A message for disappointed Game of Thrones fans ready to give up on literature
Many of us are feeling a great deal of dejection or even betrayal at the hands of the very franchise we fell in love with. Here are some quotes from fellow fans Iâve found on IMDB, echoing the same general disappointment:
âBring me my 8 years back.â
âWatching season 8 made me feel sick.â
âI canât believe I wasted 10 years of my life watching this garbage.â
âYou have ruined something I care deeply about.â
â8 years watching it, craving for it, to get so disappointed.â
âFrom a show I couldnât wait to watch to a show I couldnât care about.â
âSeasons 1-7 meant nothing in the end.â
âI wasted 73 hours of my life for this crap?â
âI canât believe I wasted 9 years of my life!â
Iâve talked to many heartbroken fans and I keep hearing the same things over and over again - Regret and shame in ourselves for ever having been invested in a fictional world at all. Feeling stupid for expressing sorrow or even shedding tears over the decimation of our favorite franchise and its characters.
Hell, this is a quote from yours truly after learning the plot to season eight:
âI feel like this is all some life lesson - not to like anything too much or get invested in fiction.â
âŠAnd I almost fell for it.
But no. Iâm not going to let to two talentless writers who managed to ruin the greatest series of all time in the span of at least three episodes⊠determine the fate of my future with literature.
And you shouldnât, either.
What a writerâs goal should never be:
Make the audience feel regret for having invested time in their work
Make the audience feel shame in having rooted for certain characters
Leave a trail of unused foreshadowing that led to dead-ends
Betray in-universe logic in favor of shock
Retcon entire books or seasons in the endgame
Leave the audience feeling apathetic upon reaching the conclusion
Destroy any desire for the audience to reread or rewatch their material
Drive them to throw out their merch and regret spending their money
What a writerâs goal should be:
Aim for complete immersion and suspension of disbelief
Give the audience a cast of characters so rich that they feel represented by someone
Foreshadow. Plant clues and breadcrumb trails and provide payoff later
Inspire the audience to pore over their work for clues and extra detail
Remain consistent with the personalities of the characters theyâve created
Introduce the reader to new points of view
Avoid problematic tropes (and consider their ill effect on the audience)
Remember that every character, good or bad, is beloved by someone, and their ending should be handled with care (for better or worse)
Have a message. Have a point.
I promise you that while David Benioff and D.B. Weiss do not understand this, most writers and screenwriters do.
Now, on the other end of the spectrum, weâve got fans who werenât quite so invested telling us to âshut upâ and âstop complainingâ, insulting us by calling us âcry babiesâ and âbratsâ and belittling and dismissing our disappointment as âfirst world problemsâ (as seen here).
We are not stupid for becoming invested in literature.
To prove that point, Iâll leave you with a collection of quotes to remind you why you invest in fiction or literature, what it is we gain from it, and to help inspire you not to give up on ever falling in love with a fictional world again, because most writers are not here to shock or upset you senselessly, theyâre here to inspire you, make you think and feel.
âThe use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.â
âUnknown
âLiterature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; itâs the only place where we can keep track of ideas.â
âReza Aslan
âLiterature plays a huge role in examining difficult real-life issues.â
âAngie Thomas
âThat is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that youâre not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.â
âF. Scott Fitzgerald
âLiterature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.â
âHelen Keller
âLiterature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.â
âCarlos Fuentes
âGood fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.â
âBarbara Kingsolver
âLiterature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.â
âC.S. Lewis
âLiterature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.â
âSalman Rushdie
âFiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth.â
â George Saunders
âWe donât read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, weâre living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.â
âOrson Scott Card