I recently read Robert McKee’s famous book on screenwriting,
Story, and one of my big takeaways from that book was his passage about
the paths a writer can follow with their theme: that of the idealist, the
pessimist, and the ironist. Generally speaking, when we’re young, we favor the
optimist’s point of view. When we’re adolescents we grow pessimistic, but at
some point, we become adults and learn to appreciate life’s rich ironies. Making
one’s peace with the dual nature of life is always a difficult milestone on the
way to maturity, and mastering ironic stories that reflect life’s duality is
the most difficult milestone to maturity for a writer. Of the many pitfalls on
the way to this milestone, McKee writes, “Irony doesn’t mean ambiguity.
Ambiguity is a blur; one thing cannot be distinguished from another. But
there’s nothing ambiguous about irony; it’s a clear, double declaration of
what’s gained and what’s lost, side by side. Nor does irony mean coincidence. A
true irony is honestly motivated. Stories that end by random chance, doubly
charged or not, are meaningless, not ironic.” Failing to draw a line between
irony and ambiguity or coincidence trips up many ambitious writers, whose
stories show a lot of promise in the beginning.
Among the most notable such failures from the last few
years was the Game of Thrones finale. When the series first started,
everyone was talking about how mature it was, how it provided a fresh dose of
realism to the genre of epic fantasy, which can all too often pit clearly
defined good guys against clearly defined bad guys. But when the series finale
aired, many fans were upset. All that apparent realism had crumbled into a big
nothing. It wavered on that line between the adolescent predilection for
pessimism and mature recognition of life’s deep ironies where joy and grief
dwell side by side. Though George R.R. Martin has stated that he has a great
deal of respect for the more conventional genre stories that he was subverting
and didn’t want to merely tear everything down, that is still more or less what
the series finale ended up doing. Figuring out why exactly that happened, and
proposing an alternative path that the story might have taken, may help anyone
aspiring to write a mature story. The main technique that Martin, along with
showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, did not fully avail themselves, is reading
deeply and broadly for inspiration from everything that has gone before, so you
write something fresh and not an inferior version of an older story. Based on a
lot of what I’ve seen from the show, it was almost as if the showrunners were
writing as if only the optimistic and the pessimistic themes had been done
before. Nothing, however could be further from the truth. As McKee writes, “stories
that end in irony tend to last the longest through time, travel the widest in
the world, and draw the greatest love and respect from audiences.” Given this
fact, I’m going to briefly dissect two masterpieces of ironic storytelling, one
of which has moved audiences for the better part of 80 years, and another that
has done so for about 2,500 years. Then, I will show how the showrunners for GOT,
might have learned from these two masterpieces to create an ending for their
show that would have given their fans the ending that they craved.
The first masterpiece from which Martin, Benioff and Weiss
failed to learn was The Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies by
Aeschylus It’s a great loss that more people have not read these plays, if for
no better reason than they are the only surviving example of a complete trilogy—the
format chosen by the major Greek tragedians— that explores a thematic arc of
thesis, antithesis and synthesis over the course of the three plays. Despite
technically being tragedies, the final play in the trilogy actual marks a
heroic triumph for its hero, Orestes who finds redemption in the third play
after murdering his mother in the second play to avenge her own murder of
Orestes’ father in the first play. Orestes’ father, King Agamemnon, who led the
Greek army in the Trojan war, provides a very compelling tragic figure, whose many
flaws might have given a more robust profile from which to draw on for GOT’s
Ned Stark.
Agamemnon, like Ned has also been unfaithful to his
queen, Clytemnestra. Not only that, but Agamemnon has taken his mistress,
Cassandra, who is actually the niece of his conquered enemy, King Priam, back
to Greece with him. Furthermore, Cassandra is a priestess of Apollo, whose
temple Agamemnon desecrated during the sack of Troy. Finally, before Agamemnon
sailed for Troy, he sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia so
that he would have good fortune in the forthcoming war. Needless to say, when
Clytemnestra, along with her lover, Aegisthus, murders Agamemnon, we understand
all too well that she has her reasons for doing so. Though it is not Ned’s wife
who murders him in GOT, his infidelity could still have been a valuable
source of dramatic tension that could have lasted into the show’s finale, had
it been allowed to stand rather than being wiped out for an admittedly exciting
twist. The twist in question—that Jon Snow is not Ned’s son at all, but the
product of a marriage between Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark—though exciting
in the moment, is actually the worst blow to Ned’s believability as a character.
It also hurts the themes of realistic, amoral, medieval politics, and puts Jon
Snow’s character arc far more in step with a conventional, optimistic hero’s
journey: Snow is actually the legitimate heir to the Iron Throne and we want
him to win. Not only this, but one of the flaws that lent Ned some complexity
has been wiped clean; his infidelity to his wife turns out to have been a noble
act of self-sacrifice, making him considerably less complex, and just a more
unalloyed good guy than he already seemed at the beginning of the show. What
the writers ought to have done was keep Jon a bastard. Though this would have
taken away one of their more surprising twists, it would have kept a major obstacle
in Jon Snow’s path to following a conventional, optimistic character arc, and
laid the groundwork for a more complex and ironic ending. Before we get to
that, however, we need to take a look at our second ironic masterpiece.
That masterpiece is Casablanca, which could
have given a more viable blueprint for the love story between Jon Snow and
Daenerys Targaryen as well as how that love story meshes with the overarching
plot of the war for succession to the Iron Throne. Like GOT, Casablanca
has at its center a story of illicit love amidst great political turmoil. Casablanca’s
two lovers, Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, meet in Paris, but when the Nazi’s began
to take over the city, Ilsa leaves Rick at the train station where they are
supposed to meet and leave Paris together. When Ilsa shows up in Casablanca on
the arm of another man, Rick understandably thinks he’s been played by a
heartless manipulator. Over the course of the film, however, Rick realizes that
Ilsa thought her husband was killed when she met him in Paris and that she
really does love him. However, when the final confrontation of the film takes
place, Rick sends her away because she needs to stay with her husband and help
him because he is a major force for good against the Nazis. The ending is a
beautiful, bittersweet example of how personal happiness sometimes has to be
sacrificed for the greater good.
Had GOT’s writers taken inspiration from Casablanca’s
ironic balancing of love and heroism, they might have come up with a story for
their own lovers that went something like this: Jon proves his courage and
steadfastness as a leader, but he still doesn’t have a head for politics, and
dislikes talking with people he doesn’t respect. He also isn’t made King in the
North because he is a bastard. He is, however, made a military leader and one
of Sansa’s closest advisors. Dany is also a strong, charismatic leader, but she
lets her emotions get in the way of a more broad-minded view of justice, simply
doing things that appeal to her personal morals, rather than considering how to
make compromises. Then, the northerners and Daenaerys join forces, and Dany and
Jon fall in love. We watch the two learn from one another, both as a person and
as a leader. You watch them grow closer and learn to respect the different
skill sets that each of them brings to the table. Danaerys teaches Jon how to
play the political game when it’s necessary, and Jon teaches Danaerys the value
of sacrificing personal emotional whims for a more cool-headed form of
leadership. Eventually, their combined forces retake King’s Landing, but then
they receive word that the Night King has breached the wall and is marching
south. Jon confronts the Night King and defeats him. Everything appears to have
gone back to normal but weeks or months later, reports come back that there are
still white walkers roaming the north. Just as in real life, evil never rests.
The Wildlings, whom Jon has befriended, desperately need a leader, given the
still-present danger of the white walkers. Jon makes the decision not to be
with Dany in King’s landing, but leaves of his own accord, rather than as an involuntary
exile, to become the new King-Beyond-the-Wall. Jon and Dany, both have brought
order and justice to a bleak world, but tragically they cannot be together.
They each have to sacrifice their personal happiness for the wellbeing of their
respective kingdoms. You have given the audience an overall positive ending
that actually rewards the arcs that both Jon and Dany have undergone, first as
individuals and then together, learning how to grow past their flaws and become
strong but just rulers. But you also give them the realistic undercutting of
political realities that force them to make a heartbreaking personal sacrifice
in order to becomes those strong just leaders.
That would have been an ending that gives the audience
the true pleasure of irony: watching how something heroic and beautiful, like
learning how to be a great leader who brings peace and justice to an ailing kingdom,
goes hand in hand with great sacrifices, like choosing not to be with the
person one loves most dearly. The ending that the GOT fans actually got was
rife with ambiguity and coincidence, but very little true irony. For a writer
who, like Martin, Benioff, and Weiss, wants to write a truly mature and ironic
story, capable of moving an audience over cast stretches of space and time, it
behooves one to learn from miscarriages like the GOT finale, and draw
inspiration from the best sources possible.
