Game of Groans, because Original Jokes are for Losers

Photo depicting my mood by Marc Kleen

I've spent most of my morning writing various promotional posts for Academicasaurus, so I'm no longer quite as annoyed about the most recent Game of Thrones episode as I was last night. However, I'm still sufficiently irritated enough that I keep thinking about it, so I might as well write some of it down, I guess. I chose to post it here instead of on Facebook because of the whole spoiler thing, but also because...I dunno. I keep forgetting to use this blog, and while it may find a second life this summer as a Paul Newman movie chronicler, right now it's still the same random bunch of nonsense it's always been.

So let's complain about Game of Thrones.

There are many things to say about the episode last night. Much of it was disappointing, lots of it was dumb, and almost all of it was the result of being in the hands of writers who have little to no interest in furthering (or honoring) character development in any meaningful way. In the immortal words of Tina, "it's pretty bad when you fuck up a zombie's characterization." And while I could write a billion-word post concerning the various characters that got screwed over (or just run over) in last night's episode, Daenerys is the one that really bothers me. And speaking as someone who isn't actually all that emotionally invested in this series, that's...not great.

What I keep getting caught up on when I think about the miserable rubble that was last night's episode is the fact that what happened should have been, if handled properly, the single most tragic moment of the entire series. Daenerys, the character who has spent the past ten years with us trying to prove that she is more than who her parents were and who her enemies believed her to be, who fought for a fair and just world, who defied every odd to become a queen, succumbs to the relentless cruelty of everything that has happened to her and those she loves. That is sad. She's a character who, ultimately, has failed. She tried so hard for so long to believe in, essentially, the impossible. She's been kidnapped, abused, beaten, betrayed, and has lost absolutely everyone who has ever meant anything to her. She's lost two dragons - her children, she's lost her best friend, she's lost her true love, and she's lost Jorah, who was - despite how he felt - basically her father figure. He died protecting her, in her arms, directly after she had to fight her own child who had been murdered and turned into an abomination who no longer recognized her. It's not a stretch to believe that this much loss and defeat could, ultimately, break her completely.

The problem is that this show has no idea how to handle any kind of emotionality whatsoever. Nothing really matters, not anymore. When Jorah died, it clearly affected her. His funeral affected her. And then - it was on to the next thing. There was no lingering sense of emotion. She was basically acting the same way she'd been before Jorah died; it was as if the character had simply been lifted away, and now we were doing something else.

The same thing with the second dragon. The dragon dies very quickly, and then that's sort of just it. Sure, we are told that she's not eating, but we don't get a real sense of Daenerys or what she's feeling. The show relies on other people to talk about it instead, which is not an effective method of creating a connection with the character. One of the things that Brian and I talked about in relation to last night's episode is the fact that you really never see Daenerys' face. There's the one moment right before she goes full firebomb, but aside from that we don't get to see her expressions. We don't see her fury, we don't see her devastation, we don't see anything. That's been the consistent problem, especially with her (and arguably with Sansa, but that's another conversation). We're just told how things are and expected to accept it.

Like I said, I don't necessarily believe that Daenerys snapping and murdering a whole city is outside of the realm of possibility. However, within the framework of the show that was created following the end of Martin's books, it was absolutely undeserved and undermining. Rather than being  a devastating depiction of someone succumbing to a rage of overwhelming grief, it's just the mad queen turning into her father. This episode was the easy out of so many things. Jamie has fully reverted back to the dumbest version of himself, following last episode's milestone of getting Brienne in a dress so she can cry in a courtyard. You know. So she can truly become a woman. The Hound's death would make more sense if we'd actually learned something more about the characters, but we don't. We just discover that the Mountain hates his brother so much that his undead, completely controlled brain is able to override his creators. Why? Who knows. See Tina's comment above. Meanwhile, Greyworm is off getting rage revenge, just like his queen, and Jon Snow stands around ineffectively aside from when he saves a woman from being raped, because #hero. And as Tina pointed out, Arya continues to have all of her interesting character traits replaced by the motto "Not Today," though at least this time she was joined by a similarly defiant horse. I think the only person whose death was slightly shocking was Qyburn, but that could just be because I like Anton Lesser. Oh well. Hopefully this season of Endeavour is good.

Look - I know I'm a difficult person to make happy when it comes to storytelling. I dislike far more things than I enjoy. I routinely just quit watching television shows because I find them dull or disappointing, and I am extremely hard to please with extended universe stuff (don't ask me what I thought about End Game. You won't like the answer). And if you find yourself thinking "Oh, so you think you could write it better?", the answer is no. I'm well aware that I'm not some kind of writing genius. If you've listened to my podcast or read my books (or gotten this far in my blog post, LOL), you know this as well as I do. But I still think that if I can see all of these stupid, disappointing flaws and dropped character development, then the people who are paid a million dollars to write a series they didn't create should be able to write better plots than the fanfiction writers who would gladly take some money for what they do. I'm betting we'd get a better end product if we asked people on Ao3 to wrap things up for us. They actually care about these characters.

I don't really feel like guessing what's going to happen in the final episode. I have thoughts of course, since I'm a human being who watches the show and also engages in blinking and breathing, but just...it doesn't really matter, does it? At this point, it's hard to picture it being anything other than disappointing. I've been creeping on posts from people who have read the books, and it's interesting to see their reactions concerning what could have been. Honestly, I never really wanted to read the books, but their comments are making me more interested than I was before. Maybe I'll give it a try once this season is over, and then we'll return to the real, true tragedy of all this - that George R R Martin couldn't type a little gosh darn faster.