For this part of fantasy’s allure, the magic is interesting but secondary. It’s there to create interesting “what if …” scenarios, to raise the narrative stakes, to make the world feel a little more exotic, or to explain (in cases where the fantasy world is explicitly ours, except with more dragons or more fairies) why this version of history is different from our own. But the important thing is the political storytelling and the sociological invention — the machinations of statesmen and soldiers and queens and cutthroats, under the weight of particular institutions and traditions, in a world more violent and extreme and death-shadowed and therefore (let’s be honest) more narratively interesting than our own.

As a generalization, fantasy writing has leaned more on political storytelling the more it’s tried to escape the inevitable influence of Middle-earth, and revise the Eurocentric and Christian tropes that Tolkien’s particular worldview bequeathed. Fantasists who aim for a maximally gritty or violent vision, fantasists who conjure a not-Africa or a not-Asia instead of the predictable northern-European setting, fantasists with a particular ideological purpose — in these cases, the political and sociological elements are likely to be stronger, the metaphysical element reduced.

But this generalization has its limits; to pluck one now-classic example, Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” novels are revisionist in some of the ways I’ve just described, but far more concerned with the life and death of magic than with an Archipelagan game of thrones. And ultimately, if you read widely enough, it becomes clear that the genre rewards the combination of the two purposes, the successful integration of the political and the metaphysical in a single world-building complex.

Two of the most successful completed sagas of the last 20 years, Robin Hobb’s Farseer novels and Tad Williams’s “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn,” balance political machinations that would be at home in Shakespeare’s histories and larger world stories about the death and life of magic. And the promise of George R.R. Martin’s saga was that it might, in its somewhat pulpy way, offer the most successful integration yet, with a political and social world rich enough to feel like a piece of 14th- and 15th-century history they forgot to teach in school, with a chivalric order breaking down and a commercial and technological order waiting to be born … except that in this world, the dragons and the prophecies and fair folk won’t go gently into the good night.

Martin has not delivered on this promise, of course, because he hasn’t delivered a new novel in his saga in eight long years. But now, in the disappointment with the show’s finale and final seasons, he has an example of what not to do.

In its rush to finish, the show effectively lost sight of both reasons for fantasy’s appeal. The showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, seemed bored with and embarrassed by the magical element of the saga, hustling through the supernatural stuff and declining to explain crucial motivations and purposes, in order to get back to the political material … but then their haste also deprived the political plot of its sociological complexity, its ripped-from-the-pages-of-history plausibility, that was necessary to make the horror and catharsis of the early seasons work.