After eight intense seasons of scheming (on the part of the characters) and puzzling (on the part of the viewership), at long last we finally know who won the Game of Thrones.
I did.
A few years back, as friends and colleagues were indulging in fevered speculation about who would ultimately end up on the Iron Throne, I attempted to spare them another Lost-style disappointment by explaining the story conventions of what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff identified as “postnarrative” fiction, which eschews the predictable, linear, closed-ended form of the monomythic arc—Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey”—in favor of an unpredictable, nonlinear, “hyperlinked” mode of narrative “that gets more open rather than more closed as it goes along” (Molly Soat, “Digital Disruption and the Death of Storytelling,” Marketing News, April 2015, 44), and accounts for such Digital Age watercooler shows as The Walking Dead, Westworld, Orphan Black, This Is Us, and Mr. Robot.
To that end, I argued that no series with as many characters and concurrent plotlines as Game of Thrones had been made to service could ever rightfully hope—or even credibly intend—to reach a definitive climax, let alone have any catharsis to offer in exchange for viewers’ time and miss-no-detail devotion:
The opening titles sequence of the show betrays this emphasis: the camera pans over an animated map of the entire world of the saga, showing the various divisions and clans within the empire. It is drawn in the style of a fantasy role-playing map used by participants as the game board for their battles and intrigues. And like a fantasy role-playing game, the show is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible. There is plot—there are many plots—but there is no overarching story, no end. There are so many plots, in fact, that an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point.
Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, [New York: Penguin Group, 2013], 34.
The many, many peers who willingly engaged me on the subject by and large dismissed the very notion of postnarrativity—of course all stories are meant to provide closure, the argument went, and A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin was on record as knowing the particulars of how his saga would conclude!—and insisted with good-natured sportsmanship that my Game of Thrones prediction (prophecy?) would be decisively debunked come the series finale. To support that assertion, the legendary five-hour pitch meeting was often cited in which screenwriters David Benioff and D. B. Weiss claimed to have accurately deduced Jon Snow’s true parentage and were accordingly rewarded with Martin’s theretofore elusive blessing to adapt the high-fantasy series for Hollywood.
To which I emphatically called bullshit. The account of that alleged pitch meeting—much more so than anything from the world of Westeros—is pure fantasy from people who know a thing or two about mythopoeia.
To wit: Anyone who’s ever written a story—particularly a long-form, multipart saga like A Song of Ice and Fire—knows that a narrative takes on a course of its own as it develops, and an author’s notions about where it’s all going are about as bankable as our grand ideas of how are own lives are going to play out in five, ten, fifteen years. In life, you got your plans and schemes… and then you got what happens irrespective of those. The latter always wins. Fiction works in a similar fashion. (And—you can take my word for this—little if anything that gets pitched in development meetings survives to the final draft, anyway.) As David Benioff himself said in 2015:
We’ve had a lot of conversations with George, and he makes a lot of stuff up as he’s writing it. Even while we talk to him about the ending, it doesn’t mean that that ending that he has currently conceived is going to be the ending when he eventually writes it.
Debra Birnbaum, “‘Game of Thrones’ Creators: We Know How It’s Going to End,” Variety, April 15, 2015
Exactly. And whereas a novel is beholden to the vagaries of merely a single determinant—its author—a television show is a complex organism whose creative evolution changes constantly based on content restrictions imposed by the studio, talent availability, production logistics, budgetary considerations… an endless host of factors.
Case in point: It came to light earlier this year that shortly after completing work on the first season of GoT, series mainstay Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) underwent high-risk surgery to treat a life-threatening brain aneurysm. In the hypothetical instance she’d been unable to resume work on the show, what would that have meant for the so-called “grand plan” of Game of Thrones?
It would’ve been thrown right out the window is what.
That’s the way TV production works. It’s amorphous. It’s fluid. It’s necessarily reactive. Trying to conceive and carry out a five-year plan for a serialized show is about as tenable as trying to do the same for one’s personal and/or professional life. It can’t really be done because none of us know what tomorrow might bring. Any showrunner that insists he knows how it all ends is either full of shit or delusional.
Despite that, my contemporaries maintained the same unwavering faith in the Game of Thrones writers that Tyrion inexplicably invested in Dany, certain all would be paid off and tied up at journey’s end—you’ll see!
“Spoiler alert”: It wasn’t.
I’m not going to recapitulate here the many shades of audience disappointment with this final season of Game of Thrones—do a Google search and go to town—but the counterargument to my position I’ve thus far heard from disenchanted peers is that there was very much a satisfying finale to be drawn from this saga, it simply required “better writing.” Many others second that assessment, having gone as far as to draft a petition—with 15,000,000 signatures and counting—to get a do-over final season on the grounds that “David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have proven themselves to be woefully incompetent writers when they have no source material (i.e. the books) to fall back on.”
That petition is beyond childish and ridiculous, of course—same as it was when Star Wars fans demanded a mulligan after The Last Jedi—but even if such a redo were to happen (it won’t, to be clear), the problem is and always will be—sorry to be repetitive—that Game of Thrones was never the kind of narrative, regardless of who was writing it, that was ever really intended to reach a conclusive resolution. Like Lost, the very thing that made GoT so exciting to watch from week to week also made it impossible to satisfactorily resolve.
That isn’t necessarily a flaw of postnarrative writing, “in which writers are more concerned with the worlds they create than with the characters living within them” (Rushkoff, Present Shock, 34), so much as a failure of expectation-conditioning. From the outset, this saga was never meant to be viewed as a closed-looped hero’s journey à la The Lord of the Rings, but rather an ongoing, expansive, storyless fantasy akin to a game of Dungeons & Dragons, whereby the point, as Rushkoff observes, is to keep it in play for as long and with as many parallel adventures as possible, and simply enjoy the breadth of its imaginative world-building for the sustainable duration. David Chase certainly appreciated the nature of postnarrativity, hence the reason we got no conclusion or catharsis from The Sopranos, merely an abrupt final cut to black in the middle of an inconsequential scene in a coffee shop.
George R. R. Martin appears to understand intuitively he writes in a postnarrative mode, though manifestly not intellectually, hence the reason he’s repeatedly and consistently promised a grand finale—of which, I assure you, he has nothing more than a vague, malleable notion (as confirmed by Benioff himself). And yet it’s a finish line he can’t seem to bring himself to cross: A Song of Ice and Fire was sold to its publisher as a trilogy… before that vision was expanded to five books… then seven, indeed positively seven… though he now admits, sure, it could be more in the final tally. I mean, who knows—am I right?
Most fans now believe he will never complete the series in his lifetime, and I agree: He will never reach The End because there is no end to reach. What many readers speculate is that another high-fantasy author will one day be enlisted to posthumously “wrap up” the series, just like Brandon Sanderson did for Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time books. Probably that’s what will happen, yes. But even if such a proxy coda is receptively welcomed, unlike Benioff and Weiss’ generally regarded flameout of a finale, that’s merely another writer’s take on Martin’s proprietary vision.
If we accept the premise most fans operate under—that only Martin has the true artistic authority to “conclude” the series properly (especially now that Benioff and Weiss have failed to deliver)—and we agree he likely never will, then there will be no “canonical” resolution, now or ever, merely a choice of take-your-pick interpretations. And that, my friends, is the very essence of postnarrativity: no definitive resolutions, only individual impressions.
The reasons for those things, dear viewer, are up to you. But that kind of narrative ambiguity (understandably) doesn’t satisfy a fan base that’s been ginned up on “spoilers” designed to create buzz and amplify online engagement. This is where Lost ran into trouble: Instead of inviting the audience’s participation—asking them to meet the creators halfway in an experimental exercise in communal imagineering—promises were made, both implicitly and explicitly, that all the dots would be connected, all the mysteries resolved, all the Easter eggs correlated. Given the ambitious scope of its sprawling narrative and unquantifiable number of POV protagonists, though, that was a pledge destined to be broken, and fans who’d given the show six years’ worth of their time and passion consequently felt burned.
A show’s “loose ends” are its flaws. They prevent the superfan from maintaining a coherent theory of everything. They are not thought of as delightful trailheads to new mysteries, but as plot holes, continuity errors, or oversights by the creators. In commercial entertainment, where the purpose is always to give the audience their money’s worth, submission to the storyteller must be rewarded with absolute resolution. This same urge is driving such entertainment to ever higher frame rates and pixel counts—as if seeing the picture clearer and bigger is always better. We don’t make sense of it; the sense is made for us. That’s what we’re paying for. . . .
Loose ends distinguish art from commerce. The best, most humanizing art doesn’t depend on spoilers. What is the “spoiler” in a painting by Picasso or a novel by James Joyce? The impact of a classically structured art film like Citizen Kane isn’t compromised even if we do know the surprise ending. These masterpieces don’t reward us with answers, but with new sorts of questions. Any answers are constructed by the audience, provisionally and collaboratively, through their active interpretation of the work.
Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human, [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 164–65
There was a staggering deluge of morning-after tweets on the Monday following the finale bemoaning the pointless eight-year wait endured to get to this moment—the dispiriting dearth of significance it all amounted to in the end. But anyone who was waiting specifically for this moment—and this is what I tried (and failed) to convey to my friends and colleagues—missed the entire point of Game of Thrones (and Lost, too). Resolution was not only immaterial, but arguably antithetical to what postnarrative fiction attempts to do: present an open-ended world full of possibilities rather than a closed-ended world of absolutes.
Sure, the show had to end—just like a game of D&D eventually does when player enthusiasm for it wanes—but if you were counting on that dénouement to make some kind of ultimate meaning out of the gameplay that preceded it, well… you kinda put yourself at cross-purposes with the experience itself. Tony Soprano didn’t get no conclusion or catharsis, and neither, gentle viewer, do you.
I once had a debate with a noted TV producer who didn’t like Mad Men and asked me to articulate what it was about and what it really had to say about those subjects. I argued that Mad Men had a lot to say about a lot of things (masculinity and feminism, to name just two), but that pointed question—“What is it about?”—occurred to me often over these eight GoT seasons. It was about power, and about the moral complexities of wielding power. (How, for instance, a cruel oligarch like Tywin Lannister could be a more effective de facto ruler of Westeros than an honorable and kind man like Ned Stark.) And it was, at times, about the ways marginalized people—whether women like Sansa or the “cripples, bastards and broken things” about which Tyrion liked to wax poetic—deserved more credit, and a better seat at the table, than society wanted to give them. But it was only about those themes and a few others to the extent that they didn’t interfere in the What Happens Next? of it all.
Alan Sepinwall, “‘Game of Thrones’ Series Finale Close-Up: The End,” Rolling Stone, May 20, 2019
That’s right—that’s what it was about. That’s what it was always about—right from episode one: simply enjoying the “game,” play by play, regardless of how or when it ended. No ending—even one that benefited from “better writing” (and I am happy to debate the caliber of Benioff and Weiss’ talents on another occasion)—was ever going to feel satisfying, because an ending is the very cessation of the What Happens Next? engine that made the saga so compulsory in the first place.
It’s the reason why Tyrion’s “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story” soliloquy in the finale felt so forced, so uncomfortably silly, so uncharacteristically metafictional: As its own title telegraphs, Game of Thrones was never a story to begin with. A story is a closed-ended narrative with a declared value at stake, and its climax takes a conclusive position on that value: greed is not good (Oliver Stone’s Wall Street); the codes we live by come with a price (Michael Mann’s Heat); there’s no sense in obsessing over the things we cannot change (Stephen King’s 11/22/63). Every turn of plot in those tales explores and challenges and supports the central theme until a final verdict on it is rendered—and that’s the moral, the point, of the story.
“Game of Thrones” instead relied on propulsion, like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. If things feel right enough in the moment, momentum carries you to the next thing. Look down, and you plummet. Maybe that’s the secret of dragon flight.
James Poniewozik, “‘Game of Thrones’ Comes in for a Crash Landing,” Critic’s Notebook, New York Times, May 21, 2019
Open-ended postnarrative, or “presentist,” literature (The Sopranos and Game of Thrones) abides by different conventions, to serve a different purpose, from monomythic storytelling (The Godfather and The Lord of the Rings), and can’t be held to the same expectations. That it thus far has been is often owed to a critical misunderstanding of both its form and function by those who create it, and/or cynical viewer-engagement tactics by its network or studio: Stick with us and all will be answered! (And make sure you watch the aftershow and web-exclusive content!)
Keep that in mind next time another one of these zeitgeist-seizing shows comes along and promises all the answers! Ask yourself: When has that ever worked out as advertised? And is it really, then, even the point of this type of fiction…? Maybe the value of true postnarrativity lies not in its absolute coherence, but its ambiguous incongruities—the questions it inspires versus the answers it supplies.
On the subject of absolute and incontrovertible conclusions: To my friends now nursing the sting of disappointment inflicted by Game of Thrones, after having spent the last eight years assuring me my assertions would be oh-so-proven wrong when all was said and done—provided, that is, I have any friends left after what I’m about to type—I graciously accept your apologies.
Update: Within hours of this posting, a few friends reached out to speculate that it was them to whom I was vaguely referring under the general umbrella of “friends and colleagues.” To set the record straight: I am talking about all of you—and none of you. (How’s that for postnarrativity?) I drew from dozens of conversations and debates I’ve had over the years about Game of Thrones with colleagues, friends, relatives, members of my writers group, and commenters here on this blog. I value every one of those discussions, all of which made me think more deeply about the matter at hand, and I hope you take my facetious closing remark in the sportsmanlike spirit intended. (Every one of you ought to know by now nothing tickles my funny bone quite like needless hostility!)
I agree with everything you’ve said here. I wasn’t so much disappointed by the last episode as befuddled by the seeming race to a finish that wasn’t necessary or well thought-out. Still, it was great while it lasted and I’m still planning on rewatching the whole thing from start to finish 😊
What I suspect happened, mydangblog, is that Benioff and Weiss — who were already manifestly antsy to move on to other projects (namely Star Wars) — at some point woke up and realized what George R. R. Martin himself has recognized (albeit unconsciously): that this narrative just wants to expand, not contract. It simply doesn’t lend itself to closure in any medium.
So instead of investing yet more time in trying to drive Game of Thrones to a climax it was clearly resisting (HBO offered to bankroll a full ten-episode final season, but was refused by the showrunners), they “raced to the finish,” as you put it, just to be done with it — knowing there was no real way in either the short- or long-term to bring it to a truly satisfying resolution. Perhaps if they’d thought through some of these issues when they first took on the project, they could have more properly conditioned audience expectations and wouldn’t have found themselves in the same unwinnable conundrum that bedeviled Lost‘s Lindelof and Cuse?
But you’ve got the right outlook on GoT: It was fun while it lasted! And one of the pleasures now in going back to re-watch the series, knowing some of its plot points don’t really pay off, is that you get to decide what some of those things mean. You know what I’m saying? You get to bring your own imagination to the vast, rich world these writers created. Good fantasy should create a world so immersive that it lends itself to letting the viewer and/or reader to go down imaginary trails of her very own within it!
I’ll add my name to the disappointees, Sean. I really enjoyed the entire eight years and didn’t miss a single episode, but I have to say the end was lame. I didn’t mind the expansive story, the huge cast, the multiple plots, and the fact that many would remain unresolved. I did want the Main Plot to be resolved satisfactorily, and it wasn’t.
Some of my issues were around plausibility. I just didn’t believe Bran would be nominated as the king and that everyone would go along with the suggestion. He was the most non-character of the entire bunch. No one, including this viewer, saw anything that would suggest he’d be a good king. Ugh. It felt like a desperate writing choice and a failure to come up with any better ideas.
Tyrian’s “story of a boy who fell from a window” was so ridiculous a reason for kingship, my brain shut down. The presentation of the Fire and Ice book was an obvious inside joke that completely popped me out of the story. And all the comedy at the end amidst a city of 1/2 million incinerated citizens was just plain annoying.
There were other aspects that I felt were rushed and therefore lost their emotional impact. I wanted to cheer and cry and ended up so disappointed at what I thought was lazy writing and storytelling. I’d complain more but the grandson just woke up – pancake and Lego time. 🙂 Real life.
Thanks for the fascinating post. Have a great weekend!
I wasn’t disappointed, Diana, simply because I never expected a satisfying resolution to any of it — even the central dramatic engine of Who Will End up on the Iron Throne? That said, so many of the narrative choices Benioff and Weiss made with regard to these last half-dozen episodes is difficult to rationalize. Certainly many of the characters acted inexplicably out of character in order to move the plot(s) to a climax, and unquestionably the choice to coronate Bran, though inarguably unexpected, wasn’t exactly logical: He’s barely had anything to do for the past eight seasons, and what little has occurred happened to him, rather than as a consequence of any choices he’s made or actions he’s taken. Bran is a cypher — and a passive one, at that — not a character with whom we felt any true emotional connection.
And I 100% agree about the presentation of the Song of Ice and Fire illustrated manuscript: It was so consciously self-referential, it really pulled me out of the verisimilitude of the world; you could feel the writers’ hands puppeteering the characters’ mouths like Kermit and Miss Piggy. The inappropriate silliness actually began before that — in that scene whereby Bran is nominated for the throne: First with the “comic relief” of Edmure Tully’s pomposity and then Samwell Tarly’s reticent proposition of democracy, through Tyrion’s metafictional waxing about how there’s “nothing more powerful than a good story.” It was kinda cringe-inducingly embarrassing, actually, and say what you want about GoT, but it had never before inspired that reaction from its audience.
To address your specific comment about all the comedy amidst what one would assume would be the stink of charred human carrion still wafting off the cobblestone streets of the city: In the leadup to the final episode, my wife and I were discussing Tyrion in relation to the penultimate installment, “The Bells.” We both felt, given how emphatically he had tried (and failed) to prevent genocide, he would be a broken man after Dany’s wanton destruction of King’s Landing and the needless murder of its one million residents — knowing all his faith had been misplaced, all his efforts for naught. Right? I mean, how does one even come back from a trauma like that…?
And yet by the very next episode, it was pretty much business as usual! Even he was given a stupid comic-relief set-piece, straightening the chairs in the meeting hall even though he knew the council was on their way in to sit down on them. Weird, man. So weird. So many strange choices on the part of Benioff and Weiss…
Some have suggested B&W self-sabotaged — that they were simply ready to move on to the next thing after a decade in Westeros, and accordingly cranked out whatever was needed simply to be done with Game of Thrones. I spoke to a friend after the finale — a former Hollywood development exec — who was deeply disappointed with how GoT turned out, yet dismissed the notion that B&W didn’t give the final season their all. Yes, they fell woefully short, he capitulated, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. After all: They knew their legacies were on the line…
He’s probably right. What my wife, who had read all the books long before the show came along, proffered is that B&W essentially fell victim to creative fatigue: They got bored with the material, and were probably privately annoyed with George R. R. Martin for falling behind on his own writing schedule; the show premiered at the exact same time the fifth book (A Dance with Dragons) was published, and it was understood that Martin would keep pace with the production by writing the “final” two volumes, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, in time for the show to adapt them. When that didn’t happen, B&W went from adapting GRRM’s work to essentially writing it for him, which probably really irritated them (though they would never admit that publicly).
I suspect she’s right on the money: B&W are likely extremely unhappy to have been put in a position whereby it fell to them to conclude the saga. I feel for them — I guess — but maybe if they’d understood postnarrativity when they took the project on, they’d have known that GRRM was never going to produce a conclusive resolution to A Song of Ice and Fire on any schedule, because postnarrative fiction resists closure. So, they are responsible, ultimately, for putting themselves in a tricky spot when they began adapting a series of novels that hadn’t yet been released in completion. Ah, well — I’ll be sure to cry for them and all the money they’ve made.
So, yes: The whole final act of this epic felt rushed — for reasons I addressed in my reply to mydangblog above — and consequently the writing/storytelling let down both the saga and its fan base. The reasons for that are likely multifaceted, as I’ve argued here, but regardless, what’s done is done. The conclusion we’re left with is now the one we have; it was a fizzler, to put it kindly. It’ll be interesting to see, in the months and years to come, if fans remember the show fondly despite the finale, or if the bad taste left by the eighth season mars the whole experience for them (à la Lost.) I guess that’ll be a future follow-up post!
Thanks for contributing to a lively conversation, Diana! Feel free to complain some more after pancakes!
Sean
I also had read all the books before the first episode aired. But only season one followed the book. After that it was almost a totally different story anyway. I don’t read incomplete series anymore because of Martin.
Well, I agree with all your points. I am disappointed, but overall, until the end, it was a magnificent tale.
Indeed, Diana. I think the lesson for readers to take from Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is that if you start reading an “incomplete” saga, you may very well find yourself frustrated with the wait for subsequent installments yet to be written. I mean, it’s crazy to think the last published volume in this series came out in 2011! That was the same year the TV show premiered! How has GRRM not capitalized on the global enthusiasm for the fantasy world he created by producing a new book…?
I mean, look: I’m a writer myself, and I fully understand that these things sometimes take as long as they take, but eight years is a lengthy hiatus between novels, especially if, as Martin claims, he knows how this will all come to a climax in the next two volumes — though I call bullshit on that. I think he’s finding the series just wants to expand, and he doesn’t know how to rein it all in any more than Benioff and Weiss did. I suspect he’s struggling with that and doesn’t have the vocabulary to express it — he doesn’t intellectually distinguish the Aristotelian arc (The Lord of the Rings) from postnarrativity. If only he would read this article!
As an addendum to that point, I would suggest the lesson viewers can take from Benioff and Weiss’ Game of Thrones (since they are explicitly credited as the creators of the show, not merely adapters) is this: Regardless of what a showrunner may insist, if a series is postnarrative, don’t expect a satisfying resolution. Just enjoy the ride for however long it lasts. Many of my friends/colleagues who spent the last eight seasons dismissing the very notion of postnarrativity are now coming around to the notion that, yeah, maybe the open-ended structure of shows like GoT, TWD, and Lost simply prevents them from reaching any kind of rewarding conclusion. It seems it took the final season of GoT to finally drive that point home. Better late than never. Maybe now they won’t get fooled again.
Sean and Diana, I figure this is the best place for me to jump in and comment here.
The final battle episode with the Night King was epic. For about 45 minutes, my blood pressure was up, my head hurt—it was wonderful. And I was able to forgive other things for a while.
Sean, it is, in fact, because of my having come across your blog years back and having been introduced to the concept of postnarrativity in the very first post of yours I read, that I went into GOT understanding fully that there could be no satisfying conclusion. And so I wasn’t necessarily disappointed in that regard, when there wasn’t one.
That said…
I did find myself eye-rolling and laughing at too many points to count in that final episode. Each of the issues you both raise here, of course. But let me add a few more.
The Dothraki have followed their Khaleesi around the world. They’ve left their homeland. They’ve braved the sea. They’ve fought for her unquestionably. The same can be said of the Unsullied. They’ve followed her to “fight Jon’s war” with the Night King, losing a sizable number of each of their peoples. Now, they’ve finally come to King’s Landing, watched their queen burn it to the ground, and are stomping and ululating in utter blood lust after gutting most of the remaining inhabitants.
Then Jon Snow kills her. And all of her fanatical, frenzied followers… agree to let Jon live, leave the city, and sulk away home again without further incident?
Sloppy. Funny… but not in a good way.
I appreciated the attempts at poeticism (e.g., a dragon who doesn’t kill his “mother’s” murderer, but instead, burns the Iron Throne into a molten pool; the fact that the living children of our first favorite character, Ned Stark, in effect rule the world: Bran to the South, Sansa to the North, Jon to far North and Arya “everything else / the unknown”). But it was so clumsily done that it all felt hollow.
Then, as you say, Diana, to have the comical bantering and talk of brothels in the middle of a devastated city with corpses still rotting in the streets and buildings… just too much.
These weren’t issues regarding lack of a satisfying conclusion. They were, in and of themselves, just bad decisions.
All that said, like you, Diana, I enjoyed the ride. (And that, Sean, is in large part thanks to you and your having exposed me to the idea of postnarrativity and the associated expectations early on.)
One more thing that bugged me (among too many to recount): Yes, Jaime completely shifts character to go to his sister. Yes, Cersei doesn’t get her due comeuppance. But when Tyrion shows up in the bowels of the Keep, there’s plenty of space that wasn’t collapsed. He moves, what, three bricks… and sees the faces of his siblings? Why the heck didn’t they just move to the side three feet?
Oh, and you know what else is funny? For all that did and didn’t happen in the ending, I found myself really irked with the unscratched itch of not getting to see what became of the Queen of Dorne and Septa Unella! (Of course, I knew we’d never see them again; but I really wanted to peek in on them after a year or so.)
I did manage to persuade a few people about “postnarrative” fiction — haha! Glad you were one of them! Funny enough, I think it was industry folks that had the hardest time getting their heads around postnarrativity. My guess is that for people who’ve spent so much time studying mythic structure — the influence of the hero’s journey on contemporary Hollywood cannot be overstated — it was just too hard for them to see that a new (unfamiliar) mode of narrative was emerging. George R. R. Martin doesn’t recognize it, hence the reason he keeps promising a Lord of the Rings–style grand finale he’s never going to deliver. Benioff and Weiss don’t see it, which is how they fooled themselves into thinking Martin would ever crank out a conclusion. Lindelof and Cuse didn’t understand they were working in a new form when they were producing Lost, else they wouldn’t have promised answers to mysteries that had no satisfying explanations (the meaning of the sequence of numbers, etc.).
All of the aforementioned writers simply thought they were working in a long-form, serialized permutation of the monomythic arc, in which the plotlines they’d created wouldn’t get resolved over the course of an episode or a season, but rather the series. But that’s not how postnarrativity works, so they put themselves in a pickle. David Chase seemed to understand the nature of postnarrativty — probably intuitively, possibly intellectually — and The Sopranos thusly ended the most honestly, the most true to form, of any postnarrative show I’ve ever seen.
But the “failures” of fan-favorites Lost and GoT to resolve satisfactorily illumine a much larger issue, which is that the massive popularity of those shows was cultivated by exploiting “spoiler culture” — you must watch else you’ll miss out on all the revelations, all the fun as it’s happening! — so that implicitly promises (and puts a premium on) Big Answers. But Big Answers are at odds with what those shows are meant to be about. What’s the spoiler in Blade Runner? If you’d never seen it, and I told you every turn of plot in that movie, it still wouldn’t diminish even a little bit the pleasure of watching it for yourself — and deciding for yourself what it all means. That’s the kind of approach these shows should take — not unlike what David Lynch did thirty years ago with Twin Peaks, a whodunit less about the providing conclusive answers than pondering the existential questions it raised.
But I fear that these ongoing, “open” narratives ultimately become too unwieldy to embed them with the kind of coherent symbolism, the kind of subtextual meaning, you get in “closed” stories like Blade Runner, so who knows if it’s even possible? (Even Twin Peaks, as I recall, flamed out by the end of its run, though I admit to having not yet seen the recent revival series. Nor, for that matter, have I yet seen Blade Runner 2049!)
But it is important to stipulate that GoT‘s insurmountable postnarrative conundrum notwithstanding, the final season sure was marred by a hell of a lot of very odd creative choices, many of which you note in your analysis, Erik. In some of the other comments on this post, I offer my two-cent speculation as to what I think happened: that Benioff and Weiss were privately annoyed at having to take on the responsibility of wrapping up GRRM’s saga, and as they started to plot The End, realized in short order that there was no quick or easy way to tie up the zillion plotlines. So they opted in many instances, as you rightly observe, for poetic over plausible: Jamie and Cersei going out of this world the way they came in — entwined — may’ve been symbolically apropos, but they were short-changed on the impactful grace note they truly deserved. Jamie’s behavior didn’t track at all for me in those last few eps, and Cersei — the series main antagonist — was given nothing to do the entire final season! I don’t know how B&W convinced themselves that would play…
Lost was a show that everyone loved till it ended, and then they retroactively hated it; to this day, the very mention of that show incites groans and eye rolls. So I wonder what the legacy of GoT will be — whether fans will think fondly of it in the years to come despite its fumbled finale, or whether the bad taste left by the last season will taint the overall experience. I don’t know. All I do know is that the next time one of these spoiler-bait shows comes around that has us all obsessively scouring the details for clues as to how it all ends, here’s hoping we don’t get fooled again!
Thanks for weighing in with some specific critiques of the season itself, Erik, something I mostly eschewed in this post in the interest of keeping it about the form rather than the content. But the content itself — the storytelling choices the writers made — is certainly fair game for critical analysis. Benioff and Weiss have been radio silent since the finale aired, but I’d love to get their insights into the creative development of these last few seasons. I was deeply disappointed in the two-hour documentary that aired on HBO the following week, Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, which highlighted some of the work of those who toil behind the scenes — and kudos on that — but had nothing to offer about how the writers approached the task of concluding this sprawling behemoth. That would be something I’d like to hear more about.
The final episodes all had mini-documentaries after them, in which Benioff and Weiss talk about the characters, their decision-making in part, etc. Did you see those?
I do find it interesting that, despite the fact that postnarrativity in television and film is not what I’d consider new any longer, people of all ages still seem surprised by it. Moreover, their ire at these non-endings and lack of answers indicates that they still expect classic linear plots.
I guess it’s easy to get to thinking that “older” people like linear plots and younger people like the postnarrative world building. But it does appear that everyong, to some degree, does still want satisfying closure on some level.
No, I somehow missed those mini-docs the first time around; I suppose they are available via HBO’s on-demand service, so I’ll have to look for them. We watched all the episodes live — because, again, the nature of the storytelling demands it — and I don’t recall those featurettes airing after the credits… though perhaps I simply didn’t stick around long enough!
The collapse of linear narrativity is something we all recognize, even if only unconsciously: We understand intuitively that “we have ended up in an always-on digital landscape, constantly pinged by updates and enduring a state of perpetual interruption — what I call ‘present shock’ — previously known only to 911 operators and air traffic controllers” (Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, [New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016], 6). As such, the “hyperlinked” mode of storytelling of shows like Lost, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead resonates with us, because these are worlds in which a zillion things are all happening at once, and before we ever get resolution to any one of their ongoing sub-dramas, we are whisked away to another one… and another after that… and yet another still. Much like our own digital reality, these shows aren’t about beginnings, middles, and ends, but rather dramatizing the disorientation of perpetual interruption.
Plus, they are inherently exciting. The hero’s-journey model of following a single protagonist through a series of progressive obstacles before finally Seizing the Sword and Returning with the Elixir is predictable, even boring, to an audience that’s been exposed to it thousands of times over. That’s why Lost felt so new and delightfully disorienting when it premiered: Those characters were in the same state of present shock that afflicts us, but we took hope that the “rules” of the hero’s journey would lead them to closure and catharsis — they very things we so desperately long for, now more than ever in an always-on digital landscape.
This longing for an unattainable closure has led to a condition Rushkoff terms Apocalypto: “the intolerance for presentism leads us to fantasize a grand finale. ‘Preppers’ stock their underground shelters while the mainstream ponders a zombie apocalypse, all yearning for a simpler life devoid of pings, by any means necessary. Leading scientists — even outspoken atheists — prove they are not immune to the same apocalyptic religiosity in their depictions of ‘the singularity’ and ’emergence’, through which human evolution will surrender to that of pure information.”
We become invested in postnarrative television shows because we see a depiction of reality to which we can directly (and even uncomfortably) relate: one of constant interruption, devoid of linearity, in which our presence is demanded in multiple places at once — leading us to do many things but finish none of them. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve been conditioned for thousands of years by the Aristotelian story arc to expect, in the final tally, closure and catharsis. So a show like Lost or Game of Thrones invests us in characters who are as hopelessly whiplashed as we are… and we long to experience the vicarious pleasure of closure through them. And then what we learn from these shows after having invested half a dozen seasons is that there is no sense to be made of any of it, no underlying narrative pattern we just couldn’t see through all the streaming code, no meaning in the endless flow of data, no hope of reclaiming a linear arc that leads to some sort of merciful conclusion. There are no satisfying resolutions for any of us in a presentist reality.
The crushing disappointment, therefore, we experience when a show like Lost or GoT fails to provide closure and catharsis (if only vicariously) is actually a reflection of the maddening frustration we feel about living in a world where we never get to be in a single place at once, focused on a single thing at a time, only to experience the satisfaction of completion. Indeed — we ache for that. And what the “failure” of these shows is telling us is that we have allowed our digital technologies to control our lives — our very reality — to the point that we can only imagine an “end” to it all through either fiction or apocalypse.
Perhaps there’s a more realistic, less desperate solution: We can learn to put our phones down. We can limit the time we are “available,” not unlike the way college professors schedule office hours. We can choose to spend more time on the street, amongst the crowd, and less online (certainly less watching TV). We can learn to do less, but do it more mindfully. We can be present without succumbing to presentism.
For more ideas on how we can reclaim a sense of purpose in a directionless reality, a sense of humanity in a digital world, I recommend Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast and book. No, it doesn’t have all the answers… but unlike Lost and Game of Thrones, it doesn’t promise certainty; it seeks only to show you the possibilities of uncertainty.
>Trying to conceive and carry out a five-year plan for a serialized show
This is exactly what Bablyon 5 attempted, and mostly succeeded. Straczynski said he specifically planned each character so that if the actor left the show could continue
Then the network said “No. Season 4 is your last season”, so they tried to wrap everything up by season 4. Then the network gave them one more season, and the quality took a nosedive, because they no longer had a direction, an overarching plan
In my essay on your site (https://www.seanpcarlin.com/blake-snyders-genres/) I discussed the difficulty of ending a post-narrative story. I said “You already know that for many now-concluded postnarrative shows, the ending is usually disappointing.” Of the four types of endings I described GoT was a combination of #1 and #3. So, like you, I can claim “I knew this would happen all along”
My own feeling about the GoT ending was that it was as good as it could have been, all things considered, though I hated the ep or two before (They have one woman of color and they kill her off?)
Babylon 5‘s run coincided with the exact same years I was in college, the only period of my life in which I never turned on the TV! To this day, I’ve never seen the final seasons of shows I’d loved throughout high school — like Coach and Seinfeld and Roseanne and Married… with Children — because I had no time for TV in the mid-nineties. Between work and class and dating the young woman who eventually became my wife, TV just kinda fell by the wayside. I didn’t come back to it till the turn of the millennium, when I fell in love with shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gilmore Girls.
As such, I can’t speak to the creative execution of Babylon 5, but I certainly recall the Buffy spin-off Angel, which had a built-in endgame: If Angel committed enough good deeds, the curse would be lifted and his humanity restored, at which point he could claim his “happily ever after” with Buffy. But…
The show got cancelled at the end of its fifth season — as I understand it, Whedon was given minimal advance warning and opted not to change the season’s planned ending, which had been predicated on the assumption of a renewal — and thusly the series never really concluded: The final shot features the gang charging into a battle they stand no chance of winning —
CUT TO BLACK. And yet somehow, it’s not a dissatisfying postlude — and certainly preferable to a hasty wrap-up dictated by cancellation over natural conclusion. It allows the audience to decide whether Buffy and Angel got their happily ever after at some point down the road, or if they were truly star-crossed lovers till the bitter end. In the years those shows have been off the air, I’ve come to value the inconclusive, imagination-provoking “ending” to that romance we got versus some passionate embrace to a bombastic musical score that would’ve tied everything up for us, felt great in the moment, and never inspired another thought about it.
On the subject of shows like Lost and Game of Thrones, Dave, you know what the problem is? They’re emotionally dishonest forms of corporate storytelling. The adopt some of the most exciting aspects of postnarrativity not to say something profound about the human condition, but rather to keep the audience engaged via “spoiler” exploitation. And the thing about spoilers is that they only work if there’s an implicit promise of eventual answers. So these shows keep you guessing, and talking, and watching the goddamn aftershows, all based on the premise that the loyal viewer will be rewarded with answers in the final outcome. They gin us up on the tantalizing ambiguity of postnarrativity, but then promise us Aristotelian catharsis. Except they can’t have both — these are incompatible modes of narrative — so a disappointing resolution becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Rushkoff explains:
Therefore, what we need to do is reject the cynical mode of corporate storytelling practiced by series like Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and start rewarding postnarrative fiction that isn’t about getting the answers but instead pondering the questions. Let’s be wary of anymore shows like Lost and GoT that promise absolute resolution on which their sprawling narratives cannot possibly deliver. Call bullshit on one-trick content creators like Benioff and Weiss, and J. J. Abrams, who exploit both postnarrativity and our fear of ambiguity by producing this kind of kitchen-sink, empty-promise fiction that doesn’t satisfy the demands of either classical or poststructural narrative; let ’em know we’re onto them, and we’re not falling for it anymore.
Thank you, Dave, for a lively conversation! You were one of the few early visionaries who recognized the validity of postnarrativity and didn’t tell me I was crazy for thinking it was a “thing”! I will be curious to see what artists do with the postnarrative form moving forward, now that more people are coming around to the idea of it in the wake of GoT‘s flameout of a finale.
SPC
Hi, Sean. To be honest, I stopped watching Game of thrones even before the end of the first season. It didn’t grab my attention at all and I didn’t care much for it. It’s just not my tipe of story, I guess.
Critically speaking, Lena, I went rather easy on Game of Thrones in this post. Rather than comment directly on the quality of the storytelling — with respect to either the controversial finale or the series overall — I simply pointed out that any fan of the show who’d been explicitly anticipating a satisfactory resolution had not merely set themselves up for crushing disappointment, but had in fact missed the entire point of GoT (to the extent it had one, that is). This was pure storyless fiction — a meaningless experiment in postnarrativity designed to determine how many characters and plotlines could be crammed into a single ongoing series before the entire top-heavy house of cards imploded. It was never meant to conclude, only collapse. Prophecy fulfilled.
That said, I never understood the feverish fascination with the show, right from the beginning. Literally every single friend and colleague I had counted down the minutes till the latest installment would air each Sunday night, whereas I just counted the minutes till a given episode was over. Watching it was nothing short of torturous. I couldn’t follow two consecutive minutes of it. I never knew who wanted what, what side they were on, or even what their fucking names were most of the time! (Hot Pie? The Hound? The Mountain? Who the fuck are these people?!) I just couldn’t make any sense of any of it… and I’m a professional screenwriter/novelist!
And for a long time, I thought the problem was me: What was I missing? You know? So, I stayed with it… and stayed with it… and I just loathed it more with each passing season. I finally came to accept the unspoken truth: It was just an ugly, sadistic, poorly written show about ugly, sadistic, poorly written characters, popular opinion be damned. (And its pro-monarchy messaging, confirmed by the finale, in which the Small Council literally laughs off the very notion of representative democracy, left a bad taste in my mouth.)
For reasons I can’t understand, when Lost ended, superfans retroactively renounced the entire series as a piece of shit from Day One, whereas the common refrain re: GoT seems to be: “It was an absolutely brilliant show… that simply deserved a better ending.”
No — it was an amorphous turd from its inception that reached the only possible conclusion available to it: an utterly illogical and unsatisfying one. I tell my apologist friends all the time that there was no “better ending,” because, as explored in my essay on Heat 2, there is a design at work in narrativity, per Tom Stoppard: “Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.” But since there was never a structured narrative supporting GoT, never a point to the series beyond its own sprawling self-perpetuation, there was no aesthetic, moral, or logical conclusion to reach — and, therefore, no point to it. It was only ever a game of Dungeons & Dragons, writ large and labeled “prestige TV.” I found every minute of it boring and confusing, in contrast with the kinds of narratively disciplined yet creatively experimental television dramas I’d admired as a young man.
And I frequently tell my friends they didn’t like GoT, either — they just bought into the hype about it. (That they angrily deny this only makes me more certain of my assertion.) For reasons I discussed in my most recent blog post, that this series found mainstream acceptance and critical adulation is incontrovertible proof of just how monopolistically geek interests are controlling our popular culture these days:
What Walther is addressing is the state of commercial adolescence to which many Gen-Xers and Millennials have surrendered, a subject I’ve explored in essays including “In the Multiverse of Madness” (part 1 and part 2), “Superman IV at 35,” and most recently in “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born.” Don’t let all the Emmys Game of Thrones has won fool you: The show is as dramatically, intellectually, and emotionally stunted as any of the other nerd-based multimedia franchises that are what pass for popular culture in our nascent millennium. It’s a show for people who’ve confused convolution with complexity, dark with deep, plot with story, worldbuilding with narrativity.
Hear, hear. Game of Thrones is immature crap masquerading as profound art, and the mere fact that audiences couldn’t see that — and still can’t, given the success of House of the Dragon — demonstrates the pitiful extent to which the geek subculture has bent us all to its will. That was the concluding takeaway, after all, of “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born”: that “we’ve all become Chosen Ones — unwittingly conscripted by Hollywood to serve as both hostage buyers of and brand ambassadors for its oppressively juvenile media franchises.” It’s not that we loved Game of Thrones — we didn’t (no one did, no matter how vociferously they may insist otherwise) — it’s just that, to quote Edward Norton, audiences have become “so used to getting fed the equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup that they can’t taste anymore.”
In short, Lena: You didn’t miss anything except a headache, followed by a disappointment. I thank you for taking the time to read and comment on this piece, though. Much obliged!
Okay, a bit of a defense
It DID have some cool moments
Tyrion was a great character (until he wasn’t)
The betrayal of Ned Stark was a major surprise (though I knew about it from having read the book). It was against what we would have expected, and left us wondering and worrying about his family
Jon Snow was in an interesting position, being a bastard w/ no claim, yet growing up w/ various advantages of being in a rich family
Watching the rise of Daenerys from a bargaining chip to a true queen was quite good (if you ignore the fact that basically the whitest person in Westeros freed all the POC’s, and the way they completely destroyed her character the last season)
Admittedly, the whole did not add up to the sum of its parts, but many of the parts were pretty cool
In fact, many of the WORST parts were when they deviated from the original novels, such as the last season
PUNCH. (November 9th, 1895)
RIGHT REVEREND HOST: “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!”
THE CURATE: “Oh, no, my lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!”
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/04/04/egg/
Despite being the oldest, the first season is actually the one I recall most clearly, for several reasons: The show was still new to me, so I was still open-minded about it. (Plus, my wife had read all the books and was really excited for the series, so I was primed to give it the benefit of any doubt.)
Also, there is an identifiable narrative throughline to that initial season (based on Martin’s first novel, A Game of Thrones) — to say nothing of a central, sympathetic protagonist (Ned Stark) — that made it easier, relatively speaking, to follow than subsequent seasons, which delighted in introducing copious new POV characters and tangential plotlines on a seemingly weekly basis. There is actually something resembling a coherent story arc in that first season, culminating with Ned paying the ultimate price for being unwilling to play the game.
And, sure, arguably some interesting characters and conflicts were set up — namely, the ones you cite above, Dell. But like a game of Dungeons & Dragons, that’s all Martin really provided: a foundation of characters and conflicts, divorced from any structured narrative. A Game of Thrones, ultimately, was a module, not a story.
And if you’ve ever played D&D, Dell, you know that it’s enjoyable for a while: exploring new settings, wielding weapons/powers, accumulating treasure and matériels, earning experience points, etc. It’s fun! But if it goes on long enough, eventually it just becomes wearisome — everyone tires of it. So, no surprise, that’s what happened with GoT: Benioff and Weiss tired of playing. They wanted to move on. And just as an open-ended D&D campaign is never really concluded, only at some point abandoned, Benioff and Weiss tied the series into a half-assed bow — because the conventions of dramatic television, unlike the RPGs on which GoT was modeled, demand a tidy resolution — only to discover the limitations of postnarrativity.
A story is driven by a controlling idea (a theme), which is explored through the story’s plot developments/complications (the conflict), and it is the decisive (and sometimes even artfully ambiguous) resolution of that conflict, which includes the culmination of the protagonist’s transformational arc, that provides catharsis: emotional release and thematic insight. That’s what good stories (used to) do: hold us in a state of controlled suspense until we can take no more, then offer us an insight into human nature in exchange for our time and attention. But…
But rather than learning to view cathartic narrativity and storyless fiction as two divergent forms, with distinctly different functions, we impose the expectations of each on the other: We demand postnarrative fiction offer the conclusion and catharsis we’re trained to expect from conventional storytelling. Worse still, we retroactively treat Aristotelian stories, particularly those that later spawned massive franchises, as codes to be cracked, as puzzles to be solved. Such is why so much ink is spilled on theorizing why Obi-Wan calls Vader ‘Darth’, or whether Indiana Jones had any impact on the outcome of Raiders:
Indeed. But audiences no longer “get” that, and neither do most storytellers/filmmakers. We’re in a new era whereby narrativity and gaming and puzzle-solving have all become conflated. The lines that used to distinguish those different forms of entertainment are blurred, perhaps entirely nonexistent at this point. To be clear: Evolutionary shifts in artistic expression are not a bad thing in and of themselves; they are a good and healthy thing! But popular culture has been hijacked by corporate interests whose agenda is to nurture commercial adolescence/nostalgia — to retard creative and emotional growth for profit.
Cersei notably said, “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” But implicit in that statement is a choice to play or to not. We can opt out of this shit any time we want, as I argued for in “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 2.” Before the premiere of House of the Dragon, critic Scott Woods made an excellent, if unheeded, case for passing on the GoT spinoff:
Right. Before Scream became a never-ending corporate franchise, it was a cathartic fable about a young woman who decides she’s no longer playing by rules imposed upon her without her consultation or consent. I loved Scream when I first saw it in 1996, and I love it today — for teaching me it’s perfectly okay, and even advisable, to let go of Scream. (Same as Buffy ’92 teaches it’s okay to not carry Buffy with you forever.) When we commence a game of D&D, we only have to play for as long as we like. Same goes for these interminable media franchises: None of us subscribed to any of them for life. Choose to play or not. Choose to quit anytime you like. Because when you play the game of thrones, Hollywood-style, never lose sight of this: The house always wins.
Actually, I play D&D every Saturday
We don’t do a hack & slash dungeon crawl, however. We fully develop the characters, roleplay their relationships, interact w/ the world around us. My female half-orc, who’d been convinced she was too ugly and too worthless to love, just got married. That’s character advancement not measured in levels, magic items, or gold
A previous game had us running a country, exploring elements of power, responsibility, doing what’s best for the people while increasing your own personal power, telling the people the awful truth vs a comforting lie…
Character arcs and story arcs are certainly possible in D&D, if you have the right players and the right Dungeon Master. The rules are just a structure to pin the game on
I love your female half-orc character! Sounds like she had the same transformational arc as Shrek, who had to learn he was worthy of love.
The mode of open-ended “sandbox” gameplay that D&D offers, Dell — the way your group enjoys it — is arguably more fun, more satisfying, and certainly more prosocial than when its storyless structure is adapted for the passive (and often solitary) entertainment experience of weekly television. By attempting to serve two masters — that is, the discrepant conventions of both dramatic television and emergent narrativity — Game of Thrones winds up satisfying the expectations of neither. The audience is denied the thrill of interactive gameplay (which the RPG provides) and the boon of emotional catharsis (the payoff of linear storytelling). Such is what Rushkoff meant when he identified the collapse of narrativity; GoT is a textbook exemplar of postnarrative fiction, having completely rejected the structure, the conventions, the expectations, and the elegant resolutions of linear narrativity — to both great commercial success and bitter audience disappointment.
My old grade-school buddy, with whom I used to play D&D (and later AD&D) in the ’80s, somewhat recently joined a Dungeons & Dragons group out in Brooklyn where he lives, and I was surprised to learn the old tabletop RPG is as popular as ever! There was a point in the 1980s when I was very into epic fantasy: I had a set of Dragonslayer coloring books; I devoured those Wizards, Warriors & You adventures (which were essentially high-fantasy Choose Your Own Adventure novels); I read the four Sagard the Barbarian gameplay novels; I did a book report on Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara in fourth grade; I was obsessed with Dragon’s Lair at the local video arcade; and, of course, there’s no accounting for how many hours I invested in playing the original Legend of Zelda for Nintendo, the first videogame that actually let your save your progress! That was a literal game-changer. No question about it: In grade school, I was taken with all that stuff.
I went into a two-year depression during high school, however, and that was when I discovered vampire fiction. From that point onward, horror and dark fantasy was my true passion. To this day, I’ve never read Tolkien or Martin or McCaffrey or Lewis or Pratchett or Jordan or Goodkind or Rothfuss or Sanderson. I never even got around to the Chronicles of the Shadow War trilogy that Chris Claremont wrote in the mid-’90s, based on a story by George Lucas, which was meant to serve as a sequel to Willow, even though I’d had every intention of reading it. (It didn’t help that those novels came out when I was in college and had zero free time for that sort of thing; had they been released just two or three years earlier, while I was still in high school, I probably would have read at least the first of them.) But I’m sure those books are — gasp! — no longer “canon,” what with the recent “legacy” series that Disney produced. (Didn’t watch that, either.)
Weirdly enough, I hear Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is actually pretty good! It’s got a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes (and a 93% audience score).
Have you seen it? I’d be curious to hear your take on it.
Always a pleasure, Sean! I know quite a few fans of GoT who gets furious when you disagree with them on the subject, so usually I just leave it.
Agreed, Lena: Don’t even engage. The toxic brand of blood-oath fandom that modern media franchises inspire these days has irreversibly siphoned all the joy out of pop culture, for reasons I explored in “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born.” Like the “multiverses” of Marvel and DC Comics, the sprawling storyworlds of the Star Wars and Game of Thrones franchises are receptacles into which (mostly) adult men channel all of their broken dreams — nostalgic fantasylands that (for the most part) reflect the patriarchal, individualistic, white-privileged, heteronormative state of existence for which these fans yearn. It’s the same mentality that inspires such fanatical loyalty to Trump:
I can’t tell you how many texts I got over this past weekend from friends who are pulling out their hair over the tepid reviews coming out of Cannes for Indiana Jones and the Duel of Destiny, unable to accept that they’ve got yet another crushing disappointment of a nostalgia sequel on their hands. So, the movie will come out in six weeks, and we’ll all go see how bad it is for ourselves, and then the next six to 12 months will be a nonstop parade of blog posts and YouTube postmortems trying to come to terms with how Duel of Destiny failed to make us all feel like the 10-year-old boys we were when we first saw Raiders in 1981 — as if the answer hadn’t been right in the mirror all along.
But that’s the thing about modern fandom: It’s trapped in a hopelessly abusive relationship with the very multimedia franchises it claims to love — and it never learns to stop going back for more. There’s nothing inherently wrong with passion, but anyone you may know who gets angry over a movie or TV show — anyone who exhibits fanaticism — is probably someone with whom you’re better off steering clear of the topic of pop culture, same as you would religion or politics. Such is what I mean when I say popular culture has become its own socioreligious belief system. Alas, I’m old enough to remember when it was just fun.
>Such is what I mean when I say popular culture has become its own socioreligious belief system
I said something like that just a little over two years ago
https://www.seanpcarlin.com/mega-franchises-part-2/#comment-7195
Indeed, sir. Pop culture is the new religion, fandom the new faith. Instead of interpreting texts like the Bible or the Qur’an, of scouring scripture for meaning, now we comb meticulously, even psychoneurotically, through the intertextual minutiae of multimedia “universes” (the sprawling storyworlds of Marvel, DC Comics, Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones) in an effort to establish a coherent theory of everything, in large part by parsing out what and what doesn’t qualify as — and here’s a telling word choice — “canon.”
(Lucasfilm recently announced that Young Indiana Jones will soon be available to stream on Disney+, leading some to wonder if this means the prequel series is still considered canon. Because, ya know, that was the point of Young Indy, after all — to be an obscure puzzle piece in a much larger franchise.)
Alas, there’s no more meaning to be found in those creatively improvised corporate franchises than there is in a 3,000-year-old book of poorly edited science-fiction stories. Religion has always been about controlling behavior, by promising to reward the faithful with an ultimate (and somehow perennially elusive) payoff — be it Armageddon or the rapture or the Second Coming or some other “imminent” miracle that’s ever and always a day away. These are the same strategies employed by multimedia initiatives, which also seek to influence our behavior as consumers — to keep us buying the latest product in the franchise, which, we’re promised, will move us one step closer to learning “what it’s all about.” It’s no accident that the word “fan” is an abbreviated form of “fanatic.”
I just saw Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a couple of days ago. I had been avoiding it because I enjoy AD&D, and as I said in a previous comment:
Whenever a movie or TV show is about something I like or something I do or something I am, I cringe
I KNOW it’s going to be wrong, narrow-minded, judgmental, insulting, misinformed, condescending, stereotyped…
https://www.seanpcarlin.com/the-girl-before/#comment-7916
So I was actually pleasantly surprised. While not 100% faithful, the movie was fairly close, w/ owlbears, gelatinous cubes, displacer beasts, and other familiar monsters. The spells were mostly recognizable, and worked basically as I know them. The mimic attack could have been out of any campaign
Of course, the fight scenes could not be duplicated in the game, but that was to the movie’s advantage. The fights were original and thrilling, whereas in the game it’s usually just two teams rolling dice and losing hit points
Quite frankly, it was exciting and fun. The character interactions were enjoyable, and similar to how some players would play their characters, the worldbuilding was believable w/o being overwhelming and true to the source material w/o the audience NEEDING to be familiar w/ AD&D. It had a decent sense of humor, w/o being too “jokey”. And the effect were (mostly) very good,
Having said that, it was basically a movie aimed at 12-to-16-year-olds. Mostly predictable, no deeper meaning, simple plot. Although the heroes were thieves, there was virtually no moral ambiguity; the good guys were good because they were good and the bad guys were bad because they were bad. Even though Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine) had “betrayed” the Harpers, this was shown to be more of a simple moral lapse, a fatal flaw for which he needed to be, and in the end was, redeemed. The possible exception was the villainous Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) who had been caring for Edgin’s daughter, Kira (Chloe Coleman) and actually seemed to care for her, though in the end he threatened her life to try to obtain a fortune in gold
Despite the occasional deaths (unnamed soldiers and others, the main villain), and the evil spell creating an undead army, this movie was a welcome change from all the grimdark that’s been haunting fantasy of late
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was trying to be nothing more than simple fun, and it succeeded
I really appreciate your sharing that thorough assessment, Dell! Thank you! I will definitely make time to see Honor Among Thieves. In fact, I’m pretty sure the first time I ever encountered the phrase in the subtitle — “There is no honor among thieves” — was in the Dungeon Masters Guide:
(Or possibly the Players Handbook or some other rulebook or module; it was a long time ago and I can’t precisely recall. I still had many of those original hardcover gamebooks in my possession up through just a few years ago, but I gave them to my aforementioned friend in Brooklyn right around the time I was first minimalizing my home.)
The creative spirit that first animated so many of today’s major multimedia franchises, from the superheroes of Marvel and DC Comics to Star Wars to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was inspired by an explicit intent to entertain (and, arguably, expand the imagination of) 12-year-olds. When we revisit the Adam West Batman or what’s now known as A New Hope or the Kristy Swanson Buffy in a cultural vacuum — that is, we pretend, to the best extent possible, the stuff that came later doesn’t even exist — the only reasonable conclusion one can reach is that they were all intended exclusively for preadolescents to consume and enjoy. There’s something utterly pure about the earliest incarnations of those franchises that’s missing from the sequels/remakes/reboots/revivals that came later. That the violence is bloodless and the morality simplistic is a feature, not a flaw, of the pre–grimdark era of corporate franchise entertainment.
Those kinds of films mostly don’t exist anymore. It might even be fair to say Pirates of the Caribbean was the last successful blockbuster franchise made in that spirit of pure escapist fun — intended mostly for 12- to 16-year-olds, yet with enough sly wit to engage adults. (And maybe Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy series before that.) Instead, now we have “legacy sequels,” which are made to serve so many masters they wind up, for the most part, satisfying none of them. You can’t cater to adult fans who are, incongruously, both nostalgic and jaded, and also expect to deliver on gee-whiz innocence for younger viewers. Can’t do it.
Even though Honor Among Thieves is based on a preexisting IP from the 1970s, it’s a niche franchise that is known more for its general sword-and-sorcery concept and epic-fantasy archetypes than any specific narrative scenario; the very term “Dungeons & Dragons” conjures a sense of genre more than a recollection of any particular story or characters. And the only previous screen adaptations of the RPG are a long-forgotten Saturday-morning cartoon series from the ’80s and the Marlon Wayans/Jeremy Irons (there’s an incongruous pairing!) movie from 2000 that it isn’t entirely clear even a single person ever saw. So, as an IP, Dungeons & Dragons has brand recognition — even those who’ve never played the game or seen the earlier movies know the broad-strokes gist of it — without carrying the burdensome cultural baggage a franchise like Star Wars is saddled with.
So, perhaps directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley chose the right property — one with reasonably high audience awareness and commensurately low expectations — and they managed to make it in the spirit of the pulp fantasies of yesteryear without having to both cater to aging fans while courting younger ones? Maybe audiences were just ready for something fun, without all the high expectations and long history of something like Indiana Jones, which seems poised to disappoint next month, or the increasingly byzantine mythology of the MCU? Either way, I look forward to seeing it!
Side note: On the subject of Pirates of the Caribbean, it pisses me off to no end that Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and At World’s End (2007) took so much flak for being “overplotted” and “confusing” that the filmmakers, stung by the criticism, structured On Stranger Tides (2011) as more of a straightforward Indiana Jones adventure, sans all the double-dealing and double-crossing of the Verbinski trilogy. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones premiered the same fucking year as On Stranger Tides, and no one — save, by all evidence, myself — seemed to have any trouble following its fifty thousand plotlines! I had zero problem tracking the plots of the Pirates movies, which I found immensely more coherent and entertaining than any two consecutive scenes from any given episode of GoT. (The only Pirates movie I dislike is Dead Men Tell No Tales, which is egregiously inconsistent with the mythology established in the earlier entries, and which completely bungled Jack Sparrow’s characterization.)
Perhaps the lesson to take from the success of Honor Among Thieves (2023), The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), and The Mummy (1999) is that Hollywood is better off mining second-string IPs that don’t have rabidly passionate (adult) fandoms — the aforementioned films are based upon, respectively, a “nerdy” role-playing game, a Disney theme-park ride, and a Boris Karloff horror movie from 1932 — and entrusting them to filmmakers with both strong points of view on the material and unpretentious, escapist aspirations, versus nostalgic fan-service vehicles like the Disney-era Star Wars, or Star Trek: Picard, or Ghostbusters: Afterlife, or David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy? To my view, that’s the difference between inspiration and imitation, and right now we have a dearth of the former and surplus of the latter.
> movie from 2000
Which I for one have not seen, but I’ve heard from someone I trust, someone who knows D&D, that it is exactly what I feared the new movie would
In a way D&D:HAT IS point and clap. Those of us w/ deep knowledge enjoyed the references. However, you don’t NEED the references. If you don’t know Mordenkainen from Neverwinter you won’t feel like you’ve missed anything
One last note: There are no great “quips” in D&D:HAT. The movie is lighthearted and humorous, but not quotable. I can’t think of a single quip! I looked up quotes from the movie online, and all of them are situational, maybe one or two you’d quote w/ friends out of context
However, the set-pieces were great! Edgin’s parole meeting, Simon’s magic show, the carriage scene, the final fight, and many others (I don’t want to go into detail and spoil things)
–
I’d read the first book in the GOT series before there was a series, so I knew mostly the first season plot. After that I began to lose track of what exactly was going on. But I just assumed that was just me and my concentration issues
Of course, George R. R. Martin is a better writer than Benioff and Weiss, so the book was easier to follow. In fact, many of the worst scenes in the show, including the entired last season, were when Benioff and Weiss deviated from the books
I suppose in that sense, Pirates of the Caribbean could be considered point-and-clap, too, because those films are loaded with allusions to the theme-park ride, including visual cues (fireflies in the swamp), plot points (cursed treasure), set pieces (the chaotic attack on Port Royal), sight gags (the dog with the keys to the cell), and even music (“Yo Ho”) and dialogue (“These be the last friendly words you hear”). But, speaking as someone who’s a big fan of those first four films (despite their slow descent into Double Hocus Pocus), I never interpreted that as the filmmakers cramming in references for the sake of fan service. Rather, I’d say the park ride, while not a narrative, conjures a very memorable Gothic-nautical atmosphere, and the filmmakers were taking that as inspiration for the supernatural swashbuckling motion picture they were creating from it. If you catch the references to the ride, you appreciate them in the moment, but Pirates of the Caribbean doesn’t aspire to be an Easter-egg hunt.
I imagine, having not seen it, such was the intention of Goldstein and Daley for Honor Among Thieves. I’m assuming that, like Verbinski and Rossio & Elliott, they understood there are certain aesthetic and mythological touchstones that make D&D recognizably D&D, and you have to honor those things without being slavishly devoted to including them — that is, you make those elemental embellishments serve the narrative rather than configuring the narrative to serve the ornamentals, which is the cardinal sin of point-and-clap entertainment.
Interesting note about the dialogue in Honor Among Thieves. Memorable dialogue is definitely one of the elements of storytelling that’s been lost in our postnarrative era. When commercial entertainment was more concerned with character than plot — whereas corporate postnarrativity, by contrast, places enormous emphasis on plot machinations above all — we got endlessly quotable movies like Ghostbusters (1984), This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Lethal Weapon (1987), Dirty Dancing (1987), Major League (1989). I mean, the plots of virtually all those movies rest somewhere on the narrative spectrum between perfunctory and irrelevant. But because all those movies were populated with interesting characters, they all wound up uttering (many) memorable lines.
Hell, when Spielberg and Lucas decided that their third Indiana Jones outing would be less concerned with the central quest than the central relationship, audiences were rewarded with a richly witty screenplay (by Jeffrey Boam) with sparkling, quotable dialogue (by Tom Stoppard). Contrast that with the Marvel Universe, where “ironic commentary” is what passes for clever banter. I would love to see a shift back toward character-driven stories like Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.
All that said, exceptional dialogue is not a prerequisite for entertaining 12-year-olds. God knows the comic books I loved as a kid are unreadable to me now. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Honor Among Thieves aspiring to be for a preadolescent audience. Just so long as those kids don’t grow up and elevate those pulp adventures to high art the way Gen X and the Millennials did!
It’ll be interesting to see where George R.R. Martin nets out with A Song of Ice and Fire. Christ, at this point, he’s been writing the sixth (and explicitly not final) volume, The Winds of Winter, for a dozen years… with no publication date in sight. I maintain he will never finish that series. He may very well be a better writer than Benioff and Weiss (not that those guys set the bar particularly high), but, like a D&D campaign, A Song of Ice and Fire doesn’t want to conclude, only to keep going for as long as possible. If he doesn’t understand that about his own creation, well… that’s a pity.
Dell,
I watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves last night and I have to say that it’s probably the most enjoyable old-school Hollywood adventure fantasy I’ve seen since Curse of the Black Pearl. I agree with your assessment 100%: inventive set pieces, lively characters with great rapport, excellent use of D&D lore (without shoehorning in references merely as point-and-clap gratuities), (mostly) good FX (more on that in a moment), some excellent (if not exactly quotable) dialogue, and — most crucially — a sense of humor! (And a really good sense of humor, at that.) It was tongue-in-cheek without ever slipping into self-parody — a very tricky balance. It reminded me why I loved high fantasy so much in grammar school, and made me realize in an elemental way (as opposed to an intellectual one) why I’ve never cottoned to the self-serious grimdark approach of Game of Thrones. My 12-to-16-year-old self delighted in every moment of Honor Among Thieves.
And you’re right: That’s the audience this movie was trying to please. It was in no way grounded or elevated — just pure visceral fun, same as the original Star Wars. We were just discussing yesterday how Adam West’s Batman and Dick Donner’s Superman were perfect, never-to-be-bested adaptations of their source material because they understood who their target demographic was… and yet the screenwriting/filmmaking was handled intelligently, so adults could find something to enjoy, too. But none of those movies — Star Wars, Batman ’66, Superman ’78, Pirates of the Caribbean, Honor Among Thieves — were for grownups; they were unambiguously intended for boys, they just didn’t alienate adults.
I admit I was a little disappointed when the climax went all-in on so-so CGI, the way every blockbuster feels obligated to do these days. That was the one flaw in the otherwise terrific Wonder Woman, too — that CGI-heavy final battle. It was the only sequence in both Honor Among Thieves and Wonder Woman where my eyes glazed over a bit. The climactic scene of Tim Burton’s Batman in the cathedral doesn’t make any sense (why wouldn’t the Joker just have the helicopter land in the plaza?), but at least it’s tactile and memorable. And the earthquake sequence in Superman: The Movie, where he’s racing around the West Coast fixing one problem after another, didn’t bombard you with imagery your eyes couldn’t process. So, it was unfortunate Honor Among Thieves couldn’t have taken a more low-key approach to its climax. But the emotional payoff — with Holga — really resonated, so at least the filmmakers brought the whole thing back down to (Middle-)Earth.
Excellent movie. I’ll look forward to rewatching it — and I can’t recall the last time I said that about a movie!
SPC
Almost missed this comment!
I’m glad you liked it
>The climactic scene of Tim Burton’s Batman in the cathedral doesn’t make any sense
You always should try for continuity, too many gaffes will pull the audience out of the story
However, like w/ Raiders of the Lost Ark and El Mariachi you want the audience so caught up in it that they either don’t notice or don’t care about sense
There He Was… and in He Walked:
>Since it was so hot, [Azul] kept taking his leather vest off between shots. In one sequence he forgot to put it back on. . . . Azul asked if we should reshoot the scene and he’d put the vest back on. I told him it wasn’t worth wasting film on something like that and that if people noticed it, that means they’re probably bored and we’ve lost the battle so we might as well keep going.
BTW, almost finished w/ The Dogcatcher. I would’ve finished it sooner, but real life kept getting in the way
Great book so far!
I particularly like how Frank, Nick, and their father all oppose each other, but nobody is completely wrong, stupid, or an asshole
Does Waff have ADHD (inattentive)?
Yes, there are plenty of plot points in all of those Gen-X classics — El Mariachi, Burton’s Batman, Raiders — that don’t withstand scrutiny. But they weren’t really meant to. For all the reasons we’ve been discussing, those movies were all made for the 12-to-16-year-old boys of their day. (Even a movie as wantonly violent as Desperado was clearly meant to appeal to an adolescent mentality.) Plus, those movies were for the most part made before we had DVDs we could rewind and pause, forensically searching for continuity errors, and they were all produced long before there were blogs and vlogs devoted nigh exclusively to microscopically analyzing and reappraising and obsessing over Gen-X pop-culture ephemera.
You know, I am aware of at least one typo that made it through I-don’t-know-how-many drafts and editors/beta-readers to wind up in the published edition of The Dogcatcher. When I realized it was in there, my first thought was, How did we all miss that? But then I remembered Robert Rodriguez’s point about Azul’s leather vest: If your readers are spotting typos, that means they’re bored, and the battle is already lost.
Thanks for the nice words about the book! Yes, I went out of my way to make sure every character had a point of view that made sense, even if it wasn’t in line with someone else’s perspective. “Competing truths,” my old screenwriting mentor taught me. I didn’t want any phony antagonism in this story. And I wanted to make sure that every one of the main characters contributes meaningfully to the outcome of the story — that if you removed any one of them from the equation, the villain triumphs.
Does Waff have ADHD? Excellent question. Here’s my answer: Probably. I admit I never really thought about why he’s irresponsible, for the same reason we don’t know why Han Solo is an unethical loner in New Hope. He just is. Readers have said to me they love how stupid he is. I never thought of him or wrote him as stupid. When I designed his Character Diamond, none of those corners were labeled “stupid.” However, one of his corners is Stupid sense of humor. (In contrast with Jessie, who has a cynical wit, and with Frank, who has no sense of humor at all.)
The idea behind Waff’s psychological profile is that he’s irresponsible (again: we don’t know why), and that he compensates for that by acting stupid. Because if his problem is that he’s irresponsible, that’s something he can work on; but if his problem is that he’s stupid, there’s nothing to be done for that. So, he lets people think he’s stupid so he isn’t forced to learn to be more responsible — he isn’t forced to grow. That’s Waff in a nutshell.
Obviously, he’s almost exclusively comic relief in this story; he is, in fact, the only major character who never gets a POV chapter. I always thought of Waff as having grown up in Cornault as the youngest and goofiest kid amongst a group of friends (like Vern in Stand by Me) who always just wanted to be included — he always wanted to come along for the ride. And he was lucky to have found a best friend who is a sucker for hard-luck cases!
Dell, thanks so, so much for buying the book and reading it right away! I’m so indebted to you. The book is up on Goodreads now, and I plan to engage with readers there through Q&As and author commentaries. After living alone with these characters for 14 years, I’m really curious to know what others think of them…
My headcanon is that Waff has ADHD (inattentive)
Like most neurodivergences, ADHD is a spectrum, and you do not need to have every trait, or even most traits, to qualify
>The idea behind Waff’s psychological profile…
If I had any doubts, this paragraph convinces me
He probably does, yeah. And that no authority figure in his young life ever recognized that or thought to address it is a failing that is perfectly consistent with my own Gen-X upbringing (even though Waff is a Millennial, and we’ve explored the differences between those generations elsewhere). Instead of getting that poor kid the help he needed, they passed a fucking bylaw prohibiting him from gainful employment. They took a young man with a problem and made his life harder, not easier. Christ, if that doesn’t reflect the experience of me and all my friends growing up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I don’t know what does. My best pals and I had no adults in our lives we could count on; we could only rely on each other. That’s what The Lost Boys of the Bronx is ultimately about, and that’s what Frank and Waff were to one another in adolescence: a pair of boys misunderstood by their families and their community, who stood steadfastly by each other despite their contrasting personalities. That’s friendship.
So, there you go, Dell: Your comments on my essays always yield deeper insight into the subjects, and now you’ve done the same for my first novel! I’m indebted, sir!