So I started writing something in discord, but then couldn't stop myself from writing a long thing about how we "fix" the final moments of the latest episode. Don't read if you haven't seen Season 8, Episode 3.
Because I can definitely see the NK seeing Jon, putting a hand up, then gesturing for Jon to come to him as he drew his sword and prepared for a duel. If we go into the duel (as a hypothetical writer, not a viewer) with the idea that the NK knows he can only be killed by being stabbed/in contact with both Dragonglass and Valyrian steel at the same time, then we know that the NK is cocky/confident in his supposed invulnerability. The idea that anyone, let alone Jon, would be able to get both the steel and the dragonglass in him at the same time would seem foolhardy and impossible to the NK. This also might come out of nowhere, breaking the rules of the white walkers in general, but since the NK is the
first of them, I didn't think it would be too impossible to make this change. It explains why he would willingly walk into dragon fire and then keep going without thinking about it. It also subverts the "Jon is always the hero" 'Problem' that the writers were having (not that I personally see it as an issue, but eh, we're addressing it anyways).
So with this in mind, we have the NK intentionally duel Jon and disarm him after maybe a minute or two of intense action. Jon gets thrown against a pile of wights, but the NK commands them not to kill. The generals maybe stab at Jon once or twice, with one of them kicking Longclaw even further away from Jon's grasp (thus giving the generals some amount of presence in the climactic final scene). This leads to Jon, covered in bite wounds, cuts, scrapes, burns, and down on one knee, weaponless save for a dragonglass dagger in his boot. He gets grabbed by the NK and picked up into the air. We hear bones creaking, muscles straining, maybe even stretching sickeningly. Jon pulls a Lyanna Mormont, has his own David and Goliath moment, which adds a hint of symmetry to the moment and makes you think we're gonna get a repeat of that same moment, but with the main antagonist. This, imho, is the
right way to subvert the audience's expectation. It's not like the audience has a problem with Jon dueling the NK if it had gone that way. Hell, the audience doesn't even necessarily have a problem with Arya getting the final blow, it's that the way she gets the final blow comes out of nowhere and, quite frankly, doesn't make thematic sense for her, her character, for Jon, for the smarmy bastard the NK is, and just for how the audience
wanted things to go. A little fan service, especially right before the main moment of catharsis, isn't really all that bad, writers. But I digress.
The dagger goes in the NK's neck, maybe the chest so the NK can't reach for it immediately. Jon expects to fall to the ground as the NK explodes into ice, but the moment doesn't come. The audience is shocked and everyone around the world is gasping as they watch the simulcast (maybe. I don't know how it airs globally, lol). Then out of nowhere you see the valyrian steel dagger that was meant to kill Bran come flying through the dark. The NK has his hands full pulling the wings off the butterfly that is Jon Snow, utterly convinced he's prevented any chance at his untimely demise, so he fails to react with his inhuman, preternatural ability. It's not that he couldn't have simply moved Jon into the path of the dagger, but that he was so cocky, he didn't think anyone would try to put up a fight after Jon. So the dagger sinks into his back, parallel, in another direction, with Jon's dagger. The NK explodes, the army of the dead finally rests.
And then, as the hypothetical writer of this scene, you can play with the major themes of the episode and the series throughout the scene. Having Jon and Arya kill him together plays into that whole ambiguous nature of the gender of Azor Ahai. Maybe they're both Azor Ahai. Maybe the prophecy was really misinterpreted. Maybe this is where the show naturally deviates from the books and hell, why not? We still get three episodes to explore and discuss it, but the main, major moment of the prophecy happens and we have both Arya and Jon at the center of it. Then, when they kill him with daggers and not swords, it's referencing small weapons, like needle if you would. In a very limited sense, Jon and Arya are like daggers themselves, as a bastard and a woman, respectively, in a society that does not appreciate or care for them. What I mean is, look at how widely appreciated swordsmen are in the seven kingdoms. You don't hear people talking about "the greatest dagger fighters the kingdom had ever seen" and it's okay, it's not a major thing that tends to happen in fantasy genre fiction anyways. So you get to play with symbolism a little, while also talking about Jon and Arya's place in the world, from lowly bastard and a girl to King/Warden in the North and A Girl, emphasis on the capitalization.
There's more I could say, but ultimately I'll just say that while I don't have a problem with subverting the audience's expectations, I do have a problem with seemingly subverting those expectations in a malicious or "prankster" kind of way. In the
Game Revealed video for this episode, you see the show leads talking about how they didn't want Jon to be the guy who defeats the NK and that's fine, honestly. What's not fine is them sort of smirking. The dude is so pleased with himself that he came up with the idea and it's annoying. (Side note, another show, How I Met Your Mother, did this thing where they had something planned years in advance and wrote things a certain way to subvert audience expectations and it absolutely blew up in the writer's faces there. They may not have done it "maliciously" or in a "haha jokey" way, but they still did it and it didn't work, same as it didn't work here in GoT.)
Jon really didn't have to be the one who gets the final blow. The audience would have liked that, sure, but they would have been fine with him not getting it so long as he still got the chance to actually fight the NK. It's a real shame because it was a moment the show and the overall narrative had been working towards for years. To throw away a chance at seeing Jon duel the NK just to "subvert" expectations is utterly silly. The smart thing to do is to absolutely include the duel. You take Arya, the girl who doesn't fit the Noble mold, Jon, the bastard, and Bran, the cripple with supernatural powers who doesn't even see himself as Bran anymore, and you place them at the epicenter of the most important battle in humanity's history (for the show, of course). It's three characters the rest of the world would have otherwise shrugged off who end up facing down the long night and ultimately beating it. Throwing Jon out of the last scene with his one main antagonist (he doesn't give a fuck about Cersei) really is just bad subversion. Same in reverse with Arya. It would be like Jon assassinating Cersei while Arya gives a speech to rally the troops, it just isn't what the audience wants.
So subverting things by having the "rules" for killing the NK be different from an average White Walker is fine. You get the actual subversion in there, it tricks the audience, it gets them to gasp, it brings the scene even lower than it already was, but then you get the payoff with Arya appearing (not from the gate where she actually does in the real scene, but off to Bran's left, as if Arya jumped off a battlement, into the Godswood tree, and then either jumped down to throw the dagger or she throws it from a branch itself).
This serves the purpose of Arya helping secure the final blow, gives Jon (and the audience) a sense of closure by having him literally face his one true enemy, subverts expectations in a heartstoppingly
fun way and not a shitty, pranky way, all while still allowing for crazy prophecy shenanigans to continue on into the later episodes. How do we interpret the prophecy now in a world where it's essentially been fulfilled? Who ultimately is Azor Ahai? Is it multiple people? Is it Arya? Is it Jon? Is it no one? (I hate this last one since the show goes out of its way to show the Red Lady and the Red God are pretty damn real, but hey, it's possible.) You lose out on this fun discussion stuff by failing to let Jon be present for the NK's death. It's a dumb subversion for the sake of pulling the rug out from under the audience. You don't wanna pull the rug out from under them, you want to surprise them by wrapping them in a blanket, but suddenly ripping the blanket off, only to put a better, but still very different blanket on them than the one they originally expected.
And okay, damn, there we go. That's the end of this post. Wow it's long. I haven't done one of these in a while...