Rubble and Ash: The Aftermath of a Tournament.

Sifting Through the Results

Arya it is! Call her Arya Underfoot, Arya Horseface, Nan, Lanna of the Canals, No One, Arry, whatever you call her, she won won 59%-41% over Tyrion. It is a little odd that the favorite character on a show about a game of thrones never actually entered into the game. That is, Arya never expressed a desire to rule. In a story about a litany of power-grabs, Arya’s arcs were centered on survival and revenge. The only time she could authentically be said to be playing the titular game is when she killed Littlefinger. But this act was attached more to her fealty to family than to her idea of who should sit on the throne.  So, it turns out that Bracket Breaker voters don’t really care about the character’s ability to angle for the throne. For further evidence, see the popularity of the Hound and of Tormund. Audiences just like to be charmed, excited, and entertained, I guess.  

They do, I suspect, admire that criteria category “Cunning,” because it is thrilling and fun to see a character outwit those around her. But the Iron Throne never seemed like that great of a prize. (Did Robert seem to like it? Did it make the Mad King happy?) Voters seem to value a character based on how they maneuver through the world of the show, how they operate and connive and survive, rather than how well they promote their own bid for power.

Tyrion, for his part, was an active power-grabber and throne-centric conniver. His behaviors on the show were very often directly related to playing the titular game, even to the point of actually ruling for a bit when he was the Hand. The character as played by Peter Dinklage had a ton of charm and the show offered him many great moments. So, no surprise that he made the final, but also no surprise, perhaps, that he could not stand up to the bracket juggernaut that was Arya.

Arya came into the finals beating her opponent with 90% of the vote on average. Tyrion came in at 80%.  60% of the people who picked her to win in their bracket expected her to take on someone other than Tyrion. Arya voters seemed to be single-minded about her supremacy but they matched her up with a surprisingly wide variety of finals contenders.

Overall, most people seemed to know that she would be in the finals, even those who backed Tyrion. Only 40% of the Tyrion-winning brackets picked him to take on someone other than Arya.

I am shocked to note that only 21% of the brackets picked the correct final round. Even without using the (ingenious) metric of the Connington Criteria, weren’t Arya and Tyrion the most objectively popular characters on the show? Maybe not. When the brackets were submitted, there was still a lot of love for Daenerys and Cersei and Sansa - as evidenced by the fact that only 16% of us accurately predicted the final four, and as I’ve whined about before, I was not one.

I am equally shocked that it was possible for someone (me) to pick 3 of the final 4 correctly, to pick the final round AND the winner, correctly, and still finish only 10th. And that includes losing to THREE people who picked the winner wrong! Only my bottom right quadrant was all green, meaning that it was all correct. I left a ton of points on the table by trying to force Ned into the final four, and by taking an ill-fated stubborn anti-Sansa stance in the first round.

Battle of House Lannister v. House Stark

One takeaway for Ol’ Connington is, don’t bet against Stark kids. You can bet against Starks, apparently; look how poorly Ned and Cat fared. But don’t bet against the wolf pups.  The Stark kids got 24% of all the votes cast. The Lannister kids received 20%. If you include Jon as a Stark, (which I do, even though he is a Snow and also, more accurately, a Targaryen), then the Stark number jumps to 34%. This is a close win for the Starks that was reflected in the final. Moreover, it shows that the umbrella category of all Vote Earners can be split into two divisions: 1) Starks & Lannisters, and 2) Everyone Else.

In an elegant example of numbers matching perception, this Stark-Lannister/Everyone Else dichotomy stayed true throughout the tourney: both the final eight AND the final four rounds were made up of exactly half Stark-and-Lannister family members, and half Everyone Else-ers.

Impact of Final Season on Tourney?

Did the show’s final run of episodes affect the tournament? I think so, even though final votes were due before the actual finale. I don’t think people were overly enamored of the final, inactive arcs of Cersei and Tyrion, and they didn’t seem to love Dany’s Mad Queen phase. That probably cost these characters a lot of up-votes, though there’s no way to truly measure that.  

Closing Thoughts on the Finale

Even though it happened after final-round voting, we should close with a word on the last episode. Series finales are all about the show presenting the viewer with a vision of the characters’ future. Seinfeld’s finale was a flop because it left us with the strange vision of our characters bickering endlessly in a jail cell outside of New York, a setting in which we’d never seen them. Audiences would have preferred to see them dropped into (and caught up in) an endless loop of madcap bickering and farce in their familiar Upper West Side milieu, the world of diners, movie theaters, and chocolate babkas. That ending would have provided its own comfort and “meta” closure. But the jail-cell ending was an unsatisfying future-vision.

The ending of The Sopranos turned many audience members off with its failure to provide full closure, but I would argue that it was brilliant and utterly satisfying because it left the family firmly ensconced in their setting. To roll credits on the core four Sopranos in a New Jersey diner allows us to imagine that they are eternally out there, having Sopranos-type scraps and escapades, forever. I, for one, did not need to be told conclusively if Tony was killed or not. We were left with a satisfying future-vision.

That leads us to our champion Arya’s “off-to-parts-unknown” ending.  On the one hand I was bummed by the fact that it looks like she’ll never see her siblings again. But even more than power-grabbing, the show’s themes seemed to be 1) answering the call to adventure and 2) being true to one’s self. As the many seasons of the show demonstrated, Arya’s abilities had evolved to super-hero proportions, and it became almost impossible to picture her continuing on in the gray, rubbly, defeated version of Westeros that we see in the finale. She needed a bigger stage. She is not a “let’s-all-pitch-in-and-clean-up-the-mess” type of person. Cleaning up and settling down to business is what we see most of the other characters doing, in the final sequence around the Small Council table. And that feels right. But not for Arya. (Not for Jon, either, although I was less convinced that his destiny was to live life beyond the Wall.) But Arya’s future-vision was appropriate to the character and it allows us to imagine her out there in strange lands, with Needle, endlessly doing Arya-type stuff.

In closing I will say that this was a hell of a lot of fun. Thanks for reading these esoteric posts about an online bracket game. I also encourage you to read George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels if you haven’t gotten around to it. They are great. They offer many more layers than the show has time for, including a major figure in the most recent novel, “A Dance With Dragons,” named Jon Connington. Great character!

Until next time, thanks for listening.

Connington