Revelling in controversy
Fans like that show defies expectations as a matter of course
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains plot details from previous seasons of Game of Thrones.
The most consistently amazing thing about Game of Thrones is its capacity to scandalize. If movies are machines that generate empathy, as Roger Ebert famously claimed, then HBO’s popular medieval fantasy series is a machine that generates offence. The outrage it seems to inspire on a weekly basis, ventilated in broadsheet editorials and thousand-word blog posts blazoned the morning after every new episode airs, remains inexhaustible, even as the show enters its sixth year and seventh season.
That’s the one thing we can predict with any certainty from Sunday’s premiere: Whatever violent delights may transpire — whatever butchery or mutilation proves essential to the ongoing saga of the Seven Kingdoms — we can be sure of the indignant web-wide yawp to follow.
Issues of representation are a matter of course in its reception. The show will doubtless continue to have a gender problem, or a race problem, or a problem with the kinds of things it does and doesn’t show. This is a series well accustomed to criticism on political grounds — and the outrage won’t abate this time around.
The show’s writers will be accused of indelicacy. HBO will be charged with exploitation. And Game of Thrones, once again, will be said to have gone too far.
Game of Thrones is always going too far — or is in any case always provoking critics to claim as much. What’s occasioned umbrage so far? Well, Theon Greyjoy burned to death a pair of innocent children and hung their tiny charred bodies on display. Tyrion Lannister murdered his father on the toilet and his ex-lover in bed. Cersei Lannister was obliged to walk through the streets of King’s Landing nude, humiliated and abused — not long before which she had been raped by her brother before the corpse of her murdered son.
Sexual violence frequently abounds. Several of the show’s central female characters have been victimized cruelly, including Daenerys Stormborn and, more recently, Sansa Stark. Skulls have been crushed. Heads have been severed. A pregnant Talisa Stark was stabbed in the belly. Poor little Shireen Baratheon was sacrificed at the stake.
Game of Thrones is intended to upset its audience. That much should have been obvious from its pilot, which concludes with a cheerful 10-year-old boy accidentally observing an incestuous tryst and being shoved out of a six-storey tower window.
The show defies expectations as a matter of course, which is precisely its appeal. You watch because it barrels toward conventional dramatic satisfaction and then thwarts it at the last minute, punishing without mercy its most likable and charismatic characters and rewarding with victory and glamour those so malevolent that their very appearance fills you with rage.
When the righteous, rightminded Ned Stark investigates the suspicious death of King Baratheon, you can all but guarantee that, far from solving the crime and foiling the schemes devised by the nefarious Lannisters, he will wind up summarily beheaded by them — a first-season twist so vexing that more sensitive viewers abandoned the series then and there. The show understands acutely what you want and unfailingly does the opposite.