Jon Snow actor says he feels "very protective" of Game of Thrones season 8 and "stands by" the universally hated finale: "What they did was the right thing"

Kit Harington as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones — (Image credit: HBO)

Game of Thrones star Kit Harington stands by the hit fantasy show's extremely divisive final season.

"The season eight thing, guys, I feel very protective of it still," Harington said during a panel at Motor City Comic Con (via NME). "And the reason is, cause I mean, I guess you all saw it from the outside, whereas I saw it from the inside. So I knew, I know how much care and how much love and how much work and how much life went into making it, and the conversations that would have happened and the arguments around the table about what way to go, and what thing to do."

"It's not a small process. It's an incredibly complex and lengthy and intricate process. And I feel that the best people to be able to do that were the people who gave us the first seven seasons, that brought it to TV, that brought George's thing and brought it to TV. And so my feeling about it is, there may have been mistakes, as we can all decide whether we liked it or not, and what we liked about it, what we didn't."

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Game of Thrones season 8 has a 55% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and an even lower 30% audience score. It's a pretty dramatic drop-off, especially given that season 7 sits at a 93%. The general consensus seems to be that the season attempted to pack too much into just six episodes, abandoned character arcs, completely diverted from the source material, and was largely boring. Fans seemed especially upset with Daenerys' total descent into madness (I personally think the writers were trying to emulate the novels and encapsulate the various 'Mad' rulers throughout Targaryen history, even though Dany herself didn't necessarily go 'mad' in the books).