It’s always been real.

As the final season begins, I’ve been thinking about why Game of Thrones caught on the way it did, when there has been such a wealth of fantastic content in the last few years.

Well, it’s fantastic. The story is dense and rich; the casting and directing is strong. And it’s just a beautiful show. The scenery, the score, the visual craftsmanship from the Red Keep down to the details of Sansa’s embroidery. Really, the worst it could be is okay.

But GOT isn’t just marketable, or even good, it’s a phenomenon. Why, around ten years ago, was that the moment when ASOIAF clicked for enough cultural decision-makers to become an HBO show? I suppose there’s an easy answer from a marketing perspective: if you grew up with Harry Potter, with a mental escape north to an ancient and magical castle, well, you’re old enough for a premium cable subscription now.

But a series can be successful, even excellent, but never quite break out and becoming a cultural thing. Part of that difference is about the context in which it’s consumed. The Sopranos was about a baby boomer’s mid-life crisis, airing when most baby boomers were feeling that crisp first chill of autumn. Battlestar Galactica and The Wire were intentionally in dialogue with the bleak politics of the early aughts – one about what happened when the systems we inherited were disrupted beyond repair and one where those systems worked exactly as intended. Not many early 2010s shows were able to retrofit themselves into the sociopolitical zeitgeist, with the notable exceptions of Homeland and Scandal – often criticized for being too gonzo (or perhaps, actually, for provoking discomfort by having complex female leads).

The Potter generation is also the Millennial generation. Millennials are the children of autumn; our generational mile markers have been one fall after another. The fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Twin Towers, the 2008 financial crash. Off in the background, the melting of the glaciers, and the decline of democracy around the world.

That sense of confusion and urgency, of the gyre ever widening, defines Game of Thrones and ASOIAF from the first couple of scenes/chapters: three hapless guys find the nerve to face something that is totally outside their frame of reference, and the only one who lives to tell the tale gets killed by the apparent protagonist. The most terrifying thing about this world is that most people don’t know how frightening it is. The most dangerous thing about this world may well be the our own human reluctance to dig in and believe a strange and awful truth. Game of Thrones is about life in the shadow of something about to go incalculably wrong.

If you hadn’t read ADWD, then you were surprised in the season 5 finale in 2015. You were probably shocked at the sheer profane misogyny on display during Cersei’s walk of shame. You almost certainly weren’t expecting Jon Snow’s leadership of the Watch – where he, in good faith, practically pleaded with his compatriots to back-burner comfortable xenophobia to face up to an existential threat, some forgotten enemy sweeping down from a distant frozen tundra to rot their brains and turn them against each other – to end because of a criminal conspiracy against him. It feels naive now, to have blinked at all that.

More than many viewers, I have not, subjectively, responded to some of its hardest-to-watch moments as a moral failing on the part of the show or the creators. I think there is a dark streak of violence inherent to the type of hierarchy this setting depicts. It is legitimately difficult to either create or discuss stories which grapple with the reality that everywhere in the world, they hurt little girls. Few, if any, of us allowed ourselves to anticipate a coalition of women taking a desperate world by storm. Game of Thrones was somehow just ahead of this cultural reckoning that we will, with a little luck and a lot of work, be having for years to come.

The world has changed radically during our lives, and it shows no sign of stopping. Maybe one of the great shows of this moment would have to be a narrative where nobody fills the role you expect them to fill. Damn right this show’ll kill Tony Soprano, and Prince Charming, and Big Bad after Big Bad. So will real life. Valar morghulis – some too soon; others not soon enough.

The show’s signature phrase, which seems to have penetrated the culture at large, are the Stark words: winter is coming. This truth is amoral, inexorable, even perversely reassuring in its consistency. Winter must come because the world has not ended. Unless Macumber weeps, unless the heavens fall, winter is always coming.

Until it’s here.

first response to The Queen’s Justice

The Queen’s Justice really nailed one of the major reasons I am so invested in Jon.

(This is mostly about Jon but a little bit more about me than I’m totally comfortable with? Oh well.)

But I Am Not a Khal

One of S6′s most exciting (and apparently most underrated?) aspects to me is that all the power brokers leading factions of the Great Game in the south are women. Ellaria recruits Olenna to join up with Yara to support Daenerys against Cersei. These women are all on the field for their own reasons, with their own strengths, liabilities, and styles. Exactly one of them is a conventionally feminine white woman under forty.

The next tier of influence in the Targaryen coalition is also pretty striking. By my count there are eight named characters in one faction or another. Four of them, Missandei and the Sand Snakes, are women of color. The other four are Grey Worm, Theon, Varys, and Tyrion, all of whom have bodies and experiences which exclude them from their world’s construct of masculinity. Once Daenerys dismisses Daario, there is nobody on her team who speaks from a place of conventional male privilege.

Without attaching a moral judgment to the storytelling here, this is pretty rare. This is interesting.

It opens up some intriguing comparisons between the characters’ different cultures. Daenerys and Yara click readily because they’re in similar situations. The Dothraki and the ironborn are similar in some ways. These hard nomadic cultures equate femininity with weakness and they have no place for weakness. That leads to the kind of glaring inequality on display in the kingsmoot, which rests on a thousand other, less visible, denials of opportunities. But those relatively small and ruthlessly efficient groups in a khalasar or on a ship means that when an unconventional leader does break through, there’s no decorative role to stuff her into, and no cover for the mediocre man who’s in her place. 

These two are on their way to a world which is restrictive in different ways, where there is a space for some women who are conventionally feminine – but it can be a small and restrictive one in a lot of ways. Daenerys will be trying to at least navigate a world with different expectations of her, and she’ll be doing that while coming up against Cersei, who’s spent her whole life trying to break out of them.

These characters will shape a new world, and how they do this has a lot to do with how they experienced the old one. Daenerys has learned about authority from men, both from watching them and from relating to them. When she commits to becoming a conqueror, she doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but she does put her own spin on it.

Khal Drogo declares what he will do and expects his khalasar to follow. It is a statement of his own charisma and ambition. Daenerys asks the khlalasar what they will do. She tells them she’s asking for something hard and unprecedented. Her pointed omission of rape and enslavement is a major alteration of cultural norms. And as the sun beats down in witness, she gives – not promises, not offers, gives – them something incalculably precious.

That is a radical disruption of the relatively minimalist Dothraki social hierarchy, imposed from top-down, seemingly on a whim. It’s the kind of thing you can only do when you have real, serious power. It’s also the kind of thing you’d only think to do if you had a visceral experience of disempowerment.

This is a different story than it would be if you ripped Daenerys out of context and dropped her into a more conventional narrative. There are challenging and nuanced questions here: Is this decision fair? Is it moral for the Breaker of Chains to give a blanket promotion to thousands of unrepentant slave traders? Is it tactically smart? Is it wise in the long term? And when you saddle a narrative with Smurfette Syndrome, it always becomes loaded, it often becomes unbalanced, it sometimes becomes overpowered. Those subtle questions can disappear, or at least be harder to appreciate. Daenerys – like Yara, like Cersei, like a a lot of the characters who won’t even cross her path – can be a complex and singular figure precisely because there are other people like her on the screen.

Like I said, no opinion on whether anyone else should like it. But I am intrigued.

Khaleesi of Nothing, the Millionth of your Name

Do the dosh khaleen have power?

They certainly have status and influence. They have important jobs in the temple. They are probably kept safe. Compared to most of the other options, it’s nice work if you can get it.

But it’s also not something that you can aspire to, earn, or even choose. When Daenerys first sees the city as a teenager, she is adapting to a situation that’s been forced onto her. While she intellectually acknowledges that the temple of the dosh khaleen is how that situation ends, she doesn’t come up against what that means until Drogo is wounded. Before anyone knows about his injury, she can pretty much do whatever she wants, as long as she explicitly invokes his authority. Even after the bloodriders realize it’s serious, he’s still alive and conscious enough that she can convince him to submit to Mirri’s treatment. Her idea is pretty transgressive and it’s impressive that she fights for it – but even then, the issue is whether Mirri’s abilities can be exercised, not whether Dany can do anything on her own. But she will lose everything with his death, and she knows it. Much as she’s come to care for him, her fear of his death is largely and explicitly about how she will lose everything when the light of her sun-and-stars goes out. And she’s right!

A khaleesi has status, and some derivative degree of influence. But it’s not a title which connotes authority or power, individually or collectively. 

That’s not to say they’re irrelevant. The dosh khaleen serves an important purpose in Dothraki life. They are the inhabitants and keepers of Vaes Dothrak. The city is both domestic and public, effectively serving the purpose of the private sphere for the Dothraki: it provides a place of sanctuary where the men who run a society are protected from competition with other men. But it also serves the public function of allowing the various khals to maximize the benefits of cooperation and trade while minimizing the risks. The dual nature of the city creates the sense of it as a home for all Dothraki, which in turn supports a sense of shared community across the many far-flung khalasars. Vaes Dothrak is important enough that the constraints on its inhabitants are critical.  

This will be history, alive...

This isn’t something that I’d planned to put together. But maybe someone who’s flipping through tags is dragging their feet on doing the right thing today, and needs a new way into it. So if you’re someone who’s being dragged down with nebulous negativity and resentment about the next leader of the free world, take a new perspective and think about why.

I am not going to go entirely off-topic and make the affirmative case for Hillary Clinton. I happen to agree with the most enthusiastic and least equivocal arguments out there, but they’re already out there. Nor am I going to get too deep into the weeds on specific character comparisons. 

This is, instead, a case for using fiction that is purposefully at a remove from the real world as a critical angle for introspection about assumptions we make about the real world. Think of it like a side-view mirror check: no matter how conscientiously you observe traffic laws, you have blind spots that you need to check.

Battle of the Bastards: roads not taken

DAMN. A lot of other thoughts that I won’t have time to write up before the season finale tonight. One interesting takeaway, though, is that, despite their victory, the Wolf Pack sure left a lot on the table. 

Book of the Stranger episode response

Remember Where the Heart Is

Upon his brutal exit from the show, a few words on why Olly was a great addition to the narrative.

In a lot of ways, he was an unusual character. Smallfolk are relatively rare among the recurring cast, and Olly gave the specific perspective of the civilians who would be affected by Jon’s truce with Tormund.

In other ways, however, he was awfully familiar.

s5 setup to Oathbreaker

I have so much more to say about the whole episode, but I keep getting carried away with this:

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Davos and Melisandre played angel and devil to Stannis because they brought out the respective best and worst in him. But they aren’t angel and demon, they’re just people with potentially useful perspectives, and the far North is bringing out the best in both of them. Which is good, because they’re both going to be vital. Davos understands the here and now; Melisandre is tuned into the big picture. Melisandre is willing to make sacrifices; Davos understands how terrible those sacrifices are. Melisandre thinks about the fantastical monsters north of the Wall; Davos thinks about the human monsters south of it. All of those things matter. Jon needs a hustler exactly as much as he needs a prophet.

So this is the future in the flames: a witch, a smuggler, and a dead bastard. The Crone, the Smith, and the Stranger.

(Ramsay with little cartoon Xs in his eyes presumably went without saying.)

Arya has a difficult relationship with femininity and that’s okay

Is Arya correct in this instinct of hers? No. Does she have a right to feel this way? Absolutely.

In fact, I think it’s quite unfair to Arya to expect her to feel otherwise – whether by creating a bowdlerized version of the character who doesn’t think such things, or to rip on her when it becomes clear that she does. It’s certainly fair, laudable even, to challenge grown fans who embrace this mindset. But an important point that seems to get lost in those conversations is that gender conformity is by and large privileged over gender non-conformity. This is true for men and for women, but it is more crucial for women and girls because women’s social identities are assumed to be defined by gender in a way that men’s are not. Arya’s identity narrative is closely tied in with this tension in her experience between who she is and who she’s expected to be.

A King’s Shadow Shifting: Reexamining Stannis, part 4

This series will wrap up with a look at the adaptation of Stannis from book to show.

S5 eps 5-8: King’s Landing and Meereen

For the sake of completeness....

S5 eps 5-8: Dorne

The Sand Snakes sure did Jaime a favor attacking when they did. If he’d gotten caught in Dorne when she wasn’t being attacked it would’ve looked pretty bad! Admittedly it still looks pretty bad, but the Iron Throne can certainly claim justification for sending a Kingsguard to protect a princess who’s so clearly in peril. I really enjoyed Myrcella’s painfully teenaged reaction to almost being kidnapped at knifepoint. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME LEAVE HIM! I LOVE HIM! GOD, YOU DON’T KNOW MY LIFE, UNCLE DAD!

The scene in the jail might have been my favorite moment in Dorne yet. With not a whole lot said, it tells us a lot about the Sand Snakes. All three of them are very invested in living up to the image of their father’s terrifying reputation. Nym and especially Obara have internalized this idea that they can be fearsome or they can be feminine, and so they kind of roll their eyes like “oh, this, there she goes again” when Tyene starts to strip. But it’s Tyene who uses her father’s poisoned weapons, who embraces his resourcefulness and showmanship, and who can’t resist turning a win into an ego trip. Her stunt with Bronn ultimately compares quite closely to Oberyn’s own first scene, when he cut that major vein in the Lannister soldier’s hand and then gave him the chance to run for his life. Probably not coincidentally, Tyene is also the one who has her mother and the security granted by Oberyn’s devotion to Ellaria. She could emulate her father in substance and not just in persona precisely because she didn’t always need to be putting on a show to impress him.

The exchange between Obara and Bronn was just great.

We know Bronn is lying.

But the great thing is, Obara knows it too.

BURN.

Tyene’s strip show in the jail felt like it was fulfilling a female nudity quotient. (I mean, I suspect it was.*) But there was an odd kind of playing both sides about it which was interesting. Bronn starts off the scene holding all the white-male-gaze cards, or so he thinks, smugly and loudly singing The Dornishman’s Wife, a grossly sexist and xenophobic anthem which is about two men fighting for possession of a woman. So when she starts to flatter his ego and play to his gaze, he completely accepts that his visual consumption of her body is his prerogative, until she reveals that she’s getting his heart rate up to speed along the poison that the “little girl” got into him. And then he plays the song through to the end as he realizes this has been happening on her terms all along.

I have a theory about the necklace, which I’m cutting for AFFC spoilers:

S5 eps 5-8: The Wall and Beyond

The weeks kind of got way from me without episode reviews, but there’s been a lot to unpack in the middle of S5, so I thought I’d take a crack t splitting thoughts up by location rather than episode.

Tyrion and Jon in Hardhome

Jon’s approach to the summit with the wildlings and Mother Mole bears a lot of similarities to Tyrion’s meet with the Mother of Dragons, using very similar tactics to take a position of strength rather than defensiveness.

Rather than ignore or try to head off suspicion, they go on the offensive...

Even to the point of insulting their hosts.

They put the worst possible spin on events that can be used against them and then walk it back, which ends up making them look strong rather than apologetic.

They cite the same specific misdeed, even: an arrow through the heart of a father figure.

They appeal to an idealistic belief in a better world -

- but also try to garner the credibility given by jaded cynicism.

They’re open-handed with trial runs.

Good weapons, and good advice. They’re showing their worth, rather than telling.

Ultimately, they pitch their proposed alliances from a place of stark (heh) self-interest, painting a dire but fair picture of their prospective allies’ prospects.

And where does this approach come from?

I don’t think either of them could have acted this out back in the early days when their problems were within their own identities, being a bastard, being a dwarf. But they carry a lot of that fuck-off attitude in terms of owning their own parts in the wars that have come.

(transcript)