How David Benioff and D.B. Weiss Didn’t Ruin Game of Thrones

The behind the scenes of Game of Thrones can serve as a cautionary tale. When you’re tackling something new and ambitious, try to comprehend the journey you’re about to embark on. If at first it seems you’re doing well, it doesn’t guarantee a perfect ending. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss perhaps didn’t understand the full scale of their undertaking, and by the end, they had fallen flat on their faces.

King Bran the Breaker of the Wheel

Since The Lord of the Rings movies have been my favorite movies for as long as I can remember, with Harry Potter and Star Wars close behind it, I was ready to hop on the GoT train early on due to the fantasy elements alone. Having never read the A Song of Ice and Fire books, I wasn’t prepared for the deep themes and heavy emotional through lines that seep into the entirety of the show. To me, it is a rich text with so much to be learned from it. Beginning to end, it is my favorite television show of all time.

Examining Jon Snow

Jon Snow garners a lot of flak as a character. He’s accused of being a brooding, gravelly voiced, whiny character. But I don’t think any of this is fair at all. He is a character with a strong sense of duty and morality, and who has no real place in a world where those two things seem to get cast aside by most.

Examining Daenerys Targaryen

Out of all of the character conclusions in Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen is the one that generated the biggest uproar and the most backlash. This turned out to be the story of someone who seemed good – like a glimmer of hope in a dark and hopeless world – making an out-of-nowhere heel turn to the dark side. It’s like Walter White, but without any of the character development, say the critics of this turn.

Examining Jamie Lannister

Who would have thought after the first episode of Game of Thrones that the guy performing incest with his twin sister, who acted like a prideful jerk, and who pushed a young kid out of the highest tower in Winterfell would have fans upset at his death? The answer is, probably no one (except those who had already read the books). Based on that first episode alone, there was nothing redeemable about Jamie Lannister.

In Defense of Arya Stark

There are lots of different aspects of Game of Thrones season 8 episode 3 that fans are unhappy with (to put it very lightly). It was way too dark, a lot of the action was imperceptible, not enough people died, we didn’t learn enough about the White Walkers, and just about everything about the way the Night King was defeated was problematic. While I could defend almost all of these choices and I think a lot of it has to do with expectations not being met (have we learned nothing from The Last Jedi?!), I can understand fans’ grief with them. But I want to focus on one specific part that I think worked to perfection, and that is Arya Stark being the one to take down the Night King.