Look, ASOIAF and GoT fans alike, your beloved series doesn’t work for one simple reason, and that reason is not wasting the viewer’s or reader’s time.
I’m not especially fond of that phrasing, because it conjures up for me a sense of entitlement vis a vis the media we consume where the audience has a right to demand entertainment conform to our tastes and expectations, rather than us taking it as we find it, for good or ill, but I’ve always struggles to come up with a more concise way of phrasing it. A less concise, but more accurate version might be this: a huge proportion of the value of a narrative derives from that narrative having a reason for being told, and that reason can be located within or outside of the text. But it must exist, or the audience will feel that the narrative is trivial (it will be a shaggy-dog story, and not a Tale), and it will lose emotional, aesthetic, and philosophical impact.
This is why “it was all a dream” stories, as a rule, usually suck. This is why time travel or dimension-hopping, if it sets up infinite identical duplicates of our heroes’ world or makes struggles trivial to overcome, usually falls flat. This is (in part) why people dislike Mary Sues–but also why stories about trivial events (modern-day romances set in totally mundane places like the office) can still work, because within the current of the narrative itself, we accept that the events being related have some degree of importance and lasting impact.
(The reasons for a story don’t have to be in the story itself: this is an important point. But in large part this has to do with how allegory, myth, and morality tales function as narrative vehiclesversus realist narrative fiction, and so don’t apply here.)
So: it is well and good to invoke the shape and motifs of heroic fantasy in your narrative in order to subvert them, to write against the canon as it were–so, your heroic-looking character dies, your prophecies don’t pan out, your war peters out after years of brutal fighting rather than concluding with An Epic Battle. But plot twists for the sake of plot twists do not count as subversion; they don’t actually create the thematic counterpoint against expectations that middle-grade TV writers seem to think they do, unless the thematic or narrative consequences of that subversion are actually sufficiently explored in the text. Benioff and Weiss are, of course, way worse at this than Martin, but honestly, this has been a consistent problem with GoT before they ran out of material to adapt–it goes back to the source material, whose author has many of the same sensibilities as present-day prestige TV writers. In his writing “about” history (in the sense he’s writing against typical theme park fantasy pseudo-historicism, and in a more “realistic” vein), his work comes off as no less exaggerated or caricatured, except in the Dung Ages direction this time instead of the Knight Errant; in writing “about” fantasy, he evinces no better understanding of (or ability to cleverly subvert) the genre than any other writer–which isn’t surprising, given that based on his comments on Tolkien, I don’t think he actually understands fantasy as a set of generic conventions as well as he thinks he does.
But the worst sin, the first sin, is that I never get the sense in George R. R. Martin’s world of why I should care. I never get the sense that his narratives are going to yield lasting fruits, sweet or bitter, only that he continuously strives to subvert, to surprise, to write against other things so furiously he is not writing for anything, not even any ending in particular. That no one knows how ASOIAF will end for sure isn’t actually a point in its favor: suspense can have its role in fiction, but there is a reason that structured plots, foreshadowing, and even fairy-tale style prophecy have their role: because narrative logic is an important part of how we understand fiction, and finding that the internal logic of a narrative has been fulfilled is what can make even tragic endings very satisfying. You may well argue, well, life doesn’t have to have a narrative logic–but this is why fiction is a separate genre from history (nevermind that we are often adept at imposing narrative logic on history retroactively!), and doing away with all conventions of fiction to try to get at a more “realistic” narrative isn’t going to drop you at the end at some expert imitation of Edward Gibbon, it’s going to drop you at some weird experimentalist thing like The Unconsoled, because the structures we use to undergird and hold up narrative fiction are based on the structures we use to understand the events of our own lives and the history of the world around us.
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