Yes, the final season of Game of Thrones was a chaotic mess, and it was glorious
II. Stupidity as instructive reality in Game of Thrones
People were really upset about the stupidity of major characters in the final seasons, especially Jon Snow, Cersei Lannister and Sansa Stark, among others. In short, people were really mad that people were stupid and doing stupid things.
#TyrionTried. Image: HBO/Game of Thrones
Tyrion Lannister digression: some fans include Tyrion Lannister among the stupid, though for me, Tyrion didn’t want anything as much as he wanted to be loved by his family, a love only Jaime ever showed. It doesn’t take Freud or Dr. Ruth or some other stable genius to know that he chased women as much as he did to fill that void and to compensate for the fact that he never had a mother growing up since she died giving birth to him; in hindsight, his efforts to humanize his sister Cersei failed, but if he had awakened some humanity in her, imagine all the lives that would have been saved… I don’t find as much fault with Tyrion as some others, though without a doubt, he wasn’t as sharp at the end and the wars fatigued him, but how hard should we come down on him for trying to believe that love of her unborn child might make Cersei see reason, or that Dany was a leader for whom it was worth fighting? Yes, these hopes have risks, but clearly the war had worn Tyrion down and rather than oversee more violence, he was doing what he could to stop the bloodshed. As the show’s most empathetic character, he consistently did not want to give up on peace in the later seasons, and his plans largely failed because of horrible decisions (Cersei not negotiating, Daenerys roasting a whole city) or brilliant stratagems (Jaime sacrificing Lannister-seat-of-power Casterly Rock to take Highgarden and knock out the Tyrells) made by others; his decisions were not necessarily the best, but were also hardly the worst. Maybe all this is, in part, why Peter Dinklage won an Emmy for his portrayal of Tyrion in this final season… End digression.
The Charge of the Light Brigade- Game of Thrones version. Image: HBO/Game of Thrones
Many, including subject-matter experts, complained that the plans for battle, tactics, and campaign strategies were perplexing and/or stupid. Most of the great statesmen and generals of Westeros—from beyond the Wall and the North to the Reach and Dorne—were, by this point, culled in the War of the Five Kings. This left suddenly elevated leaders with less diplomatic and/or military leadership experience, people like Jon Snow, Dany Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, Euron Greyjoy, and Ramsay Bolton commanding armies. In such an environment, competence is not what one should expect. In fact, the last competent operation was the one led by Jaime Lannister to take Highgarden, but most of that campaign’s victorious army was incinerated by dragonfire or run down by Dothraki, and thus much of its success was undone.
As they unfold, long wars in history tend to get muddier and bloodier over time, and the longer they last, the harder it is to find manpower or experienced leaders, with the best either falling on the field of battle or falling into cautious self-preservation. If one side is gradually prevailing over time, sometimes you get a battle-hardened core of leaders so that by war’s end, an army can be fighting like a fine-tuned machine (e.g., the U.S. Union Army in the Civil War), but if there is a lot of indecisive back-and-forth, with victorious armies winning one battle one day only to be defeated and wiped out in another (see the Stark army’s demise at the Red Wedding or the Lannister army’s aforementioned post-Highgarden demise), this can lead to bloody chaos, especially when more and more random forces end up joining the fray (see the real-world Thirty Years War). Game of Thrones demonstrates all this reality exquisitely.
The mess and chaos and, yes, stupidity of war are on full display here, especially in season 8. These people simply don’t know what they are doing. As a result, many soldiers and civilians die, the war dragging on both because leaders are making poor decisions that fail to preserve their forces, win major victories, and decisively exploit those victories, or the poor decisions of other leaders, further.
Jon Snow never got a chance to really be fully mentored by his father Ned Stark, who who had his head lopped off at the end of season 1. As a (supposed) bastard, Jon was not being groomed for leadership in House Stark, and Night’s Watch Lord Commander Jeor Mormont was killed before he got to really teach Jon what he had wanted to in order to groom him into a proper successor. Reality got in the way of a nice, orderly transition of wisdom and experience, and from that point on, Jon mainly had to feel his way as a leader without much real guidance, the one exception being the late-in-the-game coming of Ser Davos Seaworth to his side.
As Cersei got more powerful, her father Tywin was killed by her brother Tyrion, and when she had the Sept of Baelor destroyed, she also took out Tywin’s experienced brother Kevan; once she was Queen again, there were no senior Lannisters left, and throughout the series she pretty much ignored the advice of her brothers Jaime (experienced in military matters) and Tyrion (experienced in government). She only listens to the servile (if clever) Qyburn in the final seasons.
Dany never really had a true mentor, the closest being Ser Jorah Mormont, who began his time beside her as an agent working against her. Even when he was fully on her team, it was hardly the same as an elder family member who had been grooming her for years to be a ruler.
Sansa was in a similar position, with Littlefinger (Lord Petyr Baelish) or Cersei imparting wisdom to her, but hardly purposefully grooming her for leadership or giving that advice out of the kindness of their hearts.
Ramsay Bolton killed his own father. Euron Greyjoy killed his older brother. Those left to command major forces in the end were practically kids (hello, Lyanna Mormont) operating without much guidance and had sometimes even killed those who would have been their best mentors or advisors. They led too early and were, over the long run, relatively unprepared, often leading to mixed results or worse.
In other words, a good title for season 8 would be “Amateur Hour.” Yes, Jon, Dany, Cersei, Ramsay, Sansa, and Euron had all made shrewd moves to still be major players towards the end, yet they made serious mistakes typical of less disciplined or less experienced people not accustomed to leading over many years and long tutored by their elders, mistakes such elders—Tywin Lannister, Robert Baratheon, Roose Bolton, Ned Stark, Doran Martell—would have been far more likely to avoid.
Without older, wiser souls to guide them, the younger generation of Westeros—often impatient, entitled, and arrogant—made mistake after mistake.
Jon Snow kept making emotional, impractical decisions, from rushing Ramsay’s army to sticking with Dany until it was way too late.
One of many times Cersei overplayed her hand. Image: HBO/Game of Thrones
Cersei kept overplaying her hand, being far too hostile and cruel to her rivals, allies, and even her own family (who all made things much more difficult for her). With her own back against the wall, Cersei needlessly provoked Daenerys by having Daenerys’ close advisor and friend Missandei decapitated in front her, wasting her potential as a hostage and ignoring heartfelt, sensible appeals from both of her brothers to choose other courses of action that would have strengthened her position. Cersei’s being so isolated in the end was more a result of her own vindictive actions than anything else.
Ramsay often let his cruelty overtake his rationality, taking out his own father, seeming to kill or killing prisoners of war repeatedly when hostages could have been valuable or his own forces could have used the extra men, and shooting arrows into his own forces at the Battle of the Bastards.
Even while Winterfell was being overrun by wights, Sansa was being as petty as ever when it came to expressing her dislike of Daenerys. Instead of skillfully assessing and playing the situation, Sansa broadcast her distaste for Dany brazenly and in public situations, lacking subtlety where subtlety was warranted. As much fun as it was for her to disdainfully ask “What do dragons eat, anyway?” in the moment, there was a good chance the (later-Mad) Dragon Queen would have returned with her last dragon and roasted Sansa and all of Winterfell because of the barely restrained hostility Sansa had repeatedly expressed towards Daenerys, hostility that did not actually help advance Sansa’s or Winterfell’s interests but instead helped push Daenerys over the edge and made her even more dangerous to the North. Sansa and Winterfell, then, were fortunate that Jon (whom Sansa consistently doubted and challenged) risked it all to take Daenerys out when he did. Even back in season 7, Arya and Sansa fell for Littlefinger’s plan and turned against each other, each flirting with killing the other. Sansa only realized she was being played after a last-minute conversation with Bran, the mystical all-knowing Three-Eyed Raven. Without magical intervention, the Stark sisters were on a collision course that would have left one or both of them dead.
If you think stupidity is not one of the more ever-present, all-powerful forces in war, politics, and life, I’m not sure you’re paying attention to the news…
In the very last episode of the final season of Game of Thrones, when the leaders of Westeros decided to go with Bran “the Broken” as an elected king, Robin Arryn—yes, the whiny brat who was still sucking on his crazy mother’s teat well into what we would now call grade-school years and who smashed Sansa’s snow castle of Winterfell in a tantrum—had a seat at the table with the “great” leaders who were left. There was no Tywin Lannister, no Olenna Tyrell, no Doran Martell, no Eddard Stark, no Stannis Baratheon; they were all dead by the end of the show, as were most of their top advisors. Barely-not-still-children like Robin, Bran, Sansa, and Gendry and people who never thought they’d be leading realms or never thought they would be leading at this time were generally the ones left standing in their wake, along with lacklusters like Edmure Tully, who, sadly, could accurately claim to be “one of the senior lords in the country” at the council that elected Bran king.
The very makeup of the council, then, was a testament to the messy chaos that characterized the closing phases of the conflicts in Westeros. Quite often in the real world, wars devolve into Pyrrhic stalemates, with sides whittled down to shadows of their former selves as the war grinds on, with the bold and creative and even competent leaders dwindling ever more in quantity as the conflict grinds on. The final seasons, especially season 8, demonstrate this reality usefully and impart to viewers how messy war can really be in a way few shows have.