I’m Still Mad About Game of Thrones

The reason I didn’t write this earlier is because I’m ashamed to be writing about a TV show at all.

There will be spoilers.

But I liked Game of Thrones, and I cared about it for nearly a decade. So I guess it makes sense that it left a mark.

So I guess—first things first—why am I mad?

Is it because the last season or two were bad? Sure, I guess that’s the easy path. The last season sucked, and they ruined everything. That’s a way to be done with it.

Except it’s not. That doesn’t explain why this is still a splinter in my soul.

Let’s look at the deeper reasons. And let’s start with a capture of what went wrong.

It was too easy to defeat the night king
It was too easy to defeat the whitewalkers
Not nearly enough people died to make it a big deal in the final battle
Many characters didn’t proper treatment, e.g., Cersei should have had a death that matched her life

Those are bad, but the real problem was Daenerys.

This is the reason I’m still mad about this goddamn show.

I’m mad that they messed up her character. And I’m mad that they didn’t realize they did it.

I keep hearing defenses from the TV show producers, and from GRRM, saying that the seeds were laid all along. That we should have seen it. That it went exactly as planned, according to a meticulous plan of character development.

Well, you know what? You’re right. You did show that she could go bad. You did show that she had it in her the whole time. And it was realistic.

But so what. Fuck you anyway. And here’s why.

You turned a character—loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world—into fucking Hitler.

And not a little bit, either. Like actual Hitler.

Uniforms. Mass death. Planned control of the world. The subjugation of any who resist. All of it.

People fucking named their kids Daenerys. She was a feminist icon. She was a goddamn hero.

She represented the light with darkness. She represented breaking away from destiny and being better than what we were supposed to be. What others thought we would be.

But no, you had to honor the original idea and honor all those seeds you planted along the way. You had to see the full tree be born as it was planned from the beginning.

I get that nobody planned on it being as big as it was. And I get that it’s hard to change course on a story and production like that.

But damn.

Once you saw that the entire world wanted this girl to break the chain—to be better—to overcome. You could have found a better way. Hell, I could have. And hundreds of people actually did.

There were tons of lines where she went a little bad—and like Kamakasi’d her dragon into Cersei’s tower killing them both—or some other dramatic ending. She didn’t have to exit as a saint.

But Hitler?

That’s your answer?

Turn the one fucking beacon of hope—built over 10 years—into a genocidal murderer?

And then, to make the thing even worse, you mess up the execution on top of it.

Suddenly the whitewalkers aren’t so bad after all. All the Dothraki die in an episode, but then turn out to be just fine. And so many characters get abysmal resolutions (Jaime, Brienne, etc.)

What we lost wasn’t just a show. What we lost was hope that a show could actually be as good as it promised.

That’s the part that bothers me.

It was a crime against hope.

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