To anyone who doesn’t watch Game of Thrones (GOT), congratulations. You avoided ten years of build up for 6 weeks of solid let down; as you’ll probably hear from basically every other person you talk to.

It was the biggest show on TV for years (except for 2018 which was a year devoted to filming Season 8), with over 19 million people tuning in for the last episode, and an estimate of 44 million people after delayed viewing is accounted for. Point being, at least one of your friends has seen Game of Thrones, and you most likely are a GOT fan yourself. 

So it’s a TV show, how mad can people really be? Well, for perspective, 1.5 million fans (and growing) have signed an online petition to remake the season with “competent writers”. Reddit has google bombed (yes that’s a thing) the writers of the show (D.B. Weiss and David Benioff) so that their picture appears when the phrase “bad writers” is typed into a google search bar. Even star athletes and 2020 presidential candidates have been filmed expressing their anger. On top of all this, the actual beloved Actors and Actresses are speaking out trying to reason and rationalize with their devoted fans, and not one person seems to care. Sophie Turner, one of the most impressive characters on GOT, called out the petition as “disrespectful”, and fans actually responded by how they were truly the ones disrespected with the quality of the writing this last season. The writers in question, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, have scurried off to an “undisclosed location” to “go offline and drink tequila”. Smart move, or else they would most likely be stoned in the streets.

 

 

So why is everyone so upset? It’s fair to say I think that a lot of fans aren’t upset, but they are quickly being drowned out by the noise of those who are, and I also think it’s fair to say that those fans probably weren’t that invested in the show to begin with, because you know… life.

However, the fans who are signing petitions and google bombing people, do have a very valid point that can’t be overlooked. Season 8, which consisted of 6 episodes of an hour each, was supposed to encapsulate around 3,000 pages of George R.R. Martin unpublished final books (according to the author himself). Thats basically impossible. For perspective, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was 607 pages and had 4+ hours to work with. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was 1241 pages combined, and those movies total 11 hours and 22 minutes of watch time. There was no possible way, even with George R.R. Martin’s final two books, that the writers could fit that much material and character development into 6 hours. However, that was their decision, as most avid fans know. In 2015 the HBO programming president (Michael Lombardo) went on record saying that he will give them as much time and as many years that they want (keep in mind how profitable GOT was for HBO), where as the writers, having just agreed to start writing Star Wars did not want to pen a season 8, let alone the 10 episodes that was suggested.

So it’s here in that most, if not all, angry GOT fans are devising their anger. Just imagine LOTR being filmed in a 2.5 hour long movie, or if J.K. Rowling hadn’t published her last book before the films and so the writers had to wing it. GOT fans are just as devoted to their fantasy world, and were uncontrollably angry that the writers didn’t give it, or the actual author George R.R. Martin, the respect him/it deserved. Not to mention the water bottles and coffee cups left on scene, despite their 10 million production budget per episode.

So, just in case anyone is wondering, that is pretty much why everyone has been so angry these past few weeks. Their own little Harry Potter or LOTR world just collapsed around them and they can’t do anything about it.

However, everyone take joy in the fact that Mr. Martin will be publishing his final books (hopefully) and within those pages your world can be rebuilt. Also, let’s not kid ourselves…. HBO will remake the series in another 20 years, with much better writers.

 

For now, I’m just leaving this here.