The Game of Thrones Finale Issues a Stark Warning of the Purgatory of Franchise Fandom

Now that the Westerosi revolution has been televised, the largest battle in Game of Thrones history has officially begun: the debate over whether showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss stuck the landing.

Whether you view the discourse around GoT’s final season as a blithe apology tour for a parade of poor writing choices, a complete upheaval of GRRM’s motivation for creating the world in the first place, or a weathervane for the feminization of all culture because a teenaged assassin killed an ice demon, it’s important to remember that the higher echelons of AT&T are taking it all in.

This isn’t going to become a rebuke of mass media conglomeration, but it’s worth remembering that the Season 8 debate (however sprawling or divisive) is an expected deliverable for any major film and television IP, just as much as box office returns or ratings. Content providers want open-ended IPs that allow for infinite creative interpretation in order to stoke the flames of controversy to prolong brand engagement until the next entry is released. Generally, the process goes: 

1.  License creative properties that either:

a.     Capture the cultural zeitgeist or represent a shift in audience expectation (Black Panther, Deadpool, Game of Thrones)

b.     Invoke nostalgia (Star Wars, Live-action Disney)

c.     Both (Captain Marvel)

2.  Create as much content as the property’s marketability and profitability will allow to grow the audience and bandwidth for original anthology content (Fast and Furious [Hobbs and Shaw], Avengers [Marvel Multiverse])

3.  Tacitly promise some form of closure to narrative threads that we help content providers identify through the online crucible of post-game reaction.

4.  Deliver enough closure to satiate the fanbase but spin off completely new character and plot threads in the process.

5.  Return to step 2.

This isn’t a huge revelation; in fact, this has always been how the film and TV industry has operated. One could even argue that the reason why GoT became such a phenomenon in the first place is because of the increasing sophistication of filmgoers and TV audiences.

Still, because of how revolutionary and culturally impactful the show has been, it seems many GoT fans (myself included) carried an emotional blind spot borne by past goodwill into Season 8. This, despite the fact that we all understood that Benioff and Weiss gave themselves the impossible task of ending a decade-old geopolitical and metaphysical epic in six episodes despite being closer to the story’s midpoint than its climax.

I recall being in complete denial going into the first episode, Winterfell. I couldn’t begin to fathom how the showrunners would reach a satisfying conclusion with so little runway, but an ambitious plan must have an equally ambition solution, right? Surely, they’ve got this.

In retrospect, I feel like an idiot because obviously the answer was no. The second the news broke that Weiss and Benioff were working on a new Star Wars trilogy, it should’ve been abundantly clear to all of us that the most popular and scrutinized show in TV history was pulling the handbrake solely for the sake of its creators’ professional necessity.

Then, it should’ve been even clearer that GoT had crossed the narrow sea between intricately curated epic to shrewd IP when HBO opted not to continue the series with new showrunners, but instead greenlight a ton of spin-offs designed to fill in the gaping plot holes they knew would be left behind from the parent series’ abrupt ending.

Essentially, they distributed a flawed product designed to justify the existence of future “improved” products. You can see the same commercial dynamic anytime Gen 1 tech is brought to market, or in the video game industry with the advent of weekly patching and undercooked early access titles.

Despite the fact that our biggest pop-cultural tentpoles are being made more cynically than ever, that doesn’t mean we should lose our intrinsic passion for them. Our interactions with these major film and TV properties—and our interactions with each other after—makes every premiere a cultural event and, to a degree, help us better understand our world and the perspectives that build it.

We just have to better smarter consumers. Like Cersei, we have to respect the inevitability of our situation and act accordingly. The final season of Thrones didn’t answer many questions, but it makes it painfully clear that no amount of audience devotion will guarantee a responsible conclusion. In this case, it didn’t even oblige the show’s creators to even consider one.

Even sadder, content providers don’t even have to consider a lackluster ending as failure anymore, so long as they position the show as one component of a much larger revenue machine to be complimented by future iterations. It’s a wheel too large for even a show like Game of Thrones to break.

Like many fans, I’ve also noted the increased divisiveness and toxic dogma of die-hard Thrones fans quick to identify what is and isn’t the proper ending. This binary viewing of the show and the book series only serves to undercut the more impressive achievement of the Thones­-verse, which is the rich, nuanced character and world development that allows these fan debates to happen in perpetuity. More importantly, though, it makes it too easy for future GoT content creators to lure us in with the carrot of finality, only to leave us wanting because that is, after all, the first rule of show business.

Winter has come and gone, and we are left with only cold comforts following the series finale. The first being the mass delusion that GRRM will finish the books, so good to see we’re already learning our lesson about expecting too much from a franchise. The second should be our acceptance of the inconclusive nature of the stories we desperately seek canonical resolution for. Instead, we should grow our appreciation for these seminal works of art by learning how others relate to them, as opposed to viewing new perspectives as an affront to your unique relationship to them.

…And all of that’s to say, The Night King really should’ve just killed everyone.