Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
If you aren’t watching Game of Thrones, you’ve probably been nudged by about 20 friends to start because “you really don’t know what you’re missing!!!” (To their credit, they aren’t wrong). It’s a series that has truly found a home in the age of internet think-piece-fueled TV, and as we cruise through the much-faster paced seventh season, the end is finally in sight. While Twitter continues to be abuzz every Sunday evening with responses and reactions to every twisty turn and shocking moment, one can’t help but wonder if we even like this show anymore, or if it’s just become about the experience – and the fact that we have soldiered through even the slowest of episodes for some inkling of a resolution.
At the beginning, Thrones captured us because of its unique, unprecedented storytelling. Never before had there been anything as expansive and ambitious as Game of Thrones, and even when it was a struggle to get through some episodes, we stuck with it. This was history, people! Plus, how were you going to keep up during party smalltalk if you weren’t watching? I jumped on the bandwagon and binged to catch up about halfway through the series’ run, and I was told by more than one person to watch the first few episodes with subtitles because there was absolutely NO way I was going to remember everyone’s names. (They were right, and I am grateful to them). With 20 or 100 characters in the mix at once, it’s baffling that we’ve been able to keep up at all – but we have, and that says something.
Even the show’s willingness to kill off its most interesting characters initially seemed to be a bit of a plus, because hey, no one else was doing it – but then they kept the most boring characters alive (looking at you, Stannis), and killed fan-favorites. There’s some strange Stockholm Syndrome at play with Thrones, one that has seen us continue to return no matter how many times the show wounds us. But why have we always been so willing to be forgiving? Thrones was and has remained one of the most frustrating shows on television, and we’ve stuck around in search of some grand payoff – one that’s come in waves, but has never fully satisfied.
Now that we’ve said goodbye to so many of our favorite (and least favorite) characters and the show’s pace has picked up dramatically, it seems as though we’re entering fan-service territory. With blow after blow, we feel deserving of some kind of consolation prize, some sort of reward for sticking around for all this time. It’s all come swiftly in Season 7; in a single episode, we saw two Starks reunite and Jon and Daenerys finally meet, two satisfying moments that NEVER would have happened on early Thrones. We’ve barely gotten one satisfying encounter a season, let alone an episode. The truth may very well be that the team behind Game of Thrones never cared about us, but now they’re in a mad dash to gift wrap the show’s last episodes to ensure they go out with some kind of bang – and we’ve bought in to every moment of it.
It’s a testament to the power of social media and word of mouth that Game of Thrones has become such a phenomenon, and it’s likely largely the reason we’ve stuck with the show even after they’ve brutally murdered some of our favorite characters. If we’d only been enduring this kind of torture for two or three seasons, we might have given up. The wise guys behind Thrones, however, paced this misery in such a manner that we hadn’t even noticed that we’d spent six seasons watching people lose appendages, get raped, stabbed, and all of the above, and instead diverted our attention so that we’d wind up feeling as though we’d come too far to stop now. We’ve invested so much time that there’s no other option.
Admittedly, I generally still find myself enjoying the show – I’m not making some grand proclamation about how it’s not good anymore. There just seems to be more to our commitment than enjoyment, one that has a lot more to do with the desire for a grand payoff than it does with actually liking what we’re watching.
