Thread by @DanielNothing

Last scene in Game of Thrones: VR headsets suddenly start popping up on all the characters.
Cersei Lannister surveys all the corpses around her, starts yelling "DID I WIN? DID I? IS EVERYBODY DEAD?" in a broad Brooklyn accent.
Screen pixellates into the DELOS logo.
No end credits

If someone else has already made this joke don't tell me.

And to think I was going to go with my 'I hope Game Of Thrones sticks the Landing!' gag.

That would have been a LOT more apt, really :-/

But seriously folks, I feel like the reason I like Game of Thrones is exactly the same reason I liked the first handful of Dune books as a kid: they're ultimately about the uselessness and destructiveness of saviour narratives.

Heroes don't become heroes just because they're plucky do-gooders with God on their side. They're selected and groomed by committee. They're heroism is a foregone conclusion depending on who's engineering it.

Unless the hero decides that isn't what they want.

That tension between what popular memory says about someone, what they say about themselves and the likeliest version of the truth is always absorbing. If Game of Thrones is anything, it's a cynic's deconstruction of the hero's journey.

And best of all it acknowledges that sometimes doing the honourable, stoic, manly thing can be a form of moral cowardice.

Which results in a lot of blood and ash on a lot of hands.