About a month ago, I published a set of predictions for the final season of Game of Thrones. Last weekend, the series finale aired, and looks like I’ve got some explaining to do. In this piece, I’ll be self-congratulating over the predictions that proved accurate, qualifying those which were here and there, and unpredicting anything I got wrong.

My original post can be found here. Heavy spoilers for the entire Game of Thrones series hide below.

General Predictions

• The Final Battle will take place at the God’s Eye — Uh. Oops? When I’d originally made this prediction, I’d expected that the white walkers would have a little more success in their endeavors, and that, after thousands of years of preparation, they wouldn’t be stopped by one eighty-minute battle. I figured maybe they’d march on south until they hit the God’s Eye, and that would be where fate took hold. Luckily, I didn’t explain any of this in my original prediction statement, so we could argue that I wasn’t talking about a final battle between the living and the dead, but one between Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. Indeed, the conflict between these two characters did come to a head that resulted in a tragic end to their shared story. Unfortunately, that end happened nowhere near the God’s Eye… in the books. In the books (and seasons 1-7 of the show), the God’s Eye is a lake in the Riverlands, right beside the ruined castle of Harrenhal. In the updated opening credits for Season 8, though, it’s revealed that Cersei has completed the cunning act of uprooting King’s Landing from its strategic position on the Blackwater Bay and placed it way closer to the God’s Eye. Some folks online predicted this new double-emphasis on King’s Landing and the God’s Eye together was proof the lake would be important. It looks like that’s a swing and a miss, but we’re gonna throw this one in the “technically correct” basket for virtue of geographic inconsistency.

• King’s Landing Will Burn — This one’s a little more subtle than some of the others. If you look closely during Episode 5, you’ll notice that in the background, Daenerys is burning the entire city of King’s Landing. It took me a few watches to figure this out. Anyway, I think this one is gonna happen a little differently in the books. My original prediction focused pretty heavily on Cersei trying to burn the city, and I think that’s going to mean more in The Winds of Winter, a book I doubt she sees the end of. That said, I don’t think Daenerys being the one to destroy King’s Landing is wrong. I think she’ll do that too, just a little later and at the expense of a monarch who looks a little more like her.

Characters

• Bran Stark — Well, I fucked that one up. Not only did Bran somehow not warg into a single dragon, at the end of it all, he somehow ends up on the iron rolling throne. This is another prediction I have no choice for but to keep for the books. The “You will never walk again, but you will fly” prophecy is emphasized too much for how little it ever really applied. Tyrion even invokes it again in the last episode. If you want to talk to me about how controlling ravens means Bran “technically flew”, do me a favor and don’t. Did I get this one right? I can’t remember.
• Cersei Lannister — I don’t even want to talk about this one. Everything was there. Everything was laid out perfectly from the beginning. The woods witch predicted that Cersei would have three children, and she did. It was claimed that she would outlive all of them, and she did. She would marry a king, and he would have ‘twenty children’, none of them hers. The show condensed twenty kids into one or two dead babies and a Gendry, but, y’know, sure. The trend is pretty steady so far. Finally, Cersei’s prophecy says she’ll be killed by the “little brother”. There are a number of interpretations as to what this could mean. Cersei evidently believes Tyrion to be the little brother. I predicted it would be Jaime, as a necessary act to save the city from another murderous tyrant. Some folks argued the “little brother” could be Sandor “The Hound” Clegane. The showrunners subverted all of our expectations. The evidence was there the whole time, who else could the “little brother” be but 10-20 bricks? Bravo, Game of Thrones. Bravo.
• Jaime Lannister — I didn’t predict anything about this character.
• Tyrion — Just as Tyrion and Bran work together in the end to create a strengthened kingdom, they worked together throughout the season to give me an aneurysm. To be fair, I already qualified this one in the original predictions piece. I wrote that, in the books, I think Tyrion will build a saddle for a dragon and potentially ride one of the three. At the time of writing, we’d already lost Viserion, and Rhaegal was soon to follow. In the books and the show both, Tyrion refers often to his childhood dream of riding a dragon, and in the first season, he uses his technical expertise to draw up the plans for a specialized saddle for Bran. Tyrion even has a scene where he endears himself to the dragons chained beneath the Great Pyramid. Somehow, though, these threads never came together. Maybe he did build a dragon saddle at Dragonstone and had just put the finishing touches on it when the Iron Fleet came out of its hiding place (read: the ocean) to terminate any hope of using it.
• Jon Snow — He done did it.
• Daenerys Targaryen — Together with the entire internet, I predicted the downfall of the Mad Queen. I thought it would be more a tragic arc and less a 30-minute mood swing, but at this point, I should learn to take what I can get.