Where Game of Thrones Lost Me: A Ramble

It’s funny how things work out.

When I decided to write this article, I was prepared for it to kill this blog before it even started to live.

I am one of THOSE people with Game of Thrones. You know, say it with me, “the first four seasons were great, then it became crap.” Not a terribly original thought, but a deeply contentious one all the same. And I thought that I was an idiot for putting it out there, that I was going too deep into the pop culture pool. I thought this was going to be elementary school dodgeball all over again, just everyone else surrounding me with their judgmental glares, laughing as they pelt me with ball of lead.

Budget cuts are a bitch. Anyway, then season 8 happened. And suddenly “Game of Thrones is poopoo garbage” became the common consensus. So now I can shit talk this show all I want with minimal resistance. So, you know, whoohoo. But never fear, dear reader, for this will not be a deconstruction of season 8 and what a dumpster fire it was. The internet has no deficit of those, and frankly there’s nothing I can add to that discussion. Game of Thrones season 8 isn’t just bad, it’s bad in a kind of depressingly standard way. There’s nothing to deconstruct because everything is so surface level, the failure is as basic as it gets. What can I say that you’re not already thinking?

No, I’m more interested in the deeper failings of this show, the fire under the hood, the broken themes that dragged the ever so buoyant quality of the show down the bottom of a sea made of broken dreams and the showrunners disgusting brain juice.

Basically, I want to talk about Jon Snow.

Specifically, I want to talk about Jon Snow’s damn parents.

To talk about this, I need to talk about the broader trope of oh-so-special characters and their oh-so-special parents. This is about as common as it gets in stories, going all the way back to the myths of old wherein basically every hero’s origin story was “Zeus is a man-slut, whatcha gonna do?” But the modern version of this trope, like most modern literature tropes, largely goes back to my man J. R.R. Tolkien.

I hate to be mistaken for dissing the fantasy genres OG, but Tolkien’s take on this whole trope kind of sort of shows what can go wrong with it. This is because…Well, I mean…The Lord of the Rings is one of the all-time great stories and I adore it, but it’s kind of…

It’s racist as balls, okay? It’s racist as a Klan meeting around H.P. Lovecraft’s grave and each Klansman is watching a major Let’s Player on their phone. It would be the president’s favorite book if the president could read.

Of course you do.

This is especially unavoidable because the Peter Jackson films, otherwise perfect adaptations that leave out the books more questionable material…

…not only kept the racism of the book intact, but doubled down on it with visual coding. So the good humans who stick by the throne look like this…

And this…

While the bad humans who side with Sauron and Saruman look like…um…this…

And…oh god…this.

Yeah.

I should mention that this is almost certainly not the result of any intentional malice on the part of Jackson and the costume/makeup department, but instead it is what happens when you incorporate elements from older material without thinking through the implications. Loyalty to material is fine, but sometimes you have to know when to look at that material and go “Hey, wait a minute…”

The point I’m trying to make is that there is an ugly history of one of the most popular tropes in fiction is based in a very uniquely old-timey British ideas of superior breeding and divine right. It’s not great and most authors who engage in it don’t even realize that’s what their invoking because that’s how tropes work. We’re only recently starting to see a pushback against these ugly ideas in the mainstream, with recent films such as Star Wars: The Last Jedi and The Kid Who Would Be King actively subverting the trope. These films feature characters with missing parents who find themselves in an obvious heroes journey story, both of whom rationalize that their absentee parents must be some grand hero themselves who they must discover to find the truth about themselves, and both ultimately have to deal with the fact that their parents were absent because they sucked and they are special because the came from nothing, because they are heroic individuals in spite of coming from nothing.

It should also be noted that The Last Jedi got HUGE pushback from this plot detail, with people being so angry…not just disappointed, ANGRY…that Rey is not part of some special Jedi bloodline that LucasArts seems poised to retcon this twist in the upcoming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which would be the worst decision but that is a subject for another time. I don’t know what it says that people are so attached to this trope, but I’m pretty sure I don’t like it.

I assume no one had the same complains about The Kid Who Would Be King because no one saw it, but that’s another issue altogether.

So where was I? Oh, right, Jon Snow. Got sidetracked in the intro. Very professional. It’s a good blog everybody. 

JS was seemingly another bit of pushback against this trope. He is the most traditionally heroic character in the Game of Thrones. At least he is after his father, Ned Stark, who himself was so great, powerful and wise that he was capable of ending all the conflicts in the series before they even began…before he was killed because of the petty machinations of the other characters and his own insistence at keeping to his code of honor in a big statement of intent for the whole series (run-on sentence. More good blogging). So now Jon Snow is the new classic fantasy hero of the series. And he is also, as the series will never let us forget, a literal bastard. He is the son of Ned Stark and a mother whose identity Ned Stark took to the grave, most presume because it would bring shame to himself and/or Jon.

So there’s our pitch. Jon Snow is a traditional fantasy hero despite blood that is presumably quite tainted. Neat, throws away an old, ugly and overused trope and gives his character an obstacle to overcome in peoples prejudice toward the circumstances of his birth. All well and good and the foundation of a potentially fascinating character journey.

Then we found out the truth.

Jon, it turns out, is the son of Ned Stark’s sister and former king Rhaegar Targaryen. So Jon Snow isn’t just a product of fine breeding, he is in fact the inheritor of TWO royal bloodlines. So now Jon’s heroic nature and amazing battle skills are not a man becoming something special because of his own nature in spite of “tainted” blood, but instead he is super blood hybrid whose traits are 100% inherent.

It’s actually hard to put into words how much I hate this. This single handedly took Game of Thrones from a show that had lost its way but that I still tolerated and turned it into to a product I outright hated. It was a long time in the making, don’t get me wrong, but this was it. It was the utter ruination of one of the few characters who had not yet been screwed over by the showrunners after they ran out of book material to adapt. And the worst part is I can’t even blame those clowns for this. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss got to make the show because they correctly guessed Jon Snow’s true parentage. This is George R.R. Martin’s idea, his vision for the trajectory of the story. And I have actual difficulty accepting that.

Because George R.R. Martin is the good writer. He’s the one who has something to say with these characters. He’s the one interested in deconstructing fantasy tropes. He’s the one who surprises and excites the reader with his genuine insight into both fantasy and the more complicated machinations of real-life old English politics and warfare, mixing both into this wonderful tapestry that took the world by storm. And yet he decided to completely undermine the central deconstructive point of one of the main characters to instead double down on the inherently ugly idea of powerful royal bloodlines instead. I really don’t know what to do with that information. Not only did it kill the show for me, but even my enthusiasm for the books has basically died. Because who even knows what other awful decisions in the show are Martin’s and not the hack showrunner’s?

Maybe Tyrian is supposed to spend the rest of the story farting around being useless and losing all his wit and intellect. Maybe Bran’s story is meant to abruptly come to a halt after Hodor’s death and all his weird powers go completely unexplored forever. Maybe Jamie and Cersei are meant to not develop at all as characters and end right where they began. Maybe Arya is meant to just become a magic ninja successfully taking her revenge on all who have wronged her despite the fact that revenge in Game of Thrones never ends well for the person seeking it because that’s the whole point goddamnit. Hell, maybe Daenerys…

Okay, no, you know what, I know I said no season 8 rants, but screw it, we’re going to talk about Daenerys. But before we do I should wrap up this rambling article (I’m so sorry, I swear I thought I had a more coherent point to make when I started) by giving one bit of credit where it’s due; Jon Snow does not end up on the throne, and that is a good thing. That he ends up rejecting his heritage and instead returning to where he belongs in the night guard is the best possible ending for this character. I could complain for days about WHY he doesn’t end up on the throne and how his character trajectory renders both his resurrection and the parent reveal completely superfluous, but let’s just end on that positive note.

Continued in “Screw it, Let’s Talk About Danerys.”