You know nothing.

Over on my main blog I reacted to a lot of the criticism that has been levelled at the final season of Game of Thrones (which, cards on table, I thought was excellent). A lot of the criticism is devoted to supposed technical faults in the writing. A lot of that criticism seems to me to be plain wrong.

Of course, a popular blockbusting TV show may feel constrained to adhere to certain principles and tropes, but equally it may not, even if it doesn't go full David Lynch. For Game of Thrones, in which we know the source author George RR Martin is fond of undercutting and subverting tropes, it is doubly dangerous to assume that just because you don't like something it is the result of 'bad writing'. In the case, for example, of Daenarys Targarien, you may have been expertly played along for the full series.

I'm still working this through, so the below is somewhat provisional, but broadly speaking:

1.  Characters do not require a 'fully realised character arc.' People in real life are born, die, and do the best they can in between. The same can be true for characters in fiction.
2. There is no requirement on a writer to take everything that happens in a narrative and tie it all up into a neat bow at the end. Again, that's not how the world works and there is no reason it should be how fiction works either.
3. 'Character Development' is not limited to the Hero's Journey template. A character does not have to change to be developed, it is enough that we find out more about them, their depths and shallows.
4. The writer is under no obligation to deliver resolution to the reader, and may choose deliberately to withhold it.
5. There need not be any causal link between character actions and story outcomes. In a multi-character narrative over an extended time period things happen that are told as part of the story but have no impact on how things end at all.
6. Not everything leads to a 'payoff'. Acts of individual heroism or cowardice may be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. 'Did [insert name of character] die for this?' is a dumb question. 
7. A putative hero may travail to overcome obstacles in pursuit of their quest and fail in the attempt. The failure may be because of some aspect of their own character.
8. The bad guys may also overcome obstacles in pursuit of their quest and succeed.
9. In court cases, the opposing sides seek to establish 'facts' as part of a narrative to establish various propositions to be true or false (or irrelevant). A similar process can be observed in fiction, an attempt to impose some sort of narrative order on events and behaviours. But the constructed narrative may be true, false, irrelevant, misleading or untrustworthy. 

More as I think about it. Maybe.