About a month ago people started asking if I was watching Game of Thrones. This set me to reading spoilers for the last three episodes. I’d watched to the end of Charles Dance. From there, in my headcanon, as fertilized by various social media revelations, the GoT story went like this.
- War!
- Sailing.
- More War.
- Really? That happened? Yikes!
- I wonder who Arya’s killed lately?
- Not Brienne, though.
- I should totally watch The Station Agent again.
- Spoilers via Hank Green on GoT and climate change.
- Today’s special is… still more War.
On the morning after the finale aired, I rose from my too-narrow hotel bed (I was attending the Nebula Awards in LA), hit the Twitters and found out who’d won and who’d died. I got a decent sense of what fans were mad about, and glad about, and their reasons. I was a little struck by how there seemed to be no new major characters… everyone who had been introduced between the end of The Dance and the Westeros endgame must’ve been killed on their way through the plot.
It was a strangely pleasing experience. All of the closure and none of the angst. It was like offering to help with a holiday dinner once 95% of the cooking was done.
(Plus of course I saw the shot of Dani with dragon wings. Amaze!)
Then I went to LAX to fly home, and first I ended up in a long line-up behind a guy who was recapping one of the Twitter rants, very passionately, about the pointlessness of it all. And then I got on the plane next to a different guy who hadn’t seen it yet. He had bought the finale from iTunes, for the flight, and he watched it while we flew East, all while I was supposedly getting re-acquainted with my novel in progress.
Naturally this was a polite human with earphones, so I was sneaking peeks, but without sound. But who needs sound when you already know what’s happening? Not me, it turns out.
My journey on that was:
- Knew that. Knew that too! (Feels smart for no reason)
- Pang of empathy for a rather bedraggled looking character for whom I had affection.
- Dragon shot! 12/10, would watch again.
- And… welp. There’s that thing everyone was talking about.
- Oh, pupper. Your poor ear!
- Bye, everyone. That was great!
I’m not sure there’s any great conclusion to be drawn from this experience except that sometimes experiencing things shallowly, rather than deeply, may be an approach its merits. I didn’t enjoy GoT as much as many of you did, but my pain at the outcome is currently zero, and I’m thinking rather fondly of it all.