T w e n t y S i d e d
Everyone’s favoriteshut up Game of Thrones gripe-a-thon is back! I won’t even have time to complain about everything I wanted to complain about between now and July 16th, when the new season is scheduled to start. But all I can do is try. Never let it be said that common sense limited my can-do spirit.
In keeping with what I’ve done so far, I’m going to pick a single season six storyline – in this case, Arya’s – and stick with it. And hoo boy, did I pick a doozy.
It would be going too far to say that Arya’s storyline was the season’s worst – that particular trophy was retained by the season five defending champions, Dorne. But it was the one I found the most obnoxious. The Dorne plotline was inept and scatterbrained, sure, but I didn’t personally see any malice in it. The Arya plotline, on the other hand, continuously manipulates the audience in a way that I find familiar enough to breed contempt.
I’ll sound smarter if I give this phenomenon a name, so I’ll call it the “Lindeloffian Method.” Damon Lindelof is the often-talented-but-even-more-often-infuriating auteur who gave us Lost and Prometheus, among other things. He’s not the only writer who practices the Lindeloffian Method, but he is the most noteworthy, so I’ve named it after him.
The Lindeloffian method is this: have something happen that makes no sense, hint at a promised explanation later, and then never deliver. Simple, but effective, because it gives the audience something that’s initially indistinguishable from actual suspense. When they start to get antsy, you replace the old mystery with another, bigger mystery, and carry on as before.
It’s essentially the Ponzi scheme of fiction writing. In a Ponzi scheme, the grifter gets people to invest in some plausible-sounding company, and makes payments to the first group of investors with the money from the second group, then the second with the third, and so on. Once you run out of suckers the scheme collapses, of course, but by then a smart operator will have already skipped town with what’s left of everyone’s money.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game of Thrones Griping 10: The Lindeloffian Method”
