It’s hard to be surprised by much anymore, isn’t it? At least in pop culture. The purpose of entertainment is to separate the audience from their money for their personal enjoyment. To do this, companies need to convince you why they are worthy of your $15 or two hours or whatever. That involves a marketing scheme, which in the social media era can be anything from a slow drip of trailers that reveal more and more information, interviews in the media, Easter eggs hidden in other forms of entertainment, or any other numbers of ways marketers are reaching their audience in 2020.
It’s their job to get us excited about movies and series that are coming down the pipe. This is, of course, a double-edged sword, whether the marketers realize it or not. When we are made aware of a future event, it’s natural to start forming pictures and ideas in our mind about what we want and hope to see. Let’s take a simple example: Game of Thrones Season 8. Now, no one was taken by surprise that we were getting an eighth season, but the nearly-two years between season 7 and season 8 allowed for a lot of speculation about what we’d see in the final six episodes. Personally, I thought there might be a fleet coming from the East with Daario Naharis at its head to help save the day. (We’re still wondering how he’s doing, by the way, considering the woman he and thousands of others swore to serve turned out to be a homicidal maniac. Ah well.) I also thought the Night King might pull a fake out and take Viserion to King’s Landing while The Others engaged with Winterfell. There were lots of other theories bounding around: Littlefinger pulled a double-switch with Arya’s faces at the end of season 7 and was still alive; Bran was the Night King; Jaime Lannister was the Prince Who Was Promised, among dozens of other theories. Of course, as those who watched the show are now aware, few of these dozens of theories came true. In fact, the final season was about as straightforward as it could be: the morally ambiguous ruler became a tyrant, the heroes prevailed, the family the fans care about the most ended up on the Throne, and most people who survived got a happy-ish ending. There was no double-meaning, there was no hidden secret. It just was.
And that we were let down because of this straightforwardness is no one else’s fault but ours. This was a massive television series that had about eight hours of showtime left to wrap the entire story. As illogical as parts of the final season were, if they tried to shoehorn some theories that didn’t have much in the way of prior hints in the show, most people would have just been confused.
Let’s take it to pro wrestling for a minute. Every year, the WWE’s Royal Rumble is arguably the most anticipated pay-per-view event by its fans. Sure, Wrestlemania is by far the larger event when talking revenues and media coverage, but for the fans, the Rumble is a magical experience. For those unfamiliar, the Rumble determines who will be challenging for the heavyweight title (both male and female) at Wrestlemania in April. It’s a 30-person wrestling match where two people start and then one person is added at regular intervals (90 seconds or two minutes). You are eliminated only by being thrown over the top rope and the last person standing wins. The reason fans love it is we get about half a list of the wrestlers who are going to enter the Rumble, but we don’t know who the other half will be, and we don’t know the order for the vast majority of the entrants. There are, ostensibly, 28 opportunities to surprise and shock the audience. Sometimes we get a legend walking through the curtain, sometimes it’s a prospect, and sometimes it’s a big-name signing of which the fans are not aware. Regardless, wrestling fans have an expectation for the event every year, and more often than not, WWE delivers (as they do less and less these days, but I digress).
Let’s run a thought experiment, and even if you aren’t a wrestling fan, put yourself in their shoes for a minute: what if our expectations, which had been established over years by the company whose product we consume, were not met? What if one year, WWE announced every single entrant, and the order they would enter? Not only would it take away the magic of the event, there’d be a revolt. People would boycott the show. It would be a disaster, and it’s why WWE has never gone that route (and why they will never, at least in the foreseeable future).
Let’s bring it back to the final couple seasons of GoT for a minute. Think of why you were disappointed… it’s probably because of unmet expectations that the show itself set for several years prior, right? It was that it took Dany three seasons to get out of Meereen, it took Tywin two seasons to set up the Red Wedding, it took six seasons for Jon’s journey from Night’s Watch pledge to being named King in the North, and so on. Even something as small as Tyrion’s relationship with Shae took parts of four seasons to resolve. The show had established its major plot points over multiple, sometimes several, years, and then the later massive plot points – the fight with the Night King and the undead, confronting Cersei, the Dany turn, Bran assuming role of Protector of the Realm – were all laid out and resolved in 13 episodes, often much less. Our expectations of a meticulous political thriller were completely unmet as the time crunch forced the showrunners to opt for a very straightforward finish. (I maintain that Dany’s turn was laid out for years prior to this and wasn’t as out-of-left-field as it seems but again, I digress.)
But that’s our fault, isn’t it? Our expectations had been set by the show, but we failed to alter our expectations in anticipation of the finish. We failed to realize the reason Dany took 35 episodes or whatever to leave Meereen was because they had the time to tell that story. By the time season 3 finished, they knew they had a hit on their hands, and they knew they could take years to tell that story. By the end, they told us there wasn’t much time left, but we still acted as if there were another 40 episodes remaining rather than 13, or six. At a certain point, we’re responsible for our own disappointment.
Let’s take a final example, and I’ll use a personal one this time. Despite 2019 featuring both Endgame and The Rise of Skywalker, the movie I was looking forward to the most was Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Knives Out. The reason is because whodunnit movies are my favourite genre. Clue: The Movie is my favourite movie of all time, I used to read the Clue books along with The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown as a kid, and I think I’ve seen every Agatha Christie adaptation possible (including the made-for-TV Hercules Poirot movies from the 1980s). I love problem solving (probably why I play/write about fantasy sports) and whodunnit movies are the epitome of pop culture problem solving.
I had a couple qualms about Knives Out but my big problem is it’s not a whodunnit, not really. We find out who did it about one-third of the way into the movie, and the rest of the movie is about the person evading detection, before we are eventually made aware that the killer actually didn’t kill anyone. It was a bait-and-switch of the whodunnit genre, a subversion. I am very much into subverting genres, and that’s one reason why I loved Johnson’s The Last Jedi. But I wasn’t expecting a subversion, I was expecting a classic, sharply-written take on a whodunnit, even if updated for the modern era. Something that I had grown up with and still enjoy to this day. Knives Out was not that.
As a result, I was disappointed and generally didn’t enjoy the movie, even as it’s being lauded by critics and moviegoers alike. But that’s my fault, isn’t it? I went into the movie with my own set of expectations despite having no real basis for these expectations, and they weren’t met. This movie that I was looking forward to more than any other in years, let me down. Reflecting on this, though, one thing becomes obvious: the disappointment is my fault, not Johnson’s.
This isn’t to absolve the showrunners from Game of Thrones, or any other series or movie. This is just to assert that maybe we should assume some responsibility of these letdowns. Part of fandom is immersing ourselves with others in the community, sharing theories, Easter eggs, fanfic, or whatever else. But that also sets expectations, and when expectations are set, disappointment is a possible result. When we don’t get what we expect to see, whether it’s Jaime Lannister taking down the Night King, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin entering the Rumble at #30, or Knives Out not following a conventional whodunnit formula, we are going to be let down. And there’s no one to blame for our expectations but ourselves.
Cliffy's hell-hole 