Let Me Ruin Game of Thrones for You
If you don’t like spoilers, it’s time to stop reading. Once you’ve finished here, you’ll never look at the show or the books the same way again.
Still here? Last chance. You’ve been warned. I’m not kidding.
All right. Let’s go.
I’m going to reveal a ton of secrets about the plot and characters. Who wins. Who loses. How it all plays out. It’s all right here. I’ve cracked the code.
Do I know G.R.R. Martin? Nope. Do I have advanced or leaked copies of any upcoming episodes of the show or the books? Absolutely not. I don’t want them or need them.
The reason is simple:
I have one major advantage over everyone else trying to figure out how it all ends.
I’m an author too.
So what? How does that help?
Well, it’s a bit like a magician studying another magician. While the audience sees nothing but pure magic, Penn and Teller see the mechanics behind the trick. They’re rarely fooled. It happens, but not very often.
Actually, to say I’m never fooled by Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire is a lie. It was precisely because it did manage to fool me once that I become obsessed with it. I watched the first season of the show before reading the books. When Ned got his head chopped off I sat there in shock for ten minutes. I remember saying “You can’t do that. He’s the main character!” I couldn’t believe it.
It turns out, I was in the hands of a true master. He got me, like he did so many others.
He was using advanced plot and character tricks that I’d never seen before and I had to figure out what the hell he was doing. Since then I’ve studied everything he’s done from a deep structural level. That’s because, as a writer, I’m always looking for other writers who can still fool me and take me back to a time when it was all magic to me as well. It doesn’t happen very often.
You see, if you study anything long enough, it drains all the magic away. For authors we see the bones and “beats” of the story more than the story. George Lucas said “I’m the only one in the world who doesn’t get to enjoy Star Wars.” That’s because he knows how the sausage is made. And it ain’t always pretty.
But Martin is one of those rare writers who still has the power to take me back to when I first discovered books as a kid, escaping from the world and traveling to far off lands in my mind’s eye. That’s why I love him.
OK, enough talk. Time to spill what I know.
The first trick Martin pulled is a semi-rare writer’s trope called “false protagonist.” This is a bit of sleight of hand where you fool the audience into thinking someone is the main character, only to kill him off. When done right, it’s incredibly powerful.
Ned Stark was never the lead character, just the lead character of the first season. George R.R. Martin uses this technique again and again. With such a huge cast of characters he’s able to slash and burn any of them with ease. Over the years countless fans have given up on the series after their favorite character died brutally. Maybe you swore Rob Stark would save the Stark name and take revenge for his father? Instead he died in one of the most shocking and horrible scenes of all time: the Red Wedding, ripped right from the pages of history.
Maybe you think there’s no way to know who the key characters are at all? But you’d be wrong. The overarching plot of the stories dictates who lasts until the end.
These characters are untouchable until the end game of the show. The reason is simple: It would bring the whole plot crashing down around us.
Those characters are:
- Jon Snow
- Daenerys Targaryen
- Cersei Lannister
- Tyrion Lannister
- Brandon Stark
It might seem obvious now as the show enters its end game, but I called this back in 2013. Back then I realized Jon Snow was one of those characters who couldn’t die until the final battles. Of course, I wasn’t the only one but at the time, it was still well before he came back to life (in the show, as of the writing of this article, Winds of Winter is still not out so we don’t know for sure — even though yeah we do) and most people told me I was nuts because the fifth book ended with his death and the shows had not aired yet. To me it was clear for two reasons:
The first one is obvious:
We hadn’t learned the name of his true father.
The interwebs have correctly figured out his parentage with the theory R + L = J and the show has now confirmed it. In other words, Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark are his true parents. He is not a bastard. He’s the rightful king, saved by Ned Stark from the killing blow of his friend Robert Baratheon.
The second one is pretty prosaic and something only another writer would see. Martin uses a “limited omniscient” point of view for his stories. That means we see everything through the eyes of a single character in each chapter. At the point Jon died he was the only major viewpoint character at the wall (not counting the Red Woman, a minor viewpoint character), so Martin would either need to bring someone else to the wall, so we could see the events there, or bring Jon back. I bet on bringing Jon back because it didn’t much make sense for anyone else to go there at that point.
But why are Jon, Dany, Tyrion, Cersei, and Bran invincible until the end? Because the plot mandates it. It’s called “plot armor.” It means that for the story to succeed, you can’t just kill off the true main characters or the whole thing comes tumbling down.
You see, amateur writers think you can do whatever you want in a story. Pro writers know it’s the limits that make a story move. If your tale is one of swords and magic, you can’t bring in AK-47's halfway through it. It’s against the rules. If it’s a gangster story set in 1930’s Chicago, it can’t suddenly become a spiritual quest in ancient China.
The rules are the world, the plot, the time period and the genre.
They set the stage for everything else.
Once you set the rules, they’re set in stone. And once you know them you can predict many things about a story, if you know where to look. In fact, it’s only shitty writers that I can’t predict accurately because they veer off course and break their own rules like bush league scrubs. But a master never breaks them. He innovates within those walls.
The plot dictates the sweep of action in the story. There are three main plots in the Song of Ice and Fire:
- Who wins the iron throne?
- The redemption of the Starks.
- The battle with the undead.
These three directives drive everything over the whole of the series.
The first one is basically a Macguffin. It serves as a goal for all the characters to go after. They’re all fighting for it or against it. A macguffin is the perfect way to unite a big, sprawling plot because it’s an easy way to make lots of different personalities compete for the same prize.
It doesn’t much matter what they’re striving for, just they’re all trying to get it. That’s the throne and the “game” of the title. The whole plot is a game of chess to win that ugly, uncomfortable seat in the Red Keep.
Cersei is the central villain of the story. With so many wicked characters, you might think that there’s no reason she stands out versus any of the others, but you’d be dead wrong. Actually, at this point with the Battle of the Bastards over and her monster son dead it probably seems obvious now but it sure as hell wasn’t clear for most of the time to most folks before this season.
Cersei sets everything in motion, as only the true villain can. She sets up Robert Baratheon to be killed on his hunting expedition, which fractures the kingdom and sets everyone against everyone else. She hatches the plot to keep her illegitimate son on the throne, Prince Joffrey. Then she hatches the plot to keep her second son in power. Finally she takes the rule of the Seven Kingdoms for herself.
But make no mistake, she was always the shadow ruler, the true power behind all the other pretenders that sat on the throne. Eventually she kills everyone who stands in her way, even causing the death of her last son because of the sheer horror of her nature.
She’s the character that everyone else opposes. She’s the ideal survivor, a pure pyschopath who enjoys the suffering of others, and has no qualms about covering up her wrongs with more violence. Her primary goal is to hold on to what she has at any cost. She is the ultimate ego, cunning, always restless, always at war.
Dany is her polar opposite, a practical ruler, one who doesn’t want to be evil but who occasionally does bad things. She is fighting for tradition and the way things once stood for centuries of peace under Targaryen rule, before her father, the Mad King, burned it all. Ultimately she’s the people’s champion, learning as she goes, adjusting her game plan, a populist and a fighter who relies on herself and her own ingenuity and adaptability.
Tyrion survives for another reason all together: He is Martin’s favorite character, the one he identifies the most with out of all his creations. That’s why he published a tiny book about him called The Wit and Wisdom of Tyrion Lannister. Tyrion is Martin’s avatar, the character he most sees himself as, a cynical, world-weary, but ultimately brilliant smart-ass.
He also survives because morally Game of Thrones is what’s called a black on gray morality tale and he is the ultimate gray area hero. In traditional epic tales, like Lord of the Rings, the good guys are all good and the bad guys all bad, but in GoT nobody is one thing. Everyone is shades of gray. There are some truly evil characters, like the Mountain, a rape and genocide loving psychotic, who loves torture and murder, but ultimately most of the characters are good and evil at the same time, just like real people. The truly black-hearted characters serve as contrasts to the gray.
This gray mortality is actually why Ned Stark dies. Ned is a traditional all good hero. He’s a classic, noble, high fantasy character.
And Martin kills him off viciously.
The reason is symbolic. Pure good guys don’t last in the real world or in a Song of Ice and Fire’s saga. Only heroes like Tyrion do, ones who are cunning, willing to bend or break the rules, but who ultimately want to do the right thing if they can.
Tyrion is the ultimate hero in Martin’s tale. He’s a bit like the wily Odysseus, largely considered the first modern hero, who uses guile and lies when it suits him to win, while the more classical hero of Achilles is all rage and bravado, dying in a blaze of glory. It’s the wily hero who wins and survives. Wars are won by guile, not waves of frontal attacks, that’s why spec-ops rules the world today.
Still, Tyrion never really wants true power. He’d rather other people be the lightning rod. That means it’s Dany and Cersei that stand as the opposite powers in the final war of the Seven Kingdoms, which is based on the War of the Roses. The final fight comes down to good Wonder Woman versus shadow Wonder Woman.
At least for the Iron Throne.
Ultimately though, that’s not the final story. The current season 7 is signaling strongly that the battle for the Iron Throne will wrap up by the last episode, probably with the death of Cersei in epic fashion. How do I know?
Once again the plot “beats” (which are like choruses in a song) tell me. We already had two weeks of terrible set backs for Dany. Her ships were destroyed and her Unsullied mired on Castle Rock. Her Iron Islands team got slaughtered. Her Dorne team went down, and worst of all, High Garden took the big fall.
Set backs are signs of a reversal though, which means Dany is going to turn the tables on Cersei soon. No good author let’s his hero storm forward and take the prize with no fight. You have make them struggle for it. Half of story telling is making your characters suffer. But her struggles are officially finished. It’s time for her to kick ass and take names.
Actually, Dany faced three set backs, not just two. Drogon took a spear that almost killed him, sending him spiraling from the sky. He may stay badly wounded or die, likely via poison on the tip of the arrow. My call is death for Drogon.
But ultimately, the third setback was a fake out. The spear did not kill Drogon — yet. It wounded him, but by not killing him, Cersei’s secret weapon against the dragons is now revealed and you can count on Tyrion to design a countermeasure, most likely some special armor. He’ll need to come through after screwing up several military missions, in order to redeem himself in Dany’s eyes, so what better way than protecting her dragons?
Also, Grey Worm, the leader of the Unsullied is a major survivor so don’t count him out. He will break out of the embargo or Dany will come to his rescue.
But the speed that the final confrontation is progressing at makes me think that it ends this season. Most of the chess pieces are off the board. The Queen of Thorns is dead. Dorne is wiped off the map. Bye bye to Iron Islands. Dany has no allies, only the army she brought with her from the beginning. The death of Drogon will likely mark the final trigger for Dany. Just as Cersei’s children were doomed to die, so are Dany’s and the passing of her first child will drive Dany into a furious rage that will lead her to burn Westeros to the ground.
That means Season 8 is really about something else. That something else is the battle against the undead.
This was a bit of a wild card for me. Ultimately, I always thought the battle for the Iron Throne was the main plot point and structurally it is, because it carried the most weight over the most seasons, but by ending it early, the writers want to tell a different tale.
That tale will be tricky.
Despite the popularity of shows like The Walking Dead, zombie stories are hard. Essentially you’re fighting against a faceless enemy and faceless enemies get boring fast. They have no personality, which means that the personality has to come from the characters who are left to fight them, and so they fight with each other. Usually in zombie stories the humans are the worst monsters. That’s why the main villains on Walking Dead are never the zombies but the leaders of the rival factions.
That brings us to the last character in our zombie apocalypse. Bran is the king of the battle against the White Walkers because of his third eye magic, and so is Jon, who represents the union of the southern kingdoms in the Targaryen (the fire) and the northern kingdoms (ice), which makes him the Luke Skywalker of the story, the balance of light and dark.
The Starks are really the Skywalker family, if you look closely.
They’ve taken a number of brutal hits, but make no mistake, it’s the Starks, not the Lannisters or the Targaryens that are the ultimate book ends to the story.
How do I know?
Because of the way stories are conceived.
Martin tells us that he saw a powerful vision of the Stark children with their direwolves. That’s what’s called a “seed image” or “genesis image” for a writer and it spawns the entire story. It’s how the fire of creativity works. Like Martin said, he’d call it divine intervention, if he believed in God. Great writers know that stories come through us not from us. If it started with a vision of the Starks, it ends with them. That is the nature of visions.
It’s been a long road for our poor downtrodden heroes and ultimately you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re pretty much an afterthought. All the men are dead but ultimately it’s the women who survive and thrive in the world. The male Starks were all classic heroes, men of honor and duty. They all died because in the world of a Song of Ice and Fire that doesn’t get you very far. Instead it’s the ladies who adapted to a world of evil and found a way to survive and continue the legacy. Arya becomes an assassin and guile warrior, much like Tyrion. Sansa becomes a true leader, evolved from a silly and spoiled young girl who cared only about makeup and pretty young princes to a strong commander, wise to the machinations of men.
Now, if we’re fighting the White Walkers in the final season and books that leaves us with a few tantalizing options. First, Cersei must die in Season 7 or early Season 8. If the White Walkers remain a faceless, nonspeaking horde then we need someone else to take the role of villain.
Martin is the master of the false protagonist, killing off key characters you thought were important with glee, but he’s also the master of the reversal, what’s known as a Heel Face Turn and Face Heel Turn. He takes bad characters on a journey to good and good ones to bad.
That’s why this tweet is so funny:
If you really think about it, only an amazing writer can make a character who did so many despicable things likable. Jaime is redeemed once his hand gets cut off and because of his later choices. We forget that he crippled a ten year old. Martin loves to flip characters around like that and he does it better than anyone.
Dany would mark the ultimate reversal.
(Actually there is an even bigger reversal: Cersei becoming the hero and Dany dying. I just can’t see it happening though.)
The writers have signaled it for some time. She’s shown a demonic side, like when she crucified many of the masters in Slaver’s Bay. Often, she revels in using her dragons to roast men alive. She’s also the daughter of the Mad King, who’s insanity started the last war and brought her dynasty to a grinding halt. Lastly, she’s the victim of a number of terrifying traumas that can take a heavy toll on a person, everything from sexual assault to forced marriage to the death of friends and family and many of her people. If Drogon dies, that may well mark the tipping point.
And ultimately, you can’t have two kings, which means it comes down to Jon versus Dany.
Jon never really wanted the throne, so he’s not the bad guy. He’s also the one who the Red Woman seeks, the Lord of Light’s chosen one, the Prince that was Promised. Dany won’t take kindly to that and that brings us back to something else Martin suggested:
Maybe nobody wins the Iron Throne.
I think that’s exactly how it goes down.
The Iron Throne is ultimately a legacy of the past, holding back the world, a symbol of darkness and brutality. It needs to get destroyed to free the world and that’s where this goes in the long run. Nobody sits on the seat forged from the swords of murdered usurpers. That will fit with Dany’s vision in the House of the Undying of the throne room destroyed.
That means Jon must battle Dany and the White Walkers to bring the world back to life and restore the light of the world.
There is a second, long shot possibility here: a superhero teamup, if you will.
There’s a theory that Tyrion is also a Targaryen because the dragons didn’t burn him to a crisp in the dungeon when he freed them. That would mean a coalition of Dany, Tyrion and Jon to fight the White Walkers. That would give us an even stronger Star Wars parallel, as we would likely see the union of relations (aunt and nephew) with Jon and Dany falling in love before/after realizing they were related (Hey it’s GoT and there’s lots of incest going round and the Targaryen’s loved to intermarry). We might even see a love triangle with Tyrion, as strange at that seems, in the end.
It could happen.
But only if the writers decide to give a real personality to the Night King because they can’t stand united and fight a faceless enemy or there is no conflict and no conflict equals no story. That would likely stand as the last mind-blowing reveal that Martin gave to the producers. We know that Martin revealed three “holy shit” moments to the show-runners in case he didn’t survive or the show ended up beating out the books to the finish.
We now know two of them. The first was Stannis burning his daughter. The second was the meaning of Hodor’s name. The third is “for the very end.”
The show-runners are keen to tell you that the books will be very different or divergent from the books. I’m sorry to spoil this for you but no they won’t. Even if the basic details are different they will end up in largely the same place. The three plots demand it. There is no getting around it.
A good example is Dorne. Many readers of the books hated the portrayal of Dorne in the show and for good reason. The characters ended up shallow and weak, whereas in the books they’re strong and well fleshed out. Those readers see Dorne as integral to the plot.
Unfortunately, they’re wrong.
Dorne is a B plot in the show and the books. It’s just that the books have a lot more room to explore B plots in more depth. But because of the very fact that Martin told the writers the ultimate direction of the story and the key characters, means that the HBO writers felt confident in completely glossing over Dorne, which means Dorne ultimately doesn’t figure in the final battles. Sorry to disappoint but ultimately anything that happens in Dorne stays in Dorne.
If we do go with the fight against the Night King by the superhero team of Tyrion, Jon and Dany, that means the reveal of the Night King’s identity is probably the third twist. Ultimately the twists are the hardest to predict.
But if I had to guess, I would say Bran is actually Bran the Builder. He’s not just named after him.
There is also a good chance that Bran is the Night King as well. Now that would be a mind fuck.
That brings us to one more point. Bran’s powers are time travel and foresight. Martin and the writers have to obey the rules but it just so happens they gave themselves the biggest writer get-out-of-jail-free cards:
- Time travel
- Resurrection
If any of the characters I listed get killed early, you can save the email to me and just wait. I am not wrong. They are not dead. It will just end up as a head fake using one of those two cards.
The books and show can and do bring people back from the dead. Jon in the show (and count on it in the books too) as well as Catelyn Stark (in the books only), as well as Beric Dondarrion. Martin is on record as saying that bringing people back from the dead is kind of cheating, but ultimately no fantasy or sci-fi writer can resist the power of bringing people back because it allows you to really trick readers.
And actually what he was saying was not that bringing people back is cheating, it’s just bringing the person back unchanged, like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, who basically returned as exactly the same guy with a white robe. The trauma of death should change them, in Martin’s view.
I suspect his portrayal of Jon in the books will ultimately reflect that better, in a more nuanced way, as that is certainly the way he brought Catelyn back, as a hideous demonic avenger unable to speak, holding her slashed throat together. I see Jon as more clairvoyant and sagely when he returns in the books, perhaps with a hint of Bran’s all seeing third eye as well, but also haunted by hidden horrors only he can see. This is a classic trope of ancient myth, with heroes going to the underworld to return with the master knowledge of life’s purpose.
Time travel is an even bigger “cheat” because you can literally just alter entire plot strands as if they never happened. That is Bran’s true power. But we see that it comes with a price, as it did with poor Hodor, so expect major consequences if Bran must turn back time to “fix” a devastating loss to the White Walkers.
You see, it’s very likely that the Night King brings “balance” to the Force, just as Vadar did.
Wait, what? That’s right. The Night King is in many ways the savior of A Song of Ice and Fire.
Oh Vadar didn’t bring balance, you say? He just killed everyone.
Correct.
Because the Jedi had essentially eradicated evil, so “balance” had a dark connotation they all missed. Most of them had to get killed off as well, to bring good and evil back into equilibrium aka balance.
The Night King likely functions the same way here, wiping out the horror of mankind, the true source of darkness in Westeros.
In the end, Bran is the ultimate weapon against the White Walkers, and if he isn’t the Night King, he likely created him through his mistakes meddling in time.
Bran and of course, the dragons.
Fire beats ice.
A Song of Ice and Fire.
“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” says Robert Frost in his famous poem, Fire and Ice, a likely inspiration for Martin’s epic title.
Of course, while fire is the ultimate destroyer, it may just be that Martin doesn’t want the old Targaryen dynasty restored at all. He wants the Stark hybrid ideal to carry the world forward, a kind of dawn of democracy and the modern world, that begins with the destruction of the Iron Throne.
In that case, maybe the White Walkers finish everyone off and the poem proves to be the ultimate predictor:
“To say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice.”
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A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During the last two decades, I’ve covered a broad range of tech from Linux to virtualization and containers.
You can check out my latest novel,an epic Chinese sci-fi civil war saga where China throws off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first direct democracy, running a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized app platform with no leaders.
