A Game of Endings

Avengers Endgame was great, I've already seen it twice now so I know it can hold up, historically second viewings have always been my most critical ones.  I wanted to celebrate that good news before getting into what this post is actually about.

I haven't watched Game of Thrones since season 4, but after watching a plurality of Video Essays and rants about the ending I get the sense that I'm generally inclined agree with mostly all of the criticisms.  People hating on letting the North be independent makes me uncomfortable but that's no where near the main event of all the complaining.

There are however two things that are a part of this discussion I feel inclined to disagree with.

The fact that I've seen more then one person say they can't enjoy the early seasons they used to love anymore.  This is something I've already talked about more directly in the context of Anime, my fundamental disagreement with Glass Reflection's The Ending is Paramount video.

Thing is I've never really been disappointed by a bad or imperfect ending because I know better then to expect it to be great.  I know that the longer it takes to get to the ending the more impossible it is it'll feel truly satisfying.  But even in the case of a single season 24 episode show like Romeo+Juliet my frustration with the last two episodes cannot take away how much I loved the first 22.

I do love great endings when they happen, and Avengers Endgame manages to top even the Anime Endings I find highly satisfying (Code Geass R2 is still the best ending I've ever seen in Anime) because it managed to pull it off even though it was over a Decade in building.

In order for my overall opinion of something I started out liking to become even mediocre much less bad the decline has to begin very early.  In the case of Neon Genesis Evangelion it was as soon as Asuka came in things started to decline, the literal End of Evangelion being utterly irredeemable was not enough on it's own.

The second Issue I have is everyone feeling so confident the eventual ending of the A Song of Ice and Fire books will be very well executed even if at first glance it looks like the same basic ending. I'm certain their ending will also be unsatisfying.  I'm not even confident the final book will ever get written at all.

It's possible of course that now people will praise the books' ending just for being different then how the show ended, or that even if it is genuinely better executed it'll be because it had the benefit of seeing how the show's ending was critiqued. Which means Martin should perhaps be eternally grateful the TV show ended how it did.

I do think Martin has a basic idea of where he wants the story to go, and maybe he gave the gist of it to the show's writers.  But his taking forever to write even the second to last book tells me he has no idea of how to actually get there.  And I feel the same way about Berserk, the insane confidence of some Otaku who think the Mangaka has some brilliant ending perfectly mapped out when it's taking him over 30 years to get there is laughable to me.

Meaning much of the core criticism of the show's ending could easily be equally applicable to the books, forcing the characters to a predetermined end even if it doesn't organically fit their journey, it's just the specifics that would be different.  This problem has never been unique to adaptations, Star Trek Voyager's finale had the same core issue, as SFDebris explained they stubbornly stuck to a finale they wrote at the same time they wrote the pilot.

Of course part of why I doubt I'd like the Books' ending any better is how for me Game of Thrones went wrong a lot sooner then it did for them.  I loved the first 2 seasons, even mostly liked season 3, which is more then enough to indefinitely give my mind an overall positive association for the brand.  But season 4 is where the show lost me.  Most people at the soonest see the very end of season 4 as the first warning sign, but overall it's when the show ran out of book material they started not liking it.

The show had some differences from the books even in season 1, and from what I've heard I think I'm inclined to like the show better in at least that season/book's case.  I mean superficially I'd have preferred the books much more over-sized Iron Throne, but the more meaningful changes I'm glad they changed.

So it seems like if anything I'm inclined to prefer the show to the books.

Many critics of the final season say they are not in concept against Dani's heel turn and they are confident Martin is going to "character develop" it better.  For me Dani being set up as a righteous leader is core to what I was liking, and the seeds of her ruthlessness being planted was part of why season 4 turned me off.

If Martin saw "The Return of the King" trope turning out to be a bad thing as the core of his deconstructive narrative, then he shouldn't have made that King a Queen, because to me choosing to "deconstruct" the Messianic Archetype when you give it to a woman is inherently sexist.  I crave seeing that narrative played straight but with a Queen and that's why I loved Krista/Historia's story-line in Seasons 2 and 3 of Attack on Titan.

So even if Dani turning evil genocidal maniac makes more sense in the books I would still inherently hate it.

Honestly I'd like it if it's Jon Snow who turns evil after finding out he was the rightful heir all along, that would be a far better deconstruction of that trope to me.  He's the one who's journey in the first 4 seasons seems like what modern audiences are inclined to consider the most acceptable version of that Trope, like Aragon as a Ranger but with even more humility and hardship.  So deconstructing the expectation that that inherently makes a good person much less a good leader would be far more subversive.   It'd also Subvert the show's internal expectation that the Starks are always good.

But like with the Dani debate you'd have to execute it properly and not make it seem like a switch was flipped out of nowhere.