I don’t take bad endings lightly. I’m still bitter over How I Met Your Mother.

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Game of Thrones has been my favorite show since I started watching during season 3 in high school and subsequently read the books. In that time it’s been all about Dany for me, but based on the themes of outcasts being important and the ethereal nature of power I’ve always assumed that Dany, Jon and Tyrion are the three safe characters— not necessarily the ones who win the throne (anyone winning the throne is contrary to the show’s themes in my opinion) but the ones to “break the wheel” and “leave this world better than how they found it.”

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This episode was the first in the entire series to really shake my faith in the writing. I hope I’m wrong, but beyond feeling like they wrote off the Night King just to get it over with, this show subverted the character development of three of the most important women— Sansa betraying Jon (who now comes off as a dislikeable oaf with no remaining control over his character) to further what she wants makes what her character was leading to less like Catelyn and more like Littlefinger; it turned Brienne into a McGuffin for Jaime (her arc ended with her knighthood and her character this episode only served to inspire the end of Jaime’s character); and, probably the worst part, it forced plot devices on Dany to suddenly frame her having a tragic “mad queen” fall without showing any of the development leading up to it and reducing her character development from 7 seasons of learning that the world needs to change for people and being the one to do it to “well she’s so sad now it makes sense that she’ll burn it all; the other characters get this for some reason and they’re gonna talk about her behind her back and put honorable oaf Jon in because ‘she’s too strong’ and manipulative.”

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It’s not that these are bad arcs necessarily— it’s that doing them so quickly, really in the course of mostly this episode, is a betrayal of the strong female portrayals we’ve seen, a betrayal of the outcast theme, a betrayal of every main character’s development for the last 7 seasons, and characters serving the intended plot rather than the other way around; not to mention the continued suspension of disbelief the writers ask of us for the small stuff, like only “finished” characters dying at Winterfell surrounded by wights and Euron’s ambush being a deus ex machina for the plot again, although this time it was much less believable.

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On that note, I realized these were the same problems I had with The Walking Dead in season 6. The characters at that point were awkward in their development and it became less about them and more about the shocking and literally unbelievable things that happened to them to move the plot with no more care put into their past development. I had watched since Season 1 and the show became unwatchable for me after that.

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I’m disappointed that the show appears to be going this way, and I really hope I’m wrong about it and they make these characters matter again.