We’ve seen the inverse with “Game of Thrones.” When George R.R. Martin failed to deliver on his vision for the show fast enough and David Benioff and D.B. Weiss took over writing it, the idea of authorial intention went out the window quick as Bran Stark. The maddening king of fantasy was deposed; the oligarchy of the writers’ room presided. But the curtain lifted for fans, too: Now we know the show is less the product of a grand creative plan and more a matter of production schedules, haggling screenwriters and celebrity influence.

If there’s no ultimate authority, then a fan can TikTok his way into becoming a star, and we, the viewers, can start a Change.org petition demanding that HBO remake the final season of “Game of Thrones.” Many laughed at this petition — pah, millennials! — by challenging its 1.6 million signatories to make a better work of art themselves. But you might say some fans already did, and it was called #DemThrones: a messy, smart, popular vote that many enjoyed more than the show. And so, midway through the final season, the filmmaker Barry Jenkins tweeted: “The satisfaction of finishing the episode and loading up #DemThrones.” And so, shortly after the finale aired, Arya Stark herself, the actress Maisie Williams, tweeted: “just here for the memes.”

We assume that completion is to art as death is to life: You can see what it all meant only when it’s over. Incompleteness was key to #DemThrones, however. When “Game of Thrones” was still running, each episode could potentially coincide with anything: with the Portland Trail Blazers’ defeat of the Oklahoma City Thunder, with the 2020 presidential race, with a country trap song. Now that the show has aired in full, this random, hilarious meme machine has been superseded by an older, creakier interpretive machine that can make sense of, say, the visual echoes of its opening and closing episodes. Paid cultural gatekeepers are already carving the epitaphs.

All around us, meanwhile, new media forms like the Arya’s horse/“Old Town Road” mash-up continue to break formal ground. They may lack the duration and durability of classic works of art — they may be harder to Google or revisit — but they’re the more telling artifacts of our zeitgeist. “Game of Thrones” thought it knew what was good, but #DemThrones gave us the freedom to wonder, along with Jon Snow: “What about everyone else? All the other people who think they know what’s good?”