CAN GAME OF THRONES KEEP ITS EDGE?
As Game of Thrones heads into a new frontier beyond George R.R. Martin’s books, can HBO keep all its fans on the same page?
The last time Game of Thrones audiences felt a note of sustained hope was the series première. And even that began with a battle- hardened warrior fleeing a winter zombie and ended with a young boy getting pushed out of a window. This is not a series either made or watched by optimists.
Still, even for the warily weary who stick with the show, season six is marching to the beat of some particularly dour drums. Daenerys Targaryen, the closest thing the show has yet shown us to a decent and pragmatic ruler, is surrounded by a Dothraki horde, friend- and dragon- less. Her recently added advisor, Tyrion Lannister, probably the shrewdest character on the show, is left to run a city facing an armed revolt populated by people whose language he doesn’t even speak. On the other side of the Narrow Sea, Cersei Lannister, essentially the queen and effectively the most spiteful person in the world, is recovering from the world’s worst walk of shame in the arms of a literal monster sworn to kill all her enemies. Further north, Jon Snow, the last bastion of capable nobility, lies in a pool of his own blood, which may at least be preferable to being ripped to shreds by the undead horde that’s advancing on the frozen wall he’s dying on.
Whatever redemption, if any, these characters are allowed — it wouldn’t be entirely out of step with the show’s ethos to have the whole thing end with a comet smacking into King’s Landing — we can be reasonably sure bigger problems await them. There is always something else around the corner in Westeros, a land whose name surely means “There are no happy endings” in one of the show’s made-up languages.
As t he show has developed, though, the dangers that emerge have fundamentally changed. It’s a point of both pride and mockery that Game of Thrones has a cast of dozens sprawled over a vast geography, so byzantine in construction that the show itself needs to give you a little reminder of allegiances and settings in every opening credits sequence. For a long time, these competing personalities were more than enough to keep wheels turning and blood spilling; especially in the last season, though, the games between these power- hungry people have been revealed to be exactly that, as they come face to to face with forces well beyond the control of even the most devious schemers. And as the complexity of the show’s challenges mounts, so to does its critique of the stories we tell ourselves.
If you are at all familiar with the tropes of narrative, especially fantastical or heroic narrative, the early seasons of Game of Thrones were deconstructionist catnip. The animating force of the first few seasons genuinely seemed to be laying bare the myths that we had willingly swallowed of how and why things happen in the world. The standard story is a sort of Calvinist tautology, not just that there is good and evil in the world, nor that good triumphs, but that good triumphs exactly because it’s good. Our heroes are heroes because they are noble and just and what have you, and these are the essential qualities of, if not the people who rule us, at least the
people we celebrate.
This logic, of course, had its head lopped off with Ned Stark, and then was thoroughly eviscerated beside his son Robb. Those are the more memorable images, but the idea was best summed up by the sellsword Bronn, immediately after slitting the throat of a proud knight. Disgusted with the way he dived, dodged and generally slunk out of the way instead of standing his ground, the noblewoman Lysa Arryn dismissed him: “You don’t fight with honour.” “No,” said the smirking and still very much alive Bronn, before pointing in the direction of the corpse: “He did.” Time and again on the show, the only reward for higher ideals has been a blade across the neck; it has nearly always been the craftiest, the most pliable, those who respond to every situation with whatever means necessary, whatever the morality of their choice, who have survived.
As fewer and fewer people with a claim to nobility of nature are left standing, though, the show’s schemers have increasingly had to turn their craft against something much bigger than a few simple antagonists. The first hints of this emerged in the third season — the last when the Starks were a going concern for the throne — when King Joffrey’s cruelty sparked riots and the longdenigrated Iron Islanders took some revenge on the North when their chips were down. It grew into an absolute explosion last season, though, when everyone faced insurrections at the hands of large groups who were tired of being forgotten in the schemes of their worldly betters.
The most stark of these was from the Faith Militant, the religious fanatics unleashed by Cersei as part of her attempt to hold on to power. Made up largely of peasants — including their devout and purposefully destitute leader, the High Sparrow — neither Cersei nor anyone else knows exactly what to do with them, because they are not concerned with worldly rewards so much as taking them away from those who have been lording over them. They are Westeros’ faithbased Occupy movement, an avatar for the power of the people who have literally been left in the dirt while the nobles argue about a chair.
Something similar, if slightly higher up the socioeconomic ladder, befell Daenerys in the city of Mereen. A champion of the underclass after she freed the slaves, she’s facing a revolt of the former owners, the middleclass merchants who are unhappy with a powerful foreigner — who is also packing a trio of dragons — telling them their way of life is barbaric. Wearing masks that render them literally faceless and assassinating her soldiers and advisers, the Sons of the Harpy are Daenerys’s haunting reminder that no good deed goes unpunished, but also that progress is in the eye of the beholder.
Meanwhile, at t he Wall, Jon Snow ended up stabbed because of the show’s overarching metaphor for the things we can’t control, the White Walkers and their undead army. The proximate cause was his desire to protect the Wildlings north of the wall — another underclass — but even this was motivated in cold logic: any body not south of the wall is another body for the army bear- ing down on them. His brothers, like most others in Westeros, remain blind to this threat, and would rather concern themselves with immediate power, irrespective of the fact winter is, as the saying goes, coming, with little regard to who’s there waiting for it.
All of these are things that, even if they were unleashed by the people staring them down, cannot be dealt with through the up until now successful methods of careful alliance, political pressure and double dealing. The main actors in our story aren’t entirely powerless, but they have to learn a different game, probably one even more brutal than what they’ve done. But it’s not so much an interpersonal game as a geographic one: it’s not a rowing contest, it’s learning how to harness a river.
Taken together, the two kinds of problems — learning ruthless pragmatism, and then learning how to ride the winds of change — seem to cut deeper than even a deconstruction of storytelling, or at least seem to poke at another kind of storytelling entirely. Our myths aren’t just consigned to fiction: our history — excepting the dragons and zombies, Game of Thrones is a thoroughly medieval world — is written in much the same way. We focus on a few main figures, and we grant them a certain nobility and grace, rather easily forgetting that so much of history plays out in shadows, both of our knowledge and our morality.
But we also forget that history’s players are as much, if not more, acted upon than acting, dealt a hand and then left to make the most of it. Game of Thrones has gloried in the skill of its players, but it seems to be recognizing that even that is ultimately just another myth, something we tell ourselves to remain convinced that control — even if it’s not good or morally executed control — stays in our hands. But there is forever something more grand than us: the world spins and we walk on it, pretending that our steps keep it revolving.
It wouldn’t be Game of Thrones if they let us be that optimistic, now would it?