The final season of Game of Thrones is starting today (you may have heard something about it) and there are a few things I want to get off my chest.

For one thing, I’m wondering if all the death-related magic is connected in some way. Everybody makes a big deal about the Night King and his army of White Walkers because they can raise the dead, but there’s a lot of that going around. The Red Woman, Melisandre, raised Jon Snow from the dead at Castle Black. And Thoros of Myr claimed to have raised his friend Beric Dondarrion from the dead six times, and we saw him do it once.

Then there’s whatever Cersei’s disgraced former maester, Qyburn, did to The Mountain after his near-fatal injuries from his fight with Oberyn. I don’t know what’s going on under that helmet, but I can make out tinges of blue that make him look a bit like one of the Night King’s risen dead. I can’t help but wonder if the Night King will have some influence over him, which could come as a nasty surprise for Cersei.

Finally, Arya Stark is an acolyte to the Many-Faced God of Death, who has clearly granted her some gifts. That seems like it should figure into all this somehow, doesn’t it?

And yet George R. R. Martin has been maddeningly annoying about making things like this pay off. I mean, we saw our first White Walker in the first episode of the show, and then we met Daenerys and learned of her family history not long after. So it was obvious that Westeros was eventually going to be caught between the icy White Walkers from the north and Daenerys’s fiery forces from across the sea. And yet…Daenerys didn’t set foot in Westeros until the beginning of the seventh season. And the Night King’s army of the dead, which has been marching south all this time, still wouldn’t reach the wall until the end of the season.

Moreover, with the exception of the White Walkers and the dragons, many of the fantasy elements in GRRM’s stories don’t ever really seem to land. The Lord of Light seems to communicate entirely in visions that we never see, and they don’t seem to be very useful to the people who receive them. And those flaming swords look really cool, but it’s not clear from anything we’ve seen in the show that a flaming sword gives any advantage to the wielder in a fight.

And even the magic that works doesn’t seem to be used properly. I mean, if you’ve got people like Melisandre and Thoros who can raise the dead, shouldn’t you hold them in reserve as an important resource instead of allowing them to wander the countryside?

Furthermore, while Daeneyrs knows how to use her fire-breathing dragons as weapons of war, no one seems to have thought to use them to gather battlefield intelligence. The Unsullied wouldn’t have been surprised at Casterly Rock — nor House Tyrell at Highgarden — if Daeneyrs had periodically overflown the territory to spot enemy troop movements.

As for the big question of who will take the Iron Throne, Daeneyrs seemed to have the strongest claim until we learned Jon Snow’s true heritage, but would he even want the throne? He seems quite likely to yield his claim to Daeneyrs. Or I suppose they could marry and rule Westeros together. They may be closely related — she’s his aunt — but incest is kind of a thing for the Targaryens, to keep from diluting their dragon-wrangling genes.

There are a variety of other with claims. Robert Baratheon’s conquest arguably moots the Targaryen claim and establishes a Baratheon royal line, so his bastard son Gendry arguably has a claim. Then again, the Lannisters and the Baratheons intermarried at some point, so Jaime might be able to claim the throne as the oldest living male with Baratheon blood. If he refuses, the throne would fall to Tyrion. Alternatively, there have been hints that Tyrion is not really Tywin’s son — that his wife had an affair with the last Targaryen king — which would give him an even better claim than Jon Snow.

Then of course there’s Cersei. Her claim by marriage into the Baratheon line is weak, but she’s the only one actually sitting on the throne. But can she hold it? Cersei is not good at holding people’s loyalty. Even Jaime has left her, and will her armies obey her without his steady hand to guide them?

I guess I can imagine four endings I’d find interesting:

• Daeneyrs and Jon take the throne together and everyone lives happily ever after…which doesn’t sound like a George R. R. Martin ending.
• Daeneyrs or Jon dies fighting the army of the dead. The other one takes the throne.
• Cersei takes the Iron Throne, but having alienated everyone, she has no power, no friends, and no family. She is queen of nothing. This is the ending I’d like to see.
• Cersei has a change of heart, everyone fights the army of the dead together, all is forgiven, and Cersei is proclaimed Queen of Westeros. She returns to King’s Landing to reign from the Iron Throne, with Sansa Stark as her Hand of the Queen. In the final scene, Cersei peels her face off to reveal Arya Stark. This is the ending I’d really like to see.

Of course, I would be remiss as a libertarian blogger if I didn’t say that I find this whole Iron Throne business offensive. It doesn’t matter who has the best claim to the Iron Throne because there is no such thing as a legitimate king. I kind of want some previously unknown distant wealthy liberal republic to fill the Blackwater with a fleet of steam-powered warships which promptly reduce the Red Keep to rubble with naval gunfire. And I daresay a few hundred Gatling guns could probably make short work of the army of the dead. Or, if it came down to it, the Unsullied, the Dothraki cavalry, and a couple of dragons as well.

Because Death to Tyrants, one and all.

Walking Dead is pissing me off. Again.

The problem started with the final episode of Season 6, when Negan finally appears. The show had been building up to this for several episodes, as Rick’s group had a series of run-ins with Negan’s minions. In this episode, several of Rick’s group were captured by Negan’s much larger force and hauled into a clearing where they were forced to kneel as Negan gave one of his long-winded speeches.

Negan blathered on about how Rick and his group thought they were on top, but they were about to learn that they weren’t, and that he was going to punish them by beating one of them to death. He went on to taunt them with what was coming, and how much it must suck for them not knowing who would die. Then, as promised, he beat one of them to death with his baseball bat.

That’s where I got pissed off.

It’s not the killing itself that bothered me. Like every Walking Dead fan, I was well aware of the show’s willingness to kill off major characters. This was one of the things that made Walking Dead so intense: When bad things happened, no one was safe.

Obviously, Walking Dead is scripted television, so we know that the characters die because the writers decide to kill them. But until this moment, it always felt like a natural part of the story. People died because of decisions they made, or because of things they didn’t know, or because other people made decisions for which that they paid the price, or because they lost a fight with one of the show’s villains. The illusion of the fiction was working.

But Negan’s scene ruined that. In his speech, he made it clear he was calculating how to kill one of Rick’s group with the intent of causing them emotional pain, and that was weird to me, because I realized the Walking Dead writers had also been calculating how to kill one of Rick’s group to cause some strong emotions in the show’s audience. Negan was basically acting out the writers’ subtext right in front of us. The only way the authorial intrusion could have been more obvious is if series creators Robert Kirkman and Scott Gimple had come out and simply fired one of the actors.

(This was made ten times worse by having the episode end just as Negan started beating his victim, without showing the viewers who it was. We had to wait for the opening episode of the next season to find out. This cheap trick only served to emphasize how blatantly the writers were trying to manipulate us.)

Nevertheless, I continued to watch the show through two dismal years of the conflict with Negan, hoping that it would get good again. This season, under new showrunner Angela Kang, was really starting to show some promise. At least until last Sunday’s episode, which did pretty much the same damned thing the season 6 finale did.

(Spoilers ahead.)

In this episode, the Whisperers capture some of the good guys out on a patrol. Instead of killing them, the Whisperers give them a portentous warning and tell them to stay out of Whisperer territory, which would now have a special border marker. As the captives leave, they come upon a row of stakes, with a head mounted on each one. These are revealed to be the heads of various cast members, conveniently arranged in order of importance and shock value.

Since the Whisperers just grabbed a more-or-less random selection of people from the Kingdom, this feels just like Negan’s random choice of who to kill. But of course, neither of these killings were at random: The writers were doing it. I can imagine them sitting down to calculate how many minor characters they could kill without it seeming like a cop-out, and which major characters they could kill without hurting their ratings, and which ones they had to keep around for plot purposes…until they had just the right combination of dead characters to shock the viewers without driving too many of them away.

The big shock might still have worked if we had seen the action, if we had seen them captured, seen how they fought, and seen how they died. But all of that happened off screen (except for a hackneyed flashback narrated by one of the survivors). All we got to see was the proof that they were dead. This is only slightly better than if they’d ended with a white-on-black text epilogue that said “While you were watching this, the writers have decided to kill the following characters…”

Things like this make the whole show less enjoyable. Instead of being enthralled by the ups and downs of the story, I just feel silly for ever having cared.