At the start of Game of Thrones, winter was coming. By the end of season seven, winter has come. Due to the length of the seasons of summer and winter in-universe, years elapsed before winter arrived. And much occurred in those years. Many characters appeared, many died, and the ones that survived have been deeply changed by their hellacious experiences. Over season seasons, Game of Thrones touches on many philosophical, theological, moral, and epistemological issues. It is not that every episode or season covers its own specific philosophical theme, but that there are lines of dialogue and concepts spread all throughout that at least brush up against some aspect of reality, even if only a line or two is devoted to that topic. One thing that is developed throughout the entire current series, though, is redemption.
By the end of the seventh season many of the surviving characters have truly grown in some way. Sansa was a mere child in the first episode but has been transformed by abuse, political terrors, and the loss of family members into a more confident person. Daenerys has matured from an abused bride into a powerful queen who can deliver Westeros from impending destruction. Theon started out as a selfish, power-hungry young man willing to betray the kind family that raised him, but is now a person committed to doing the right thing.
Included in the character changes, as one might expect, are some changes for the better, though they can take entire seasons to unfold. Tyrion is a promiscuous alcoholic who learns to truly love, eventually deciding to try to dethrone his largely tyrannical family. Jaime is an incestuous attempted child-killer revealed to have saved thousands of people by making a difficult decision to violate an oath, a man who who eventually comes to recognize the irrational self-absorption of his sister Cersei and walks away from her madness.
Characters like Theon and Jaime are given season-spanning redemption arcs that really flesh them out and show how drastically people can change for the better with time. Although the show has yet to provide a basis for many of the characters to hold their moral beliefs to be true, it does allow some characters to move in a direction that Christianity would certainly call redemptive. Westeros is not only a place of misery and tyranny; it is also a place of moral growth (by Christian standards, I mean, as I do not know if Westeros itself has a moral standard above it [1]). It holds many evil people. But it also shows that people do not have to remain moral monsters. They can and sometimes do change, and not always into more wicked persons. Humans are not bound by necessity to remain in evil habits, since they are rational creatures with free will, the capacity for self-reflective introspection, and the desire to move from one moral state to another.
I sincerely wish more Christians would recognize the power of entertainment that is as honest, as thoughtful, as masterful as Game of Thrones. The show portrays a fictional yet very familiar world where everyone does what is right in his or her own eyes, the majority of characters consumed by short-sightedness, egoism, and utilitarian leanings--but it still insists through its unfolding narrative that redemption is possible. Game of Thrones is a gloriously executed examination of the complexity of human nature, acknowledging both selfishness and redemption in dozens of little ways. Winter is here, and it has been preceded by some deeply insightful character arcs.
[1]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/02/moral-skepticism-in-westeros.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/03/moral-skepticism-in-westeros-revisited.html
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