Why Game of Thrones endgame is just the real world, post Brexit, with additional dragons. Spoiler warning This article contains extensive spoilers for all of Game of Thrones to date. If youre not caught up yet, back out until you are. A few years ago, around the time of season 3, I was talking to a friend about Game of Thrones. We were throwing around theories about the next season or sos potential events, and somewhere along the line I found myself freewheeling right out to the shows eventual end game and conclusion. Obviously I didnt have all the granular details and still dont, but suddenly the overall shape of Thrones narrative arc, and the thematic reasons for it, became clear. I knew at the time that I might be going out on a massive limb, but cut forward four seasons, and pretty much everything I predicted is coming true. In truth, I kind of knew it would. The specifics Well first theres the steady erosion of the control enjoyed bythe bloody minded, selfish, short sighted, and deeply factional elder generation, leading to a regular offing of its numbers more often than not resulting directly from their own petty hubris. Tywin Dead. Walder Frey Dead. Alliser Thorne, stubborn, vindictive, traditionalist bully of the Nights WatchDead at the order of Jon Snow, the young revolutionary he tried to oppress and murder. Men of his type are dying a lot. At the same time, weve seen the steady strengthening of the increasingly relevant younger generation, not through a new wave of family House factions, but a result of often suppressed lone individuals coming together agnostically, for the greater good, in contravention of the old world order and its rules. Northern Tribes Game Of Thrones' title='Northern Tribes Game Of Thrones' />Baelor is the ninth episode of the HBO medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones. 3D Text Effect Psd Files. First aired on June 12, 2011, it was written by the shows creators and. There was something very telling about Marvels decision this past Monday to announce to The New York Times how its Secret Empire event would end. It felt like the. Jon, once a lowly bastard, is now an accidental king. Arya has become a battle wise master assassin. Tyrion has found power and respect at the hand of a new also young monarch. Samwell Tarly has evolved from bumbling oaf to inspired, potentially critical scientific adviser, simply by standing against the father who kept him down. Everywhere, were looking at the drawn out death of the old, inefficient, set in their ways, isolationist tribes, and their replacement by a fresh generation without such boundaries and distinctions, whose minds are open to what can be achieved through open collaboration, new ideas, and a focus on something bigger than consolidating power and wealth. Its all coming true. The reason I initially saw this comingWell in broad strokes, Game of Thrones has been playing with some tried and true narrative tropes for a long time. Sins of the Father. Inter generational discord. Breaking the cycle. Escaping the past to become ones own person. My parents dont understand me. The state of youth today. Parental disappointment. Youthful rebellion. Distrust of the radical new ideas of a younger generation. Northern Tribes Game Of Thrones' title='Northern Tribes Game Of Thrones' />These themes have, individually, been present in popular media pretty much forever, because theyve been present in real life for just as long. But Game of Thrones has, from the start, been using so many of them, so frequently, that the shape of its ultimate story destination and the path taken to reach it has long been pretty clear. A story as old as time almostWhy are these themes present Well for starters, a great many of them are very useful at least in abstraction in telling the classical Heros Journey narrative, the archetypal blueprint for pretty much all heroic adventures, from ancient mythology to modern action movies, formalised by narrative scholar Joseph Campbell. The Heros Journey which youll immediately recognise if youve played any JRPG starts in a state of assumed societal normality, with a widespread acceptance of the current often defective or troubled status quo, and a would be hero in some way uncomfortable, disconnected, or unable to reconcile with it. Defined against this historical sense of normal, the protagonist is eventually called to action. Theyre forced out of or voluntarily leave the accepted world, and set about overcoming challenges which ultimately lead to growth, self realisation and the ability to change their home for the better, by winning the means to overcome its challenges. If you suddenly find yourself applying all of these ideas to the entire younger generation of Westeros, from Jon, to Arya, to Daenerys, to Tyrion, then youre doing so with good reason. Theyre all going through their own versions of it. The status quo in this case is the traditional, deeply hierarchical, divided, adversarial, House dominated set up of Westeros in season 1, and the heroes various journeys are leading them to the new world of personal individuality and the prize of collaboration and insurrection. The other reason these specific themes are such a major part of Thrones and indeed, Game of Thrones universal success, is that theyre endlessly relatable, even on an unconscious level. Everyone has a relationship with, or personal perception of, the generation that came before. Everyone gains a growing sense of self throughout their life, a need to express that, and a desire to reshape their world in sympathy to their own needs. Drama awaits in the Wild Atlantic Ways Northern Headlands with these exciting trip ideas. Everyone struggles through adolescence. And everyone, eventually, gets older, and sees a new generation rise up and start to do things differently for themselves. Beyond the back stabbings, boobs, revelations and eviscerations, the way that the show consistently plays with this stuff is a huge factor in Go. Ts narrative resonance. Hell, these parallels to the universal human journey are almost certainly what defined the universality the Heros Journey in the first place. A huge amount of effective storytelling is in the creation of a relatable metaphor for the individuals path through life. Thats why these themes are, historically, the key to decoding a staggering amount of storylines, portrayed from both sides of the generational divide. Northern Tribes Game Of Thrones' title='Northern Tribes Game Of Thrones' />A Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance, is about a group of teenagers achieving maturity, self confidence, and resilience or dying in failure while cleaning up a mess wrought by their parents impulsive, primitive actions, decades previous. The Hunger Games and the recent boom in dystopian, young adult fiction in general drips with themes of oppressed, manipulated, and abused youth overthrowing the complacent cruelty of a Machiavellian, self obsessed, outdated, older ruling class. And every creepy little kid horror movie youve ever watched is the product of generational anxiety on the part of the older contingent, on some level inexorably scared of being replaced, newly aware of its own mortality having now made itself the elder, and uneasy about what kind of changes its offspring will bring to the wider world. What happens in Westeros does not stay in Westeros  So yes, the general ideas at play in Game of Thrones have been around a long time. But whats interesting in this case is just how many of them are explored so intensely, so explicitly, and from so many different angles. Find me some non abusive parents in Westeros, and Ill point toward a couple of dead Starks and pretty much no one else. George RR Martins world might be a cold, uncaring crapsack continent at the best of times, but in terms of its citizens approach to child rearing, its positively a cruelty theme park, where every kind of abuse and repercussion is explored in harrowing detail. Favouritism, disinterest, bullying, abandonment, manipulation, even outright, profiteering exploitation and murder.