This point supports the previous one. Certainly, this is a point of contention for many. But the fact remains that sex is a big part of the show, and it often feels more like tantalizing material rather than actual. The amount of rape and incest on the show has grown over time, and critics finally put their foot down when, in Season 5, Sansa Stark was raped on her wedding night.
Because of the gratuitous sex and violence, viewers generally know where things are going when they watch Game of Thrones. At the same time, the series relies on shock value. When defending the series, many fans reference their intrigue for the fantasy genre. As seen by the popularity of book-turned-film series like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings , there are a lot of people out there who want to see an imaginary world filled with fictional creatures.
But where the adaptations of J. Rowling and J. The series uses the idea of fantasy in the abstract, with very few specific elements of the genre, leaning more toward magical realism. There are many, many evil characters in Game of Thrones , and they almost always seem to prevail in the end. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person. The second season, for example, focused on the demise of the unionized working class in the U.
Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. Tellingly, season eight shocked many viewers by … not initially killing off the main characters.
It was the first big indicator of their shift—that they were putting the weight of the story on the individual and abandoning the sociological. In that vein, they had fan-favorite characters pull off stunts we could root and cheer for, like Arya Stark killing the Night King in a somewhat improbable fashion.
For seven seasons, the show had focused on the sociology of what an external, otherized threat—such as the Night King, the Army of the Undead and the Winter to Come—would do to competing rivalries within the opposing camp. Having killed one of the main sociological tensions that had animated the whole series with one well-placed knife-stab, Benioff and Weiss then turned to ruining the other sociological tension: the story of the corruption of power. Dany had started out wanting to be the breaker of chains, with moral choices weighing heavily on her, and season by season, we have witnessed her, however reluctantly, being shaped by the tools that were available to her and that she embraced: war, dragons, fire.
Done right, it would have been a fascinating and dynamic story: rivals transforming into each other as they seek absolute power with murderous tools, one starting from a selfish perspective her desire to have her children rule and the other from an altruistic one her desire to free slaves and captive people, of which she was once one.
The corruption of power is one of the most important psychosocial dynamics behind many important turning points in history, and in how the ills of society arise. In response, we have created elections, checks and balances, and laws and mechanisms that constrain the executive. Destructive historical figures often believe that they must stay in power because it is they, and only they, who can lead the people—and that any alternative would be calamitous.
Leaders tend to get isolated, become surrounded by sycophants and succumb easily to the human tendency to self-rationalize. There are several examples in history of a leader who starts in opposition with the best of intentions, like Dany, and ends up acting brutally and turning into a tyrant if they take power. Yet in the hands of two writers who do not understand how to advance the narrative in that lane, it became ridiculous.
Then, suddenly, she goes on a rampage because, somehow, her tyrannical genes turn on. In interviews after that episode, Benioff and Weiss confess that they turned it into a spontaneous moment.
And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country years ago.
For them, however, this was the eating-ice-cream-with-a-fork problem I mentioned above. They could keep the story, but not the storytelling method. They could only make it into a momentary turn that is part spontaneous psychology and part deterministic genetics. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.
In my own area of research and writing, the impact of digital technology and machine intelligence on society, I encounter this obstacle all the time. There are a significant number of stories, books, narratives and journalistic accounts that focus on the personalities of key players such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos.
Of course, their personalities matter, but only in the context of business models, technological advances, the political environment, lack of meaningful regulation, the existing economic and political forces that fuel wealth inequality and lack of accountability for powerful actors, geopolitical dynamics, societal characteristics and more.
The preference for the individual and psychological narrative is understandable: the story is easier to tell as we gravitate toward identifying with the hero or hating the antihero, at the personal level. We are, after all, also persons! Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain.
In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, whose research revolves around how technology, science and society interact.
Those fans also organized petitions and flew sky banners over Comic-Con. They also engaged in other documented aggressive behavior , although it does not appear they forced anybody out of a job. For many, decrying the failure of Game of Thrones is just as much a piece of public theater as claiming not to watch it when it was on the air.
One interesting trend in the internet age is the increasing sense that reviews and opinion pieces exist to validate existing opinions rather than to broaden perspectives; this is why critics get death threats for having dissenting opinions on works with vocal fandoms.
Similarly, it is interesting how reluctant people are to let go of this. Professor Jonathan Cohen has suggested that one of the reasons why finales like Game of Thrones can leave viewers so fixated is because they can feel like breakups. Of course, none of this is to suggest that those vocal fans are necessarily wrong in their assessment. Taste is inherently subjective, people like what they like, and they react emotionally to different things.
However, it would also be absurd to assume that the most vocal and aggressive of fans are representative of the bulk of the viewing audience — particularly considering the evidence that Game of Thrones continues to be enjoyed by a large audience almost two years after it went off the air.
This is about more than just pop culture, but speaks to an increasingly fragmented world in which people seem incapable of discerning between what they want to believe and material reality. Those two things can be true at the same time. You must be logged in to post a comment. Share Tweet Pin Share.
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