Nikki and I will have this week’s Game of Thrones recap and review up in a day or two, but in the meantime I want to share my newfound Twitter celebrity.
Well … Twitter celebrity by my standards, which is to say the standards of someone whose blog posts top out at maybe one hundred page views and who tweets about once a millennium.
It’s my turn to lead off our Thrones discussion this week, so I wanted to get my first pass done before going to bed. I was in the middle of talking about Varys’ amazing speech defending his ostensibly flexible loyalties when a thought occurred to me. Quickly finding that scene on TMN Go, I took a screen cap of Varys and memed it. I posted it to Facebook and then—as an afterthought, because I hardly ever use Twitter—I tweeted it.
Within a few minutes, my phone was buzzing every few seconds to tell me someone liked it and/or retweeted it (as I write this the next day, my phone is still going off with alarming regularity). I woke this morning to see that I had over a thousand likes, which by my standard makes me want to don a Garbo-esque scarf and seek solitude. I mentioned this to my girlfriend as we had coffee, and she immediately called it up on her phone. “Oh my god,” she said. “Have you read any of the replies?”
I had honestly forgotten than people can reply to tweets, mainly because I’ve had so few replies in the past. But now that I had a tweet being fairly broadly disseminated, it was inspiring responses beyond just likes and retweets—and many of the responses were, shall we say, less than enthused. To put it briefly: I’m apparently a lunatic libtard intent on destroying a great TV show by bringing politics into it. Case(s) in point:
OK. So, I’m going to talk about the political content of Game of Thrones later in this post, but for now can I just say: Wha? Getting your nose out of joint because someone “brings politics” into Thrones is like getting upset with someone for suggesting that The Wire has a lot to do with race. The show is about politics, as a few respondents pointed out …
And here, a classic misapprehension of precisely what fantasy—and fabulation, fiction, and imaginative invention more broadly—is about. Perhaps you watch Game of Thrones to distract yourself from the world, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t, in some variety of ways, about the world.
But again, more on that below.
First, here’s a few of my favourite responses. It is taking ALL MY WILLPOWER not to respond to them individually on Twitter, but as my girlfriend reminded me this morning, it isn’t worth it to feed the trolls. As Jayne Cobb would say, there ain’t no percentage in it. Instead I’ll respond to them here for the benefit of my tens of readers.
And how’s that working out for you?
At least one person granted that the show might have an allegorical dimension:
Then there was this one, a variation on the Trump-wrestling-CNN gif:
OK, so with this one I just have to ask: you do know that Euron is the bad guy, right? He’s a despot and rapist, and his attack on these key female characters is …
Sigh. Never mind.
By what metric? Obama was worse than Hoover, Filmore, or Pierce? Or Bush Jr.? Look, even if you think everything Obama did was disastrous, the key question here is competence. Hate what he did all you want, but dude at least got shit done.
Here’s someone who apparently took the few seconds to read my profile:
Two things: one, what “associate professor” actually means is that I have tenure. Two, that’s the lawyers’ business what they call themselves. “Counselor” is a pretty cool title, so perhaps they’re happy with that. And for what it’s worth, the title “doctor” was employed by doctors of philosophy for centuries before physicians adopted it.
This one makes me wonder if the guy knows me:
That seems a wee bit personal. But as it happens, I’m in good company. There are plenty of jackasses who see real world politics in GoT (and over 1500 of them have liked my tweet so far).
I’m just going to assume this one is a knee-jerk response this person tweets to anything resembling liberal/lefty sentiment, given that I really don’t see what it has to do with my tweet.
Speaking of WTF tweets:
I … what? I suppose I would be … if I had been. I mean, I am Canadian, and I suppose the balance of my bosses might have been card-carrying Tories, but …
Yeah. Really don’t get this one.
Dear Americans: fix that electoral college already, wouldya?
Well, except for those who obviously watched the show and made a special point to take the time to call me an idiot.
I think my Twitter handle confused this poor fellow.
And my favourite thus far (as the hits keep coming):
Yes. Yes. It’s true. I cannot hold more than one thought in my head. Trump is the only thing there is any more, and he has ruined every pleasure I might otherwise have. Samwell in the Citadel Library? All I can think of is Betsy DeVos. Ser Jorah’s greyscale? OMG, Medicaid cuts! I wonder if Melissandre is plagiarizing Michelle Obama. What bathroom would Grey Worm use in South Carolina? Is Cersei going to build a wall? Are all Dornishmen bringing drugs? Are they rapists? Littlefinger? Little hands! Ahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
Idiot.
***
So, back to the question of Thrones and politics.
Is Game of Thrones about politics? Of course it is. It’s a show all about individuals and groups jockeying for power, and striving to maintain what power they have. It’s somewhat amusing that people would question this with regard to this episode in particular, considering that three out of the five principal storylines have to do with political maneuvering: Tyrion counseling Daenerys to proceed in a manner that will win her the support of the major houses, Cersei attempting to frighten other houses into falling in line behind the throne (and Jaime making an extra effort to recruit Randyll Tarly), and Jon Snow considering the risk vs. reward scenario of allying with Daenerys. The episode might have given us a thrilling sea-battle, and might have distracted us with the sexual shenanigans of Grey Worm and Missandei, and Yara and Ellaria, but ultimately this episode—like so many episodes preceding it—was a meditation on what it means to attain, retain, and exercise power.
And the show depicts the contestations of power and politics in a manner far more consonant with other HBO offerings like The Wire and Deadwood than with The Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia. To the dude above who tells us “Don’t compare real and fantasy,” I say don’t confuse fantasy with “fantasy.” Game of Thrones might have magic and dragons and take place in an alternative reality, but it is an eminently political show.
But then, The Lord of the Rings is also political—just not in the same manner as Thrones. Power is treated in markedly different ways in the two works, but both make political statements. Tolkien’s masterpiece is an expression of nostalgia for a premodern world governed by extrinsic, spiritual laws and a rigid religious hierarchy, and was written in part as a vehement reaction against what he saw as the depredations of modernity, secularism, and technology. Is that not a political statement? Daenerys’ challenge to Varys in this week’s episode articulates a tension in GRRM’s work between an essentially progressive sensibility embedded in an essentially conservative genre—Varys’ impassioned speech is populist and democratic, but reflects the difficulty of finding a vehicle for such beliefs in a monarchical, undemocratic world.
As it is, sadly, in our own at the moment.
it's all narrative 