I understand that as a total nerd, I am the ideal audience for Game of Thrones: some maladjusted doofus who has to settle for a weekly hour-long vicarious escape to a fantasy world full of gratuitous nudity and munificent protagonists. And yet I’m not — the standard medieval fantasy world just feels too fake to take seriously, with the dragons and the magic and of course the family of ridiculous Elvish languages with their unpronounceable diphthongs. Or sci-fi, for those of us patiently waiting for the future to bring something better. Or Teen Nick, for those of us who wish our parents would just get the hell out of our hair. Or Twilight, for those of us who believe hooking up with hunky, polyamorous vampires and/or werewolves beats waiting by the phone for some boy to call and ask us to the prom. They’re effective because they’re shell genres, less interactive versions of Dungeons & Dragons, where the observer gets to build himself up a character that fits into the playground.
Before Game of Thrones, and before some introspection, I thought I had a fair amount of respect for the hyper-realistic epic, as if it’s a puzzle I could work really hard at and bask in the sense of accomplishment once it’s all finally put together. I would keep HBO’s massively hyperlinked Cliff Notes-style Game of Thrones manual next to the DVR — hell, I studied all the supplementary material to HBO’s previous Dickensian aspects — but the Westeros histories, genealogies, and geographies don’t add any emotional substance to Thrones. They just imbue detail into its simulacrum of reality, so every city is accounted for and every year and every person you’d bump into wandering this land, but it’s still emotionally bereft and open for the audience to populate.
What made the HBO golden years — that wonderful time when the not-TV station was running The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood — transcendent was that the Chase, Milch, and Simon trio were telling stories about characters, not archetypes. They had to; it was the age of the antihero, a character archetype you couldn’t simply watch and live vicariously through with a shit-eating grin on your face. The character is both the cause and the solution to a crisis, a tangle of complicated, sometimes contradictory influences whose very being is a moral gray zone. HBO asked its viewers to empathize with a character like Tony Soprano, to ask what it would mean to live Tony’s hedonistic but vacuous lifestyle, without actually liking the man — an experiment in grown-up programming about grown-up relationships in grown-up reality that failed miserably when David Chase inadvertently set off a rage of Guido-mania and had to spend the final two seasons of his show castigating his audience for being morally void, knuckle-dragging philistines.
But when it’s not misconstrued, that ambiguity is what’s captivating about both the characters and the story. It’s the reason why Al Swearingen stole every Deadwood scene from Seth Bullock. Al is gripping, like a puzzle and you don’t know how the solution will turn out; Seth is like cheating and getting the answer beforehand. Game of Thrones has that same feeling — next episode, Ned Stark will be noble and upstanding, Joffrey will be a little punk, Jon Snow will feel inadequate and motivated to change that. Cersei could be replaced by any of the scheming kin-fucking women from Rome and no one would ever be able to tell the difference.
It’s good for the genre, and good for people who get sucked into the fantasy world, but it’s alienating for me. I’ll bet that a lot of people just automatically assign some backstory to anyone they meet, assign emotions, assign some stimulus response. I am a very face value person, so if the king’s being a pig and louse then he’s being a pig and a louse for the sole sake of being a pig and a louse. There’s no internal conflict driving him to be a pig and a louse, nothing for me to connect with other than the obnoxious role that he’s playing. And so far, role-playing is all that Game of Thrones is.