You heard it all by now – Game of Thrones sucked. Everyone and their aunt-girlfriend has talked about it. I won't go into too much detail about it but suffice it to say that I agree with the majority opinions, namely that the show was rushed, that every ounce of logic went out the window so as to give way to cool shots, that characters stopped making any sense, that everything the show was built on was totally forgotten, such as the political intrigue, the house allegiances, old oaths and rivalries, all that and then some. On a positive note, the dragon CGI was an ace. But was it enough to save the show? No, not really. Cool vistas, even very cool ones, only get you so far. If the story isn't any good then the charm of the visuals just wanes with each subsequent viewing. For example, as a huge fan of the first four seasons, I still often find myself rewatching random dialogue scenes from those episodes, just for the smart characters and the political complexity. But on my second viewing of seasons seven and eight, the impressive scale and realism of the dragons had already lost its teeth. Thing is though, I think this problem has deeper roots than just the decisions of the showrunners and the simple changes from the books that had to be made for the story to fit the screen.
As far as the origin of the decline goes, some people go way further than me, all the way to season one in fact, but I consider that Game of Thrones as we knew it died with season four. I spent some good times in the summer of 2014 binge-watching those four seasons, just losing myself in that world, and I was very curious to find out what awaited, especially after the massive change in the political sphere that came with Tywin's death, as well as a new world to discover with Arya's journey. However, when season five came along I immediately felt something was off. I talked to my friends about it but they didn't seem to agree though. The common responses were something like – they are just setting up the scenes on the first few episodes, then the response was that the first half of the season was setup, then it was all a big setup to the season finale, then it was a whole season of setup so that season six could be great, and so on... It was just kicking the can down the road, something which never made any sense to me.
And that is because, in a way, the whole of Game of Thrones was about kicking the can down the road. The idea was always that there's an apocalyptic threat of ice coming from the north and an apocalyptic threat of fire coming from the east, but meanwhile, everyone is playing chair games. That idea is pretty great and it worked brilliantly in season one with the Ned Stark story. In seasons two and three it worked great as well because of how amazing the Stark-Lannister conflict was. But with Robb's death, the conflict ends and Westeros regains some level of stability under Tywin. However, with Tywin's death, that stability is once again in total disarray. I would argue that the Stark-Lannister conflict is the whole center of the political game and, after it ends, the game of thrones has come to its logical conclusion. As a result, season five should have sped up, it should have gone full blast. At that point we have had enough of those political wars which pail in comparison with the true war that is to come. I think there's only so many chair games one can care about until it just becomes proper pointless. But maybe what you love most are indeed the politics?... Well I do too and I'll return to that point shortly.
But instead of a quickening, what oddly happens with season five is that it slows down. I would go as far as arguing that it's almost filler. Jon Snow dies which seems like a major event until you realize that his resurrection didn't really amount to anything, Daenerys has her trials and tribulations in Meereen, which people would defend as her lessons in politics so that she could rule Westeros, but they ended without her learning how to rule, Arya had her adventures in Braavos but they served nothing except to help establish her skills, or at least some of them, in later seasons. But it's all toothless, it's filler-like... Remember when Arya was stabbed by the waif in season six and everyone was coming up with complex theories to justify her stupid decisions? All very smart theories that were wholly ignored by the episode itself. I have to ask – if you watch the whole show with fresh eyes as if you've never watched any of it before, would you really believe that Arya's story arc would have ended there? Well, with how bad the later seasons turned out, maybe it should have... But that wouldn't have made any sense. While in this story characters often die suddenly I wouldn't say they die senselessly, and a death like that in season five would be precisely that. So I watched that season with a whole lot of boredom, it really felt like I was watching anime filler episodes, knowing that nothing of too much importance could happen until Daenerys and Arya returned to Westeros, that is to say, until the story picked up its major thread.
So why the shift? Here I get to the crux of my argument and, as far as I can tell, the mistake lies with the source material itself. In a nutshell, I started to think that George R. R. Martin greatly overstretched with the books, namely with Feast for Crows.
Considering that the first four seasons are relatively faithful adaptations of the first three books it's no wonder that they are the best seasons indeed. However, I think I'm not talking out of school when I say that people consider Feast to be the worst book. It did mark the first time we got a Cersei point of view which was really interesting, and some of Sam's and Brienne's adventures were pretty neat... but I don't think I can use a stronger word to describe them. And that's the problem. There's only so much waiting a person can do, and I don't mean that in a Winds of Winter sense, I mean it in a why-is-this-even-happening sense... Feast is the fourth in a series of seven books, and Dance with Dragons even happens concurrently with it, at least for the first half or so. It seems that George now has to fit a whole lot of story in two books but not only that, he has to resolve storylines that don't appear to have a lot of impact on the main story. It's almost a trap... The moral of the story was always – why does it matter who sits on the throne when everyone, lord or peasant, is in mortal danger? A good question, but at some point it's almost as if the spirit of the story itself began to care.
I suspect the issue lies with George's writing style. He often talks about writing as a gardener, that is to say, he sows the seeds of his story, he plants a vast array of characters and, as he writes, he instinctively discovers the direction the story is supposed to take, letting the story dictate the pace, so to speak. In many ways I like that idea a lot and I could say I was inspired by him to do something similar in my own books. But I'm not so sure how that can work when, from the very first couple of pages, we are teased with an epic conflict. At a certain point, all the little details, all the political intrigue, the lords of minor houses, the who's in which castle, the who marries who, all that stuff wherein the greatest strengths of the story lie, becomes pointless. Maybe I'm in the minority but while I do like the idea that the dornish and the northmen are up to no good, I can't quite devote much attention to it if the white walkers are coming to kill them all. It's almost akin to watching a game you know the result to – if your team is winning, you can't feel happy because you already know that they lost, if they are losing, you don't need to root for them because you know they won.
Now, returning to where I said I would, it could be that being pointless isn't necessarily bad, right? I agree, and as I thought about, not necessarily the show, but the story as a whole, I began to think that it should have followed something more closely resembling The Sopranos. If you've watched it then you deserve soft drinks of choice, if not then I'll explain loosely. The reason I found myself thinking about it so much is that in The Sopranos you have, for the most part, the same characters doing the same things – they live their lives, they go about their business, they form and break relationships, you get an insight into their psychology, you understand how their world works, and so on. In many ways it's great to just sort of observe them, you feel like whenever you watch an episode you're finding out what they are up to. And the reasons why that works are, firstly, because it's very well-written, the characters are great and the world around them is one you wanna understand, and secondly, while there's continuity between episodes and even between seasons, there isn't an overarching plot thread that has to be resolved. The show could have ended at any point and you wouldn't think – hey, but what about that thing Tony said in episode one?
In Game of Thrones, that first reason is wholly fulfilled. Like I said, it's great to watch random scenes from the first four seasons so as to just spend some time with the characters, to spend time in that world. But the second reason? Not so much... The title of the book series itself seems to suggest an epic conflict. With each passing season that conflict should develop and draw ever nearer to being resolved, but Feast, and in some ways Dance, didn't give us that, instead they overcomplicated it. The show, somewhat understandably, decided to cut through all that, to simplify it, which inevitably came at a great cost. Alternatively, I wonder if this simplification had happened in season five, the ending wouldn't have been so rushed and so jarring. In many ways, seasons five and six were kind of a waste of time.
But on the other hand, can you envision a satisfying ending to the book series? If so, can you imagine it happening within seven books?... I'm not sure I can, and in many ways, though it sounds drastic, I would have much preferred this story without the white walkers. I believe it ought to have been quite like The Sopranos – a sort of meandering show where characters come and go, where they just go about their normal lives without this piano hanging over their heads. That way, when they have their personal issues, we can feel them more personally. I can care about, say, Christopher and Paulie being lost in the woods because I care about what happens to Christopher and Paulie. But it's hard to care about, say, Daenerys' feelings as she's walking barefoot through the grass when an ice zombie is gonna come to kill everyone. So in a way, some people go further than me in that they consider the first big issue in the show to be the lack of Jeyne Poole, something which created a butterfly effect that only hit us in season five. However, while in some sense I agree, I often think that the story itself screwed up on the very first prologue of the very first book.
I suspect that to be the true downfall... You have a writer who loves detail, who loves, all things considered, a realistic world, who loves to get into the minds of even the seemingly smallest characters and reveal them with great depth, but he does so in a world that exists under an inherently epic scope. I for one just can't adjust my eyes to it... If the white walkers were removed from the story we could have taken each season and each book as they came out, one at a time, and we'd wonder what's going to happen on each page rather than wondering how what happens now will affect the true ending.
But having said all that, it's still possible that Winds comes out and George wows us all with the new twists and turns his mind has conjured up. Maybe all the pointless stuff isn't actually pointless at all, maybe it's part of a massive jigsaw puzzle that's going way over my head. In either case, much like with Berserk, I am still very curious to find out if A Song of Ice and Fire has a great, epic finale, and I look forward to reading it. However, having said that, one tends to assume that the bad decisions of the show were all made by the showrunners because that way we can at least hope for a proper ending on the page. But with how many characters there are and with how many plot points there are left to resolve, I can't say I would bet on it. Though if I'm wrong I'll be the first to admit it.
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