There will be spoilers. I finished watching Game of Thrones, this week. I was slow to get on board. First, there was the problem of not having HBO. Then there was the way people talked about it. It sounded like it was as kill-happy as The Walking Dead, where the showrunners were happy to kill off a good and interesting character each week. For no real reason. Remember the death of Beth? Randomness is part of horror and it’s a part that that show enthusiastically embraced.

Second, there was the issue of misogyny. Everyone, it seemed was sure that GOT was promoting violence against women, that it desensitized viewers. This is a really fraught topic. I will say right from the start that I don’t think there is any one answer to this question. Responses will vary. I’m sure it will disappoint some that I don’t think the violence against women depicted in the show was either excessive, gratuitous, or misogynistic. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand how some people could find it excessive, gratuitous, or misogynistic. Good people will disagree on matters such as these and we need to allow each other to disagree.

The third thing that kept me tepid on the whole thing was that it was on HBO. The Sopranos’ infamous ending wasn’t inspiring confidence. People whose views I respect were of the opinion that Westworld also went off the rails pretty earlier on. When the finale of GOT elicited such an outcry, I felt my suspicions were confirmed. Here’s what I think: the ending of Game of Thrones was perfectly anticipated. All of the foreshadowing pointed that way. That Jon Snow did what he did was not only where the plot had been going all along, it was overdetermined. It was within his character to do what he knew was both right and hard — to the point of it being tragedy. He had in fact done it before. And if he hadn’t stopped the Dragon Queen, his sisters and Winterfell would have been destroyed. He took the only action that made sense for him. Failure to do the hard necessary thing would have been an act of cowardice, and Jon was never a coward. That Daenerys was destroyed, was perfectly in keeping with the theme and plot of the show. She may not have wanted to become her father, but it was her fate. That we didn’t want it makes it tragedy.

As for the brutality, I can’t be an arbiter of taste for anyone, but I can say that the violence, for me, rings true of the world of GOT, and also our own world. There was violence against women, yes, but there was equal violence against men. Women were raped. Theon Greyjoy and Varys were painfully neutered. One of the most shocking deaths was how one of my favorite characters, Prince Oberyn, met his end. It doesn’t seem to me that the showrunners were ever interested in celebrating violence against women. But again, judgments will diverge. There were plenty of strong women. And one of the most evil characters I’ve encountered in film, Cersei, was never made into a caricature. She was never a “motiveless malignity.” There were, however, plenty of women who figured elsewhere on the continuum of good to bad. Brienne of Tarth was almost wholly good. Arya Stark was a very complex character. We can imagine her becoming another Daenerys Targeryan. The main and crucial difference being that Arya never showed any desire to hold power. The brutality also stands in for our own world. It’s not just that Daenerys reduces King’s Landing to smoking rubble. It’s that it calls to mind Dresden in WW2. It also calls to mind what we fear will be the fate of women and children at the hands of the Taliban. The world of GOT is savage and cruel. So is ours.