Do you think Jon or Arya's endings, with both of them essentially living out separate exiles, are likely to have been in the outline Martin provided HBO, or just endings that made sense to the writers in the context of the show versions of those characters? I'm torn with Jon especially, because it seems like he *could* end up effectively becoming a wildling, but it also seems weirdly mundane for a boy that died and came back.
I think they have both good chances to be part of Martin’s outline. I’m less certain of Arya’s ending, because I don’t think the books have laid an adequate foundation yet for her eventually leaving Winterfell again to explore the world. Re: Jon’s endgame, I have mixed feelings. It’s a bit too circular to suit me (and I hate circular storytelling), but I also think it absolutely fits George’s definition of “bittersweet” ending, as well as his deconstruction of heroic tropes and chosen one narratives. The fact that it “seems weirdly mundane for a boy that died and came back” is exactly why I feel it works. Jon already had a climatic, sacrificial death, if you think about it. And if I’m being honest I’ve always felt that the three heads of the dragon riding into the sunset the curtain of light in a suicidal mission to destroy the heart of winter, and never coming back but being forever remembered as the saviors of humanity, was a bit too standard high fantasy to really fit George’s narrative. That’s not what I would call bittersweet---it’s highkey epic.
With this finale, on the other hand, you have the entire parabola of a hero: a secret prince who is raised as a bastard, joins the Night’s Watch, goes undercover as a Wildling, becomes lord commander, dies and resurrects; goes from war hero to king, from king to savior of humanity, from savior of humanity... to queenslayer and kinslayer, imprisoned and plagued by guilt, and eventually sentenced to go back to where he started---with the Free Folk, the people he initially was meant to defend the realm from, and now has to defend from the realm (because the realm corrupts, look what it did to him), and finally guide home.On the surface it’s a regression but it’s also him going back to where he actually had been at his happiest (even if at that time he was weighed down by too many oaths and unresolved business to notice), where he met his first love and what it meant to be free. Ironically, it’s the ending that fits most my own headcanon that Jon, Dany and Tyrion would all survive the WftD only to retire to a quiet place where they could heal, while the world would go on without them and slowly forget them, even. I wasn’t entirely sure of what they would need to heal from, when this idea formed in my mind. But the show provided an answer.
Overall, although this season was DEEPLY flawed, I could see George’s blueprint filtering through. In its basic concept, if not in the details and certainly not in the execution. It deals with the “what happens after the big heroic battle?” in the same brutally sincere and vaguely uncomfortable way I expect Martin to do. We thought the story ended with the WftD, we got a curveball instead. The main heroes survived relatively unscathed the battle against the Others, and then... Then they had to deal with what’s left. We thought the aftermath would simply be about mourning their losses and rebuilding, but instead it was about deep identity issues coming to a tragic climax for Dany, and the inability to cope with a world where the evil you know and have built your whole life around no longer exists for Jon. As I said many times, I don’t necessarily think the events will unfold in the books the way they did in the show---but the spirit, the intent, the main climatic and thematic beats behind this season, regardless of the execution, are something we should definitely look at when speculating about the books’ endgame.
