My 2 Cents: Game of Thrones

 

Jodi and I tend to trail behind popular culture by about five years. I could go on about that, and maybe someday I will, but just trust that it’s the truth as a lead-in to this post. About five years after most of the rest of the world, we finished watching Game of Thrones on Monday night. Before I dive into the point of this post, I want to make a few things clear:

1. I have read the books. Jodi has not. I will say that when I started reading the first book, I was near a point of giving up on the fantasy genre. I had read a few of the Robert Jordan “Wheel of Time” books with great frustration. I found Jordan’s writing derivative, he had a penchant for long blocks of retelling of previous books, and each book felt like a level of a video game – you know, beat the boss to advance to the next level and the next boss.  I will admit that I didn’t really feel much better about Game of Thrones until reaching the conclusion of the first book and the beheading of Ned Stark. In the fantasy genre, main characters never die, and it had felt like Ned Stark was going to be the lynchpin of the series. With his death, it changed the tone. This truly was a “Game of Thrones” where you either “Win or you die.” By the conclusion of the books that are written, I was starting to worry about a couple things:
• Much like professional wrestling fans in the late 1990s, I found myself looking toward the aisle instead of watching the action in the ring to try and see what surprise was coming next. The problem with that is that there is a law diminishing returns with such booking. Sooner or later because you don’t care about what’s in front of you, you stop caring about what happens to anyone. The surprise from behind the curtain will never then live up to expectation.
•  I was becoming convinced that it was unlikely with such a grand scope that the conclusion of this series was going to be wholly satisfactory. Its charm was its immensity and once all these characters and plots collided, I worried we might find that the pieces didn’t really all fit together.
2.  I am not going to spend a lot of time discussing the gripes most people had with the conclusion of the show. Mostly I’m fine with it (see above, I suspected it wouldn’t all fit perfectly together). Was the last season rushed? Yes. Why did Daenerys go mad? Not entirely sure – grief, lust for power, just in the Targaryen blood. All of the above? Was Bran the right pick as king? I don’t know, probably as good a choice as anyone. The lesson was that wanting power is evil.

Since this is a writing blog, I wanted highlight things I’ve considered about this series.

Character Development

The strength of Game of Thrones is development of numerous complex characters. Jamie Lannister pushes a child out of a window to hide his affair with his twin sister, yet by midway through the series you want to root for him. Tyrion Lannister is a quick-witted drunken dwarf, who also happens to be idealistic and a romantic. Brienne of Tarth is a hulking brute who is so guarded because of the cruelty she’s faced her entire life. Theon Greyjoy has confused loyalties, does terrible things in hopes to win his father’s approval, endures torture and emasculation, and struggles to find redemption. These are only a few of the characters we meet, love, and lose along the way.

The lesson for a writer is that almost no one is perfectly good or completely evil. Crafting character isn’t just about providing physical details and dialogue. It’s creating nuances in personality, building sympathy and/or contempt, and developing all these traits through plot. 

The World

Like Tolkien before him, George R.R. Martin creates an elaborate world with a rich history that plays a major role in the events taking place on the pages and screen. From the Targaryen’s conquest of Westeros to the building of the great wall in the North to many other major and minor events that are detailed in the books and hinted at in show. For example, “The Rains of Castamere” is a song about the slaughter of House Reyne by Tywin Lannister. It’s a grim tale and one that highlights Tywin’s cunning and ruthlessness. The band begins to play this song after the wedding of Edmure Tully and Roslin Frey, which Catelyn Stark recognizes and immediately knows that she and her son, Robb, are in trouble.

I admire fantasy writers who can develop such rich and poignant history. The trick is to do it without losing the forward motion of the story you’re telling. I can’t claim that I have that ability, but if I ever write a fantasy story, it’s something I’ll have to consider.

The Magic Balancing Act

Okay, the dragons are cool. The magic that brought them back sort of vague, but they serve a purpose in the story. Melisandre seems to have some magic, but her abilities seem to wax and wane at times. She serves the Lord of Light but births a shadow of death. Sort of confusing. The faceless men – still not sure I get that. Bran is the Three-Eyed Raven, which I guess means he can see the past and the present and maybe the future. Maybe he’ll live a long time if he lives in the roots of a tree. And, boy, the Night King wants him dead, even though it seems like the Night King could have done just that since the last Three-Eyed Raven was north of the wall for a long time with minimal protection and wrapped up in the roots of a tree. The reality is that Bran’s ability is a way to fill in gaps to the reader/viewer. It’s a plot device, so you must accept some head scratching parts. The Night King – so I like the story of everyone coming together to defeat this guy – but isn’t it really the story of beating Sauron or insert every other totally evil wizard in the fantasy realm. It made for great theater, but the character itself is flat, his motivation kind of narrow, and then there’s only one way that he can lose, and he allows himself to be fooled into exposing that weakness (himself). You know, like Sauron tied himself to a ring that could be destroyed. The Night King just needs to stay five miles from the battle, and his side wins. The more I think about the end of the series, I sometimes wonder if the entire Night King scenario just didn’t quite fit into this otherwise political story.

I guess what I am saying is that magic is something that is part of fantasy, but it’s often a tricky thing, and I am not sure it’s a strength for George R.R. Martin. Oftentimes writers use magic to get out of corners. Can’t beat a villain, develop a magic scheme that makes it possible. The problem is that magic often also blows holes in plotlines. I mean, if Gandalf can call the eagles, why don’t they just fly the damn eagles to Mordor and drop the ring in Mount Doom? Well, it’d be a shitty story if they did, for one thing. The other is that writers should brush lightly but precisely when it comes to magic.

Well, that’s what I have to say. Let me know your thoughts on Game of Thrones, and thanks for reading.

My 2 Cents: Community

Somewhere in the blur of the four-plus years of my tenure as sports editor at SVM, I stumbled upon the sitcom “Community” in syndication in late night (probably more like early morning) programming. The time slot, which didn’t seem fixed in a spot for very long, was the same sort of treatment the show received during its original run on NBC. I am pretty sure the syndication time for at least a little while was like 1 AM on Monday morning. I worked every Sunday night, so I have clear memories of getting home after deadline and this show being on.

The issue I initially found with Community, as I always seemed to catch the same handful of episodes and, at the time, I had little knowledge of the show or how many seasons it was on, was that it was a “hit-or-miss” kind of show. The season three episode entitled “Chaos Theory,” where various scenarios play out depending on the roll of a dice, was a gem while the Claymation Christmas episode where Abed (Dani Pudi) sinks into a delusion due to the dissolution of he and his mother’s seasonal traditions seemed to lack the humor and punch of other episodes.

Even in the misses, I could tell there was more going on with this show than the average sitcom. While it often presented the familiar tropes found in other shows, the characters – usually Abed – identified the scenarios as the tropes they were and thus bent them away from the expected outcomes – or in other instances played right into the tropes and thus concluded that sometimes tropes are manifestations of reality.

The show required a more thorough and linear exploration.

The setup is of students of various backgrounds and ages forming a study group for a Spanish class at Greendale Community College. The shows initial hook was of Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), who has been disbarred after it was discovered he was practicing law without a legitimate bachelor’s degree, enrolling at Greendale to quickly earn said degree and return to his swarmy and shallow existence. In an attempt to woo an attractive, but also world-savvy (she had once lived in New York, after all) classmate, Britta Perry, he sets up a study date with her. When he arrives that evening, he finds she’s invited a bevy of classmates to make it a study group.

The first season revolves around Jeff’s pursuit of Britta, his flirtation with younger group member, Annie (Alison Brie), along with Annie’s infatuation with Troy (Donald Glover), Abed’s reliance on television and movies to relate to the real world, Shirley’s (Yvette Nicole Brown) pushing of Christian beliefs on the group while also dealing with her divorce, and Pierce Hawthorne’s (Chevy Chase) relentless desire to prove that he’s still relevant and hip enough to hang with his younger peers.

The backbone of the series comes from a classic Winger pep talk where he says “we are no longer a study group, but a community.” The lesson for Winger, a perpetual loner, being that the individual thrives in a community.

For the last five or six years, Jodi and I have been watching the series from beginning to end, and on Sunday night, we watched the finale of season six bringing this chapter to a close for me (us). While we have several shows we are watching like this, this is probably the first one that I’ve ever watched from beginning to end, so it was a little bit of a lesson on storytelling, but more a trip for me where I’ve grown along with the characters. It started when I was at a very different place in my life, coming home late at night, often overwhelmed and exhausted and sometimes feeling lost to the place I am now, more stable, more attentive to the important things in life (family, etc.), and focused on new goals and hobbies. While I am not going to say the finale was anything earth shattering, watching it was a little hard, because it did feel like a door closing for me.

By the sixth season, half of the original cast had moved on. Chevy Chase left after three seasons and much feuding with show creator Dan Harmon and other castmates, Donald Glover left to become a bigger star in music and television, and Yvette Nicole Brown left for various reasons including getting a spot on another short-lived show. The dynamic of the show never truly recovered to the magic of the first three seasons and original cast, but it also was a better reflection of the real world – particularly one at a community college where students usually change every two years or so. The show’s final season aired on the short-lived Yahoo TV (the show is blamed for the internet station’s demise), and while there’s occasionally talk of a movie (a running callback within the show was six seasons and a movie), it seems likely the show is destined to slip further into obscurity.

I can’t recommend checking this one out enough if you like shows that break the mold a bit. If meta isn’t your thing, then you might want to pass. As someone into writing, it’s also worth a study on how to juggle an ensemble cast along with complex themes and breakneck-paced wit. Most of all it is fun, often individual episodes feel like mini-movies and the paintball episodes in seasons one and two are epic.

Cool, cool, cool.