SPECULATION: How will Game of Thrones end? Look at its genre

There’s no greater question when attempting to discuss Game of Thrones than this: How will it end? Will we see heroes riding their dragons to defeat the White Walkers? A bloodbath on the steps leading to the Iron Throne? Or perhaps the winter wind howling over the graves of the main characters?

Normally, the best way to tell how a story ends is to look at its genre. Watching an action movie? The hero’s going to beat the bad guy, and win their romantic interest’s heart. Reading a romance? The love interests will hook up, or one of them will die terribly symbolically, depending on how arty the novel is.

And what about Game of Thrones? Its closest genre is “heroic fantasy,” the genre of Tolkien and Eddings and Jordan—and before that, Arthurian legends and medieval romances. But it doesn’t have a cozy relationship with that subgenre, alternating between shoving it away, slyly subverting it, and surreptitiously embracing it. Heroic fantasy tends to have pretty rigid rules about how it works and how it ends, and figuring out whether Game of Thrones wants to follow those rules leads directly into predictions of how GoT might end….

Heroic fantasy (often called “high fantasy” or “epic fantasy” as well, although distinctions between these can be made) was the dominant form of the wider fantasy genre from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, when A Game of Thrones was written and published. 1977 is the crucial year for the subgenre: Star Wars was released into theaters, and Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannarra was a best-seller. (Star Wars may use a science fiction shell, but it adapts fantasy and fairy tale tropes).

Its popularity only increased: you couldn’t throw a magical sword in the 1980s without hitting something like David Eddings’ Belgariad, probably the platonic example of the form in fantasy literature. And in the early 1990s, the biggest title in the genre was Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time—a traditional heroic fantasy made much much bigger, most importantly in terms of having more point-of-view characters and more books in the series. The story tropes also worked really well with role-playing games, both paper and video, as they grew in popularity across the same era.

The subgenre typically works like this: there’s a young man*, separated from the centers of power, who is prophecized to save the world. He goes on a quest, travels the world, recruits entertaining companions, falls in love, finds lost magic, faces and defeats the ultimate evil, returns the world to normal and then is often rewarded with a position of power over the world he just saved. Some aspects of this may be fiddled with (Luke Skywalker doesn’t find romantic love), but the general form is extremely common. It’s a simplified version of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth—for Lucas this was deliberate, but many others have simply absorbed the tropes.

*The masculine nature of the genre is deliberate; almost all heroic fantasy focuses on men, and most woman authors in this era tended to have shorter, smaller-in-scope novels. The closest example that I know of from that era are probably Mercedes Lackey’s novels, particularly the Mage Winds/Mage Storms trilogies starring Princess Elspeth. This has changed, though, since A Game of Thrones’ publication in 1996.

Game of Thrones both fits this and doesn’t. It’s got long-lost heirs running around, coming-of-age and finding magic in the world—most obviously Daenerys Targaryen (gender aside), but a strong argument could also be made for Jon Snow. By heroic fantasy logic, the story of Game of Thrones is the story of these adolescents growing up, finding themselves and each other, and defeating ancient magical evil. This ending looks likes so: “The White Walkers invade, and Dany and Jon ride dragons to burn them all away. They get married, and rule the Seven Kingdoms wisely and firmly, and everyone who survives lives happily ever after.”

According to conventional fantasy tropes, this is the default ending. And I think it’s what many fans expect, or even want. It’s not without some level of support from the text, either, particularly the novels, which provide prophecies and clues suggesting that the endgame will look something like this.

It’s hardly an open and shut case, however. First of all, George R.R. Martin has both demonstrated and explicitly described an unwillingness to work with those default fantasy tropes. His willingness to kill leading characters, particularly Ned Stark, can and probably should be seen as an explicit rejection of conventional ideals of how fantasy should work. Moreover, quotes like this illustrate a tiredness of Tolkien-esque happy endings:

Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs?

[spoiler]Readers will note that “What happens after the war?” is a crucial part of Jon Snow’s A Dance with Dragons story, adding another fascinating wrinkle to the discussion.[/spoiler]

Second, part of the “back to normal” aspect of heroic fantasy endings involves an end to magic and magical events. This is most obvious with Tolkien, where Lord of the Rings is itself the end to a long story of supernatural tragedy, and it ends with the elves and wizards who embodied the unreal aspects of Middle-Earth getting on a ship and leaving the humans with their industry and technology behind. To take it even further, Arthurian legend uses this theme as well—its last action is usually considered the returning of the magical sword Excalibur from whence it came. (The Arthurian connection has been used by other authors to subvert the heroic fantasy tropes as well; Martin was not writing in a vacuum. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon is a prime example of that.)

But Game of Thrones moves entirely in the opposite direction. Instead of being eliminated or controlled, magic is returning to Westeros. (Recall the scene where the pyromancer asks Tyrion if he has any dragons, because with dragons alive, wildfire is much easier to make.) The White Walkers haven’t been seen in thousands of years, and they’re back too. The Red God’s power rises; Bran Stark is a more potentially powerful warg than anyone has heard of; direwolves are seen south of The Wall. Far from bringing stability to Westeros, Dany is bringing revolution—and her dragons are bringing chaos and destruction.

The implicit structure of Game of Thrones doesn’t entirely fit the idea of heroic fantasy either. This Jon and Dany’s story, yes, but it’s also Tyrion’s, Arya’s, Sansa’s, Jaime’s, and more. Could they be sidekicks for the true heroes? Perhaps, and in a couple of those cases, that might be the perfect place for them. But, after everything, say, Sansa Stark has gone through, does it make sense for her story to be totally enveloped by Jon or Dany’s story? I don’t see it easily.

That last bit is why I, personally, can’t buy into Game of Thrones as disguised heroic fantasy. In order to assume that the ending involves good triumphing over supernatural evil, characters and storylines that I like and consider critical have to be assumed to be less important than those of most important characters. This both goes against my preferences, and my understanding of the story being told. In my personal Game of Thrones, a fascinatingly flawed negotiated compromise serves as the climax, not a glorious dragon run.

One thing that complicates matters is the existence of Game of Thrones the television show as distinct from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels. After news came out that Martin had told D+D the general shape of the ending prior to Season 3, I kept a keen eye out for anything that might prove to be a clue. Sure enough, the moment Dany is introduced in that season—with her ship heading into Slaver’s Bay, and her dragons dancing around it, the music swelled in a way that pushed all my “this is the hero” buttons. Now, I will happily admit that my interpretation of this could have been wrong—my point is more that the show’s producers and crew could hold different views about the position of the story in relation to the genre, and utilize music, editing, lighting, and framing to position it as more or less of a heroic fantasy than was originally intended.

Thus I end up with three possibilities for the Game of Thrones ending:

• it embraces heroic fantasy, with heroes, dragons, and wizards combining to end the supernatural threat and restore order, or…
• it subverts heroic fantasy—perhaps Dany wins the Iron Throne, but becomes a terrible Queen, or…
• it rejects heroic fantasy, letting petty politics and Red Wedding-like events continue to dominate the story, leading to a deliberately unsatisfying ending.

I’m sure we’ll see elements of all three of these options moving forward, but at a certain point, Martin is going to have to decide how important the supernatural element is, who will end up on the throne, and who will be allowed to live and succeed. What you think the answers to those will be, and what you think they should be, are probably informed by how much you think Game of Thrones follows heroic fantasy tropes.

• Published on 12/08/2014 at 7:37 PM CDT
• Last updated on 12/08/2014 at 7:37 PM CDT