Game of ransom for a cultural touchstone
On Sunday, more than 10 million people watched a woman on a dragon burn most of an army to death before being knocked from the sky by a bolt from a giant crossbow.
On Tuesday, the President of the United States threatened an unstable dictatorship with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
The first was a surprise ending to an episode of Game of Thrones, an epic television fantasy set in a fictional land and the subject of a real-life ransom demand on Tuesday. The second, a policy statement that just might edge the real world into nuclear war.
Naturally, it didn’t take long for wits online to connect the two.
“Trump’s got a dragon?” Vermont political writer John Walters tweeted.
“Trump been watching too much Game of Thrones,” another user, @roneman90, wrote. “Out here promising fire and fury like he Dany (sic) on a dragon.”
It’s hard to picture another scripted show in 2017 inserting itself so naturally into the public conversation. But in this era of culture silos and fractured attention, Game of Thrones isn’t like other shows.
Though it runs on HBO, a paid, premium cable service, Game of Thrones operates like a kind of cultural lingua franca.
There are entire cottage industries dedicated to analyzing and rehashing every episode.
The New Yorker and the New York Times both run Game of Thrones weekly recaps. The Ringer, a sports site, treats Game of Thrones like it does the NBA, offering blanket takes on every fantasy detail. As of Wednesday afternoon, Vanity Fair writer Joanna Robinson had written nine stories about Game of Thrones this week alone.
So when Donald Trump mused Tuesday in his own chaotic way about lighting up North Korea with “fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen,” Game of Thrones seemed to many the natural comparison to make.
“Is it possible Trump thinks the Mad King is the hero in Game of Thrones?” t weeted Dan Pfeiffer, a former advisor to Barack Obama.
“If I die before seeing the Game of Thrones finale,” a woman by the name of Viv Heaton tweeted, “I will release #fireand fury on Trump myself.”
Game of Thrones is about, among other things, chaos, violence and the horrible things that terrible rulers do. So, the Trump comparisons aren’t much of a stretch. But the show edges its way into the news cycle, over and again, more from sheer cultural ubiquity than it does from direct parallels to real life.
It’s the thing that everyone’s talking about already. So it becomes the way we talk about other things.
That ubiquity helps explain why coverage of a recent data leak at HBO focused so narrowly on the Game of Thrones aspect. Last week, hackers released a trove of stolen HBO material, including emails, full episodes from some shows and, crucially, what appeared to be the scripts for the first five episodes for the seventh, pen- ultimate, season of Game of Thrones. (The fourth episode, with the dragon and the murderous fire, aired Sunday.)
On Tuesday, according to several reports, the hackers released an online ransom video, demanding what Mashable believes to be between US$6 and US$7.5 million dollars in Bitcoin for the return of the stolen loot.
The rambling text focused obsessively on Game of Thrones. Although the hackers failed to obtain any actual episodes, they set their ransom video to the Game of Thrones theme and promised to release information that would ruin season seven for fans and “corrupt” HBO’s “idea (sic) and efforts to season 8.”
But the idea of ruining the suspense in Game of Thrones seems kind of bunk. The first six seasons were adapted from a series of books that has been out for years. Anyone who wanted to know what was coming next could easily find out. And yet, despite that, the show became a massive, generational success. The idea that spoilers, available somewhere in the online ether, would change that now, as the series moves beyond the narrative of the books, seems naive. If anything, they might drive even more hype.
No, the real danger for HBO i sn’ t that someone might find out too soon who rides Daenarys’ other dragons. It’s that the stolen emails and other data might contain information or conversations that would prove embarrassing, or worse, to the company.
In that way, the HBO leak is the same as any other. Dragons notwithstanding, it’s a story about data stolen by a bad actor with an obvious motive to cause harm. If one tried hard enough, I’m sure they would find a Trump parallel there as well.