I read the first book maybe 15 years ago, and I’ve been in on the show since day one. Generally speaking I’ve agreed with Ginger Yellow. This is what the show is, this is what that world is, I’m not surprised at the grimness. But during season five I’ve had a growing sense of disappointment or dislike with the storytelling. It feels intermittently tasteless to me, in the very high-minded sense that John Gardner uses here:
To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one’s work may be dying, or have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. This is not to say, of course, that the writer who has no personal experience of pain and terror should try to write about pain and terror, or that one should never write lightly, humorously; it is only to say that every writer should be aware that he might be read by the desperate, by people who might be persuaded toward life or death. It does not mean, either, that writers should write moralistically, like preachers. And above all it does not mean that writers should lie. It means only that they should think, always, of what harm they might inadvertently do and not do it. If there is good to be said, the writer should remember to say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist is never so lost in his imaginary world that he forgets the real world, where teen-agers have a chemical propensity toward anguish, people between their thirties and forties have a tendency to get divorced, and people in their seventies have a tendency toward loneliness, poverty, self-pity, and sometimes anger. The true artist chooses never to be a bad physician.
If you had a lousy Sunday, I doubt you felt any better about it after episode nine – it wasn’t a life-affirming hour of television. ASOIAF (true of the books as it is the show) gets lost in its fictional world sometimes, and deploys really unpleasant material for a purpose as low as character development. Stannis is a ruthless, driven man; Ramsay Bolton is an ogre; Joffrey is a terrible prince. How this is proved to us is so frequently sordid and so frequently nothing more.
I admire a lot about ASOIAF, its narrative engineering in particular. This story is a big machine with a lot of moving parts, and being passed through its innards is an engrossing experience for the audience. The catastrophes are scheduled just so, the twists are somehow right on time. But for all that, it can never be my favorite like it was when I was just a kid reading the first book – I’m now dubious of its heart.
Compare Game of Thrones to another HBO show, Deadwood, to see what I mean. Deadwood had all kinds of mayhem and terrible behavior, just like GOT, but it never lost sight of its humanity. There was just a lot more mercy in that show, if that makes sense.
