Game of Thrones leaves all that to cleaner, lighter fiction.Īnd just in case it still feels too cozy, we see characters we’ve come to love over the years sneer and laugh at the idea of democracy, still secure at the apex of the feudal system that’s been ripping their country apart since the days of the Long Night 8,000 years ago. No locked-in golden age, no heroic promised one to wear the crown, no satisfaction at seeing people good and bad receive their karmic sentences.

What’s left is a council of misfits, a wise and peaceful king, and a broken kingdom remade a little different, perhaps a little better, than before. The throne, over which so much blood was shed, melted to slag the queen who never got a chance to take it for her own killed in its shadow the dragon that set fire to tens of thousands at her command flying away into the falling ash toward no-one-knows-where. Weiss’ Game of Thrones left us: the messianic king-who-wasn’t, Jon Snow, riding out of Westeros in company with the Free Folk to bring life back to death’s frozen domain. Imagine, growing from out of the ashes of Sauron’s dominion, tender blades of green grass.

Imagine if Lord of the Rings ended with Aragorn riding out into the abandoned wastes of Mordor, his crown forsaken, his throne left to an uncertain fate.

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