#GameOfThrones ended a year ago today, with its legacy smeared by the show's gradual, Elvis-like decline into bloated self-parody.

But when GoT soared, it was glorious. At its peak (S1-4), it was pure storytelling bliss.

*Stories always live & die on quality of their writing*

This is the scene that made me fall in love with #GameOfThrones in the first place.

Watching it now, it's hard to believe Benioff & Weiss wrote it.

This sort of scene belongs in a show - a universe - where catastrophes like the Sand Snakes & Euron bloody Greyjoy can't exist

There's more happening in the subtext of this scene alone than in the entirety of the final 2 seasons. Every character, using power (in whatever capacity they have it) to get what they want. Reversals, evasions, confrontations.

A writing masterclass. Game of Thrones at its best

It was *so good* by season 4. That's what made the decline so grim

I mean, thousands of people did excellent work to the very end: the incredible cast, the directing, cinematography, set & sound design, etc.

But without a strong narrative spine, the entire thing just fell apart

I could have watched Cersei & Tyrion's quiet, complicated hate for hours on end. Arya & the Hound. Jon & Ygritte. Arya & Tywin. Melisandre & Davos & Stannis. Jaime & Brienne. Sansa & Tyrion. Littlefinger & Varys.

All this gold, utterly squandered

Okay, one last bit on #GameofThrones, one year since its finish. This is a thread on storytelling technique, which I’m gonna roughly divide into ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ approaches. GofT at its best was doing both inside-out and outside-in storytelling all at once.

George RR Martin divides writers into 2 types: gardeners (inside-out) & architects (outside-in). Gardeners start with a seed & see how it grows; architects methodically plan everything in advance & fill the blueprint in. A story with the depth & scale of GoT needs both approaches

Gardener stories are typically character-driven. Complex personalities w. differing motivations & goals trying to assert themselves in a world which either rewards or punishes them for it. In GofT, they were frequently punished. This is what made the show so thrilling for many

Ned’s execution, the Red Wedding, Joffrey’s murder, Oberyn’s skull-crushing. All huge turning points in the show. Yes. But they mattered because they were both the expression of tangled character motivations & the logical consequences of decisions that *many* characters had made

No one wanted or expected Robb & Catelyn to be killed, for example, but we all understood why it happened. This only deepened the sense of tragedy to the whole thing

These ‘big events’ mattered, not because of their shock/spectacle factor, but because they were the hinge points or peak moments in ongoing character arcs/interactions etc.

Once Game of Thrones forgot that and began to focus exclusively on set-pieces and hollow, made-for-the-memes gotcha! moments, the show was basically a zombie. It has stopped operating from the inside out and was entirely shaping itself from the outside-in.

The outside-in approach was twofold: on a banal level there was the increased engineering of the show according to what Benioff and Weiss thought worked for the audience

They completely mistook why the shock/spectacle moments mattered and instead began to reorient the show towards a sort of ‘reaction video’ crowd (is there anything more debased? Like, really)

Added to this was the tendency to keep fan favourites in the show long after they had anything to do (Brienne, Bronn, even Cersei, had no business being in the show after a certain point. They were all inert, static & passive cos the writers didn't know what to do with them)

Subtle and tactical characters (Tyrion, Varys, Littlefinger, etc.) became both idiotic and utterly inert. Why? Because the more sophisticated versions of these characters no longer had any place in the type of show Benioff and Weiss were now making

But this leads to the greater outside-in issue: the fact is that stories tend to want to go directions that writers can't anticipate at the outset. Even adaptations.

For example, Tyrion is a radically different character in the books (especially after season 4, where TV Tyrion basically becomes a banal proxy for the boring viewer). This happened for many reasons (Peter Dinklage brought out the gentler, nobler nuances in the character etc).

The point is that a responsible writer, a writer who actually has some intuitive sensitivity to 'story' itself, is going to recognise and respond to such evolutions in the material as they emerge. Rigid architecture becomes poisonous at this point

If your story organically wants to go in certain directions bt you're hell-bent on forcing it in others, ok, you can force it where you want it to go. & the result will be a mutilated, mechanical, hollow exercise in plot whose limbs have been chopped off to fit a prefigured mould

Benioff & Weiss jettisoned all the ‘gardening’ the TV show had done in order to get to the architectural blueprint of an ending GRRM had provided. They just ignored the story they themselves had created, the GoT that had organically grown separately from the books

They took all the material they had on their hands & crowbarred it into a mould that belonged to an entirely different telling of the story - GRRM's - one in which characters are different, there's a whole other set of protagonists, and GRRM is playing a *very* different game

The show remained excellent on basically every other level – acting, photography, direction, etc. – but none of that, NONE of it, counts for much when the most crucial part of the entire storytelling edifice - *the writing* - is no longer there

If you’ve read this far, you probably think I’m a lunatic (and I probably am) but I’m writing all this out of a sense of frustration at the decline of one of the richest story experiences in my life

Game of Thrones was once on a par with The Wire and The Sopranos. Perhaps the bleakest analysis of how far it has already fallen is how few people seem to be rewatching it during this whole lockdown period.

I adored the show. If I watch it again, I’ll know where to stop. S04E10