When you can even make Therion give a **** speech, you've outdone yourself!

It is pretty astonishing how much worse every episode (with the exception of S6E10) after S6E8 is. Battle of Bastards really was where things really started to go downhill and logic was thrown out of window.

4.6 and dropping fast!

What's the worst finale score ever? This has to be close...

There are so many ways getting to King Bran could be amazing with the right build, both with bran as a good guy and with bran as a bad guy.

I hope we get to find out how it really happens because it sure as hell isn't gonna be Tyrion saying he should be king because he has a good story

I'm expecting Bran to live the rest of his life in the cave of the three-eyed crow and connected to the weirwood tree. He's Brynden Rivers' heir/replacement.

Do others think he's eventually going to leave and head back south?

I always thought GRRM told D&D the ending

According to GRRM, they had a big 3 or 4 day meeting a few years back at his home where he gave them everything he had -- the essence of everything Martin has ever said about it was that he knew where all the major characters were going to end up, but he didn't have it all mapped out yet

This also jives with the showrunners saying that they have know for the past 3 seasons that it was Arya who was going to kill the NK

I can't help but think GRRM is sitting on about 2,000 pages of manuscript and seeing the fans' reactions and thinking "oh s hit"

I'm still shaking my head at Tyrion, the man who is on trial for his life, picks the new king

I mean, good lord

Although I will say, Tyrion and Bronn arguing over whether they should prioritize rebuilding the hooker houses over rebuilding the navy was classic

So which living characters' stories ended the same on the TV show as you expect them in the books? I'll go with:

Daenerys Targaryen: She'll sack and burn King's Landing with Drogon. However, she'll die before ruling Westeros. (Jon Snow will not be the one to kill her)

Jon Snow: He'll leave the Night's Watch to live north of the wall with the wildlings.

Sansa Stark: She'll rule in Winterfell, possibly as a Queen.




And which are definitely different?

Arya Stark: She's not going sailing. She may die and warg into Nymeria.

Bran Stark: He'll be the new three-eyed crow, living permanently in the cave.

Bronn; I don't think he's getting HighGarden. Though, his point about tough men founding Houses rings true.

Tyrion Lannister: I can't fathom him being Hand to King Whoever. I don't know his fate.

tyrion did a great job as hand to the king of joffrey. but after that he just failed constantly, completely incompetent.

it's funny, back a couple seasons ago in that scene where jamie is charging dany and gonna kill her with his lance, we were all rooting for her to live. if he would have killed her, he would have killed two insane targaryen rulers who were slaughtering innocents.


btw, i guess all that stuff about the lemon trees was nonsense

Bran definitely ends up king I think.

Whether he also wargs Drogon/manipulates Dany in to the massacre, and wargs Tyrion in to convincing the council to elect him, and what the **** he is doing with the night king... That I don't know

His story is untold and ******ed in the show, but I'm confident his rule is the endgame

I’m looking at it like this:

Tyrion and Jon are prisoners of the Unsullied/Dothraki, not of the Lords of the 7 Kingdoms. In the Lords eyes, Tyrion is the Warden of the West due to being the only surviving child of Tywin and Jon is the Warden of the North.

While he may be in shackles, he would still be their contemporary.



Dude who can see the past and future, can communicate with people in the past, take over weak minded animals/people, make people go insane through time travel voodoo just happens to end up King after a ridiculous string of events, despite being a cripple in a society that basically considers crippled people worthless.

That was the showrunners' decision (they have said so). And there are definitely major characters who have been plotted totally differently in the show, most obviously Tyrion (read my post below and the linked essay).

I have broadly similar thoughts, I'll reproduce the post I made on the new Politics forum:

SUBSTANTIALLY THE SAME IN THE BOOKS

Jon/Dany: The details will be different but their whole basic arc - meaning them having a relationship, Dany burning KL, Jon killing Dany and him being sent north - is all exactly GRRM's ending imo. Dany is basically a Shakespearian tragic hero and she won't "go mad", she will burn KL as a sane person.

Sansa: I think the symmetry of her starting the series wanting to be a QUEEEEEN and ending it as a Queen (or at least the Lady of Winterfell) under very different circumstances is a little too neat to not be in the books. With Sansa currently with Littlefinger in the books, it makes sense that she'll become more cunning. I think the "Sansa is smart" stuff in S8, which otherwise has no point, was just trying to get her character in line with the ending GRRM gave them.

SOMEWHAT THE SAME AS IN THE BOOKS

Bran: Bran's overall plot will be very different, he should play a big role in ending the Walkers. I'm coming around to the idea that King Bran is his book ending, obviously set up a lot better than in the show where it came completely out of the blue. The first chapter in the books is a Bran POV and it's Ned teaching him about the nature of being a ruler, making him watch the execution of the deserter. There are a few other hints as well and "Bran the Broken" feels like it might be from GRRM.

VERY DIFFERENT TO THE BOOKS

Tyrion: In the books Tyrion is going dark. I had my eyes opened to this by this essay and in particular this rather straightforward quote from GRRM at the time of the release of ACOK:

Not a lot of wiggle room there. In the books Tyrion doesn't make peace with Jaime on the way out of King's Landing, in fact he tells Jaime that he is a monster and killed Joffrey, and Jaime tells him the story about his wife, who was supposedly a whore, actually having loved him. Tyrion is extremely bitter towards his family and the people of King's Landing, he despises them. He will probably be Dany's Hand of the Queen in the books too, but rather than trying to moderate her, he will gleefully egg her on in the destruction of King's Landing. He has always been spiteful and now he can come back to the city which unfairly rejected him and his efforts to help them, pulling strings on dragons from behind the scenes. The show whitewashed Tyrion, perhaps correctly from an audience point of view, as I think the audience would have hated Tyrion becoming a villain.

Arya: One of my annoyances with the writing in the later seasons is that ASOIAF revolves around giving characters tough choices between two things important to them and seeing what they do, but that D&D have no understanding of this. The point of Arya's story in Braavos is that she is supposed to choose between being Arya Stark and gaining the ability to wield violent power. In the show they let her have both. In the books she'll be made to choose. I'm not sure what she'll choose, but I think her story is going dark places and expect her to die.

Jaime/Cersei: Again, Jaime is supposed to CHOOSE between not being a scumbag and having Cersei. He's not supposed to get both. In the books I think the valonqar prophecy will happen as written. It seems "obvious" now the whole internet has dissected it, it was probably a lot less obvious when GRRM wrote it in 1997 or whenever.

Just saw you have Jon not killing Dany, that's an incredibly hot take imo. I would literally bet my life that is straight out of the books. It's the third "holy ****" moment:

That can't be Dany burning KL as that isn't "the very end".

Edit: As for Bran just chilling in the cave for the rest of time, that would be a pretty dull ending for him I think. I think he emerges from the cave to help end the Others threat and doesn't go back there.

It's not in the show. I don't get why people expected the show to explain book-only stuff. In the books it's probably just a revelation that Dorne sheltered her and Viserys and were Targ loyalists all along, or something.

Jon going back to the night watch doesn't make sense at all. Who is going to enforce his banishment when the Unsulllied and I assume the Dothraki sail off. Everyone else agrees with him killing Dany and consider him a hero.

Regicide is serious in Westeros even when warranted, look at what people think of Jaime for killing Aerys II. It mirrors the story of Bloodraven, who was sent to the Wall by Aegon V Targaryen for committing a murder which was likewise "for the good of the realm".

The plot details can be worked out, like I don't really care what the answer is to "but what do the Dothraki think about this?". It didn't really make sense in the show, but nothing has for 2 seasons now. What matters is that the ending is emotionally fitting for Jon. I'm not sure if the Night's Watch will be extant or whether Jon will live with wildlings or what, but I expect it to be a more or less happy "bittersweet" ending for Jon. It's just like Frodo, "the realm is saved, but not for me". Being with his brothers, and with Ygritte, was his happiest time. He liked it there and he hates the game of thrones and doesn't want to be a ruler.

Meh I can definitely see the books not having Jon killing Dany, I found that incredibly boring and drawn out, it was just one of the two most obviously predictable level 0 ends for her character (the other being Arya killing Dany). It wouldn't surprise me at all if the books had a more interesting way for her to die.

The third holy **** moment has to be Dany burning KL.

Jon is the personification of Dany's two desires, i.e. to have security/companionship/belonging and to be Rightful Queen. Jon offers her the first at the price of the latter. As I said, the bedrock of the series is offering characters tough choices between things they value. In the end Dany absolutely must have the latter, so that instead of her liberator, Jon becomes her demise. He is her internal struggle made external, her tragic flaw brought to life, that's why he needs to kill her.

I think calling a story where one of the major heroes of the book turns villain and is killed by another hero "predictable" or "level 0" is pretty ludicrous. It's like when people started calling R+L=J "predictable". It's only predictable in the context of thousands of people on the internet spending half their lives obsessing over the story. If Jon killing Dany qualifies as "predictable", I'm not sure twists are even possible anymore.

arya killing the nightking is 99% to be a show only thing.

the night king ( as far as we can tell) doesnt even exist in the books

I think we are totally missing each other here.

To my understanding, you are saying that the third big twist was not: Dany heel turning, and was: Dany being killed by Jon.

I read this as you saying that Dany heel turning was not that big a deal, but the big twist came when Jon killed her.

If I've misunderstood you, then no worries.


But once Dany turned heel there were realistically only a few boring, predictable ways it could play out. One was Arya killing Dany and one was Jon killing Dany. There were of course other possibilities that could have been more interesting, but those were the two level 0 options.


On a separate topic: Was Dany heel turning predictable? I mean I definitely had #burnthemall as one of my 5 most likely endings from pretty early on (with that being the conclusion), but that's neither here nor there to the point I'm making. Reading the books I couldn't realistically see any of the main characters other than Sansa (and maybe, a remote possibility of Baelish) sitting the Iron Throne and to be honest never even really considered Bran whatsoever as a possibility.

from grrm's journal

I don't really separate Dany turning heel and Jon killing her in my mind, to me they're almost one and the same because of what I wrote in my last post. They're both the undoing of Dany via her tragic flaw. If you haven't read the Daughter of Death essay I linked earlier I really recommend it even though it's long. If you read that and we disagree about where Dany is headed in the books, there's no other argument I can make. The essay really gave structure to a lot of vague intuitions I had around Dany, including the frequent intrusion of the supernatural into her story.

That said, I don't think Dany burning KL is the third "holy ****" moment because it's not "right at the end" even in the show and there's a substantial chance it will be nowhere near "right at the end" in the books. For example:

This is a prophecy about three false kings. The first is Stannis, the second fAegon, and the third nobody is sure, it may be Euron. But fAegon appears chronologically after Stannis in the story, so it may be that Dany burns KL, with fAegon ruling, and then there's still a substantial amount of the story to go after that. In fact, that event may be the climax of TWOW.

Edit: Also re whether Dany turning heel was predictable, I think it totally is in the books. Again, read the essay. In the show, I think it's just a vaguely-hinted-at possibility.

I agree, after episode 5 it was clear that Dani was not even an option to survive episode 6, and the only 2 ways it could end for her as I was predicting was 1) Jon kills her or 2) Arya kills Grey Worm and wears his face to kill her (my idea being that Grey Worm is the only person Dani would allow to get close to her)

I spent a considerable amount of time reading GOT theories over the past 2 years, and off the top of my head I can't remember any respected posters presenting a "Bran becomes king theory" -- all of the theories that centered around Bran involved the NK, time travel, warging, etc....With the proper buildup, I believe I could have been satisfied with a "Bran was manipulating everything all along" ending -- as it stands now, Bran being king is meh, that's the best they could do?