**CONTAINS GAME OF THRONES SPOILERS**
Since The Last Jedi came out (a movie which, in my opinion, is terribly flawed and has awful writing throughout) it's become extremely popular for creators and fandoms to defend writing in shows and films with "It's great at subverting audience expectations! You just hate it because you weren't expecting those things to happen!"
With the release of Season 8 of Game of Thrones and the awful massacre of that show's story and characters, it seems like people are jumping on this same bandwagon. "But it was so subversive!"
The idea, it would seem, is that writing is great merely by virtue of having unexpected things happen. If the audience is surprised with something you did as a writer, you are inherently a genius and your scripts are fantastic.
I'm going to be blunt.
This is a complete fallacy and the people using this reasoning are completely intellectually bankrupt when it comes to telling a good story.
Honestly, this whole line of reasoning is pure unadulterated nonsense.
Imagine you're watching Pulp Fiction. Marsellus Wallace is talking to Butch about throwing the boxing match. Suddenly, his head violently and gorily explodes everywhere and Willis reels in shock.
Cut to next scene. Vincent has just saved Mia from OD'ing. He takes her back to the house, smiles, and then he pulls out his pistol and shoots her dead.
Final scene. Travolta and Jackson are in the restaurant. Roth and Plummer talk about robbing the place, reach for their guns...and then decide that actually, no they won't. They just walk out, roll credits.
All three of these scenes are examples of completely subverting an audience's expectations. We don't expect Wallace's head to explode with no foreshadowing or apparent reasoning. We don't expect Vincent to randomly murder Mia, and we don't expect a robbery set-up from the start of the movie to suddenly lead to absolutely nothing.
Did these changes feel satisfying? Does it make absolutely any sense that Wallace suddenly just dies? Why would the film set up the cafe robbery for the whole run-time and then just ignore it in such a frustrating way?
No, these three examples are examples of terrible writing and would render Pulp Fiction an awful film. The expectations of the audience are "subverted" in these examples purely out of laziness or the desire to be "shocking" and unexpected. This destroys the story.
By contrast, there is actually a scene in Pulp Fiction in which a character's head suddenly explodes, subverting our expectations. However, this scene is both funny and horrifying, and is subtly foreshadowed in the form of Vincent's incompetence throughout the whole story. It also leads to a major plot dilemma which the characters successfully resolve using logic.
To cut a long explanation short; this character's sudden and "subversive" death is clever. It's not a stupid subversion for the sake of it.
Subverting an audience's expectations is not inherently bad.
But doing it out of laziness, out of stupidity or out of simply forgetting key plot points is not good writing.
Game of Thrones Season 8 is a perfect example of the worst, laziest, most idiotic "subversion". Jon Snow is set up for the entire show as a Targaryen - it's a huge reveal that means he is the rightful King of Westeros.
This is massive. This is a show all about the throne of this Kingdom and people scheming to sit on it. Jon is a protagonist we have followed right from the very beginning and is the favourite character for many people (myself included). He is revealed as the man who should be King, by right of his blood.
Yet in Season 8, Jon is suddenly meek, timid, weak, repetitive and stupid. And worse, his entire backstory and his heritage is completely ignored. The writers end the show by just giving him...nothing. He's pointless.
Arguably the biggest main character in the show becomes utterly redundant, his claim to the Kingdom is completely glossed over and he's basically deleted from the script. Instead, total randomer Bran becomes King for...no real reason whatsoever.
This is inexcusably terrible writing. To utterly ignore a central character's entire arc that you have been building for 8 seasons of television to this one incredibly important moment purely to "subvert expectations" is moronic beyond belief, not the sign of scriptwriting genius.
To round up:
Anyone can write a totally "random" story which ignores Chekhov's Gun and in which expected pay-offs are completely ignored in favour of "unexpected" twists. Children often write extremely simplistic stories like this, because they don't understand writing conventions. Does that mean children are excellent screenwriters now?
Subverting expectations in and of itself is not a mark of an excellent writer.
