GOT Season 8 Episode 6: Plot Destiny
I am 33 years old and I have spent over half my life waiting for an ending.
I read Game of Thrones for the first time in 10th grade. It was “sold” to me by an equally reclusive nerd I had met online because of our shared interest in anime and nascent online high-fantasy video games (Diablo 2). Princess Mononoke, starring the eponymous wolf-riding princess, had been released stateside and was the “closing” of the epic chapter of 90’s feature anime that any of my nerd peers would have consumed during their formative years: Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Ninja Scroll.
The AIM conversation went something like:
“Princess Mononoke was awesome.”
“Hey, do you like wolves?”
“Yeah!”
“You should read Game of Thrones, it’s like The Lord of The Rings, but WOLVES”
And that was it.
I read everything in my youth. I learned early that the best way to avoid the attention of my authoritative father was to have my nose in a book or to be cleaning something at all times. I was one of six kids, parental attention was limited and my father ruled the house with simple apothegms like:
If the TV was on: “Why aren’t you reading?”
If your shoes were off: “Where are your shoes, why aren’t you cleaning?”
Once I learned that I would be left alone if I was reading, my father bought into my act as if my singular passion truly was reading books in seclusion. To support this development, he brought home a library of literary finds for me from our families’ weekends spent second-hand shopping at estate sales and auctions. Hoping to spark a scholastic desire in me, I was showered with “nerd treasures”: an early edition paperback set of The Lord of the Rings jacketed with a Pauline Baynes illustration of Middle-earth, a complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, four legal document boxes filled with hundreds of golden age marvel comics that had all of their covers ripped off, a leather-bound omnibus edition of Frank Miller’s Batman, nearly every published Stephen King novel at that time.
In my early-adolescent years, my basement bedroom looked like it belonged to Howard Hughes, littered with piles of comic books, fantasy, anime, and sketchbooks blocking all walking paths.
My first reading of Game of Thrones was a bookend to those awful, awkward middle school years. I had found sports, friends in the real world, and the freedom of a driver’s license; the joys of High School.
Still, I devoured book one of A Song of Ice and Fire as if it had been written solely for me; a high fantasy grounded in brutal faux-middle ages reality about a family of six children, a stern but righteously-fair patriarch, and each Stark-child having a pet direwolf (my family bred Corgis, you know, the same thing).
I was ensnared, but I cut myself off after the first novel. I have always been a “completion-ist” in fiction and am generally unable to sit and wait for future releases to complete a story (irony I know). Still, I revisited the trilogy (…) after the third was published and dived in unknowing the previously planned trilogy had now surreptitiously expanded to five(!) books.
…Fast forward six or so years and I was fooled again when the long-awaited “final” fifth book was released. The HBO show had been announced, which I thought would be a Dragonheart-bomb as the books are generally incomprehensible to casual readers and the special effects too outrageous for TV.
Still, being an insufferable book elitist, I reread everything before the premier, swallowed the bitter pill that I still had to wait for a newly announced book six and seven, and forced my then girlfriend to tune in to the show with me.
And the premier was good! Surely if a show was green-lit and a smash hit the books must be humming along…
They weren’t, but in the meantime, I made the wise decision to marry that girlfriend. She loved the first season and peppered me with so many questions about the world of Westeros (a selling point), that I was able to convince her to give the books a stab with little cajoling.
Infamously now, I gave her a paperback copy of Game of Thrones at the start of our honeymoon, and it can safely be said she took more interest in reading than in your normal honeymoon activities.
Pound that fast forward button again. A near decade of premier television is produced, Game of Thrones becomes equal in the nerd Pantheon to giants like Star Wars and Marvel, and the internet refines itself into a content machine creating recaps, subreddits, wikias, and memes (gods the memes were strong) inflating a world created for basement-dwelling middle schoolers into a true social zeitgeist.
A decade and no more chapters, no more books. I left college, got married, had a kid, and had a second one just yesterday.
On Friday, my laboring wife, while on the way to the hospital, looked at me and said “Gabe, I’m not fucking missing Game of Thrones.”
More than once during the ordeal, and mostly to fight off the pre-delivery anxiety with a conversation, she asked me to extol how I really thought Game of Thrones was going to end. In a feat of womanhood she delivered a second healthy daughter with time to spare, we named her Jane Frances (because we aren’t freaks and name our children after fictional fantasy characters), and hunkered down into our hospital room for the weekend.
In true Game of Thrones fashion, the story hasn’t been completely bucolic. My wife’s epidural punctured her spinal cord casing(I’m sorry to any expecting mothers reading this, it’s rare but it does happen and it usually resolves itself without permanent complications) and a day to be spent recovering from the madness of delivery and bonding with a newborn has been usurped with triaging mom as the leaking spinal fluid makes it difficult for her to stand or sit and stuck in a blanketing migraine-like malaise.
But we fucking watched Game of Thrones.
There’s a Game of Thrones analogy here, I swear, where all of this winding and set-up eventually gets to an ending.
I said earlier that I am an insufferable nerd and book elitist and I meant it. I hated the Harry Potter series (it has grown on me with time), but I read every book at release largely so I could torment my youngest sister, who was firmly in the “Harry Potter generation”, with how bad they were.
She was the youngest, and a notorious mooch, so I always had to buy the books if we hoped to have a copy at release. I would rip through it in a couple of weeks, hold on to it for a little longer than needed so she could twist-in-the-wind over reading it, then hand it over with a, “have fun, it’s terrrrrible.”
We left for college at the University of Maryland together, as I was a little behind on the academic front, and life advanced but when The Deathly Hallows was released we still camped out at a bookstore in our tradition from childhood (how nineties!). I forked over the cash and started my read, and in the few weeks it usually took me to finish a Harry Potter book (solely to ruin it for her) she died.
So how does Game of Thrones end again? Two different nurses today, completely unprompted, asked my wife and me if “we watched” and “how we thought it would end?!”
I can tell you for the overly pessimistic “book-readers”, the consensus is that it ends with GRRM dying and the books left incomplete.
Real life can’t be saved by plot destiny, that most unrealistic depiction of reality, which has been the overwhelming driving force of the fan-fiction we call the show.
But what do you call it when you have run out of source material, you have stripped the book down to its barest narrative to chart directly towards an ending, and you arrive empty of the juice that got you there? By virtue of there being no more episodes, there is no more of that inevitable force (plot destiny) to get to an ending, and all goodwill has been exhausted in the lead-up by cutting everything a fan has grown to care about on the winding journey: subplots, humor, confusion, and subversion.
That’s what we saw tonight, and it was uh… something? *delirious thumbs up*
I can tell you how Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows ends. That ends with me twisting in literary guilt for what seemed like a lifetime as the grief crushed the perception of life’s progress to a crawl. I ultimately read the now cursed book out of sheer rage then left it on my desk unmoved from where I finished it for most of a year. One night, in the midst of a panic attack, I considered destroying it in every possible fashion as it tormented me like Poe’s Telltale Heart. A bolt of rationality struck instead, and I clothed myself and walked to the campus library in the middle of the night and pushed that grim token through the return slot, hoping that oblivion resided on the other side of that metal flap.
Tonight's broadcast of Game of Thrones really ended with no books, but me in a similar hospital room, looking at the same view of Baltimore, rocking a similar-looking baby to the one I rocked here three years ago. My brain such a mush of new father bliss that I can’t for the life of me straighten out my daughters’ names between the two or the passage of time that feels instantaneous.
Watching the finale, The Jon Snow and Tyrion mea culpa was closure enough. Where do we go after we die? What’s the ending to a book that hasn’t been written? Where was Jane Frances before her arrival yesterday? Is The Deathly Hallows I banished there with them in oblivion?
My wife didn’t make it through the finale before succumbing to fatigue and the demands of breastfeeding a newborn. After rousing, and knowing that I knew she had slept through the episode, she rolled over and whispered;
“So, what did you think?”
“I love you”