The stink of this year’s Game of Thrones finale might finally be dissipating, but that doesn’t mean it’s over. Especially not after David Benioff and DB Weiss appeared at the Austin film festival last week, apparently with the sole intention of enraging Game of Thrones fans.
The talking points were numerous. According to one attendee, who tweets under the name @ForArya, Benioff and Weiss delivered a greatest hits collection of fan insults. They described their dismal initial pilot, and how they were only given a second chance because HBO already had several foreign pre-sales by that point. They said they didn’t know what they were doing. And, most damningly, they tried to eliminate overt fantasy elements because “we didn’t just want to appeal to that type of fan”.
It doesn’t help that they have announced they are dropping out of Disney Lucasfilm’s upcoming Star Wars trilogy, which many fans suspected had cause them to rush the final season of Game of Thrones.
And now, uproar. “They killed their own fandom straight-up dead on their way out the door,” tweeted one fan. “Tell me which woman writers in Hollywood have ever had this kind of privilege,” tweeted another. A third added: “No wonder the last two seasons were a shitshow.”
My main takeaway from this kerfuffle – and the one that’s going to keep me off the internet for the rest of the week – is this: Game of Thrones has the worst fans in the world. Their sense of ownership of the show is horrifying. It exceeds that of even the creators themselves, which is genuinely confusing. Besides, what Benioff and Weiss said makes sense.
By deliberately avoiding the fantasy elements, the showrunners were able to build something far bigger than a TV programme. They created a phenomenon, maybe the last giant TV show ever, a juggernaut that outstripped its source material. Sure, Game of Thrones could have gone another way and serviced the most devoted fans as aggressively as possible. But that sort of show doesn’t come with a $6m episode budget, and it is usually cancelled after two years. Yes, the finale was disappointing, but it was just a television episode. Get over it.
