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Does Game of Thrones Tell Us Something About Western Society? — Kofola
Over at The Federalist, Robert Tracinski has an interesting article about the success of the HBO series Game of Thrones, the medieval fantasy based on the books by George R.R. Martin. Tracinski attacks the show as little more than vapid “torture porn” due to its extreme violence and sexuality, and questions why the show has become so popular. His answer is that it appeals to the left’s need for a totalitarian impulse. He argues that the show presents an ugly world of corruption and brutality to appeal to mentalities of the left for a utopian leader to assert his or her will to bring order — in this case, to fictional world of Westeros.
I can see his point, even though Tracinski makes it abundantly clear that his knowledge of the material is superficial at best. One can see this mentality at work in the character of Daenerys Targaryen, the exiled heir of the former royal family, bent on returning to Westeros to reassert her own claim to rule. This character attempts social engineering in every culture she encounters on her journey, hoping to mold them to fit her utopian worldview. My leftist colleagues all love this character. I find the character loathsome—a naif who thinks that just because she believes in her own cause the world will just fall in line. Ultimately, she ends up causing more destruction or disorder than she prevents. The television show’s successful effort at building a cult of personality around her only exacerbates my dislike for the character. If I were in Westeros, I would have my sword ready to fight her off at every turn.
That said, Tracinski’s attempts to reduce the show to left-wing cynicism does not account for the widespread interest in Game of Thrones. Nonetheless, the success of this show is interesting, as is trying to answer Tracinski’s question about what is driving its success.
Part of me thinks the answer is just boredom; that in our post-modern culture, with so many options to turn to, this continuing shift toward extremes has been necessary to keep people’s interest. Nevertheless, I also think Tracinski’s on the right track, although pinning this phenomenon purely on the left is misguided. I feel that Game of Thrones appeals to a broader cynicism in western society, regardless of our political views, based on a sense that the world is corrupted, root and branch, with no clear answer on the horizon.
I see a similar appeal in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films. Those films, based on the Batman character, essentially tell the story of a modern society wracked by corruption, on the brink of complete collapse. This draws out social engineers and anarchists eager to put the final nail in the coffin. Those films, nonetheless, offer flawed but resilient (if just barely) heroes fighting to hold civilization together.
Game of Thrones offers a similar situation, albeit in a world that appeals to more extremes and one that does not have clear heroes holding the chaos at bay. The honorable characters that do exist in the story tend to be caught in the muck and killed off. Part of me worries that the success of such a story reflects a shift toward nihilism; that people embrace the show because of its seeming reflection of the random ugliness of a world without any real meaning other than the obtainment of power.
That said, this certainly does not reflect my own interest in the show (and the books). Despite the extreme lows that the story presents, I still hope to see one of the generally good characters (John Snow, perhaps) come out ahead from the utter darkness to establish a civilized order not dependent on a totalitarian, or ‘would-be’ messianic, figure. Although we do not live in an environment as extreme as Westeros, I honestly cannot say that my view of America and the American people right now is very different. This is why the show, thus far, has an appeal to me: the idea that, even in utter darkness, something good can yet emerge.
What do you all think about Tracinski’s argument? Do you think the popularity of Game of Thrones reflects something about our society?
(After I wrote this, I see Rachel Lu already had a post on this article. I’m still posting mine, since I spent the time writing it, and her post focuses on something different.)
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Indeed! Geeky debates rule!
It does seem as though the users of magic are in league (generally) with the state, serving numerous roles from priest to pyromancer to assassin. The Citadel is essentially a guild for the Maesters and hands out their “certification” in the form of their chain. The Maesters explicitly serve the realm and are generally forbidden from pursuing unauthorized forms of knowledge at the risk of being cast out, although there are rogue maesters who’ve been stripped of their chain.
Great. Now it’s only a matter of time before someone describes Qyburn as a “typical libertarian.” Thanks a lot, buddy. :)
“Cutting off nipples” is a possible consensual activity. Not with Qyburn, however. If he had made some vague reference to Ayn Rand before torturing people for Cersei then we might be talking…
The news feed on Drudge.
Remember that Clarke’s law works in reverse too. “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology”.
If a man with stars on his pointy hat can conjure cloth out of the twisting nether, why do we expect he wouldn’t sell it? If you can use pyromancy to forge better steel without inventing the blast furnace, then why shouldn’t we assume Westeros’ equivalent to Andrew Carnegie would employ them by the score?
The free market is agnostic about how you bring goods to sell cheaper than your competitors. If magic is powerful enough to replace technology then it’s powerful enough to substitute for it.
A lot of fantasy series give short shrift to human development over long periods of time. It’s as common as scifi writers underestimating the size of space. The Belgariad has societies existing practically unchanged for thousands of years. Tolkien does too. In his case, the society changes but the tech level is pretty much the same from Numenor to Gondor.
Martin’s SoIF isn’t any more realistic than those other series. The tech level for his world (and a lot of other fantasy worlds) could largely be described as “D&D Standard”–If it shows up on the equipment lists of the Player’s Handbook, than it appears in Westeros.
Any time the author describes a period of time as “thousands of years” he really just means “long time”.
Unchanging tech over thousands of years isn’t really all that unusual, actually. I believe one person said once you could transport a peasant from 0 AD to 1000 AD and he’d barely notice the difference. Development was slow and incremental.
The probelm in SoIF is that Martin has chosen to place the technology at High Medieval (D&D Standard) and stick it there. High Medieval was the very beginning of a huge uptick in the development of technology that saw massive change. The kind of developments in metallurgy and manufacturing for plate armor to replace mail as the primary armor also opens up new developments in all sorts of other ways.
I was unclear: what makes you think that GoT and ASOIAF fans think Martin is describing the world as it should be?
I’m not sure he intends it to be, nor that all fans take it as so. But that the combination of its wild popularity and the general decline in religious adherence leaves me concerned that the worldview espoused in the show is seen as desirable. I have nothing to base that on except correlation of phenomena and a general visceral hunch though, I admit.
It’s not often that I have to do this with you CJS, but I have to take you to task for this. If what you say is the case, the wild popularity of The Walking Dead must indicate that what we as a society want is annihilation via zombies. I doubt this is the case, incidentally. It has more to do with the balkanization of media and the realization by studios and producers that more niche/archetypal programming can be successful.
Another part of this is the emergence of the fact that what was previously considered to be too nerdy for general audiences is now deemed to be cool – and to be fair, sci-fi and fantasy tropes have had hugely improved press agents lately.
There are entire universes of nerd-lore which await exploration in the mass media which have would never have seen the light of day if not for (frankly) the splintering of the old media monopolies.
There’s even a Magic: The Gathering movie coming.
As with most of the metaphysics of such worlds, magic is not depicted as something mechanistic which any fool can learn. Some people are born with this innate ability and even when they perform it, the costs are typically quite high to the user – sufficiently high in fact that doing things “the normal way” is typically preferable if more time-consuming.
Terry Brooks’ depiction of Wil Ohmsford’s use of elfstones doing serious magical damage to him in “The Elfstones of Shannara” is one such example.
How Game of Thrones is based on British History:
http://www.cracked.com/video_18853_5-game-thrones-plotlines-ripped-right-out-history.html
Not quite, but it is indicative of the romantic idea of the “return to nature”.
In that way, The Walking Dead shares a lot of its DNA with extra-planetary colonization stories (creating a new, more natural society on an unspoiled planet).
Unlike many other post-apocalyptic stories (Mad Max, The Road, Waterworld, etc), in the zombie genre the planet isn’t polluted beyond repair. It’s just the humans who have been decimated, not the rest of the planet. It’s totally where survivalist and environmentalist fantasies meet.
Even though it makes no sense, logically-speaking. If 90% of the humans suddenly became zombies, I’m gonna assume they didn’t have time to safely shut down all the nuke plants, chemical factories, oil tankers, etc, etc, first. Those suckers are gonna fail, and then mother nature is screwed.
So no, “we” don’t pine for the world of The Walking Dead, but deep down I think progressives do.
Yabbut, every fantasy author likes to put pretty explicit limits on what magic can and cannot do within their little fictional universe.
Personally, my favourite is still Discworld, in which using a spell to perform a task (like, say, levitating a rock) requires the same amount of effort if one was to simply perform the task manually (like, say, lifting a rock), so it really doesn’t provide that much benefit at the end of the day, which is why wizards spend most of their time drinking.