Game of Thrones' refusal to kill off major characters was its most subversive plot turn yet

Vox

The HBO drama has been accused of losing its ruthlessness, becoming too sentimental and losing its nerve with Sunday's "The Long Night" episode that saw the major characters survive. But as Todd VanDerWerff points out, what has made Game of Thrones a successful show is its subversion of fantasy tropes and fan expectations. "The more I sat with 'The Long Night,' the more its relative lack of ruthlessness felt like the most interesting thing Game of Thrones could have done," he says. There are already fractures in the alliance that will fuel the remaining three episodes. "But these fracture points are only interesting because all the characters involved in and affected by them are still alive," he says. VanDerWerff points to the aftermath of World War II as a precedent, noting that the United States and its ally the USSR engaged in a Cold War after they defeated the Nazis. "Really, the only reason to have expected the Night King to kill so many major characters was that there was a lot of hype built up around the episode by the HBO promotional machine and Game of Thrones’ biggest fans," says VanDerWerff. "When you get right down to it, there wasn’t really a way for the show to subvert the fantasy trope of 'the heroes win the battle at serious cost, and everybody lives happily ever after' without eliminating the 'at serious cost' part. The final three episodes of Game of Thrones are bound to somewhat feel petty and pointless, like everybody is squabbling over a chair when they were just fighting off the forces of death itself. But isn’t that exactly what would happen here, in our reality? Isn’t that what has happened multiple times throughout human history? It’s the lesson of Game of Thrones that our nobility is easy to sustain when we think we might lose our lives. It’s in every other scenario where we lose sight of our better natures."

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• Game of Thrones taught us to want death, then it changed the rules: "In killing Ned, and Robb, and Joffrey, in constantly violating basic structural storytelling conventions—don’t kill your heroes or your villains (till the end)—it brought us closer to the thudding, juddering unfairness, the finality and randomness, the awful abruptness, even when expected, of real death," says Willa Paskin. "And with these relatively early major character deaths, the audience became conditioned to expect more, and I don’t just mean in some Pavlovian way....But then, around when Jon Snow was stabbed to death and resurrected as a man with an important mission (but still no ability to make varied facial expressions), something new began to settle on Game of Thrones, a new feeling, a new flavor: untouchability."
• Arya vs. Buffy parallels are hard to ignore: "That spectacular moment in the Godswood during Sunday's episode had an unmistakable antecedent," Maureen Ryan says of Game of Thrones and its parallels to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which premiered one month before Maisie Williams was born. "It hit me like a ton of bricks on Monday morning, when I thought about Arya sinking that dagger in the Night King in 'The Long Night.' As we saw so many times during Buffy's golden years, a lone young woman made a last-ditch attempt to save everyone from a relentless evil, despite knowing it probably wouldn't work. For a heart-stopping moment, I thought Arya's attempt wouldn't work. Thanks to the ensemble nature of Game of Thrones and the show's (intermittent) penchant for killing off major characters, there was a real chance Arya's gambit would fail and that the most badass fighter in House Stark would end up among the fallen. But she — like our Sunnydale heroine — had trained for this."
• Game of Thrones tried to make Arya's big moment both surprising and inevitable: "'The Last Night' worked to conceal its Arya ex machina twist from first-time viewers," says Sam Adams, "dropping Arya from most of its final act in hopes that we’d forget her purposefully striding away from the Red Woman and the Hound, a killing look set on her face. But watch it again and the episode is making a sustained argument—a plea, really—for us to see Arya’s killing of the Night King as a satisfying, even inevitable, culmination. This isn’t just chance—which is good, because no one is that lucky—it’s fate, the fruit of a design so grand that even the Three-Eyed Raven and the Red Woman can only glimpse its outlines."
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• Has Game of Thrones gone too soft?: "It’s sentimental about its people — maybe as the inevitable by-product of writing stories for them since 2010; it happens to almost every series that’s on the air for a long time — and it’s clearly invested in the idea that good ultimately needs to triumph over evil," says Matt Zoller Seitz. "I’m starting to worry that Thrones has gone soft. It has certainly lost that magisterial streak of cruelty and darkness that drove it throughout the first five seasons, when the scripts were being drawn straight from George R.R. Martin’s texts and then compressed, expanded, or rearranged for TV."
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