Game Of Thrones

A collection of commentaries, mostly on the HBO adaptation, from before its disappointing conclusion.

Feudalism

The problem

Laurie Penny’s article Game of Thrones and its Good Ruler Complex at The New Statesman says some astute things about the racism in Game of Thrones, but says the wrongest thing possible about what the show and series of novels implies.

Game of Thrones is all about kings and queens, all about who gets to be in charge and how they win and retain power, by violence, by force of will or simply by accident. The essential assumption of this story is a familiar one: sovereignty and leadership are inherently good things, common workers need decent kings or queens to make them happy and prosperous, and even if a catalogue of leaders are bad, mad or murderous, if you can just find the right king, the true, wise, noble king who deserves to be on the throne, then everything will be okay.

This is a bit like saying that the message of The Wire is that we need to support good cops in putting a stop to crime. (It is not.)

Yes, the people of Thrones’ fictional Westeros think exactly what Penny says. Yes, a lot of naïve readers of “genre fantasy” literature think the same thing. Authors in the medium have called that out as a problem, and in particular Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings wrestles with it.

But the Song Of Ice And Fire books and and the TV adaptation Game Of Thrones do not think that a Good Ruler can save Westeros. The idea that a good ruler will save the realm is part of the feudal order which is the villain of the story.

Not the greedy House of Lannister. Not the White Walkers. Not the dragons. Feudalism is the villain.

At every turn, we are shown the evils of the feudal order. The honorable suffer. The dishonorable triumph. Both the ordinary people and the nobility suffer in the endless pointless wars it engenders. Westeros is a horrible place to live. The sexist nightmare of rape, prostitution, and chattel marriage that Penny criticizes is a demonstration of how bad things are in Westeros.

And in a direct parallel to The Wire, we see smart characters try vigorously to make the systems in which they are enmeshed work. They play along, or try to game the system, or try to work against it, or try to step outside of it, and meet with failure every time.

Penny is right that Westeros is horrible, and it is madness to wait for a Good Ruler. But that’s the point. Which is why in early seasons I loved Game of Thrones so much.

In the genre

I recommend the commentary Why GoT Season 7 Sucked, and Season 8 Will Too, though it gets one thing half-right in a way that is importantly wrong.

Martin was asking “What happens to the Honorable Paladin when there is no longer a Heroic Narrative protecting him?”

Again, it is not that A Song Of Ice And Fire is about characters trying to live genre tropes in a realistic world. The world of the story is fantastical! There are monsters and magic and impossibly capable knights and so forth. It addresses the unexamined implications of genre fantasy worldbuidling by doing realist storytelling in that unreal world.

Horror

Brad DeLong reminds us People: Game of Thrones Is Horror!

In the very first scene of the very first episode of the very first season of Game of Thrones, three members of the Night's Watch — an older veteran-type Gared, and two callow-youth types, one in command named Waymar Royce and the other named Will — set out on patrol. By 2:45 the point rider Will has encountered horrible evil. By 3:30 the veteran-type Gared has told the two callow-youth types that they need to head back to their base. By 5:50 they learn that the evil is supernatural, and start to die. By 6:15 the survivors’ courage has broken and they are running south as fast as they can.

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By the end of the first episode it is clear that horrible things happen to people.

For, as anyone who has read other things by George R.R. Martin like “After the Festival” or “A Song for Lya” would expect, it is a horror show.

Although George R.R. Martin cloaks his story in the tropes of other genres, what he is really writing is horror. I am not saying you should watch Game of Thrones. I am not saying that you should enjoy Game of Thrones. I am not even saying that there are psychologically healthy people who enjoy Game of Thrones. But what happened to Sansa Stark at the end of season five, episode six is not as bad as what happened to Daenerys back in the first episode of season one, or what happened to innumerable other women not constantly in the camera’s eye episode after episode as among the good-guy Starks. The horrible things that happened in season one were not exceptional plot-driving motivators. They are the warp and woof life as it is lived in Martin’s Westeros.

I concur. It opens with a zombie attack, fergawdsake. The horror and the genre fantasy are blended to a very deliberate effect.

Negations

One of my favorite ways that Ice and Fire subverts genre tropes is the way it has characters offer sly negations of them.

One of these reversals is particularly dear to me. Ned Stark, a good man and the near-perfect chivalric hero, is imprisoned awaiting execution in a power play by his less virtuous rivals at the king’s court. Varys the spymaster visits him in the dungeon, trying to persuade him to offer a noble lie which will prevent his execution, because Varys (correctly) fears it would result in a bloody war between the noble houses of the kingdom with devastating results.

Ned simply cannot see the problems his adherence to feudal conceptions of honor have created, and cannot understand why Varys would urge him to betray the virtues he believes in. In his bafflement, he asks, “Who do you truly serve?”

Varys’ reply delivers the thesis of the whole series.

And Ned simply cannot understand this answer. The story underlines the rot this produces as it unfolds.

Violence

Responding to a friend who asked about the violence, particularly the sexual violence:

Thrones is definitely not for everybody. It can be hard viewing. There is violence and sexual exploitation all through it. This portrayal has, I believe, a serious and worthy purpose. But there’s no doubt that it is hard to watch, even for a jaded viewer like me. There is no dishonor if one cannot watch that.

But if one can watch it, I believe that it rewards the attention and heartache. Thrones, like The Wire, is at once entertaining, harsh, and smart enough to be important. I’ll be the first to admit that Thrones isn’t so sophisticated as The Wire, but considering how sophisticated The Wire is, that Thrones gets itself into close enough range to merit the comparison is very high praise.

Thrones is especially rewarding and important for people like me who have a weakness for “genre fantasy”, the strain of literature which has emerged from generations of writers inspired by Tolkien. Part of the way Thrones works, part of why it is entertaining, is that it offers strong examples of the seductive allure of the feudal romance: heroism and honor and glory in battle and all that jazz.

But Thrones is ultimately a critique of why we should not trust the appeal of that feudal world. The villain in Game Of Thrones is not any of the rival houses of Westeros or any of the nasty characters or even the White Walkers of the North — the villain, again, is the feudal social order itself. A while back I wrote that Django Unchained is laudable for making us unable to watch Gone With the Wind uncritically. I believe that Thrones is working similarly to make us unable to watch The Lord of the Rings uncritically.

As a proponent of liberal democracy and other Enlightenment values, I think this is important cultural work.

To achieve this, the show portrays the violence and sexual exploitation that are integral to the feudal world, and portrays it forcefully. Were it my show to make, I’d have been less explicit. A friend reminds me of the scenes between Theon and Ramsey, and I also think of Jamie and Cersi in the sept, some of the goings-on at Petyr Baelish’s brothel, and so forth. There are moments when critics of the show who see it as exploitive rather than critical of exploitation are persuasive. What is wrong with us that we would watch these things as entertainment?

Well, it works hard at being entertaining, and succeeds handsomely.

In early seasons I suspected (wrongly!) that in choosing what to portray and how to portray it, the makers of Thrones often had better judgment than I did. Noticing a number of fans online complaining that the show has taken the Westeros they daydreamed about traveling to when reading the books and curdled it into the unpleasant Westeros of the show, I thought that perhaps the show needed to beat the drum that hard to ensure that, for all the charms of the feudal world, people register that it is not romantic but a nightmare. Were it less brutal we might miss its meaning, but were it less entertaining we might never watch it. And to hold entertainment so close to brutality threatens to devolve into exploitation.

Alyssa Rosenberg says similar things in Game of Thrones Has Always Been A Show About Rape.

I didn’t find it gratuitous in the way I might have felt if I saw “Game of Thrones” as simply a sprawling, quasi-medieval adventure or an ensemble Golden Age drama, sort of a mash-up of anti-heroes culled from “The Sopranos” and awesome women inspired by “Mad Men,” with dragons for an extra fiery kick. Instead, this scene felt of a piece with the way I’ve always understood “Game of Thrones” and George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire”: as a story about the consequences of rape and denial of sexual autonomy.

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There’s no requirement that anyone like any of these storylines or that anyone who feels exhausted from spending his or her days in a world marked by sexual violence retreat to a worse one for pleasure. But that’s not the same thing as proof that Game of Thrones is generally careless in its depiction of sexual assault or that rape doesn’t serve a purpose on the show. Sansa Stark isn’t ruined, as a character or as a person, because she was raped. She lives, and her story continues, even if you’re not tuning in to watch it.

Normalizing?

I said this to a friend worried that the show allowed an audience to read the story as normalizing the subjugation of women. In later seasons, the show would betray the trust I extended to it:

The strategy of both the show and the novels is unmistakable. It offers you the pleasures of classic genre narratives … and then makes them increasingly uncomfortable. When we first encounter Petyr Baelish’s brothel, we think we have been there before: giggling girls and palace intrigues and all the cheap thrills we have come to expect from a hundred genre fantasy novels. Then each time we go back, there's another, stronger reminder of what it really entails. The story asks us, “Does this still seem fun to you? How about now? How about now? How about NOW?”

Maybe I caught on to what the story was doing a little early, because I came in already thinking about genre fantasy in these critical terms. But the novels and the show are evidently fearless about escalating however far is necessary. (If anything, the show is more direct about its implicit criticisms of the genre.) I have a hard time imagining a reasonable viewer who will make it through without getting the point.

Drogo & Daenerys

In another discussion, friends and I got into Drogo's rape of Daenerys early in the series, which evolves into a close bond between the characters. This is one of the places where my defense of the show is at its weakest. The Drogo-Daenerys relationship plays more plausibly than the bare description makes it sound, but that doesn’t make it okay. Repeating the love-born-from-rape trope is a problem for all the obvious reasons, doubly since it plays into the orientalism of the portrayal of the Dothraki with pale Daenerys acting as a “civilizing” influence on swarthy Drogo. Ugh.

At the time of this writing, my viewing of the HBO adaptation was ahead of my reading of the books; at that moment, Daenyrs’ story is awash in White Savior narrative tropes. I’m okay with that, since my reading that Thrones is an attack on genre fantasy tropes which works by showing us those tropes’ seductiveness makes me very confident that a critique of white-savior-ism is just around the corner.

(Edited later to add that I am proud to have called the heck out of that one. Daenyrs liberated the slaves of Essos out of ego rather than real compassion. She ignored the people of color who warned her about the conditions and consequences, so it all went to pieces. But that sly takedown of a racist trope did not make the racist way the show had already portrayed the Dothraki any more forgivable.)

More failings

Chuck Wendig’s We Are Not Things: Mad Max versus Game of Thrones makes astute observations about how my hopeful reading of what Game Of Thrones was trying to do did not work as it unfolded.

It’s not that GoT is poorly-written. That’s actually the shame — it’s often so well done. The show is really one of the best television shows around right now. It’s part of the Renaissance of hella good storytelling going on the tube at present. If it was a garbage-fire of a show, we wouldn’t even care. We wouldn’t expect better. But me? I’d like to expect better. Because its creepy fascination with hurting and marginalizing its women characters is increasingly gross and lazy.

Rhube’s We Are Not Your Shield pointedly examines the meaning of the series’ female fans.

Dear GRRM, the “millions of women readers who love the books” were never OK with the sexual objectification, exploitation, and violence against women in them. We were always critical. We initially praised the TV show for dialling back on the really sexist aspects of your books that we had put up with because we wanted to hear more about Brienne and Sansa and Arya, and because if we read the Daenerys chapters between our fingers to obscure how much you clearly enjoyed perving on an underage girl, we could see glimpses of a Dragon Queen.

I was wrong, and so was the show

I posted the commentaries above when the show was still in its early seasons. As it progressed, the show demonstrated two terrible failings which make me much less willing to embrace it now.

The HBO team did not know what they were doing

So much worked well in the first season that I thought that the show understood what I read GRRM as trying to do. It became clear that they did not.

Partly it was a matter of mortifyingly bad execution. In countless ways, the thoughtful purpose I saw in the depiction of violence in the world of the story was undercut by the show in practice being incompetent, naïve, sexist, or deliberately exploitive. The standout example for me was the director of the episode saying that sex between Jamie and Sersei in the sept in S03E04 “Breaker Of Chains” was meant to be shown as “consensual” despite what we saw being very much not.

Partly it was the way the show fell apart after it passed beyond the material in the published novels, relying on GRRM’s story outline. It turned out that Martin’s skill at the particulars, at the execution of the genre tropes, was holding the show together. Which leads to the second problem.

Trope whiplash

For someone like me, who read countless genre fantasy stories and novels in my misspent youth, GRRM’s technique was very effective.

“Remember this one? Remember how good it feels?” Then GRRM would deliver a delicious example of the trope.

Then he would follow the trope’s implications just one step further, making me recoil in horror. Why did I like that trope?

Perhaps my favorite example of this is in S04E01 “Two Swords”. Arya and The Hound, after a series of adventures in Kurosawaland, stop into the tatty Inn At The Crossroads. When I originally saw the episode, maybe fifteen seconds in as we surveyed the other people there I could not help whistling the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in anticipation of the inevitable fight. As I anticipated, the tension ratcheted up, the fight broke out, and it delivered all the Bad Wrong Fun one could want. But then … as Arya got her chilly revenge on Polliver for stealing her sword, one realizes that she is traumatized and turning into a murderous monster. A suitiably queasy meditation on our enthusiasm for violence committed by “heroes”.

And seeing people who had not grown up on those genre stories talking about the show, I came to realize that rather than innoculating them against the problems with those stories, the show was cruelly disorienting. Getting the deliciousness of the trope directly juxtaposed against the deconstruction of it made it feel too much like the pleasure it delivered from the new-to-them move was an endorsement of the horrors revealed just beneath the surface. They just could not process it as the critique of an entire genre because they did not know the genre.

We should have let them enjoy a few straightforward examples like The Wheel Of Time first.