I’ve had to eat my fair share of crow when it comes to predicting the pivotal developments of Game of Thrones. Two years ago on this very website I mustered what understanding I had of both George R.R. Martin’s narrative style and the general language of storytelling to argue that everyone’s favorite Onion Knight would be biting the dust in Season Seven. He did not. Not only has the show been able to keep me guessing, postulating and theorizing over what each respective character will do next and how they will respond to the latest developments — it has consistently proven me wrong. Often due to the writers having a better idea, as was often the case in the earlier seasons, but occasionally due to a lack of one.
It is no secret that Season Seven of Game of Thrones took more than a few departures from both audience expectations and from the show its first five to six years promised to deliver. The newer seasons (lovingly called “fan fiction” by some after running out of books to translate) are wrapping up the epic Ice & Fire saga in a manner immeasurably more straightforward and un-nuanced than that in which it began. As entertaining as it is, and as much as I love it, Season Seven has an inescapable feeling of having lost the direction with which GoT garnered its initial acclaim and adoration. All of which is to say that the following can be logged less as a prediction and more as an impassioned plea to Benioff and Weiss as we approach the series climax: no one gets the Iron Throne.
The Iron Throne is the object of singular desire for dozens of characters across the span of the series and the subject of its title. Men and women equally have lied, married, deceived, killed, waged war and worse for it. It is the symbol of ultimate power and status on both ends of the Narrow Sea.
But there is a second throne that is less coveted, beyond just the Red Keep and the unlimited food and wine and the lengthy conversations with Varys. There is a burdensome weight in ruling the people of the seven kingdoms that few of the show’s characters acknowledge, and even fewer have the talent for: the obligation to the citizens of Westeros as lord protector of the realm. The throne is simultaneously both carrot and stick, a dichotomy manifested plainly in its thousand-sword construction. Yes, it looks gloriously badass, but the physical agony of actually sitting on it is a painful reminder of the responsibility with which it is imbued.
The Iron Throne’s eventual winner has been the subject of thousands of online debates and theories as book readers are still two entire books away from seeing it. Most currently awaiting to see what the rest of Season 8 holds agree there must be a victor to whom must go the spoils. For any character you can name you can find at least one person who not only believes they are destined for the Throne, but can tell you the exact sequence of events they predict will make it happen (RIP King Hodor theory).
But these debates are only ever centered around who should defeat all other enemies and emerge victorious. This is a question with dozens of valid answers and possibilities therein. Yet we never ask — which character would make the best ruler and protector of the realm? Who will end mad grabs for power? That’s a question to which no perfect answer exists. As Varys once put it, “Why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?”
Any of these theories of anyone from Jon to Daenerys to Tyrion to Podrick actually taking the Iron Throne in the end coming true would, in this writer’s view, miss the point. Game of Thrones has never been a black and white epic of the good guy who gets to be king or queen as reward for their honor, birthright, matriarchal strength or intelligence in the face of the bad guy most positioned as their diametric opposite. It is saturated in far more gray and concerned with problems without easy and decisive solutions, leaving us to ruminate on their complexity and expansiveness. If I may borrow from a different fantasy franchise phenomenon, “There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.” Ideally, no one would get the Iron Throne because establishing a new monarch would only see Westeros’ history of bloodshed and chaos repeat itself.
Four kings and queens have sat the Throne since the series beginning (five if we count flashbacks to Aerys), each dreadful rulers in their own way. Yet whether under Targaryen rule or Baratheon or Tyrell or Lannister, one constant has remained in this ever-changing storm of variables: no matter who is king, someone else always wants the crown. No one on the show has both the strength to take or hold onto the crown and the wisdom with which to wield it. Much less do they have the ability to sit uncontested or un-plotted against by more intelligent would-be usurpers.
If the show is to keep with the uncompromising cynicism it has saturated itself in since day one, then barring an unfathomable convenience or contrivance, the kind of which Game of Thrones has gone to great measures to communicate does not happen in Martin’s stories, there is no character who can win the titular game with a sense of finality. There is no prospective king or queen of the seven kingdoms who does not immediately beg two additional seasons’ worth of questions over what happens next.
It has been almost four years since Daenerys first mused to Tyrion about breaking the wheel that turns on and on between the warring Houses on top and crushes those underneath. Either out of vanity or ignorance the mother of dragons fails to acknowledge her own place on the wheel and the sacrifice that breaking it would entail. Nothing would make me happier than to see the wheel truly broken, and the seven kingdoms which behave more like seven countries be permitted to govern themselves. But Daenerys came for her birthright, and as long as that remains her goal the wheel will continue to spin.
What I fear is that the writers do not realize this. That Benioff and Weiss are geniuses at adapting Martin’s story and bringing his world to life but are utterly inept at replicating his narrative creativity and nuance. I worry that they are now aware of their own inferiority as storytellers and will divert to Jon being crowned king like any port in a storm as the conclusion least likely to upset the fans. I worry that they lack the hindsight to see the kind of world they have gotten their audience attuned to and what ending the story in line with what was promised would demand.
I hope I am wrong, and that The Battle of Winterfell sees the Iron Throne be melted down and the seven kingdoms divided. Or if it is not, that Game of Thrones is able to surprise me yet again with an outcome I had not considered that stays true to its original subversive and nuanced principles. But mostly I, like Varys, hope for the outcome that is of greatest benefit to the realm.
And that does not happen with any of our favorite characters on top.
