Game of Thrones edition (I'm sorry)
Hello friends,
If you don't watch Game of Thrones, or you avoid reading any cultural criticism tied to the insufferably popular Game of Thrones, or you aren't caught up to the second-to-last episode of the show, you probably are better off just closing this email. If you are interested, I've got two pieces. I won't discuss their content here to avoid spoiling the show for those who care.
Final warning: spoilers ahead!
There was no pivot
The big debate online about Game of Thrones is whether or not Daenerys’s pivot to Mad Queen makes sense given her story arc. My take is that the execution of the moment of her transformation was terribly written — much like everything else in the last few seasons of the show — but on a thematic and ideological and backstory level it made sense. What so many of the people in the “this makes zero sense” crowd miss is that Dany was never actually Good in the first place — and that her prior behavior and her new behavior are two sides of the same coin.
A leader driven by a messiah complex, a leader who believes that their own pursuit of power is done purely in service of the liberation of others, a leader who conflates their own interest with the interests of everyone they want to govern, a leader who takes pleasure in obliterating enemies, a leader brimming with righteous conviction that they alone can bring about a just world, is not a virtuous or progressive leader. This is the mindset of an imperialist or an autocratic vanguardist. Some of the outcomes of their leadership may be good, but the means by which they achieved it are not.
Dany’s massacre needed a lot more plot groundwork and even in the episode itself the mechanisms for triggering her final act could’ve been so much clearer. Why not have her get mad about Jon trying to stop the siege and make plain how isolated she is, or force her to fight through civilian human shields to get to the queen? These sorts of obvious ideas seem to elude the writers of the show who have shown themselves to be C-list talent after running out of source material from the books.
But ultimately Dany’s attitude toward ruling remains consistent. When you’re obsessed with the ends, and your means is force, and you’re always convinced that you’re right, and you have massive power at your disposal, then it is inevitable that you will apply force in heinous ways. Witness the moral atrocities of US foreign policy since World War II, committed nearly invariably by people who are convinced that they are fighting on behalf of humanity. (For a close analogy, consider how the US, the "good guys" in World War II, dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima after it was clear that they had won the war.) The emancipatory agenda of these actors is ultimately subordinate to and in service of and sometimes only a cover for an expansion of power. It does not surprise me in the slightest that so many viewers from across the West were taken by a white ruler who beneficently freed savages from their chains and were then shocked that the very same leader was capable of harming innocents.
Okay, but was it sexist?
Another debate that's accompanied this episode has been over whether Daenerys's turn is sexist.
A number of critics have argued that having a powerful woman slide into hysteria is a stale and offensive trope. The fact that the psychological switch seemingly came about abruptly only compounds this concern: Dany's behavior appears to have revealed an innate erraticism that women are accused of far more often than men. On top of all this, the showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have described Dany as acting impulsively in the King's Landing scene.
I'm sort of sympathetic to the argument given how shoddy the writing was. To repeat the point for the thousandth time, there needed to be more tangible moments in the plot over a long period of time to help make Dany's ultimate action believable on a visceral level. And there have been other things in the show regarding gender and power — the show's depictions and discussions of rape, for example — that seem exploitative and careless.
But overall I'm not persuaded. And I also think that some of these kinds of critiques could be at risk of creating cultural pressure for very boring art.
There are three main reasons that I think Dany's actions don't reek of misogyny in the writers' room.
First, the show is packed with tons of exceptionally rational female leaders. Going into that episode, the show had Cersei, Sansa, and Arya (not exactly a leader, but an extremely powerful character) thriving. The entire last act of the show revolves around a clash between two larger-than-life female leaders (Cersei and Dany) who are both considered formidable strategists with coherent claims to the throne and who have demonstrated distinct and workable models of governance. There are no men in the show who have power that can rival them, with the exception of Jon Snow potentially. (To the extent that he could end up taking the Iron Throne in the show's finale, it's also worth considering the kind of masculinity he represents — self-effacing, consensus-seeking, relatively gentle.) To sum it up, you've got a world in which women are calling the shots, and in a way that's completely believable.
Secondly, Dany's family history is one of brutality and madness. Her father was the Mad King, her brother was ill-tempered and unstable, and so were lots of her family members. While Dany seemed to have less of that in her blood, there were plenty of signs of her being brutal and strong-willed and then lots of environmental triggers for anything latent: the death of two of her dragons, the loss of most of her confidants and allies (even the ones that have survived are all betraying her in one way or another). This provides a crystal clear, non-gendered explanation for her final act of fury.
And finally, to double down on the point I made earlier, she doesn't ever really go mad. As I wrote in the earlier post, the King's Landing massacre is ideologically consonant with her worldview prior to the act. Over at the LA Review of Books, Aaron Bady has an excellently-reasoned argument for why Dany was acting rationally given her ultimate goals and her options, and that her attacks are actually a sign that she's more capable of adapting to her environment than almost any of the remaining major characters. The short version of it is that in light of her total isolation and her tools for claiming power she has to go over-the-top to secure the throne. It has a great kicker:
The problem, ultimately, is not that Daenerys is a mad queen; there is no such thing. It’s a redundant phrase. Power corrupts and absolute power—dragon power, destiny power, fantasy power—most of all. To be a king or queen is to win the game, and to win the game, everyone else has to lose, and die. That’s the game. And if the fantasy of “High Fantasy” is always that absolute rulers might rule well and kindly and with good intentions for their people, then Game of Thrones has abruptly woken up and remembered what a queen is.
Given all the confounding variables that explain her behavior, the rationality and consistency of her action, and the abundance of powerful, sensible women in a cultural work that comes from a genre that treats often treats women pretty hideously, I find the sexism argument fairly weak.
I do also worry that this mode of scrutiny, which I see being brought to bear on all television and film, might effectively start to view the trajectory of every female/minority character as a litmus test on whether the writers want to empower the community they hail from. I think it's one thing to be hyper-vigilant about dehumanizing stereotypes and tropes (a good thing), and it's another to demand, either implicitly or explicitly, that every female/minority character be exemplary and that most everything become a liberatory text (not a good thing).
In my opinion, the ultimate representation goal is to have women and minorities (a) in shows and movies at a rate that at the very least mirrors actual American life and (b) span the spectrum of characters of storylines that are given to non-minority characters. The counter-argument would probably be that right now in this moment of "transition" in how we think about representation in cultural life that there should be a kind of activism to women/minority characters, but it is my belief that didactic activism generally makes for poor art.
Consider Game of Thrones itself. I ventured into the world of "stan Twitter" — people who are obsessive fans of specific characters/storylines/shows — to understand some of the conversation among Game of Thrones viewers, and it was pretty weird and depressing. A lot of characters who were fans of Dany were filled with rage and identified with her personally, and felt personally affronted by the way she turned out. Many of them expressed feelings of "betrayal" that the writers would "ruin" someone so dear to their heart.
These fans are an extreme example, but I think they represent an extension of some of the logic we see among the cultural representation activists, which is that they view the fate of individual characters as tied up in their own liberation.
The very premise of Game of Thrones is that everyone exists in a moral gray area, that humans are fallible, that even the good do vile things, that moral purity is a luxury only afforded to those who don't have to politick or fight for things, that the world is indifferent to your values, that seeking power is ugly business. Even if you think the writing has become very bad, which I do, this premise remains and it's at the very heart of why this show has become a global phenomenon and more politically sophisticated than most television shows ever made about politics. If Dany were to remain "good" and vanquish Cersei without making hard decisions, it would've betrayed the foundational ethos of the entire enterprise. The fact that fans feel pain is a testament to the show's artistic power, not a defect.
I suspect some of the pain people feel is anger that's displaced from the marginalization they feel in their own lives. I respect that. Perhaps it's a good thing to have art that doesn't lie to us about how hard it's going to be to end it.
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