![]() And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?īut all that is surface stuff. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. ![]() They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well. It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss-partly because they are genuinely bad at it. What Storytelling It Was and What It Became in GOT Let’s first go over what happened to Game of Thrones. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence-but more on all that later. I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing-technology and society. This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.Īfter the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.Īt its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn go way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). Indeed, most of the reviews and fan discussions seem to be pondering where the acclaimed series went wrong, with many theories on exactly why it went downhill. ![]() Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it seems that a substantial portion of those millions are loathing the season. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. But I was glad to see Game of Thrones acknowledging its roots, and thinking seriously about who would be in charge of putting the country back together.Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days. They even dusted Robin Arryn off for this meeting! It’s laughable, in a way, that these pale, subdued people are what’s left of Westeros’ leadership, but they’re still arrogant enough to look down on their own people, and laugh at them having any say in their own rule. Someone actually thought about who’s left of the great houses and who would represent them. (Someone finally found Edmure Tully! And he has the balls to try to stand up and take the throne, and Sansa gently, rightly, slaps him right back down again!) It would have been so easy to lose the politics entirely in this final episode, and completely forget the show’s roots, but here, we see the first hints of Westerosi traditional society returning. We’ll have to talk separately about the actual result of the lords’ summit, but I was impressed that they brought all these characters back.
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