Game Of Thrones’ final season as written by fans would also be a mess

By Dan Neilan | May 16, 2019 | 6:14pm

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Game Of Thrones’ final season as written by fans would also be a mess

Photo: Helen Sloan

Yesterday, we wrote about the fact that a contingent of Game Of Thrones fans angry with the way season eight has turned out have started a petition urging HBO to remake the final season with new writers. That petition has since gained over 400,000 signatures, but we still contend it’s very stupid. The writers over at The Week, however, took things one step further and decided to imagine what the end of Game Of Thrones would look like if it actually sought to satiate the fan community’s every whim. As expected, it’s a goddamn mess.

Using the leading fan theories from the r/gameofthrones, r/asoiaf, and r/gottheories subreddits, The Week has cobbled together a final season in which Theon kills Euron to win back the Iron Islands, Cersei has a miscarriage to satisfy the prophecy of Maggy the Frog, Jon gets turned into a dragon-riding White Walker by the Night King, and Dany dies giving birth to the baby she conceived with Jon (who, lest we forget, is her nephew). Some of these ideas sound halfway decent on paper, like the Night King using the Battle of Winterfell as a diversion so he can attack King’s Landing, or Bran warging into a dragon to kick some ass, but they start to fall apart once you take them out of a vacuum and place them in the context of the dozen or so other plots unfolding concurrently.

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Of course, there are a couple theories that are just straight-up awful. There’s the one saying Arya isn’t actually Arya, that real Arya died in Braavos in season six and the person we’ve been following is actually the Waif wearing Arya’s face. Why did the Waif come to Westeros? She was hired by Littlefinger, of course, who is, you guessed it, not actually dead. In this alternate GoT finale, Littlefinger faked his death and hired the Faceless Men to come to Winterfell and kill Bran. Why? Because, apparently, when Arya does something amazing it’s dumb but if Littlefinger does a bunch of inconceivable bullshit it’s very cool. Definitely nothing more to read into there.

Obviously, the people who conceived these theories never planned on them working in concert with everyone else’s ideas, but that’s exactly the point. Coming up with a few paragraphs of text that explain how Tyrion ends up on the Iron Throne is very different than satisfactorily concluding a dozen simultaneous, interweaving plot lines in a way that is both emotionally resonant and cinematically impressive. Also, in regard to the theory that the show will end with Samwell writing it all down in a book called A Song Of Ice And Fire—Tolkien did it first.

Check out The Week’s full write up here.

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