Category: George R.R. Martin

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Degenerate art Film Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin

House of the Dragon’s nigger

House of the Dragon is a Game of Thrones prequel that premiered tonight on HBO.

If you are interested in my critique of all 73 episodes of Game of Thrones in eight seasons (2011-2019), you can read the final essay of On Beth’s Cute Tits (this link is temporary: when I correct one more book article with DeepL Translator, I’ll delete the old link and upload a new one).

The screenplay for House of the Dragon was written by Ryan Condal, George R.R. Martin (whom I’ll just call Martin) and the Jew Miguel Sapochnik. Like Games of Thrones, House of the Dragon is based on Martin’s novels A Song of Ice and Fire.

The plot of ‘The Heirs of the Dragon’, the first episode of the first season of House of the Dragon, takes place almost two hundred years before the events of Game of Thrones, at the height of House Targaryen and featuring seventeen dragons. It tells the story of the origin of House Targaryen, and the development of an intra-family conflict known as the Dance of Dragons, which stems from the division of the royals into two camps over the choice of the heir to the Iron Throne: Rhaenyra Targaryen, daughter of King Viserys Targaryen (played by Emma D’Arcy) and Daemon Targaryen, brother of King Viserys Targaryen (played by Matt Smith).

In this new series there seem to be three main feudal houses: House Targaryen, House Velaryon and House High Tower. Corlys Velaryon is the head of House Velaryon.

In the books the Velaryons are much like the hyper-Nordic Targaryens, because the two families have been marrying each other for generations. In Martin’s universe, the Targaryens keep their Valyrian blood pure, within the family; so when they don’t marry a Velaryon they usually marry their sister. Thus, the Targaryens and Velaryons in the books are one big, albeit incestuous, family of inbred blondes. The show that premiered today directed by a Jew (remember that Game of Thrones was directed by two Jews) betrays this in the vilest way imaginable.

Lord Corlys is black: a perfect inversion from the books! To boot, the Aryan Queen Rhaenys Targaryen, a dragon rider, in the TV show has coffee-and-milk kids with Lord Corlys! What’s more, Mysaria is a woman from a brothel in Lys. In the books she’s described as ‘very pale’. Mysaria is a lover and trusted confident of prince Daemon. But in the show that premiered tonight she’s a mudblood!

But that’s not enough. In today’s premiere, Lord Corlys sits at the Small Council table across the bedside from the King of the Seven Kingdoms. That is, he also sits at a head table, albeit on the opposite side. And he does so in three Small Council sessions we just watched.[1]

Lord Corlys’ mulatto children, a boy and a girl, appear in tonight’s premiere during a tournament. Remember the tournament in the first season of Game of Thrones: in the blue-blooded people’s seats there were only white people. What the directors of this show are doing is similar to what Peter Jackson did after filming LOTR. In his traitorous The Hobbit trilogy, Jackson started introducing non-white characters in towns that were white in Tolkien’s tale!

Something that the various directors of this new show don’t realise, or perhaps they do get it, is that, as it is set almost two centuries before the events of Game of Thrones, if miscegenation was already being perpetrated back then there couldn’t have been Targaryens as blond and as white as the ones we saw in Game of Thrones.

Obviously, this new show is nothing but poisonous projection of the suicidal zeitgeist of our times onto Martin’s novels—TV shows where it’s increasingly clear that the religion of the West is to wage a war of extermination on the Aryan man.

If I do an episode-by-episode review of this new series as I did of Game of Thrones, Lord Corlys will no longer be called by that name, but Lord Nigger.

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[1] The ‘Small Council’ is a body which advises the king of the Seven Kingdoms and institutes policy at his command. It is the inner (thus ‘small’) council of the king, essentially forming the government cabinet of the Seven Kingdoms. Members are appointed to their position by the King; theoretically they can be dismissed at will by him.

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Bible Destruction of Germanic paganism George R.R. Martin Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Tree

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 6

This claim of historical Christianity, as indeed of Islam, to be ‘the one true faith’ is a legacy of Judaism, whose tradition serves (in part) as the basis of both religions.

The ancient world—including that of peoples related to the Jews by blood, such as the Canaanites, Amorites, Jebusites, Moabites, Phoenicians and, of course, the Carthaginians—was, as Adolf Hitler wrote in the quote reported above, a world of tolerance. Racine, undoubtedly without realising that he was paying homage to the enemies of the ‘people of God’, underlined this fact when, in the first scene of the third act of Athalie, he put in the mouth of this queen, worshiper of the Gods and Goddesses of Syria, the words she addresses to Joad, High Priest of the Jews:

I know, about my conduct, and against my power,
How far your speeches go in the direction of licentiousness;
Yet you live; your temple stands…

The daughter of Ahab understood by this that if, in her place, the Jews had had the power, it was not they who would have left the sanctuaries of the Baalim standing, nor who would have let their faithful live, let alone their priests. The end of the tragedy—where we see the queen traitorously locked up in the temple of Yahweh, and slaughtered mercilessly by order of Joad—and the whole history of the Jews as reported in the Old Testament, confirms her clairvoyance.

What does the Holy Bible say to the Jews about this? ‘When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are to inherit, and drives out before you many peoples—the Hittites the Jerjessites, the Amorites the Canaanites, the Perizzites the Hévites and the Jebusites, seven peoples, more important and stronger than you—and when He delivers them into your hands, you must crush them and destroy them with violence; not make treaties with them, nor show them pity; you must not unite with them. Nor shall you give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters as wives for your sons, for they will turn away from me and worship other gods’… ‘This is how you should deal with these peoples: you will overthrow their altars and smash their statues; and you shall cut down their sacred groves, and burn their carved images with fire, for you are the holy people in the sight of the Lord your God. He has chosen you, that you may be the chosen people among all the peoples of the earth’.[1]

And once after a conquest that surpassed (by far!) in atrocities those led by other peoples, both in antiquity and closer to us, the Jews finally established themselves in Palestine. Once there were two more or less stable Jewish kingdoms: one in Judea, the other in the north of the country. The Jewish Scripture became ‘holy’ Scripture in the eyes of so many people, for the only reason that their religion is based on the tradition and history of Israel. And how does this Scripture characterise each of the kings who succeed their father on the throne of Jerusalem or Samaria?

Oh, it’s very simple! It declares the king was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ without nuances of judgment, and even without reference to his political behaviour. ‘Good’, if he worshipped Yahweh, the god of the Jews, never bowing his forehead to other deities. Even if he persecuted the faithful of all cults other than his own; if he razed the sacred woods of the ‘false’ Gods, destroyed their images, prohibited the celebration of their mysteries and killed their priests.[2] ‘Bad’ if, on the contrary, the king showed a spirit of benevolent tolerance, and especially if he himself sacrificed to the Baalim or to the Mother Goddesses, according to the custom of the peoples whom the Jews had driven out before them, from the thirteenth to the eleventh century BC, during the conquest of the promised land.

The alternation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ kings is impressive in its monotony. Every story of a reign begins in the same way, with the same phrases, depending on whether Scripture praises or blames the king. ‘And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, and followed in the footsteps of his ancestor David. He suppressed the worship of Baal in the high places, and smashed the statues and cut down the sacred trees’.[3]

This is Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, king of Judea, but it could just as well be any ‘good’ king, as the Jewish Scripture understands that word. And this is the description of the reign of Manasseh, the son and successor of Hezekiah, who was twelve years old when he came to the throne, and who ruled Judea for fifty-five years.

‘He did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and followed the abominations of the peoples whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. He restored the high places which his father, Hezekiah, had laid waste, and raised altars to Baal, and planted a sacred tree, as had done Ahab king of Israel; and he bowed his knee before all the host of heavenly bodies, and worshipped them’.[4] It is identical to all the early accounts of ‘bad’ reigns found in the Old Testament—‘bad’ simply because tolerance was practised there, according to the spirit of all people of antiquity.


Editor’s Note: I doubt anyone understood my initiative to have added so many entries about Game of Thrones on this site. Since almost no one in white nationalism is interested in, say, the books of the old Aryan religions that Arthur Kemp is re-editing, my idea was to use a popular television series for the normie to take his first baby steps towards the other side of the river through George R.R. Martin’s imagery. In Martin’s universe, the fanatical invaders who brought their new religion to Westeros destroyed the Weirwood trees south of the Wall with the same fanaticism as Hebrews and Christians did in real history. Savitri continues:

It should be noted that the mass of ancient Jews in no way seems by nature to have had that intolerance that has played such a far-reaching role in the history of Israel. The ‘average Jew’ before, and perhaps even more so after, the conquest of Palestine, tended to regard all the Gods of the neighbouring peoples as ‘gods’. The similarities of these deities to their own Yahweh, their god, held much more attention, apparently, than the differences which separated them. And it took all the curses of the prophets and all the severity (often bordering on cruelty) of ‘good’ kings, to prevent them from occasionally offering sacrifices to these foreign gods.

It was Moses, the prophets, and some of the Jewish kings—such as David, or Hezekiah—who, by marking it with the sign of religious intolerance, cut off Israel from the community of the peoples of the desert—from the ‘Semitic’ peoples, as they are called—and who, by cultivating at home the myth of the ‘chosen people’, indissolubly linked to the worship of the ‘jealous god’, prepared them for the unique role that, from the fourth century, Christ played in the world.

It is they who are, in the final analysis, responsible for all the violence committed over the centuries, in the name of the exclusive ‘truth’ of the religions of Judaism, in particular, of all the atrocities perpetrated in the name of Christianity, from the dreadful murder of Hypatia in the year 415, to the massacre of four thousand five hundred Germanic chiefs faithful to the Paganism of their race, in Verden, in the year 782, and to the stakes of medieval Europe and conquered America.

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[1] Deuteronomy, Chapter 7, Verses 1 to 7.

[2] See at the end of Chapter 12 of the Second Book of Samuel, the treatment inflicted by the ‘good’ King David on the prisoners after the capture of the city of Rabbah, capital of the Ammonites.

[3] The Bible, Kings II, Chapter 18, verses 3 and following.

[4] The Bible, Kings II, Chapter 21, verses 2 and following.

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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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Degenerate art Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin

Unbowed, unbent, unbroken

‘Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken’ is the sixth episode of the fifth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 46th overall. In the pic we see a shot of King’s Landing in this episode, where we can see the Castle and also the Great Sept of Baelor: a kind of Vatican within Rome.

As you may have observed, it isn’t my intention to summarise the plots of each adventure thread in various parts of Westeros, but to record the bad messages of the series. The plots are mostly empty and fantastic, although I admit that Martin has a great command of the language.

For example, when in Braavos Arya enters the sanctum sanctorum of the House of Black and White after some time working as a servant and sees the columns with thousands of inlaid faces, there is nothing profound in that idea. It is pure imagery of a writer who, in interviews, has shown himself to be a traitor to his race and who writes for an audience that all it wants is cheap bread and circuses. The only mystery in those scenes that initiate Arya into the mystery cult is a psychological trick: the viewer is eager to find out what exactly the Faceless Men’s religion is. Believing that he is going to find out just by watching all the seasons, he forgets that it’s all cheap fantasy.

Cheap I say, because it’s far more difficult to try to decipher the religions of the real world. (See for example the efforts I made in Day of Wrath in trying to figure out why, in the past, parents led their children to the sacrificial stone.) And precisely because it is infinitely more difficult to understand the religions of the real world, the typical westerner takes a shortcut: attend television circuses even if they lack the least depth. In the episode then we see the first bad message on the Valyrian peninsula: a black slave trader hits the Aryan Jorah twice in the face.

In the warm King’s Landing there is a phrase by Lancel Lannister, now called simply Brother Lancel—a kind of monk of those who destroyed the Greco-Roman world in the 4th century—that deserves to be quoted: ‘The city has changed since you were here last. We flooded the gutters with wine, smashed the false idols, and set the godless on the run’. Far from there, in the cold Winterfell, in the novels Ramsay doesn’t rape Sansa in front of Theon after their wedding, as we see at the end of the episode. But as we know, those who produced the series are worse than Martin.

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

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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A Song of Ice and Fire (novels) Aryan beauty Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin

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.

Categories
Game of Thrones Genuine spirituality George R.R. Martin Poetry

You win or you die

‘You Win or You Die’ is the seventh episode of the first season of the HBO medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones. The implausible blunders on the part of the most honourable people surrounding the death of King Robert are outrageous to see even if it is only fiction: e.g., a document without witnesses about the succession signed by the sick king on his bed. But worst of all, Ned doesn’t know that the Lannisters will make sure that Joffrey, Robert’s supposed son, is the immediate heir independently of the king’s will.

There is some truth to this whole story of the Starks from the north, who fare badly when they travel south. The Northmen don’t smell the tricks of the Southerners, just as the pure Aryans don’t smell the Mediterranean ways, especially of the Semites.

As night fell Ned was warned by Renly, the dying king’s brother, that Cercei Lannister would not care about King Robert’s last written will. Ned responds that he isn’t going to pre-empt an alleged Lannister coup by dragging frightened children from their beds, referring to Joffrey: the future teenage king who, in a couple more episodes, would have Ned Stark beheaded! This ninth-episode spoiler is worth mentioning now because that’s how, in the real world, white people with very different honour codes reason compared to people from the South, and I mean the real world, not this television series.

Back to the seventh episode. Ned had a second chance when Littlefinger also proposed a pre-emptive strike to the coup that the Lannisters could forge. But blind to his honourable Northman code Ned is unable to see what’s happening, and that he may be betrayed at any time by those who he trusts when the succession to the Iron Throne is in suspense.

But I don’t want to tell about the pathetic way this episode ends for Ned and the welfare of the Seven Kingdoms because I prefer to focus on something more important from the point of view of genuine spirituality. I mean the vows that Jon Snow and Sam Tarly take on the other side of the Wall.

In the novel there is a more numinous environment than what we see in this seventh episode. Martin’s prose reveals nine weirwood trees, all with carved faces, that is, heart trees. A heart tree is a weirwood tree that has a face carved into the wood of the trunk. Heart trees are sacred in the religion of the Old Gods of the Forest, the closest thing to a shrine that the old, dying religion still possesses. Jon is astonished to see the spectacle of these nine trees as he has never seen so many weirwoods together south of the Wall, let alone heart trees. It’s the first time in his life that he has crossed the wall. But we are now in the lands on the north side of the Wall where, long before, magic flourished before the arrival of the bearers of a new religion.

Let us remember that the heart tree is the symbol of this site, and instead of quoting what Jon and Sam said in the episode when kneeling before one of them, and reciting the oath that makes them members of the Night’s Watch (a military order which holds and guards the Wall to keep the wildlings from crossing into the Seven Kingdoms), I prefer to quote some lines that do not come from Martin’s pen:

Nicht in kalten Marmorsteinen,
Nicht in Tempeln, dumpf und tot:
In den frischen Eichenhainen
Webt und rauscht der deutsche Gott.

Not in cold marble stones,
Not in temples dull and dead:
In the fresh oak groves
Weaves and rustles the German god.

Categories
A Song of Ice and Fire (novels) Aryan beauty Blacks Feminism Film Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin Poetry

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]