A grateful ode to Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones is over.

Even writing that sentence leaves me with a heavy heart. For the past decade, this show has been a huge part of my life. Before that, the books ignited a lifelong love of reading, eventually propelling me down the path to becoming a writer myself. The characters who inhabit the world of Westeros were some of my favorite friends, my greatest teachers. Tyrion Lannister showed me the value of finding strength in your weaknesses; Jon Snow that the right thing is not always easy to see, and sometimes only your heart knows the difference; Daenerys Targaryen, the girl who was sold to a horselord, who outwitted the slavers of Astapor and rode from the fighting pits of Meereen on the back of a dragon…she taught me to never give up.

If you’ve already seen “The Iron Throne,” the Game of Thrones series finale, then you know how their stories ended. And if you loved these characters like I did, then you might be in a state of shock. The finale stirred up a complicated cocktail of emotions, including grief, outrage and denial, as well as joy for respites well-earned and wisdom hard won. It certainly wasn’t the ending I would have wished for many of these characters…but looking back, it’s hard to imagine things concluding any other way.

Game of Thrones has never been a show that shirked difficult situations. That is part of what made it such a huge success. It attempted to teach us something valuable about the human experience, and that is anything but simple.

It can’t be denied that the show had flaws. Many of the criticisms leveled at it over the years have merit. But I want to talk about what the show was, about what it did for television and for storytelling as a whole.

Game of Thrones brought adult fantasy into the mainstream, showcasing how the genre can be used to dig into moral questions and challenge us to think critically about the world we live in. Based on books that were written by a former TV writer who, tired of being told that his pitches were too sprawling and complex, set out to create an “unfilmable” story featuring a cast of thousands inhabiting a world with a history every bit as intricate as our own, it was about as ambitious as television projects get.

And HBO pulled it off. Regardless of anyone’s qualms, the fact remains that HBO, David Benioff, and D.B. Weiss made it to the end of the story. They got to tell their version of it, in its entirety.

There has been a lot of anger circulating around this final season, much of it aimed at the series’ showrunners. In light of the ire, I think it’s important not to forget how much we owe Benioff and Weiss. HBO took a chance on this show largely because of their passion for the source material. HBO exec Mike Lombardo was convinced that “these were the right guys” for the job when he saw Weiss reading a dog-eared copy of A Game of Thrones at the gym. Without Benioff and Weiss, Game of Thrones does not get made.

Take a moment and try to imagine that. Imagine if Game of Thrones never existed…

The series has some of the most stunning moments in television history, Hollywood’s most detailed interpretation of a dragon, battle scenes as massive as anything on film, excellent acting and costuming and attention to detail. Whereas many of fantasy adaptations that came before, like Legend of the Seeker or Earthsea, treated their source material with a degree of camp, Game of Thrones did its utmost to capture the gritty realism and gravity the story required. A decade before Game of Thrones aired, this sort of thing was nigh unheard of outside of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. How lucky are we to be able to debate the quality of a sequence like the battle between the living and the dead in “The Long Night”?

Because of Thrones’ success, many other high-quality fantasy and sci-fi shows have either launched or are in the works. The Wheel of Time, The Witcher, His Dark Materials, The Magicians, The Expanse, Outlander, Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, The Kingkiller Chronicles, The Dark Crystal—the list goes on and on and on. Everyone wants to make the next Game of Thrones, and while that might inevitably lead to a few botched experiments — some of these projects will fail, no doubt — it’s also a wonderful thing for genre fans, if not for all fans of good, thought-provoking storytelling. We’ll have some interesting watching over the next several years.

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Looking back on the run of the show, I can’t help but be incredibly grateful for it. This story we’ve been living in for the past decade is the sort of cultural phenomenon that many of us are unlikely to see again in our lifetimes. And by “story,” I’m talking about more than the events of the series itself; I’m talking about the story of the series. It’s a tale of beloved, unfinished books that birthed the biggest TV show ever made, of fans engaging with material en masse in a way that’s never happened before, of people sharing feelings of shock, delight, and awe the world over, all because HBO took a chance on a show about swords and dragons.

What an incredible thing.

I’d like to leave you with a parting thought. If you had qualms with the pacing of the final season, the glossed-over plot points and rapid spirals that led to Daenerys’ demise, consider this: rushing is the one thing that George R.R. Martin has consistently demonstrated he will not do. Despite the colossal pressure on him to finish his books, he has remained dedicated to telling the story right, no matter how long it takes. We’ve gotten an ending to this tale, but it’s not the only ending. All together, we will have a great story we can cherish for generations to come.

For as a wise man once said…

“There is nothing in the world more powerful than a great story.”

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