After a decade of feverish predictions and Reddit-generated theories explaining how the series will play out, Game of Thrones is rapidly approaching its grand finale.
Who’s going to sit on the Iron Throne? Is the Iron Throne even going to exist? Will Westeros exist as a political unit, or are they just gonna all hunker down in their castles and wait for the Night King to gnaw on their frozen bones one great dynastic family at a time? Who’s gonna fuck? Who’s gonna die, in what order, and by what gruesome means?
With the Season 8 premiere now behind us, Jezebel has taken our best guesses as to how the ending will play out. Some of those guesses are more informed than others!
Bye, Dany
My latest prediction is that Daenerys is going to be killed by wight-dragon Viserion’s ice/fire breath. —Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Let’s Make a Deal
History—specifically, the history of the throne of Great Britain, which is obviously the source material for this show—teaches us that the only way you can sort out a national mess like Westeros has gotten itself into is to cut a deal. Usually, that deal involves arranged marriages.
For instance, there was “the Anarchy,” the period of civil war after William the Conquerer’s grandson died in a shipwreck, leaving the throne without a legitimate male heir, leaving Stephen of Blois to fight it out with the erstwhile Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, Matilda. How did they square the circle? When they agreed that Matilda would back off and Stephen would make her son his heir. Nobody gets exactly what they want; everybody gets something. How did they sort out the War of the Roses, a brawl between two great houses, the Lancasters and the Yorks? (Sound familiar?) Eventually, Henry Tudor—a member of the Lancastrian cause—acceded to the throne and married Elizabeth of York, which stitched the two claims together good enough for everybody who was just goddamn sick of the whole business.
Westeros is basically a burnt-out hulk. The great families have been decimated. God only knows what’s happened to the Tyrell grain stores, and as far as I can tell, that’s just about all this continent has to eat for the next few years. Everyone is tired, they’ve got several people with a half-decent claim to the throne, and nobody with a clear path to victory. Whether they do it before they face the Night King or after—with even fewer people in the mix—the only way they sew this place back together is with a series of alliance focused marriages.
Personally, if I were writing this series, I would have spent the last 10 years writing the characters of Sansa and Jaime specifically to this end, creating a narrative arc where they transformed into a good fit for each other and an ironic mirror of the way this whole series began, leaving them to rule together in hard-won wisdom after everyone else dies fighting the ice zombies. However, I am not writing this series, and so it’ll probably be some deal involving Dany, Jon, Tyrion, and Sansa. Nobody’s dumb enough to try to marry Arya off; she’d just stab the guy and leave under the cover of night. —Kelly Faircloth
The Starks Win
As someone who has not seen the show since the White Walkers first appeared, and who could not keep track of any of the characters even when I was watching the show, here’s my really informed prediction: Arya and the blonde queen (not Cersei, the one played by the actress who used to date Seth MacFarlane) will become best friends and jointly rule all of Westeros and the dragons will maintain peace and rule over the land. Longbottom (is that his name?) will become a White Walker. Bran will time-travel into the past and save his father, bringing him back to life, but he will again be killed. The Lannisters will be stripped of the kingdoms and whoever is left will become servants to the remaining Starks. —Prachi Gupta
Starks Live
I have only watched the first and seventh season of Game of Thrones and now the Season 8 premiere, so I feel the most equipped to answer this question, given my immediate knowledge of only the beginning of the series and the journey to the end. I think that blonde kid Joffrey—I’m not sure what happened to him, but I assume he’s dead or something—is the Night King or someone people who’ve watched the entire series knows is the Night King in disguise? And maybe it’ll be revealed and everyone will get scorched by the Night King’s dragon and die that way. Cersei will definitely die in a really regal but satisfyingly horrific way, as well as the guy she’s fucking who’s related to her—he seems like he’ll go very soon. Tyrion will die nobly. Only people with high probability of not dying are Sansa, Arya, Jon and Dany. That all-seeing raven kid will be the last one alive and he’ll say, “See. told you,” and that’s the end. —Clover Hope
The Dragons? Gotta Fuck
There is only one way for Game of Thrones to end that would satisfy me, a viewer who watched every season mostly awake and definitely not stoned: the dragons that remain must fuck. Let’s workshop this, shall we?
As we know, the dragons are Khaleesi’s most powerful weapons and her only true friends; recall the fire from which she emerged nude but for three lil dragons suckling at her teat. These dragons are the thing that will either torch King’s Landing or kill Dany for keeping them trapped in a dungeon for a while, and they need love. Specifically, with each other. It doesn’t matter that they’re related, because almost everyone on this show who is related has had sex with their third aunt, and also these are dragons, so whatever. The dragons must fuck, and in their frantic, frenzied lovemaking, the fire they make will do what their destiny was in the first place: King’s Landing will burn to the ground. Dany and her uncle brother cousin Jon Snow will share the throne, whose iron was magicked such that it will NOT melt. This is canon. The dragons will fuck. As it was written, so it shall be done. —Megan Reynolds
