The Wheel Unbroken

May 20, 2019 | Goggle-eyes

And so finishes Game of Thrones as it began, with a ride into the trees beyond the Wall. Loved it.

I’ll probably drone on about it for a while yet, but some initial thoughts.

I thought the finale, and seasons 7 and 8, were excellent. They did a great job of bringing the story to a conclusion in a way that GRR Martin conspiculously hasn’t. They also did a creditable job of delivering a through narrative while GRRM is still off on lengthy world-building frolics of his own. I know he is following a schema he descerns in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings of expanding the narrative then contracting it again (which is exactly the supposed fault the makers of the TV show are accused of perpetrating), but at least Tolkein had the sense to leave his ephemera in appendices or at the bottom of the barrel his family have scraped these past decades.

Were there aspects of the books of which I would have liked to see more? Sure, specifically the religions of Westeros. Am I going to be so pathetic as to get up a whiny petition about it? No. Did I, as someone wrote in a critique I just read, take it as a ‘personal slap in the face’? Hell no. Just as, as Neil Gaiman famously told an entitled fan, George RR Martin is not your bitch, so too with Benioff and Weiss.

I did consider whether it would have been better to include more of King’s Landing and Cercei in the latter part of the show but have concluded it was better from a narrative perspective that they didn’t. First, there is a risk we’d get involved in interminable subplots as in Dorne (in the books) or as we did with Daenerys (in both TV and books). More to the point, keeping the focus on Daenerys and Winterfell this season made the payoff of Daenerys’s antihero’s journey so much more powerful and thereby underpinned the action in the finale.

There are still, of course, people moaning about it on social media as, also of course, is their right. But some of the takes are more examples of that faux technical diagnosis I mentioned in my last post. To address two only.

There is precisely Zero obligation on a writer to deliver ‘fully realised character arcs’ for any character. We are born, we die, we try not to screw up in between. That’s it. If writers want to impose an arc on a character in a story, that’s fine; if they don’t, that’s fine too. And there are some writers who go out of their way to challenge that kind of mechanical thinking; M John Harrison’s Viriconium stories spring to mind. Moreover, as we are neatly shown in the finale with respect to both Jaime and Tyrion Lannister, characters and their roles and importance in events are mutable and subject to the writer of the narrative.

Secondly, there is no obligation on a writer to tie together all the threads and characters into a neat bow at the end. Like ‘character arcs’ that’s not how the world works and it need not be how fiction works either. Things happen; people come and go. For an extended example, have a look at Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin sequence. For that matter go and read the Icelandic sagas

There is a group-think that can take hold in which opinion is asserted and elaborated upon as fact, to the exclusion of any contrary opinion. Works of art or entertainment are subject to immediate reactions either pro or con, but then a further process happens. Works that are universally asserted to be deficient are recognised as having their moments, then become ‘flawed masterpieces’ then finally masterpieces. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is one such, Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner is another. Conversely we can look back at Oscar winners celebrated at the time, and lists of best selling and critically acclaimed writers and think what? Who? In my view, when people come to look back on Game of Thrones the voices of criticism that currently shout loudest will be forgotten.

Finally, given one prominent criticism that the shows have become less satisfying as the narrative has moved away from the ‘sociological’ to the ‘psychological’, I note that despite the destruction of King’s Landing, the death of the Night King, and the selection of a monarch by acclamation, the old order persists and reasserts itself. The wheel has not been broken. That strikes me as an inherently sociological perspective.

You Know Nothing

May 19, 2019 | Goggle-eyes

And so we reach the final episode of Game of Thrones.

Predictions are foolish at this stage, but Daenerys’s next move should be quickly to eliminate any potential opposition or rival. Of those, only Sansa and Tyrion seem bright enough to work that out. I suspect D’s vanity will mean she glories in her triumph for too long. Trust no one (per Petyr Baelish).

Also, Daenerys was given her dragon eggs by Illyrio Mopatis, perhaps as an outrageously ostentatious wedding gift but perhaps also for a reason and, although that subplot has been largely lost from the series as it followed the rise of Daenerys, it hasn’t been entirely lost. Specifically, it was carried via Melisandre and, to some degree, Bran as Three-Eyed Raven. So, as well as the playing out of realpolitik, I expect something of that to play its part in the final.

The tedious controversy about episode 5 continues to rumble on, including a ludicrous petition to have HBO remake season 8 in the way entitled idiots would like it to be. Two excellent pieces I’ve seen attempting to rebut the controversy have been by James Cooray Smith in the New Statesman and Adam Roberts on his blog.

The James Cooray Smith article is here: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv-radio/2019/05/fans-reaction-game-thrones-reminder-no-one-owes-you-story-you-want

The Adam Roberts piece is here: https://amechanicalart.blogspot.com/2019/05/game-of-thrones.html

A paragraph in the New Statesman piece that rang bells with me is this one:

This is probably the reason so much fan criticism takes the form that it does. Just as “the death of the author” is used merely as cover to talk extensively about authorship while ignoring anything the author might say, discussion of television indulges in faintly ludicrous fan argot about the difference between “plotting” and “pantsing” (don’t ask), and deploys “deus ex machina” to mean “I was unpleasantly surprised”, pretending that there are rules about how stories must play out, rather than simply conventions about how they do. This faux-technical diagnosis is simultaneously couched in ethical terms, an attempt to condemn mere storytelling decisions as morally unsound as well as practically inept, asserting them to be objectively wrong in two senses.

It’s the faux technical diagnosis that resonates. It’s as though thousands have downloaded a pirated copy of an MFA Creative Writing For Dummies and missed the bits about unreliable narrators and misdirection. I’ve seen this a lot over the last few years, at any rate since Ben Aaronovitch commented on a review of his Peter Grant novels. It was the fall out from that contretemps that brought both the ‘death of the author’ trope and a sense of the depth of ‘fandom’ entitlement to my awareness. It was also when I started to think that fans are great but fandom is fertile ground for toxicity.

More about this another day, but for now I want to put on record that I have enjoyed Game of Thrones throughout its TV run and will miss it when it’s gone. I also want to stand against all the voices saying the writing has been bad in seasons 7 and 8; I do not think that is true at all.

The Bells

May 14, 2019 | Goggle-eyes

The most recent episode of Game of Thrones, Season 8 episode 5, The Bells, has caused quite a stir. It was, apparently, the worst reviewed episode in the programme’s history and a quick dip into social media reaction was sufficient to make one leap straight back out again. Season 8 generally has attracted vociferous comment, much of it negative.

I thought the episode was terrific.

I’m not going to write a lot here but what I do write will contain spoilers, so if you’re saving yourself for the boxed set look away now.

Investing in the characters of Game of Thrones, whether in the books or on screen, has a consequence that isn’t always appreciated: you are also lulled into investing in the world the characters inhabit. From the perspective of immersion in the world this is, of course, a good thing, but immersion in the world and the characters means that the world isn’t always questioned in the way it should be.

It is a commonplace that GRR Martin took early inspiration from the England of the Wars of the Roses and modelled other key scenes, such as the Red Wedding, on events in British history. But he has taken in more than just events and reshaped them towards his purpose, he has also taken in a series of cultural assumptions, key among them being a feudal society and a hereditary monarchy under God sustained by military might. Within that context, the rule of engagement was explained clearly by Cercei Lannister to the honourable idiot Ned Stark in season one episode seven: When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.

We have now had eight seasons of opening gambits and positions, an extensive middle game which has seen the removal of many key pieces from the board, and we are now in the endgame. Over the course of the eight seasons we have followed the development of the key characters and been led to see them in certain ways, but this has, I think, been misdirection on the part of the writers, including GRR Martin, because it has kept our eyes on the pieces and off the board.

In The Bells, Daenerys Targaryen goes full-tonto mad queen. This has been there as a possibility all along, but she has usually been pulled back from the brink of her preferred ‘burn them all’ solution by wiser counsels. But all the wise voices have gone, save Tyrion, whom she does not trust, and Jon Snow whom she thinks has betrayed her and is, in any event, not too bright. This has upset and outraged Dany ‘fans’ who have expected to see her take her rightful place on the throne without descent into tyranny.

But what claim does Daenarys have to the throne except parentage and airpower? Her rise has been marked by the ruthless application of lethal force in pursuit of her sense of entitlement and manifest destiny, of her right to rule kingdoms and peoples she has never met or lived amongst. She freed the slaves while crucifying and incinerating those who stood in her way. Yet as the white saviour of enslaved coloured people she got a free fan pass, a shiny ticket that said for her the ends justified the means.

In The Bells she defeats Cercei who has been set up as cruel, calculating and manipulative, which she is. But, at least in outline, Cercei and Daenerys have parallel backgrounds: both had abusive childhoods and were forced into marriages by men in their families; both experience the loss of children; neither is a stranger to incest; neither has any hesitation in resorting to mass murder to achieve her aims.

And Daenerys wins the encounter through overwhelming firepower, not through any outworking of a moral or ethical imperative or principle. This is not a fairy tale, this is Game of Thrones, and you win or you die. There is no middle ground. It is Shock and Awe.

The fires in King’s Landing push the point home; Cercei is in the Red Keep watching events just exactly as she did at the end of season 6 when she lit the wildfire under the Great Sept of Baelor taking out the Tyrells and the High Sparrow. Afterwards she tells Septa Unella that it felt good to watch them burn. Amidst the dragonfire we see occasional explosions of wildfire, linking Daenerys’s attack both to her father, the Mad King, and to Cercei. Daenerys and Cercei are shown to be morally equivalent.

And that is the genius of The Bells, with which we can assume GRR Martin is content since he told Benioff and Weiss how it ends some time ago and we have no reason to think they’ve departed from that ending. The Bells reveals Daenerys’s journey, like that of Paul Atreides in Dune, to be a longform subversion of the Hero’s Journey, the triumph of an antihero by the overcoming of obstacles in her path. Daenerys is just Cercei with airborn napalm. This subversion has been expertly done, and the extent of the reaction is itself evidence of that; it is the exact opposite of bad writing.

I should also mention a second part of the genius of the episode, and one that, I’d like to think, points to something deeper thematically. Back when Daenerys burned the ships of the Masters in Traders’ Bay at Meereen, Tyrion said it always seems a bit abstract doesn’t it, other people dying? The Bells dropped away from the concerns of the noble houses and their strategems and focused on the carnage from the eyes of the population who were busy doing the dying. This removed the abstraction and showed exactly in what the Game of Thrones really results. Forget medieval history, the final scenes of the charred corpses of the population reminded me a lot of another time arrogance and entitlement backed up by overwhelming aerial firepower met fleeing people, on Highway 80 from Kuwait to Basra.

How it will end next week? I don’t know, except I doubt it will be a fairy-tale ending of any kind.