Game of Thones: Kubler-Ross Edition

With just two episodes remaining, it’s time to accept that Game of Thrones is limping to an early finish line that didn’t need to be. Join me on this journey into hyperbole.

The Five Stages of Grief, taken from here.

Denial:Denial is the first of the five stages of grief. It helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle. As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface

You can actually HEAR me go through the first few stages of grief in this season of the Take the Black podcast. In my first article for WiC, I wrote about how the shortened episode count for the last two seasons had created a time crunch issue. Some of y’all disagreed, and bless your hearts. Bless all of our hearts.

I think we all stayed in the denial phase for quite a while. Episode 2 was actually really good, and Episode 3 was…exciting? I was a defender, anyway. I even said that while some of the criticisms were valid, we still had three episodes left so there could be a lot of stuff to come that would answer some of the questions.

Welp. Episode 4 came and went, and we learned nothing. In this most recent podcast, you can hear most of us move on from denial to stage 2, Anger.

Anger: “Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this? Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – – your anger toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing. We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love.”

Let me just say up top that all of us on Take the Black LOVE Game of Thrones. We’ve been doing the podcast for quite some time. Through the good times and bad, and even in the long off-season. So when I say this, understand that it is coming from a place of love.

This season has not been good.

I’m just going to stream of consciousness a list of things here in a couple of angry paragraph and we’ll move on, okay? Here we go:

What does Bran do, actually? They’ve shown us nothing of his powers aside from warging into ravens that just squawk about in the sky. Dany’s remaining Small Council is ready to abandon her for Jon because of the things she’s done…oh wait, no, she hasn’t actually done anything yet except listen to her small council, which was a mistake. She has no friends left alive, only one dragon, her Small Council is abandoning her at a party and also conspiring behind her back. Oh, and the Starks said she can’t sit with them because they’re mean girls now. Arya even has to shush Sansa and remind her that Dany played a big part in their victory over the army of the dead, only to immediately swivel back to “but she isn’t one of us.” Dany has done literally everything possible to earn at least a modicum of respect from the North and they don’t give it to her.

So just to check those boxes real quick: she’s alone, hated, ignored, and conspired against by the only people she has left that she trusts….hmm, I wonder why she might say screw it and burn everything to the ground? And while this is an effective way to create a Mad Queen on the fly, it’s not effective storytelling with all the development we’ve had from these characters over the years. Dany is held to a higher standard than any other character on the show, and it makes absolutely no sense. In the same episode, Tyrion is freaking out because Dany wants to use her dragon, but then stands in front of CERSEI LANNISTER and says, “you’re not a monster.” Tyrion struck a deal with slavers to allow them to keep slaving, he is wanting to starve the people of King’s Landing to the point of starting a revolution that in no way is guaranteed to work, and he blew up half a fleet using wildfire back in the day but Dany is the evil one. Got it. Not to mention all the bodies at Vary’s feet.

More from Winter is Coming

The thing is, I’m not a Dany stan. Truly! But just like with Bran’s journey culminating in him sitting still for a whole episode, what they’re doing to and with Dany defeats the entire purpose of her journey that we’ve watched for a decade now. If they had 10 episodes to turn Dany from the Breaker of Chains into the Mad Queen, it might work better, but instead we’re getting her doing nothing and reacting very reasonably to the events around her and that makes her crazy because “cocks matter,” even though Cersei, Yara, and Sansa are all in power as well. What the hell is going on?

Hey, the new prince of Dorne (who we don’t even care to name) has said he supports Dany, as does Yara Greyjoy who just took back the Iron Islands, and now there’s a new Lord of Storm’s End that could rally some troops, and I bet the lords of the Reach would be board if she talked to them. So maybe we should listen to the best suggestion Sansa has made in a long time and take a nap and make a plan. Nope, we’ll just fly down and get ambushed on the open ocean on a sunny day by the fleet ex-machina and Euron Sparrow with upgraded scorpions. Those same scorpions, by the way, were pointed at Dany, Drogon, and about 40 men standing well within range of the walls of King’s Landing at the end of the episode and Cersei didn’t shoot them.

AND PET THE DAMN DOG, JON.