Numerous fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones have expressed disappointment, anger and disillusionment at the way that the last season has played out. Fans now want GoT's eighth and final season to be remade and have started a petition to that effect on change.org. At the time of writing, about 7.4 lakh people had signed the petition, with new signatures being added practically every second.
The petition feels that unlike previous seasons, the final season is woefully inadequate and makes no sense. This is apparently because David Benioff and D.B. Weiss did not have George R R Martin’s books as source material and have thus proved themselves to be incompetent.
Considering the fact that the show has an overall viewership of about 17 million, a few hundred thousand disgruntled fans don’t really count for much. However, the dissatisfaction of fans finds expression all over social media. The last episode to air also had the lowest ever Rotten Tomatoes rating.
There was a lot wrong with episode 5: the Master of Whispers Varys suddenly decides to shout out all secrets and after a lifetime of surviving, tamely surrenders to death-by -Drogon-the-dragon. It was a ridiculously easy win for Daenerys. Cersei is supposed to be many months pregnant. Where is the belly? Dany the ‘protector of the weak’ goes ahead and annihilates said weak: the poor destitute, kids, sick, old. The Northern army arrives strangely quickly. All Arya's training doesn’t give her the strength or wile to evade being stampeded. How, how, how?
Dany starts out as the underdog who rejects victimhood to become the most powerful of rulers and the up-lifter of the downtrodden. For once a popular show showed a powerful, capable woman devoid of male props. Her descent into madness and villainy is a cop-out. It is devoid of nuance, and gives in to the hysterical female stereotype to excuse the mantle of leadership being passed on to a rightful (read male) heir. The strong Brienne, the newly powerful Sansa are kept out of the narrative, the evil Cersei is unceremoniously done away with and even the slayer of the Night King, Arya is reduced to being helplessly trampled upon.
Fans and viewers have expressed disappointment with many of the show's inconsistent plot lines, tropes and characterisations and have put forward alternatives of their own.
Most people seem to agree that a petition will do little and that it is highly unlikely that the show’s last season will be remade.
The fact is that the fandom is not a monolith. It is varied and different fans want different things; they have different favourites. If Dany fans are disappointed, there exists a subculture of Stannis Baratheon fans (the pretender to the throne who died in season 5) who still want him to be king. Even if the show were to be remade (which it certainly will not be), a similar number of disgruntled fans would express their dissatisfaction for a new set of reasons.
To ask for a remake is really entitled and it betrays a lack of knowledge of how television production works. There is one episode of the eighth and final season of Game of Throne left to be aired. Fans will just have to grit their teeth and accept what is dished up to them.
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