Why I’ve Gone Back To Game of Thrones

My Game of Thrones life started the winter after the first season aired. My housemates and I watched it in a few days, and I was in love. Completely in love. I read all of the books in a caffeine fuelled two weeks that also happened to be the exam period of my second year of university. I didn’t love anything like I loved Game of Thrones. I breathed it for almost two years.

Then came season four, and the scene that changed it all.

I think we can all agree that the first few seasons of the show were – problematic. They used sex and sexual assault as plot devices gratuitously and unnecessarily in many cases, and we all know how many women were naked on screen in comparison to the men. For a while, I was willing to let this go, because I really loved the story and the characters, but it never sat well with me, or the friends that I shared it with.

In season four came the scene between Cersei and Jaime that was the last straw for me. A sex scene that in the book had been entirely consensual was played as a rape. Since then everyone involved, from the actors to the producers, have insisted that the scene was consensual – or at least they intended it to be. But I know what I saw, and my friends know what they saw too, and what we saw was horrible. I remember pausing the episode and texting my friend like – did that just happen? And she said yes, it did. I don’t even think I finished the episode.

I don’t really know why that scene, above all the horrible and unnecessary scenes, was the thing that made up my mind. Maybe it was because Cersei and Jaime were more established characters and we were more attached to them. Maybe it was because it was so out of character for Jaime to do something like that. Maybe it was just one scene too many, or maybe I was older and wiser. Whatever it was, I stopped watching the show.

Of course, I am alive and on the internet and I know the characters very well, so it has been almost impossible to avoid it entirely. I’ve even enjoyed looking at the memes, and I was sad when my main man Stannis died. I haven’t been completely detached, but I didn’t watch or actively engage with Game of Thrones itself.

But time goes by – almost five years, I think – and here we are at the end of the show. George RR Martin is showing no signs of even announcing a definite date for the next book, and that book won’t even be the last one. Who knows how long it will go on for, and who knows if it will ever even end? I’d be so pleased if it did. I’d be at a midnight launch for that book. But I am also realistic. If he has run out of steam, I don’t want to be one of those entitled fans who demands a book the author doesn’t want to write, or that he is struggling with. I know he takes a long time in between volumes – like a really, really long time – but I somehow feel this time it is different. His relationship with the show has been fraught, and I wouldn’t even blame him if he just turned around and said he was done. He doesn’t owe us anything.

But man, I want to know how it ends. And the show universe of Game of Thrones, for better or worse, at least is an ending. One that is probably fairly similar to what Martin originally had in mind. Similar enough that it will feel like closure on these characters I have loved for almost ten years now.

I had a friend who quit the same time I did, but lived with people who did watch it and she ended up seeing most of season seven. I trust her judgement and she said it was okay. The things we had a problem with mostly weren’t there anymore, and it was tolerable. Tolerable is all I need it to be.

I have examined how I feel about the show and how I feel about going back to it at this late stage. I’m not thrilled, because I was making a statement at least to myself when I quit. It was something I could do to show I wasn’t happy, even if no one really noticed. But I have come to a sort of peace with it. That same friend described it as going through the stages of grief and coming to acceptance. That might sound a bit melodramatic for something as simple as a TV show and it probably is, but there is a kind of grief when a thing that you loved is taken away from you, or when you have to choose between something you enjoy and the way it makes you feel. Art, and the art we enjoy, is intrinsically a part of who we are. It helps to shape us and how we see the world, and to have it abruptly ripped away because of irreconcilable differences is hard.

They made a mistake when they filmed that scene with Jaime and Cersei the way that they did. They made a mistake when they used sexual assault as a casual backdrop for a scene that wasn’t even about the characters who were engaging in the act. They made a mistake that rightly upset a lot of people when Sansa got married off to Ramsay Bolton as nothing that happened in that relationship could be described as ambiguous. They made a lot of mistakes.

What they also did was make a TV show that is a cultural phenomenon, a touchstone of the 2010s, an event that people all over the world are sharing right now. I don’t want to make Game of Thrones sound more important than it is, but ours is a world right now that is divided and seems more divided by the day. Anything that can bring together such a huge number of people can’t be all bad. It can’t possibly be all bad. There are a lot of things that are good – a diverse cast, and female characters with agency and strength, and some characters really getting the just desserts that they deserve (cough, Littlefinger, cough).

So I’ve decided that I will watch the last season of the show and I will enjoy it. I liked the first episode a lot. I loved Sansa all over again, and I loved Arya and Jon’s reunion, and like everyone else I’ve been loving the Bran memes. I’m excited to see what happens with Jaime in the next episode, and I cannot wait for Euron Greyjoy to meet his end, because one episode of him was quite enough, thanks. I’m feeling all the old feelings. I rolled my eyes at the Bronn scene and I skipped it, because I still think it is ridiculous. I’m sure I will have to roll my eyes and skip other scenes in the next five episodes.

But there will be an end to the story, and I will be able to share in it with millions of other people. Although that doesn’t exactly make up for the terrible mistakes they have made over the years, I am not being too generous when I say that it seems like at least some of the people involved have tried to be better in recent years. And trying to be better is the first step towards actually being better. And just like every story has to end, it also has to start somewhere too.