Spoilers ahead for A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones… although why would you be reading this if you didn’t already know those things…
The End of a Fantasy
A Song of Ice and Fire is not a story that should have an ending. It was written to decimate all the tropes of fantasy where the heroes win, honour is rewarded, duty is respected and we stand sure-footed on firm foundations. It is a deconstruction of fantasy stories.
George R.R. Martin intended for his fantasy epic to be a trilogy of books but it has since escalated beyond that. Its complexity is double-edged; few stories can match its intricacy and interwoven plot lines, but this comes at a cost - it’s hard to finish writing. What you have are loose ends whose allure is lost when tied. But there is a greater issue. In its unflinching cruelty and lack of sentiment, the story is true to life (despite the fantastical elements) - too true.
Life does not contort itself into neat bows for our benefit nor our detriment. It does as it will. It leaves our questions not unanswered but often ignored, our plans at sea or shipwrecked. A sad ending is as untrue to life as a happy one. In the story, tradition and trauma perpetuate down the generations. The actions of each character sit on a continuum between the deep backstory that precedes them and the ripples they create forward in time. It is endless - like life. You could stop at certain points, and certain points might feel more natural to stop at than others, but there is no “end”. An ending is the biggest trope of all.
As things stand Jon Snow is still lying dead on the cold ground of Castle Black and has been there for over a decade now. People see this as a cliffhanger. I would contend that this is in fact the zenith of the story. The moment where a story line or character we're invested in gets ripped away from us makes this story what it is. Had the story stopped after the death of Ned Stark or at the Red Wedding or indeed where it is right now - it would be perfect. It is the point of this story to give us these moments, or rather, to deny us the moments that we want. George R.R. Martin knows it’s not really what we want. We want the constant looming threat, we want death to be sitting at all times in the room with our heroes. We want to become attached and to lose it all. We want to grieve - because that makes it real.
George dying before finishing the series is the perfect meta ending for the story. It leaves us hanging, grieving and feeling robbed of something we're owed. Am I saying that Martin did this by design? No, definitely not. It still counts as a failure on his part but in my warped mind it's poetic. Do we deserve our ending? Yes, of course. This story's legendary status is built on the love, investment and obsession of the fans. But, you don't always get what you deserve. That's life.
The cultural phenomenon of the GoT show is something I think we're still feeling the effects of. There are likely many factors that contributed to its success, but I find the whole to be less than its sum, and I really want to point a finger at the show runners.
The lack of understanding of the source material can be felt from the very beginning: in the book, Daenarys is traded like any other diplomatic chess piece, as is fitting her role in a feudal society, but then Drogo shows her tenderness and caring during their consumation. In the show, the interaction cannot be classified as anything other than rape.
This same thing happens in the season when Jamie returns to Cersei as she's mourning her son's death: in the book it is a consensual, albeit utterly disturbing sexual event, whereas in the show a woman is saying "No" and "Stop" and it's completely ignored. And the brain-dead, tone deaf response the fans got was "well WE didn't think it was rape."
While some changes and concessions have to be made when translating stories across mediums, there were many that likely had thought put behind them. And then the final season has literally no thought, simply a continued demonstration of what the show runners thought the audience liked: sex, violence, madness.
An entire zeitgeist formed around millions of people (not all of them adults) consuming this sensationalist media. Conversations about incest started happening. The world had a collective freak out about the red wedding - this particular reaction being enough for me to throw my hands in the air and dejectedly submit to the entirety of episode 1, which contains for too much reality for my fantasy epic. In the following episodes I could see the epic tale beginning to develop, and I managed to start enjoying the show. But the damage was done, and I committed to cautious optimism which was ultimately pissed on by the ending.
As someone who aspires to create, I also wonder what sort of thinking develops as you prepare for the possibility of finishing a story. Some authors choose successors to carry the torch, and that sort of emotional math interests me as I hope to understand the human equation.