Let’s be topical for once and talk about why Game of Thrones is bad. Now, Game of Thrones has been bad for like four seasons now, and people have been uneasy about it for years. Almost nobody ever wanted to be the one to stand up and say that this show is going off the rails until right near the end, when it dawned on everyone that there wasn’t enough time left to turn this thing around, but people could’ve seen this coming years away, and many of them did. The showrunners didn’t just roll out of bed and decide to phone in the final few episodes. They’ve demonstrated an obsession with the cliffhanger and the twist to the detriment of character motivation since at least Jon’s death (in fairness, GRRM wrote that scene exactly as poorly, trying to have Jon’s death be sudden and shocking instead of letting the tension build properly). They’ve demonstrated a failure to pay attention to details in troop movement and logistics since at least when Dany showed up in Westeros. In terms of writing, once they ran out of material to adapt they always had exactly one thing going for them: They were good at baiting their audience into thinking this was all going somewhere. Like the writers of Lost, their only merit was their ability to make convincing promises. When the story was wrapping up, they had no ability to deliver.
You can even see what they were going for if you look closely. Drogon avenges Danaerys by destroying the Iron Throne, the obsession with which would’ve killed Dany in any scenario, rather than killing Jon, the guy who happened to do the deed in the specific course of events that actually happened. Drogon (somehow) recognizes that it is feudalism that killed Dany, that she succumbed to it when she tried to claim the Iron Throne, a goal that stands in direct contradiction to her nominal desire to “break the wheel,” and Jon was merely a tool in the hands of the system. If it wasn’t him, it would’ve been someone else. It’s a good metaphor, a really well shot scene, and would’ve been a fantastic ending if only the showrunners had bothered with writing the beginning and middle of that story. Tyrion’s explanations of Dany’s motivations after the fact make sense and could’ve been the basis of a season 8 that was actually good.
The problem is that all of this was kept completely hidden from us until after the scene for which it was vital context. In order to make Dany’s torching of King’s Landing maximally shocking, the writers shut us out of Dany’s head until after it was too late – both too late for the audience to predict what would happen next, and too late to make the scene work. And that former one didn’t even work out well, because once a show becomes sufficiently popular, the internet’s theorycrafters will have any team of writers so thoroughly outnumbered that your only options are either to favor one faction of theorists over another or else to provide an ending that’s so bad that people never entertained the notion, because fans of ongoing art generally agree that the ending is going to be good. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be fans.
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