Game of Thrones: Empty Calories
The Rule of Cool helped destroy one of the best series of all time.
I don’t have lofty goals as a writer, really1. I want people to read my words. Well, I want them to read my words and somehow make it to the sweet escape of death without ever having someone create a Change.org petition demanding I rewrite one of my novels that nearly 2 million people sign in disgust. Considering that Game of Thrones got somewhere between 10-12 million viewers per episode, that’s a solid 20 percent of your audience. It doesn’t take a literary scientist to know them’s some bad numbers2.
Game of Thrones will likely go down as one of the most self-destructive shows in the history of television. After establishing itself as a dense, twisty, surprising, and well-made fantasy story based on some of the best epic fantasy books ever written, it managed to squander it all in two shortened seasons. It often felt like those last dozen episodes or so were filmed under a process similar to Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season3, with D.B. Weiss and David Benioff in banker’s caps counting their cash while the cast argues about all the typos in the script they received just moments before shooting began.
Most people blame the heightened pace of those last two seasons, wherein characters teleported around the world with ease and scenes that once would have required six weeks of setup dropped out of the sky like first drafts rushed to the printer. The general assumption is twofold: One, that Weiss and Benioff no longer had George R.R. Martin’s books to work from (because Martin himself doesn’t have his own books to work from4) and thus had to rely on their own much dimmer imaginations, and two, that their eagerness to end the series rushed everything, ruining the pacing.
Yes, these are both probably true. But the rot had started long before. Game of Thrones was killed by the Rule of Cool.
We Real Cool
The Rule of Cool is simple: You’re crafting a story of some sort and you start making decisions based on how cool something is as opposed to how much sense it makes. And then, once you’ve decided it’s so cool you really must include it in your story, you proceed like a drunk who’s applied sunk costs to his decision-making process5 and lay waste to vast stretches of your story’s internal logic and character work. You toss aside carefully-calibrated character journeys, break some physical laws, hurriedly introduce new characters, rules, and physics all in the service of getting to that awesome moment you’ve conceived.
For example: You want to see a dragon destroy a medieval city, so by fucking god you’re going to see a dragon destroy a medieval city before the end6. Or, perhaps you have an idea for an absolutely shocking, gobsmacking twist (say, about who winds up wearing the crown when the smoke clears that the aforementioned dragon attack7). You chuckle in anticipation of dropped jaws and blown minds as you hammer that scene into your narrative, sense be damned. Sure you have to write some really shitty, crappy dialogue to justify the twist, but fuck it. It’ll be cool8.
It’s not entirely Weiss and Benioff’s fault9; I have little doubt that Martin consulted on those final two seasons and offered at least a glimpse of his plans for the books—in other words, I have no doubt that in Martin’s outline Bran the Broken was indeed going to wind up on the molten blob that was once the Iron Throne. Like most Rule of Cool mistakes, it’s not so much that the plot twist itself is inherently terrible10 (though Bran the Broken would require ... a lot of work to make it stand tall), it’s that no one does the necessary work to make it not terrible: The patient clue-dropping, the slow evolution of a character as they actually, you know, do things aside from being dragged around on a sled and occasionally defended against zombie attacks.
Without that work, the cool stuff is hollow. It might still be cool, but it won’t be good.
The rot started before Season 7 and 8, though. When Jon Snow was brought back from the dead by a hilariously surprised Red Lady, it was a pretty amazing moment. It was cool, and the show had done a lot of the work necessary for the moment to land, including ensuring that Melisandre was at Castle Black to conveniently resurrect him (again, exhibiting hilarious shock when it worked11). Snow’s resurrection was assumed—everyone knew he was coming back, because he was so clearly necessary for the story. The cost of that Rule of Cool moment was to take away any sense that this show would surprise you the way it surprised you when Eddard Stark’s head said adios to his body. Sometimes the price for a cool moment isn’t worth it12.
Of course, that would have been a forgivable decision if the next two seasons were not simply a string of Cool Moments connected by Video Game Cut Scenes13. The lesson here is simple: Cool moments can destroy your story. You have to earn those Cool Moments with a lot of less-cool moments. Writing the slow dialog scenes, the journey scenes, the world-building scenes, and engineering the pacing of your plot is less exciting, sometimes, than the epic action scenes and the shredding twists. But those are the bits of your story that make all the difference.
Predestination
Of course, even if you went back in time and forced Weiss and Benioff and the cast to do four more seasons and take their time in order to sell those Cool Moments, the question remains: Would it have mattered? If the series finale arrived in 2024 after selling the hell out of Dani going insane, Arya killing the Night King, and Jaime’s inexplicable decision to toss decades of character development in the nearest bin, then set the bin on fire, and then urinate on the burning bin14, would the whole “Bran the Broken” thing have sold better?
Maybe. If part of those phantom seasons was spent making Bran into the sort of quietly powerful character whose elevation to kingship made sense, sure. By my calculations, that would require about 267 hours of screen time, but if you interspersed a lot of dragon fights, it might just have worked15.
In other words, sometimes a Cool Moment is just bad storytelling. For example, that time in high school when I told everyone I could drink an entire bottle of Everclear by myself. That was a bad story, believe me.
Next week: Comin’ for the King.
As a dancer? My goals are super lofty, beginning with someday learning how to dance.
On the other hand, the only peitition anyone’s ever signed concerning Yours Truly is one demanding to know who I am and why I keep showing up at all these literary events.
Easily the best thing Kevin Smith has ever been involved with:
The Winds of Winter is the new Chinese Democracy with the advantage of having zero Buckethead content. I assume. Oh my god, I assume.
There’s that magical moment when you know you’re so inebriated it literally doesn’t matter what you do next, your morning is fucked either way. It’s quite liberating. Until it most decidedly is not.
This episode had the curious effect of making scenes of a dragon burning innocent people alive somehow off-putting. Weird, that.
I am encouraged that in the GoT universe kingship is simply awarded based on how sad and pathetic your story is, which means I’d be, like, third in line of succession.
In the history of crappy writing, that Great Council scene where Bran is elected king is in the Hall of Fame. A bunch of randos we’ve never seen before plus the tattered remnants of authority in Westeros unanimously elect Bran king. After a three-minute speech by Tyrion. After fighting what was essentially a war of independence for years. I may have thrown a shoe at my screen.
It is entirely Weiss and Benioff’s fault.
This one is inherently terrible.
Her expression resembled mine that time I replaced the toilet in my house and … it worked.
That being said, to be fair at a certain point in 99% of all stories your characters have to don some Plot Armor. Killing your protagonist 98% through the story is a ballsy move … that will absolutely bury you, and your story.
I can’t be the only person who jabbed the fast forward button on their remote control in the vague hope we could just get past the cutscenes.
Frankly, a scene of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau doing just that would have been kind of cool.
Or, possibly, moar incest.
Thanks for putting to words what I've felt ever since the disaster that has been the last two seasons of this otherwise great show that I have been championing for years. I think the writers of GOT and Yellowstone should take a writing class on how not to ruin good characters with terrible plot points.