Blame of Thrones II
What do we say to the god of lazy writing? "Today," apparently. "Today will be fine."
I Have No Pants, and I Must Scene
A few weeks ago, a well-meaning soul on Twitter tried to explain the latter days of the Game of Thrones series via the theory that George R.R. Martin is a “plotter” (a colloquial term for a writer who really loves lots of meaningful squiggles on graph paper) while the showrunners who ran out of GRRM material to directly adapt are “pantsers” (an equally colloquial term for a writer who works by intuition and improvisation rather than detailed planning, as in “by the seat of one’s pants”). That’s a cute image, like a baby unicorn gamboling around a sunlit forest clearing, and it’s got about as much basis in reality. There’s nothing mystical about being careless! That’s what the responsible parties were. Just careless. That carelessness is why I’m sat at my keyboard, glass of Glenmorangie Lasanta keeping me sane as I try to recall why I ever promised to avoid excessively performative negativity in the previous installment of this essay.
The idea that one is either a “plotter” or a “pantser” is a recurring topic of distraction in the writing world, and I must admit that I’m not enamored of the concept. As I see it, planning and intuitive improvisation are both merely tools in a kit, not intrinsic qualities of one’s human condition, and I think the whole idea smacks more of the arbitrary comfort of proclaiming labels meaningful than of identifying a genuinely meaningful dichotomy. At any rate, neither plotting nor pantsing has any bearing on what befell the climactic episodes of Game of Thrones. Bad writing is bad writing, impatience is impatience, lack of care is lack of care.
Failure to Respect the Soap
It ought to go without saying that what follows will contain some drastic spoilers for the works in question, but if you’d like to continue partying like it’s 1996, shield your eyes now.
Game of Thrones takes place in an intricate fantasy world full of competing economic, political, and religious factions; a world full of history and precedents and traditions and secrets, a world of pomp and circumstance and unfinished business. To summarize it all at once risks quasi-parody: “Well, before we get started, my sweet summer child, you need to understand that the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros were once forcefully united by the power of House Targaryen, who monopolized the power of dragons, but gradually lost it, until they were overthrown by a rebellious coalition of noble houses, and also blah blah Iron Bank, blah blah Dothraki, blah blah Night’s Watch, Wall, and the Long Winter, blah blah Andals and First Men and the Iron Islands and Three-Eyed Ravens, blah blah traditional rugged independence of the North contrasted with the cosmopolitan opulence of the South…”
Bullshit. Before we got started, you didn’t need to understand any of that stuff. The first season of Game of Thrones (like the book from which it was fairly closely adapted) proved it by not giving it to you. No long scrolling paragraphs of backstory, no illustrated prologue with a voiceover, no preliminary scene-setting at all! Game of Thrones, like its literary predecessor, opens with two situations that are relatively limited, local, and universally comprehensible:
Men patrolling an ominous woodland encounter a deadly supernatural threat; and
A middle-aged family man who takes his responsibilities very seriously finds out that his old friend the king is coming to pay him a surprise visit, which surely means unexpected bad news.
The brilliant gimmick of Game of Thrones, novel and first TV season alike, was to fold all considerations of in-depth worldbuilding into the basic format of a family drama. In the early story, you don’t learn anything about the Iron Bank or the finances of House Tyrell or the machinations of the warlocks of the House of the Undying in the distant city of Qarth. You learn about the nature of Eddard Stark, and how it contrasts with the nature of his old but deeply problematic friend Robert Baratheon. You learn that Robert’s marriage is a brittle artifact of political convenience, that the Starks disdain the Lannisters as greedy opportunists and the Lannisters detest the Starks as austere and provincial. Husbands and wives, friends and rivals, cousins and hostages— first we learn the fundamental dispositions of these characters as human beings, and from that the story branches and flourishes, eventually telling us more about history, economics, magic, religion, and so forth. We come to understand those things as outgrowths of the fundamental human conflicts rather than as some sort of homework to be memorized on the side.
Game of Thrones, at its core, is a soap opera. Nothing about that term is meant to be derogatory. It’s a wide-scale human drama in which the humanity of all the participants is constantly emphasized. Even the most conventionally admirable character has weaknesses, and nearly all of the most reprehensible have some thread of private tragedy or sympathetic motivation (there are distinct exceptions; Gregor Clegane, for example, is a transparently basic brute, but if you look around you’ll find we have plenty of those in the real world, too). It doesn’t matter how much mystery and sorcery and fantastical adventure the plot piles on. Beneath those shiny baubles the core stories are of people seeking the easily relatable: honor, love, employment, knowledge, riches, glory, connection, affirmation, revenge, pleasure, and even oblivion.
Now, one crucial aspect of a soap operatic format is its emphasis on human details. A soap opera steadily builds an intricate social and emotional portfolio for everyone in its cast of characters. We find out about their natures, their aspirations, their rivalries, their motivations and abilities. All of this information enriches the developing drama— the audience looks forward to clashes of wit and personality, to responses to crisis or temptation, to discovering how characters change after success or frustration. This great mass of detail isn’t trivial, but is instead central to the pleasure of the narrative experience. The richer a fictional human portrait, the more the reader or viewer enjoys loving or detesting that character, as they will.
Imagine how the audience feels when, after years of development, these details are brusquely ignored or even contradicted without warning. We don’t really have to imagine, though. We just saw it. Consider the strange narrative fates of the Lannister siblings.
In order to survive his uniquely challenging situation, Tyrion Lannister has become a generally sharp (though not infallible) judge of character and a patient observer. His chief weaknesses are his satisfaction with his own cleverness and his unpreparedness for the true magnitude of his father’s buried resentment. When it comes to his siblings, however, he’s got them pretty much cold— he knows exactly who Jaime and Cersei are, how deep their qualities and depravities run.
Tyrion is thus handed one of the more insulting plotlines of the closing seasons of Game of Thrones when he is made to insist, over and over, that Cersei had nothing to live for prior to her new pregnancy, but that this will make her tractable by restoring her will to survive. The foolishness of this is staggering. Even if Tyrion is understandably a bit blinded by a desperate, late-blooming need to keep what’s left of his dwindling family out of the ash heap, this line of reasoning requires him to ignore the previous twenty years of Cersei’s life, which he has either personally witnessed or been made well aware of by various sources of intelligence. If Tyrion is a haunted survivor, Cersei is a brutally hardened survivor, a woman who made decisions to take and use power that were well beyond the limits of Tyrion’s own conscience. She is no stranger to risk.
Cersei, let us recall, survived fifteen years of increasingly loveless marriage to a hot-tempered king and actually properly cuckolded the fellow with her own brother not once but three times, which would have been sufficient to get her entire family executed if Robert had experienced a single moment of inconvenient clarity. She proved herself willing to help engineer not just murder but regicide and full-scale civil war to avoid the consequences of all that. She meddled in the affairs of church and state to secure more clandestine power for herself, and endured torture and humiliation when that plan went sideways. For a climax, she added the effervescent charm of fucking necromancy to her public persona, blew up a temple, killed hundreds of innocent people along with her enemies, and declared herself Queen by what amounted to force majeure. The idea that Cersei had nothing to live for before her uterus came back into play is laughable. The gloriously-cheekboned bitch has done nothing but live, successfully treading a winding path of skulls while thousands have died around her.
We are expected to believe that Tyrion has missed all of this. Or perhaps we are simply expected to forget it happened. Who can tell? After all, we are also treated to a marvelous scene (season 8, episode 4) where Tyrion stands before the walls of King’s Landing and proclaims his awareness of Cersei’s pregnancy. Euron Greyjoy, standing a few feet behind her, is never seen to express any curiosity about the interesting fact that Tyrion has come all the way down from Winterfell in possession of this news, which he himself has only just received. Euron of course won’t live long enough to get to compare the actual number of months remaining in Cersei’s pregnancy with the number ‘nine’ and ponder why these numbers might be different. The point remains that this is the sort of crucially scandalous relationship-shifting detail the show never ignored in its early seasons.
Indeed, the study of natal incongruities launched the entire plot of the series. Jon Arryn was murdered after conducting too much research into historical records revealing that all previous unions of the Lannister and Baratheon lines had yielded children with dark hair.
Dropping or ignoring such details at a late date doesn’t simply make characters look like twits. It prevents the satisfying closure of plot threads and thematic symmetries previously built up for years. It severs connections across the show’s seasons, turning something that ought to feel grandly coherent into something fragmented and misfiring.
So much for Tyrion and Cersei. Let us not forget their poor brother Jaime, who at the height of season eight is apparently replaced by a Skrull duplicate.
Jaime Lannister, to be clear, is an arrogant, incestuous conspirator, a crude jackass, and a casual murderer. Remember the time he threw a small child out a tower window, or the charming interlude in which he sexually assaulted his sister beside the body of their freshly-killed son? A successful redemption arc was always going to be a tough sell for this guy, but the show (and its source material) did a fine job of illustrating the intriguing tragedy that lay behind the gleaming garbage fire of the present day. Jaime genuinely understands what a true knight is. He desperately wants, in his heart of hearts, to be one, and he knows how drastically he falls short. He has always wanted idealized knighthood more than he wanted the power and wealth of his Lannister inheritance. Despite the fact that he primarily retained his office as a Kingsguard in order to continue sleeping with his sister, he also struck down Aerys II Targaryen rather than obey the “mad king’s” order to burn a city full of people to death. Remember that bit, because it’s terribly important. Jaime is a vicious piece of work, but he’s also torn by his encounters with genuine honor and loyalty, and stung by the fact that his good deeds are occulted by his reputation, by the harsh presumptions of conspicuously upright people like Eddard Stark. So what does Jaime say in his final conversation with Tyrion, in season eight, in reference to the people of King’s Landing?
“To be honest, I never really cared much for them. Innocent, or otherwise.”
Cough.
Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer. The man who defied every tradition of the Kingsguard, who personally hacked down his avowed sovereign, then continued to wear the white and gold armor in the service of Aerys II’s usurper. Did I mention the word “Kingslayer?” Because it was the defining act of his entire life. A fate and a sobriquet he accepted. A proud and willing traitor. Kingslayer. He confessed the entire story to Brienne of Tarth in one of the most powerful (season 3, episode 5) emotional moments of the entire series.
Suddenly, he “never really cared much” for the people he donned the mantle of oathbreaker and arch-traitor to protect?
I don’t buy it. I ask why anyone would expect me, in good faith, to buy it. This raises the question of whether or not whoever wrote that line of dialogue even knew they were trying to sell something shady. Did they ever review Jaime’s story? Did they simply forget? Did they give so little of a damn, that any line would do so long as it sounded pithy in a vacuum? I doubt we’ll ever know. But carelessness is a destination as well as a journey. A series that built so much early momentum by leveraging the power of soap operatic structure lurched to an uneasy, frustrating finish by working unexpectedly hard to avoid paying off any of the promises of that structure.
Ah, But You See, This is a Deliberate Subversion of Expectations!
Ha ha! You thought you had subscribed to my electronic newsletter. Instead, I drove to your house and set your garage on fire in the middle of the night! Aren’t your expectations thoroughly subverted? Aren’t you surprised?
(The reader is invited to imagine the onomatopoeia of their choice suitable to a theme of “writer’s forehead meeting writer’s desk several times, vigorously.”)
For some reason, the powers responsible for the tail end of Game of Thrones decided that “subversion of expectations” means “to veer suddenly and without preamble away from things that have been foreshadowed or constructed for years, often merely because they have been foreshadowed or constructed for years.” Jon Snow’s non-involvement in the final defeat of the Night King is a standout example. To hear the showrunners tell it in their episode commentary, they decided to do this because they had set Jon up as (in their minds) an obvious hero, and so it was important to not have him do anything critical in the end. Because, you know, surprise!
Now, there’s a valid and interesting story that could have been written about what it means to Jon to be set up for something mysterious and important, only to have it come to no recognizable fruition. It could even have been a thematic reflection of Jaime Lannister’s arc— the man who did a great good deed in secret and was widely reviled for it, contrasted with the man who was raised from the dead for some great good deed that was taken out of his hands.
However, that’s not what we got! There’s no exploration of the ambiguity surrounding Jon Snow’s destiny at all. Failing to write a story is not the same as actually writing a story about failure. Props to Jon for electing to stand up and go face-to-face with an undead ice dragon (just a moment before, unbeknownst to him, Anakin Skywalker would blow up the droid control ship and shut down all the bad guys in one swoop) but, uh, what meaningful information was the scene meant to convey? We’re already well aware that despite his myriad flaws Jon Snow has immense personal courage. Jon doing something very brave and very stupid for very little effect isn’t a revelation. It’s a weekday.
If the extent of your “subversion” is to reflexively dodge away from the logical outcomes of storylines you’ve set in motion, you’re not subverting anything. You’re just flinching, then retconning that flinch as artistic courage. The real subversion, the subversion that GRRM’s novels and the early seasons of the TV series became (in)famous for, is to subvert the expectations and tropes of the genre with which your story is in conversation. That’s it. That’s the big secret. To play interesting games with the foundations and traditions of the narrative itself.
While writing A Game of Thrones, Martin used his considerable genre expertise to position Lord Eddard Stark as the platonic ideal of a major commercial fantasy protagonist, the sort of complicated but fundamentally sympathetic viewpoint character who is expected to be a star of the proceedings. When Ned is dragged toward his possible execution, Martin dangles multiple plausible reasons to spare him in front of the reader like sugarplums: He would make a valuable hostage! He could beg pardon and take the black of the Night’s Watch! Joffrey might forgive him for Sansa’s sake, or to win the love of the crowd! The little blond shit even takes it a step further when he loudly announces that his mother and his bride-to-be have begged for him to show mercy… which he then takes immense pleasure in not granting.
GRRM was hardly the first person to write about life in a grimmer, more difficult flavor of fantasyland (check out the underrated work of Barbara Hambly if you want examples written 10-15 years earlier, or the contemporaneous works of Ray Feist, or the classic fantasies of Poul Anderson), nor did he invent the concept of heaving a sympathetic character off a metaphorical cliff to forcefully yank the reader’s heart into their throat. However, he did it with skill and memorable effect, at a fortuitous time for an entire generation of fantasy readers, myself included. Once the shock of Ned’s death faded, the fascination of the story only increased. After all, if someone as obviously destined for bigger and better things could bite it early, who could possibly be safe?
A genuine subversion uses surprise to create a meaningful emotional or artistic effect. It doesn’t just discard all other considerations to create a surprise.
TO BE CONCLUDED…
NEXT: Bullet points, Brienne of Tarth, empty whiskey glasses! The difference between meaningful and meaningless dramatic contrast, the collapse of all time and space in Westeros, and the tragic power of gorgeous set pieces orphaned from logic and consequence.
Recent News…
• I was one of several fantasy authors recently interviewed by Aidan Moher for this huge Kotaku piece: “How Japanese RPGs Inspired a New Generation of Fantasy Writers.” Check it out!
Until Friday, cheers!
SL