“Game of
Thrones Revisited”
Remember
all the disappointed hullabaloo over Game of Thrones’ last few seasons
and its ending? It struck me at the time that it was somewhat clueless, as the
show couldn’t have ended much better – if you were a sort of democrat. If you were a conventional royalist, then
your disappointment would be great. If
you were unaware of the past or modern historical references buried in the
story, then you would be flummoxed.
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| The night fog of war |
Like others
in this time of COVID, I’ve re-watched the whole series, which I think will rate
as one of the great modern myths. Unlike
Joseph Campbell who looked back to the ancient Bible, to old Greece legends,
Roman heroes or Nordic sagas as Western European myths, modern societies create
their own myths all the time. GoT
and JRR Martin was inspired by Tolkein’s prior Lord of the Rings – a 20th
century British book with far more current power than Campbell’s citations. Modern myths actually translate through
films, TV series or books now - these are the new myth-makers. The classicist Campbellites, and even the
Jungians, should catch up.
I too was
disappointed by the Season 8 Winterfell night battle with the Night King, his
blue-eyed dragon, White Walkers and his zombie wights. It was scattered, jumpy, hard to see what was
happening and most of all allowed many key characters to stay alive. Absolutely unlikely that each would be
surrounded by an aggressive clot of zombies and still survive. 6 died – little Lady Mormont, Jorah Mormont, Theon
Greyjoy, Beric Dondarrion of the Brotherhood Without Banners, one of the lead
Dothraki and Melisandre, the Red Priestess.
But why did Podrick survive? Or
Robert’s bastard Gendry? Or even Ser/Lady
Brienne? Or Grey Worm? Or Davos Seaworth? This preservation of lead characters was
forecast in Season 6 & 7 as fewer died in those seasons. This signified the increased control by the
show runners, who favored familiar ‘heroic’ individualist framing.
In that
battle, other things made no sense. Who
sends hundreds of Dorthraki on horses in an attack into the dark? Didn’t all their lighted scimitars go out –
which led one to think that they were all dead.
But no! Many show up at the siege
of King’s Landing. Same with the
Unsullied, who were all caught in front of the moat, including Grey Worm, still
under massive pressure from the wights, armed only with long spears. A number of them somehow survived too. Unlikely, especially as they both functioned
in this tale as dark-skinned cannon fodder – just like the real world. Instead
of general winning tactics, a skillful assassin, Arya, takes down the Night
King with a cheesy move. She is sort of
a modern JSOC Navy Seal. The Night King
– i.e. climate change - was far more dangerous than Cersei, GoT’s version
of Trump. This battle leads to a bit of
an anti-climax, as I would have structured it the other way around. Cersei first, the Night King last. And that would have negated any lame plot
needs to keep those characters around.
Anyway. For the endless and ahistorical Middle Ages depicted
in the story of fire and ice, it ends somewhat benevolently with a bit of
historical progress. This in spite of large narrative errors like the stolen Highgarden
gold buying the services of the Golden Company.
This even though the whole Highgarden gold-laden wagon train was scorched by dragon
fire and its defenders defeated. And yet Cersei still got the gold!
If you were
banking on Daenerys Targaryen, John Snow/Targaryen, Tyrion Lannister or Sansa Stark
as the new head of the 7 Kingdoms, then you were disappointed and perhaps so
set in your royalist tendencies you didn’t even know it. As I’ve pointed out before, it ended in a bit
of a Runnymede. What we got instead was an all-knowing cipher
of a king, Bran the Broken; independence for the North and John Snow leaving to live
with the northern Free Folk. And note how the Westerosi ‘south’ is the most
corrupt part, much like the present U.S. neo-Confederate / Republican south. Maybe ‘beyond the wall’ for the U.S. is really the Canadian border and not Scotland.
Tyrion, who
made so many mistakes, will probably end up running everything in the 6
kingdoms as a liberal technocrat. That
is if he can get the brothels up and running in King’s Landing. This is the guy
who negotiated the handing back of slavery to the slavers for 7 years, even
after winning the war against slavery.
Would Lincoln
have done this? No, but Andrew Johnson basically
did. This is the guy who doesn’t know
how to send out scouts to find fleets and armies, leading to the destruction of
two of Daenerys’ fleets, one dragon and one ally in Highgarden.
Yet he’s supposed to be some kind of military thinker. He’s the guy who thinks he can negotiate with
a medieval fascist, his sister. All this
to capture a wight and subsequently lose a dragon that later melts Hadrian’s
Ice Wall. If the 700 foot ice wall hadn’t come down, Westros would have had a
better chance. So love me, I’m a
liberal! It is not his dwarfism or his 'humanity' that is
odious, it is his politics. Identify
that.
Liberalism,
royalism and even imperialism take blows in this series. The final dystopian incineration of King’s
Landing is the capstone to it, recalling the fire-bombing of Dresden, leveled north
Korean cities, burning Vietnamese hamlets, smart bombs over Baghdad - but
especially the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a nuclear ‘dragon.’ Our ‘breaker of chains’ turns out to be a megalomaniac
– her humanitarian imperialism has run its course. This might have surprised the liberal, the
run-of-the-mill fantasy watcher, the YouTube podcast dweeb or the royalist. After all, she’d won. Martin, who stayed to the end of the series as
advisor, was making a bigger point.
Prior blog
reviews on this subject below, use blog search box upper left: “Game of
Thrones.”
The
Cultural Marxist
July 14,
2020
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