Fighting Words: Game Of Thrones

Game Of Thrones’ season return airs on Australian pay TV tomorrow, two hours after it screens in the States. You already know this, because the internet is going crazy for it. But why? 

We asked two friends and Junkee contributors with very differing opinions to be involved in this experiment. Caitlin Welsh loves Game Of Thrones: she’s read the books, seen the series countless times, and has even been to the themed dinner parties. Matt Roden has no interest in shows with dragons, so had never seen an episode. Until last week.

Caitlin picked six episodes for Matt to watch, which she believed would be enough to turn him around. Beforehand, she explained the show’s qualities and rebuffed his complaints; afterwards – well. You’ll have to keep reading.

(But beware: season one spoilers abound.)

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MATT: Hello Caitlin. What is the deal with Game of Thrones? Why are you watching it and loving it and knitting finger puppets about it and holding expensive feasts in its honour? Am I just being a stubborn dill because I have publicly labeled it “that dragon show”, and don’t want to back down on my snobbery?

CAITLIN: Dragons are a cool thing people want to see – they’re badass and they fly and breathe fire and shit, and you can’t argue with that. But there is actually very little magic. It’s all people and politics 95% of the time.

MATT: I’m assuming the other 5% is thrones?

I would say about twelve months ago a lot of people I know and like and respect would approach me at parties and BBQs and luaus and talk to me with the assumption that I was as fully ensconced in the world of GoT as they were. They would say things like “What season of Thrones are you on?” (often) and “Man, that is totally Thrones” (only once) and “Winter is coming” (constantly, usually followed by a knowing wink). Maybe that last comment was just a flirty seasonal announcement. Either way, I would explain that I don’t watch the show, and they would ask why, and I would usually give one of a couple of excuses. Would you like to rebut them?

CAITLIN: My mother always says I have an answer for everything, so let’s go with yes.

The Set-Up: Why Hate On Game Of Thrones?

Reason #1: I don’t have time for another TV show.

MATT: I watch lots of television. I watch what everyone watches, like Breaking Bad and Homeland. And I watch what some people watch, like Damages and The Good Wife. And I watch stuff no one has ever heard of, like Terriers and The Chicago Code (do you not believe that a police procedural starring Jennifer Beals and Delroy Lindo could be good? Believe). What will all of this throne gaming add to my already overstuffed schedule?

CAITLIN: Look, the A Song Of Ice And Fire book series , and by extension, Game of Thrones, is an epic political story on a par with The Wars Of The Roses. There are nine major Houses (each with their own sigil, colours, and characteristics; sort of like Hogwarts houses but with way more blood feuds and incest) and dozens of smaller ones, and everyone is scheming according to their extremely complex interests, which may include long-held grudges, lust for power, a sense of honour, family duty, money, allegiance to doomed figures or causes, the desire to be left the hell alone in one’s castle, the need to bang every pretty wench in sight, unbreakable oaths, and yeah, throw some vengeance in there too. Almost nobody is wholly good; unshakeable honour might see you rewarded, but eventually you will need to compromise one interest for the sake of another or you’ll get your head on a pike.

These characters were made for the moral murk of premium cable drama, where we’ll follow serial killers, meth cookers and whiny white girls through endless predicaments of their own making for entertainment. But every moment you spend wanting to reach through the screen and slap Joffrey Baratheon as hard as you can, or mourning a character you’d pinned your hopes to, is building to a moment of glorious catharsis: a spectacular battle; an emotional reunion; someone speaking truth to power; or Joffrey Baratheon being slapped as hard as his Uncle Tyrion can.

Reason #2: Magic wolf puppies. And dragons.

MATT: I am really not into all that dragon stuff.

CAITLIN: Ah, so you’re one of those people who only reads DeLillo, and sneers at swords and sorcery?

MATT: Clearly you never made it far enough through Underworld for the warlocks to show up… To be entirely honest, I used to be very into that dragon stuff. As a kid I read and re-read David Eddings and Raymond E. Feist and Terry Pratchett non-stop, and would draw maps of made up worlds. As a younger kid I played that favourite game of boys, ‘The Eternal Search For The Perfect Stick’, and I would find them and whittle off the knobby bits and think about how this would be the perfect companion in my questing days. But as an extremely old man, I have put away my childish things, including stories with dragons.

CAITLIN: Dude, I have no idea why you’re stuck on the dragons. There’s certainly a huge symbolic significance to dragons in the Song of Ice And Fire mythology: dragons were the sigils, familiars, weapons, steeds, pets etc of the ruling house for hundreds of years – they were what gave that family their power. But to most of the people who live in this world, dragons are as real as dinosaurs are to us.

I should point out that you should read the books, because they will give you a better experience of the show. The books are fucking marvellous. I read all five (of an eventual seven) in a few weeks after the first season finished, and I’ve never been a hardcore fantasy reader. I haven’t read Wheel Of Time, I don’t read Eddings or Feist or McCaffrey (although I have come to Pratchett late in life), I’ve tried to get through LOTR several times and never make it past The Whine Of The Prancing Elf or whatever it is. But I devoured these. If you are, as you say, a Child Of The Questing Stick, you need to get on that shit.

Reason #3: It looks like a show for children. But with sex.

MATT: I guess, in the end, I’m just interested in why this show would interest people I know and respect and like. When it kind of looks like this.

CAITLIN: The writing is smart, the production values make Hercules look like Ben Wyatt’s nervous-breakdown Claymation movie, and the performances are across-the-board great, often stellar. Peter Dinklage as Tyrion – the adult dwarf scion of rich, arrogant House Lannister, living in a medieval world where he would have been killed at birth had he been born any poorer – is the obvious breakout star, giving the sly, calculating Tyrion a likeability that’s hard to get on the page. Maisie Williams, as tomboy Arya Stark, carries the nastiness of the world with a grim ease that recalls Chloe Grace Moretz in Kickass. Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen improves enormously throughout season one, as does the character; Mark Addy, as the King Robert Baratheon, is perfect as the famed warrior gone to seed after fifteen years sitting half-drunk and complacent on his throne, big old goofy Fred Flintstone grin from behind his beard, with icy Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) beside him – all Lady Macbeth with mama-grizzly priorities. Plus Sean Bean, because Sean Bean, obviously.

MATT: I fear I’m just like the one timid man at yum-cha, surrounded by people happily gnawing at chicken feet, too stupidly inflexible in my tastes to even consider popping the morsel into my gob. Caitlin, will you please help me tackle this strange, confronting experience?

The Challenge: Watch These Six Episodes And Tell Me You Still Don’t Get It

CAITLIN: I’m giving you six of the ten first-season episodes to watch, because I think it will win you over and it would be a shame to spoil season two. (But if you’re not as anti-spoiler as me, finish with S2E9, ‘Blackwater’.)

Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2

CAITLIN: I thought about getting you to skip E1, as it starts a little slow and cryptic, but it’s the setup, and it’s important to know how things were in the beginning. In E2, reluctant public servant Ned Stark discovers how Westeros is really ruled, and we catch our first glimpse of The Wall that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the icy wilds north of it. (Oh, by the way, winter is coming.) If you have any inclination at all to burn through the next three anyway, do it. If not, go on…

Season 1, Episodes 6 & 7

CAITLIN: One of the best scenes in the first series comes in E6, ‘A Golden Crown’, showing just how poetic this show is about its brutality. E7 is where the status quo shifts properly for the first time, and goes some way to explaining the complex interests at play in the capital.

Season 1, Episodes 9 & 10

CAITLIN: Fire and blood, baby. Fire and blood. (AKA the “holy shit” episodes.)

MATT: Well, questing stick in hand (no euphemism-o), I march into the wilderness of my living room and will return having watched these episodes. See you on the other side of Mordor.

The Verdict: Well? Do You Love It?

MATT: I watched the six episodes prescribed in just under a week. I tried to watch them in two episode blocks, to build a little momentum. I didn’t manage to fit in reading the thousand-plus page tomes as well, so hopefully we can discuss the show without too much “but in the books you learn of his tragic childhood as a dog-less dog trainer allergic to dogs” stuff.

CAITLIN: That’s totally fine. I’d compare it to having only seen the Harry Potter movies, though – the books have so many rich details and discursive chapters about history and grudges, but they’re also not exactly the same, and the screen adaptation is done well enough to be satisfying alone for most people. 

MATT: So, if my watching of these episodes was to be better informed about whether I want to watch this show, it has answered that with a resounding “No”. I’m sorry.

CAITLIN: Was there not enough slapping? There’s more in season 2!

1. The Plot

MATT: If my viewing was to find out why other people might like it, I get it. A bit. There is a wonderful world to explore. A humongous world. The clockworked pop-up card cartography opening sequence does a great job of showing you the geographical scope of this story, with a charm I’d hoped would continue through the series – but what impressed me more was the built-in history.

MATT: I very much enjoyed piecing together the who-was-aligned-with-who-how-many-years-ago aspects of the story. I’m sorry if I ever made fun of how interesting sigils can be. I can imagine a lot of people just enjoy the amount of learning you have to do, in maybe the same way that you did as a kid studying the intertwined histories of the Greek gods, or the X-Men.

CAITLIN: I was actually a huge ancient mythology nerd as a kid – Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, I devoured it all – and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s contributed to my love for these fantasy universes, where the colour of your hair or the clasp on your cloak means you have this characteristic or that allegiance. Martin’s creation of the history is a lot more subtle than a lot of these worlds; he takes the structures of these neatly delineated groups, spreads them out over a large country and many years, and swirls them around a bit, so everyone has a little bit of some enemy house in them through marriage, and there are complex motivations beyond “You are enemy! My family best!”

MATT: But that interest in back-story was the only thing that got me through the episodes, because I actually found the present story pretty boring. This may have to do with the reading I did as a kid – I feel I’ve already experienced the stories of the bastard children and the royal schemers; the weary mercenary and the girl in-over-head. The show trots out a lot of archetypes that repeatedly populate these stories, and, at least in the first season, does little to add nuance. There’s always a witty dwarf and a stoic leader, and simply roughing up their vocabulary doesn’t make them fresh.

CAITLIN: Sure, but how often is that leading man beheaded publicly before the first season finishes? How often does that dwarf have power and privilege, challenge assumptions about the social value of those born a little different, and get laid on the regular? If you don’t think Tyrion is a fresh and interesting character, I’d love to borrow your Awesome Short-statured Lead Characters box set some time.

MATT: I’ll admit that I knew about the removal of Sean’s bean before I watched, so I missed some the shock and awe. Speaking of shock and awe, I thought the show was pretty lazy when it came to all the “adult” aspects: the swearing, sex and violence that I have to assume are what allows adults to happily admit to watching a sword and sorcery series. But adult content does not a show for adults make. Game Of Thrones doesn’t do anything with its F-bombs (compared to the creative cussing on The Wire or Deadwood). The only dirty poetry I heard was the occasional ye olde schoolyard euphemism for masturbating. So much fatal slicing and dicing occurs that when it’s inflicted on a character that’s appeared in more than one episode, it rings dully and expectedly.

2. The Sex

MATT: And the sex. Emily Nussbaum at the New Yorker did a fantastic job of unpacking the show’s predilection for ‘sexposition’, the spoonful of T’n’A that helps medicinal monologuing go down. Can you please tell me that at some point in the series a female character has unpaid sex with a partner of their choosing (and outside their immediate family)? If you can create seven kingdoms and seven gods and seven breeds of satanic snowmen, then why not a couple of more interesting women?

CAITLIN: Yes, there’s some nice sex in store, promise. And Arya’s status as a child shouldn’t exclude her from consideration as an excellent female character – she’s young, but she’s resourceful, resilient, and has been pushing back against the repressive expectations of highborn women her entire life – unlike her sister Sansa, who’s bought into her wifely destiny 100% (and is not drawn sympathetically for it). Women who are not beautiful, pliable wives or maidens are not looked upon with favour – except by the audience, who are supposed to cheer on Arya’s independence, Daenerys’ realisation of her own power and creation of a loving, passionate marriage after being sold to a warlord.

Part of the problem with this assignment is that Martin is playing a very, very long game. One of the best bits about this series is how the men start out thinking they’re in charge of everything, only for them all to fall to pieces, leaving a selection of women – smart, dumb, blind, snarky, pretending to be men, powerfully feminine, sexy, not-sexy, magic, brutal – and a eunuch and a dwarf and a few boy children to run the place, with mixed results. Even Sansa improves enormously.

There are, of course, a range of poor prostitutes, peasant women, slave girls and noblewomen who are mistreated horrifically. There are also a lot of young men impaled on pikes and burned alive. War is brutal. This world is brutal. And sometimes the sex is baldly gratuitous, no argument there. Welcome to cable!

 

3. The People

MATT: I think you’re right, the skimming of episodes does little to allow for nuances. I guess in the end my biggest issues come from the format, both in the literary genre and its adaptation to television. We spend so much time with the plot, and we have so little with the people. By making sure we keep tabs on everyone at all times (does the dragon lady ever even get out of the desert?), all we get are tabs. It feels like the “greatest hits” vibe that comes from the worst bio-pics. Everything we’re seeing is solely conducive to this juggernaut of a story.

CAITLIN: The pace is punishing, to be sure. It’s very plotty and can be rushed as they try to fit everything in. I’d still love you to watch ‘Blackwater’ (SO2, E09)– you spend a good bit of time with Sansa, Cersei and another woman of different origin discussing their place in society, Tyrion is brilliant (there’s loads more of him and sly Varys in season 2), and for once it’s all in the one place. No dragon lady, no Jon Snow being a boring fur popsicle, just a lot of fear, talking and waiting. Also explosions.

MATT: I like shows with thinking time, where we see what characters do in repose, as opposed to just watching them react again and again.  This is an issue with fantasy, as characters barely have time for reflection between quest-visions, and I can understand the show’s creators staggering under the amount of info they’re trying to cram into each action, conversation and Machiavellian eyebrow cocking.

I much prefer following Tony Soprano and Don Draper and Hannah Horvath as they mumble and fumble through the slow times than I do watching Walter White duck and weave. I guess the show I want is what happens when these people aren’t playing this game of thrones, and I found what little there is of the benchwarmers (Dinklage’s side-lined black sheep; the court’s periphery ensemble, like the sly eunuch and the covertly doddering priest) more interesting than the leading men and ladies. And it’s not the show’s fault if it doesn’t deliver exactly what I want.

CAITLIN: If you prefer talky shows, perhaps this isn’t for you. (But you know what has a lot of talking and intrigue and history and all those other things you said you liked? The books!) I adore talky shows too, but this is popcorn TV with sky-high stakes, a very precarious balance between bleak realism and fantasy camp. It’s a terrifically frustrating show at times, but scenes like the end of the final two episodes of season one should make up for it. If they don’t – well, entertainment resides where one believes it resides, and if you’d rather watch Don Draper be a whiny little bitch than a witty dwarf learn how to rule the world, you’ve only got a couple more weeks to wait.

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Caitlin Welsh is the acting Assistant Editor of Sydney street press The BRAG. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam.

Matt Roden helps kids tell stories by day at the Sydney Story Factory, and by night assists adults in admitting to stupidity by co-running Confession Booth and TOD Talks.