Notoriously HBO’s Game of Thrones series delivered a final season (or two, depending on your view) that disappointed most fans of both the show and The Song of Fire and Ice novels. Yet there has been some hope that since George R.R. Martin has not finished books 6 and 7 of the series, we might get a better written conclusion and maybe a better ending.
As in: no Bran. Okay, let the guy live, but don’t give him the throne. He’s just too weird and feckless.
Alas, we might be stuck with Bran as the oligarchic figurehead. The Express writes that despite fan pressures to finish and to change the books, Martin will be sticking to his plan:
Well, according to Martin he doesn’t want to rush, as he wants the last two books to be as good as possible even if fans know how it all ends now.
”Even if the fans know how it all ends” is the phrase that sticks with me. In the context of the Entertainment Weekly interviewThe Express farms content from, this phrase seems to imply that Martin is resisting the temptation to change plot and character revelations that fans on the Internet has already guessed.
There were early hints about [who Snow’s parents were] in the books, but only one reader in 100 put it together. And before the internet that was fine — for 99 readers out of 100 when Jon Snow’s parentage gets revealed it would be, ‘Oh, that’s a great twist!’ But in the age of the internet, even if only one person in 100 figures it out then that one person posts it online and the other 99 people read it and go, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’ Suddenly the twist you’re building towards is out there. And there is a temptation to then change it [in the upcoming books] — ‘Oh my god, it’s screwed up, I have to come up with something different.’ But that’s wrong. Because you’ve been planning for a certain ending and if you suddenly change direction just because somebody figured it out, or because they don’t like it, then it screws up the whole structure. So no, I don’t read the fan sites. I want to write the book I’ve always intended to write all along. And when it comes out they can like it or they can not like it.
As a writer, I completely respect this position. When you write a story, your main priority is staying true to the story, to the best possible telling of the tale, but also to the integrity of it.
As a reader, too — our culture of spoiler avoidance has always bothered me as sensation fixated neurotic tic. For most of the history of drama, from the Greeks through Shakespeare to your local high school production of Death of a Salesman, knowing how a story ends is not as important as the telling of the story itself and what the production says about its themes and characters. We know Hamlet is gonna dither, and Oedipus unintentionally slept with his mom and killed his father, and Willy Loman is a sad, beaten down little man who betrayed his family. But they are all great stories, the writing is standard bearing, and let’s hope the actors can provide some new insight into fictional lives that have become so iconic. Martin has created a world and a cast of characters that have already left their mark upon our culture, and his vision for the series should be respected.
He also has a much better knack for storytelling than the two D’s. The GoT showrunners favored spectacle and plot twists over the intelligence or the arcs of their characters. As Lindsay Ellis recently pointed out, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss paid too much attention to fan predictions on Internet forums, writing more in the interest of surprising viewers and thwarting their expectations, at the expense of coherency, meaning, and the integrity of the show.
Of course, thanks to Martin, they were in a tough spot when during the fifth season they began to run out of source material. And, yes, they had to work from Martin’s rough outline and suggestions. So Martin is not entirely blameless for the disappointment the last two seasons became.
However, we should expect that Martin’s talents and critical judgment will guide him toward a better, more satisfying resolution. I just really hope, even if Bran is the one finally chosen to lead Westeros, his ascension to the throne is not treated like some brilliant idea from the mind of Tyrion. It should be a cynical joke. The only moment I truly enjoyed from the finale came when Samuel Tarly gets laughed down for suggesting democracy. It suggested that Bran’s election was an elite-driven reform meant to divert the revolutionary tendencies of the peasants hinted at throughout the series. The seven houses sacrificed the lives of thousands of oppressed people to pursue their selfish ends, a theme that Martin (and D&D themselves) has emphasized repeatedly, so we should not expect a happy affirmation of our ideals or preferences when the books end. But we should expect an ending that — both thematically and in terms of the main characters — makes sense.
