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Category: A Song of Ice and Fire (novels)

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A Song of Ice and Fire (novels) Feminism Film Game of Thrones

The long night

‘The Long Night’ is the third episode of the eighth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 70th overall. Below, the most beautiful moment of the episode according to Yezen (including the music I’d add) in his video ‘Why Theon should have killed the Night King’.

I have said that Martin didn’t finish the last two novels of his epic when D&D were filming the series. If I had been the director, instead of what the D&D Jews did—trying to compact what Martin had confessed to them in a few episodes—I would have devised the script differently so as not to spoil the plot, as D&D spoiled it. I simply would have forgotten about the game of thrones, or the war between the two bitches, and focused solely on the threat that the army of the dead posed to Westeros once the Night King’s dragon brought down the Wall.

From that angle, the long night in the sense of the long battle that was fought at Winterfell would have appeared at the end of the last season. And instead of the ultra-feminist scene that D&D came up with—the girl Arya kills the Night King in this episode—I would have chosen Theon to be ‘The Hero of Winterfell’. That way we wouldn’t have seen packed together, in just six episodes, a complex plot—or rather plots—that should have been filmed over several seasons.

It’s no excuse that the directors have run out of Martin’s latest novels. If they had been good artists they would have simplified the plot, guillotining any war between Dany and Cersei from the script—that is, the ‘game of thrones’—so that the show would look more like ‘a song of ice and fire’. The Night King, the white walkers and the army of the dead live on ice on the north side of the Wall; and fire is represented by the character most loved by fans, Jon, who lives on the south side of the Wall. As we saw, in previous episodes it’s revealed that Jon is Aegon Targaryen, and in Martin’s universe the Targaryens represent fire.

Without Martin’s latest novels, that would have been the compromise a good screenwriter would have made.

In many respects, ‘The Long Night’ is the culmination of the entire series. The following episodes, # 71, # 72 and # 73 represent a huge anticlimax that disappointed the fandom. And while the battle against the army of the dead in this episode is the most exciting of all seasons, I suspect that the feminist agenda finally stretched the show’s credibility to breaking point (as we said above Theon, not a girl, should have killed the Night King).

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A Song of Ice and Fire (novels) Feminism Film Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin

Beyond the Wall

‘Beyond the Wall’ is the sixth and penultimate episode of the seventh season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 66th overall. Here we see Beric talking to Jon on the other side of the Wall.

From this episode until the grand finale we began to see problems of another kind. Since George R.R. Martin didn’t finish the last two novels of his epic when they were filming the last two seasons, the producers rushed the story to levels that spoiled the rhythm of the series.

Many fans of the novels are furious with Martin because even today he has not finished the last two novels of A Song of Ice and Fire. I feel a little more empathy for the writer. Writing is a thankless task that is done in solitude, in the writer’s home. Most writers can’t even make a living from their craft. When the miracle happens, as it happened to Martin when HBO decided to bring his most ambitious work to the small screen, it is natural that with the river of money flowing towards the writer he changes his lifestyle, doing the writing in the bedroom more difficult, especially due to Martin’s advanced age.

But the mistake of this episode and others of the following season is that Martin was right in asking the creators of the HBO series David Benioff and D. B. Weiss that the series should run for about fourteen seasons. That would mean that filming would be roughly halfway through by now. If we assume one season per year, the eighth season should have been released in 2018; the ninth in 2019, the tenth in 2020 and this month that I write the fans would be watching the eleventh.

Benioff and Weiss went their own way by taking a shortcut, narrowing down the remaining seven seasons in episodes 66 to 73. And unlike previous seasons that had ten episodes each, the seventh season only has seven. The following season, the eighth and last, only six episodes. That’s far from the adequate pace, although it was only until the middle of the eighth season that fans were very disappointed by this rush.

But still, in this rushed episode 66, we see two conversations between the Stark sisters in which Arya tells Sansa that since she was a child she wanted to become a knight, though there are still no female knights in Westeros; and that she wanted to break the rules. (Worse still, the writers recast this Arya girl with psychopathic traits as we see when she talks to Sansa.) But feminism doesn’t end there. Near the end of the episode the king of the north, Jon, promises Dany that he will bend the knee before her.

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Breaker of chains

‘Breaker of Chains’ is the third episode of the fourth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 33rd overall.

A scene from the episode that we see right in the place of the photo above, when Tywin and his grandson Tommen leave it, caused an incredible hysteria among the cretinous fandom of the series.

Right there, on the floor below Joffrey’s corpse, Jaime almost rapes Cersei: a mortal sin for woke people, although the real sin of the siblings Jaime and Cersei had been to engender, incestuously, former king Joffrey and the future king Tommen (something that Tywin ignores). Even more serious is what Cersei said before the lustful Jaime jumped on her. Without any proof, this evil woman said that Tyrion had been the one who poured poison in Joffrey’s cup (in fact, it was Littlefinger in collusion with Olenna Tyrell). But that unfounded accusation didn’t scandalise the cretinous fandom.

I don’t want to focus on the fandom’s hysteria that caused the purported rape scene in this episode, but on the dialogue between grandfather and grandson. Less than a year ago I said that the philosophical problem of who should govern arose from the times of Plato’s The Republic, and that in popular culture only Martin apparently has dealt with the idea of the philosopher-king as we can watch in this scene, transcribed below:

Tywin: ‘Your brother is dead. Do you know what that means?’

Tommen: ‘It means I’ll become King’.

Tywin: ‘Yes, you will become King. What kind of King do you think you’ll be?’

Tommen: ‘A good King?’

Tywin: ‘Huh. I think so as well. You’ve got the right temperament for it. But what makes a good king, hmm? What is a good King’s single most important quality?’

Tommen: Holiness?

Tywin: Hmmm… Baelor the Blessed was holy. And pious. He built this Sept [the cathedral in Martin’s universe seen in the above image]. He also named a six-year-old boy High Septon [a kind of Pope in Martin’s world] because he thought the boy could work miracles. He ended up fasting himself into an early grave because food was of this world and this world was sinful.

Tommen: Justice.

Tywin: Huh. A good king must be just. Orys the First was just. Everyone applauded his reforms. Nobles and commoners alike. But he wasn’t just for long. He was murdered in his sleep after less than a year by his own brother. Was that truly just of him? To abandon his subjects to an evil that he was too gullible to recognise?

Tommen: What about strength?

Tywin: Hmmmm… strength. King Robert was strong. He won the rebellion and crushed the Targaryen dynasty. And he attended [only] three small council meetings in seventeen years. He spent his time whoring and hunting and drinking until the last two killed him.

So, we have a man who starves himself to death; a man who lets his own brother murder him, and a man who thinks that winning and ruling are the same thing. What do they all lack…? [rhetorical pause]

Tommen: Wisdom.

Tywin: Yes! But what is wisdom, Hm?

Last month I mentioned Yezen and below I quote from his video ‘Why Bran Stark will be King’, which was uploaded twenty days before the grand finale. Note that Yezen’s words were uttered in YouTube during the show’s eighth and final season, and that he was the only fan of Game of Thrones who correctly predicted who would become king at the end of the series:

On a fundamental level, Game of Thrones is an exploration of power, and different characters coming to power convey different messages about what it takes to rise up in the world.

The rise of Daenerys [called ‘Dany’ by her lover Jon] emphasises strength and justice and ambition. Jon champions honour and righteousness. Someone like Littlefinger, deception and opportunism, while Cersei emphasises ruthlessness and vanity. Meanwhile, King Brandon would convey a more mysterious meaning that, although strength, lineage, deception and ruthlessness each play a part, all of them are bound up by fate.

This ending would serve as a strange marriage of idealism and cynicism. In many ways, Bran begins the story as the most powerless character, lacking even basic bodily autonomy. And as fate would have it, Bran ends up the most powerful. Yet that power comes at the cost of isolating Bran from his own humanity, and never gives him the thing that he really wanted.

And look, I know you probably still don’t buy it, or you still think it’s gonna be Jon [crowned king in the finale], and you really might be right about that, but hear me out just a little longer, because there is a glimmer of idealism to this ending.

Though many will die, and the wheel [Dany’s metaphor for the feudal system] might not break, Bran just might make a good king after all. Despite having lost so much of himself to the Three-eyed Raven [see my posts about this character: here], Bran, perhaps more than any other character, has grasped one of the most essential lessons of the story, which is the importance of empathy.

Despite their history, Bran is able to look at Jaime Lannister, the man who once shattered his life, and to see good in him, to see Jaime as a man who was protecting the people he loved. And to not only forgive him, but to protect him. This simple act of understanding demonstrates what the war-torn kingdoms of Westeros have been so lacking: not strength, or cunning, or even honour, but real wisdom.

For a world that’s been so damaged by people’s inability to see from one another’s perspective, maybe a broken boy is the right ruler to heal a broken kingdom. Maybe not the one you want, certainly not the one we’d expect, but the one the ending needs.

The only problem is, Martin hasn’t published the last two novels in his series. And while he did tell the producers how his A Song of Ice and Fire saga would end, it would still be better to have Martin’s books if he ever does finish them. As we’ll be seeing in future posts this is the topic I’m passionate about Game of Thrones, not what the cretinous fandom cares about: whether or not Jaime raped Cersei in this episode.

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A Song of Ice and Fire (novels) Feminism Feminized western males Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin West's darkest hour

The bear and the maiden fair

‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’ is the seventh episode of the third season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 27th episode of the series overall. The episode was written by George R. R. Martin, the feminist author of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels on which the series is based, and was directed by a woman, Michelle MacLaren.

The group of wildlings just crossed the Wall and we heard the first bad message from Ygritte’s mouth: ‘You know nothing, Jon Snow’. Unlike others on the expedition, Ygritte just crossed the Wall for the first time in her life. It’s she who hasn’t seen the world, not even a single stone building, since north of the Wall there are only huts. A moment before Ygritte didn’t understand why the southern armies need drums and those who fly the banners. But although she is ignorant, her mocking gestures suggest that Jon, who was raised in a castle south of the Wall, is the ignorant one.

Then we see, in the Riverlands, a love scene between Robb and non-white buttocks. The female director dared to show off Robb’s wife’s buttocks in a presumably aesthetic shot in King Robb’s candle-lit military tent. The camera changes places and we see a shot from above of the naked woman, who is face down, once more showing us her buttocks.

Rob: (Sigh) ‘If you don’t put some clothes on, I can’t promise I won’t attack you [sexually] again’.

These scenes make me want to see what will happen to the bicolour couple in episode 29, where the accounts are settled. But for the moment the director shows us a long scene and then Robb says, looking at the map of his military strategy although distracted by the exposed buttocks of his wife: ‘How am I supposed to sit here planning a war when you’re over there, looking like that [naked face down]?’

The woman seems unconcerned about the war. She writes a letter to her mom and asks the king when he will take her to her hometown. But as always: the failure doesn’t come from women like this director, but from writers like Martin and the culture that allowed Jews and women to come to Hollywood. Then non-white buttocks tells him that she is pregnant and Robb is surprised. ‘You’re my queen’ says the idiot (in later seasons we’ll see that Jon uses the exact same phrase with Dany).

It is embarrassing to quote the dialogues between non-white buttocks and her husband. Instead of preparing for battle, Robb finds himself in the middle of a long honeymoon with his non-white wife. The mere fact of taking her to the military camp is insanity, and it isn’t surprising in a later episode that Roose Bolton confessed that Robb’s ignoring him when Roose was his military adviser contributed to betraying him to the Lannisters. One more shot from the ceiling filmed by the female director shows this woman’s buttocks again before Robb, already dressed, pounces on her again.

We then see a surreal dialogue between Ygritte and the warg Orell, probably the most important element of the wildling expedition south of the Wall due to his out-of-body abilities. The surreal thing is that, as I have already said, in the real world an outsider like Jon would never have access to the buttocks of a beautiful woman from a tribe. But except Orell, here the ‘tribe’ is behaving with Jon’s relationship with Ygritte as if tribal mores were those of Murka: an astronomical projection of present feminism to a medieval era that never existed.

So here we have a double bad message in a script written by Martin himself and directed by a liberated woman: a cute woman going to war as if she were a common soldier, and with all the sexual freedoms of a contemporary Western woman, including freedom of choosing an outsider instead of a member of her tribe, like Orell. The stupidity of Game of Thrones fans not to report these things is limitless. But in the darkest hour of the West these things are the bread and butter.

Another bad message is that Murka’s central values—social justice warring—are projected back to a fantastic medieval era. Dany arrives with her mulatto army and her two white guardians outside Yunkai, where there are 200,000 slaves. Jorah advises her not to invade the walled city as that campaign won’t bring her closer to the Iron Throne, which is where Dany wants to go. The girl responds to her counsellor that she has 200,000 reasons to take it.

Naturally, in medieval times no one fought wars in which a king could lose half his army just to free the slaves of a distant and exotic culture. But here we got a SJW queen! I have barely read A Song of Ice and Fire but the fact that these novels have become bestsellers speaks ill of the readers. Let’s just imagine what the West would be like if, instead of Martin’s novels, they had William Pierce’s first novel as their biggest bestseller. But the bad messages don’t end there.

In King’s Landing we see an absurd discussion between Tyron and his whore, which would be sad even to cite because in this TV series men are infinitely more idiots than they have been in the historical past (although not in the present). All I can say is that if I were Tyrion I would have already sent Shae to Volantis: her hometown where, by the way, Robb’s wife also comes from. Yes, non-white buttocks and Shae have something else in common besides their hometown: they’re light-brown skinned.

As if those bad messages weren’t enough, in the Riverlands Arya escapes from the cave in front of the entire Brotherhood, and although they run after her they don’t reach her, which suggests that the girl runs faster than the soldiers. Then we see another anti-male scene, although here the message is more than direct. Before castrating Theon (remember that Ramsay has him in a torture chamber), he puts two stunning young women in the chamber, both telling him that they want to see his penis. Then the attractive women get naked and things happen before the castration.

Another feminist scene: Jon tells Ygritte that a deer she wants to hunt with her bow is too far away but Ygritte hunts it. The scene is somewhat reminiscent of that scene from the first episode of the first season, in which Arya hits a perfect target with her bow after her older brother, Bran, terribly missed the target. Reality reversals are ubiquitous in this series.

Then Ygritte continues to taunt Jon, even though she confessed to Orell that she loved Jon. An absurd love: as absurd as Robb’s with Talisa and Tyrion with Shae. Seeing these romantic scenes filmed by a woman, produced by Jews and written by a traitorous white man only humiliates the male viewer. But these idiots play romantic music when Ygritte kisses Jon on his mouth.

‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’ ends with another unreal scene between a man and a woman. Jaime Lannister throws himself into the ring where Locke had planned to kill Brienne with a huge bear, as if in real life the heir to Casterly Rock, the ancient stronghold of House Lannister, could dare to risk his life to save a woman. The whole scene exudes unreality, and it was this scene that gave the episode its title.

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Kissed by fire

‘Kissed by Fire’ is the fifth episode of the third season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 25th episode of the series. The title of the episode refers to the red-haired wildlings, like Ygritte, who are said to be ‘kissed by fire’.

The first stupid scene of the episode is the love scene in a cave between Jon and Ygritte. In real life, a foreigner could never fuck a beautiful woman from a tribe, as the wildlings apparently allowed Jon north of the Wall. However, unlike the crap they filmed in Littlefinger’s brothel in other episodes, the director failed once again in not showing the redhead’s pubic hair, just her breasts and then her buttocks. A pubic hair of the colour of her hair would have lived up to the episode’s title as it’s implied that Jon kisses the redhead there.

But even after making love you can see the feminist follies of the screenwriters. Jon was a virgin and has just popped his cherry. Ygritte, on the other hand, tells him a couple of anecdotes of her sexual adventures from which she apparently didn’t get pregnant (remember that a semi-wild tribe doesn’t practice birth control). Here we see once again the reversal of the sexual roles, especially since in the intimate chat after the kiss of fire Ygritte is over Jon in front of the cameras, both talking lying down.

South of the Wall, before Robb sentenced Lord Karstark to death for having killed two Lannister captives without approval, Karstark tells a great truth to he who had married non-white buttocks: ‘the King who lost the North’. And sure enough: because Robb publicly beheaded him, Karstark’s soldiers abandon Robb, which means that the boy lost almost half his army (in Martin’s novel Robb is younger than the actor we see in the HBO interpretation).

What can be gathered from this story, although it is fictitious, is that a lad-king commits blunders. In A Song of Ice and Fire Martin seems to philosophise around the idea of who should rule, although the moral he arrives at doesn’t appear until the finale that would premiere on television six years after this episode.

Away from the green and rainy Riverrun, in the desert Slaver’s Bay the two seasoned knights who serve as Dany’s advisers have a conversation. Barristan asks: ‘Do you believe in her?’ To which Jorah replies: ‘With all my heart’.

Curiously, this scene follows a very interesting dialogue between Jaime and Brienne, both of whom are naked. (The scene isn’t erotic, as they were cleaning their mud at the baths after Roose Bolton freed them from Locke’s captivity.) Jaime confesses to the naked Valkyrie that King Aerys Targaryen, the father of Dany, had wanted to incinerate King’s Landing in a fit of madness and that Jaime prevented it by killing him. In the previous episode to the finale we’ll see that Dany did in King’s Landing what her father had wanted to do. But this pair of naïve watchdogs of Dany trust the last Targaryen with all their heart.

Although the last two novels of A Song of Ice and Fire are yet to be published, inadvertently to viewers Martin is gradually weaving a platonic fabric, although unlike The Republic he does so in novel format. Fans, even those with exclusive channels on Game of Thrones, never smelled a deeper message than the superficial one of castles and a social justice warrior Targaryen who wants to regain the throne for her House, or the right to the throne of Jon Snow that we shall see a few seasons later. Normies see this series as they see other TV series. I’ve already talked about it when they premiered the grand finale, although I’ll revisit it when we get to that season.

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Dark wings, dark words

‘Dark Wings, Dark Words’ is the second episode of the third season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 22nd episode of the series. In King’s Landing the messages that put men as silly continue. In the castle gardens we hear this conversation:

Olenna Tyrell: ‘Do you know my son, the Lord of Highgarden?’

Sansa: ‘I haven’t had the pleasure’.

Olenna Tyrell laughs: ‘No great pleasure, believe me: a ponderous oaf. His father was an oaf as well, my husband, the late Lord Luthor’.

But in the Riverlands, Rickard Karstark tells King Robb a great truth: ‘I think you lost the war the day you married her’, referring to non-white buttocks.

In the North, while heading to the Wall, Bran Stark has a dream, where he tries to kill the three-eyed raven, but a boy tells him that this is impossible because the raven is Bran himself. When he wakes up and they continue with the march, Osha suspects that someone is following them and goes out to investigate. At this moment the boy from Bran’s dream arrives and reveals that his name is Jojen Reed. Another message in which the male-female roles are reversed is seen when Jojen, who is accompanied by his sister Meera, tells Bran’s caregiver Osha: ‘I’m unarmed. My sister carries the weapons’.

But the writers were still unsatisfied with those two scenes and included one more scene that reverses the male-female roles. Travelling North, Arya, Gendry, and a fat boy nicknamed Hot Pie are discovered by a small group called The Brotherhood Without Banners led by Thoros of Myr, who suspect the three of them have escaped from Harrenhall. Arya draws her sword to face alone the group that has found them while her two friends, Gendry and Hot Pie, hide behind the rocks. We can already imagine in the real medieval period a girl doing that, in the context of crossing a dangerous forest where there could be highway robbers!

Back at King’s Landing, the erotic scene between Tyrion and Shae is disgusting. Those scenes, and many other erotic scenes of Game of Thrones would never have been shot in a healthy West.

En route to the Wall, Bran receives from Jojen the first revelation about what has been happening to him since Jaime threw him from the tower of his home. Jojen says that, like Bran, he is also a greenseer: as those gifted with clairvoyant powers (out-of-body experiences, also known as astral projection) were called in the ancient religion. Greenseers also have retrocognitive powers (seeing the past paranormally) and precognitive powers (glimpses of the future). Jojen explains that the three-eyed raven that appears in Bran’s dreams means someone who ‘brings the sight’.

Bran still ignores it but the old man in a hiding cave under a huge weirwood tree on the other side of the Wall, who has been sending him those dreams under the image of the raven, is the most powerful man in Westeros even though he can no longer move (in Martin’s novels Bloodraven’s power in Westeros affairs is more conspicuous than in the HBO series). Jojen, another gifted psychic who tries to guide Bran, tells him that he too has had the same dream and that he has followed Bran believing that the boy will play an important role in the future. But even during that conversation between two gifted thanks to the old religion, the reversals of roles arise between the women who follow Hodor, Bran and Jojen from behind:

Osha: Isn’t he [Jojen] ashamed, your brother, needing you to protect him?

Meera: Where’s the shame in that?

Osha: Any boy his age who needs his sister to protect him is gonna find himself needing lots of protection.

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The pointy end

Almost two years ago I wrote:

‘The Pointy End’ is the eighth episode of the first season of Game of Thrones. It is the eighth episode of the series overall among the 73 episodes aired over eight seasons from 2011 to 2019. This episode premiered on June 5, 2011 when I didn’t even know that Game of Thrones existed. It was written by George R.R. Martin and directed by Daniel Minahan, who is not classified as ‘Jew’ at least in his Wikipedia article (the series has changed directors several times).

Bran the Broken, still a boy, prays by the heart tree when he is approached by Osha, a woman of the Free Folk or ‘Wildlings’ (in this pic, Osha is barely visible because she’s laying on the ground). Osha tells Bran about hearing the Old Gods of the Forest and that the Wildlings also worship the Old Gods. She laments that the South has lost touch with the past, and that the southern weirwood trees were cut down long ago and, therefore, the Southerners have no idea about what’s awakening in the north.

I have just watched again the scene in ‘The Pointy End’ when the above photograph was taken and must add something to what I said four days ago in the article ‘New subtitle’. In the scene, a couple of times Osha calls the attention of Bran about the hidden message that could be heard from the gods by listening to the whispering leaves of the heart tree.

When four days ago I wrote ‘I will leave the image of Bran in the sticky post unless I can think of a better one that symbolises this site’ I hadn’t re-watched the scene with due attention. Now I see that it resonates not only with my editorial note in my previous article today, but with the heart of my own life (cf. my book Whispering Leaves). This day I make official the above pic as the ‘logo’ of this site.

As some readers may have observed, I have been using Game of Thrones not as fans see it, but as a sort of Rorschach test to project things that I have in mind.

From when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey as a child I projected my most cherished ideals on that film. Decades later I realised that there was a problem: the transformations of 2001 involve extraterrestrial agency, without which the transformation of the Australopithecus Moonwatcher and his descendant Dave Bowman wouldn’t have been possible at the end of the film. But something tells me that there is no intelligent life in the Milky Way, and instead of an ‘eschatology from above’ I began to forge an ‘eschatology from below’, in the sense that some of us have to transform ourselves into mutants if we are to save the planet from the most primitive version of humans that currently swarms it.

As there is something very specific that I project onto Game of Thrones I won’t talk about what happened in this episode in the Mountains, the Eyrie, the Riverlands, at the Wall, the non-white lands of Lhazar, and King’s Landing. The only thing that has interested me in the episode is how the arc of the boy Bran Stark unfolds, specifically this scene, as only he will undergo a psychic metamorphosis in subsequent seasons.

The difference between David Bowman and Bran Stark is, as I already implied, that the latter doesn’t require extraterrestrial agency to metamorphose into a new man. If there is anything to save us from the Neanderthals he won’t be a personal god (let alone a Semitic god!) or benevolent aliens. That’s human fantasy ‘from above’. On the contrary: the symbols of the forest and the sacred trees of the ancient religion behind the Wall are exclusively terrestrial. By ‘eschatology from below’ I mean that only with the resources that we already have on Earth, and with the mind that Nature has provided us, we, a kind of feathered serpents, aspire to the wings of the caduceus.

That’s why if Martin were to publish his next novel in the saga soon, as speculation among fans of A Song of Ice and Fire has already begun, I’d only read Bran’s arc to see how it differs from the HBO series. If, like Bran’s mentor, one lives in a cave entangled in the roots of a weirwood, he won’t devote himself to talking about the inane events of the immediate present as is done in the forums of white nationalism. Rather he will ponder the past and the archetypes that have taken over the white man’s psyche trying to figure out the deeper roots of Westeros’ darkest hour.

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Winter is coming

‘Winter Is Coming’ is the premiere of the HBO medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones.

When in years past the comment threads were open on this site I noticed that one of my topics that didn’t attract attention was Game of Thrones (A Game of Thrones, which English-Spanish translation I have near where I write, is the first novel of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire). But it must be understood that in my childhood, after seeing Kubrick’s best film, I wanted to be a film director (that was a few years before a family tragedy that would destroy several lives).

In my books I say that when I was a child Warner Bros. offered my father a job so he could go to work in the United States. My father declined the offer and sentenced me to live in a country other than my own. But I was left with the desire to have been a director and the only thing I can do now is film criticism. Of course, as a director I would have handled Martin’s novels in a very different way compared to the way the pair of Jews who produced and directed the HBO series did. For example, Martin’s feminism was exacerbated by David Benioff and Daniel B. Weiss, known to fans as D&D. I would have decreased it as much as possible.

In this series of criticising each episode of Game of Thrones that I’m starting with this post we must bear in mind that I am more critical of the toxic fandom made up of whites than the script that D&D developed. The author of the video we recently transcribed for this site on toxic fandom said elsewhere that Arya Stark was the most mishandled character of all Game of Thrones seasons. I would add that this speaks very badly of the fandom of whites who complained a lot about the finale but never about what D&D did with Arya.

Only in the first episode of the HBO series does Arya appear as she must have appeared throughout both Martin’s novels and the television series: a girl being educated in embroidery and weaving and confined to the home of a feudal lord. Not only the normies don’t want this ‘transvaluation of values’ on how to educate women today. Even many white nationalists don’t reject feminism with the vehemence that every Aryan male should (the masculinisation of the white woman is directly proportional to the feminisation of the white man).

In that same opening episode, shortly after showing Arya in her embroidery and knitting classes with other girls, we see her little brother Bran Stark trying to get a good shot at target shooting. Bran does it very badly and, from behind, Arya, who is even younger than him, hits the target with her bow and arrow thus humiliating her little brother.

That is the first bad message of Game of Thrones. As we have already said on this site, Hollywood is portraying female warriors as faster than men. The reality is that women are slower and generally inferior to us in both physical and intellectual sports (see what I said last December about chess).

It is very important to criticise the white fans of the series for not being outraged by such reversals of reality, from the very first episode. White nationalism limits itself to blaming Hollywood Jews as if whites, in this case the toxic fandom, weren’t equally guilty of greedily consuming those products without criticising them.

When the king of the seven kingdoms, Robert Baratheon and his royal court, arrive in Winterfell and the Starks receive them, Arya contemplates them with a helmet (in its place that little girl would have had to wear a hood). When Arya arrives with her reunited family about to receive the king, Ned, her father, immediately removes her helmet. In the historical medieval world, not in these mad films that demoralise the Aryan man, little girls didn’t want to become soldiers throwing away all of their femininity, much less a blue-blooded girl like Arya Stark.

In sharp contrast, the dialogue between King Robert and Ned Stark in the crypts is very realistic and very masculine. Voices like this are no longer heard in the West, not even among its supposed defenders. This is how we men used to speak: as Robert Baratheon spoke in the crypt when paying his respects to Ned’s late sister Lyanna Stark, with whom he had been in love.

Across the narrow sea in Essos the blond prince Viserys Targaryen forces his sister, Daenerys, to marry a Dothraki warlord, the non-white Drogo. Viserys thus fantasises about conquering Westeros and claiming the Iron Throne for the Targaryen House that Robert had destroyed. (In Martin’s universe the Targaryens were known for their incredible hyper-Nordic beauty, and I think the producers of the show should have chosen more beautiful actors to play the roles of Viserys and Daenerys.) Viserys says something horrible to his blonde sister: that in his quest to regain the throne for his house he would even allow the forty thousand horses of the swarthy Dothraki to mount her. It’s a terrible message because, despite medieval barbarism, I don’t think blond princes treated their princesses like that in real history.

Later we see an uninhibited King Robert dancing, kissing and groping a fat commoner during the evening feast in the great hall of Winterfell in front of Cersei Lannister, his wife and queen. But that’s nothing compared to the wedding between the blonde and the swarthy warlord on the other side of the narrow sea. If the white fans of Game of Thrones were good people they would have rebelled from this moment on. But as we know from the recommended readings in the sticky post, they are the worst generation of whites since prehistory.

But the superiority of the white race cannot be hidden visually, not even with Jewish directors. There is, in this premiere, a short scene that puts Daenerys side by side with black and mulatto women before she was deflowered by Drogo. I mean Daenerys’ walk in the direction of her white mare that Drogo gave her as a gift on their wedding day. The seventh art perfectly portrays the infinite superiority of a white woman over dark people.

The brief scene reminded me of a tale by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916), who contrasted a white girl eating grapes with the swarthy people who surrounded her here in Latin America: Y sobre aquel fondo de hollín y carbón, sus hombros delicados y tersos que estaban desnudos, hacían resaltar su bello color de lis, con un casi impenetrable tono dorado (‘And against that background of soot and coal, was the beautiful lily colour, with an almost impenetrable golden hue of her naked and delicate smooth shoulders’).

Categories
A Song of Ice and Fire (novels) Film Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin

Toxic fandom

Editor’s note: On 18 August 2019 this was originally uploaded as a video in YouTube by YezenIRL under the title ‘Forgiving Game of Thrones: An Unpopular Opinion’:

[Tyrion on the Iron Throne] Disclaimer: The following is not necessarily meant to argue whether or not Season 8 of Game of Thrones was good or bad. But rather to challenge the way we as an audience engaged with the story, and reframe our expectations regarding what value we can take from an imperfect work.

Jon: ‘You can forgive all of them. Make them see they made a mistake. Make them understand’.

Dany [Daenerys Targaryen]: ‘I can’t’.

Okay, so I’m back, and we have to talk about Toxic Fandom.

Since Season Eight ended, the internet’s been flooded with countless takes on the ending of Game of Thrones. From fans insisting they know the story better than the writers, to a petition demanding re-shoots, it’s clear that reactions are mixed. And while criticism is important, I think that if we want to be critical of media we should also be critical of our own opinions.

So, in light of some of the extreme reactions we’ve been seeing…

Youtuber: ‘…the worst, the worst, the worst [emphasis in his voice] finale episode in the history of television!’

…I’m gonna say we need to take a step back as a culture, and take a look at ourselves.

[Cersei on the Iron Throne] This kind of reaction isn’t really exclusive to Game of Thrones. Fandoms actually have a history of toxic backlash when things don’t go their way… Now look, I know we all have a right to our opinion and I realise negative opinions are not the same as bullying, but I do have to ask—how much of this is constructive? Do people understand the thing they’re criticising? And, are we maybe overreacting?
 

Part One: What if we’re overreacting?

It’s hard to talk about fandoms without generalising people, because everyone responds to a story in their own way. Some people loved the ending, some hated it, some hated the ideas, and others hated the way they were executed.

Obviously not everything I say can apply to every single person, so in order to be objective, I’m gonna be a nerd and start with some graphs. Looking at the data, there seems to be a distinct sense from the critical community that Game of Thrones fell apart in the last three or four episodes.

Before that, the show was mostly a critical hit. But was this sudden drop in scores actually fair? For me, the show had been struggling for years to depict organic character development and realistic politics. And to be frank, the books Game of Thrones is based on are way too dense and expansive to be accurately adapted to television. The problem so many had with the ending are problems I’ve been seeing for a while now, and so I’ve come to look at the show as kind of a preview for the books.

[Jorah on the Iron Throne] While I understand people’s frustration with certain sloppily handled twists, I’m also kind of just ‘over it’ and prefer to focus more on the core ideas, like what does the ending say about moral certitude and the glorification of war? Or about power, redemption and choice?

In the backlash, these bigger discussions aren’t really being had. Yet, the show-runners that fans are now calling ‘Dumb and Dumber’ are the same ones who’ve been writing the show since Season One, and had been receiving critical acclaim well after they passed the books—as we saw with episodes like ‘Battle of the Bastards’ and ‘The Winds of Winter’.

Stannis: ‘A good act does not wash out the bad. Nor a bad the good’.

Though many repeat the mantra that ‘the problem isn’t what happened, it’s how it was executed’, I don’t think that sentiment captures the full story behind the backlash. And that’s not to say that everything was well executed, but to say that for several years fans have been forgiving and even applauding sloppy writing, because they liked what was happening. For example, the resolution of the ‘Slaver’s Bay’ storyline and the ‘Battle of the Bastards’ aren’t really set up much better than anything in Season Eight. They just have more popular outcomes.

What changed in the last three episodes is that the outcomes got controversial. For example, many believed that defeating the Night King was Jon’s whole arc, and insist that Jon was robbed of his destiny. But even before he encountered the White Walkers, Jon’s conflict was always framed as Love versus Duty—the human heart in conflict with itself. His arc is about making difficult choices, not accomplishing great feats. And in that, Jon is still a chosen hero. It’s just that his heroism isn’t supposed to be cool, or honourable, or even triumphant. The point is that doing the right thing isn’t always totally awesome.

[Brienne on the Iron Throne] That kind of subversion is classic Game of Thrones. I mean: if we look to the beginning, Ned’s arc seemed to be going South to become Hand of the King and solve the mystery of Jon Arryn’s murder. Yet, not only does Ned die, he also never figures out who the real killer was. The true arc was Ned’s inner struggle, and like Jon, the legacy of his actions on the world isn’t immediately apparent.

Tyrion: ‘Ask me again in ten years’.

Not all, but so many of the complaints around the final season come down to some form of ‘this isn’t what I expected’. From the belief that the Night King was the true threat, through the belief that Jon would sit the Iron Throne, to the belief that Jamie’s ending would be more heroic. Which leads us to question: why did the audience have the expectations they did? And what is it about subverted expectations that’s so hard to accept?
 

Part Two: What if Game of Thrones was never meant to be popular?

Throughout its eight-year run, Game of Thrones became what can only be described as a landmark television drama, pushing the limits of what a show could accomplish in terms of scope and story, and gaining popularity approaching that of Star Wars, Harry Potter, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Simply put, the show reached mainstream status, which is complicated.

So for those who don’t know, Game of Thrones is based on this series of gritty fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, who’d previously been known for writing really weird niche sci-fi, filled with telepathic hive-minds, body-snatching, and Space Catholicism. The books, as well as the early seasons, trade out straightforward character arcs and cathartic victories for messy, soul-crushing realism. I say this to point out that, unlike Star Wars, Harry Potter or the MCU, Martin’s story was probably never meant to be a big crowd-pleaser.

Shireen: ‘Father, help! Please don’t do this, father!’ [she’s being burned alive at the stake as a plea to the Lord of Light]

But with the growing popularity of the show, Season Six and Seven saw Benioff and Weiss shift gears to a more mainstream narrative. There were probably a lot of reasons for this; some business-related, others to do with the challenges of adaptation. But the story that once built up Joffrey as a villain for four seasons, only to have him poisoned by a relatively minor character, became the show that gave every victory to the fan-favourite character that most wanted it.

So of course people expected Jon and Dany to achieve their goals together. Of course they expected Jaime to save King’s Landing from Cersei. They just watched Sansa execute her rapist, and Arya assassinate everyone who took part in the Red Wedding, and Grey Worm kill the slave masters, and the Stark kids avenge their dad. Suddenly, we were being given a steady stream of good triumphing over evil, and people were eating it up.

So, when we got to the messy George R.R. Martin conclusion, audiences were jarred by the lack of cathartic victory. Thus came a flood of emotions from the fandom. People were upset by the execution and content of what happened, and it became hard to draw the line where one feeling ended and the other began.

[The Hound on the Iron Throne] So people stopped looking past flaws in the show’s execution like they used to, and instead fixated on them directly. After all, people don’t need much justification for stuff like ‘Jon is King now!’ or ‘Dany’s finally coming to Westeros!’ like they do for ‘Jaime goes back to Cersei’. We actually saw this already with Stannis Baratheon, whose tragic ending received highly polarised reactions depending on whether or not viewers had high hopes for the character, with his fans accusing the show-runners of intentional character assassination. And what happened with Stannis is now happening on a much larger scale, with much more popular characters.

While we can say that the tragedies of Ned, Catelyn and Rob were better set up, it’s also important to recognise that, thanks to online spoilers most people knew those characters were doomed within a month of starting the show. So those deaths didn’t really betray the people’s idea of who those characters were or shatter their expectations for what the story was supposed to be…

Due to its emphasis on prophecy and mystery, Game of Thrones actually engages in way more of this kind of theory baiting, with a fan community that’s built on piles of online theory discussions. For millions, speculating about Game of Thrones was a key part of enjoying it. Trust me, as a guy who once wrote a weirdly popular fan theory about Bran possessing Jon’s dead body, I know how it is.

And while that speculation was key to bringing together a dedicated fandom, it also led to fans taking an unwarranted sense of ownership over the story. To get even deeper into it, various fan communities even developed vastly different headcanons and would ridicule each other over their wildly different—and as it turns out—equally incorrect expectations.

[Jaime Lannister on the Iron Throne] People have difficulty accepting that Jon’s parentage is meant to subvert the secret lineage trope, revealing it to be a burden rather than a solution, or accepting that the Night King being defeated before the end is meant to reframe the Dark Lord trope—from being an external evil to an internal consequence of the pursuit of power [the social justice warrior Daenerys Targaryen]. Or accepting that Jamie’s story is an exploration of the limits of redemption arcs.

But we also have to bear in mind that Martin came up with the stuff in the 90’s, well before the internet had developed into what it is today. So we can’t blame him for not expecting fans to come to the conclusions that they did.

But it’s fan entitlement that causes literally a hundred percent of misunderstanding being blamed on the writers. At no point are most people accepting that they might have been wrong about anything. This is because people have projected their own ideas of where the story was headed onto the world and characters, and interpreted everything based on those expectations.

[Sansa on the Iron Throne] Basically, I’m saying that people tend to forgive a story that’s sloppily done if it gives them what they wanted. But those same people get hypercritical if a story subverts their expectations in a way that’s upsetting.

Which brings me to my first ever YouTube callout. I’m sure a lot of you have seen [YouTubber] Think Story’s ‘How Game of Thrones Should Have Ended’.

In this video, Think Story recites his fan-fiction of how the story should have played out—abandoning everything subversive and instead just playing out all the most popular fan theories: Jamie kills Cersei; Bran gets stuck in the Night King’s memories; Jon makes the big sacrifice and is remembered as a hero-King, and queen Dany carries forward his legacy. And of course, this video was wildly popular even though it ditches the tough questions Martin asks about war and power, and just offers a conformist fan-fiction about heroes saving the world from [the bad guy of the movies]. So Think Story, thank you for being such a perfect example of mediocrity!

I bring this up because it exposes the entitlement of fandom.

[Samwell on the Iron Throne] Not every story has to please the mainstream. That’s not what Game of Thrones was ever supposed to be. In a world where stories so often fail due to corporate greed, or a lack of creativity, or pandering too hard to a particular demographic, Game of Thrones is actually being punished for the opposite. It’s being punished for keeping through the artistic vision of its author.
 

Part Three: What if I’m wrong?

Ok, so I’ve made some harsh claims. I’ve said that a lot of people’s reactions are being driven by their attachment to an incorrect idea of what the story was supposed to be. As in, I believe the story was always gonna have Jamie choose to die with Cersei, Dany burn King’s Landing, Jon exiled to the Night’s Watch, and Bran chosen as King. That’s the story Martin was always telling, and for the most part, anything else would have been untrue to it.

But what if I’m wrong? Wrong about what’s driving people’s anger, or wrong about the story Martin is telling, or wrong about what’s good?

Jon to Dany in the finale: ‘What about everyone else? All the other people who think they know what’s good?’

Though my channel’s become most widely known for predicting that Bran would be King, I have to admit that over the years I’ve had a ton of theories, and most of them ended up being wrong. Yet, every time, I was so sure that I’d figured things out; that I knew what was good and what this story was supposed to be. Truth is, I’ve always been a little too certain that I’m right about things, and that’s something that I’ve always had to work on, and maybe so do a lot of us.

[Davos on the Iron Throne] And if you notice, that was a big part of the message of Game of Thrones there at the end. That maybe in the process of being so certain that you know what’s good, you aren’t doing anyone any good. Maybe people are out here pointing out plot holes while missing one of the key messages the show tried to deliver; that it’s destructive to be so stuck in our own perspective that we stopped trying to understand.

I mean, does this kind of backlash really benefit anyone? You know, probably not.

I think this need to direct all of our anger at a particular person when we feel let down tends to miss the bigger picture. With Game of Thrones, it’s Benioff and Weiss even though there are much bigger structural issues with adapting A Song of Ice and Fire into a television format. I mean, George R.R. Martin himself splits the story in half for Books Four and Five: a strategy which would have been impossible to do with the television show. Also, he throws in a bunch more characters, and he spent the last eight years writing the sixth book.

Meanwhile, D&D had to not only condense the story, but do it in a fraction of the time. People call them out on rushing the story, but they went one season beyond their initial plan, and spent an entire two years on the final six episodes. They made mistakes, yes, but they did so because they had a hard job…

This is kind of an obvious statement, but television and film is largely driven by the market, and so what gets made will typically be what can reliably turn a profit. On account of just how much goes into shows and movies today, studios avoid taking risks, leading to our current age of remakes, reboots and adaptations.

[Theon on the Iron Throne] When we punish stories that try to be subversive we’re implicitly telling studios to keep playing it safe. So, for better or worse, I appreciate when people have the courage to try something different. We need more different. Frankly, we need more ‘weird’.

Jon: ‘I think you’re making a terrible mistake’.

Mance Rayder: [smirks] ‘The freedom to make my own mistakes was all I ever wanted’.

Which brings me back to the petition and maybe my most controversial point. In a recent interview, actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau [Jaime Lannister] joked that the final season of Game of Thrones would be remade once the million people who signed the petition could all agree on an ending. And while he makes a great point about how it’s impossible to appease every headcanon out there, I do want to challenge his point just a little bit.

Because I actually think it would have been easy to make an ending that was better received than the one we got. Which is actually why David Benioff and D.B. Weiss deserve some credit. It would have been easy for them to abandon Martin’s vision and do a crowd-pleasing ending that people were expecting: Have Jon sword-fight the Night King; have Jamie heroically kill Cersei; have Dany install democracy, and then fly off into the sunset with Jon.

An ending like that isn’t hard to come up with. After all, that sort of fan-service and wish fulfilment is pretty much exactly what they wrote for ‘Battle of the Bastards’, and it received widespread acclaim. Seriously people, the last two episodes of Season Six are not well written. People just liked watching the heroes win.

So despite everything, I respect D&D for trying. For doing a final season that took big risks.

Do I think it was great? No! But it was ambitious, and to me that’s more important. Now, of course—of course!—there are things I would have done differently. Characters that I don’t think were handled well, and valid criticisms to make. But, we should consider that for everything that the show-runners might have gotten wrong, there were probably a ton of things we had wrong too. And instead of obsessing over plot holes, maybe our energy would be better spent trying to reach a better understanding. And appreciating that, despite being really flawed, the ending we got was genuine; not focus-grouped or test-marketed, but an attempt to explore some tough questions about who we are. Which is why we should forgive Game of Thrones.

[Varys on the Iron Throne] Although I can’t tell anyone how to feel, I can suggest that we also be self-critical. Though I can’t necessarily tell people what ideals to live by, I do suggest we try to understand the ideals present in the media we consume, and then make a choice whether or not to apply those messages in our own lives. And though it’s up to each of us to choose what we like and what we can forgive, maybe we owe it to ourselves, when our favourite stories let us down, to remember all of the things that made them our favourite stories in the first place.

Cersei: ‘Our marriage’.

Robert Baratheon: [laughter]

Thanks for watching. [Music]

Categories
A Song of Ice and Fire (novels) Feminized western males Game of Thrones Hate

Robert and Ned

‘Civil war or the gulags… That’s now the choice of white males in America and they should take chances with the former’. —My paraphrasing of a commenter

For some time I have been imagining that, when starting the racial wars, some guerrillas will execute their victims with a photogenic message to upload on the internet: two daggers in each eye until they reach the brain, and another dagger stuck in the solar plexus of the traitor with the message: ‘This happens to me for having voluntarily given myself to Evil’.

Of course, it’s pure fictional imagery for a novel of the future, when things get much worse. But the imagery shows the gulf between the racialised right and what I imagine will be those freedom fighters who feel infinite hatred.

Yesterday for example I heard part of the podcast from Keith Woods (a brat about whom I said something last year), who invited Richard Spencer and Hunter Wallace to ask them about their reaction to the MAGA march on the US Capitol. I also heard the beginning from Jared Taylor’s podcast about the same event yesterday.

None of these hetero fags think about the bloody revolution that is coming, not even at the level of futuristic novels. But even the topic of literary fiction needs to be discussed outside of this site. I don’t think WordPress censors would like an expansion of Pierce’s or Covington’s fiction on their platform. Will the dark web be the site for the priests of the holy words? One thing is clear: I feel increasingly more and more disgusted towards everything that comes from the hetero fags of the racialised right, be it their texts, videos or radio podcasts.

But perhaps more than insulting them we have to understand what is going on in their cute little heads. They remind me of a passage near the beginning of the first A Song of Ice and Fire novel. King Robert Baratheon curses the northern climate even in summer; he tells Ned Stark that the Others (meaning the white walkers) take the light snowfalls, and he wonders what Winterfell would be like in winter. Then Robert adds a phrase that I consider key to understanding the chasm that separates the three-eyed crow from the Americans: that in the south—that is, far south of Winterfell—all citizens are drunk and have become rich.

The wealth of the West has corrupted the white man in ways never seen before in all of human history. With people like those native English-speakers who have become so rich we won’t get anywhere.