{"id":36964,"date":"2017-02-10T06:00:06","date_gmt":"2017-02-10T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=36964"},"modified":"2017-09-08T13:19:53","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T17:19:53","slug":"game-of-thrones-griping-3-the-gitchy-feeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=36964","title":{"rendered":"Game of Thrones Griping 3: The Gitchy Feeling"},"content":{"rendered":"
This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both.<\/div>\n

Last week we attempted to locate the “original sin” of the season five Winterfell storyline – the place where it all started to go wrong. My conclusion is that the whole thing never should’ve happened to begin with. From a character motivation standpoint, it was hopelessly broken from the word go. And yet as you’ll recall, the critical backlash centered not on the fact that none of it made any sense but that Sansa’s rape was some mixture of excessive and exploitative. My personal explanation for this centers around something I call the “gitchy feeling.”<\/p>\n

The Gitchy Feeling<\/h3>\n

Check out Bone if you get the chance. It's a fun (though tragically short) comic.<\/div>
Check out Bone if you get the chance. It's a fun (though tragically short) comic.<\/div><\/p>\n

The phrase itself comes from an oldBy “old,” I mean nineties-era. You know, old.<\/span> comic book called Bone. I briefly attempted to be a comic book nerd in the fifth grade – it never really took, but I did enjoy Bone, which had an art style and sensibility something like Walt Kelly’s Pogo, another favorite of mine. One of the characters in it is Gran’ma Ben, a salt-of-the-earth homesteader type who sometimes gets the “gitchy feeling,” an omen of bad things to come.<\/p>\n

For whatever reason the phrase stuck with me for years afterward. Eventually, inside my own head, I came to use it to describe the feeling I got when in the presence of slapdash writing – the feeling that something is not right, and whatever’s happening on the page or screen is going to end not with a satisfying conclusion but with a cloud of excuses and distractions. You could think of the gitchy feeling as being an early warning sign for story collapse, and if it gets bad enough it can spoil a story by itself.I remember for instance that starting around season three of Lost I couldn’t really enjoy the show anymore because the gitchy feeling had gotten too bad.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the tricky things about the gitchy feeling is that it’s possible and even easy to misdiagnose its source. This leads me to an example that’s important in my own psuedo-career as an amateur internet complainer guy. Like many people, I was influenced by the famous “Mr. Plinkett” review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.Here’s a link<\/a> just in case you haven’t already seen it. Warning: long.<\/span> Of course, that movie had produced a negative reaction in many who saw it, but it also produced a common misdiagnosis for that negative reaction: Jar-Jar Binks. It was Jar-Jar, people said angrily, that had ruined the movie – or possibly the kid who played a young Anakin, or maybe the introduction of midichlorians, or some other specific, limited failing.<\/p>\n

Plinkett, by contrast, correctly stated that the problems ran deeper: the movie had no clear protagonist, bland characters, and a murky plot that failed to establish any emotional stakes with the viewer. The problem wasn’t so much Jar-Jar as it was everything else. This is what led me to believe that audiences get the gitchy feeling just like I do – and when they do, they often look for the most obviously offensive or conspicuous flaw in a work and identify that as the culprit. In the case of the Phantom Menace, that was the goofy, overbroad comic-relief character: Jar-Jar Binks.<\/p>\n

Now, with the full knowledge that this theory is about as thin as gossamer, I’ve come to hold the following belief about Game of Thrones: that Sansa’s rape was to season five as Jar-Jar was to The Phantom Menace. Audiences, attempting to locate the source of their dissatisfaction with the story, seized on its most offensive and conspicuous element. This isn’t to say that the scene wasn’t bad in and of itself, or that people are somehow wrong to dislike it on its own merits, or that other criticisms of the show not made here aren’t valid. But I do suspect that some of the dissatisfaction that audiences thought came from that particular scene also come from deeper problems with the narrative.<\/p>\n

Regardless of the source, however, the show now had an image problem, and HBO wanted it fixed. It was now time for…<\/p>\n

Woman on Top<\/h3>\n

A rare non-smirking picture of Natalie Dormer.<\/div>
A rare non-smirking picture of Natalie Dormer.<\/div><\/p>\n

Never let it be said that the showrunners, Benioff and Weiss, don’t listen to at least some of their critics some of the time. If Game of Thrones was being accused of sexism, then by god they were going to fix it, and they were going to let everyone KNOW they’d fixed it. That meant a marketing blitz where nearly every mouthpiece the show had was deployed to give interviews and plot tidbits designed to play up the strength and agency of the women of Westeros.<\/p>\n

Most notably (and infamously, in certain corners of the internet), this led to Entertainment Weekly’s collection of “Dame of Thrones\/Woman on Top” cover stories, each featuring a different female character from the show. The fact that they chose to brand this campaign with a rather crude sexual innuendo suggests that they may not have learned the exact lessons their critics wanted them to. With that said, I don’t mean to be overly scornful of the attempt. If you believe, as many do, that popular culture is sexist in its representational habits, then one way of addressing the problem is to deliberately and self-consciously overcorrect in the opposite direction. Such overcorrections can be clumsy at times, but it doesn’t mean their intentions aren’t good, or that they can’t be positive in their net effect.<\/p>\n

Just because good intentions pave the road to hell doesn't mean you have to TAKE the road.<\/div>
Just because good intentions pave the road to hell doesn't mean you have to TAKE the road.<\/div><\/p>\n

Of course, changes such as these are only worthwhile if they take place on a level deeper than the superficial. If the only lesson the writers learn is “take it easy on the rape scenes” that’s not too encouraging. Nonetheless, the narrative was set: the show had made its mistakes in season five, but it was going to fix them and then some in season six. Stay tuned to see how successful they were.Spoiler alert: I think they pretty much made a hash of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, the End of the Introduction<\/h3>\n

Now, after three weeks’ worth of posts, I’ve finally arrived at what was supposed to be my starting point: a critical analysis of the season six Winterfell storyline. In my defense, brevity was never one of my virtues. But I felt that a detailed introduction was necessary to establish my various claims going forward:<\/p>\n

1. That Game of Thrones has a writing problem, and a pretty bad one.<\/p>\n

2. That audiences and critics are aware of this problem on some level, and are experiencing the “gitchy feeling.”<\/p>\n

3. That at some point between now and the end of the final season, the writing problems are going to become too severe too ignore, at a cost to the show’s reputation.<\/p>\n

4. That the negative reaction to certain elements of the fifth season has given us a sneak preview of what this might look like.<\/p>\n

My goal now is to demonstrate that the show’s writing hasn’t been any less broken in season six than it was in season five. My critique of season five’s Winterfell storyline was about as brief as I could possibly make it; I could probably write reams on its other parts, from Ramsay’s rape and torture extravaganza to Stannis Baratheon’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. But I want to stay as focused as I can: from here on in, we get to the real meat of the complaining, so strap in. This week’s post is pretty short – the calm before the storm…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both. Last week we attempted to locate the “original sin” of the season five Winterfell storyline – the place where it all started to go wrong. My conclusion is that the whole thing never should’ve happened […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-of-thrones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}