They did one original thing, at least: “You ain’t never had a friend like me” is now an inadvertent Uncanny Valley joke.

If Nolan is doing a palindrome-themed spy thriller, I’ve got the perfect trailer tagline:

To be fair, I don’t think any of us realised how many bitter unemployed screenwriters and medieval tacticians there were out there.

Bran makes sense as a safe pick for king by a generation of nobles that’s just been through a succession of dramatic dumpster fire monarchs. He’s from an established house but aloof and disinterested, very unlikely to seize your lands or your daughters. The worst eccentricity he probably has is an excessive interest…

Come on now, this is subtext 101. Drogon’s flames melting down the Iron Throne clearly represented the endless hot takes aimed at the show by an army of overworked, click-hungry pop culture commentators.

We need Ken Loach to direct an Inglourious Basterds-style alternate ending for this tripe.

Re: the question of why doesn’t Tyrion appear in the in-universe A Song of Ice and Fire.

SPOILER:

Due Naath. Grey Worm is a polite, straitlaced, fish-out-of-water cop in the crime-ridden island city.

Who died? HBO’s subscription revenues.

It turns out Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister all along.

Legend tells us that the once and future King of Queens slumbers in a cave under Citi Field, to return when his borough faces its hour of greatest peril.

He was away on a listening tour of rural Iowa.

Bran is a robotic, unlikeable leader with impeccable credentials, and as such he seemed like an obvious winning candidate when GRRM planned out the finale in October 2016.

Those are certainly about the best recent examples of consensus well-received endings, but you don’t have to look far to see that even they managed to inspire a huge amount of fandom hate and hot takes - Harry Potter for the epilogue/Cursed Child/Twitter retcons, and Endgame for the Black Widow plot/time travel…

Has the tone of online fandom made it impossible for basically any genre series to have a consensus satisfying ending, though? Too many Extremely Online fans, too many headcanons, too many hot takes - this could never end well, for the 2019 definition of ‘well’.

Okay, if you’re sure: ‘the Actually Perfectly Sane While She Was Mass-Murdering A City Queen’ it is.

In the spirit of the Sonic the Hedgehog row (and more distantly, the Mass Effect 3 ending hate), I’d like to offer nervous HBO executives an easy strategy to appease the haters.

Re:

(Cue video of Trump whipping a willfully gullible crowd into booing a horror movie scenario whereby a doctor swaddles a newborn baby, then decides with the new mother how to murder it.)