Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Hot on the heels of an extremely divisive final season and a record-setting number of Emmy nominations, the cast and crew of Game of Thrones headed to San Diego Comic-Con to interact with fans during a highly anticipated panel. And yep, the cast took criticisms of the final season head on.
The panel in Comic-Con’s massive Hall H was initially supposed to feature showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, cast members Jacob Anderson, John Bradley, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Liam Cunningham, Nathalie Emmanuel, Iain Glen, Conleth Hill, Maisie Williams, and Isaac Hempstead Wright, and Miguel Sapochnik, who directed many of the series most well regarded episodes.
However, just as Comic-Con was kicking off, it was announced that Benioff, Weiss, Glen and Emmanuel would no longer be attending, leaving the rest of the cast to face thousands of fans all by themselves. Oops.
It’s surprising for a show like Thrones to be taking a victory lap at Comic-Con at all. In recent years, the convention has been used to plug upcoming work, and given the expense to networks, the money is usually focused on creating buzz for the next big thing. HBO is different, though, with Game of Thrones still being heavily used to promote subscriptions to their cable service, HBO Go and HBO Now streaming services, and the 2020 debuting HBO Max. So in theory, it makes a certain amount of sense.
That’s before Season 8 aired, of course. Not that a good chunk of the fans and even some critics didn’t like the season — and in fact, there’s general agreement about the insanely high quality level of the production and performances throughout. However, particularly the back half of the season saw a drastic dip in critical response, and a sharp divide in response from viewers. Though it’s by far not the only metric, Rotten Tomatoes scores for the final season were far below any previous years, and the last three episodes in particular — including the finale — were deemed “rotten.”
In response, certain fans even gamed the Google system recently to have Benioff and Weiss show up in search results when users of the search engine look for “bad writers,” which is, you know, a little rude. Regardless of what you think about the season. Just saying.
All that is sort of moot, though, as Game of Thrones was nominated for 32 Emmy awards on July 16, including for writing the series final episode, “The Iron Throne.” So poo on you, Rotten Tomatoes! A pox on your house, Google gamers!
Though the panel started off with pleasant reminiscing, it didn’t shy away from talking about the reaction to the final season.
“You look at the amount of people who are here, and we always did our hard work over the years,” Hill said addressing the crowd. “This is the reality, not the media hate.”
“It was surprising the level of it, of course, HBO has to change the whole thing,” Coster-Waldau said, laughing, adding that every season, from Ned Stark dying, to the Red Wedding, led to fans saying they would ditch the show. “I feel so lucky to have to met so many people… So many fans of the show. So obviously it comes to the end, it’s going to piss you off no matter what. Because it’s the end! If you hated the ending, if you loved it, that’s great! Just don’t call people names.”
“You have to remember, it’s not the end of this thing, it’s the journey,” Cunningham added. “We weren’t just delivering something nice… All of us feel absolutely blessed, we’re all huge fans of the show.”
On the other hand, when asked if they could have changed anything about the show, Cunningham immediately shouted out, “I should have been on the Throne!”
So then, back to jokes.
Will Benioff and Weiss brave the sea of fans at next year’s Comic-Con? Will they ever publicly comment on the season? They’ll surely be back at some point, as they’re currently working on a trilogy of upcoming Star Wars movies. But for now, the cast has the final word on the subject.
