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.
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.
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.