The final season of Game of Thrones is a catastrophic mudhole of such epic proportions that fans still have a hard time trying to make sense of it. A recent explanation tries to shift the blame from the obvious culprits, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, to the fictional world’s own complications, and as absurd as we find it, there’s actually some sense in what it has to say from a technical point of view.
After building up the White Walkers as the greatest existential threat Westeros would have ever faced, the final Game of Thrones season dealt with them in a single feature-length episode and moved on to Cersei. As for the tyrant queen on her throne of lies, Daenerys made quick work of her armies thanks to Drogon and then went on a rampage through King’s Landing, burning most of the population to cinders.
That all led to Jon Snow killing Daenerys, Tyrion proclaiming Brandon Stark as king, and the rest of the characters randomly ending up in different places throughout the Seven Kingdoms. What stands out the most amid all of these strange developments is the general decline in IQ from season 6 onward.
Tyrion himself went from the cleverest politician in the realm to a useless sidekick who’s just along for the ride, and while we’d all be quick to condemn the writers for this travesty, one fan is pointing the finger at rampant medieval diseases, and chief among them: Lead poisoning. No, really.
The theory certainly poses an interesting possibility. We aren’t seriously relegating the travesty of season 8 to that, of course, but historically speaking, lead poisoning was a common debilitating illness in the olden days. Some Westerosi stans are taking it a step further, using in-universe elements like Valyrian steel to justify the ensemble’s sudden-onset stupidity.
So, there you have it, folks. Game of Thrones never stood a chance, because its characters were getting too sick to act like their former selves.