QC

On that note let's talk about "themes." From this POV themes are consistent patterns in the meanings of events. You could say early GoT has a theme like "actions have consequences," and what that means is that events consistently have a particular pattern of meaning...

...involving characters' actions propagating wildly through the rest of the story. Jaime pushes Bran out of a window -> Catelyn arrests Tyrion -> Tywin goes to war, etc. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Read a review that points out "actions have consequences" stops applying later. I haven't watched S4-7 so here's a S8 example: one of Varys's last scenes is him hurriedly writing letters to people about Jon being Aegon. This scene is never followed up on. No consequence.

Overall thinking and writing about this has given me a stronger appreciation of the nature of the difficulty in writing a good ending. That includes e.g. ending this thread! What was I building to? What did all of these tweets mean?

Here's one possible ending: the process of meaning-making does not actually end at the ending, of course. After a story ends it gets digested by its audience and the audience is an active participant in meaning-making. It may e.g. come up with meanings unintended by the author.

Audiences construct fan theories to guess at the meanings of events, and sometimes the ending is so unsatisfying audiences prefer their fan theories to the "official" meanings.

Audiences also write fanfiction that offers better or at least differently exciting meanings. On that note @AliceShipwise is almost done writing a totally original S8 script and it's fantastic: https://www.aliceshipwise.com/gameofthrones/scripts/S08E01_fealty_part1.html …

There is a beautiful kind of freedom that opens up in this environment. It becomes reductive to talk about "the" meaning of anything that happens in the story. There is a multiverse of meaning, represented in fan theories, fanfiction, headcanons, etc.