If You Hate Season 8 of Game of Thrones, You Hate Everything

From Men's Health

Game of Thrones fan discourse -stuff that’s normally only read by hardcore fans-has spilleth over from the fan sites to the mainstream, like so many soldiers of the Dead stepping over their own brethren to get into Winterfell. Haters are excoriating writers and producers of the show for what’s gone down in Season 8-the plot holes, the too-quick resolutions, Jaime bailing on Brienne!

There’s a Change.org petition to “remake season 8 with competent writers.” One million people had signed by the morning of the series finale.

Reactions have mostly ranged from the outraged...

To the ambivalent...

To the resourceful...

The only problem with complaining about season 8 though, is that the whole series from start to finish, from Bran falling to whatever Dany vs Jon imbroglio occurs in the finale is… and here I search for the right words… an absolute f---ing miracle.

The books were basically unfilmable, as Entertainment Weekly editor-at-large James Hibberd recently told Esquire. The most lifelike fire-breathing dragons ever. Armies of cadavers. It's so difficult to render that each episode of season 8 is estimated to cost $15 million.

For those of you who prefer Dothraki when speaking of Game: K’mon! Ees Greath Showsa!

And it’s a show that has consistently provided “fan service” to Game of Thrones obsessives: larding the show with stuff viewers want to see: nudity, at least for the first three seasons, dragon-fire porn the three after that, and all the reunions and loose-end tying-up, especially in Episode 6 which featured reunion after reunion.

Even as the series over seven seasons glacially moved along toward the battle between the living and the dead that finally occurred in Season 8, Episode 3, it managed to stay satisfying. Yes, it sped things up a little too fast at times, and yes it had characters in one kingdom one minute and another the next in ways that defied space and time even accounting for GOT physics, but there’s never been a TV show that so elegantly weaved multiple story lines and gave you payoff after payoff along the way. Game of Thrones never once plodded along (except maybe the Arya in Braavos storyline-sorry).

I'm with this guy:

You want length? Read the books and wait for the last volumes, which George R.R. Martin is suggesting he’s still going to write, even though the show left the books behind seasons ago. You want a less dark Battle of Winterfell? Check this out.

You want a remarkable show that uses zombies and dragons and evil queens and impossibly capable warriors to illuminate the darkness and light inside each of its viewers-even the ones who borrowed their mom’s HBO password? Then let the finale wash over you and then immediately start watching the series over again right after the finale.

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