{"id":40588,"date":"2017-09-04T06:00:35","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T10:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40588"},"modified":"2017-09-08T13:15:07","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T17:15:07","slug":"timely-game-of-thrones-griping-8-the-offseason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40588","title":{"rendered":"Timely Game of Thrones Griping 8: The Offseason"},"content":{"rendered":"
This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both.<\/div>\n

With season seven now wrapped up, it would be good to revisit some of the things I said many moons ago, when I first started my epic journey of complaining about Game of Thrones<\/em>. Basically, what started all of this was a hypothesis. I believed that the show’s audience was in the early stages of experiencing what Shamus refers to as “story collapse”If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s explained in this series of posts.<\/a><\/span>, and that, sometime during the final two seasons, full story collapse would occur, and the show’s reputation would suffer.<\/p>\n

The 'gitchy feeling' is my pet term for the feeling you get prior to story collapse.<\/div>
The 'gitchy feeling' is my pet term for the feeling you get prior to story collapse.<\/div><\/p>\n

Was my prediction correct? So far, no. (However, there’s still another season for it to come true.) Instead, many critics did something I didn’t account for: they experienced story collapse, but their opinions on the show’s overall quality didn’t change.<\/p>\n

The best (and daftest) show on television<\/h3>\n

Take this review<\/a> of season seven from Vox, titled “How Game of Thrones season 7 went awry: The series is so intent on fooling its audience that too much of its storytelling no longer makes sense.” You can read the linked article if you want, but hopefully the title is enough to make you believe me when I say that it’s pretty critical. The author makes many of the same complaints I made in my reviews, and is bothered by many of the same things I was bothered by. “Right at the worst possible time,” he writes, “it's become all but impossible to figure out just what anything on the show means<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

But then, after more than 1600 unminced words of criticism, the final section of the review starts with the sentence “Please note that none of this means Game of Thrones<\/em> is bad.” Doesn’t<\/em> it, though? To me, a TV show with nonsensical storytelling is a bad TV show. But maybe I’m wrong about that.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In case you think that’s a isolated case, try reading this review<\/a> from the Guardian, titled “Game of Thrones: the best show on TV just became the silliest.” If you don’t want to read the whole thing, I can just give you some highlights:<\/p>\n

“little things like “logic” and “character” have burst out of the seams . . . did any of the characters do or say anything remotely plausible for the entire episode? No they did not . . . characters telling each other exactly what they thought of them in great granite slabs of exposition . . . the characters felt like they were little more than window-dressing as the narrative groaned and twisted to see to it that Dany joined the war against the Walkers and the Night's King got his dragon . . . Characters aren't so much pieces being moved on a board than the board is being moved under them, credulity be damned . . . In a show full of dragons and magic, it's strange that the humans are starting to feel fake.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course the humans feel fake. Look at the ones in the background of this shot. Painfully obvious CGI. You can see the pixels!<\/div>
Of course the humans feel fake. Look at the ones in the background of this shot. Painfully obvious CGI. You can see the pixels!<\/div><\/p>\n

But then, after spending most of the review laying into the show with no mercy, the author ends by writing that Game of Thrones is “still the best show on TV, and I will have an inappropriately passionate argument with anyone who claims otherwise. It's just a shame it's also now one of the daftest.”<\/p>\n

This sort of thing is frustrating for me to read. I don’t believe that it should be possible for a show to simultaneously be both the best and<\/em> the daftest show on television. To me, those are mutually exclusive states.<\/p>\n

I could list more examples, but you get the idea. In the last part of this season, several sites whose reviews are usually positive followed a similar pattern to the above two: the body of the review seems to describe a one or two-star show, but the final rating is four-five stars or the equivalent. When this disparity is acknowledged, the reasoning given is usually that the show is an entertaining spectacle. From the Vox review: “I finished watching almost every episode of season seven with a stupid grin on my face, and it only became apparent how little sense it made once I started trying to write about it.” From the Guardian: “To the series' credit, if you are going to paper over gulfs in logic, the best way to do it is with explosions, zombie bears and flaming swords.”<\/p>\n

Curiously, none of the reviews mention how entertaining it is to watch an aunt fall in love and have sex with her nephew.<\/div>
Curiously, none of the reviews mention how entertaining it is to watch an aunt fall in love and have sex with her nephew.<\/div><\/p>\n

There is one particular word, conspicuous by its frequency, that floats around the universe of Game of Thrones<\/em> criticism, the use of which I think is telling. That word is “satisfying.” Again and again reviews will use that word to refer to developments on, or episodes of, the show. Wondering if I was crazy, I googled the names of several other prominent shows along with the word “satisfying” to see if this was a common occurrence. Based on my highly unscientific research method, it’s not. This is a word that the world has settled on to describe Game of Thrones<\/em> in particular.<\/p>\n

It seems that so long as “satisfying” things keep happening, most critics will continue to like the show, and in the end it doesn’t much matter if those satisfying things make no sense, or go nowhere, or are reversed in the very next episode. But if the world at large is going to take this show seriously, then in my opinion it should<\/em> matter. This is the opinion I’ve settled on. This is the windmill I’ve decided to tilt at.<\/p>\n

Ordinarily, I keep topical soccer analogies out of my posts here, but this one is too perfect not to use. In the early 2000s, Real Madrid had a player named Claude Makelele. He did his job so well that to this day people refer to a certain style of midfield play as “the Makelele role.” But Makelele was not a flashy player who could make long passes or dribble around people, so Real Madrid’s management, not properly appreciating his importance to the team, sold him to another club in the same offseason that they bought David Beckham. Legendary player (and expert headbutter) Zinedine Zidane, who played for Madrid at the time, famously said “we’ve put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley, but we’ve lost the engine.”Or something like that. I’ve heard different wordings of the quote from different sources.<\/span><\/p>\n

Game of Thrones<\/em> keeps adding new layers of gold paint to the Bentley. New deaths, new emmy-bait monologues, new CGI showcases, new shocking twists. But they lost the engine a while ago.<\/p>\n

What exact species of bee is in my bonnet, anyway?<\/h3>\n

Why do I care about this so much? On any list of the world’s injustices, “critics are too forgiving of Game of Thrones’<\/em> faults” is going to rank pretty low. Sometimes I feel like the grumpiest grump in all of Grumpistan, shaking my fist at a decadent public and demanding that it stop enjoying things.<\/p>\n

Stop enjoying the scenery! It's internally inconsistent! Dragonstone is supposed to be on an island with no significant agriculture! You are objectively a bad person if you think this shot is pretty!<\/div>
Stop enjoying the scenery! It's internally inconsistent! Dragonstone is supposed to be on an island with no significant agriculture! You are objectively a bad person if you think this shot is pretty!<\/div><\/p>\n

In fact, the idea of people liking the show doesn’t bother me. I suspect that part of it is its sheer popularity. The show is huge – more than any other show since Lost,<\/em> and possibly moreso than Lost<\/em> itself for that matter, Game of Thrones<\/em> can plausibly lay claim to the title of “television event.” It’s not just that so many people watch it, but that it’s referenced everywhere. Almost anytime there’s any kind of double-cross or unexpected twist in the news, there’ll be some commentator or another along shortly to tell us how this is just like Game of Thrones<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It’s hard not to get swept up in something like that if you’re part of it. When I was thirteen, I didn’t particularly like football. But then the Chargers had a season where they went all the way to the Super BowlAnd, once there, got absolutely housed by the Steve Young 49ers.<\/span>, and I got swept up onto the bandwagon. I still didn’t really like or understand football, but I liked watching Chargers games. Up until that point I wasn’t familiar with the idea that a San Diego sports team could be good, and it felt like I was part of something big and exciting.<\/p>\n

Game of Thrones<\/em> is riding a similar wave. There’s nothing wrong with that. I can’t bring myself to disapprove of people doing the same thing I did with the Chargers. And even I can’t help but chuckle whenever I hear the Cleganebowl airhorn. But here’s the thing: as Uncle Ben has taught us in so many Spider-Man<\/em> reboots, with great cultural ubiquity comes great responsibility. I believe that when a show becomes this popular, it takes on a moral dimension that it didn’t have before. And in this case, the moral dimension is a troubling one.<\/p>\n

Explaining what I mean by that is going to take its own post. It turns out I have at least one more week of griping left in me. I’ll see you next Monday.<\/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. With season seven now wrapped up, it would be good to revisit some of the things I said many moons ago, when I first started my epic journey of complaining about Game of Thrones. Basically, […]<\/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-40588","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\/40588","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=40588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}