To get this out of the way first: a large proportion of my family and close friends don’t watch Game of Thrones for various reasons. I gather this makes them feel a bit left out of some online conversations, since Game of Thrones has pervaded pop culture so thoroughly by now. I can relate. When I was a kid at primary school, we were the only household that didn’t have a TV. For context, in 1980s New Zealand there were exactly two TV channels, of which only one had children’s programming; so every day, every kid in the school had seen the exact same TV the previous afternoon, which made it ideal fodder for conversation icebreakers and small-talk. Every kid, except us. At the time I blamed this fact for the social difficulties which later turned out to be autism.
...annnd I’m already getting sidetracked in the first paragraph. What I was going to say was, I know how something just being popular with other people creates social pressure, even if it’s unintended, for you to join in and pretend you enjoy it as well. And honestly Game of Thrones is not for everybody. I’m going to be talking about its merits quite a bit, so I want to be clear from the get-go that if it isn’t your thing then it isn’t your thing and that’s fine. (Though I should warn you that I’m assuming my readers are familiar with the series, so this post will be both confusing and spoilery to those who aren’t.)
Indeed, you’ll notice as we go through that I’m not doing comparisons with the books very much, and the reason for that is that the books aren’t my thing. I’ve kind of skimmed through them and occasionally browsed a page or two in bookshops, but I haven’t read them properly, and that’s because I can’t. I understand (and I’ll get into) the reasoning behind the “any character can die” dynamic, and it works onscreen for me, but on the page I don’t get the intended effect. My emotional brain basically goes “Well, if I’m going to be punished for caring about these characters then I’m not going to care about them any more.”
I’m not entirely sure what difference the transition from page to screen makes. I used to think it was because the TV characters had faces and I couldn’t help empathizing with them, but the characters on The Walking Dead have faces too and I gave up on that a couple of seasons ago because I was disengaging from the characters for much the same reason I do with the Game of Thrones books.
Ahahahaha. Yes, yes, I mean the A Song of Ice and Fire books, A Game of Thrones being the title merely of Book I (roughly equivalent to Season 1 of the show). In this instance I’ll grant the book purists the point: A Song of Ice and Fire is a much more appropriate title for the series as a whole.
Whilst most fans as far as I can tell are loving the way things have developed in the later seasons, there’s also a dissatisfied contingent who argue that the whole thing started to go downhill as soon as the showrunners got ahead of George R. R. Martin’s published material. They seem to particularly dislike the way the characters have now fallen into some pretty solid coalitions of people who mostly trust each other, leaving behind all the politicking and betrayals and whisperings and jockeying for power – the game of thrones – that characterized the earlier seasons.
Not to be overly snarky, I think these people are missing the entire point of the series from start to finish. (This is as good a point as any to cut for spoilers.) The very first scene is a Night’s Watch ranger deserting his post north of the Wall for fear of the White Walkers. I don’t think this is a coincidence; I think it’s meant to set the tone for the whole story. You’re supposed to keep the White Walkers in your head as you watch all the goings-on in the brothels and the marketplaces and the corridors of power.
Through the first few seasons the reminders are subtle and infrequent, but never quite absent; they intensify as the series goes on. This is the whole point of the story. The game of thrones going on in the foreground is supposed to fill you with trepidation lest the petty infighting among the living should prevent them from banding together against the army of the dead and so doom them all to destruction. Now, with the final season upon us, the resolution of the story looms. Of course all the political machinations are fading into insignificance.
What these people seem to like the most is something other people criticize it most heavily for – this second group largely composed of people who’ve seen one or two episodes before realizing it wasn’t their sort of thing. The word “amoral” gets bandied about a lot in this connection, the idea being that there’s no justice to be had, so the show asks you to sympathize with people who’ve done horrific things. While, as I say, if it’s not your thing it’s not your thing, I don’t think “amoral” is at all a good description. “Moral ambiguity” is nearer the mark but still not quite there.
Certainly, Game of Thrones up until now hasn’t followed the traditional fantasy convention of putting all the Good Guys on one side and all the Bad Guys on the other and having them scrap it out, the archetype being The Lord of the Rings. In the early seasons, when the focal conflict was between Houses Stark and Lannister, there were sympathetic characters on both sides, and the whole tragedy of the thing was watching them being forced by their circumstances to kill each other. In this respect Game of Thrones is less like The Lord of the Rings and more like Homer’s Iliad, which pits Greeks of varying virtue against equally variable Trojans.
On the other hand, nothing cosmic hangs on the outcome of the Iliad beyond the petty caprices of the gods. On that front, Martin I think has chosen rather to contrast his story with Tolkien’s, a decision he signals by heralding the threat with White Walkers instead of Black Riders. In both works, the forces of evil encroach upon civilization from the outside; but whereas in The Lord of the Rings the battles serve to hold back the encroachment long enough to let Frodo get in and defeat Sauron, in Game of Thrones they serve, like the politics, to weaken the world of the living and bring evil closer to triumph.
But it’s also often claimed – as a positive feature of the show by some, a negative by others – that the individual characters in Game of Thrones are all amoral except for a few who end up getting killed or tortured. This claim I think is mistaken; I was about to say “simply” mistaken but it’s not, it’s complexly mistaken.
Martin himself describes A Song of Ice and Fire as a battle between good and evil, but not (he explains) across a battlefield; rather, the battle is fought in the human heart. It’s not that there are no good or evil characters on Game of Thrones – it’s that every character is both good and evil, and which impulse they will choose to act on always hangs in the balance.
Again, the contrast with Tolkien is illuminating. For all that he was a devout Catholic, Tolkien doesn’t seem to have believed very strongly in repentance or redemption, at least to judge by Middle-Earth. Boromir is the only true penitent I can think of, and that’s only on the point of his death, after an entire arc of pretending to comply with the directive to destroy the Ring in order to get close enough to seize it. Though Frodo does well (we’re shown) to accept Gollum’s repentance and spare his life, Gollum himself is treacherous and comes to a bad end. In the Silmarillion we have a repeated pattern where a villain – Melkor, Sauron, Maeglin, and I think more besides – is captured and spared, makes show of repenting and is forgiven and allowed to rise to a place of honour, only to betray his benefactors and destroy everything they’ve built.
Contrast all that with the situation you have in Game of Thrones, where no less than four characters actually kill children (or, in one case, attempt to), and then are given redemption arcs. Three of these are straight from the books. It’s not that their sins are glossed over; Jaime Lannister, Sandor Clegane, Theon Greyjoy, and (on the show) the Red Priestess Melisandre all suffer for what they have done. The point is, they choose to become better. We are shown the evil within them so that we can then watch the good triumph over it.
This moral ambiguity – no, I think moral conflict is the phrase I was looking for – is one facet of Game of Thrones’ famously “grimdark” nature. Again this is a quality of the show that turns a lot of people off, and again there’s a contingent of fans who come to the show especially for it and are now complaining it’s being lost, and again blaming the showrunners for departing from Martin’s vision. And again I disagree, though with qualifications.
There’s been a fad for grim-&-gritty shows over the last decade or two; not just Game of Thrones but The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Vikings, Black Sails, Westworld, and more. And there are at least some people who’ve come to feel that anything not grimdark must be for kids, which others have quite rightly rejected but in some cases over-zealously.
What defines grimdark? Moral ambiguity, or conflict, is one diagnostic feature. Another is the absence of any superhuman purpose or force of destiny keeping things on track; the characters’ choices have real and permanent consequences. That means, in particular, that primary characters can be killed in combat or dragged off and executed. And just as the characters are not shielded from the reality of violence, nor is the audience.
Once again, you can point to the Iliad as a precursor, although in that instance there certainly are superhuman entities at work – they’re just not any better at keeping things on track than the humans. To this day the Iliad is hailed as the most realistic literary depiction of war ever produced, and a large part of that is the graphic yet matter-of-fact descriptions of exactly what happens to a human body when you hit it very hard with a sharp piece of metal. The violence in Game of Thrones is in the same tradition.
I’m OK with this. Graphic violence in media is an acquired taste, in the same vein as other initially scary or intense experiences like climbing mountains or drinking whisky or eating super-hot chillis. Again, if it’s not your thing it’s not your thing, and it’s perfectly reasonable to want to keep it out of reach of children. Since obviously violence in real life is morally charged, I can see why depictions of it raise concerns about their effects on people. I’m not going to sidetrack myself on the validity of those concerns; suffice to say I’m pretty sure it’s more complicated than either “no effect” or “monkey see monkey do”.
Depicting violence is not the same thing as glorifying violence. In some ways, if you’re going to have violence on your show, it might be better to make it graphic and be honest about the huge harm it does. These days, honestly, it’s sanitized violence that creeps me out – when punching people in the face is presented as good clean fun, when stabbing or shooting someone causes them to fall over and expire tidily with only the teensiest trickle of blood and maybe a few poignant last words. If you don’t like the ugliness of real violence, then maybe have your characters solve problems without using violence at all. Just a thought.
But Game of Thrones is not grimdark for grimdark’s sake. Game of Thrones has what Tolkien, in his famous essay On Fairy-Stories, called a “eucatastrophe”: a moment when the plot threads come together to reverse the hero’s fortunes and bring good unlooked-for out of bad, thus ushering in the happy ending that Tolkien argued was intrinsic to the fairy-tale form. That eucatastrophe occurs, of course, at the end of Season 6 episode 2 – the Easter Sunday to the Good Friday of Season 5 episode 10, the resurrection of Jon Snow.
And the thing is, you need the grimdark up until that moment to make that moment work. You need to think Jon Snow really is dead for good, until suddenly he isn’t. That’s tough to do with the main character of a fantasy story. Look at comic books and the associated movies, for comparison. Much as I will fight anyone who disses Avengers: Infinity War, we all know Spider-Man and Black Panther aren’t dead for realsies. The question in suspense for Endgame is how they’re going to be brought back, not whether they’re going to be brought back.
Given that resurrection is conventional in fantasy, how do you make it miraculous again? What you have to do is make it clear from the get-go that it isn’t something readers should expect in your fantasy world. And you also have to make it clear that nobody has plot armour, not even protagonists. And the only way to do that is to kill off central and/or sympathetic characters unexpectedly, which is exactly what Game of Thrones is notorious for doing. Ned Stark, Khal Drogo, Lommy, Jeor Mormont, Ros, Talisa Stark, Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark, Oberyn Martell, Ygritte, Jojen Reed, Ser Barristan Selmy, Princess Shireen Baratheon, and Princess Myrcella Baratheon all died to pave the way for Jon Snow.
My answer, then, to the accusation that Game of Thrones lost its mojo and became commonplace and tiresome when things finally started going right for the characters, is that all the stuff the accusers evidently preferred was never anything more than the drawing back of the bow. Now the arrow is in flight and nearing its target. I won’t claim the shift in tone was carried out perfectly; the earlier seasons so belaboured the impossibility of getting where you’re trying to go in Westeros that now that the characters are regularly getting where they’re trying to go, it feels a little cheap. But what’s the alternative? Another three seasons getting Arya back to Winterfell and Daenerys across the Narrow Sea?
I left a snarky comment on one YouTube video bemoaning the “decline” of the show into “bad writing” (on the basis that it’s now “predictable”, i.e. actually resolving its storylines):
How could the last two seasons have gone and still been in accordance with the tone set by the previous ones? Simple.Season 6
- Jon and the Hound are dead. The Northern Houses drive out the Free Folk, exiling them once again beyond the Wall along with Ser Davos and any Night’s Watch members who sided with Jon.
- Daenerys spends the whole season in the Dosh Khaleen. Ser Jorah dies of greyscale, first passing it to Daario, who is caught and killed by the Dothraki but again passes the infection to his killer, who brings it back to Vaes Dothrak, and in the final episode Daenerys contracts it.
- The slavers retake Meereen and kill Viserion and Rhaegal; Varys and Tyrion are enslaved. Euron sells Yara to the slavers, cue explicit rape scene.
- Ramsay Bolton recaptures Sansa, kills Theon, and eventually is not defeated in battle but stabbed in the back by Littlefinger, whom we then get to watch having extremely disturbing sex with Sansa. Brienne, unable to rejoin Sansa, sets out to get help from the Blackfish, but she and Podrick are caught and hanged by the Brotherhood Without Banners.
- Arya chooses to kill Lady Crane and, over the course of the season, abandons all shreds of her conscience. In the season finale she kills Jaqen H’ghar and becomes the leader of the Faceless Men.
- Cersei’s plot proceeds as per the existing show.
- Sam Tarly pretends Young Sam is his son and is tried and ultimately executed for breaking his Night’s Watch vow to “father no children”.
- After Hodor dies, Bran is caught and turned into a White Walker.
Season 7
I don’t think we need a Season 8 in this scenario.
- Dorne and Highgarden rebel against the Crown and are put down by the Lannisters. Ellaria and Olenna are nastily killed by the Mountain; one of the Sand Snakes survives, flees to Braavos, and hires the Faceless Men to kill Cersei.
- The Iron Bank engage Euron, the re-enslaved Unsullied, and the Sons of the Harpy to collect the Crown’s debt. The Lannisters are victorious after a season’s worth of skirmishes and intrigues. Varys manages to talk his way into his masters’ good books, whereas Tyrion is kept on a chain and made to entertain people. Varys promises to help him but over the course of the season it becomes clear that this is not in his interests and he breaks his promise, whereupon Tyrion kills him.
- In the final battle Tyrion is captured by the Lannisters and brought before Cersei, where he makes a convincing case for sparing his life but she kills him anyway. She is then killed by Arya. Littlefinger is in King’s Landing by this time, playing both sides against each other and becoming powerful as he always does. He gets the “me on the Iron Throne” part of his wish but misses out on the “with Sansa by my side” part because Arya (who, in this version, remember, has become a remorseless assassin) kills her as well.
- Ser Davos and Tormund find the Horn of Joramun and quarrel over what to do with it. In the final episode Ser Davos tries to destroy it; Tormund kills him and blows it. The Wall falls and the Dead enter the Seven Kingdoms.
- Daenerys sort of wanders around Essos gradually developing greyscale and going mad. By the time she finally catches up with Drogon in the final episode she’s suicidal and commands him to kill her. He does.
Is that (I did not say but implied) the show you would rather have watched?
Now since I’ve mentioned the sex scenes, I don’t suppose I can avoid discussing them; though – unlike the grimdark – I haven’t heard anyone complain that Game of Thrones doesn’t have enough sex or nudity. I’ll start with the nudity. I’ve heard some people say that they didn’t mind the violence or the swearing but they got sick of seeing boobs in every episode. I’ve heard others say that they were attracted to the show by the nudity, although they would have preferred to see more penises, but the violence put them off.
For the most part the show treats nudity as inherently sexual. Social nudity from the books – such as among the Summer Islanders, or women’s fashions in the city of Qarth – largely disappears. Public nudity does occur in non-sexual contexts, but it’s always presented as an exceptional display of vulnerability, of something that would usually be private. So while I, as you know, very strongly hold that nudity is not about sex, I acknowledge that in Game of Thrones they’re intertwined and best treated together.
Not that it’s without nuance. I’ve had occasion before to compare the two scenes (in Season 5 episode 10 and Season 6 episode 4, respectively) where Cersei and Daenerys each emerge from a temple where they have been held captive by their enemies and walk naked before the people of the city. Cersei’s nudity demonstrates her powerlessness in the hands of the Sparrows, and King’s Landing responds to it with violence. Daenerys’s nudity demonstrates her faith in herself and her power over the fire she set in the temple, and Vaes Dothrak responds to it with worship. (Cersei, to complete the parallel, burns her enemies’ temple in Season 6 episode 10.)
As to the sex, there are two separate complaints. I know, I know, there are a myriad of specific complaints, but they fall into two broad streams. One is that Game of Thrones objectifies women, particularly in the way it depicts rape; the other is that it has sex scenes and sex scenes are dirty and yucky. You’ll probably already have guessed from my tone what relative moral weight I assign to each. As always, if sex scenes aren’t your thing then they aren’t your thing, and I will never tell you that you ought to watch them – I just object to the insinuation that I must be a person of low tastes because I watch them.
This time, we can’t reach for the “Homer did the same” excuse. The Iliad’s main plot is set in motion by a dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon over their property rights in Trojan sex slaves, and its background is of course the adulterous affair between Paris and Helen. Yet, pivotal though sex and rape are to the story, they are never described in plain words. The reader or hearer is expected to fill in for themselves what happens when two lovers enter a bedchamber or a warlord orders female captives to his tent.
I’m not going to argue why I don’t think it’s immoral to have sex scenes in a book or a show, because frankly I think the burden of proof is on those claiming it is immoral. Artistically, however, every element of a narrative work has to be judged by how well it advances the story. Do the sex scenes in Game of Thrones advance the story? Would the show be diminished if they were merely hinted at from context? I mean, apart from the view that the whole thing is just an excuse for the sex scenes anyway (like when Ian McShane described it as “only tits and dragons”).
Honestly, I think it would. One of the major themes of Game of Thrones is the discrepancy between how the nobility present themselves to the common folk and what they’re actually like. For that to work, you need to see the times when the image and the reality diverge most strongly – and unless the nobility of Westeros are very much more noble than our own leaders, those times more often than not are going to involve sexual misconduct. There’s a reason why Littlefinger makes his income running a brothel: that’s where you see the rich and powerful at their most compromised. Which unusually neatly explains both the character motivation and the thematic relevance of this story element.
Once again Jon Snow is the key – Jon Snow, his supposed bastardy, and his actual parentage. None of that would work unless he came from a society that both valued chastity enough to treat the offspring of illicit sex as “lesser”, and violated it often enough to need a whole social category to contain such individuals. Such a society is necessarily both hypocritical and unjust, and when you have hypocrisy and injustice it is best to lay it bare. To sneak the sex away behind curtains and tent-flaps and bushes and scene cuts and discreet camera angles would imply that there was after all something wrong with sex per se, which would undermine the show’s case against the hypocrisy of condemning bastardy.
Which is all well and good, but by that logic, we would expect to see an awful lot more male characters nude than we do. We would expect to see sexual situations from the point of view of the female gaze approximately half the time, instead of three or four times in seven seasons. I fully agree with the complaint about the lack of penises. On the rare occasions when we do get to see them it’s played for the gross-out value, not sexualized the way the show does with female bodies. Curiously convenient, how challenging societal hypocrisy happens to involve pandering to the straight male market. No, I don’t have a defence this time. Game of Thrones could and should have done better.
The problem becomes particularly acute when we come to the intersection of violence and sex – Game of Thrones’ notorious rape scenes. Martin is perfectly right to argue that it would be dishonest to talk about war and leave out the rape; rape has been central to war as long as there has been war, as the Iliad illustrates. On the face of it, given its grimdark ethos and its frankness about sex, it makes perfect sense for Game of Thrones to address rape head-on... if only, if only the sex didn’t have to pass through the filter of straight male desire before hitting the screen, until the rapes seem calculated to titillate as much as to horrify.
OK. Now I’ve offered separate justifications for the violence and the sex being shown explicitly, albeit with a change of focus for the sex; does that mean I think the explicit rape is also justified? Truthfully, no. Or at least it should have been shown far more sparingly, and otherwise left to the imagination.
Why the inconsistency? Because the arguments for the violence don’t work when it’s sexual violence, and the arguments for the sex don’t work when it’s coerced sex. The violence is explicit to imbue it with the visceral horror of serious injury; but rape onscreen mostly just looks like sex, since the viewer isn’t actually inside the victim’s head. Conversely, the sex is explicit to challenge the hypocrisy of pretending to abhor it, since most of us actually seek it; but there is nothing hypocritical about abhorring rape.
What I can say is that there has been a sudden drop-off in the incidence of rape scenes on Game of Thrones ever since the end of Season 5. In fact, in all of the last two seasons there was only one, that being part of the punishment Cersei devises for Septa Unella, and that was handled much more sensitively – we see Unella bound to a table, we hear her screams, but we don’t get shown what she’s screaming about. That was in Season 6 episode 10, and there was no rape at all in Season 7. Better late than never, I suppose.
Right now, I’m approaching Season 8 with trepidation. I probably won’t get to see Episode 1 for a few days after it airs, for boring reasons, and so I’m going to be dodging spoilers for a while. At least I don’t have a Tumblr any more.
Part of the appeal of Game of Thrones has always been how good it is at keeping its many story threads running, making sure that every setup eventually leads to a payoff. But it’s a lot easier to give the impression you’re doing that when you’ve still got chapters left unwritten to defer some of the payoffs to. At the conclusion, all those bills come due. I’ve seen stories with as much promise as Game of Thrones stumble at the end before now.
I didn’t originally intend to get as deep as this – this post was going to be mainly predictions for what would happen in Season 8, because I made some bold ones last year that came true and I hadn’t written them down, particularly the fate of Littlefinger. But that feels like a bit of a tone-slump now. The only one that feels like I’m sticking my neck out is: I don’t think the Blackfish is really dead. We saw no kill and no body in Season 6 episode 8, which isn’t how Game of Thrones kills its characters. We got the news of his death from a character who had every reason to lie. If Sandor Clegane can come back after a season and a half when we thought we’d seen him dying, Brynden Tully can come back from a rumour.
Right, I’d better get this posted before it goes out of date.
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