Patreon Letter: 30th Aprill 2018

CW: Rape, Violence, Racism; I’m talking about Game of Thrones so y’know

Hey folks,

Jackson here with the Patreon Letter! Sorry for the delay, busy week, busy weekend, you know the deal. But I’m here now and I have a couple things to talk about. So let’s get right into it.

I’ve been struggling focusing a lot this year, I’ve talked about it before and am making steps to getting some better medical support, but in the meantime the material upshot is a lot of putting off what I really care about and spending my time with fun distractions, because I’m not in the right frame of mind to really enjoy things. This is why in the middle of January I decided to start playing through Kingdom Hearts, it was in the zeitgeist, I didn’t care, and it was fun enough. Then I played myself by getting way too invested in Kingdom Hearts and the cycle continues anew. This is a long winded way of saying I put off playing more Birth By Sleep this week to watch Game Of Thrones. It is in the zeitgeist, I don’t care, and it is fun enough.

That’s right, it’s 2019, and I have some takes on the first season and a half of Game of Thrones. Please enjoy this contradictory paradox of both extremely timely and the least timely content in the world.

So I mostly had a good time watching the show. I’ve read half of the first book and it’s certainly much better and more interesting when it allows the scenes to breathe and gives each character a sense of real interiority - especially when it comes to Sansa, because I don’t know if you’ve lived under a rock for the last decade, but if you have allow me to be the first to tell you: the Game of Thrones showrunners aren’t the best at writing women. Yet what it loses in depth it mostly makes up for with a soapy energy. The actors are - except Kit Harrington and Emilia Clark, who are nigh on unwatchable - having a great time delivering exposition or slimy politicking. The best scene in the show is between Littlefinger and Varys, who have a politics dick measuring contest with backhanded compliments which is interrupted by a random guy walking into the room and asking them what on earth they are doing standing in the middle of the room. Go to bed, nerds.

Everything happening on Essos, however? Absolutely unwatchable. Illegally bad. Its honestly amazing that it’s part of the story because it single-handedly destroys any credibility that the show might otherwise have had about its politics being a deconstruction of patriarchal medieval rule. That holds much less water when you cut over for a few scenes every episode to a plotline about bringing civility to the violent brown horde with the power of white feminism. The answer to the question “how do I stop being raped by my violent foreign husband?” is unironically and canonically: “get on top of him.” The plotlines only saving Grace is that most of the actual dialogue is exposition delivered by him from Speed Racer and him from Resident Evil so I appreciate the casting. But man. I legitimately believe the show would be eaten alive if it came out today. 2011 - at least when it comes to The Discourse - was a long time ago. Confederacy, coming soon.

Anyway those are the broad takes, but I want to talk a little more about its thematic aims, and why I think its form of cynicism is, well, not very good.

So Game of Thrones is a show in which you watch hope die. Ned Stark is an honourable man, he fucking dies. Robb Stark is an honourable man, and unless the Red Wedding was an elaborate stunt to feed me fake spoilers, he is super triple dead in 14 episodes time. Ned is a man we like, but he is done in by his good and trusting nature, used immediately and thoroughly as a tool by those seeking greater power, before being pointlessly executed for very stupid reasons. The war in the series is presented as the result of acts of violence that start small, but each of which are met with violence in return. Would Ned Stark have died if Joffery hadn’t had a childish fight with Arya in the woods? It is impossible to say, but these are the questions that the show wants us to ask. It is the story of petty and craven men fighting over a chair with the blood of thousands, all the while ignoring the existential threat coming beyond the wall. Ignoring for a minute that the show’s Climate Change parallel is a second scary foreign other, the show’s conception of politics feels - at least to me, the Gundam Watcher - frustratingly incomplete.

Game of Thrones is, by intention, not a show driven by any real ideology. For the average person in Westeros, life will suck just as much no matter who sits on the Iron Throne. If it has one a principle it is that honour is a weakness that will get you killed by those willing to break the rules, which makes sense seeing as the series emerged in conversation with standard fantasy tropes in the 90s. Its message is simple: there are no heroes, and believing in them (as Sansa does) is a childish fantasy. And while watching the good guy lose so completely has a certain electric energy that the show has ridden to the heights of pop cultural phenomenon, it ends up allowing the show to sidestep the more difficult and interesting questions about how state power and violence operate. Here’s what I mean: Ned Stark losing can never hit close to as hard as Naked Snake winning.

It presents itself as a critique of escapism, but responds immediately with its own form of escapism, a world in which The State is presented as a construction of the whims of craven, evil men who do not care about anything other than power. It’s a comforting nihlism that allows the show to avoid any structural conversations about the nature of power or even of the cultural constructs of heroism in the first place. Because if it did this then it would have to actually reckon with the fact that it’s a show about not one but two uncivilised foreign hordes, and then the whole thing falls apart.

Anyway! That was my take. I like Gundam a lot, is what I’m saying. Shout out to Judau. See you all in a couple weeks.

-Jackson