Game of Thrones: Let's Start With the Ending

This never happened

It should have been Jon Snow.

Fire and Ice, Stark and Targaryen, The Prince Who Was Promised.

In fact, this is my recommendation to George RR Martin to help him finish the books. Make Jon the king in the end. That story line should be easy to write, because the whole story leads to that ending. No need to have Tyrion appoint the human encyclopedia and have everyone miraculously agree. Jon makes sense.

You know, the bastard, man of the Night's Watch, wildling, defender of Castle Black, and Lord Commander. The guy who rose from the dead, became King of the North, rode a dragon, led the battle against the Night King and the undead army, and killed the despot and mass murderer who wanted to wage war on the entire planet. Also, by birth the heir to the throne.

That is the kind of back story that we might expect for the person who eventually takes the throne. Daenerys's story works as well. Bran, on the other hand, seems pretty random. Sansa, Arya, Davos, Gendry, Brienne, Lord Royce, Sam, Edmure Tully...anyone would have made as much sense.

If I ever write a seven-book epic, I want the ending to follow from the rest of the story, not for it to seem like well, it had to end somehow.

It does not help much that Daenerys is eliminated from contention because, after seven and a half seasons watching her fight for the oppressed, we find out that she and Greyworm are both homicidal maniacs who will happily slaughter prisoners, civilians, women, and children by the thousands not for any military purpose, but out of a personal need for vengeance. Or that Jon is eliminated because the Unsullied, who are presumably leaving Westeros and never coming back and so really have no ability to enforce anything, do not want him to be king. 

So when I watched all of Game of Thrones again over the last couple of months, I blamed George RR Martin when it still felt like the ending did not hold up. Martin created a world and characters that allowed him to tell stories, even if those stories did not contribute to the main story, because Martin was not that concerned with the main story.

(Here I need to pause and note that there were actually two main stories, the other one being the attack by the army of the undead on Westeros, and that story actually did conclude more conventionally. It's only the story of who takes the throne that goes sideways.)

To illustrate in a different way, here are a few characters and places that could have been left out or their stories severely shortened, and both main stories could have still worked:

• Renly Baratheon
• Balon Greyjoy. In the War of the Five Kings, two kings barely showed up.
• Dorne
• The Iron Bank
• Qarth
• Yunkai
• Mance Rayder
• Ramsay Bolton
• The High Sparrow
• John Snow's parentage. It was one of the great revelations in the show. Then it didn't matter.

The end result is that the last three episodes in the last season do not live up to the rest of the series.

With the ending out of the way, I will write a few more posts about Game of Thrones.