bonfarr said:

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How did Sam become Grand Maester in only a few weeks? He dropped out of The Citadel after a short period without completing his studies and the Grand Maester is supposed to be the most senior Maester in the Seven/Six Kingdoms. It seemed like a huge stretch for fan service.

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bonfarr said:

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How did Sam become Grand Maester in only a few weeks? He dropped out of The Citadel after a short period without completing his studies and the Grand Maester is supposed to be the most senior Maester in the Seven/Six Kingdoms. It seemed like a huge stretch for fan service.

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bonfarr said:

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How did Sam become Grand Maester in only a few weeks? He dropped out of The Citadel after a short period without completing his studies and the Grand Maester is supposed to be the most senior Maester in the Seven/Six Kingdoms. It seemed like a huge stretch for fan service.

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ham98 said:

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If Arya wanted to know what's west of westeros why not ask bran?

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The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn go way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). It's not that these are incorrect, but they're just superficial shifts. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don't really know how to tell sociological stories.

At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King's Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.

After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that's unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That's the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.

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But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn't persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

To understand the narrative lane shift, let's go back to a key question: Why did so many love Game of Thrones in the first place? What makes it stand out from so many other shows during an era critics call the Second Golden Age of Television because there are so many high-quality productions out there?

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One clue is clearly the show's willingness to kill off major characters, early and often, without losing the thread of the story. TV shows that travel in the psychological lane rarely do that because they depend on viewers identifying with the characters and becoming invested in them to carry the story, rather than looking at the bigger picture of the society, institutions and norms that we interact with and which shape us. They can't just kill major characters because those are the key tools with which they're building the story and using as hooks to hold viewers.

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The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn't carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters' behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

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That tension between internal stories and desires, psychology and external pressures, institutions, norms and events was exactly what Game of Thrones showed us for many of its characters, creating rich tapestries of psychology but also behavior that was neither saintly nor fully evil at any one point. It was something more than that: you could understand why even the characters undertaking evil acts were doing what they did, how their good intentions got subverted, and how incentives structured behavior. The complexity made it much richer than a simplistic morality tale, where unadulterated good fights with evil.

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Woody2006 said:

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Also, (may have already been discussed) but if Jon had just ****ed Dany when she wanted him to would that have saved a million lives?

What a selfish *******

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Ban Cow Gas said:

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Best ending would have been Meera rolling Bran off of a cliff.

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• whether it was realistic for her to push him up there
• why he did not see it coming
• that he really didn't die he warged into a bunch of ravens and caught himself
• that Howland Reed told her to do it because he knows about Jon

Ban Cow Gas said:

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Best ending would have been Meera rolling Bran off of a cliff.

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Ban Cow Gas said:

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Best ending would have been Meera rolling Bran off of a cliff.

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ham98 said:

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If Arya wanted to know what's west of westeros why not ask bran?

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