How I’m Slowly Learning to Love Game of Thrones’ Abysmal Ending

It took six years, but I’m finally able to see the light beyond Game of Thrones’ broken conclusion

HBO

If there’s one indisputable certainty in the universe, it’s that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss dropped the ball with Game of Thrones. The epic TV fantasy show’s conclusion will forever go down in the annals of history for its unforgivable repugnance.

So how could I betray the ten articles I’ve written lambasting the ending and suddenly say I’ve grown to actually like it, one might wonder? How have I finally begun to appreciate this unparalleled abomination after all of these years, you might ask?

“I read the title and you just said you love the ending, Ben, stop harping on what a travesty it was and get to the point!” more impatient readers may lament. But circuitous openings are as integral to my writing as grating violence is to Westeros.

When Game of Thrones ended, it took six whole years before I grew the stomach to revisit it. But when I did, I noticed that the weight of the calamitous conclusion to come left the show feeling hard to enjoy in even its best moments. The horrible remembrance of the crushing finale ahead toxified both epic fight scenes and magnetic verbal parleys between royals and magnates.

But there were exceptions. Sometimes, I lost myself in the scenes all the same and forced myself to forget about where the train I was riding was ultimately destined to arrive. I appreciated the sights and let the truth of the dead-end terminus awaiting me flee from my mind. I repressed memories of the Night King’s dismal demise and Bran’s final appointment on the Iron Throne in the hopes I could recapture some fraction of that prior thrill in the sprawling wars between factions.

But as that iconic part of the show came to a close and the spiral toward oblivion began, I braced for the force of a thousand anti-climaxes to hit me head-on. Yet, as the beginning of the end started and the cinematic cacophony grew almost deafening, I noticed miraculously that I was still breathing. The medieval arrows fell to the floor like discarded bullet shells and I remained unscathed.

I could see the fantasy world beginning to fall apart around me, yes, but in the systematic downturn of every plot, I found a discordant sort of bliss. Even as the arc of the show had taken shifts that any writer would struggle to rectify, the budget of the show continued to balloon to new expanses all the way until the grand finale. It was a unique sort of top-heavy. Had the same budget been applied to earlier seasons, one can only imagine the tormented ecstasy that could have emerged.

Instead, by the time the Game of Thrones fandom plague swept the world, we watched together as it crashed and burned in a slow-rolling, cash-hemorrhaging conflagration.

I’m a fan of both the Game of Thrones and Marvel Cinematic Universes, and for most of the time that I’ve loved both, I’ve struggled to see any real common traits between the two. Where Marvel was light and formulaic, Game of Thrones was dark and unpredictable. Where Game of Thrones was realistic and each character multi-faceted, Marvel was bombastic and spectacular and without much nuance. Its characters stood as little more than caricatures. One universe was tragic, political, and relentlessly graphic, and the other self-contained, safe, sanitized, and second-screen-watchable.

And even while the two worlds bore little in common, I loved them both for entirely different reasons. Among my friends, an ongoing debate between us centered around which of the two we were more excited to see finally reach its conclusion. Game of Thrones was usually the winner of that debate. But to our dismay, it was only Avengers: Endgame that managed to deliver on the colossal web of events that preceded it.

But remembering what I love most about Marvel movies and applying it to the end of Game of Thrones, I’m able to suspend annoyance and enjoy spectacle for the sake of spectacle. Plot holes become less bothersome. I can watch idly, knowing that the details aren’t important and that the exchanges of dialogue aren’t what they once were. I can let the idea out the window that the end of this show is the head of the same horse as which it began.

The end of Game of Thrones is best appreciated not as Game of Thrones, but as a medieval Marvel movie with dragons and suspiciously plot-armored protagonists. It’s best thought of as another rollicking, multidimensional misadventure that lands our characters facing scourges of zombies rather than purple titans wearing bejeweled super gauntlets.

When viewed in the light that the Westerosi universe has already been soured beyond repair, it’s no longer that same horrible sight to behold.

It’s actually pretty fun to watch. In the same way that the bends and twists within any film or show can rarely affect audiences in quite the same manner as those first viewings, the same is true of a bad ending. On one hand, nothing can prepare the loving fan for the pitiful denouement that Game of Thrones brought to viewers back in 2019. But on the other, the sting of that blow will never be as keenly felt as when we first witnessed it all fall apart.

The Game of Thrones ending is remembered so awfully because the entire arc up to that point was so spell-bindingly great. It’s because it felt like a betrayal of tones and trends that had been established as early as the first episode that the close of the show is still so bitterly reviled to this day. But even as it crumbles to earth, it still remains better and more cohesive in my eyes than most mid-tier Marvel entries. It was in the stark and sweeping culminations Game of Thrones failed to deliver that it drifted furthest from fans’ hopes and expectations.

When thought of as beasts of their own, the final few seasons of Game of Thrones aren’t bad. They’re just bad by comparison to the show at its peak. Had the world been built from the beginning off of the Hollywood-styled heroism that reigned supreme in the ending, it might actually be remembered in a favorable light today.

Approaching those final few seasons with a full awareness that I won’t get what I know and recognize from the show, it’s not the same bitter pill to swallow. This time around, I let the Marvel fan in me take over. I enjoyed the fire-breathing dragons and the clashes between forces and fan service and let myself forget whether it made sense. I let bad dialogue drift by me with a bleary-eyed detachment and allowed the betrayals of show-long character arcs to stop bothering me.

Forced ex-machina moments could fall by the wayside and I could enjoy the enthralling world and visuals for the sake of sights and action-packed showdowns alone. I could revel in the stupidity of a “Clegane Bowl” and a duel between Cersei suitors. It didn’t matter whether the scenes were comically convenient in how they came about because they were still damn entertaining to watch.

Extending the same courtesy to Game of Thrones that I always have to most superhero movies, I’ve learned to appreciate the ending I once detested with an unceasing enmity. Love may still be a strong word to describe my relationship with the show. Maybe six years still isn’t enough time for me to begin justifying this nonpareil atrocity that befell fans.

But maybe, just maybe, I can begin the process of forgiving Benioff and Weiss for what they put me — put all of us — through. It’s an ambitious goal, but as years turn to decades, there may come a day when I look back on those fateful final seasons with a wistful reverie.

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This article was originally published on Medium.

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