May 21, 2019

Game of Thrones Comes to its Catastrophic and Pathetic End

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Movies, Nerd Culture, Reviews | Tags: |
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[Spoilers below obviously]

In 2016 a journalist reported that voting machines of a county in Florida had been hacked by the Russians, in support of electing to the highest office in the land an unqualified and useless white man who has never achieved anything. Other media outlets, right-wing agitators and partisans jumped on this and dismissed it, burying the story completely. In 2019 we discovered it was actually two counties, and the Florida governor has signed an NDA while the FBI investigate. In 2016 Barack Obama tried to organize a coordinated statement from political leaders on Russian interference in the election, but Mitch McConnell refused to support it and threatened to oppose it, in service of electing to the highest office in the land an unqualified and useless white man who has never achieved anything.

In 2018 the producers and writers of Game of Thrones had their Mary Sue, Tyrion Lannister, give a speech about the power of stories, and about how evil men cannot kill a story, in support of electing to the highest office in the land an unqualified and useless white man who has never achieved anything.

Do they think we’re fucking stupid? Or are they, in fact, fucking stupid?

Jon Snow Completes the show’s murderous and misogynist arc

Until this season, to the best of my recollection, Jon Snow had not murdered any women in cold blood, and hadn’t killed his own lover in a passionate embrace. I guess the show-runners wanted to make sure that he got to share in the fundamental misogynist spirit of the thing, so gave him the chance to murder his own lover in cold blood and made sure it was the crowning moment in the entire 8 seasons of this shitshow. Remember Jon Snow has been turned into this show’s liberal conscience over the past 8 seasons, so in doing this they made their modern, liberal audience complicit in this final act of spite.

They also had Tyrion complicit in it, because the misogyny of this show has always been a conscious conspiracy by the male characters (with people like Littlefinger and Varys explaining this with bored exasperation to the female characters who hadn’t figured it out). Tyrion egged Jon Snow on to do it, and what were his reasons? Listen to him lay them out: he reels off a long list of all the bad men Danaerys has killed and all the good people she has liberated, and suggests Jon and Tyrion and the bad men of Westeros might be next. Yes, Danaerys killed slavers and murderers and rich exploitative bastards and every man who harboured resentment towards her in his heart. Clearly she was going to have a field day in Westeros! So better that the show’s liberal conscience kill her off before she gets to work. #notallmen amirite?

The show betrays its own grimdark history

I have watched over 8 seasons as the people of this show go through a vicious and cruel exploration of the grimdark genre which, I have argued before, has nothing in common with the reality of mediaeval history and is really just the show-runners’ fantasy of how they would act if they had no legal restraints on the murderous power of their cocks. One element of this grimdark fantasy’s over-the-top bloodthirstiness is its heroes love of murdering prisoners, and the gleeful abandon with which they wander through the battlefield putting their vanquished foes to the sword. This has been standard practice of all the armies of Westeros since the beginning, including the good guys. Jon Snow certainly had no problem with it when he defeated the wildlings north of the wall, or after the battle of the bastards. He didn’t complain when Sansa had the captured leader of his enemies eaten alive by his own dogs.

But when Danaerys and her foreign horde do it, the men who have been running people through with impunity for 8 years develop a sudden case of the Geneva Conventions. Suddenly the show would have us believe that its gentlemen are really gentlemen, and if any one of these other leaders got astride a dragon in a time of war they wouldn’t burn a city to the ground. They’ve been more than happy to have their soldiers run rampage through vanquished cities for the last 8 years and suddenly they get the willies. It does seem like the show has softened this season, as they have attempted to make some of the characters more relatable to the liberal US audience watching it, but this is a problem. For 8 seasons we have understood that the spoils go to the victor. We accepted Danaerys’s Dothraki horde raping and looting their way through every town they conquered and we understood that powerful men get to choose who and what and how they fuck. There was nothing in all the abuse Sansa experienced that was incongruous in its time or place, and only its brutality was unusual. We appreciated that when the Hound killed those dudes talking about Arya as a chicken it wasn’t because their conversation was in any way wrong in the context of this world; it’s just that the Hound didn’t want them to do it to his friend. But if we carry this to its logical conclusion then whoever ascends the Iron Throne is going to murder their way there, and treat the city – and all the seven kingdoms – like their property. Given that the only people left standing are the liberal crowd pleasers, this is going to be a little on the nose for many of the fans. So the show had to take a liberal turn to not end up with one of the most repellent endings in cinematic history. But to me this is a massive disappointment. Don’t throw this gory shit at me for 7 seasons and genuinely revel in it then suddenly get squeamish at the last. Show the courage of your convictions and have the eventual ruler burn, stab, rape and murder their way to the top. Dispense the summary justice and vengeance we should expect! Even Cersei’s death was a cop out here: we all know that if this show were sticking true to its roots she and Jaime would have been captured and she would have been handed around to the people of King’s Landing to be used before her eventual bitter end.

I didn’t sit through the red wedding to see this piss-weak cop out of an ending. If you’re going to commit to this level of grimdark, see it through.

Does everyone in Westeros have their own weather?

I tried to focus on the stupid scene where Tyrione is allowed to choose the next king by a suddenly piss-weak Grey Worm, but I kept looking at the costumes and thinking what is wrong with these people? All the northerners were dressed like they were on a mission beyond the wall, while the southern dandies were in the mediaeval version of shorts and a t-shirt – on a sunny day in the south! What’s going on here? Does every noble in Westeros have the power to set up their own personal environmental zone? Shouldn’t the northerners be sweating like Brits? This whole scene was some of the worst story-telling I have seen in modern tv but still, couldn’t they at least have got the costumes right?

(Incidentally and relatedly – as time goes on in this show I have become more and more convinced that the Northerners are a bunch of insufferable prigs. Turning up to a meeting in the sunny south wearing your best arctic weather gear and sitting like you have a stick up your arse Sansa is the epitome of the kind of inflexible prudery that makes them Westeros’s eternal losers).

Pulling the teeth of all the most dangerous people

I think I’m not alone in wondering what the actual fuck was up Grey Worm’s arse in the second half of this episode. Or Drogon’s, for that matter. Or Arya’s. Or Sansa’s two episodes earlier. Over the past 3 episodes we have seen Sansa retreat to the basement at the first sign of trouble, we have seen Arya go from monster-slayer to pissy girl who forgot how to change her face, and finally in this episode we see Drogon just give up on the whole thing and piss off once his mother dies. WTF? Since when do dragons just chuck a bit of side-eye and run away after someone kills their mother? Worse still, Drogon shows enough intelligence to know that Danaerys’s quest for the throne was her undoing, but not enough to figure out that the dude holding her body killed her, even though the knife that smells like him is sticking out of her chest. Why didn’t Drogon burn Jon Snow, the tower, the city, and all the rest of humanity? Oh because he’s a dragon and they’re renowned pacifists? This is just pathetic.

Similarly with Grey Worm, who goes from being willing to kill all his allies in order to get vengeance on a couple of captives, to handing Tyrion over to what are effectively his enemies, making some weak mewling pleas for justice, then allowing his prisoner to speak, choose a king of all the 7 kingdoms, and then get himself pardoned. The Unsullied have gone from an unstoppable force with iron commitment to their queen, to a bunch of pussies who give up as soon as some white people ask them nicely. Similarly the Dothraki, who in the last scenes are depicted walking along the docks past Jon Snow – the man who murdered their queen – and ignoring him affably.

Basically every opponent of the entitled white men in this story – and in particular every rival to Jon Snow’s attentions as the Most Important Character – has been completely disempowered in this season, their motivations, powers and murderous ethics all melting in the southern sun so that Jon can come out as the reluctant hero. This is weak.

Tyrion fails up

Tyrion has been a failure for multiple seasons. Basically every piece of advice he has given Danaerys has been wrong. She could have captured King’s Landing first with three dragons, burnt Cersei alive, raised a huge army, waited for the army of the dead to come to the south, burnt them all to a crisp with her three dragons, presented herself to all of humanity as their savior, and then replaced all the kings of all seven kingdoms with her handpicked allies. But because of Tyrion’s advice she lost a dragon on a stupid mission to the north that just led to her fooling herself into thinking she had an ally she didn’t; she gave that treacherous ally time to build dragon-killing machines that took out her second dragon; and she lost her best friend in the process. Then Tyrion helped her enemy escape which ensured that she didn’t get to flamegrill Cersei, the woman in all of human history who most deserves a flame grilling, and almost allowed a claimant to the throne to escape alive and foment insurrection. And finally Tyrion managed to convince her lover to kill her (not a hard job since Jon Snow is such a piss-weak loser of a human, and in this show the boys will always prioritize their misogynist conspiracy over a worthy woman). Anyone looking at Tyrion’s history of bad advice would probably think that he’s not a good person to listen to.

So of course when he proposed Bran as king they all agreed. Bran, the most useless person in all the useless people in this show. Bran, who has no experience of leadership, no experience of battle, no significant education, no identifiable character traits, and no evidence of any ability to think or plan. Bran, whose sole contribution to the progress of the story – in fact the only way in which he has materially affected any human being in 8 seasons – was to break Hodor’s mind in a desperate defense that was revealed to have been completely futile within a couple of minutes of it happening. This man is the person who was recommended to the council of Entitled Fuckwits as the next leader. And what new system has Tyrion introduced them all to with his shitty speech? An elected monarchy? I’m sure that will last the test of time!

And after that, with all his evidence of dangerous and useless advice, Tyrion was appointed hand to this useless man. Has anyone ever failed their way to a loftier position than this pair of idiots? This show is like an object lesson in the value of being a rich white failson. Even Jon Snow, whose repeated failings led ultimately to the destruction of much of the northern population and the sacking of King’s Landing, manages to escape justice for murder and then once assigned to the Nights Watch is seen, at the end, just skipping out on those obligations to go and fuck wildlings beyond the wall without a care in the world.

This show should be renamed Rich White Kids Can’t Fail.

Winter’s waning as the final insult

At the end of the show, as we see Jon Snow skipping out on his punishment that Grey Worm meekly agreed to and heading north of the wall to find, fuck and fail another Ygrit (who had the clearest judgment of his character, though for some reason she still fucked him) we see the first budding shoots of spring. This really pissed me off. For 8 seasons we have watched this show on the fundamental understanding that winter in Westeros is unpredictable, long, and horrible. It has been made clear to us that winter doesn’t just come because the Night King brings it, but that it comes randomly for its own reasons, and the Night King has not had anything to do with its coming for so long that nobody believes in him anymore – Cersei had to see a wight with her own eyes to believe he was even real, remember. We were told repeatedly that this coming winter would be longer and harsher than those recorded in long memory, and led to believe that this is why the Night King has been raised up and why he is using it to his advantage. Yet here, barely a couple of months after the Night King dies and so only perhaps an actual earth season since winter reached Winterfell, we see it is already receding.

This is utter bullshit and it is the perfect, final example of how the writers of this show betrayed all its fundamental principles in order to tie it together into a nice, trite package that reassures us that the system must stay the same, nothing must ever change, and white men must win. It’s pathetic, weak writing and the end of this show was a catastrophe.

 

May 14, 2019

Danaerys Targarion’s Fiery Mirror

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Reviews, Uncategorized | Tags: |
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A lot of people are getting upset about the way that Danaerys Targarion has gone off the deep end and turned into a crazy firebug. Some people are saying it’s sexist because she’s only lost her shit because Jon Snow won’t sleep with her (because suddenly incest is uncool in this world?!) Some people are saying it’s terrible writing because we had no clue that this was coming, since she’s been put forward as the people’s savior since the very beginning. A lot of people had high hopes for this woman because she seems to have something resembling a moral code, breaker of chains, etc.

This is the woman who burnt her servant alive after her Dothraki warriors raped her and murdered all her family. It’s the woman who burnt the Tarly brothers alive because they weren’t sufficiently obsequious. It’s the woman who got all wet every time her first husband talked about burning Westeros cities and dragging their broken gods back to Essos in chains. None of this is unexpected. Amanda Marcotte makes some of the build-up to this supposed degeneration clear at Salon, but I have to ask why anyone is surprised when any character they thought had redeeming features turns bad? Because none of these characters have redeeming features. This happened three seasons ago when Stannis Baratheon did exactly what a man in his position should be expected to do and burnt his own daughter alive as a sacrifice to the Lord of Light. I wrote then about how weird it was that anyone ever respected this guy, let alone were surprised at his sudden barbaric turn. The same thing applies to Danaerys.

The only way to watch Game of Thrones is with a nihilistic eye to the slaughter and destruction. I enjoyed this episode because it is always fun to watch the dragons off the leash, and I’m in this to watch bad people get what they deserve. There is nothing else to redeem this misogynist shitshow. Yesterday’s episode was full of dumb writing: Turning Cersei into a wailing girl instead of having her die on the rooftop of the red keep trying to kill the dragon with the last Scorpion; having Arya suddenly walk away from 7 seasons of training because a pscyho guy saved her physically and morally, and suddenly lose all her ninja skills to boot; having Jaime try to save Cersei instead of killing her as prophesied; having Danaerys not burn Tyrion along with Varys; why in all the fiery fucks I don’t give is Jon Snow still allowed to do anything except polish Brienne of Tarth’s codpiece?! It’s terrible writing and the plan to strip away all the female characters’ strong points and render them useless at the feet of the men (just as they started back in season 1) is obvious. But you don’t watch it for that. You watch it so you can see everyone die. There is nothing else to redeem this show.

The only character you should ever have been supporting was the Night King.

 

April 30, 2019

Jon Snow Should be Executed for Incompetence and Cowardice

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Nerd Culture, Reviews | Tags: |
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… and if it weren’t for her dragons Danaerys should probably swing with him.

[Spoilers for Game of Thrones Season 8 Episode 3 below]

He is incompetent, rash, and when it matters he always makes the wrong decisions. This time around, at the Battle of Winterfell, he also managed to stay well out of battle, hanging around on a dragon and using it to no good end while beneath him thousands of his men died horribly.

This isn’t the first time, either. At the Battle of the Bastards he completely broke with his own plan when he saw his brother murdered, and then led his troops on a reckless charge that sealed their destruction, and stood their helplessly while they fell all around him. That time only Sansa saved him (though she should probably swing for not telling him about the Knights of the Vale). This time it was Arya.

Let us recall as well that when his little team were fleeing from the army of the dead beyond the wall, their dragon still alive, it was Jon who delayed their retreat with a stupid reckless charge that put them in range of the Night King’s spear. Everything Jon does is driven first and foremost by stupid reckless rage and posturing. He’s a useless planner and a terrible leader.

Not that there isn’t blame to go around. In Episode 2 of this season we see the whole team – including Daenarys and Sansa – planning the battle as the Night King approaches, and it’s their clear plan to keep at least one of their dragons out of the battle because they think that the Night King is going to come for Bran. This means that their one reliable weapon against the countless dead is out of the battle, and all on the strange idea that the Night King is going to break out of the battle to kill Bran, a man whose sole effect on the world over 7 whole seasons has been to break Hodor’s mind. Why would they think that is going to happen?

A better plan

A far better plan for this battle would have been to use the unmatched power of their dragons to draw the Night King into range of their missile weapons, then shoot him down with dragonglass. They know that the army of the dead has no missile weapons, so once they get near the army of the living the dragons could simply hover over them, within missile range of the army, burning everything that approaches. The Night King then faces a choice: lose his whole army with no ability to replace it, or come forward to kill the dragons. Given the Night King doesn’t know that they know about dragonglass, and doesn’t know they have a huge supply of the stuff, he’s unlikely to think that all the human soldiers are armed with weapons that can kill him and his dragon; and although he will be hard to hit, his dragon will be super easy to kill with dragonglass – not to mention that it will be two dragons against one, and all they need to do is knock him off it so that the army can take him out with dragonglass weapons. They could further bolster this plan by putting Bran in the crypt, instead of in the garden, so that the Night King has to fight his way through the castle to get to him.

The many stupid decisions in this stupid battle

But no instead they put Bran in the garden, where the Night King can fly straight in and he can be attacked from all sides; left him with a very small number of defenders; sent the Dolthraki in to fight the Night King without any support; put the siege engines in front of their army and then didn’t bother to use them; dug a trench behind their army so they had to retreat over it; and hid all their non-combatants in a cellar full of dead people when they knew they were fighting an enemy that can raise the dead.

It’s also worth noting that until Melisandre turned up – completely unexpected – to light the Dolthraki weapons they were standing in the front line with weapons everyone knew could not harm the undead, and obviously intended to be a sacrifice to slow down the enemy. If you want to slow down the enemy why not build your trench a little further out? And have the Dolthraki charge in from the flanks to disrupt the forward motion of the enemy, while the dragons burn the front ranks as they arrive, and just wait for the Night King to get desperate? And why why why would you sacrifice even a single soldier when you know your enemy animates your dead and uses them against you? The moment the Dolthraki rode off into the dark the forces of good knew that they had gifted the Night King another couple of thousand soldiers. Well done!

This was the worst-planned battle ever. Why did they put their cavalry in front of their infantry, and why was everyone arrayed in front of the enemy even though in the previous episode we learn Brienne will command one of the flanks? You know you’re fighting a tireless enemy who can charge at you so why would you not use the cavalry from the side to disrupt movement? And why did they stop using the siege engines pretty much as soon as the Dolthraki died, instead of laying down a ceaseless rain of fire? And why did Jon spend so much time fart-arsing around up in the clouds on his dragon? If you don’t know where the Night King is, why not idle away some time by incinerating your enemies one field at a time? You’re sitting on the most powerful weapon the world has ever known, rubbing one out in the night sky because you don’t have the guts to fly down and set a bunch of dead people alight? You don’t just know nothing, Jon Snow; you are nothing.

What is the point of Bran?

Since the beginning of this show I have found every episode with Bran to be boring and pointless (except the Hodor one). He does nothing, learns nothing, tells no one anything, and contributes nothing. As far as I can remember his sole effect on the world of the living was to break Hodor’s mind, and his worging power is completely useless. Who cares if he can see through crows if he can’t move or speak while he does it, can’t communicate over long distances with anyone else, and can’t do anything through them? I was briefly hoping at some point he might worg into a dragon, which would be great, especially if it was the Night King’s, but nobody has bothered at any point to make his “power” useful or interesting. The people of the forest basically got exterminated helping him, the weird pointless dude in the tree gave him some riddles, Hodor died, and for what? He is supposed to carry the memory of humanity, but that’s already all written down in books and unlike Bran, books are actually capable of communicating, and will still be around long after Bran is dead. What’s the point of him and why would anyone think the Night King would come for him?

If you’re the Night King why would you break off of a battle where your enemies have two dragons that your forces cannot defend themselves against to hunt down a single useless dude, when you know that once the dragons are dead you can kill him at your leisure? If you were planning such a battle why would you assume he is going to do that? When Bran announced this silly idea in the meeting everyone should have just looked at him and said, “Dude, seriously? Get over yourself.”

The problem of failsons in Game of Thrones

Bran’s arrogance in assuming that the Night King would come to him first – because if you want to exterminate all human life you can guarantee the job is done by starting off with a rich dude who has a special insight, amirite? – is of a piece with the show writers’ weird attachment to Jon Snow. Way back when they killed Jon Snow, an act that is entirely consistent with their ruthless willingness to brutally slaughter popular characters and nice people, but then they went against all the show’s moral history by bringing him back from the dead. In doing that they basically singled him out as a super important character in this show with some kind of plot destiny, but since then he has led his people near to ruin repeatedly, and done nothing worthwhile. So why are they keeping him alive?

They have revealed to us now that he is the true heir to the Iron Throne, which raises the obvious possibility that they’re keeping him alive to fulfill his destiny and sit on the throne. If so then we can see how the show is going to play out: Through his poor temperament and bad judgment he is going to repeatedly create crises that the competent women will have to save him from, and then at the end he will simply walk up to the throne and take it from a more qualified woman. If that is their intention in keeping him alive then the ending of this show is going to be breathtakingly cynical. I’m still hoping Arya will assassinate them all and take it for herself now that my personal favourite the Night King is out of contention, but I’m thinking the chances are low. Jenny’s song [sung admirably by Florence and the Machine] implies that he might abdicate the role in favour of Danaerys getting it, but I doubt that will happen, so my guess is the show-runners are going to lead us to the final conclusion in which this incompetent failson gets everything he doesn’t deserve.

Please god no.

A final point about the Arya-Mary Sue thing

Apparently online a horde of manchildren are angry that Arya killed the Night King and are making out that she’s just a Mary Sue for the creators. This is hilariously bad analysis, and a strong reminder of why fan boys are the worst. Arya has spent 7 seasons training to become an assassin who can swap her face and moves so silently that even the dead can’t hear her, she was introduced in the very first scene of the very first episode as an excellent archer, and her every move in the final scenes of this episode was foreshadowed over the past three seasons, but a bunch of angry men online are angry that Jon Snow – who let me remind you should swing for being an incompetent fool – should have got the pleasure of killing him. Why on earth and wtf? Furthermore, since when did these showrunners reveal they have any kind of Mary Sue characters? They kill off all the cool kids, and the only character they’ve shown any loyalty to is Jon Snow. Before this episode aired there was general speculation about which of the famous people would get it, and who would come back as a wight, so it’s a surprise Arya even got to the end of the episode. And her final act had a great deal of surprise and tension to it – I think the viewer had been well deceived into forgetting her, and even when she leapt she got caught and everyone in that moment surely thought she was going to be the famous person who got done. That was genuinely the best moment of the episode, and way more plausible than the stupid battle plan they came up with. But for a bunch of angry neckbeards it was a step too far because a girl did something important.

If ever you have cause to doubt male resentment towards women in power, women in the workplace, #metoo or anything else – if ever you find yourself doubting that there will be many men who say they would love to vote for a woman but just not this woman – then just remember how this show unwinds, with an entire battle built around the idea that a useless rich kid who can’t do anything and has contributed nothing should be the focus of everything; a rich man who is so incompetent that every time he takes leadership thousands die, who will probably win the prize because he was just born to win; and a legion of men who are pissed off that this failson didn’t get to be the hero because an actually competent woman cleaned up his mess.

So much of what’s wrong with modern America is encapsulated in this episode of Game of Thrones, and the reaction of a bunch of angry men to a woman cleaning up an incompetent failson’s mess. I hope this man dies horribly, and I hope Arya does it wearing Danaerys’s face.

 

June 9, 2015

Stannis Baratheon’s Fiery Mirror

Posted by faustusnotes under Fantasy, Horror, Nerd Culture, Reviews | Tags: |
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Full of terrors ...

Full of terrors …

This is a level 7 cleric spell that does 10d10 damage per round (no save) to a single target. It also instantly grants the caster a profound insight into the psychology of everyone who witnessed the death of the target. After receiving this insight, the caster must make a save vs. death to avoid losing all respect for those whose mind she now knows.

[Warning: this post contains spoilers for both the TV show Game of Thrones and its associated books. Don’t read on if you haven’t yet got to season 5 episode 9]

So last night Stannis Baratheon did what any sane viewer of this show should expect him to do, both on character grounds (he’s a murderous arsehole) and metaplot grounds (George RR Martin is a murderous arsehole). But reading around the traps this morning it appears that a lot of people are shocked that Stannis – the man who killed his little brother with an abomination born through adultery to a psychopathic witch, and cut off his advisor’s fingers, and burnt Mance Rayder alive for shits and giggles – is willing to sacrifice his own daughter to the lord of light’s [insatiable] blood lust just when his entire life’s goal is going pear-shaped. Others are shocked that a show that threw a kid from a window in episode 1 – and allowed the incestuous arsehole who did it to redeem himself later! – and burnt two farmboys to death because of reasons, should somehow murder a noble child that everyone loves.

The Guardian has an excellent episode-by-episode blog of the show, with generally excellent above-the-line posts and great below-the-line banter, including by some dude who writes only in the voice of Stannis Baratheon. The blog writer, Sarah Hughes, declares that burning a child to death may be a step too far for her, in the same episode that we are shown another character paying to fuck a child and making it pretty clear that the child is going to be severely damaged by the affair (“you’ll have another one for me tomorrow,” he warns the brothel madam). This is not the first child we’ve seen burnt to death, or thrown from a window; it’s not the first barely-adult teenage girl we’ve seen murdered (though usually they’re raped first) and her fate is hardly special against the general backdrop of violence and murder in this show. What about that horrible little tete-a-tete north of the wall, where a bunch of men in black find a community in which a single man rapes all his daughters, murders their male children and raises the girls as sex slaves; and what do the crows do? They rebel against their leader so they can take the guy’s place. But burning some girl you were starting to like is a step too far? Lots of people in comments are complaining that this is outrage for the sake of it, suggesting that it’s just done to lure public attention or something (because the most pirated TV show in history really needs more press!) Have these people been watching the same show as me or is there some kind of politically correct, heavily pixelated version that Guardian readers can download? Because I can’t comprehend how anyone would be surprised that a man as cold, driven and vicious as Stannis Baratheon would burn his own daughter at the stake, or that burning a child at the stake is somehow a step further in any direction for this show. In response I can only think of that great Raul Julia line from Streetfighter: “For you it was the most important day of your life, but for me it was just … Tuesday.” This is not a show where a single extra dead child is going to tilt the scales.  Especially when you consider that the week before everyone was singing the praises of a 20 minute long battle scene in which multitudes of children died and were reanimated, and one excellent character was attacked and murdered by undead children.

There’s an obvious class analysis to be had here: how is it that some rich, educated girl in a dress dies and we are all up in arms about it; but no one notices the way that Sansa was completely relieved and happy to learn that two boys burnt alive were not her brothers. They’re just two farmkids, irrelevant in the scheme of things, their deaths a hapless accident that brings her joy because it confirms her brothers (real people!) are still alive. And of course wildling children aren’t even human, right? By now we’ve all become so complicit in the vicious intrigues of the elite that we’re now thoroughly indoctrinated into their code of combat: only rich people matter, and though their lives are expendable they should only be expended for a purpose. To channel Drew’s dialectical ephemeralist for a moment, quoting the Falcon:

Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal.

In my opinion one of the great joys of this show is that it gets us complicit in the brutality and bloody-mindedness of the ruling elite that we should be despising, so that we even feel horror and indifference when they do. Sure, you burnt a few farmboys but I’m much more well-disposed towards you now I know they weren’t important; and sure, you raped and murdered a girl but rich boys will be boys, eh?

Which brings us to the obverse of this, which is the shock that many people on the ASOIAF reddit are apparently feeling that the show would lead Stannis to this bitter and barren path. I can’t read the reddit, because it contains spoilers (I tried and I think I just found out Jon Snow’s fate which is really annoying) but the word on the Guardian blog (and expressed by a few people directly there too) is that the reddit is up in arms about how the show “broke” Stannis’s character and goes against his character in the books. The latter argument is easily dismissed since apparently the show’s makers have revealed they got this little bbq party straight from George RR Martin; but the former is interesting. There are actually people out there who believe that it’s out of character for this murderous, devious, sinful man to kill his own daughter if it suits him – and worse still they don’t like him anymore. They’ve been led so deep into the psychology of the books that, I guess, they actually think his previous horror shows – the mass burnings, the satanic rituals, the fratricide, the prisoner-killing and the ruthlessness of his war tactics – are all signs of a good man. Presumably if he had just ordered all the guards on the picket tortured and hanged (which he did) and then held off burning his daughter everything would be a-okay … The truth, of course, is that there is nothing about Stannis’s conduct that is morally acceptable, and he is a deeply evil man. His daughter even said this, that picking sides was the reason for all the trouble in the first place and if everyone just stayed home none of this shit would hit the fan in the first place. I guess we’ll never find out where this logic would take her, since her dad decided to burn her alive in order to ensure the side he picked won.

It’s interesting that the readers of these books seem to be prone to picking up the psychology of the psychopathic ruling class to the extent that they can accept Stannis despite his many evil deeds; but they haven’t picked up the cosmology of the show that they can accept that the sacrifice of Shireen is obviously essential to the success of his mission (because of magic reasons). Because once you accept his religious fanaticism and the undoubted efficacy of his red witch’s powers, it’s obvious that when you’re in a bind you should burn whoever proves handy to her. It’s only morally beyond the pale for a man of Stannis’s sterling qualities if it’s useless, and it’s clearly not useless. But many people on the Guardian blog were protesting that it was senseless savagery, and many on the ASOIAF reddit appear to have the same view, and they can get behind a man who commits deeds too foul for words if they’re useful but they can’t accept a man who murders his own daughter because they think it’s useless. Is this ability to engage readers in the psychology of the books, but fail to bring them into the cosmology, a failure of George RR Martin’s? Or is it a failure of his readers’? Having not read the book I don’t know but I’m inclined to the latter because the people protesting this “senseless” savagery on the Guardian blog hadn’t all read the books, and so presumably had also managed to accommodate the ruthless logic of the TV show but not its magical cosmology. Is it a problem of the low-fantasy genre that we don’t believe the power of magic? Or is it just a problem when lots of people not steeped in the fantasy genre watch a fantasy show?

I think it takes special skill to get people to accept a deeply flawed and immoral world view so completely that it takes the burning alive of a schoolgirl to get us to snap back to our normal frame of reference. This is great work by the TV show’s creators, and really shows how far they’ve sucked their viewers into the horrible world they’ve created. Let’s hope next week they reward us for our complicity with a river of noble blood.

I’ll finish by quoting someone from the Guardian blog:

Guess i’m rooting for the Night’s King now then….