What's up, Wisecrack? Jared again.
So, Game of Thrones is over,
If you're one of those people who smugly reminds every person you know that you don't watch Game of Thrones,
you might have missed the part where one and a half million people signed a petition to get season eight remade,
with quote,
competent writers.
People hate this finale.
And yeah fans complained about The Office when Michael Scott left
or how Dexter concluded
or the whole Sopranos thing.
But the rage against Game of Thrones seems to transcend all barriers.
It has truly united the fractured American public.
After 73 plus hours of prophecy statecraft, death, magic, more death, and zombies,
we were given an ending that felt rushed, poorly executed, and possibly dumb
but unlike Twitter, we want to give the show its fair shot.
After all, we even tried to see the light in things like this. . .
"I don't like sand."
or this. . .
"Not the bees!"
[yelling]
Endings, by their very nature, solidify the themes of the show and color the meaning of every episode that came before it.
So now that we have an ending to this milestone in television, it's time to ask:
What is Game of Thrones about and is it deep or dumb?
Welcome to this Wisecrack edition on the Game of Thrones finale Deep or Dumb,
and obviously, spoilers ahead.
But before we get to it, I want to give a shout out to our sponsors over at Skillshare, the online learning community.
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First, an insanely basic overview of the show is in order.
Game of Thrones is about the literal game for the throne in the wake of the king's death.
The Seven Kingdoms are thrown into chaos as competing factions duke it out for supremacy.
Also, a woman gets dragons.
She burns all her enemies and finally wins that game
but it turns out the real reward wasn't the friends she made along the way.
She gets replaced by the NSA,
I mean Bran, who can spy on you at any time with his magic.
The end.
To figure out whether this ending had some greater message or maybe was just awful,
we'll be looking at two critical elements of the show:
its political world building
and its relationship to the fantasy genre.
Part 1: Breaking the Wheel?
Now that we loosely understand what happens in the show,
we have to figure out what is it trying to say.
One big indicator that the events of the show have translated into meaningful change for the realm
is the big, expensive, visual metaphor in which the dragon melts the Iron Throne.
Certainly, the wheel has been broken, right?
Well, let's find out.
Throughout the show, we see the way common people suffer amongst the drama of the well-to-do lords and ladies of the land.
Perhaps no character focuses on this travesty more than Daenerys Targaryen,
Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, and by the end, Homicidal Maniac.
Dany has been saying for years that she means to break the wheel of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms.
- "Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell--
they're all just spokes on a wheel."
"This ones on tops, and then that one's on top,
and on and on, it spins, crushing those on the ground."
- "It's a beautiful dream,
stopping the wheel.
You're not the first person who's ever dreamt it."
- "I'm not going to stop the wheel.
I'm going to break the wheel."
Dany's an interesting character because while she often had the best intentions,
her plans often have terrible consequences.
In season 4, she crucified over 100 masters in Slaver's Bay, as justice for their crucifixion of slave-children.
Later in the season, she learns that some of those crucified masters fought to prevent the deaths of those slave children.
- "Your father crucified innocent children.
- "My father spoke out against crucifying those children."
After she 'liberated' Astapor,
it was overtaken by a new tyrant because she hadn't actually taken the time to solidify a new political system
before moving on to the next city to conquer.
- "The council you installed to rule over the city has been overthrown by a butcher
named Cleon whose declared himself, his Imperial Majesty"
But even as she gives speeches on mercy and liberation,
Daenerys also believes that she was born to be the queen of the Seven Kingdoms
and deserves that title based on bloodline.
Bloodline succession is one of the most common justifications for the wheel-turning wars that Dany claims to want to end
whether that's the War of the Five Kings, or the Blackfyre rebellion.
Shout-out to you book fans
"You're the real MVP."
And worse, by the second-to-last episode,
Daenerys commits some 'light' crimes against humanity
and burns King's Landing to the ground.
So what is the show trying to say?
If we were to zoom in on Daenerys, we might get a message like,
some idealism often fails because the world is a hot garbage fire
and in the final seasons, we might see her growing frustrations with the difficulty of ruling,
dramatized to show us how an idealist turns into a war criminal.
Instead, she just takes a hard right turn
and her insanity is justified through some heavy-handed foreshadowing.
Is it because through these shows careful plotting of politics viewing yourself as 'the savior of the world' is a recipe for tyranny?
Maybe that's what the show was going for.
But with just a crammed-in speech Tyrion made post-facto to draw this connection.
It seems light.
"Everywhere she goes, evil men die
and we cheer for it.
And she grows more powerful and more sure that she is good and right.
She believes her destiny is to build a better world for everyone.
She believed that. She truly believed it.
Wouldn't you kill whoever stood between you and paradise?"
That's the best case.
The worst case seems to be that madness is genetic as this clip indicates.
"They say every time a Targaryen is born, the Gods toss a coin and the world holds its breath."
Whatever they were trying to say,
Daenerys did not end up the savior nor the oppressor of the realm.
She got shanked.
So if she didn't break the wheel, did someone else?
Is the wheel still intact?
And what bearing does this have on the themes of politics, ruling and leadership?
If the whole point of the show is studying the difficulties of ruling
and if we expect some sort of cathartic conclusion at the end of any narrative,
something must change.
We should walk away with a takeaway.
One of the last scenes of the finale,
we see the remaining lords and ladies of the Great Houses convene in a council to determine who will lead Westeros.
Tyrion, still handcuffed,
proposes that what the country needs is a leader with a good story
who will unite the people and
". . . lead us into the future."
He also proposes a nifty political system to break the wheel called oligarchy
where bloodlines succession will be replaced by a dozen wealthy and powerful families
deciding each new leader by their own messed-up internal politics.
"Sons of kings can be cruel and stupid as you well know.
This will never torment us.
That is the Wheel-lock Queen wanted to break.
From now on, rulers will not be born,
they will be chosen.
On this spot, are the lords and ladies of Westeros."
Never mind that half the Great Council is made up of Northern families
who then immediately secede from the country.
"The North will remain an independent kingdom."
It's the equivalent of, like,
the southern states swaying the U.S. election
right before they simultaneously peace out from the Union.
So, we'll see how that goes.
So if we're judging whether or not the wheel has truly been broken,
one approach might be to weigh the possible effects of the new oligarchy on the small folk.
Ostensibly, the goal of breaking the wheel is to better the lives of the small folk,
the peasants who have no noble standing.
Dany wanted to free them from tyrants,
Varys wanted to free them from tyrants,
Sansa wanted to free the northern small folk from tyrants,
and Tyrion wants to free them from tyrants who don't have a good elevator pitch.
But even his own story schpeel isn't terribly consistent.
Two episodes ago, he argued to Varys
that most of the millions of people in Westeros don't care who sits on the Iron Throne.
- "You know, I will never betray the realm."
- "What is the realm?
A lost continent, home to millions of people, most of whom don't care who sits on the Iron Throne?"
- "Millions of people, many of whom will die if the wrong person sits on that throne."
Even with the throne itself melted by a grieving dragon,
There's no indicator in Tyrion's final speech
that he's actually changed his mind about the apathy of the people.
But even if most of the realm doesn't care about Bran's story,
they'll probably benefit from a pause and the wars over the throne.
The north men aren't the only ones who have been fighting.
Pretty much every great house has sent their peasants into battle
at some point over the course of the show,
and a new mechanism for the easy transition of power between houses
would have a huge material benefit for the little guys.
At the same time, the mere existence of a Great Council
hardly guarantees they'll all agree on the next leader
or that that leader will agree to be peacefully outvoted.
Both Robert's Rebellion and the War of the Five Kings
are examples of what can happen when the Great Houses are not on the same page about who should be in power.
Maybe we're all being pessimists for being skeptical
that a council that convenes every couple decades might not put a stop to violent disagreement.
But it might just make us realists
so it's a coin flip on whether the new oligarchy will improve the lives of the small folk,
even if it's probably a safe bet that it won't make their lives any worse.
Now, I'm not saying that Game of Thrones necessarily needed an optimistic ending,
Maybe it was all along a tale about how humanity's bullshit would get them all killed
or at least living under some new despot.
But it's hard to even say if the show intends this to be an optimistic or pessimistic ending.
Look no further than Tyrion's first meeting as the newly instated Hand of the King,
In it, Sam makes some appeals for clean water,
Davos requests money to rebuild the forts and armada,
Bronn insists on building more brothels,
and Tyrion seems like he's trudging through the same old nonsense.
So much of the show's definitive meaning is wrapped up in this scene
but it's not even clear if this is a positive step for the realm or a negative one.
It really depends on how you read it
In one reading,
the small council is no different than before with a bickering bureaucracy
unable to determine whether the land needs new brothels or sewers.
They're just as ineffective as ever.
A couple of visual metaphors reinforce this reading.
In one, Tyrion carefully arranges the chairs in a neat orderly manner,
as if he's trying to get it right this time,
but when everyone flies in
they immediately dishevel the room
so does this mean, that despite Tyrion's efforts, everything will remain the same?
In a second visual cue,
the camera widens out to reveal the map of Westeros fractured by a crack in the floor
Is this meant to suggest that things are still broken?
The other way to read this scene is as a kind of Republican ideal with differing perspectives coming together
to do the hard work of forging new compromises for the better of the land.
Not unlike America's founding fathers
who famously holed themselves up in a hot sweaty building for months
until they walked out with a Constitution.
So is this ambiguity in itself deep?
Well if you ask us,
[buzzer]
This isn't the kind of cool ambiguity where we ask if Cobb is still dreaming or not.
That was the whole point of the film.
This is like winging your high school civics speech on checks and balances
and your classmates walking away with the impression that you may or may not really love Stalin.
But that's just one message of the show that finds resolution. . . ?
There's also the much bigger idea that the show has been dealing with for a long time--
that power may inevitably corrupt those who have it.
Does the finale gesture toward an end to corrupt politics
or is the new power structure still susceptible to the problems of the past?
What does it mean for Bran to be kinged?
Besides having a story, what sets Bran apart in Tyrion's speech is his 'three-eyed raven'-ness.
He can warg into animals and Hodors and he contains all the memories of humanity.
As Bran reminds us when he goes to search for Drogon,
he can see anything, anywhere.
"Perhaps, I can find him.
Do carry on with the rest."
He's basically a one-man surveillance state.
It sucks that Rickon died
but at least now Bran gets to be a Big Brother again.
[ba-dum-tss]
But is this supposed to be a good thing?
Why does being the three-eyed raven make Bran a good king
when it disqualified him from being Lord of Winterfell?
- "You know our history better than anyone.
That'll be useful as Lord of Winterfell."
- "I'm not Lord of Winterfell.
I don't really want anymore"
- "I envy you."
- "You shouldn't envy me.
Mostly, I live in the past."
I mean, sure, he didn't want to be King either.
But he also travelled a hell of a long way to accept a position that had plenty of qualified candidates.
And when Bran asks,
"Why do you think I came all this way?"
Does he mean literally the journey from Winterfell to King's Landing
or more metaphorically, some far-reaching plot the three-eyed raven concocted years ago.
Does living in the past,
handing off decisions to the small Council,
and playing 'Where in the World is Drogon: San Diego,' make him the best choice?
As many frustrated fans have pointed out,
the show doesn't give us a whole lot of context to understand the decision.
We don't know the real significance of the three-eyed raven--
why he's necessary, why that position is compatible with some political titles but not others--
really we don't know what has been going on with Bran for a couple seasons.
And since the show goes all-in on Bran as the answer to a decade of political strife,
that's a problem.
Since Bran doesn't 'want anymore'
that's probably supposed to gesture at him being incorruptible.
So if power corrupts, is it deep to say,
"Let's give it to the omniscient wizard-man who has no desires?"
Since to the best of my knowledge, aspiring to know everything isn't practical,
I'm gonna say no.
But wait
what if the show is all about how we should vest power in the people who know things?
Afterall, the ones who really want the best for the people of Westeros are Varys, Tyrion, and Sam--
people who all eventually came to fear Daenerys.
What they have in common:
they're interested in evidence-based decision-making, loosely speaking.
If anything, Bran's ascension seems to be saying,
"Man, If only we could have a state of technocrats,
one of whom literally knows all there is to know then everything would be fine."
And that seems a little too far out of left field
and more like the premise of a Black Mirror episode than the end of a fantasy series.
So is the wheel broken?
Is there any meaning to the image of the throne melting?
Weiss's and Benioff's answer is. . .
Part 2: Fantasy?
If you haven't checked out our last Game of Thrones video, I'd recommend it.
While we were solidly in the wrong about who would end up on the throne,
the video does a great deep dive into the show's use and subversion of various elements of the fantasy genre.
Game of Thrones is famous for tossing fantasy tropes on their head.
Prince charming is a sadistic monster,
the good-guy protagonist loses his head in season 1,
and the sweet, orphaned princess ends up committing mass murder.
But a few of the events in the final season have us wondering if they really are subversions
or if the show retreated back to the same old stereotypes that at once rebelled against.
As we mentioned in the last video,
George R.R. Martin is both heavily influenced by and actively subverts the works of J.R.R Tolkien.
One Tolkien trope directly addressed is the idea of good man equals good king.
That is, if you have a pure heart, you will be a good ruler.
In interviews, Martin has noted that
Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years and he was wise and good
but Tolkien doesn't ask the question:
what was Aragorn's tax policy?
That quote is great.
It's the exact sort of interesting political nuance that we've come to expect from Game of Thrones
which is why it's all the more frustrating that we could just change a couple words and make it
"Weiss and Benioff can say that Bran became king and reigned for a hundred years,
and that he could see things and remember things.
But Weiss and Benioff don't ask the question:
What was Bran's tax policy?"
Like we mentioned before,
maybe the point is that Bran is such an absentee king that it just doesn't really matter.
Maybe it's just that he puts capable people in charge,
but so did Robert Baratheon?
Maybe the scene were the small council meet to talk about the treasury and water supply
is an answer to that question.
They really are getting down to the business of ruling
and the success of the kingdom doesn't rest on Bran's character.
Long live bureaucracy.
But whether this is a flipped trope or just a regular trope
depends a lot on how we're supposed to read Bran as king,
and again,
we just don't have enough context.
In the same interview where he dunked on Aragorn,
Martin also may have given us a hint as to why the great war against the Night King
came before the battle for King's Landing.
The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity,
and that's become the template.
I'm not sure that it's a good template, though.
the Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers
to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes.
But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that.
Evil minions? Check.
Black clothes? Check.
Ugly? Oh, we hate to be judgey but check.
With the conflicts against the white walkers,
the show is directly referencing that genre trope and it's not meant to be subtle.
So it makes sense that they positioned this great war for the future of humanity
before the much more realistic political war.
The ultimate showdown of the series isn't over an existential threat facing humanity,
it's over the fate of human politics.
As far as genre subversions go, this one seems pretty clear-cut.
So deep, maybe?
But subversion for its own sake isn't necessarily a good thing,
and this still leaves the question,
Why did they spend so much time building up to the battle with the Night King?
Were they only using it to show that our anxieties about a centralized evil are misguided?
If that's the case, why make a big show of melting the throne
or ditching the murderous Dany for the uncaring Bran?
It's possible that the show is making allegorical references to the wars for humanity that have been waged in the past,
one of which also heavily influenced Tolkien.
World War I was far more devastating than the battle with the Night King
and perhaps, coincidentally, was often referred to as the Great War.
But even after it had ended,
there wasn't peace and prosperity throughout the world.
Certain countries were crippled or blown to bits in the aftermath of the fighting
[leading] to an even more catastrophic war, World War II.
WWII is perhaps even more convincingly described as a battle for the soul of humanity.
But after it was won, we got a few decades of the Cold War,
Chaos in the Balkans, etc
It's possible that by making these somewhat jarring choice to move directly from the Great War to the last war,
Game of Thrones is acknowledging that wars of that magnitude leave a power vacuum
and to stabilize a region in a way that can lead to immediate follow-up conflicts.
And so we're left with an ending that doesn't definitively point to any great peace,
nor great strife.
But, to be honest, that doesn't really feel like what they're doing here.
The Seven Kingdoms were already thoroughly destabilized even before the Great War.
And as far as the show tells it
most of the southern kingdoms weren't really materially affected by the battle that they never participated in.
It seems like the one big subversion the writers were going for was not making John the king.
Instead, they sent him back north of the wall.
But choosing Bran seems less like a meaningful subversion
and more like some random decision that's meant to surprise you.
So again, for its treatment of the genre that we all thought It was revolutionising,
we're gonna say dumb.
So what should we make of the Game of Thrones finale?
We acknowledge that writing for television is a hard job.
Especially, when expectations are this high
and when you ran out of rich source material a few seasons back.
Trying to complete someone else's story can't be an easy task.
But honestly, we don't have a ton of sympathy for Weiss and Benioff.
They had access to more money and brilliant writers than most cable or network shows could ever dream up
and they still managed to give us an ending that was both unsatisfying and confusing.
There are still plenty of questions that we can ask about the finale
Does the lack of radical political change make a case for Incrementalism over revolution?
Does the abandonment of the show's prophecies and end to bloodline secessions
signal that nothing is decided by fate?
So we have to ask, what was Game of Thrones trying to do?
What was it all about?
We probably could have answered that question better at the end of season one
than at the end of season eight.
D&D took a show with clear political application and interesting approach to fantasy
and made it, well,
dumb,
But hey,
at least John got to pet his direwolf and as a dog lover, that means something.
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