Recommendations of the Editorial team
“Game of Thrones” Is history. In the meantime we know who made it onto the iron throne (the answer is amazing!). Even if there is now a crowd of spectators who want nothing more than a restart of the final seasonthere was inevitably an end for the most popular series of the decade in addition to “The Big Bang Theory”.
We remember “Lost”which with his esoteric attempt at an end, puzzle many unresolved and some nonsense finters played his complete reputation. Hardly anyone speaks of “Lost” more than one of the best series of all time – and only because of the tired conclusion.
So “Game of Thrones” had to endure. And inevitably. Because of the so-called “Peak-End Rule”. Don’t you know? But you should! This is a heuristic approach of psychology, in German also the highest level of the Gennant. In short, it is about experiencing and remembering a situation can clearly differentiate between us.
The brain plays a prank
The Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once found that the experience of a situation is often evaluated differently by the brain than the memory. Our handling of memories therefore has complex consequences of how we evaluate certain events, especially in the future.
Related to emotional events, this means that, if they are asked later, people usually only remember the most powerful (most beautiful, most unpleasant, most painful) moment in an ongoing process – and the end point! Everything in between seems to be completely meaningless for the evaluation of the overall complex. (You can find a concrete description of the Peak-end Rule HERE). If the end is gentle, then the memory of it is more positive. If it fails more violently, then more relaxed phases are displaced in emotional memory.
For “Game of Thrones” this would mean that the series would only have led to no disappointment if it did not try to shock or surprise the audience in the last episode. If this effect were to be excited about the exciting key scenes (such as the “highlight”, to name just one example), then only disappointment and, in the psychological sense, in terms of critics and fans.
In other words, the more highlights in the viewer remain, the less intense the end of a series must inevitably be in order not to endanger the power of these impressions and thus lead to disappointment. In this regard, “Game of Thrones” had a problem from the start that it couldn’t get rid of it: the question of who is sitting on the Iron Throne in the end. The development of the last seasons made it impossible to find a theater-like anti-solution that does not require a kite.
“Game of Thrones” focuses too much on overwhelming
The fantasy series played these violent emotional effects, combined with costly visual tricks, in the last episodes (keyword: “The greatest battle of TV history”), still ambivalent against those values that many appreciated “Game of Thrones”. Riot instead of narrative. Surprising actions instead of consistent character development. Explosive, fast story development instead of slowly revealing problems (with temporarily violent outbursts of violence).
With this attitude that was also longed for by fans, “Game of Thrones” has so far violated the highest level of ends if you consider the last season to be a big ending. In order to reconcile the spectators, hardly anything should have happened in the last episode, so nothing surprising. But that did.
“Game of Thrones” should do it like …
If you look at the question of who is sitting on the Iron Throne in the end when a painful in the sense of an unbearable tension, it would be best for the satisfaction of this rule if after only a few minutes of the last episode it would have become clear who could take a seat. And that someone does it at all. The rest would have been reconciliation. And what would “Game of Thrones” have needed more than conciliation and relaxation after Daenerys Inferno?
If you don’t believe a word, think of the “sopranos”, “Six Feet Under”, “Breaking Bad”, “The Leftovers” and “Mad Men”.
