This is the season everyone became unsullied; this is the season no one could sit back and smugly say ‘I know what is going to happen’: but this was also the season that has drawn the most ire and vitriol from a fan base upset with a huge chunk of the direction the show’s plot is heading towards.
Game of Thrones Season 5 is mere hours away from completion, but not everyone is happy. This season has been a typical Thrones season, a slow start, a thrilling mid section, a game changing 9th episode, then the (upcoming) denouement in episode 10. And whilst this season has hit all those stops, there are tangible changes in plot and character that is making fans very concerned.
Thrones is no stranger to gratuitous violence, nudity, other hard to watch and difficult to process scenes.. The infamous ‘Red Wedding’, Ned’s beheading, Oberyn’s head squeezing, Joffrey’s death (not really), pushing a 9 year old out of a window tower to cover incest, and the numerous scenes of s*xual violence against women.
Yet somehow this season has managed to top all these shocking and sometimes controversial scenes, and not exactly in a good way. You remember when Jaime was bad, then he became good, then he went on to rape his sister over their son’s corpse and suddenly he was bad again; well they pulled that same bait and switch again this season.
Stannis Baratheon has been called by some as the one true queen of Westeros. He is the legitimate heir under the current regime (his brother’s kids are bastards born of incest and do not belong on the throne), he is the only king who listened when the wall called for help, and he is the king currently en route to fight the evil Boltons. He is also a people burning religious fanatic with a witch beside him who just burned his only daughter.
That scene, the hardest I ever watched on Thrones- and remember the atrocities I listed above, including a wedding that saw a king and his entire army and his wife and her unborn foetus butchered- is one of the biggest controversies of the season. Some feel the Red God arc has been played to death, or that Stannis betrayed everything a king is supposed to stand for. What can’t be denied is that he just sold his soul to the devil and lost any interest to most people as a morally ambiguous character.
Which leaves Dany as the only monarch with any moral claim to rule people, but she’s dithering around on a different continent, in a place which obviously does not want her and whose entire society she’s uprooted without any proper solutions to their problems. She’s had to compromise so much now she might as well as not made reforms in Meereen in the first place, and it was at one of the things she’s had to compromise on that led to her almost demise in the last episode.