GOT - Jonsa

What if instead of having Dany “suddenly go mad” and burn down King's Landing, she just sort of burns down the Red Keep?

And the 8x05 ends with her landing her dragon looking all cool an evil (like how 8x06 starts) and making her speech about taking over the rest of the kingdom, and it’s this moment (that is fully in character) that makes us (well, the general audience) really worry she might not be the good guy. Along with her unceremonious execution of Tyrion right on the spot when he throws his hand of the Queen pin away. Just behead him right there, in the same spot Joffrey beheads Ned Stark at the end of season 1.

We'll all remember the fact that Ned was killed for suggesting Joffrey was illegitimate, and not the true heir! This is pretty much exactly the position Dany finds herself in now as Vary (and Tyrion) are conspiring to put Jon on the Iron Throne instead of her.

Jon looks on horrified as Tyrion’s head rolls away, Arya in the crowd just like when Ned was killed, and we get a last parting shot at Dany looking pleased out over her subjects.

Cut to black.

And that’s how the show ends.

So I just realized I’m still upset about season 8. I mean, it’s been like 7 months and pretty much as soon as it was over I went “well okay, that sucked, now let’s just repress the last 2 season” and haven’t really reflected on it that much. Other than to just tell anyone that asked: “I hated it.”

As it is Christmas and the New Year will soon be upon us I’ve been thinking a lot about 2019 and the ups and downs. This brought me to ponder GoT again after all this time, and what went wrong.

I think I just kind of realized why pretty much anyone who is more than a casual fan of the show hated the end.

It’s not because it gave no one what they wanted. I mean this is, of course, part of it. (Seriously, mention one person who was rooting for Bran on the throne at the end! Who wanted Jon to kill Dany after promising her he was on her side? Bronn as the Master of Coin?)

My theory is simple: We all hate it because not only do we not get what we wanted (be that Jonsa, Dany on the throne, Braimie or Theon alive) but what we did get wasn’t anything.

Simply, we hate it, because nothing mattered.

Maybe that’s not so revolutionary to the rest of you. Maybe you all figured out why you felt so empty, why all fans, no matter who they were rooting for or hoping to die, did.

Nothing mattered.

And I wish it would have. Me, as a Jonsa and anti-Targ-restoration, would rather have had Dany on the throne married to Jon with boat-baby on the way if there could have been some sort of “the wheel can never be broken” everything just keeps on going and nothing really ever changes as the “message”.

And I think even the most hardcore Dany-stans would have preferred well-executed (political) Jonsa to the mess we got with Dany going Mad-Queen in two minutes, with maybe the message ending up being “the pack survives” or “Ned really did play the long game, huh” or something.

I would even have preferred Cerise as the End Boss Queen, somehow beating Dany, to what actually happened. Imagined that! Instead of Dany burning the city down, her dragons get shot down, the Golden Company kills the Unsullied and the episode ends with Dany being executed by the Mountain on Cercies orders.

Last episode is Tyrion, Sansa, Jon and the reaming folks rallying folks to once more to fight Cersei and maybe the show ends with the start of “the last battle” with Cercsie which we don’t get to see the outcome of, once more giving us the message of “nothing ever changes, the wars just keep going.”

Everyone dying at Winterfell as the Night King comes would be something too. Or everyone retreating to King’s Landing and then everyone dying there. Maybe killed by the NK, maybe killed by each other. That would have been an interesting ending.

I mean what we got was just a mess. A mess without meaning. A meaningless mess we all spent so many hours on.

And I’m not sure who to be angry with about it. DxD is an obvious one. GRMM too, because if he hadn’t told them “the ending” then DxD would have had to wrap it up in a way that fit the TV show. And as terrible as DxD are, that would have been better than two seasons trying to get everything to fit into GRMM ending. An ending to a very different and longer story than the show.

But the person, I’ve been the maddest at though, I’ve realized is probably myself.

Because I invested too much. I dedicated so many hours, read so many fan-theories, had my own, woke up at ungodly early hours to watch the episodes before work. I geeked out like I hadn’t in a decade during the year leading up to and during season 8. I went into the season with such high hopes, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, waiting for a brilliant conclusion to a brilliant show. And by the last episode, I had no feelings at all.

But as part of my new year's resolution I’ve decided I’m going to stop blaming myself for things that aren’t my fault. And it’s not my fault season 8 was a disappointment. It’s not my fault I decided to care about something, even if it was a TV, and it disappointed me.

It wasn’t my fault Game of Thrones’ ending sucked. And no matter how much I want to, I can’t change it. So like a bad relationship I’m now going to attempt to let go, heal and move on from the bad parts and remember the good parts.

Because one of my favorite things about Game of Thrones has actually been the community, the fandom. The messy often fractioned (and sometimes right out hostile) people that loved and invested in this show for years and years, just like me. We were all disappointed, betrayed in a sense, but we were still part of this thing. And we were part of it together. So you know...

I for one, can’t quite make myself fully regret getting into GoT. I wish at times I hadn’t but for all the bad, there has been a lot of good. I found a new OTS that never got a chance to show how great it could be (but those longing looks and the subtext will be forever in my heart), read so many smart metas on so many different things from movie lighting, to beauty and beast tropes, to power and story structure, found amazing fan art and talked and argued with people with so different opinions on so many different topics.

I also realized that it’s okay that my best friend and so many people love Dany because “the dragons are cool” and don’t like the Starks because they’re “boring” and that not everyone will invest as much into a TV show as I did. And that doesn't make me a wacky nerd (or maybe it does, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing). It just means we have different interests and one of mine is caring about theories about fictional worlds and characters that (inevitably) end up disappointing me. And that’s good. The world is full of people who love, hate, do, different things and that’s pretty neat.

So that’s what I’ve decided to take away from Game of Thrones. Maybe the show’s end was meaningless. But the community, the fans (and the amazing actors and crew that worked on the show) were, are, not meaningless.

We might, in fact, be the actual meaning of Game of Thrones.

Thinking about it like that makes things a little easier for me. It gives me hope and makes me feel like I didn’t waste time but rather invested it wisely, into something. That I contributed to something important. And I hope that all of you out there that have maybe despaired and felt something similar to me, will try to look at it this way too. Because the more we do that, the more meaning we will give it, and after all, isn’t that what we all want most? For it to have meant something?