How did Game of Thrones get so instantly dated? As the hit-show let down or sidelined most of its female, POC, and LGBTQ characters, it almost turned itself into a time capsule underlining just how much changed in a few short years.
TRANSCRIPT
How did Game of Thrones get so instantly dated?
Premiering in 2011, Game of Thrones was a phenomenon— arguably the last water-cooler show that everyone had to at least know something about. Yet after its widely hated finale aired in 2019, the show that was all anyone talked about became the series that must not be named, and disappeared from the zeitgeist, a cultural footnote. So… what happened?
Game of Thrones ran over a period during which cultural values underwent a rapid and radical sea change. It was viewed as revolutionary when it began for bringing epic fantasy to the small screen and centering powerful women, but by the series’ end, the show felt noticeably behind the times.
Starting near the end of TV’s golden “age of the antihero,” Game of Thrones is full of 00s “prestige TV” hallmarks that our culture has increasingly rejected: pointless female nudity, sexual assault as “phoenix moments” for women, a sea of morally “grey” characters who don’t really change, and an overwhelmingly white cast with a tokenistic approach to its few characters of color. Then there’s the outrage over how suddenly the show’s finale season turned its feminist hero Daenerys into a mass-murdering villain without any convincing exploration of her internal journey. A lot of Game of Thrones is really about female anger.
Daenerys Targaryen: “When my dragons are grown, we will take back what was stolen from me and destroy those who wronged me!” - Game of Thrones 2x04
But in the end, it punishes Daenerys’ rage— turning her from a dragon-riding “girlboss” into an evil dictator who deserves to be murdered (and by the lover who rejected her, adding insult to injury). As The Atlantic observed, this “rebuke” of anger was a “misreading” of our moment— because just as the show was ending, our society was owning the importance of getting angry when change is called for. As Game of Thrones let down or sidelined most of its female, POC, and LGBTQ characters, it almost turned itself into a time capsule underlining how much changed in a few short years. Even more fundamentally, on the story level, it rushed toward a finale that left numerous plots unresolved, and wasted almost all its characters’ development, leaving a confusing and disappointing legacy. So, are we ready yet to talk about Game of Thrones— and can it ever hold a place in our hearts again?
A Fatally Flawed Finale
A number of beloved shows have suffered from finales their fans hated, but this didn’t irrevocably taint their entire runs. Yet Game of Thrones’ reputation was essentially destroyed by its final episode.
Seth Rogen: “...I would imagine those guys regret making Bran the King because… he doesn’t have the best story…” - YouTube, Heavy Spoilers
One crucial error was not delivering a payoff and resolution to the countless storylines and innumerable conflicts that had drawn us into this vast expansive world. Fans were especially dissatisfied because the massive popularity of the show had created huge communities around fan theories and speculation. And even if many of those theories were long-shots, some of the basic questions the show had underlined were ignored or given vague answers amounting to: I guess it didn’t actually matter.
Creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, perhaps eager to move on from the show, diverged from the regular ten-episode format with two shorter final seasons.
George R.R. Martin: “We could have gone to 11, 12, 13 seasons, but, uh, they- I guess they wanted a life.” - Youtube, Variety
But with only seven episodes in season seven and six episodes in season eight, much of the conflict that had been slow-burning was suddenly in a rush to be resolved. In episode one of season eight, everyone has to come together to fight the White Walkers who are an existential threat to humanity, but by episode three, they’re defeated in a single blow, and we realize that after all this we learned nothing, really, about them.
Moreover, while you’d think (given the limited episode count), the script would be straining to pack in all the drama, the writing did the opposite; it included less dialogue per minute of screentime and didn’t really deal with a lot of the more complicated side plots or characters. The result was a strangely bloated waste of the little time the season did have to wrap up its story threads.
Many viewers traced these weaknesses to the show passing the plots of George R. R. Martin’s source novels. The Change.org petition asking HBO to remake season eight put it in pretty harsh terms: “David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have proven themselves to be woefully incompetent writers when they have no source material (i.e. the books) to fall back on.”
Another way the show went astray was due to its abandoning the “no plot armor” approach that contributed to its rise.
Arya Stark: “Anyone can be killed.” - Game of Thrones 2x05
Game of Thrones was known not just for its violence, but also for the fact that no one was immune to that violence. Audiences loved being upset by the terrible shock of the Red Wedding, Ned’s beheading, or “The Mountain and the Viper”— and they loved the show that dared to upset them like that. But in the final seasons, almost none of the central characters die up to the very end— even in scenes where it’s truly straining believability that more main characters aren’t getting killed. A surprising majority of the characters we’d been led to care about the most even make it out with relatively happy endings in the finale. It’s a symptom of how, in a larger way, the show gradually began to pander to fans, only to actually turn audiences off— because, on a deeper level, pandering doesn’t give fans what they really want.
All these creative missteps revealed a failure to understand why and what about the show’s storytelling was so loved. By not ending the show with the vast, unpredictable complexity that had once defined it, Game of Thrones led us to wonder if we’d misread its original identity or given it too much credit.
Falling Behind the Culture: Punishing Female Rage
As a show that straddled two eras, Game of Thrones went from feeling edgy and timely— as it gave us powerful women taking the center stage— to suddenly behind the times, when it didn’t follow through with truly empowering its female characters, let alone its (few) POC or queer characters. Game of Thrones was a show that allowed its women to express righteous anger. Yet its ending rebukes and punishes women for their anger.
The writers did hint at a potential dark side of Daenerys.
Daenerys: “And I will take what is mine— with fire and blood I will take it.” - Game of Thrones 2x06
We saw glimpses of her father, the “Mad King,” in her. But with every ruthless or violent decision she made, there was always justice, a cause and effect, and people who deserved it.
Daenerys: “Slay the soldiers, slay every man who holds a whip, but harm no child.” - Game of Thrones 3x04
Moreover, she constantly strove to protect the innocent, not just in lip service but with concrete actions. Unlike Cersei, she selflessly paused her ambitions to devote her (much needed) forces to fighting the White Walkers. And she explicitly says she won’t destroy King’s Landing:
Daenerys: “I am not here to be Queen of the Ashes.” - Game of Thrones 7x02
Heeding the advice of her rational and balanced advisor, Tyrion.
Despite all this, the show ends with her deciding to senselessly mass-murder the innocent men, women, and children in King’s Landing. It’s a plot turn that could have made sense if written well— there were always issues with her “conqueror’s” belief that the throne was “hers” due to her Targaryen blood, and the “white savior” imagery of her freeing slaves who just happened to all spontaneously serve her. Moreover, there are motivations pushing Dany to the emotional brink like the loss of two of her dragon-children; being spurned by her lover Jon Snow after finding out he’s her nephew; and Cersei’s murder of her right hand and friend Missandei.
Yet, whatever’s happening in Dany’s head and feelings as she becomes increasingly isolated isn’t really articulated or shared with us. The sparse dialogue of these final episodes leaves us to basically infer why Daenerys is turning to the dark mainly through a series of facial expressions, and a few post-show explanations from the creators.
D.B. Weiss: “It’s in that moment, on, on the walls of King’s Landing when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to, to make this personal.” - Game of Thrones 8x05
As the show’s most beloved, charismatic character morphed into a one-dimensional, unrelatable villain, the series pathologized her rage— and turned her into a madwoman consumed by a hysterical anger which makes her a violent danger to society. She even becomes an extreme form of the “crazy ex-girlfriend” to Jon Snow, who decides she’s such a problem he has to kill her. And so, the show that had been known for centering powerful, layered female characters ended by signaling that progress and peace would come through naming a bland, emotionally distant man, Bran Stark, to rule. To be fair, the writing tries to position Bran as the figurehead for a more “collective” or representative government than the previous autocracy; and Bran isn’t your typical “white guy” boss, as someone who’s disabled, has experienced a lot of loss, and also… has become the three-eyed raven.
But this doesn’t change the fact that the strongest female leaders on the show were demonized and punished for their anger. Always-angry Cersei is set up as the other, second-most threatening villain, viewed as selfish, irrational and plain wicked by the other characters— and in the end, Cersei gets no kind of catharsis or even illuminating dramatic moment; she just has to bitterly swallow her rage, passively crying on a balcony before dying in defeat.
The ending pathologized the anger of people of color, too, through Grey Worm, who embraces Dany’s massacre as an outlet for revenge. Of the two featured black characters on the show, Missandei was brutally murdered (or “fridged”) to motivate a white character (and a male character), while Grey Worm’s demands of justice for Dany’s killing were left unaddressed.
Grey Worm: “We need justice. Jon Snow cannot go free.”
Tyrion: “That’s not for you to decide.” - Game of Thrones 8x06
As one critic wrote, “Game of Thrones did not have to kill Missandei in order to give Daenerys a motivation to reclaim her throne or to inspire Grey Worm to fight in her name. Both these characters already do this. It’s literally their purpose on this show. Killing the only woman of color on Game of Thrones, just one week after killing off the entirety of the Dothraki army is a huge problem for a show that has always struggled with diversity.”
Before this faceless mass death scene as a preamble to the Battle of Winterfell, the Dothraki— the largest group of POC characters on the show— are portrayed as one-dimensional “savages.” They prize simple strength over all else and rape and murder innocents for fun.
Khal Drogo: “These women are slaves now to do with as we please.” - Game of Thrones 1x08
The show’s few queer characters— including the characters from Dorne, who were People of Color and some of whom were shown to be bisexual— met similarly brutal ends well before the final stages of the show.
The series’ ultimate fear and sidelining of the rage of women and minority groups came just as our culture was embracing the opposite idea— that a lot of this kind of anger can be warranted and just. Esquire argues that the show’s treatment of women overall is what will “tarnish its legacy,” saying, “Misogyny is Game of Thrones’ original sin.” The show premiered in 2011 during the antihero era, when unfiltered realism was the hallmark of prestige TV, and nudity and violence were also selling points for HBO, so “realistic drama” became an excuse to show lots of sex, female nudity, and gratuitous violence in a more exploitative way that wasn’t really justified by the story. As Esquire points out, “The nudity on Game of Thrones was regressive, never equitable and often contrived, and consisted largely of beautiful women dropping trou to titillate the audience, again and again.” Vice brokedown the nudity on the show and found that 83.7% was female. One director, Neil Marshall, said, “The weirdest part [of directing Game of Thrones] was when you have one of the exec producers leaning over your shoulder, going, ‘You can go full frontal, you know…. I urge you to do it!’ This particular exec took me to one side and said, ‘Look, I represent the pervert side of the audience, okay?... and I’m saying I want full frontal nudity in this scene.’”
Emilia Clarke was 23 when the show began filming and has said she felt pressured into doing nudity. As the show progressed, she said she had “fights on set…where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’ and they’re like, ‘You don’t wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans.’” And while the leading female actors could increasingly exercise some control over their nude scenes, the show continued the dehumanizing practice of using naked female extras almost as props or sex dressing.
The show is also full of rampant, disturbing violence (both physical and sexual) against women. George R.R. Martin defended the prevalence of these acts in the story: “Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought… To omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest.” But the problem lies less in depicting this, and more in how the subject matter’s dealt with. The show takes a casual attitude toward rape as a tool to torture its female characters, without bothering to address the underlying issues and resulting trauma.
After being sold to the Dothraki, Daenerys is forced into a marriage with Khal Drogo by her brother, and Drogo, who sees Dany as his property, rapes her twice on screen. But after this, Drogo becomes a grand romantic hero.
Khal Drogo: “Moon of my life. Are you hurt?” - Game of Thrones 1x07
It turns out he just needed Dany to learn to please him in bed, so he would fall in love with her and treat her well. Meanwhile, Cersei’s rape by her brother in front of their recently deceased son was (according to Vulture) a “new low for the deeply violent series, because the scene was rewritten from the book to recast the sex as not consensual, and yet the show’s cast and crew aren’t even sure whether it constitutes rape. ‘It becomes consensual by the end,’ director Alex Graves” told Vulture. The coffin scene seemingly undoes a lot of Jaime’s heavily featured redemption arc, but afterward, there’s no discussion about Jamie’s assault or Cersei’s mental state at all.
After Sansa’s attempted rape at the Riot of King’s Landing, we witness her harrowing rape by Ramsay in season five on their wedding night, in Sansa’s childhood home— but the camera is focused on Theon’s face, making us feel not the victim’s experience, but this bystander’s pain. Unlike most of the other women, Sansa does get to survive and become a strong leader, who ends up ruling the north (so she’s the female character with the most formal power in the end). But regrettably, the show implies that her experience of being repeatedly abused by Ramsay is a key part of what made her into a stronger person.
Sansa: “Without Littlefinger and Ramsay and the rest, I would have stayed a little bird all my life.” - Game of Thrones 8x04
As Jessica Chastain tweeted, “Rape is not a tool to make a character stronger… The #littlebird was always a Phoenix.”
Rapes of faceless and voiceless women also occur in the background of scenes for an easy “shock” factor, or rape can be used as a tool to allow male characters to swoop in and save the woman— in what’s known as the White Knight trope.
Jaime Lannister: “Lord Selwyn would pay his daughter’s weight in sapphires if she is returned to him…But only if she’s alive, her honor unbesmirched.” - Game of Thrones 4x05
After Sam rescues Gilly from being assaulted, the two have sex— an unrealistic expectation for a woman who has just been attacked, as the show acknowledges earlier:
Shae: “A girl who was almost raped doesn’t invite another man into her bed two hours later.” - Game of Thrones 1x09
And of course, the show wraps up with the climactic moment of its hero Jon killing his former lover in a stabbing that’s positioned as noble and selfless— leading to a troublingly glorified image of domestic assault.
Outside of any external “messages,” the final season fundamentally let down its characters with writing that abandoned their complexity and seemed to forget much of what it set out to do. Narrative-wise, the choice of Bran felt almost like the plot was trying so hard to avoid an obvious, predictable conclusion, they wrote an ending that didn’t complete what had been set up by the narrative.
George R.R. Martin: “If you’ve planned your book that the butler did it… someone has figured out that the butler did it and you suddenly change in mid-stream and it was the chambermaid who did it… you screw up the whole book…” - YouTube
Tyrion suggests Bran as the King because he has the best story, but evidently the show didn’t really think this because they put him offscreen for much of the middle seasons’ action. He doesn’t appear in season five at all.
Another fan-favorite character, Tyrion, does end up in a high position, as the advisor who’ll seemingly be running things. Yet, in the final seasons, Tyrion’s trademark wit starts to evaporate, and— for all that we heard about what a smart guy he was— the advice he gives is rather basic or wrong.
Peter Dinklage: “He’s bringing all the dead people back to life and they’ve put women and children in a crypt with all the dead people… Tyrion is smart, but I guess not that smart.” - YouTube, GameofThrones
So while his final position would have felt earned in earlier seasons, based on his recent job performance it feels a lot like “failing up.”
Then there’s Jon Snow, whom the show had always been leading to some larger purpose. Arguably you can interpret Jon’s great destiny as bringing a much-needed end to the Iron Throne, protecting the world from a darkness which isn’t actually the White Walkers as much as Dany. Still, if his right to the throne didn’t matter, why did the show make such a big deal about Jon’s parentage if not to just aggressively trick us? And if the point is about getting over the idea that your ancestry matters, then why did Jon’s great heritage make him the only one able to fulfill his destiny?
David Benioff: “We hoped to kind of avoid the unexpected and Jon snow has always been the hero, the one who’s been the savior, but it just didn’t seem right to us for this- for this moment.” - YouTube, GameofThrones
The retconning, dead ends, inconsistencies and loose ends retroactively damage the quality of the early seasons, as (rewatching or starting as a new viewer) we know all that character development is going to be wasted.
Conclusion
An ending often determines a story’s takeaway. Game of Thrones epitomized the cultural moment of its time, but misread that moment— and didn’t think carefully enough about what its legacy as a time capsule should be. So now, perhaps its greatest legacy is a caution to look before you leap to the end— because if you don’t stick the landing, you may devalue everything that came before.
Samwell Tarley: “And now his watch is ended.” - Game of Thrones 5x07