Throne game
Magine Imagine that the Lord of the Rings ended up in the desert of Mordor, driven by Aragorn, leaving his crown and leaving his throne in an uncertain fate. Imagine growing from the ash, soft grass blades of Sauron’s power. Here, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s Game of Throne left us: The Messianic King who did not, Jon Snow, drove from Westeros with free people to bring life back to the frozen kingdom of the dead. The throne, over which so much blood was shed, melted in snails; the queen, who never had a chance to think for herself, killed her in her shadow; a dragon that, by command, kindled tens of thousands and flew as ashes to anyone who does not know where.
What remains is the Abuse Council
Wise and peaceful king and broken kingdom, a little different, maybe a little better, rebuilt than before. No locked golden age, no hero promising anyone to use the crown, no satisfaction to see good and bad people get their karmic punishment. The throne game leaves everything to a purer, lighter fiction.
And just in case it still feels too comfortable, we see characters we’ve loved over the years, mocking and laughing at the idea of democracy, still relying on the feudal system, tearing the country to tears from long days. night 8000 years ago. The dragon – a war avatar capable of leveling any city in Westeros – is still nearby. It is a world that will surely see misery again soon.
The end of the series unleashed a seemingly bottomless geyser of fan dissatisfaction, ranging from mile-like Twitter threads to a heartfelt appeal that HBO makes from the scratch of the eighth season. Complaints are typically typical of the “Peak TV” era: an uprising expected of people who interpret Emilia Clarke’s traumatized, cruel Daenerys Targaryen’s power of girls as a one-dimensional message; hates that it and that character “deserved” a certain ending that they didn’t get. Much of it stems from viewers interpreting their own discomfort about the failures of the show.
But was the Game of Thrones ever a show of satisfaction? Was the goal to make people feel good? It’s hard to see Burn Gorman when Karl Tanner, Craster’s female rapist, or City Watch kills babies in bed and says it’s pure escapism.
The end of the thrones is a turning point in how our society treats art. As vulture critic Matt Zoller Seitz said, Game of Thrones is possibly the last show we’ve seen together, a crossover hit set in a similar fork in our visionary habits as the M * A * S finale. * H was in 1983. From now on, the future of television is an illegal maze in which Netflix originals, Disney, and premium streaming services strive for distressed cable TV through ever-changing viewing habits. There are far too many there and too many places for America to be united soon to show agreement. So now that it’s seen from behind, what did the show try to say? What has it done to popular culture, and what did our response say about us?
WOMEN ENERGY
Women have been at the center of the Game of Thrones discussions since credits premiered in 2011. How many women are there? How often are they naked? How many horrible experiences can Sansa Stark experience before there are too many? But one subject has always dominated: power.
The Thrones built kingdoms that had the freedom of action and the military power they managed to acquire, but the description of their power is anything but glamorous. The moments are called feminist victories – Sansa fed her rapist her own starving dogs; Daenerys attacks the Lannister convoy from Dragonback and burns it to charcoal – giving us a nauseating picture in the minds of women who have learned to behave like the men who beat and abused them. It is a strong condemnation of the systems in which women live in Westeros, and a warning to those who thank women for occupying the same inherently violent and oppressive positions that men traditionally have.
“Wherever he goes,” Daenerys Tyrion Lannister says, “evil men die. And we thank him for it, and he becomes stronger and more confident that he has right and justice.” He may as well speak on behalf of viewers, and who can blame us? As long as Daenerys burned and crucified the slave traders, the world was far from me.