Game of Nope

On paper, Game of Thrones seems like a show I would enjoy. It’s medieval fantasy with complex political intrigue, and a large cast that, in theory, gives me a lot of opportunities to find characters I’m interested in. But there was something about the look of it and the reviews and the MASSIVE fandom that made me wary. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it (apart from a general dislike for all things trendy), but it took me until the series was finished to finally be willing to give it a shot.

I made it through two episodes before giving up. Actually, five minutes into the first episode I was pretty much done, but I gave it two episodes worth of opportunity to claw its way back from that awful first impression, and it only got worse.

If I want to see rich white men rape and murder their way through their privileged lives, I’ll turn on the news. That’s not entertainment for me, no matter how you dress it up. I need to see virtuous characters, complex characters, diverse characters… I need a cause I can believe in, someone I can cheer for, so I have a reason to keep watching. None of that showed up in the first two episodes.

I especially want female characters I can relate to – ones who don’t stoop to male vices or methods, ones who see the horrors of the world for what they are and try to change things for the better. Instead, GoT offered: an incestuous, adulterous harpie who condones murder to cover up her incest/adultery and over-parents her spoiled brat of a son; a probably-incestuous shell of a person who allows herself to be used as a political pawn and repeatedly raped, and then… tries to please her rapist; a long-suffering worrywart who takes up doll-making (a light form of witchcraft?) as a coping mechanism for her son’s near-murder; a young tomboy who’s sort of on the right track but is in that can’t-help-but-be-obnoxious phase that children go through; myriad whores who are, as it happens, the only female characters I even marginally like in this show because they’re the only ones who seem to enjoy their lives. None of those are women I can get emotionally invested in – their personalities fit tired, over-used tropes, and they were so clearly written by men that I can’t identify with them.

Then there’s the men. An adulterous, gluttonous asshole and his also-adulterous lap-dog, an angst-ridden bastard who seems to buy the idea that he’s no good to anybody except as a sacrifice, an erudite dwarf who seems to have dedicated his life to exploring every vice known to man, a stoic “exotic” rapist, an incestuous wastrel, a spoiled brat… and not one of them a compelling character for me. If the rest of the story were better, the rest of the cast more interesting, I might have stuck around to see what the dwarf gets up to, but he alone can’t carry the show.

The whiteness of the cast is boring (the world is completely made-up... why make it whites-only?), the petty motives are depressing, the gratuitous female nudity feels pornographic, and the story is too much like current-day politics to be worthy entertainment. The show is clearly targeted to teenaged boys, and it confuses me how so many people who don’t fit that demographic watched the first two episodes and decided they wanted more. What does it say about our culture that this show is so popular?

It probably didn’t help that I watched this shortly after getting caught up on two fantastic series: The Man In The High Castle, and The Expanse. Both of those have diverse casts, complex and compelling characters, a far better balance between virtue and vice, interesting plots, and underlying themes that I can relate to and want to see more of. Even in the medieval fantasy realm, The Last Kingdom and Vikings both did far better at drawing me in (though Vikings, with its purple faux-fur, eventually lost this historical costumer’s interest) by having characters whose motives were more relatable than “gotta f*ck my sister.” Game of Thrones feels like poorly-written fanfic by comparison – nothing but a masturbatory aid for hormonal boys – and that’s not worth my time.