Game of Thrones is
an exciting, albeit violent, medieval fantasy novel and TV series. The special
effects are incredible, the characters interesting as they are disturbing, and
the story writers extremely good at getting you to watch the next episode. But
behind the stunning visuals is a story that goes largely unseen by the viewers.
Whether you are a die-hard fan, or a casual viewer, hopefully in the next few
paragraphs I can open your mind to whole new levels of meaning in the epic
fantasy Game of Thrones. I will divide
my review into three parts, the magic and its meaning, the politics of thrones
and the politics of today, and finally critiques and inconsistencies.
Part 1: The magic and its meaning.
Magic and the medieval era seem to always go hand in hand,
but Game of Thrones is almost void of
it except for a few elements, the white walkers in the north, and the dragons
of Daenerys Targaryen and a few other minor elements.
Magic in literature can almost always be taken as a symbol
of insanity. Probably the best example is the beloved children’s series Harry Potter, which is the imaginative
re-telling of the trip of a severely abused and neglected boy (Harry) to a
mental institution (Hogwarts).
The “White Walkers” are essentially a zombie army in the
frozen land of the north. The only people who have seen the White Walkers are
the “Night’s Watch” a group of men who through choice, or through force (mostly
force) have given up everything, i.e. the company of the opposite sex, the
chance to see or have a family, and more, in order to supposedly “protect the
kingdom.” Many are there because of incredibly traumatic reasons, such as being
abandoned by family or as part of a plea bargain. As seems to be rampant in all
military situations, abuse, anger, and fighting are rampant.
Now what if, after making all these sacrifices and living in
this near hell, you realized that there was no real threat? The wall is
ridiculously large, and no one would ever get in, and it is in the middle of a
frozen desert. You will stay on the wall all your days, never have a family,
never do anything meaningful, and not really be useful or create any value to
anyone. The acceptance of that reality would be ridiculously difficult and
painful. The desire to have a real enemy and a purpose for your existence would
be enormous. Traumatized people are forced into alternate universes where the
trauma and pain can, if nothing else, be meaningful.
“The White Walkers” are easily interpreted as nothing more
than the creations of severely traumatized soldiers. The parallels to our own
world and soldiers should be apparent, where imaginary white walkers are the
least of our problems, but the men having the illusions could be.
The dragons follow a similar pattern. Khaleesi (among my
favorite characters) is a girl whose only family member, her brother, is a
complete sociopath who is happy to have a whole army rape her if it will be
beneficial to him. After being told this absolutely horrific thing by her
brother, that same brother essentially sells her to be the wife of a borderline
rapist who for entertainment at their wedding watches women being raped and men
being killed. If trauma exists, this is it. If this were your lot in life,
suddenly being the “mother of dragons” who could birth all-powerful dragons
that caused men to do whatever you pleased would sound pretty nice, especially
since it is men who ruthlessly and harshly disregarded her life. Being able to
control men with her family’s emblem, the dragon, would be almost infinitely
appealing.
Magic makes movies fun and interesting, but often hides a
lesson about trauma and coping mechanisms.
Part 2: The politics of Thrones and the politics of now.
Most everybody is appalled by Joffrey, the young boy king in
the movie. He is brutal, he is mean, and he is a coward, unlikeable in every
possible way. But the people around him,
such as his mother and the other kings vying for the throne, are not much
better. Basically the show is about a bunch of sociopaths who go around
ordering people around and killing whoever gets in their way or for whatever
whim they have.
It is kind of crazy that these characters are even
relatable, because they are nothing like you or me.
A testament to the messed up nature of the show (and the
world that cheers it on), is that deep down we are cheering for Ned Stark and
his family. Ned Stark and his family seem to be the only good guys.
But remember something about Ned Stark. He opens the show by
chopping off a head of a man he has barely met and only listens to for about 30
seconds of testimony/defense. Chops off his head! To make things worse, he forces
his 10 year old son to watch. In what planet is that man a good guy? The
political planet.
Ned Stark only seems like a good guy because next to Joffrey
and the like he is a saint. Compared to prostitutes we may all seem like chaste
virgins, but that does not make it so. It is not like our virtue is increased
by being surrounded by people that lack any. Ned Stark, despite what virtues he
may exude is a man who abandons family for power and who kills men without
trial in front of his young son.
This is the supposed good guy.
The parallels to today are painfully clear.
Ned Stark (and his family), are the “good politicians” The
guys who are finally going to “fix the system.” They are loving, they are
caring, they are compassionate. They will get rid of the bad guys and restore
order, rule in justice, end the war, etc. etc. That may sound far-fetched and
ridiculous, but listen to the rhetoric around any politician running for
president this coming year: it will sound the same. If you are in team [enter
candidates name] that candidate can do no evil. This is what we think. If only Rob
Stark (i.e. Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul or Hillary Clinton) gets into power,
then the system will be fixed. That is what we tell ourselves every single
year. And just like in Game of Thrones,
we keep watching hoping “Joffery” will be killed and the murders will stop, but
just like in the show the murders, the killings, the rapes, the brutality never
stop. The Ned Starks of the world keep the system going, by keeping us hoping a
violent system can in some way become non-violent.
The Game of Thrones,
for ways I will discuss in the next section cannot be midlevel era, largely
because of the large scale constant war which was impossible before the
industrial revolution. No, Game of Thrones
is not about medieval war, it is about the wars of the post-industrial western
world.
The Game of Thrones
is the modern world in many ways. The U.S. government has been at war almost
non-stop since World War II. They have propped up dozens of dictators around
the world, set up governments to support their causes, and tear down any
government that threatens their rule. The government today is the real life Game of Thrones, and it is every bit as
bloody as the medieval drama. And as much as we would like to exonerate Ned
Stark, no man’s (or woman’s) hands are clean.
We like to think our politicians are beyond the brutality of
these medieval barbarians, but look at the drone strikes which kill school
children and wedding guests. These are the people who will send down bombs on
an innocent family gathering, and hardly feel remorse about it.
These are people who will send thousands of men into Iraq to
die, and hardly flinch or worry about the validity/necessity of the war.
These are people who prop up dictators in foreign countries
and sell weapons to brutal regimes around the world.
These are people who will take a mother from a child simply
because they don’t have the proper piece of paper.
These are people who will throw thousands in prison because
they don’t agree with the vegetation they keep.
And it all just keeps going because we keep believing it is
somehow necessary, keep believing that somehow “the good guy” will finally come
in and kill Joffery and all the bad guys, and there will be peace! This is the
great fallacy of the human race, the belief that somehow we can destroy
violence with violence. It never works. The violence will never stop, the wars
will never cease. Just like Game of
Thrones, as long as people keep watching, the violence continues, but the
moment we turn away, is the moment it disappears and the show will cease to be
aired.
Part 3: Critiques, irrationalities/inconsistencies, and economics
Game of Thrones
has some compelling and well done story telling. There is a reason I got as far
as I did. And as stated at the beginning, visually, aesthetically, etc. the
movie is great.
The biggest problem is the show’s plot and premise are so
completely irrational and inconsistent that the whole thing gets so utterly
ridiculous that it requires too much suspension of the rational mind.
A story can contain magic and dragons and it is okay, as
long as the movie is internally consistent. That is fire cannot move in one
direction one minute, and a different the next, unless the rule is fire
constantly moves (which would be interesting.)
First and foremost, Game
of Thrones deals with human entities, so there are some basic rules that a
storyteller must accept when using humans.
1. Humans do not like/want to die and will do most
anything to avoid it.
2. Humans need food to live
Not too complicated, and pretty indisputable. Sure there are
some humans who want to die, but those are a very small fraction of society at
any given moment.
Game of Thrones
breaks both of these rules almost constantly. Most of the characters are
completely given over to the author’s whims to keep the plot going, without any
sort sense of desire to survive, or any ability to get food. Every level of the society is either irrational
or ignored. The peasants and lower-classes are ignored and killed on whims by
the other classes without any reference to the essential function they carry
out in society. Kings, knights, soldiers all depended heavily on peasants and
the lower-classes for everything, sure they could kill a few to make a point,
but they were a valuable resource which the kings would not have been able to
just slaughter at the drop of a hat.
The soldiers are assumed to have no sense of will or
morality whatsoever. This is the stereotype and in many ways the reality of soldiers,
but many soldiers do maintain some level of morality, and even more than that, the
desire to survive. The show assumes that not only do soldiers have zero regard
for the lives of other people (which is semi-believable), they also have zero
regard for their own lives (which is not believable).
The ruling class does irrational things right and left
because they want to, and because it makes the story last longer. The whole
story is the story of the irrational decisions of the ruling class (much like
our history books). But what makes this unbelievable (as opposed to the history
books) is the rulers often act against their own self-interest in ways that
would decrease their wealth or chance of survival. Sure rulers do a lot of crazy and irrational
things, like invading Iraq, but we can look back on that event and realize with
Haliburton and all, there was a lot of self-interest driving that decisions
(and bloody ruthlessness). What wouldn’t make sense if George Bush had instead
decided to invade Uruguay, kill everyone in the country, burn all the resources
in the country, have half the army kill themselves, take what was remaining of
the army and send them into Indiana where they did the same thing. That would
make no sense, but that is about the level of rationality that goes on among
the Thrones rulers.
Like so many modern stories, the people who make them have
no sense of technology or economics, or just the basic reality that people need
food to survive.
People look at the medieval ages as a brutal time, but life
expectancy actually took a small bump from Roman times, mostly because there
weren’t so many wars. Yes you read that right, less fighting. Sure there were
really long wars, but our conception of warfare is nothing like medieval
warfare.
In modern (as in post-US Civil War) warfare the wars
generally last 2-10 years with frequent fighting and battles. World War I
lasted 4 years, with men constantly in the trenches and having battles every
few months. By Korea and Vietnam wars soldiers faced near constant fighting.
Compare this to medieval war. In the 100 years’ war, which was at the pinnacle
of the medieval times (1337-1453) there was on average less than one battle every
two years! A king would call for all the Lords, they would bring the men and
they would go fight, for one day, and
that would be it for the whole year. If the battle was particularly bloody
there would be no battles for multiple years as the kingdoms recouped.
When people write these ridiculous stories they have no idea
the crazy amount of resources it takes to go to war. In medieval times these
resources were simply not available for large constant warfare. You could not
have year-long wars because your soldiers would starve to death. There just was
not enough food. This is the same reason that peasants did not go to war, and
why you simply did not kill peasants willy nilly. Each peasant dead meant less
food and resources for you and your army.
Also another thing to note is the size of the battles. From
the shows it is difficult to get clear statistics about the demographics of the
“seven kingdoms.” To be fair, in Roman times larger armies and battles were
able to be created simply because there was a larger government with a large
kingdom. However, in the typical battle in the 100 years’ war there would be
5-10 thousand men on each side going into the battle. The winner would lose a
few hundred men; the loser would lose a few thousand men. In other words all of
France or England would be able to field one army of approximately 8000 men for
one battle for a whole year. That was it. In all of England only 8000 men would
be in battle for the whole year. Of those 200-2000 would likely be killed in
any given year to war. And that is it. Why? Because they could not afford to go
to war more, there was not enough food. One can only steal so much food from a
farmer, before the farmer is on the verge of starvation himself; when it gets
to this point, threats of violence become meaningless. As the ruler the option
is to steal what is left of the food (and the farmer dies of starvation) or
kill the farmer, either way this means less food the coming year because there
is one less farmer.
It is these fundamental realities about life and economics that
the writers of Thrones are completely
oblivious of.
A king makes a calculation just like anyone else. Put
yourself in their shoes. You are the Lord/King of the north. You control a
large area where people pay tribute to you and you get food. What should you
do? Take your huge army, loose thousands of men, and go attack the capital? Or
a neighboring lordship? Maybe, if you could steal more resources than you would
lose through the war, but the reality is that going to war takes TONS of
resources, so one has to be pretty dang confident it is going to work, because
it is a huge risk. This is why in medieval times the operations were generally
small and calculated. Sure kings made mistakes and were even irrational and
lost thousands of men at times on bad decisions, but their decisions were reined
in by economic realities. Just this one rational thought makes much of Game of Thrones nonsensical. But
unfortunately it does not stop there.
What is their motivation of the soldiers to fight? They are
paid, so that keeps them going for the routine task, but when going to war, no
amount of money is worth a person’s life (i.e. almost no one would say, “I’ll
kill myself if you give me X dollars”) This is what people often don’t
understand about war. Soldiers do not fight for love of country, or whatever
B.S. propaganda says. Soldiers fight because they take a calculated risk about
money and their chance of survival or (as is more often the case) there are men standing behind them who will
kill them if they do not fight.
The common soldier is stuck between two enemies: The enemy
on the other side that is coming to destroy them, and their commanding officers
who will kill them if they desert. Once again people, even most soldiers, care
about their lives and will not risk it without some pretty compelling reasons,
like getting killed.
This makes lots of the scenes with soldiers completely
nonsensical, because the soldiers are treated as people without morals and the will
to live.
There are many ridiculous scenes that could be analyzed, but
just to look at one, the scene where King Joffery has all the bastard sons of
the previous king killed. The scene is completely ridiculous (at least based on
the information given). First off there is no way they could track down those
sons. The previous king had sex with prostitutes regularly. These prostitutes
had sex with tons of men regularly (they are prostitutes after all). It would
be impossible to track down whose sons were whose, so that whole thing is
ridiculous. Then to add on some ridiculous crème, a group of three soldiers go
and search out this one bastard son, who has joined “the night’s watch.” The
leader of “the night’s watch” group threatens them with violence. There are two
or three soldiers. What would they do? They would leave and just say they
couldn’t find the boy (or even that they found him and killed him, because honestly
who is going to know?), that is the way that involves the least violence and
risk to their own lives. The fact that they come back and try to fight for some
random boy is just absurd. Also in this episode, soldiers literally pull babies
from mother’s arms and kill them. I find it extremely difficult to believe that
this would not lead to full-scale, all out revolution. People are not easily
pushed to revolution, but seeing babies murdered by the king would probably do
it if anything did.
The list could go on and on with irrationalities and inconsistencies
and plot holes. The general problem is that people consistently act contrary to
their own self-interest, which in real life rarely (if ever) happens. People
make miscalculations and mistakes, but to consistently do opposite what any rational
human being would do makes things real difficult to take seriously.
“I’m Ned Stark’s wife, I’m going to let Jayme Lannister go,
because meh, no reason.” Then some random guy kills some kids for no good
reason, then the Rob Stark kills the guy despite knowing he is going to lose
half his army. Basically the author decided bad things needed to happen to Rob
Stark’s army to keep things interesting, so let’s have everyone in his army go
completely insane and irrationally killing each other.
