How to End a Game of Thrones

It was the best of times; it was the blurst of times...

[Warning: Spoilers Everywhere]

The year was 2006. My fiction reading list was maybe 60% science fiction but 0% fantasy. It had been this way for years, after my love for second world fantasy died on a hill called The Wheel of Time. Subsequently, I had internalized normative cultural discourses that devalue fantasy unless packaged as “magic realism.” Former NOAF contributor Jemmy, however, had other ideas.

At that time we were working for the same company, our offices strategically located in a neighborhood famous for its second-hand bookstores. We would often visit them during our lunch hour; without fail, Jemmy would pester me about this fantasy series that he claimed “changed everything.” But I was resistant, that is, until he bought me a copy of George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones and I relented.

So I read the first chapter, and then the next, and then the next. Within a few days I had devoured A Game of Thrones in its entirety, proceeding to devour its sequels, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. I couldn’t get enough, so I moved on to other series; I was most definitely back on the fantasy train.

I have issues with those 3 books, some quite serious, but for my money the worldbuilding, character development and punctuated narrative moments are as good as any in the genre. Furthermore, despite their heft, these books feel meticulously planned, tightly plotted and rich with narrative detail. Most importantly, they revived my interest in fantasy and led me to discover a range of authors I otherwise might not have read: Andrzej Sapkowski, Gene Wolfe, Elizabeth Bear, N.K. Jemisin, Steven Erikson, Kate Elliot, Django Wexler and many others.

I like to think of those first three books as a complete trilogy with an ambiguous ending. It’s a coping mechanism that helps me deal with the fact that the next two books - A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons - are such disappointments; a single, bloated novel in two 1,000-page installments; a failed attempt to “get to Mordor” that aptly demonstrates the importance of a good editor in no uncertain terms. And it helps me deal with the fact that Martin may never finish the series.


Enter the Series...

When Game of Thrones launched in 2011, I was excited. Early indications suggested HBO would go all out adapting the series. Like many fans of the book series, I hoped this it would serve as a catalyst for Martin to finish the series. Instead, it has finished the story for him. But more about that in a bit.

The initial season was a masterful adaptation of the first novel, which is far tighter in both narrative and geographic scope than its sequels. Many of the actors looked and felt exactly like their written counterparts; some – like Jorah Mormont and Tyrion Lannister – were an improvement.

The second through fourth seasons captured much of what made A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords effective as novels, though they also amplified the shock value of their punctuated moments. In truth, there’s nothing in the show that isn’t also represented in the books, but the show frequently makes explicit what is relayed secondhand or merely suggested in the books. To put it another way, the books already make it clear how common murder, rape and torture are in this world, but the show positively revels in it. The effect is to cheapen their impact; we are frequently shown how grim and dark this world is, but little or no time is spent on exploring the implications and consequences of all the grim darkness. Not in any meaningful way, at least.

On the other hand, the show pulls off a fairly remarkable feat: adapting a sprawling fantasy epic for a medium that can do plot and character, but routinely struggles with the kind of myth- and world-building that are essential to second-world fantasy.

As with the books, though, things degenerate once the moves on to interpreting A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. Though mercifully eliminating the horrid Quentyn Martel storyline, nearly everything else that made those books a tedious slog is recreated for television (only now with more rape and torture!). The low quality of storytelling from these books mars seasons 3 and 4, and (in my view) outright ruins seasons 5 and 6.

In season 7, Benioff and Weiss officially moved past the source material altogether (though apparently with some input from Martin). Like many fans, I was deeply skeptical of their ability to right the ship. In fact, I probably would have quit the series if I hadn’t been worried that this was the only ending we’d ever get. Only, I found the experience oddly liberating – for the first time since season 2, I wasn’t comparing the show negatively to the books, even to the books I didn’t care much for.

Season 7 has its share of head scratchers - most notably, Jon Snow’s incredibly stupid plan to risk half the elite warriors under his command on a commando mission to bag a wight to show Cersei (who, predictably, is unmoved). But it was dirty fun.

The narrative decisions in season 8 are better, but nearly all require more exposition than they are given. Danaerys becoming the “Mad Queen” is a perfect example: history is replete with individuals who begin as idealists and end as ideologues; who through struggle come to believe the ends justify the means; or who believe the justice of the cause confers infallibility onto its avatar.

By the season finale, It is clear Danaerys has become all these things - only we haven’t made that journey with her. Rather, it happens so fast that you’re left wondering if it was something Tormund said, or that time Jon didn’t want to kiss her. It would have been much better, and much more believable if we’d had a few more episodes of developing paranoia and anger.

The season finale is, in a word, polarizing. Long-anticipated series finales often are, and several times I’ve been on #TeamKvetch (e.g. BSG). But I found this denouement quietly gratifying.

Bran becoming king is a bit weird, until you realize the whole point is to devalue kingship. And I was neither here nor there on Arya the Pirate (though what a great spinoff that would make). On the other hand, I Ioved Sansa asserting the independence of the north - regardless of the fact that her brother sits on the proverbial Iron Throne. Jon rejoining Tormund and Ghost felt equally appropriate, as did Brienne honoring Jaime in the annals of the Kingsguard - a touching act that almost helps you forget that bizarre moment when their friendship became gratuitously (and unnecessarily) sexual.

My favorite moment, though, comes when Tyrion waits for the new Small Council - which includes Brienne, Sam and new Lord of Highgarden and Master of Coin Bronn - and nervously keeps adjusting the chairs. It’s a tiny detail, but one that speaks volumes to the endurance of hope.

I don’t know if Martin will end his books the same way, or if he will ever end them at all. I certainly hope he does. But if he doesn’t, then at least we have this - a poignant and cathartic end to the journey we started so long ago.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Watching GAME OF THRONES Again

Winter is an asshole

[Warning: spoilers everywhere]

I'll admit I'm not the biggest fan of HBO's Game of Thrones. I'd read the first four A Song of Ice and Fire books twice by the time the show debuted in 2011, and have strong, positive feelings about the first three. I love the characters, the meticulous detail that George R. R. Martin put into world building, and the lore. And of course on top of that, the books are impossible to put down. I spent many a night prying my eyes open by sheer force of will, determined to find out what happened next.

Then came the show, which in its first season seemed like a near perfect distillation of A Game of Thrones. The actors embodied the characters they played; the sets brought Westeros to life; and the lore--it was there too. I was beyond excited for Season 2, when the show would move on to the events portrayed in my favorite of the books, A Clash of Kings.

Only, I found myself slowly falling out of love with the show. You see, it's impossible to capture all the detail of a 700+ page book in a 10-episode season, and that was doubly true once the scale of the drama shifted from the closed-door intrigues of A Game of Thrones to the cross-continental wars of A Clash of Kings. So the writers and producers had to pick and choose what they would bring to screen, as well as take some shortcuts. All quite understandable, really.

Unfortunately, they chose to emphasize what are to me the most problematic and least attractive elements of the books, namely, their excess of cruelty and sexual violence. And the show didn't *just* emphasize these elements; it made them more central, upfront and over-the-top. Meanwhile, I was getting less of the things that made reading the books a magical experience for me--less than I wanted, at least.

At the same time, the source material was still really good, so despite having issues with the show, I was still getting a visually arresting, immersive television adaptation of books I really liked. Thus I could hold out hope that show might actually fix A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, the latter of which I found simultaneously tedious and splatterpornographic.

I would be disappointed, as the show retained most of the tedium and, once again, chose to amplify the splatterporn. The worst came in Season 5, which lingered on some of the most agonizingly boring storylines in A Feast for Crows (e.g. the sparrows, Dorne) and then chose to depart from the books in order to burn a child alive at the stake. That was it for me. I was done.

Only, then Season 7 rolled around--the first that would not have Martin's novels as a guide.* And given that we're still waiting for The Winds of Winter, six years after A Dance with Dragons, there's a good chance that the book series will never be done. So for those of us who've invested a lot of time and thought into the story, this may be the only form of closure we ever get. I decided to catch up with Season 6--which was very good at points, and not very good at others. But I was excited again, more than I had been since the start of Season 2.

[*The show moves past the books midway through Season 6, to be precise.]

So how was Season 7? To quote...


"It Was the Best of Times...

Season 7 is, in a word, campy. But don't take that the wrong way--campy can be great too. And this season was gratifying in a lot of ways.

To begin, I appreciated the shift in how the show treats sexual relationships. Both Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire are very rapey. The books feature more rape than the show, while the show makes up for that by making every rape graphic and in-your-face rather than, say, a reference within in conversation. The low point, for me, was Sansa's rape by Ramsey in Season 5 (which, one notes, is not in the books). Season 7 stops using rape as a go-to device to illustrate how grim and dark this world is. And as far as I'm concerned, that's a very positive development.

But that's not all. Season 7 also allows its characters genuinely romantic moments, so much that the contrast with previous seasons is immediately striking (Jon's doomed relationship with Ygritte notwithstanding). And somehow, among all the things that don't make sense about Season 7 (more on that later), the budding romance between Jon and Danaerys does--on a personal level, at least.

I also appreciated the renewed focus on action. One thing Martin does exquisitely well, and which has also translated well in the TV adaption, is maneuvering chess pieces to build tension and momentum toward rare but superbly-rendered set-piece action scenes. Well, the first 3 books/4 seasons of the show do that at least. In truth, the maneuvering got really wearying in A Feast For Crows/A Dance with Dragons, as well as in Seasons 5 and 6 of the show, where it essentially became an exercise in wheel spinning. So it was nice to see the producers de-emphasize intrigue in favor of more action. That's what the series needs at this point. Even Euron Greyjoy, that most ridiculous and cartoonish of characters, stops talking long enough to give us an epic sea battle.

Trogdor!!!!! I mean...Drogon!!!!!

Also welcome, while Season 7 contains a lot of violence, it doesn't linger on moments of cruelty like the show has previously, to ever-diminishing effect. That breaks the cycle of always needing to go further, from rape to torture to castration to child sacrifice. Instead, we get dragons burninating the countryside--a moment we've all been waiting for. Hell, I don't even think I'd mind if the rest of the show was just Danaerys engulfing the show's many villains in flames. Especially Euron. That guy's annoying as shit.

If that means Game of Thrones feels a bit more like an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, and a bit less like I-Claudius-with-extra-splatter, then that's okay in my book. Oh, and Littlefinger getting punked by badass sisters Sansa and Arya? That was a lot of fun.


...it was the Blurst of Times."

As much fun as Season 7 is, it's also littered with incongruities, plot holes and absurd narrative devices. Readers/viewers who have invested a lot of time and energy into the story may be on board with the shift in tone (emphasis on may), but most I've spoken to are frustrated with the decline in plotting.

The most obvious sign is the emergence of teleportation in Westeros. Armies traverse land or sea in hours rather than days or weeks, while ravens deliver messages instantaneously--from the northernmost to southernmost points of the Seven Kingdoms, no less. I get that the writers need to speed things up, but this strains credulity.

Worse, in my opinion, is the revelation that Jon isn't just the child of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen, but the legitimate heir to the throne. Because apparently the High Septon annulled Rhaegar's marriage to Princess Elia Martell--for reasons unknown and despite their having multiple children--and simply didn't bother to tell anyone about it. Oh, and Jon's real name, Aegon Targaryen, is already the name of Rhaegar's other son.

WTF is this garbage

This isn't just implausible, though it is certainly that. Rather, it's the show reverting to that hoariest of hoary fantasy tropes: the proverbial pig farmer who turns out to the the prophesied one, which in turn allows him to ascend to the throne and marry the princess without upsetting the precious class hierarchies of medieval pseudo-Europe.

In doing so, the show violates a core tenet of Martin's novels: that the true heroes are not the obvious heirs, but rather the outsiders and castaways. Not Ned, Robb, Stannis, Viserys or Jaime, but Jon, Arya, Davos, Danaerys and Tyrion. (Also Sansa, but only after circumstances force her to shed her insider status.) The pig-farmer-to-prince trope does away with that by telling us that, appearances notwithstanding, the outsider was in fact never an outsider at all. It's corny, and actually kind of fucked up when you think about it. To be a hero, you have to be born with a hero's blood in your veins. I have a very hard time imagining that Martin signed off on this one; it feels like an innovation born of convenience by people who are now adrift at sea without the sage as their navigator.

The absolute worst thing about Season 7, though, is Jon's ill-fated quest to bag a wight. Why does he do this? To convince Cersei, the entirely self-interested and wholly dishonest usurper of the throne, to join up in the fight against the Night King and his army of undead warriors. This is, prima facie, a bad idea because, as I mentioned, you simply cannot trust Cersei to do anything but look out for herself. It is also a baffling idea because, as we see in Episode 4, Cersei no longer has an army to offer.

Even if Jon doesn't get this at first, you'd think that someone would tell him. Danaerys, for example, who crushed the Lannister army and executed its Warden of the South (and his heir).  Or Tyrion, who watched it happen and is allegedly a pretty smart fellow.

The smart play, of course, would have been to occupy Highgarden. It is the breadbasket of Westeros, its castle is currently unoccupied, and the one-time army of occupation done got burninated. Cersei's ability to raise another army, and keep it loyal over time, is predicated entirely on her access to the riches of Highgarden.

But no! Instead Jon, one of the two most important figures in the fight against either Cersei Lannister or the Night King, traipses off north of the wall with a motley crew of other important figures in order to bag the wight, only to attract literally the whole army of the dead. So what do they do? They call Danaerys via insta-raven, who shows up with all her dragons. The Night King throws an ice spear through Viserion, who then becomes a fucking badass ice dragon. And at the end of the season closer, Viserion the Ice Dragon burninates (freezinates?) the Wall.

Cool, but...

The emergence of an ice dragon in and of itself is not surprising--Martin did wrote a novel called The Ice Dragon, after all. But it only happens, in the show, because Jon starts acting a careless idiot, risking everything for nothing, when he could have risked far less for much more. Now, thanks to his stupidity, the wall is toast, the Army of the Dead is on the march and the Night King has a fucking ice dragon.

This is a hallmark of bad writing, to the point where it has a name (coined by SF writer James Blish, no less): the idiot plot. It's clear, in my eyes at least, that the writers are now just looking for the fastest way to get their ducks in a row. And in this case, the duck is a dragon on the other side of the wall.


Conclusion: Dumb Fun is Both Dumb and Fun

Summing up my feelings about Season 7 is basically a fight between heart (which likes it) and head (which does not). Heart wins out, in the end, for the simple reason that head's been increasingly lonely since the end of Season 1. Despite its many problems, Season 7 has a ton of gratifying fan moments, while (1) upping the action quota, (2) moving on from Dorne and the sparrows and (3) abandoning earlier seasons' obsession with sexual violence and cruelty all help transform the show into something I can just have fun with again, rather than endure for the sake of keeping up with things.

At the same time, it is dumb. At times it is very, very dumb. It's too bad the writers didn't have a full 10 episodes to work with, something that might have helped them get the Night King over the wall in a way that's more consistent with the spirit of Martin's books. Nonetheless, I'm glad I got back on board. Here's to Drogon and Rhaegal burninating the shit out of the Night King in 2019.


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POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator, since 2012. 

Game of Thrones Overtakes A Song of Ice and Fire

Disclaimer: this is an opinionated opinion piece where I say what everyone else is thinking but no one is saying. Consider yourself warned.

-Tia

In case you haven’t noticed, GRRM recently announced that the sixth A Song of Ice and Fire novel: The Winds of Winter will not be published before Season 6 of Game of Thrones airs, surprising no one. He, and others in fandom assure us that this won’t really spoil the book series too much and we should all feel bad for George because he seems so depressed about it.

This makes me mad. Like, REALLY F***ING MAD. Like, straight up PISSED OFF. 

The show is ABSOLUTELY going to spoil the books! Anyone who says different is in denial. I think deep down inside we all sort of hoped that maybe GRRM would get the books out in time, or that HBO would say, “aw shucks guys, ok, we’ll do Dunk and Egg for a while.” Some, including Martin himself, attest that the show and books are two different entities at this point, and even though they will end up at the same place, the journey will be different. Again, no. If we find out from the show that Danny swoops down on Drogon spitting fire to destroy the army of white walkers attacking the wall and accidently melts the wall down and then the Others overtake Westeros and kill everyone…the book is spoiled. If we can’t figure out how to do that thing on Twitter where it blocks all tweets including the phrase “Game of Thrones” and JON SNOW LIVES comes across our feed… the book is spoiled. If in the show Sansa rises from the crypts of Winterfel riding the ice dragon… the book is spoiled, regardless how she finds the dragon.

Let me tell you something... George R.R. Martin is our bitch.

From the second he signed away the rights to the unfinished series, he had an obligation to his readers to finish the story before the show caught up. I understand that he doesn’t like deadlines, and I understand that he has other projects, and I understand that he feels bad about it all, but I don’t care. The show has, in my personal opinion, turned into a vile thing. With every season it continues to butcher the source material by reducing it to a series of television tropes. It has negatively changed the storylines of many of the main characters, turning some of the series’ strongest female characters into victims of rape. I’ve written about how problematic this trope is before. It makes me especially mad in the case of Sansa. Critics argue...what does it matter if it was Jeyne or Sansa? It matters a lot because Sansa is a main character with influence in the story, and she now becomes a product of overcoming sexual violence and her arc here on is thus defined by Ramsay’s actions. In fact, I’m sure the viewers already figured how horrific a character Ramsay was and we could have done without a rape all together. Speaking of, how about that god awful scene where Jamie rapes Cersei in the Sept of Baelor in Season 4? In the books we’re supposed to have grown to sympathize with Jamie and not like Cersei or approve of her actions. Twisted by the show, we are expected to feel bad for Cersei and all the adversity she has to overcome, like being raped by her brother. No. Oh, and, lets not forget that they recently burnt a little girl alive, just in case the rape of Sansa didn’t hit the shock value quota for Season 5.

And, really, I’m okay if the show wants to diverge from the source material (not okay with the added rapes and child burning though) given that the source material remains just that, the source material. Now though, this has all changed. From this point forward the books will be a divergence from the show, not the other way around. I only watched one episode of Season 5 because I wanted to see Arya enter the House of Black and White (which ironically was barely even a speck in the episode titled “The House of Black and White”) and I still know all the controversial crap HBO pulled this past season, just by being on the internet. It is going to be really hard to NOT have the show ruin the upcoming books for me, and this makes me really sad.

Sure, the show is a wild success and many people (book readers included) really enjoy it. But I’m not one of them. I think I speak for many fans when I say that I have invested a lot of time and emotion into A Song of Ice and Fire and I am SO sad that GRRM is not going to be the one to tell me how it all ends—or even if Jon Snow lives, and who his parents are, and if Arya ever sees Nymeria or her family again, and what happens to Bran, and so many other things.

This feels like the end of a ASOIAF as we know it. What motivation is there for an author to finish a story once the future of so many characters' arcs and the greater plot itself have been revealed? And how can he truly write unbiasedly once the show airs? Together, GRRM and HBO have ruined what is arguably one of the greatest and most influential works of modern fantasy. I don't blame HBO since they're a corporate money grubbing conglomerate, but I do blame Martin and his publishers and his lawyers. This should never have been allowed to happen contractually.



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POSTED BY: Tia   Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2014 who really needs to figure out how to do that thing on Twitter in a vain attempt to gain some semblance of control over not being spoiled by Season 6