbye before he leaves forever. In the book, she even tells Jon to his face that she wishes he’d fallen from the tower. And after all this, we’re meant to like her. Seriously.
Something cold moved in her eyes. “I told you to leave,” she said. “We don’t want you here.”
A Game of Thrones
Her eyes found him. They were full of poison. “I need none of your absolution, bastard.”
A Game of Thrones
“It should have been you,” she told him. Then she turned back to Bran and began to weep, her whole body shaking with the sobs. Jon had never seen her cry before.
A Game of Thrones
See that? Notice how George R.R. Martin emphasizes Catelyn’s anguish even when she’s telling an innocent child that she wants him dead. This is called narrative framing, and the text is very clearly on Catelyn’s side here.
The Red Wedding
After her son Robb manages to offend a potential ally, they both try to mend the rift by arranging a wedding. At the wedding in question, their hosts murder Robb and everyone else except Catelyn with crossbows.
Grief-stricken, Catelyn’s first impulse isn’t to kill the mastermind (who was right in front of her at the time), but rather to grab the nearest innocent bystander from under a table and hold them hostage. In the show it’s a fifteen-year-old girl, but in the books it’s a mentally-challenged man called Jinglebell.
See that woman about to slit the innocent girl’s throat? We’re supposed to like her!
As is common in stories, the character who’s supposed to be the villain doesn’t care about the hostage and has his men deal Robb a killing blow. Unlike in ordinary stories, Catelyn doesn’t cast the hostage away and throw the knife at her enemy. Instead, she slits the mentally-challenged man’s throat, drops the knife, and stands there screaming for a while.
Honourable Murder
And just in case you can’t believe we’re actually meant to like this character, allow me to present her threat in its entirety. Catelyn’s quote in the show is as follows, and it’s similar in the book:
“On my honour as a Tully, on my honour as a Stark, let him go or I will cut your wife’s throat!”
Catelyn Stark
I think, given the morality we’ve seen thus far, that it’s pretty clear we’re meant to think it would be dishonourable were she to spare her hostage, since that would mean breaking her oath. Thus, if I’m not completely off, Martin wants us to like Catelyn more because she murdered an innocent bystander, not less.
Murder or Suicide
Lastly, many fans have tried to explain Catelyn’s murder of her hostage as being an act of suicide. The idea is that she wanted to be killed so she did something that would force them to kill her. Unfortunately that explanation doesn’t hold up to any amount of scrutiny. Catelyn obviously had a knife in her hand; she could easily have killed herself.
Better yet, she could have at least tried to kill her son’s killer instead. That way, they’d have to kill her or let their leader die, and in the best case scenario she might succeed in avenging her son before that. Instead Catelyn kills an innocent, whom none of her enemies care about in the slightest, before clawing her own eyes out.