found on gourmet hot takes, but seems pretty obviously true
Expanding a little:
GoT as deconstruction of the premodern world is laughable, because the characters and the society of the show are not actually premodern
whatever social critique there is which is relevant to contemporary society is fairly shallow and uninsightful
there is some genre-deconstruction, but it’s already outdated in terms of literature, and fans of the show but not the books were not particularly in need of it to begin with
So what happens when we actually read GoT? What does it have to say about society and power?
First, all who are not in the nobility or their attendants are basically NPCs. It is a thoroughly aristocratic view of power. Where the people appear, they are nasty, cowardly, violent and traitorous. Their deaths are, broadly speaking, utterly irrelevant.
It is a machiavellian world of brutal realpolitik. Almost all who hold to any kind of ideal die, often horribly. The only redemption so far countenanced by the show is for the right monarch to rule, i.e. Danaerys.
Danaerys has one of the strongest claims to the throne among the various pretenders. In spite of the Targaryen dynasty having ended in a mostly righteous revolt against the Mad King, hope for the realm lies in the restoration of the traditional royal line, which is also tied to a great and ancient empire.
Jon Snow, her presumptive mate, was in the last season revealed to share that lineage. As the other protagonist, he represents another ancient royal line, the Starks, returning to their rightful place as the rulers of Winterfell.
The central drama thus has from the beginning been the restoration of the king and queen by right from usurpers who took it through might (the Baratheons), money (the Lannisters) and treachery (the Boltons).
So the show turns out to all along have been, and unless there are some major thematic upheavals will continue to be, monarchist in its very heart. And let me tell you–the reason people love the show is not that they haven’t noticed.
Ross Douthat continues to be wrong about literally everything
Game of Thrones has the exact opposite message - it is very consistently anti-monarchist. The people don’t take part in the Game of Thrones because they don’t care who sits on the throne and they’re just trying to survive the brutality of the nobles’ wars and intrigues. Again and again the would-be kings are promised ‘the smallfolk are stitching banners for you in secret waiting for your return’ and it’s always bullshit. They don’t support anyone - they just endure them. What does the Game of Thrones do for the people? It makes them suffer, and that’s all. It’s not empowering or ennobling for them - read Septon Meribald’s speech about broken men, which is perhaps the heart of the story’s message. The horrors visited on the population aren’t irrelevant to the story at all - they are the punchline of the whole thing, these crowned idiots, each horribly flawed in their own way and none fit to rule, couldn’t stop playing their game and here’s how the people paid the price.
No one has any better claim to rule Westeros than anyone else, least of all Daenerys, her dynasty hasn’t been on the throne for decades and she’s apparently behind Jon Snow in line anyway. And that’s a key theme to this all - there is no rightful monarch. Who has power is all about, yes, brutal realpolitik, rather than law, justice, or righteousness. And Daenerys is not righteous at all - everything she’s done in Slaver’s Bay has left chaos and oceans of blood in her wake. She is another character like each of the Stark children - each is a naive caricature of a heroic fantasy archetype who is brutally confronted with the harsh reality of the world at every turn. Her arc is all about how you can’t just sweep in and try to present yourself as a messianic liberator, turn everything upside down, and have everything be swell after that (see: what happened when she saved Mirri Maz Duur), and she is becoming increasingly comfortable with ruling by terror. This is an anti-war story even more than it is an anti-monarchy story, and she is US foreign policy in the Middle East. She is well on track to becoming the worst villain of the story in the end, she is being set up as a paranoid tyrant who burns her enemies just like her father. If you think she’s really gonna be the hero who’s going to show up and save the day from the Others and take back the Iron Throne and marry Jon Snow and live happily ever after I don’t know what story you’ve been reading. That would be a ‘major thematic upheaval.’ If this were a standard predictable heroic fantasy story that’s where things would go from here, so that’s definitely not where things are going.
The reason people love the story is that it subverts heroic fantasy tropes in surprising ways without censoring itself and so it’s fresh and exciting and it feels gritty and real, not because people really subconsciously want a king to rule them. It feels like you’re being told the truth about the nature of war and political power - not a feeling you get from Douthat’s crowd anymore these days, I’m afraid.
I feel like the author has already called out this perspective in the character of Jorah Mormont - he idealizes Daenerys and desperately longs to submit himself to her and serve her, but she won’t have him, because she’s not who he thinks she is and this isn’t the kind of story Mormont thinks it is, and IMO she’s almost certainly going to betray and kill him before the end of it because she’s turning ever more paranoid and brutal even though IRL fanatics and sycophants to powerful politicians are taking it as her becoming ‘mature’ and ‘serious’ and thus are only going to be able to see her descent into madness in retrospect
This is…not fair to Douthat, and not a super-on-target reading of the ASoIaF books, in a couple of ways.
The big narrative arc set up in A Game of Thrones is straight-up old-timey heroic fantasy; there’s definitely a thick layer of, uh, “Knights Who Say Fuck” grim cynical realpolitik slathered on top of that arc, but it’s not the core or the foundation of the story. There is a zombie apocalypse on the horizon. Winter Is Coming. This is the single most important fact about the setting, plot-wise: all your stupid dynastic intrigue is a diversion, what matters is having a heroic executive who can coordinate Bold Strong Action against the Existential Threat.
Which is certainly old-timey-monarchist enough, just by itself. But the books go on to emphasize that the tools needed to defeat the Existential Threat are the tools of the Old Legitimate Royal House (dragons and Valyrian steel), that only those Born of Rightful Blood can wield these tools, and that the scions of the Old Legitimate Royal House (Dany, Jon, quite probably Tyrion) are the individuals displaying the proper benevolence and strength-of-character to pull this off.
That’s where we were as of, say, the end of AClash of Kings. It’s become pretty clear since then that Martin has fallen in love with his own reputation as a purveyor of Grim Cynical Reality, and also with his reputation as someone willing to shock his readers by having his lead characters meet horrible fates, so he’s drifted more and more in that direction – see, e.g., the whole Brienne and Pod wandering-through-the-horror plotline, and Tyrion’s Book 5 transformation into a unpleasantly selfish dickwad. And, concomitantly, he’s drifting further and further away from the heroic fantasy arc.
(This is my personal explanation for why the books are taking so damn long. I think he really doesn’t want to get around to doing the things his plot demands that he do, because they will reveal the extent to which is opus really is just Lame Old-Fashioned Extruded Fantasy Product at its heart.)
It wouldn’t surprise me hugely at this point if he were driven to subvert the whole thing by, say, having Dany turn into a Crazy Bad Guy and having some relative rando end up more-or-less saving the day and holding power, no matter how little sense it made from a literary perspective. But I don’t blame anyone for looking at the plot being set up in the first segments of the series and the show, the plot where “Jon is Rhaegar’s heir” is the central hidden plot hinge, and taking it seriously.
But of course Douthat isn’t really interested in the actual literary properties of this story. He’s interested in the psychology of the readers/viewers.
And if you’re trying to sell me on the idea that people are into Game of Thrones because they so dearly love watching cynical eviscerations of the monarchy – that is, because it’s so much fun to watch someone “subvert fantasy tropes” – well, all I can say is that my priors are blaring all sorts of alarms here, and you’re going to need to present a whole hell of a lot more evidence in order to convince me. That does not sound like any large group of people I’ve ever heard of. That sounds like the kind of thing that appeals to small communities of intellectuals and artists, sometimes, and pretty much no one else.
Yes, yes, “they secretly yearn for a king” is a little strong and a little out-on-a-limb (although frankly I wouldn’t be so super surprised). But let’s go with “they like pretty old-fashioned outfits and cool-looking castles and badass swordfights.” And “they like the idea of being important and noteworthy just because of your birth, with the details of your personality being socially and politically salient facts.” And even just “they like [fake] history-as-soap-opera, where people and relationships dominate, because it’s a lot more resonant than history-as-the-grinding-of-vast-impersonal-egregores.”
