(no subject)
Game of Thrones 8.5
Prophecies and other destiny apparatus are pretty much outcroppings of the Borgesian narrative magic inherent in protagonism. Being selected by the gods for some magnificent purpose fits being selected by the writer to be a pleasing vessel of our hopes, or, failing that, entertaining in some other way.
But yes, to the reality-based prophecies and destiny are stupid and appalling ideas. We know this because we live among people who actually credit them, so see the damage they can do. They extend protagonistic magic outside stories and into persons, where they don’t belong.
So it can feel a little cheap when an author messes with us by attacking a character in a story for thinking they’re a magical protagonist if the story itself has been treating them as one. This is especially true in genre, the main selling point of which is guilt-exiled indulgence of magical story-thinking we on some level know we should find dubious. Literal magic (or technological analogies) in genre are weirdly superfluous, if readily accepted, precisely for the reason that the narrative elements are already wildly implausible wish-fulfillments. The hero is clever, is brave, is good, is the center of the world; all the elements of the world serve the hero, fly him to his glorious finishing place, then neatly erase themselves. If the hero does wrong it is not a real wrong, if he makes a mistake it will prove both unavoidable and secretly right. Why? Because otherwise the story is less exciting! And not *just* because he assuages our vicarious narcissism, but because as a story element himself he’d better be the most rewarding carrier of our attention.
But giving readers exactly what they want wrecks the surprise, thus the Emersonian point, of writing. Contempt for genre fiction and genre heroes was a legitimate reaction, prior to their starting to subvert *themselves* (genre-founding works’ getting a sort of “Marx was not a Marxist” exemption, because we sense the resistance of the jungle pressing in on the trails they blaze, whereas their imitators’ might as well be interstates). Why contempt? Because we still feel the appeal! The proper, natural reaction to things that suck is to ignore them. “Mere” genre pieces tempt us with their easy pleasures, their unartfully maximized story payoffs, thus make us immediately slap ourselves in the face to remember that this is the kind of unsustainable evening high that will leave us feeling low all day tomorrow. False promises of love awaken hate.
Fantasy is the worst offender, the genre-est genre, where the world and all of reality’s rules are reshaped entirely into a slow-onset power trip disguised as a morally corrected version of our high school experience. So while presumably as susceptible to its temptations as anyone Martin and the tv dudes want to murder it, at least once it’s married its audience - our lizard brains - and given them its hope babies.
But while Martin’s analogizing of divine right bullshit with protagonist-elevating narrative magic is probably deserved, fucking with the latter fucks not just with one errant genre but with a more basic narrative phenomenon: the writer-reader contract. Subversive fiction needs to present itself as such, so when not clearly subverting from the start tends to be deliberately “off,” most commonly by being too on the nose to be trusted at all or too smart/complex/detailed to be satisfied with another run down the highway. If it *doesn’t* it comes across as a sneak attack on its audience. That can be fun, especially for jaded tastes, when done in small doses or when it involves peripheral characters, but delivering a kind of *primary* excitement that supplants rather than supplements the sort the audience was already riding high on is too much like suddenly interpolating pages from a completely different book.
This betrayal is all the worse when the whole point of it is to spank the audience for letting itself be excited by the sort of story it thought it was auditing. The toddler’s toy isn’t just broken but mocked.
Which, as someone who was mostly hating Game of Thrones, was just fine for me: Daenerys is a stupid character with a stupid history and stupid magical powers. But the stupid thing all of this amounts to is a promise of an easy, perfect fit between life and world (not starting as such, because that’s not a promise, but just a mockery of our wishes - our sense of reality needs to erode away in the face of relentless threats that the promise won’t be fulfilled, until we need it to be so bad we don’t want to hear any more reasons it can’t, even from inside our own heads). But the people the story’s actually intended for are now being punished by it. They’re upset because someone's deliberately upset them.
And to the extent the fantasy hero’s an intensification or caricature of the basic narrative hero, the us-like focal point that gets our full attention entertained by a story, which is usually necessary for its’ getting to do whatever else it wants to, maybe on some level the tactic’s legitimately unfair.
...
Not showing Varys’ being burnt alive may have been merciful, but the showrunners haven’t tended to show much of that mercy during previous “good guy” deaths. What they were actually up to was their version of the last shot of Breaking Bad S3 or of Walking Dead S6: we see the flames coming as though at ourselves because this is what Daenerys would do to anyone putting democratic or utilitarian principles above her divine-ish claim to the throne. I can’t remember if she feels her reign has been prophesied, but prophecies exist largely to be misinterpreted, in this story.
Were the swelling, epic music and other celebratory trappings of most of the Game of Thrones season endings misleading, then? Sure, but deceitful presentation’s fine so long as, looking back, we can easily locate another reason for its existence, and we can: all this glory’s taking place in her own damn mind. Being randomly presented with dragon eggs? That’s princely power. Her fire-surviving ability derives from her birth, like her claim does. What she’s a representation of is the near-inevitably corrupting self-concept of those raised to think of themselves as deserving to rule all others because of their blood. Jon Snow’s free of this conceit only because he didn’t grow up with it. Targaryens aren’t 50/50 mad - kings are. Robert: self-indulgent but sane; Joffrey: nuts; Tommen: weak but sane; Cersei: nuts. Blood isn’t the issue. At best monarchs are spoiled, at worst wrecking balls. Half Westeros’ problem may have been the family-minded vengefulness symbolized by the Night King, but the other half is the daylight king, is having any monarch at all. The Iron Throne, Iron Islands, Iron Fleet testify to the technological basis of monarchy - it’s not inevitable but historical, deriving from specific circumstances, and when those change it ends. Snow may prove a Marcus Aurelius, but he prefigures an age of leadership by people who don’t think of themselves at entitled to it. Though Joffrey’s quite Nero-like, Nero was an emperor; when one thinks of a mad king one thinks of last ones: George 3, Ludwig.
Do we need this message now? Well, clearly. The very existence/persistence of the fantasy genre is presumably evidence of an abiding weakness for identification with princes, and may be part of what feeds it. Think of all the goddamn Disney princesses! They’ve gotten a lot more feminist and heroic since the Snow White and Cinderella days, but the warrant for their specialness is still basically that they’re royal. People have all sorts of fantasies, but “fantasy” keeps zeroing in on just one: being better than all others because the world has chosen you to be. Fantasy protagonists are protagonists who come to know they are that, who exult in it. But what’s fine in a book, something that’s *supposed* to be unitary, whim-indulging, and temporary - is a disaster in the world.
So not a terrible message. But Breaking Bad was wisely subtle - you were supposed to think about how Gale could have been you, but were saved by the fact that he wasn’t *quite*, since technically a criminal. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, targeted a supposed hero (whose magical protagonist armor was too shiny to let us notice had become a just-following-orders war criminal). It was the too-sudden cliffhanger that got people utterly furious, but maybe some of that was rage at the episode’s barely-hidden message that the lead characters were so far from actually deserve protagonist protections that we deserved to suffer (by seeing *them* suffer) for believing they did. Breaking Bad keeps the 1st person shot and the Lily of the Valley shot a full season apart, in other words, while the less savvy shows squish them into pretty much the same episodes (Rick with the hanging man, Danaerys over King’s Landing). Unsettle the cart, don’t upset it, or the narrative isn’t rerouted but merely stopped. Maybe they might as well, if you’re at the ending anyway, but last impressions tend to be lasting. The fact of betrayal will tend to obscure the message you were trying to send by betraying your audience.
Prophecies and other destiny apparatus are pretty much outcroppings of the Borgesian narrative magic inherent in protagonism. Being selected by the gods for some magnificent purpose fits being selected by the writer to be a pleasing vessel of our hopes, or, failing that, entertaining in some other way.
But yes, to the reality-based prophecies and destiny are stupid and appalling ideas. We know this because we live among people who actually credit them, so see the damage they can do. They extend protagonistic magic outside stories and into persons, where they don’t belong.
So it can feel a little cheap when an author messes with us by attacking a character in a story for thinking they’re a magical protagonist if the story itself has been treating them as one. This is especially true in genre, the main selling point of which is guilt-exiled indulgence of magical story-thinking we on some level know we should find dubious. Literal magic (or technological analogies) in genre are weirdly superfluous, if readily accepted, precisely for the reason that the narrative elements are already wildly implausible wish-fulfillments. The hero is clever, is brave, is good, is the center of the world; all the elements of the world serve the hero, fly him to his glorious finishing place, then neatly erase themselves. If the hero does wrong it is not a real wrong, if he makes a mistake it will prove both unavoidable and secretly right. Why? Because otherwise the story is less exciting! And not *just* because he assuages our vicarious narcissism, but because as a story element himself he’d better be the most rewarding carrier of our attention.
But giving readers exactly what they want wrecks the surprise, thus the Emersonian point, of writing. Contempt for genre fiction and genre heroes was a legitimate reaction, prior to their starting to subvert *themselves* (genre-founding works’ getting a sort of “Marx was not a Marxist” exemption, because we sense the resistance of the jungle pressing in on the trails they blaze, whereas their imitators’ might as well be interstates). Why contempt? Because we still feel the appeal! The proper, natural reaction to things that suck is to ignore them. “Mere” genre pieces tempt us with their easy pleasures, their unartfully maximized story payoffs, thus make us immediately slap ourselves in the face to remember that this is the kind of unsustainable evening high that will leave us feeling low all day tomorrow. False promises of love awaken hate.
Fantasy is the worst offender, the genre-est genre, where the world and all of reality’s rules are reshaped entirely into a slow-onset power trip disguised as a morally corrected version of our high school experience. So while presumably as susceptible to its temptations as anyone Martin and the tv dudes want to murder it, at least once it’s married its audience - our lizard brains - and given them its hope babies.
But while Martin’s analogizing of divine right bullshit with protagonist-elevating narrative magic is probably deserved, fucking with the latter fucks not just with one errant genre but with a more basic narrative phenomenon: the writer-reader contract. Subversive fiction needs to present itself as such, so when not clearly subverting from the start tends to be deliberately “off,” most commonly by being too on the nose to be trusted at all or too smart/complex/detailed to be satisfied with another run down the highway. If it *doesn’t* it comes across as a sneak attack on its audience. That can be fun, especially for jaded tastes, when done in small doses or when it involves peripheral characters, but delivering a kind of *primary* excitement that supplants rather than supplements the sort the audience was already riding high on is too much like suddenly interpolating pages from a completely different book.
This betrayal is all the worse when the whole point of it is to spank the audience for letting itself be excited by the sort of story it thought it was auditing. The toddler’s toy isn’t just broken but mocked.
Which, as someone who was mostly hating Game of Thrones, was just fine for me: Daenerys is a stupid character with a stupid history and stupid magical powers. But the stupid thing all of this amounts to is a promise of an easy, perfect fit between life and world (not starting as such, because that’s not a promise, but just a mockery of our wishes - our sense of reality needs to erode away in the face of relentless threats that the promise won’t be fulfilled, until we need it to be so bad we don’t want to hear any more reasons it can’t, even from inside our own heads). But the people the story’s actually intended for are now being punished by it. They’re upset because someone's deliberately upset them.
And to the extent the fantasy hero’s an intensification or caricature of the basic narrative hero, the us-like focal point that gets our full attention entertained by a story, which is usually necessary for its’ getting to do whatever else it wants to, maybe on some level the tactic’s legitimately unfair.
...
Not showing Varys’ being burnt alive may have been merciful, but the showrunners haven’t tended to show much of that mercy during previous “good guy” deaths. What they were actually up to was their version of the last shot of Breaking Bad S3 or of Walking Dead S6: we see the flames coming as though at ourselves because this is what Daenerys would do to anyone putting democratic or utilitarian principles above her divine-ish claim to the throne. I can’t remember if she feels her reign has been prophesied, but prophecies exist largely to be misinterpreted, in this story.
Were the swelling, epic music and other celebratory trappings of most of the Game of Thrones season endings misleading, then? Sure, but deceitful presentation’s fine so long as, looking back, we can easily locate another reason for its existence, and we can: all this glory’s taking place in her own damn mind. Being randomly presented with dragon eggs? That’s princely power. Her fire-surviving ability derives from her birth, like her claim does. What she’s a representation of is the near-inevitably corrupting self-concept of those raised to think of themselves as deserving to rule all others because of their blood. Jon Snow’s free of this conceit only because he didn’t grow up with it. Targaryens aren’t 50/50 mad - kings are. Robert: self-indulgent but sane; Joffrey: nuts; Tommen: weak but sane; Cersei: nuts. Blood isn’t the issue. At best monarchs are spoiled, at worst wrecking balls. Half Westeros’ problem may have been the family-minded vengefulness symbolized by the Night King, but the other half is the daylight king, is having any monarch at all. The Iron Throne, Iron Islands, Iron Fleet testify to the technological basis of monarchy - it’s not inevitable but historical, deriving from specific circumstances, and when those change it ends. Snow may prove a Marcus Aurelius, but he prefigures an age of leadership by people who don’t think of themselves at entitled to it. Though Joffrey’s quite Nero-like, Nero was an emperor; when one thinks of a mad king one thinks of last ones: George 3, Ludwig.
Do we need this message now? Well, clearly. The very existence/persistence of the fantasy genre is presumably evidence of an abiding weakness for identification with princes, and may be part of what feeds it. Think of all the goddamn Disney princesses! They’ve gotten a lot more feminist and heroic since the Snow White and Cinderella days, but the warrant for their specialness is still basically that they’re royal. People have all sorts of fantasies, but “fantasy” keeps zeroing in on just one: being better than all others because the world has chosen you to be. Fantasy protagonists are protagonists who come to know they are that, who exult in it. But what’s fine in a book, something that’s *supposed* to be unitary, whim-indulging, and temporary - is a disaster in the world.
So not a terrible message. But Breaking Bad was wisely subtle - you were supposed to think about how Gale could have been you, but were saved by the fact that he wasn’t *quite*, since technically a criminal. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, targeted a supposed hero (whose magical protagonist armor was too shiny to let us notice had become a just-following-orders war criminal). It was the too-sudden cliffhanger that got people utterly furious, but maybe some of that was rage at the episode’s barely-hidden message that the lead characters were so far from actually deserve protagonist protections that we deserved to suffer (by seeing *them* suffer) for believing they did. Breaking Bad keeps the 1st person shot and the Lily of the Valley shot a full season apart, in other words, while the less savvy shows squish them into pretty much the same episodes (Rick with the hanging man, Danaerys over King’s Landing). Unsettle the cart, don’t upset it, or the narrative isn’t rerouted but merely stopped. Maybe they might as well, if you’re at the ending anyway, but last impressions tend to be lasting. The fact of betrayal will tend to obscure the message you were trying to send by betraying your audience.