Like a lot of people, I'm watching Game of Thrones. Here's my take on how it should end.

Should, mind you. Not will. Not what I think will happen.

But, this is what should happen.

THE END OF GAME OF THRONES

Daenerys: I am Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains.

Jon Snow: You cannot claim the Iron Throne! I am Aegon of Houses Targaryen and Stark, Sixth of His Name, King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm!

Daenerys: What is in a name, Aegon who used to be Jon Snow? I have vanquished the other Khals of the Dothraki and claimed their khalasars. I freed the soldiers of the Unsullied, and they joined me of their own free will. I woke dragons out of stone and led the armies that destroyed the Night King and the Long Night.

Jon Snow: But I was born to be the King of Westeros and sit on the Iron Throne! Rhaegar Targaryen, your older brother and heir to the Iron Throne, was my father, and I am trueborn, not a bastard because he lawfully married my mother, Lyanna Stark. I claim my birthright as the heir to the Iron Throne and King of the Seven Kingdoms!

Daenerys: Birthright? What is birthright? You are no king, Jon Snow. You have been given everything, mostly by women, and you have failed at every point in your life.

You sulk and make poor, long-ranging decisions when your pride is hurt. At your birth home, they did not heap unearned honors upon you due to your supposed parentage, you left them all and joined the Night’s Watch.

You are haughty, prideful, and rash. At the Wall, instead of making allies, you shamed your brothers with your swordfighting skills that they had never had a chance to learn, and somehow you were rewarded for it and fast-tracked for leadership by the Lord Commander, Jeor Mormont. When you tried to break your vows and desert, a crime with a death sentence, you were dissuaded from committing insubordination and desertion by Mormont again, but someone had to tell you not to, and then you sulked.

You have neither honor nor intelligence. When you went to spy on those north of the Wall, they almost immediately discovered you were a spy.

A woman, Ygritte the Wildling, saved you, and you broke your Night’s Watch vows with her. Then you betrayed her, and she, your Night’s Watch brothers, and many wildlings died for your betrayal.

Somehow after your betrayals and inadequacies, you ended up the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, where you were so unable to lead your men or earn their respect that they actually killed you, mainly because you could not communicate your leadership goals and decisions or conduct any kind of diplomacy with your own people, but led like a mad Targaryen monarch.

At that point, another woman saved you, Melisandre, when she brought you back to life as a fire wight.

Then, you broke your Night’s Watch vows again, though no one stopped you. You tried to retake your childhood home from Ramsey Bolton. You did make some alliances, but you did not have the diplomacy to make the important alliances with the larger houses. You did not listen to your most valuable advisor, Sansa Stark, who on the night before the battle, explained to you every one of Bolton’s tactics that he would use. Even forewarned, you had neither the discipline nor the wits to avoid Bolton’s simplistic trap. As you were losing the battle and your meagre armies were being massacred by an obvious pincer movement, Sansa Stark had negotiated an alliance with Littlefinger and rescued you and your few surviving soldiers with the Knights of the Vale.

Somehow, despite your total inability to lead tactically or strategically, you were named King of the North. On your first diplomatic mission, you discarded that honor by bending the knee to me, thus abusing the trust of every leader in the North. When you returned, both Sansa Stark and Lyanna Mormont asked you to explain your leadership and reasoning, and you could give them no more than the rhetorical equivalent of a shrug.

When you, the supposed commander of the troops, went north of the Wall personally to obtain a wight to convince Cersei of the dire threat, I had to rescue you, losing one of my dragons in the process, which led to the destruction of one of the Living's most valuable fortifications, the Wall.

When we went to negotiate with Cersei, you could not conduct diplomacy and ally the Lannister army with ours in this fight, allowing us to be tricked.

Despite your failings, I gave you a dragon, one of two of the most powerful weapons in the world.

During the battle with the Night King during the Long Night, your tactical and strategic plans for the battle were asinine and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of our soldiers. You did not establish an engagement area to disrupt the enemy forces. The Dothraki light cavalry rode out in an unsupported frontal attack. Light cavalry should be used to screen the allied lines from view and to gather intelligence on the enemy. Our heavy-fire artillery weapons like the batteries of trebuchets should have been positioned to be protected and mutually supported. Instead, you placed them between the cavalry and infantry units. After a single barrage, you gave them up because your poor strategic planning of the charge had rendered them useless. Placing the anti-personnel ditch with chevaux de frise between the infantry and Winterfell produced a choke point during the inevitable retreat and cost many lives.

During this time, you squandered our most obvious and powerful weapon, the close air support of the dragons. We maintained two dragons for direct support of the ground defense and for air interdiction against the Night King’s single, ice-zombie dragon. We had two-to-one air superiority, an enormous advantage. We needed to use these weapons as multirole platforms. I flew sorties and conducted reconnaissance over enemy lines and even located the Night King, the objective of the battle, though our first attempt to kill him with dragonfire failed. Failure to properly establish friendly dragon-marking measures before the battle resulted in a green-on-green incident that nearly destroyed our air capabilities.

Your one duty during the battle was to watch for the signal from Ser Davos and use Rhaegal to light the anti-personnel trench after the retreat. You weren’t paying attention, and Melisandre lit the trench. Yet again, a woman bailed you out after your failure due to your inadequacy.

During the battle, you did doing nothing of value–no strafing runs on wights early in the melee, no attempts to attack the line of commanding White Walkers waiting in the rearguard, or even any dragonfire attacks from Rhaegal at all. Instead, you got lost in a storm for a while and then crashed your dragon. When faced with the Night King, you charged blindly toward him, thinking you could end the war with a single swing of your sword. You had failure after failure after failure. No wonder you ended up shouting at an undead dragon.

Finally, at the end of the battle, Arya Stark used the assassin skills she has been honing for years instead of swanning about Westeros worrying about your insulted pride and killed the Night King, thus ending the battle and saving you yet again.

Jon Snow: But . . . but . . . I’m Aegon Targaryen. I get the Iron Throne. Because bloodlines, and my parents were married.

Daenerys: You have not listened to me, Jon Snow. I come not to claim the Iron Throne, but to break it. The Iron Throne has ruled Westeros with dissent and bloodshed. It has established an oligarchy that crushes the people of Westeros under its wheel. It is time to break the wheel. It is time to establish a new order that does not crush its citizens.

Sansa Stark is the Queen in the North. Yara Greyjoy rules the Iron Islands and Riverlands as queen. Cersei Lannister rules the Rock and the Reach. Ellaria Sand, now released from the dungeons, will rule Dorne because weak men never will rule Dorne or Westeros again.

And I am one queen to rule them all.

We form a queens’ council, a new order in Westeros, and we will break the wheel.

#breakthewheel #breakthehouse