Game of Moans
[Spoiler warning for the entirety of the titular series here. You’ve been warned!]
Everyone and their mother is hating on Game of Thrones.
Checking twitter for episode reactions reveals an unbroken wave of negativity ranging from outpourings of genuine sadness to rage-filled torrents of hate. This is a show that to many became the foundation of their becoming adults and a sizeable portion of this demographic now feels betrayed.
The problem is, I agree with them.
Not the betrayal part of course. Recently there’s a habit of associating bad writing with conscious malice which of course is bunkum. Bad writing is bad writing is bad writing and as the trend towards the media franchises shows, sometimes these things get away from themselves. But the new episodes are bad, but opining as such can end up with ones opinions lumped in with the muck.
Take the the third episode of the final season. The White Walkers are finally here, the North stands ready to defend the realms of men from the army of the dead, everyone expects to die. This is an episode with a multitude of problems but online the conversation has been hijacked by two alone; the way the episode was shot, and the fate of the Night King himself.
The first is a rather dull, binary topic well suited to memes and twitter gags. It was a dark episode. Too dark for the encoding used by most digital TV services, despite the protestations of the man who shot it, and that’s about all there is to say.
But the other bone of contention bares examination: Arya’s killing of the Night King. The primary focus of the dissatisfied has revolved around the critical lens of the Mary Sue; the idea that a character is written too powerfully and that all tension around them fades as they can simply never lose. The apparatus itself is a lazy one, often little more than a way to legitimise readers’ personal discontent with a writer’s work, and here this is no different. Arya’s story over previous seasons was of her becoming the deadliest assassin in the world, able to take on even her teachers and come out on top. Her body count is as impressive as any Knight or Kingsguard. She was legitimately given the skills to finish off the big bad.
Of course this didn’t stop the spectres of sexism and discrimination raising their heads, as volleys of complaints were made that a girl, a girl!, was the one to defeat the greatest threat this fictional universe has ever known. The less said about these claims the better.
And yet. And yet. I hated that she killed the Night King.
My problem comes not from the idea of the character as a Mary Sue, or because she’s a woman, but from the execution. The writers have reacted to the backlash by crowing they’d known for years that Arya would be the one. By doing this they’ve demonstrated how little narrative groundwork they laid with this time and how they utterly failed to plant the seeds of this arc.
Arya had been, until this season, absent from the continent threatened by the King of the White Walkers. She had no knowledge of te threat, indeed she did not know they existed before an acquaintance let slip. Upon arrival in Winterfell she was unconcerned with any of the greater threats or tactical decisions, instead focusing on showing off to Brienne and engaging in some healthy time with Gendry. Nothing in her dialogue suggested she was there for any other reason than to man the barricades with her family. No actions she took hinted towards a greater purpose.
We also had multiple characters present with a long history in this arc. Jon Snow was the most obvious, but even others like Melisandre, Dany, Tormond, Sam and even Dolorous Edd were heavily involved.
A decent conclusion is a satisfactory paying of narrative debts rather than a simple cessation of story. This is why the Red Wedding was so effectively shocking but Cersei’s destruction of the sept felt cheap. Rob had wracked up a narrative debt in betraying his oath to the Freys, and the conclusion of his arc was this debt needing to be paid. The characters killed in the sept were mid-arc, their debts not yet been accounted for. Having them blown away to unify the meta-narrative left many loose ends flapping and felt like reach the writers made to streamline the major plotting.
Here, Arya was not owed anything by the story of the Night King. She was a foreigner, or at the very least a recent addition, and her pinching the grand prize felt like a cheat specifically designed to out-do expectations and subvert viewer guessing. It was not a end that was earned by the writing, however preplanned that writing had been.
The rest of the episode’s faults have gone largely undiscussed outside of forums and discussion boards: The spatial flow of the episode was all over the place, meaning Winterfell became less a battlefield than a stage upon which various confusing scenes were enacted. The tactics given to the defenders by the writing were nonsensical and entirely story led (the first of which was literally “Sacrifice the brown people”. Yikes). The writers still have no idea how to deal with the overwhelming power of the dragons so wrote them into getting lost in a snowstorm. The few deaths there were were telegraphed and drawn out.
It was a bad episode for legitimate reasons but the narrative surrounding it became something else. While expressing my views in public spaces I became uncomfortably aware of how toxic the voices around me were, and how similar overall opinions were being used to prop up discriminatory viewpoints and hateful diatribes.
In the end this is just a show, and everyone and their mother is currently hating on it. I just wish they were doing it for the right reasons.
This is the fourteenth entry in my ongoing series of freewritten doodlings. The rational behind this is here: https://goo.gl/hi9Ub7
