Why ‘Game of Thrones’ will end in peace, not war

“The battle of good and evil is a great subject for any book and certainly for a fantasy book, but I think ultimately the battle between good and evil is weighed within the individual human heart and not necessarily between an army of people dressed in white and an army of people dressed in black.”

 – George R. R. Martin

There is a huge, seemingly unsolvable problem with ending Game of Thrones. 

Quite possibly, it’s why George R. R. Martin has spent the last eight years failing to finish the final two books in his Song of Ice and Fire series. And it’s also why, out of the all fan theories that have guessed at the conclusion, only one would truly hit the “bittersweet” note we’ve been promised.

Our desperation to see how Season 8 ends goes far beyond just needing to know what happens to our favorite characters. Nor is it only about finally solving the mystery of the White Walkers.

The fanatical hype around the final act of Game of Thrones comes from a more fundamental tension: How do you end a story that’s gone out of its way to break all the rules, tropes, themes, and structures we’ve come to expect from stories?

Since the first scene in Season 1, we’ve been lead to believe this will all culminate in an epic battle of good versus evil. But actually delivering on that promise would go against everything Game of Thrones is at its core. 

So the problem remains: How can Season 8’s finale stay true to the show’s themes, while still giving us a satisfying ending?

In Game of Thrones, there are no rules

Many times, Martin has said that his novels are a direct subversion of the Tolkien-esque tropes that have dominated the fantasy genre since Lord of the Rings. Pulling off a story that deconstructs fantasy tropes sounds hard enough in itself. But it’s even harder when you consider that the good versus evil theme he’s talking about isn’t just embedded into modern fantasy. 

How do you end a story that’s gone out of its way to break all the rules?

In more abstract ways, it’s embedded into the narrative structure of how we’ve been telling stories since the very beginning.

It’s the basis for Joseph Campbell’s seminal Hero’s Journey structure, which distilled all mythology and folklore from cultures around the world down to the same basic formula. And that basic formula came to dominate screenplay and fiction writing, directly influencing our most popular films, TV shows, books, and video games, from Star Wars to Stranger Things to Harry Potter.

But subverting this culture-defining Hero’s Journey narrative is the reason why Game of Thrones continues to shock us like nothing else.

Season 1 tricked us into believing Ned Stark was our hero and moral compass in a corrupt world. So, we assumed, there was no real need to get worried when he was sentenced to death. He’s the hero! He couldn’t possibly di — welp, there goes his head. 

The creators even linger for a few graphic seconds too long on his severed head falling off his body, cutting away only after they’re sure viewers have moved past the grieving stage of denial and into acceptance.

So, okay. Ned wasn’t our hero. But it’s definitely still the Starks, right? They’re the good guys! This must be Robb’s story, then — the story of how justice and vengeance is always served to bad people… Nope! They’re all dead, too. And to rob you of any sliver of hope, an unnamed Frey even stabs Little Unborn Baby Ned Stark Jr. repeatedly in the womb.

Every time you think you’ve figured out the rules of Game of Thrones, it pulls the rug out from under you. 

After the Red Wedding, we recalibrated our expectations. Okay, so this is a story where the bad guys always win, right? Well, not so fast, because just a few episodes after the Red Wedding, the villainous Joffrey is killed at his own wedding. 

The next logical conclusion, then, is that people who play game of thrones well are safe — regardless of whether they’re morally good or bad. But that ain’t it either. 

Game of Thrones is essentially a series of set ups that dismantle our expectations.

Season 4 concludes with the best player, Tywin, dying on the shitter. Season 6 concludes with Margaery Tyrell, one of the savviest players on the board, getting herself and her entire family imploded by wildfire — bested by one of the least savvy players, Cersei Lannister.

Game of Thrones is essentially a series of setups that dismantle our expectations. That’s half the fun of all the predicting and theorizing. The one constant on Game of Thrones is that it consistently evades our attempts to figure it  out.

But by subverting all our expectations, Game of Thrones has written itself into an extremely difficult narrative corner with no truly satisfying ending in sight.

An impossible ending

The ending of Game of Thrones is totally uncharted territory. After successfully upending all the  tropes of good-versus-evil storytelling throughout its first, second, and third acts, it feels like Martin has come to a harsh realization while trying to write the final fourth act: That the good versus evil narrative tropes were there for a reason. 

When the final act doesn’t end with a definite conclusion, it often leaves audiences dissatisfied and outraged. I mean, remember the cut to black after the last episode of Sopranos?

That’s a totally different genre, but a show that took the surprisingly similar narrative risks to Game of Thrones. Creators are still figuring out how to end stories where the heroes don’t win — but neither do the villains. 

And ironically, letting the White Walkers win is even too predictable for Game of Thrones at this point.

After several years of training fans to expect the unexpected and anticipate the worst, it feels like the most surprising (and worst) ending would be if everyone lived happily ever after: Jon and Daenerys both fulfill the Prince Who Was Promised prophecy, defeat the White Walkers, get married, have a baby, and ride off on their dragons into the sunset to rule over a peaceful Westeros!

But as Ramsey infamously said, “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”

Yet we can also guarantee that Game of Thrones won’t end with what a Season 8 promos already showed us: A Westeros after the White Walkers win, everything we knew and loved buried beneath a wintry wasteland, devoid of all human life, leaving behind only vestiges of our heroes’ remains. Because, spoiler alert: HBO would not have revealed how Game of Thrones ends in a promo.

That only leaves us with one option for an ending that is surprising, unexpected, subversive, and still true to the themes of Game of Thrones.

Make compromise, not war

Despite what we’ve been lead to believe, Game of Thrones won’t culminate in an epic Battle for the Dawn akin to Return of the King. It’ll end with diplomacy — a compromise with the White Walkers that will likely require the classic hero types (Jon and Daenerys) to sacrifice themselves.

I know what you’re thinking. First of all, we already know that there is for sure an epic battle going down in Winterfell. That footage has not only made up the entirety of the trailers and promos, but it was also the focal point of a pretty spoiler-y Entertainment Weekly cover story.

It would make no sense for the main conflict in Game of Thrones to be resolved with war.

Here’s my counter: Has Game of Thrones ever shown or even hinted at a season’s major surprises ahead of time? Whether it was Ned’s death, the Red Wedding, the Purple Wedding, Hardhome, or the wildfire explosion at the Sept, they do their best the bury the major reveals of the season by averting our attention to a different, more predictable major event. 

The Battle at Winterfell is a red herring.

We’re willing to bet that everything we’ve seen of the battle will happen relatively early on in the season. And the conclusion from that battle will be that, well, there is no way in hell we’re going to win this war by fighting. They’ll need to look for other answers.

On a thematic level, it would make no sense for the main conflict in Game of Thrones to be resolved with war.

War has never solved a single problem on Game of Thrones before. The whole point of showing war, indeed, has been to prove how futile it is as a means of resolving issues.

For Robb, going to war didn’t bring Ned back home. It got his entire house killed. Tywin won the War of the Five Kings through treachery and marriage pacts, not on a battlefield. Both Renly and Stannis died because of their wars, despite their vast armies. Daenerys has discovered again and again that waging war may get her short-term gains, but never any closer to her ultimate goal of winning the Iron Throne or even breaking the wheel.

Trace the story back farther, and we find that although Robert’s Rebellion brought a brief period of peace, it ultimately destroyed the realms even worse than before after the king died. 

Even if you go as far back as Westerosi history goes, the war between the Children of the Forest and First Men lasted for two thousand years. And all that fighting only led to the creation of the White Walkers, who lead to even more war, death, and destruction.

War has never solved a single problem on Game of Thrones before.

You know what did finally solve the millennia of war between the First Men and Children of the Forest? A pact. 

This historic peace treaty not only let these warring races set aside their differences to coexist, but led them to become one. After the pact, the First Men eventually abandoned their own gods, and began worshipping the Children’s Old Gods and following their customs.

There is no way we’ll get our bittersweet ending through war. But the idea of trying to compromise with a pure, mindless, almost virus-like evil sounds laughable. Right?

The White Walkers are not the villains

Well, the White Walkers aren’t purely evil villains. Martin basically said as much in different words:

“A villain is a hero of the other side, as someone said once, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and that’s the interesting thing. In the case of war, that kind of situation, so I think some of that is definitely what I’m aiming at.”

Nobody — none of the characters and none of the show’s fans — know what the White Walkers want. Characters like Jon have made educated guesses, based on the mass destruction he witnessed at Hardhome and the legends of the first Long Night.

Because these old legends claim that thousands of years ago, the White Walkers brought death to all living things, that’s what the Westerosi believe is happening now. Many also believe in the legends and prophecies claiming one hero (known as the Last Hero, Azor Ahai, or the Prince who Was Promised) defeated them in single combat.

But if you question that old good-versus-evil narrative even a little, the logic falls apart.

For one thing, it’s hard to believe another claim from these legends that, after the Long Night, the was built by men (with help from the giants and the Children of the Forest). Doesn’t it make a lot more sense if the creatures who possess ice magic built the massive, magical ice wall instead of  humans?

“Nobody is a villain in their own story.” 

Let’s also think about what could be motivating the White Walkers to return and mobilize against man again after all these years. Nobody knows for certain, so the characters project the motivation for why men usually start wars: to conquer and take over land.

But again, that doesn’t make any sense for the White Walkers. So fans have speculated on reasons for their return that would align more with Martin’s philosophy that, “Nobody is a villain in their own story. We’re all the heroes of our own stories.”

The most popular theories involve the White Walkers fighting to protect their species from going extinct. And in addition that, during the first Long Night, the humans never really “defeated” the White Walkers. Rather, they made a pact with them like the one man made with the Children of the Forest. The Last Hero was a diplomat, not a warrior, who compromised and sacrificed himself for peace.

But over thousands of years, the truth of this pact was lost and distorted, rewritten by history to reflect the more glorifying narrative of a hero conquering over evil. And that’s why the White Walkers are back now. Unwittingly, humanity has violated the pact they let history forget.

That’s a lot to take in, I know. But bear with me. Because there’s a lot of evidence to support the many different ways human actions might’ve made the White Walkers feel threatened. 

Fans focus on Craster’s sons, whom we saw being sacrificed then transformed into a White Walker in Season 4. This might be the White Walkers’ only form of reproduction, and a dwindling number of human sacrifices could be threatening the survival of their species (read more on that theory here and here). Either way, it’d be silly to assume the White Walkers’ overall goal is to kill all of humanity, since we know they need living human beings to make more White Walkers.

Others speculate that the White Walkers interpreted the return of the dragons as a violation of peace or declaration of war (read more here). Or it might have been the arrival of the Red Priests, who recently started burning down weirwood trees in Westeros, which are very likely tied to the White Walkers’ source of magic (read more here).

Those are just a few. But whatever the reason, the point is that there’s more to the White Walkers than we’ve been led to believe. Because every time we see more of them, we get a glimpse at how there’s two sides to this story. And right now, we’ve only ever seen the humans’ side.

Nothing captures this more than the Season 6 scene revealing the White Walkers’ origins. In that scene, we saw how the White Walkers never even asked for any of this. They were forcibly turned into monsters of darkness by the Children of the Forest. They were also once men. Even now, they are still living men (they never died, unlike the wights they resurrect) trapped in a monster’s body.

One of our personal favorite theories for how it all ends is that humanity doesn’t defeat the White Walkers by killing them. They “defeat” them by curing the White Walkers of this curse inflicted on them long ago by the Children of the Forest (read more here).

The sacrificial hero

You might still be clinging to the picture painted by the many prophecies that speak of a hero wielding some sort of special sword to end the darkness. But the most classic hero figure we’ve got — Jon Snow — has proven that his most heroic skill is not sword fighting, but diplomacy. And self sacrifice.

If you’re still doubtful that the humans could ever learn to set aside their differences and compromise with their mortal, monstrous enemy, then you’ve forgotten that we already saw that happen once before.

Jon Snow brokered peace between the Night’s Watch and the wildlings. Before they became buddies with the wildlings, legends about them were as barbaric as those about the White Walkers: They eat babies, mate with animals, etc.

Turns out they’re actually just people on the wrong side of a wall.

It will end with the a sad song of ice and fire — finally in harmony.

But for centuries, the Night’s Watch’s interactions with the wildlings supported this dehumanized view of the them. Then Jon realized that the wildlings, like the Night’s Watch, had just been fighting for their own survival. Jon subsequently did the unthinkable, reconciling with the wildlings — a concept that was not only laughable, but called treasonous.

Would it be so crazy for the same to thing to happen with the White Walkers?

That’s how we get our perfectly bittersweet ending to Game of Thrones. Because the last time Jon negotiated peace with an enemy, he was killed for it. Now he’s back. And it’s probably so that he can broker peace with yet another enemy, before dying for good this time.

As for Daenerys? Some believe Jon will have to sacrifice her in order to fulfill the Azor Ahai prophecy. Others speculate she’ll be the new Night’s Queen, a female White Walker from the legend of the Night King.

However it happens, Game of Thrones will not end with a game of thrones. It will end with a sad song of ice and fire — finally in harmony after millennia of death and war between the two.