The Quill and Tankard

Quick disclaimer: I’m on my second read of the novels, and not yet to the Red Wedding again, so I’m going to be looking just at the ending of A Game of Thrones (the book). Everyone with even passing knowledge of the series knows about the dramatic and shocking event at the end of AGoT…

Arya leaping from the shadows to shank the Night King was not badass. But why not? Plenty of people have lobbed well-founded criticisms at that moment: The Night King was Jon’s adversary, not hers; her ninja skills leveling up was out of nowhere; the Night King’s invasion ended way too quickly; you can’t just retcon…

In Faking Shapely Fiction, Michael Byers splits written descriptions into two camps: potatoes and vodka. Potatoes are the tangible, observable facts of a scene, while vodka is the meaning the narrator distills from them. For example, a scene from The Great Gatsby when Nick first meets Jordan Baker, vodka in italics: The only completely stationary…

Any writer that asks “How should this series end?” has already gotten it wrong. The same is true for any other medium. “How should this movie end?” or “How should this novel end?” These questions miss the point, and there’s a far more important question that needs to be asked instead: How Should This Story…

In light of the Game of Thrones TV series coming to its end, and the book series entering (eventually) into its final stage, some folks are starting to ask what I think is a really interesting question: Just what was the purpose of the War of the Five Kings, and specifically the Red Wedding? I’ll…

While many authors talk about letting the characters drive the narrative and just following wherever they take the story, it’s common for them to also have a specific place they want the story to go. For Game of Thrones, we can identify a few of these landmark events where the story needs to get to:…

Often when a movie or TV show fails, it leaves the audience wondering “What was the point of all that?” This can happen for a number of reasons, but one of the most common is that the story wasn’t worth telling in the first place. When it comes to understanding any audience disappointment in the…

Something a lot of TV series and film franchises miss the mark on is how to raise the stakes from one season or film to the next. They instinctively go towards having another “boss” to fight leading to a final showdown with the Final Boss, or creating some sort of Bigger Bad leading up to…

Just like episode 8.3, this post won’t be about Jon Snow. What I want to discuss in this post is one thing that made Arya’s defeat of the Night King so controversial. I’m not arguing here about whether or not it was bad, but instead focusing on why there is so much disagreement and how…