I don’t know when it took a hold of me. Probably when they really wanted it to take a hold of me. It’s just a matter of texture in a world dominated by TikTok shorts. What am I going to do with myself? Stupid question, easy answer. Let’s play with the phone. Tick tock? Entertain me. And our algorithms follow us and titillate us and generally are geared to annoy us and push us to action. Usually a discharge of some kind. Damn! That just makes me so angry. Or put you in a passive mood to spend money. That’s what the world is about. That’s what you get in public entertainment.
Suddenly I was thinking of Peter dinklage. I was thinking that the role of Tyrion Lannister was the greatest television role of all time and eventually, he would have to be recognized as a member of the Pantheon of television actors of all time. He became a universal thing for all of us. He spoke for us. He caused us no pain to look at him but yet, we could not help but understand the pathos and bravery to have to live in such a world. And really, let’s be extremely serious. Westeros is dystopia. It is fascism without laws. It is open festering wounds without any nod to science. It is only the pursuit of the blood of others and living for promises made for God only knows what. And we can’t get enough of it.
I’m saying that because apparently, they have seven sequels coming out one after another. Plenty of dragons and dwarves. Plenty of dialogue about gutting one another. Plenty of tough guy moments and moments of bravado amidst the war. A war that never ends because leadership has a hunger for blood that never ends. Only to have power but having no idea whatsoever what to do with it once they have it. Literally, to sit in a chair and have obsequious friends dance for you like fools while you ruminate on whether or not to put a hole in the chair to more easily shit while you’re there.
Game of thrones is British. Let’s get that straight. This business of the accents is all well and good when we think it’s bloody charming but this is the history of the British. All of the concepts and all of the manners of war, this was the British one way or the other. And we’re not even talking about the Empire British. We are talking about being subjugated by the Vikings and the Romans. We are talking about the absolute soulless royalty from London, as sick as any of the other European vampires, but blessed with water making it mildly difficult to attack. At least in the short term. If you wanted to lay siege to the miserable rainy rock in the middle of the sea, you had to plan to stay a while.
What we have now is the concept of game of thrones. We have the residual emotion. We are at the end of the baseball season right now and it’s so easy to be nostalgic for all of those great times condensed into a moment or two. Indeed, many highs and many lows. So many emotions. But I was there when they were playing this and honestly I was not interested in it so very much. I don’t really admire or looking at Hollywood actors being tough with each other. I’ve thrown enough punches around in real life that I am unimpressed by snappy dialogue. I’m also unimpressed by the constant threat to life in everything that happens there. It’s just a matter of dramatic moments and dialogue for the entertainment of the TV audience, but you can’t take a walk down the road without running into people who are going to kill you or you are going to kill before this relationship is over. Is it just a comment on why marriage is a failing institution? Is it impossible for people to get together without stopping each other in the heart when things get hard?
The popularity did not go for a while. They slogged for a year or two. It was an epic and they had their attention. It was a show that would play. But they didn’t become the Beatles for quite some time. I remember it was important for them to have naked women. That was one thing you got if you paid attention to Got. And it wasn’t just the naked women, although that worked for me. Well there was also the ridiculous violence and cruelty that they would practice on each other. Bend the knee or die. Pretty much explains Christianity. Allow me to be your complete and utter ruler or I will burn everything to the ground that you know. And let’s not even talk about greyjoy. Jesus Christ.
The real question is why we love this so much? Why is it that we think that this is good entertainment? Well, we seem to have been captured by another bit of royalty and the only way out of it is to fight for my life physically. They have these courts of law but they are worthless because no one can handle facts. When things get you difficult, we agree to fight physically and this is enough to resolve things. This by the way is the justification for war on a level of provincial royalties. People cannot kill but kings can. And of course anyone who works for the king can kill. That’s a big wow for some people. A lot of people probably. A lot of people who don’t have any money and don’t really know how to do anything else but be a soldier. Kings always employ lots of soldiers. It’s very important to them.
In terms of infrastructure of the castle region, things didn’t really go so well. The plague, the Black death, that pretty much is what happens when you get a wise people in poverty and don’t give a damn about them. If you don’t have adequate sewers, we all live in our own shit. This is not healthy and breathes lots of diseases. We don’t want to live in a place that breeds diseases. We need good sanitation. Of course, there are two ways to handle this problem. One, we can spend massive amounts of money creating remarkable works of engineering to allow liquid waste to flow away from the city center and kill another region some distance away. Or we can stop having these little power centers and allow reasonable distribution of humanity with enough space for everyone to breathe through clean air.
The hound. A direct talker. He’s not afraid of losing. I don’t know what to say about the fellow. But he was very popular. He was a compelling fellow. The guy who had been robbed as everything sweet in his life and the only thing that made anything worthwhile where are the endless opportunities to take life. He wasn’t just a big man who could handle his sword well. He just bloody liked killing things.
I think people would be shocked to find out who they actually were or would be in westeros. It’s an easy game to play. How do you make your money? Well, I’m a programmer. Of course that’s not going to translate to ancient times. I’m sure that was also part of the package why people like it. Nobody’s on their mobile phone. Cersei, the army of the Dead is at the wall. Don’t bother me now, I’m flipping on Instagram. Do you know many likes I got on my green dress and small crown. I have to think more like that. But basically we’re talking about someone trying to have an unphysical job like a clerk. Plenty of clerks and plenty of bureaucrats in the city. You would be exactly who you are right now with the only difference that there are no antibiotics and no laws protecting anyone from anything. Have fun until you get sick. I believe the life expectancy was somewhere between 40 and 50. I’ve also read 35 is being a pretty good number to get to considering how many children don’t make it.
And then there’s the thing that we bother me the most. You agree to bend the knee to somebody or you die. And this is for every single transaction along the way. If you wish to say that you have agency and power, there is probably going to be some blood shuttle on the way one way or the other. And understanding that this is the currency of life, it seems mass murderers have risen. If you have the capacity to hack many people down, you are the in Vogue carpenter of the week. We’re doing a rebuild, you hire the sword.
Or did you think it was really that everybody was just so darn good looking? Did you really think that you would exist with the scheming good looking people who have all the money? Do you really think that you would be friends with the folks who command armies and can make things happen on their word? Do you think you would be welcome in the conversations? Do you think any distraction to their day that you might offer them might in fact make them angry enough to swat you like a fly? And I know we get to look at them freely. And there’s dinklage. Not just his absolutely gorgeous face but even that tiny body. And don’t even ask about Daenerys. Did you really think you were hanging out with the good looking decision makers who had all the money?
Well, it’s entertainment. But it’s entertainment that apparently we have been trained to enjoy greatly. Got was not amazingly global from day one. Like many people, I never even looked at an episode until maybe the 4th or 5th year. I had students. Students thought it was wonderful. They thought it was the greatest entertainment in the world. The Russian students thought game of thrones was absolutely number one. So there you go.
Me? I have a lot of free time these days. I don’t go out much because I don’t have much to go out for. And I rely a lot on electronic media to keep things interesting. Residual feelings of usefulness as a writer to notice things. And sometimes there are nagging thoughts that need to be addressed. I did not like game of thrones. I find the highlights and the shorts to be interesting to look at sometimes. But to actually sit through or care about these stories is of less than no interest to me. I wouldn’t want to join the club that talks about all the details incessantly. I really wouldn’t want to get into the marketplace that funds all of these spin-offs and new stories of dystopia in the time of dragons. I wouldn’t want to get into something huge and confusing and so open to creating misery amongst others.
This is what they do by the way. This is what the great leadership does. They create misery. You did understand this, right? Not even dinklage is going to save your ass. The job is for the leadership to create enough misery let nobody even thinks to challenge their leadership and there’s nothing else going on.
I vote no. Not interested in these shows. I’m glad they made the first one. The first one was interesting and it brought the public together strangely if that could ever be good. Unfortunately, this is what brought them together and that makes it inherently bad. And it is amusing how much we loved the actors and when they made their celebrity appearances, it really was embarrassing for them to have such Beatle level popularity. But what was the one obvious thing to almost all of them, none of them quite understood why the popularity had to come from such evil and violence. There really was nothing nice or likeable about game of thrones except maybe dinklage. There was nothing nice or likable about life at that time and frankly, I don’t see very much nice or likable about the world we have thanks to British petroleum now.
