{"id":40706,"date":"2017-09-18T06:00:39","date_gmt":"2017-09-18T10:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40706"},"modified":"2017-09-18T08:42:34","modified_gmt":"2017-09-18T12:42:34","slug":"timely-game-of-thrones-griping-9-valar-bloghulis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40706","title":{"rendered":"Timely Game of Thrones Griping 9: Valar Bloghulis"},"content":{"rendered":"
This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both.<\/div>\n

Two weeks ago I promised you all an update “next week” (ie, last week). That’s because I forgot that I wasn’t planning on doing one last week because of busyness issues – sorry about that. But now I’m back and ready to start complaining again.<\/p>\n

Whenever I review Game of Thrones I have to rein in the impulse to just laundry-list all the things I didn’t like or that didn’t make sense to me. If I did that, we’d be here all day and it wouldn’t be much fun to read. Instead the challenge is to pick out the things that bothered me most, or if not that the ones I think are most revealing. Using this technique, I will now review the entire show. Not an episode, not a season, but the entire show – or at least my personal experience with it.<\/p>\n

My personal experience can be bookended with two moments: the first time I began to have doubts about the show, and the time that I finally gave up on it. I’ll describe each below, and then tell you what I took away from the whole thing.
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Ned Stark: Average Swordfighter<\/h3>\n

My first doubts about the show happened in season one, episode five: “The Wolf and the Lion.” Note that I still liked the show at this point. I kept liking it through the first three seasons, in fact – but even then there were things that bothered me.<\/p>\n

In this episode, Jaime Lannister, angry about his brother’s kidnapping by Catelyn, confronts Ned Stark in King’s Landing. Ned initially tries to talk him down, but then Jaime kills Jory Cassell (I don’t remember if he was a named character in the show, but that’s his name in the books) and Ned and Jaime have themselves a swordfight. They seem evenly matched, but then a Lannister guard stabs Ned in the leg. Jaime, irritated at being denied a fair victory, punches the guard out and then leaves Ned wounded in the street.<\/p>\n

Very much a season one set. This is what the show looked like before HBO secured funding from the Iron Bank of Braavos.<\/div>
Very much a season one set. This is what the show looked like before HBO secured funding from the Iron Bank of Braavos.<\/div><\/p>\n

This is the point where I bring in the dreaded book knowledge. In the books, this setup for this scene is more or less identical (Jaime confronts Ned after Tyrion’s kidnapping), but there’s no swordfight. Ned tries to defuse the situation, then Jaime orders his men to kill the Stark men (including Jory Cassell), and in the chaos Ned’s horse falls over, injuring his leg.<\/p>\n

To understand the book’s version of events, it’s important to know that in the books, Ned has no particular reputation as a swordsman. He is a noble, which means he would have been trained at arms from a young age, and he is, generally speaking, a capable person. So while it’s reasonable to expect that he’d be good with a sword, there’s no reason to think he’d be great with one, or that he’d be a match for a famous prodigy like Jaime Lannister. For his part, Jaime is as good as he is because he’s driven. As we’ll later learn (in the books, at least), he’s a very damaged person, almost addicted to self-hatred, and his fighting ability is the main thing that he takes his sense of self-worth from – a sense of self-worth that will be shattered when he loses his sword hand.<\/p>\n

In fact, in the books Ned never fights anyone at all. If anything, he’s always striving to avoid violence, and particularly to protect children. So to me, having Ned and Jaime fight like this diminishes both characters. But Benioff and Weiss, who wrote the episode, either didn’t realize that, didn’t agree with it, or didn’t care. They wanted a swordfight, and a swordfight is what they got.<\/p>\n

Hizdahr zo Loraq: Legitimately a very good show-only character<\/h3>\n

In season five, my personal breakout star of the show was Hizdahr zo Loraq. You should know that Hizdahr is not, strictly speaking, a show-only character. In the books, there’s a character called the same thing, who advocates for the re-opening of Meeren’s fighting pits, and who Dany eventually marries. But the show version is so different from the book version in personality, dialogue, and role in the story that I basically consider him a creation of the show and not the books.<\/p>\n

And he’s good! He’s really good! His dialogue is thoughtful and has real heart. The performance – by an actor named Joel Fry – is right on the money. He’s a good example of an adaptational tool – a character that, in a minimum of screen time, communicates to the audience the complex challenges of ruling a foreign city undergoing sudden social, cultural, and economic change. I liked Hizdahr, to the extent I’m able to like someone who’s part of the elite class of a slaveowning society. And even if that tempered my opinion of him as a (fictional) person, it didn’t temper my opinion of him as a character that played an effective role in the story.<\/p>\n

The show never took full advantage of Joel Fry's glowering ability.<\/div>
The show never took full advantage of Joel Fry's glowering ability.<\/div><\/p>\n

All of this just made it more disappointing when the show started treating him like a chew toy. I personally got an almost palpable sense of the writers’ unease that they’d accidentally created a likeable character who wasn’t motivated by revenge or bloodthirst. So Daenerys takes him prisoner, herds him and some other Ghiscari nobles into the dungeon, and has her dragons set one of them on fire. She’s about to do the same to Hizdahr when she changes her mind and chucks him in a cell instead.<\/p>\n

When she visits him later, he’s on his knees, prepared to beg for his life, when she announces that she’s going to marry a Ghiscari noble. “Fortunately, a suitor is already on his knees,” she says, in her signature emotionless monotone that I think we’re supposed to find cool and badass. He isn’t given a choice in the matter, and they’re married when next we see them.Yep, they get married offscreen. I thought it was weird too.<\/span> From here on Hizdahr doesn’t do much. Daario keeps trying to one-up him in front of Dany, who rewards his rudeness with approving smirks, and he gets into a confusing argument with Tyrion, apparently about whether or not you can accomplish great things without killing people. I couldn’t figure out what point Hizdahr was trying to make, but this show loves Tyrion. If a character is arguing with Tyrion, we’re generally supposed to understand that that character is in the wrong.<\/p>\n

Then the Sons of the Harpy attack, and he gets stabbed to death. And thus ends the initially promising but ultimately pointless story of Hizdahr zo Loraq.<\/p>\n

Why did I just type all that?<\/h3>\n

I promised you a takeaway from these two anecdotes. I think they reveal what kind of creative product the showrunners wanted to make, and how they wanted it to be seen.<\/p>\n

A useful word in criticism is “framing.” The shortest explanation of the word’s use I can come up with is that the audience’s perception of an element of the show will be influenced by how that element is presented to the audience – how it’s framed. One easy way of intuiting a scene’s framing is asking “am I supposed to cheer or boo right now”? It’s not always obvious – the show does still occasionally traffic in measured ambiguity – but it usually is.<\/p>\n

For instance, we’re supposed to like Ned, and we’re supposed to like Dany. We’re supposed to cheer when Ned pulls out his sword and starts fighting. even if it damages his characterization. We’re generally supposed to cheer whenever Dany starts up with a speech or threat, or goes into her emotionless monotone mode, even if she’s doing horrible things. And she does do horrible things. She has no way of knowing which Ghiscari noble or nobles is collaborating with the insurgency, so her plan is to burn them one by one until one of them talks. Then she forces marriage on Hizdahr without any input from him.<\/p>\n

From the show’s framing, it’s clear that our overall reaction to Dany is supposed to be “YAS QUEEN.” But all this yas queen stuff becomes very unsettling when the person we’re yas queening is an actual, literal Queen who is setting human beings on fire for not doing what they’re told. Nevertheless, Dany is welcome on the show. A Ned Stark who doesn’t get into swordfights is not. A Hizdahr zo Loraq who speaks eloquently of his desire for peace and reconciliation is not. Instead, Ned gets a pointless swordfight and Hizdahr gets sidelined and then stabbed to death.<\/p>\n

YAAAS QUEE-wait a minute.<\/div>
YAAAS QUEE-wait a minute.<\/div><\/p>\n

Two weeks ago I wrote about how many critics have given up on defending the show’s various nonsense plotlines, but still give it high marks for its showmanship. A familiar phrase in this argument is “mindless fun.” The show is mindless fun! Tits and dragons! Just enjoy it for what it is! But when we call something mindless fun, we’re saying something about what we think audiences find gratifying. In fact, to me the phrase “mindless fun” is a contradiction in terms. Mindless things in general are never mindless. They just speak to parts of our mind that we usually don’t like to scrutinize too closely.<\/p>\n

In my opinion, scrutinizing the appeal of a show like this is part of a critic’s responsibility, and retreating into the comfortable redoubt of “mindless fun” is an abdication of that responsibility. And that, in the end, is what has bothered me most about Game of Thrones. Not the plotholes, not the teleporting armies, not the repetitive character beats, not the continuously respawning armies and fleets or the mach-6 ravens or any of that. Encouraging viewers to think about, and be critical themselves of, the things that entertain them is the part of a critic’s responsibility that carries a moral dimension. And the more popular and ubiquitous the show, the more this moral dimension comes into play.<\/p>\n

I myself have been guilty of this. Too often distracted by inconsistencies of character, setting, and plot, I only occasionally touched on one of later seasons’ most consistent through-lines: their infatuation with authoritarianism and gratification through violence. If I sound something like a preacher thundering about fire and brimstone right now, or perhaps just a garden-variety buzzkill, it’s because I don’t know how to make this point without at least dipping my toes into buzzkilldom. Such is the price of unloading my hangups onto an unsuspecting internet.<\/p>\n

I never even had time to complain about Emilia Clarke's wigs. Human beings do not have this much hair!<\/div>
I never even had time to complain about Emilia Clarke's wigs. Human beings do not have this much hair!<\/div><\/p>\n

The good news is that, for the forseeable future at least, I’m well and truly Game-of-Thronesed out. Right now, wild aurochs couldn’t drag me to the keyboard if it meant typing one more word about the show. That’ll probably change before long, but for now I’m putting a period at the end of the series. For everyone who’s stuck around this long, I appreciate it. I’ve never felt fully comfortable responding to my own comments, but I do read them, and I’ve enjoyed and often found interesting the discussions that take place below the line.I think that’s what you’re supposed to call it.<\/span> Also, many thanks to Shamus for hosting the reviews, and for often staying up hella late to upload pictures for monday morning.<\/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. Two weeks ago I promised you all an update “next week” (ie, last week). That’s because I forgot that I wasn’t planning on doing one last week because of busyness issues – sorry about that. […]<\/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-40706","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\/40706","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=40706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}