The Doomsday Scenario Where Game of Thrones Agrees to Reshoot Season 8
The Doomsday Scenario Where Game of Thrones Agrees to Reshoot Season 8

Nearly a half million of Game of Thrones fans signed a petition on Change.org demanding a reshoot of the show’s final 8th season. Fans declared showrunners of the most iconic and record-smashing show of the decade David Benioff and D.B. Weiss completely incompetent when left without source material. Among those half a million are people who dearly love the show and have invested a lot of time into it, some who found plotholes and, of course, there are the 300 responsible parents who named their daughters Khaleesi. But let’s try and imagine what will happen if HBO chooses to indulge protestors and indeed reshoots the season.

As scary as it sounds, the idea may be lucrative at first. This will be the first season reshoot in history, HBO ratings are guaranteed to go through the roof for another year, the social media buzz will be unprecedented. And I can’t wait to see all the memes. What’s next?

The army of unsatisfied, appalled and constantly complaining will break the through The Wall and march on other media: Kanye should go back to the studio and redo a couple of tracks on his last album, that last Star Wars movie was a complete joke, let’s tweet so much they’ll reshoot about 80% of the movie and imagine how many likes and signatures we can get for Seinfeld or Sopranos finale doover. This isn’t the first time The Wall was breached, fans pressured networks to change plots and characters before. Never in a show of Game of Thrones’ magnitude, but networks surrendered. They thought it was their way of listening to constructive criticism, which is the right thing to do, they were desperate to improve ratings, there could millions of reasons, but ultimately they surrendered to the loud and unhappy.

We’re all entitled to an opinion and ways of expressing it. The question is are we entitled to intervening in creative processes? The decade of complaining and being outraged on social media and actually winning has bred an army of couch experts who think they know more about character development, plotlines than the creative team that gave us the show. All they really know is that they weren’t satisfied. Daenerys didn’t turn out to be the way they wanted her to be. Wasn’t that the exact ingredient that made the show so popular? We all admired Ned Stark and had high hopes for him. Robb Stark smashed Lannister armies one after another and was approaching King’s Landing like the righteous leader we all secretly want to have. We were all left in awe and uncertainty when Jon Snow was killed. And now when some fans sense things aren’t going the way they planned it in their heads they want a redo, like the 10-year old who didn’t get the property, he wanted on Monopoly. And they find plotholes and flows to substantiate their arguments: Tormund mounted a dragon before and now he thinks it’s madness, there was a Starbucks cup in the scene.

The show had its ups and downs, there were boring episodes and lagging seasons before, but today the stakes are higher and that’s why everyone’s David Benioff and D.B. Weiss know it too, Game of Thrones The TV Show is their child and whatever ending Twitter user @Khaleesi4evaQueen thinks could be better, they have thought of it and found it imperfect. Hell, I’m sure if they give @Khaleesi4evaQueen the ending he craves he or she will just say the finale wasn’t surprising. Artists must listen to criticism, but they shouldn’t obey the critics. We have thousands of “Katy Perrys” these days, but very few “Bob Dylans”.

Of course, there’ll be no reshoot of season 8, the show will end the way it was planned, deliberated and agreed upon with George R.R. Martin. What matters is we as a society need to learn to deal with things. Whether we like them or not, whether we have the platforms to be loud and get a million people to sign a petition or not. Game of Thrones, the TV show is a work of art, and it’s none other than the artist who gets to decide how it ends.
['Narek Margaryan']
['Creative Writing', 'Game of Thrones', 'Social Media', 'Screenwriting', 'TV']