After eight intense seasons of scheming (on the part of the characters) and puzzling (on the part of the viewership), at long last we finally know who won the Game of Thrones.
I did.
A few years back, as friends and colleagues were indulging in fevered speculation about who would ultimately end up on the Iron Throne, I attempted to spare them another Lost-style disappointment by explaining the story conventions of what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff identified as “postnarrative” fiction, which eschews the predictable, linear, closed-ended form of the monomythic arc—Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey”—in favor of an unpredictable, nonlinear, “hyperlinked” mode of narrative “that gets more open rather than more closed as it goes along” (Molly Soat, “Digital Disruption and the Death of Storytelling,” Marketing News, April 2015, 44), and accounts for such Digital Age watercooler shows as The Walking Dead, Westworld, Orphan Black, This Is Us, and Mr. Robot.
To that end, I argued that no series with as many characters and concurrent plotlines as Game of Thrones had been made to service could ever rightfully hope—or even credibly intend—to reach a definitive climax, let alone have any catharsis to offer in exchange for viewers’ time and miss-no-detail devotion:
The opening titles sequence of the show betrays this emphasis: the camera pans over an animated map of the entire world of the saga, showing the various divisions and clans within the empire. It is drawn in the style of a fantasy role-playing map used by participants as the game board for their battles and intrigues. And like a fantasy role-playing game, the show is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible. There is plot—there are many plots—but there is no overarching story, no end. There are so many plots, in fact, that an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point.
Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, [New York: Penguin Group, 2013], 34.
The many, many peers who willingly engaged me on the subject by and large dismissed the very notion of postnarrativity—of course all stories are meant to provide closure, the argument went, and A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin was on record as knowing the particulars of how his saga would conclude!—and insisted with good-natured sportsmanship that my Game of Thrones prediction (prophecy?) would be decisively debunked come the series finale. To support that assertion, the legendary five-hour pitch meeting was often cited in which screenwriters David Benioff and D. B. Weiss claimed to have accurately deduced Jon Snow’s true parentage and were accordingly rewarded with Martin’s theretofore elusive blessing to adapt the high-fantasy series for Hollywood.
To which I emphatically called bullshit. The account of that alleged pitch meeting—much more so than anything from the world of Westeros—is pure fantasy from people who know a thing or two about mythopoeia.
To wit: Anyone who’s ever written a story—particularly a long-form, multipart saga like A Song of Ice and Fire—knows that a narrative takes on a course of its own as it develops, and an author’s notions about where it’s all going are about as bankable as our grand ideas of how are own lives are going to play out in five, ten, fifteen years. In life, you got your plans and schemes… and then you got what happens irrespective of those. The latter always wins. Fiction works in a similar fashion. (And—you can take my word for this—little if anything that gets pitched in development meetings survives to the final draft, anyway.) As David Benioff himself said in 2015:
We’ve had a lot of conversations with George, and he makes a lot of stuff up as he’s writing it. Even while we talk to him about the ending, it doesn’t mean that that ending that he has currently conceived is going to be the ending when he eventually writes it.
Debra Birnbaum, “‘Game of Thrones’ Creators: We Know How It’s Going to End,” Variety, April 15, 2015
Exactly. And whereas a novel is beholden to the vagaries of merely a single determinant—its author—a television show is a complex organism whose creative evolution changes constantly based on content restrictions imposed by the studio, talent availability, production logistics, budgetary considerations… an endless host of factors.
Case in point: It came to light earlier this year that shortly after completing work on the first season of GoT, series mainstay Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) underwent high-risk surgery to treat a life-threatening brain aneurysm. In the hypothetical instance she’d been unable to resume work on the show, what would that have meant for the so-called “grand plan” of Game of Thrones?
It would’ve been thrown right out the window is what.
That’s the way TV production works. It’s amorphous. It’s fluid. It’s necessarily reactive. Trying to conceive and carry out a five-year plan for a serialized show is about as tenable as trying to do the same for one’s personal and/or professional life. It can’t really be done because none of us know what tomorrow might bring. Any showrunner that insists he knows how it all ends is either full of shit or delusional.
Despite that, my contemporaries maintained the same unwavering faith in the Game of Thrones writers that Tyrion inexplicably invested in Dany, certain all would be paid off and tied up at journey’s end—you’ll see!
“Spoiler alert”: It wasn’t.
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