And now our watch has ended.
Game of Thrones ended May 19, in a fashion that most people expected: After Queen Daenerys destroyed Kings’ Landing and further demonstrated her danger to the world in a speech to her troops, Tyrion publicly quit as her advisor and, in prison, advised Jon Snow to kill her off. Which Jon did. And as a compromise to the Unsullied (who took Dany’s death personally for some reason) Jon was exiled and the new King became Bran Stark, which a few people did expect. I’m not sure how many people expected Drogon to respond to Dany’s death by melting the Iron Throne, but there was certainly a point to it, as with the destruction of the One Ring: Power corrupts, and for the world to be healthy, the object of that power should be destroyed.
In that regard, there’s a whole lot of meta-text in the final episode. With the kings’ throne gone, Samwell Tarly observes that the aristocracy has brought things to this point, and actually proposes that decisions which affect everyone should be made by “everyone.” And the other nobles just laugh him down. I guess democracy is above the Social axiom of this cosm.
Tyrion then says that if nations are to have leadership, people are most motivated by stories, and tells the noble council that to create a leader that people will follow, the most compelling story is that of Bran “the Broken.” And again, this is agreed to because he’s actually a better alternative than Jon Snow or war with the Unsullied. And then as more meta-text, Ser Brienne actually gets to write the final chronicle of Jaime Lannister’s life, and the whole set of accounts is presented to the royal council as “A Song of Ice and Fire,” establishing that in some imaginary universe, the whole thing actually was completed in print.
And when it was all said and done, most of us in the audience thought it was … Odd? Dull? Anticlimactic?
Well, of course. The story is over because the conflict is over. And the conflict is over because the thoughtful, responsible people, like Sansa and Davos, got together and hammered out a system where they could work together. Arya doesn’t want to be involved in Westeros anymore, so she left it. Jon was never really cut out to be king, he certainly can’t be now, so he’s back up North with Ghost and the wildlings, where he’s- well, I wouldn’t call Jon Snow “happy,” but at least at home. Sansa always wanted to keep the North free, and she, once the most useless character in the series, used her will and negotiation to make it truly independent. And Bran is content to be a symbolic monarch for Westeros while Tyrion does the hands-on work. If people like this had been in charge in the first place, you wouldn’t have had all these wars and death.
People get addicted to drama. And by “drama” I don’t just mean a fantasy of castles and dragons. I mean the spectacle of watching emotional, dysfunctional people act out their issues, screw up their lives, and make the world more complicated than it has to be while making everybody else suffer in the process. A spectacle sometimes known as politics.
I get the impression that if the real world’s current crop of drama queens, inbred aristocrats and religious cultists kills itself off with its own stupidity, some people just won’t know what to do with themselves.