I’ve just finished all the Game of Thrones books, simulating the experience of an old folks home by being left wondering “Who dies next?” (The GoT equivalent of “What happens next?”).

You used to know that the good person would die next, but the series has run out.

Obviously the rest of this article is more of a spoiler than finding out that Stephanie Brown had made a costume to secretly fight crime in Gotham.

Because writers don’t sit around doing nothing! We sit around hammering at the keyboard until we  feel better. Behold, a selection of endings for the song of ice and fire:

• A little-known lord looks out over his lands, raises his banners, and then DOESN’T immediately make the absolute worst possible decision given his situation. The entire universe collapses as its most fundamental law is broken.
• The maesters, motivated by the endless stink of just about everyone in their world, develop a cheap and powerful method for dispensing masking aromas from thin metal cans. A side-effect is the end of winter, and the eventual opening of the world-famous entertainment resort “Starkyland”, just a day’s travel from the scenic Lake Wall.
• Tyrion’s studies reveal the existence of a piece of mystic jewellery that will fix everything. He sails into the smoking ruins of old Valyria with tough guy Ser Jorah Mormont, girl Daenerys, and a Summer Islander who keeps pointing out how fell things are. After a series of action set-pieces they find and destroy the Fantasy Gem Of Mmakh-Jhuffyn, which suddenly fixes everything. Even the social unrest which would normally result from any such sudden societal change in a medieval kingdom, inevitably causing widespread death and suffering.
• The red star is revealed to be plasma leaking from a Klingon bird of prey being chased to ground by the Enterprise. The surviving Klingons join the Dothraki and both have just the most fantastic time. Kirk takes forty-five minutes to punch Stannis and sleep with Cersei and this, somehow, fixes everything.
• Eddard Stark comes back and just kicks everyone’s ass. What appeared to be his “head” was a masterfully crafted pumpkin. You know you’d love it.
• Jaime’s hand finds a more satisfying new life in the Addams household. They’re aware of its murderous past, which only adds to their fondness for the thing.

“We have guests coming this evening, so NO eviscerations on the new Yeti rug.”

• The Others break through the self-destructing Night’s Watch, determined to spread death and misery through all the mortal realms, and realize that they can’t do half as good a job as the realms are already doing. They return past the frozen North border to create a more polite society with sensible weapons regulations and universal healthcare.
• The Doctor arrives with a secret plan to fix everything and has his head hacked off by the first drunken hedge knight he tries to bluff with a sonic screwdriver.
• Shipfuls of elves arrive from the east, horrified to learn that the promised lands in the west referred to Westeros. They find that instead of simple struggle between good and evil, they’re now mired in a pointless knot of wasteful conflict without any clear course of action, which is the sort of thing that happens when you run away from problems instead of solving them. They resolve to return to Middle Earth and help the humans actually do things this time, but are all slaughtered by Euron Crow’s Eye.
• The dragons all drop dead of a bacterial infection which hadn’t existed the last time they were around. It turns out that spending generations in mineral form isn’t a great way to keep up with the Red Queen race.
• A strange vessel arriving at Pentos reveals that every nation we’ve met so far is only a small archipelago off the coast of a real continent, where we meet five hundred more characters. The projected date of completion of the story advances to 2100 AD.
• An aircraft carrier arrives from the opposite side of the world. It takes generations of peacekeepers and careful education before the “Savage Lands” can be integrated into global society. The surviving nobles struggle through the rest of their lives by getting reality TV shows.
• Bill and Ted arrive and have their heads hacked off by a drunken hedge knight.
• The peasants of the world develop the ability to remember things for longer than a week, and suddenly throw off the entire structure of feudal lordship. They’re about to raise a new leader to guide them when they suddenly realize “Duh!”, don’t do that, and proceed as a loosely-affiliated network of productive communes. Anyone found wearing armor is chained into it and tossed in a lake.
• Marty McFly arrives and has his head hacked off by a drunken hedge knight.
• Just as the wildlings were fleeing before the advance of the Others, we find the Others in turn fleeing from an even more terrifying force of destruction. Their shredded corpses are found twitching against the north face of the wall, while the corpses of the Night’s Watch litter the south. The invading army cannot be located, only tracked by the burned castles and slaughtered armies left in a direct line leading to King’s Landing. A maester finds a single man-sized hole in the Wall linking the seas of death, just as that man strides into the Red Keep and through every knight sent against him, five hundred sers slaughtered where they stood. He did not think it too many. Slaine sits on the Iron Throne, blunting it, and proclaims that those who do not lay down their arms shall lose them to his axe. A thousand years of peace follow. He only stayed for four, but the kingdom remained too scared to try anything stupid for a millennium.

For more improvements on fiction, read Pacific Rim: How The Kaidanovskys Survived and An Infinity Of Alternate Batmen