I’m sorry if you thought that the final season of Game of Thrones was not to your liking. I’m sorry if you feel like the characters you’ve invested so much time and emotion in didn’t quite end up where you wanted them to be. But if you feel so entitled over somebody else’s creative vision that you think you have the right to tell them to remake it with more ‘competent writers’ then maybe you ought to try writing your own seven-tome fantasy epic or adapting your own remarkably expensive television project instead.

Realistically there was never gonna be an ending that satisfied everyone, the show was simply too big and too popular for that. And the same online bandwagon effect that rose this show to international phenomenon status kinda turned on it at the end there, as Jon did to Dany. Live by the sword and die by the sword. So it goes. But everybody took different personal expectations into this final series and of course those expectations wouldn’t all be met.

Were there some stupid bits of writing in the last season? Of course there were. Dany’s heel turn didn’t come as suddenly as some people seem to think but the dragon-killing bolts that have perfect accuracy until they don’t any more, Dany ‘kinda forgetting’ about the iron fleet, and Missandei randomly getting captured despite everyone else washing up ashore… those were all pretty stupid. But this wasn’t a season eight thing either because the dumbest thing this show ever did was send a bunch of heroes north to capture a wight for tenuous reasons and at massive risk (note that they won the battle for the living without Cersei anyway). No coincidence at all that these inconsistent elements emerged as the show diverged further from the books.

Keep it real though, this is a completely unique beast we’re dealing with here. Plenty of books have been adapted as shows/films and plenty of those shows/films have eventually expanded beyond their source material. But having a show adapted from a book that hasn’t even been written yet is a new one, that’s for sure. Supposedly GRRM had a big old chat with D+D a few years back where he outlined his main visions for the end of the story and it’s from those outlines that the show has been working ever since.

David Benioff, 2014: “Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be. If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character.”

Martin described those outlines as “broad strokes” which is a little less comprehensive. So here’s a theory on that: what’s if all those dumb bits were all because of George RR Martin’s ideas? More specifically, the pressure of staying true to GRRM’s ideas. Like, now there’s plenty of chat about how much better his books will be while showrunners Benioff and Weiss are copping it from all angles but think about what they’re working with here.

Martin told them where to go with the ending. Character by character. So it’s likely that the book ending won’t be a whole lot different from the show ending, which means that Mad Queen Dany and King Bran might well be exactly what we end up with after all when A Dream of Spring is finally published. Following The Winds of Winter which, fingers crossed, might be out early next year. Best not get attached to the prediction game, tbh, too many deadlines have already come and gone.

But yeah, the difference with the novels will be that, with the character perspectives from which they’re told and the vast space for elaboration on the page, the books are going to do a more expansive job of explaining things compared to what felt like an unnecessarily rushed final season of the HBO show. Dany’s descent will make way more sense from within her own inner monologue. Same with Bran randomly deciding that he wanted to be king after all despite showing zero worldly passions for three seasons previous. They feel like much better book ideas.

But the biggest problems weren’t the show’s monumental moments, those were always going to be controversial. It was the set ups that really got you scratching your head. For every page that GRRM publishes, he probably has thirty more of mythology and backstory that won’t see the light of day but which contribute to the world-building of his fantasy universe. JRR Tolkien is always the example for fantasy writers and he invented entire languages for his Lord of the Rings novels. We’re talking warehouses of research and development in order to colourise a thousand-page novel. Martin mighta told D+D how the show is ending but he surely never told them all the minute details that would go into getting them there.

Dany’s madness, filtered through grief, is a great example of this theory. The dragon killing. Missandei’s execution. These events happened in order to get us to the monumental moment where she burned down King’s Landing, which was probably GRRM’s idea. Same goes for bringing back all those Dothraki who had clearly been mostly wiped out at Winterfell. Yet conveniently having them around meant we got that dark and wonderful scene where Dany addressed her followers looking like something out of a Hitler rally. It wasn’t where they got to, it was the getting there that was the problem. Filling in the blanks, so to speak.

That’s where an otherwise great final season slipped up for Game of Thrones but it’s unfair to put that blame solely on The Two Ds. They went off-book whilst still trying to stay honest to the writer’s original vision, a mix and match of creative expressions. Those big moments were 100% Martin: consistent in their vision. But the things that D+D wrote on their own were in service to getting to Martin’s intended conclusion so they were always compromised. Sticking to those broad strokes that GRRM gave them might have been more of a risk than they were worth.

Because while the books won’t be too different in literal outcome, the journey to get there will be completely different, not in the least because of characters like Lady Stoneheart and Young Griff who never made it to the show and how they might affect things, but even characters like Dany, Tyrion, Jaime, and Arya feel different in the show than they do in the books. Largely because of the undeniable portrayals from those actors, which definitely affected the telly writing, and also a little because of the limitations of telling a story like this through such a visual medium. So Benioff and Weiss might as well have just gone crazy with it. Who knows, maybe they did?

Thing is we won’t know for sure until we’ve read the final book and that could be years from now. Unfortunately the show also suffered from that uncertainty. Just the mere presence of the idea that there will be some sort of alternative ending out there when the last book is published sort of added a layer of malleability to the final season. People didn’t see this ending as definitive because there’s already another one out there. So why not a third and just re-write the whole thing? Again, stupid way of thinking. But it was at least partly influenced by this insane situation where the last two-sevenths of the book series this show was based on haven’t even been written yet.

So maybe take it easy on Benioff and Weiss here. And give George RR Martin the room to write the books he wants to write as well. After all the old axiom stands undefeated: the book is always better. Usually because it comes first and has more room to work with. Here’s what GRRM had to say in his blog the day after the series finale on HBO:

“How will it all end? I hear people asking. The same ending as the show? Different? Well… yes. And no. And yes. And no. And yes. And no. And yes. I am working in a very different medium than David and Dan, never forget. They had six hours for this final season. I expect these last two books of mine will fill 3000 manuscript pages between them before I’m done… and if more pages and chapters and scenes are needed, I’ll add them. And of course the butterfly effect will be at work as well.”

Same as people who raged against the show’s ending are doing, it’s probably best to let the author have the final word.

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