“Cripples, Bastards, and our Broken Politics”.
In defence of Game of Thrones’ attempt to finish a story we are all still living through.
**there are, of course, spoilers in what follows**
HBO’s Game of Thrones was born into a world on the cusp of the change it helped its viewers to understand. Its medieval themes were so quickly, and so obviously, in tune with a politics becoming more medieval. It’s easily forgotten that as its first few episodes captured imaginations in the April of 2011, the legitimacy of the king of the world was being called into question.
The pilot opened to an audience being inundated with coverage of the “Birther Conspiracy”, as the birth-right of Barack Obama to rule was being openly challenged by those who believed him to be, on account of the circumstances of his birth, illegitimate. By the time the second episode aired, he had been pressured into releasing his birth certificate. Then, one day before the third episode aired, Obama delivered his now famous evisceration of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner — making a public show of mauling the man who had led the conspiracy to call his rule into question. The day after it aired, Obama stood before his nation to announce that Osama Bin Laden, the central antagonist of the realm, had at last been found and killed. At precisely the moment that television viewers were sucked into the intrigue surrounding a Royal Court in a way they hadn’t been before, the 21st century American Presidency had taken on an air of monarchical drama; of power, nemesis and bloody triumph.
And in this sense, it is retrospectively fascinating that Game of Thrones wound up carrying its hundreds of millions of viewers through a decade of real-world turbulence just as if not even more profound than the journey it took its in-world characters on in the same timespan. It picked us up at the twilight of an old political order, where 20th-century liberal truths about politics, the press, and presidents still held true but were quickly crumbling. It drops us off here, in a world where its lawless fantasy has become realism, where Donald Trump survived his public execution and achieved his dreadful revenge — sitting on that leather throne in his oval throne-room. It is a world in which Littlefinger’s now years-old adage that “chaos is a ladder” is a regularly shared wisdom-meme to describe political machinations in Trump’s sphere and beyond. He has borrowed, sometimes explicitly, sometimes seemingly unconsciously, from the show — and whether or not he truly engages with its substance, there can be no denying that he pitched his revolution in a decade in which a Wall, designed to keep out the nihilistic invading foreigner, had been renormalized as a concept in the minds of millions of viewers.
So how can it be then, that an audience sworn loyal to it for its increasingly relevant exploration of the world, found its final season so deeply underwhelming? How could it be that, having spent years weaving a world so intricate and complicated that it was possible for even casual viewers to engage with one another in debates about theories as to how the story would end, and what that meant about which philosophy of the world would win, the show could so spectacularly fail to please both the Nietzschean power-nihilists and the idealists in its ranks?
The answer, I think, is that Thrones suffered from the same symptom as the world it inadvertently ushered in; uncertainty. If Game of Thrones is the show of this era that we are living in, critics of its ending would do well to remember that the era we are living in has not yet ended. Stories are absolutely crucial to the way we understand ourselves and the world we are living in. But how do we understand stories when we are living through them? What do we make of events that form rungs on a ladder we have started to climb but can’t see the top of? This profound uncertainty about where the world is going is not new, but it is a marked shift from the end-of-history narrative that took hold once the potential for the Cold War to turn into a Nuclear War ended. It is, I think, a question we are beginning to grapple with, as the threads of thirty-years-worth of history seem to reach a confluence in the high-drama politics of the turn of this decade.
So, whilst Season 8 might well have committed the deadly sin of being a final season aware of itself as a final season — criticisms of its ending, no matter how awkwardly arrived at, are misguided. The decisions it makes about how to end a story thats macro-real-world-version hasn’t ended yet (and indeed, even in its original book form hasn’t ended yet) are as good as any of ours could ever be, scrambling as we are in the darkness for glimpses of our future.
If the Whyte Walkers really were stand-ins for climate change, then it might well be true that, although we certainly need a major mobilisation and alliance the likes of which we’ve never seen before to face it head-on, once we get to that battle, one swift unforeseen stab at the problem, made by an unlikely hero, with a weapon we’ve known about for years, turns out to be the silver (dragonglass?) bullet.
Daenerys’ slide from muscular liberalism to authoritarianism might not have felt earned, and the picture it paints of a will-to-power hidden in “social-justice-warrior” impulse of the modern liberal-left is problematic. That said, is there not at least a smidgeon of worthy concern that the populist, warpath-orientated attitude that Corbyn and Sanders represent whether they like it or not to their young followers (many of whom grew up believing in Daenerys Targaryen before they believed in state socialism) represents something latent, and worrying? At the very least, her story arch is an interesting musing on that timeless observation that our revolutionaries turn into our dictators. It is a worthy point to make that flags of freedom turn into the flags of fascism, just as a flag of Dragons can mean one thing hoisted around Slaver’s Bay, and something very different draped, Swastika-reminiscent, over a firebombed King’s Landing (even if the show makes the lazy assumption that fascism always looks so explicitly, well, Nazi — an unforgivable one for a show that helped trace the rise of a very modern-looking fascist).
And, King Bran the Broken of the Six Kingdoms might have been the most rushed development in network TV history, but as a guess as to what kind of messy compromise the survivors of our culture war will make with whatever ideals and newfound insights they cling to after our thrones have been burnt and all has been shaken in the battle, it’s quite literally as good a guess as any. We might still yearn to know what the Three-Eyed Raven really was, but being generous to the writers’ intentions, it is an inspired point to make that symbols of our shared and traumatic history, and of a greater, enlightened understanding of them, are the things we should rally behind in our next great constitutional settlement, between races and classes and genders unreconciled in today’s world where histories are hidden and the age of empire’s brutal legacy denied. The era of the ruthless pursuit of hegemonic power really ought to be replaced by the era of the ruthless pursuit of that kind of knowledge.
Game of Thrones might not have been the only show this decade to first foreshadow and then take on this cultural moment, but it was the most important. To take just one example, House of Cards eerily depicted a ruthless power struggle for the U.S. Presidency, complete with foreign meddling in an election and a deranged madman denigrating the office’s norms. It even normalised the psychodrama of the presidency, with Spacey’s fourth-wall-breaking oddly analogous to Trump’s self-narration on Twitter, both giving us an unusual amount of access to the inner monologue of the most powerful man in the world. But, oddly, in terms of drawing parallels between that show and the big shifts in our politics, it suffered from being a show actually about politics. Game of Thrones instead took us thousands of miles across a fictional world to show us home truths about our civilisation, and how those power games in the capital look from the perspective of the street, or on horseback through the Vale. Whether it wanted to be implicitly political or not, a show about people, the state and power that attracts such a significant audience at such a significant time can’t help but take on a bigger meaning. It took us on a fantasy journey, and we would do well to remember that secret about fantasy that has been passed down by Carroll and Tolkien and Lewis to the likes of George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry, and now to us; that escapism is never really an escape. Whether it tries to or not, fantasy always tells us something about the world it is a response to, and how we can never truly escape it.
