Episode 216: Game of Thrones’ Fantasy Politics

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 216 is something like what can fiction tell us about statesmanship? Or perhaps what role do mass consumed fantasy TV shows have in society? And we're talking about the TV series Game of Thrones as aired from 2011 through 2019. For more information about this podcast, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, the least buff actor to play the role of the mountain, talking to you from beyond the Wall in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan with a stack of stolen books in Oldtown.

0:43 Dylan: And this is Sabrina Weiss, the sand snake from the land of heat and Spice.

0:48 Mark: All right, so this is not a normal philosophy topic, but we wanted to do something super timely. We've all been catching up on this. Seth does not know anything about the show, did not want to participate. Dylan is in Italy. So our ringer today. Sabrina, you were on episode 37 on John Locke. So long ago.

1:06 Dylan: Wow. When you guys were just getting started. I'm glad to see you guys are doing so well now.

1:10 Mark: And You've gotten your PhD right since we talked to you last?

1:14 Dylan: Yes, I did. That was in science and technology studies. And I came out to Arizona, worked on a research project for a while and decided I wanted to get back into teaching. Currently I'm teaching for gifted online students with ghf.

1:30 Mark: Excellent. Yeah, I looked at old previous guests that we had and tried to see who is likely to be into this. I remember when we had the Locke discussion with you, we got into our first like a bonafide geek discussion about tagging monsters and MMORPGs or something like that, so.

1:45 Dylan: Well, specifically it was in wow. And I was actually going to argue for the comparison of Game of Thrones as the wow of TV shows, if I'm allowed to do that.

1:55 Wes: Wait, wow.

1:56 Dylan: Yes. Oh, World of Warcraft.

1:58 Mark: Oh, this is way more than you know. When we've talked about a movie in the past being an ongoing cultural thing with such a rabid online presence and it already being degraded from the author's original intentions. George R.R.

2:13 Dylan: martin, degraded is such a strong word. Can we say transformed?

2:16 Wes: Can we say how we all got into this? Actually, yeah, go ahead. I think I read there's something like 28 million people worldwide watch it. I don't know if it's the biggest collective television event ever, but it's got to be one of them. And it's hard not to be involved because I hardly ever meet a person who's not following Game of Thrones. And you get on Twitter and it doesn't matter who you are following. It could be former director of the CIA or Jake Tapper. I think he's a journalist. I think it's NBC or cnn. Elizabeth Warren without them posting.

Yeah, of course, Elizabeth Warren wrote an article. So. But the way I got into, I think it was in the third season before I actually started watching it. And I didn't care that everyone was watching it up to that point because I didn't get it. My conception of the show was that it was just a straightforward fantasy show and the tradition of Lord of the Rings. Even though I loved fantasy as a kid, I haven't really been that happy with movie portrayals, you know, with the Lord of the Rings movies, which to me, take the books, take something that's more, not necessarily all about action and turn it into an action film.

And I just moved beyond being genuinely interested in fantasy. And then when I was forced to kind of, you know, because I went to visit family and everyone was watching it, I was kind of forced to watch the episode. I couldn't believe it. And I didn't understand what the hell was going on. It was something beyond the wall with Wildlings, which was not ever my favorite thing about the show anyway. So that in itself didn't turn me onto it. But I felt pressured just because everyone else was watching it. All right, give it a chance. Watch the first episode.

And then I realized, okay, this isn't actually fantasy. We can talk about that later. But it's actually more of a. You could call it a soap opera or a drama or whatever you want to call it, but it's a very political show. Like, it doesn't really revolve around magic and wizards. It revolves around the politics. And then there are characters. Like, I think Tyrion as a character was the thing that actually drew me. And so that's how it started for me.

4:22 Mark: What is your story, Sabrina? I certainly don't have, like, Wes, everybody that I know is into it. In fact, most of my family, I introduced my son, who turned 18 at the time, to it, so we sort of watched them all last year in a row. And he's been, I guess, everybody at college, like, it would have been a serious handicap for him to go to college, not having already been caught up in this. But as far, you know, my wife or, you know, the wives of most of my dude friends who are into Fantasy novels or whatever, you know, it's just too violent for a lot of people. And so I'm surprised that this is as ubiquitous as it is.

4:55 Dylan: Yeah, well, I'd be happy to, you know, engage in a discussion about what are some of the reasons or causes for why this has become so ubiquitous as a cultural phenomenon. As far as my introduction to it, I was not an early adopter through the books. I found the show and decided to give it a try. I've always been a fan of fantasy and science fiction since I was very little. I've always loved dragons, and I've always been excited about stories that didn't show dragons as just some big destructive beasts that were actually intelligent or had some sense of wonder or had some sort of sentience to them.

And so that always guided the types of stories that I would look at. But I have a pretty strong background in fantasy books and reading. I had to put that aside a little bit for grad school, but I've been working on getting back into that since. So I saw the show premiering and I watched an episode of it, and then I said, wow, this looks like really good stuff. Oh, there's this whole series about it. So I went, and then I mainlined the books as I was watching the early episodes of the show. And it was really interesting for me, as someone who started as a, quote, unsullied and became a book walker to watch the show and start with the actors, visuals of what these different characters look like.

And then I'm reading the books, trying to keep track of all those names. And my image of the different characters are largely based on the actors. And so I had a very interesting hybridized introduction to this series. As I progressed, I've discovered that some of my longtime friends have been holding out on me, that they have read these books long ago, and they were really excited about them. So it's been an interesting process. I'm in kind of a weird situation, the opposite of Wes, where locally, I don't have a whole lot of friends or I don't have those large groups of people who are all excited about the show.

A lot of my friends are spread out across the country and the world, and so we've tried to connect and have conversations at times. Sometimes one of my friends in Boston actually will talk before the show, and then we'll talk after the show, and she'll share memes with me and such. That's been really fun. It has been really interesting for me as somebody who doesn't fit the profile of who your stereotypical fantasy fan would be to have been interested in this type of genre for a long time. I also really enjoy politics and so I was a big fan of the West Wing when it was on and I worked in politics for a while.

So for me that political element is not really off putting. But it was very interesting. The violence and the spectacle and the objectification, all the naked women, that's been an interesting thing to observe and to observe the evolution of how those sorts of controversial issues have been handled over the course of the TV show. And there's lots and lots of discussion in all different spheres of the Internet that I've been seeing that have responded in very different sorts of ways to it. So for me, as a fan, I've really enjoyed the show. I have a lot of mixed feelings for the latest few seasons, mostly because I want to see what George R.R.

martin intends with the works. And we're not going to know that for a little while or ever. Well, yeah, well, we'll keep our fingers crossed on that. So I find myself retreating back as a scholar who is looking at media from a critical perspective, as somebody who has both a philosophical and a sociological background to try to understand how people talk about, value and evaluate this show and talk amongst themselves and develop identities based on where they stand on issues related to the show. And so that's been my haven to kind of appreciate that sort of aspect and the great impact it's had on society, as you mentioned, on a worldwide basis.

And I think that's kind of the future of media now is it is global and we get to see people from many different cultures and many different countries talking about the same piece of media and seeing it in many different

8:55 Mark: ways, which seemed to be something that was over with the breakdown of traditional media. And, you know, everybody watches the same three channels and all that kind of stuff. That everything is now boutique and specialized and seemed like it was going to be extremely boutique and specialized. I did read the books after I finished grad school. Yeah in 2000 when I was like, oh, I can read regular books, not just philosophy all the time. And Brian Casey, Dylan's brother, introduced me to this was one of the series that he got me into and like, oh, okay, there can be stuff that's cool from this genre because I had really felt like, you know, this is something.

I read the kind of book fantasy as a kid. It's actually my mother introduced me to them when I was young. She would read the Shannara stuff like that to me and Herself. So I associated that with a. I know. I guess the typical geek is male, but the fantasy geek, I think the majority is female historically, is at least what I had heard. I don't know where that comes from or why one would be more taboo than the other.

9:56 Dylan: Well, women did write the first science fiction.

9:59 Mark: Ah.

9:59 Dylan: Margaret Cavendish is one of the early people who was considered to have written science fiction. She was a contemporary of Hobbes and Descartes and would debate Descartes about the tripartite soul while he was arguing for a two part soul. They had some very interesting correspondences back and forth.

10:16 Mark: Neat. I actually did end up getting the first couple books for my mother and she read the first couple and then she stopped and she's like, life is too short. Why am I putting myself through this

10:27 Dylan: for virtue?

10:28 Wes: There's also Mary Shelley with Frankenstein.

10:31 Dylan: Exactly. Yep.

10:32 Wes: Paradise Lost by Milton is another entry there.

10:35 Mark: But yeah, I just didn't have HBO for a long time. So I watched several of the seasons in a row. I don't remember exactly when I checked in. I think I got them pirated one at a time for a while until the last couple seasons when I've actually, you know, stepped up now that they have the on demand thing rather than having to get HBO with a giant package.

10:53 Dylan: The marketing that HBO has done has been very interesting because in this age where piracy is very rampant and very common and a lot of companies will try to crack down on that. Hbo, especially for the first few years, was surprisingly lenient. And part of that was because of access issues that people in a lot of other countries could not subscribe to hbo. They could not get access. And so they really did not prosecute much of the piracy that happened. This becomes a question of intellectual property and are there things that are worth other things than the actual property you're making? And it probably helped the snowball into the massive hype that it is now that more and more people got access to it. Plus they offer the free trial subscriptions and such. That has been very interesting from kind of an economics and a property standpoint.

11:42 Mark: Sabrina, you've been saying you're sort of more interested in the sociological aspect of it. Wes, what are you coming in here kind of looking to explore?

11:49 Wes: I was sort of trying to think about why the show is so fascinating, why it's had such a wide reach, what it is, exactly what kind of genre it is. And because on a little reflection, I don't think it's fantasy, truly fantasy genre. There are dragons and there's Some magic. But, you know, those sorts of things don't play the central role that they do in regular fantasies. Leaving the zombies aside, there aren't really representatives of true evil like a Sauron, as in Lord of the Rings and orcs who are sort of. They're repugnant physically, but they're also representatives of spiritual deformity and true evil.

You get real representatives of true evil and true good. So in the Lord of the Rings, a character like Frodo or Bilbo who really are representatives of fundamental decency, really English decency when it comes down to it. But the characters in Game of Thrones, of course, are more generally. They're powerful and they are misbehaving in some way, killing people and doing horrible things. In any case, whatever you think about all that, they're at the very least complex. So you don't get this typical bifurcation between ultimate good and ultimate evil.

Even if you think there is evil, there's not a supernatural element to that. Now, seems like zombies would be a counter argument to all that, but I think zombies are actually more of a sci fi element that points to possible naturalistic explanations. So in some movies it's like a virus or something like that. And zombies, because they're essentially dead and there's no. You don't ever get to know them as subjects. Right. You can't hate them, you can't want revenge against them. They might as well be robots or animals or something like that. They can't do the work as representatives of evil that creatures in other true science fiction.

That's what I've been thinking about with regard to the show. What sort of genre is it? What's it about? Is it about anything? Is there a theme or a thesis to the show? Is it a soap opera, which some people have said. But overall, what is so fascinating to

13:51 Mark: everyone, I think they pitch it as a show about nothing. Right. It's just about nothing. A lot of people hanging around anyway.

13:58 Wes: Yeah, well, I think it is ultimately about nothing, but we'll talk about that.

14:02 Dylan: The question of genre is really good and I have similar mixed feelings. I've run into stories that ostensibly were in a fantasy setting, but the marker of what was a fantasy setting was that it had dragons or it had something else that was kind of supernatural. But it wasn't. It didn't feel like it was used in a proper fantasy way. Just as you were saying, Wes, when you mention the zombies, that makes me think about Max Brooks in World War Z. And I got to go to A talk by him, which was great because I hadn't actually followed the whole zombie hype with his books.

But what he said was that he was fascinated by zombies as a kid. And as he grew up and as he decided to write books about zombies, he decided to make zombies a metaphor for the unknown or the massive disaster that we are not yet ready to deal with. And he seems to be onto something because he's gotten invited to the Naval War College and a lot of other military establishments to talk about the hypothetical zombie threat and what that represents in terms of the kinds of disasters that would befall people. And so I completely agree that the way the zombies are handled and the way they're presented in the books is they can easily be a type of metaphor or allegory for any of those big existential threats that threaten all life and that people are not mustering to deal with, or that people are too busy squabbling and bickering over other things to actually pay attention or send resources.

That's been very interesting. And so I think when we're thinking about the genre of this, for some people who've never had exposure to fantasy, oh, there's dragons, oh, there's magic. Oh, there's these weird white guys walking around who can't be killed for them, that's pretty fantastical. But if you were to try to use, you know, a bit of gatekeeping or categorization, then it probably would be. It wouldn't quite be in fantasy. Some have said science fantasy is something else, kind of a subgenre that you could talk about. And I think about what is the world's setup and the physics of the world is that there are very long seasons that summers last for many, many years, and then winters last for many, many years.

And then with those seasons come other changes in the world, such as in the winter, there's more supernatural phenomena like magic, like these other gods showing up, the Lord of Light, zombies coming around, direwolves showing up. Those sorts of things are weird. Things start happening when the seasons change. And there's such a long amount of time between the seasons that society has different sorts of ideas on how to deal with those. And so I think a lot of the differences in the world of Westeros follow from a few basic differences, which are much more of a science fiction, speculative fiction, science fantasy sort of element than fantasy.

16:50 Mark: So the world building, I guess you could ask, is the world building thoroughgoing or not? Certainly, insofar as the characters interact with it is as thorough as it needs to be. Getting into the plumbing and whatever aspect you know, which is part of the fun of it, is figuring out what the sociology is, what the class system is, what the technology they're using. And insofar as the characters understand the magic, trying to make it like you're saying, like it's sort of an alternate metaphysics, you know, what is the metaphysics that allows Bran to see through time?

What is the metaphysics that allows warging things like that? But there's still only George R.R. martin knows how deeply he's figured out mechanics of it, beyond whether he posits midichlorians or whatever the equivalent that he has in mind that he's not going to spell out. But certainly what makes it seem awesome to the characters is the unknown part of it. And I remember some essay by Stephen King talking specifically about how much he prefers when the ultimate thing is mysterious. And we talked about this in our HP Lovecraft episode earlier this year, that when you're talking about the awesomeness of the threat of the white walkers or something like that, getting too into the details of, well, how do the Craster's babies grow up to be white walkers?

How do they live all the time? Do they eat up there? That there's something counterproductive narratively about spelling that out too much, even though you can be as detailed and transparent with some aspects of it, in some ways that just makes the part that you purposefully leave mysterious all the more effective. So it's kind of mixing genres in that way.

18:27 Dylan: The idea of leaving some sort of mystery and not over explaining things, that idea has tied in a lot to the discontent I've seen generally. And part of this comes, I think, from the vast audience that we have so many different people who are in this audience now for the show. But what I've seen, especially for this season, because this is the end, this is the culmination of eight seasons worth of television, and after an episode so many people are dissatisfied and much of it comes down to, oh, why didn't they do xyz Or I really was hoping for ABC and they didn't do it.

And for people who've read the books or even people who've been following the show and been online and discussed with people, I think that people have pretty much just theory crafted their way out of getting to have any sort of surprise anymore about many things. And I think it's unfortunate, but it is kind of an indicator of the type of world we live in now is that unless you're very rigorous and pretty much Avoid all social media. You might have been spoiler for Endgame, for example. And it's really difficult with the interconnected world we have where people want to speculate and talk and think.

But now that you can speculate and talk with the entire world, and it's kind of the infinite monkeys in the room on infinite typewriters, eventually somebody's going to hit on what the actual outcome is, and then by the time it happens, there's going to be some people who said, oh, well, I predicted that would happen. And then there's other people who were very set on their own idea of what they wanted to happen, that it doesn't. This kind of touches on the fanfic that came up a little bit earlier. And I think that we're kind of getting to a different way of having media now.

Where I listened to the Adorno episode and Adorno's concern was about the people watching media, that they would just be passive consumers. And as I was listening to that, I thought, oh, I wonder what Adorno would say, seeing how the reception to Game of Thrones has been. And I probably would have told him, be careful what you wish for, because now we have very, very active watchers who are saying lots of things to each other and back to the show and creating theories and creating media to go alongside this. And I don't know if it's better. I don't know if we really have much choice in the matter.

20:44 Wes: Adorno would have despised Game of Thrones. He didn't like Hitchcock. Hitchcock, for him, was low entertainment. So the entire medium is corrupt, I think, for Adorno, well, I guess it

20:54 Mark: depends on what the character of the interaction is with it. So there's a dynamic of fantasy that I guess I want to lay out first before we make this point. But you think what fantasy is in itself is wish fulfillment. Fantasy should be. Everybody is beautiful and everything works out and there's good versus evil. So it, like, you know, oversimplifies everything. So that you could definitely see Adorno saying, that's putting you to sleep. That's the man giving you some opiate to tide you over and distract you from your dreary economic lives. But the big innovation from Martin here, I just was listening to the interview with him, that he kind of got this right out of Lord of the Rings, his original, you know, when he was 13 or whatever, reading Lord of the Rings, that it seemed like Frodo dies at the end of book two, and you don't find out that he's not actually dead.

And Gandalf seemingly just dies. And the fact that Boromir actually does die, it became something that, at least in that sense, not everybody has plot armor all over them, as this term that's used now makes it more realistic. It sounds like it's something that's supposed to be running against or a more mature take on the fantasy genre. And you see this all over the superhero thing. You know, superheroes are the big fantasy, even though there are no elves necessarily. Although some of them do have freaking elves in them. The Marvel universe has just about everything in it, the DC as well, demons and elves and whatever.

As soon as adults start playing with these things and they're not just aimed purely at 12 year olds, they start asking like, well, what would the world really be like if there were superheroes in it? And maybe start getting this really gritty and like, what the effect does of killing all these bad guys would be. And so Martin is doing the same thing with this other kind of fantasy of, yeah, realistically, not everybody's going to survive the adventurer, and it's not even going to be just the peripheral characters like he's trying. And it's funny that this is so fallen away from how people talk about this most recent season, I think because of the drifting away from the source material.

But it could be that, you know, this is just something inevitable when you get toward the end of a story that what happens at the end of season one is only surprising because you sort of don't know the overall arc.

23:07 Wes: Right.

23:07 Mark: It's the fact that there's so many other characters that can keep pulling things over. So you can see in retrospect, oh, it totally made dramatic sense for that one character to die then.

23:16 Wes: Yeah. So I actually was thinking about wish fulfillment too, because it's relevant to the question of whether there can be any meaning when you interpret a text. To develop a subtext requires going against wish fulfillment. Freud's idea was that subtext involves shifting a meaning from one signifier to another to creating something symbolic. That doesn't happen unless there is some censoring or suppressive dynamic which will cause that shift. So in other words, there really to be meaning to a text, it can't just be purely wish fulfillment. And I think it is largely, actually wish fulfillment.

I don't think the criterion of whether something's wish fulfillment is whether you see some main characters or some beloved characters dying. Because ultimately, you know that the arc is not going to be tragic. Right. So it's not going to be like a Hamlet where Everyone, including the protagonist, just dies in the end. And it all sucks.

24:11 Mark: We didn't know that until a couple weeks ago.

24:14 Wes: But, yeah, well, it could do that. But it's because this is serialized that changes the whole thing. The analysis is something that serializes. The fact that it's serialized changes that whole analysis. But you do know that. We'll get to that. The main point I'm trying to make is that the superhero genre is actually like the quintessential standard for wish fulfillment. And what makes it wish fulfillment is that it invites the audience to simply identify with a fantasy of power as a reaction to vulnerability. Right. So it's why it's such a perfect nerd haven.

I'm getting beaten up in school. Well, in my fantasy, I'm the big strong guy. I'm the jock, right? Except I'm wearing tights. And regardless of what happens when the superheroes generally don't die, or if they do, they come back to life. But regardless of all that, the wish fulfillment never goes away. In a sense that you always have some point of identification with power in the movie or whatever. Or if it's something you're reading and that's critical, you don't lose that. And in other genres of literature, like tragedy or comedy, say a Shakespeare comedy, none of the effect depends on you getting a kick out of identifying with anyone powerful.

25:28 Mark: You don't identify with Prospero in the Tempest.

25:31 Wes: Well, it's all about him giving up power. That's the whole arc of the play.

25:34 Dylan: But anyway, I like the idea that wish fulfillment is being able to wear tights and still be respected because you're so awesome.

25:42 Wes: Yeah, that's great.

25:44 Dylan: Ballerinas already get that. But I think this wish fulfillment element is really key to this question about fantasy and such. Because there's this escapism element. There's this idea of being able to identify with characters and feel like you get to be like those characters. I think that's part of why the Lord of the Rings stories were so popular. Because the core idea was that you had all these amazing, powerful people, but the people who actually saved the world were these hobbits who are small and humble and nothing fancy, but because they were good people and they were honest and they persevered, they were able to bring everyone else together and get them to stop bickering.

And when you look at a lot of other books and stories, you see a similar sort of wish fulfillment. Superheroes too. But I think a core philosophical question to ask is, whose fantasy is this? And who is that audience that you are targeting? Who is that audience that you expect to read this and then see themselves in the characters? And this is my roundabout, nice way of bringing up the demographics of who is there. Are there characters in the Lord of the Rings who female readers could identify with? And that was one of the big complaints that was leveled against the movies, was that Arwen had a larger role, was that some of the other female characters had larger roles because the original books were very focused on boys, Peter Jackson and the people making the movies knew that they would not be able to get as many people in their audience, you know, of different genders, you know, women, girls watching this too, if there were not other types of characters, if they didn't see female characters on screen and present and respected instead of just being kind of these far off ideals of things.

And that was one of the transformations that I saw in the Game of Thrones TV show from the books with several characters. Shae, she's a very controversial character. She was way back in season one, she was a prostitute who Tyrion basically purchased to sleep with. And her character is very different between the books and the TV show. And in the TV show, she's much more actualized and she gets a little bit snarky. She kind of pushes back against Tyrion. And it was very interesting seeing the response by a lot of fans, male fans, about the character, because a lot of them did not like her.

And so when your fantasy or your wish fulfillment involves interacting with somebody else, whether that is being some rich person who gets to purchase a prostitute or being a lord who gets to have lots of small folk, lots of, of serfs working the land for you, so this way they can give you food and do deference to you. Those types of wish fulfillments get complicated, especially today. And that, I think, ties into the questions of good and evil, that it's harder for us to have clearly good and clearly evil powers and things now because the world is not like that.

And similarly, it's harder to have a simple wish fulfillment because there are so many different people watching the show who have very different ideas about what kinds of wishes they would want to have fulfilled.

28:50 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important because I think you've made an important connection because I had been talking about wish fulfillment as identification with the power of, say, a superhero, which is raw physical force and vigilantism, let's say, or bringing justice through the world through one's powers. And then you mentioned the Hobbit, where the power involved. We're asked to identify with the decency of the hobbits. And that's what wins out, by the way, against the forces, the malevolent evil forces, which are a different kind of power. So we're not identifying with simply brute strength in that we're identifying with a certain powerful psychological trait.

And then when you get to the point where people are thinking about identifying with groups based on race or gender or anything you like, that is still about power, right? That's still about the idea of the status of a group and making sure that the group that I belong to receives the proper recognition and status and power within their representation with the medium so that I can identify with that and feel powerful by way of that. That is something that serious literature, for instance, completely avoids. It avoids asking us to identify with power of any sort, including the empowerment of certain classes of people.

30:18 Mark: So there's still something going on in here. Again, it's kind of an interesting comparison between the books and the show and what in the show gets glossed over, gets cleaned up. It only works because you sort of ignore in the books. I think the idea is that as long as a character is described in enough detail that you can get inside their head, then you will identify with them just as a particular individual. Everybody's the hero of their own story. So, you know, it doesn't seem like this is one of the tricks. Jaime and Cersei are external for the first book, and then in the second and third book, I believe they become protagonists.

And it just turns it around almost instantly. You know, in the first Jaime chapter or whatever, you're like, oh, this is what that guy's motivation is, and he's not just a scumbag. And, well, or, you know, the fact that you can lay out somebody's a scumbag, but just because you're presenting it from their point of view, then you'll get an identification. Now in the show, you know, you can kind of do that, but it's not exactly from anybody's perspective. And so there wasn't the distinction, you know, like there was in the books where Rob was never a first person character.

He was always external. But like, oh, well, no, let's make him a dreamy lead, have more stories about his romance and, you know, things that are a little more centered around him in the show. And. And I think you do identify in the show, certainly at this point with power and the fact that these characters were powerless earlier. It makes it more of like a revenge fantasy. So we're supposed to root for and identify with Arya, even though she's really a psychopath and has gone through all these horrible things to make her like that. I don't know if people actually identify with Sansa at that point, but there's certainly a similar.

You know, I've been abused and now I'm trying to exert my power. And the other characters, to greater or lesser extent that you have a similar thing.

32:10 Wes: Well, Sansa's gained a certain kind of wisdom.

32:12 Mark: Yes, exactly. That she's a badass.

32:15 Wes: And Arya is a badass. A true badass. In Arya, we're not asked to like her because she's a nice person or because she's gone through some sort of transformation which she's come to terms with her human condition or something like that. The transformation that she undergoes is she becomes a badass. And that's why she's admired, purely on that basis of being a badass.

32:40 Mark: So basically, she is a superhero in this, whereas I, you know, the books have not gotten to a point with her where that's so clear. I think she's still in training or something. When it ends, as far as the books go, becoming no.

32:52 Unknown speaker: 1.

32:53 Mark: This whole, like, how you become a super assassin, you actually lose your identity in these parts that you play. Like, so it, you know, becomes an interesting thing about the self and self definition that is really papered over that you can't really properly convey in the show. And I think ultimately it rejects that. It's that. Did you become no one? No, I'm actually Arya Stark. Screw you. I'm going to run off and pursue my personal vendettas. And the assassin guy's like, okay, you've proven yourself. You beat our champion. Go ahead and do what you want. As opposed to, no, we own you now. Unless she gets hunted down and killed at the end by another faceless man.

33:31 Dylan: Are we allowed to cover spoilers for the latest episode?

33:34 Mark: Sure.

33:34 Wes: Yeah. By the way, before you say that, though, I've always been betting on Arya to be on the throne in the end. Or I haven't always, but in the last few months, I've been trying to tell everyone that. Not that I think that's really gonna happen, but I just think you gotta place your bet somewhere. And she's the dark horse that I'm betting on soon.

33:50 Mark: So this episode is gonna come out right after the finale, but we have not seen the last two episodes.

33:55 Dylan: Arya's development and her reception as a fan favorite has been really interesting. And especially at the beginning of the show, her character was contrasted very strongly with Sansa, who, at the beginning of the show was much more stereotypically feminine. Fit into a lot of the standards of what a young noble lady was supposed to. To do. She sacrificed a lot of personal integrity because she was trying to uphold the system, the patriarchal system of supporting Joffrey and the Lannisters and such. And it's been very interesting seeing their two story arcs and their character development.

Some scholars and some other people were concerned that people generally favored Arya because she was rejecting a lot of the feminine norms of the society. And there's a general trend towards everyone, men and women, oftentimes celebrating women who reject traditional feminine norms and ideas and then starting to look down on women who do uphold stereotypical feminine norms, and that it's kind of generally a bias towards acting. You know, quote, womanly. And so, yeah, Arya is this awesome rebel. She's a badass. She's rejecting all this stuff and she's going out and doing great things and being strong.

And as he pointed out, Mark, she's also a bit psychotic and she's a bit of a killer, and she's a very effective killer, but that also has alienated her from connecting with people. In this latest episode, she rejects Gendry's proposal. And Gendry seems like a nice guy. They seem to like each other. And I think that this idea that where I am no one. Her catchphrase is, that's not me.

35:26 Wes: She tells him, I'm not a lady and never have been.

35:29 Dylan: Exactly. Exactly. So she's not a lady. That's not me. This is not what I'm supposed to do. So, sorry, Wes, I'll take your bet that she' going to end up on the throne. She might jump off it to stab somebody, but no.

35:41 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. It really doesn't fit with her character.

35:45 Dylan: Yeah, but Arya's whole story is of somebody who's rejected society, but as a result, she doesn't really have a place in society anymore. Sansa, she's been through a lot, and I can't speak to this personally, but I do know that a lot of women have been talking about Sansa's journey and how her story's been portrayed, how the really terrible rapes and violations and other bad things that have happened to her have gone. And a lot of people have come around in the recent season seeing her now as the lady of Winterfell, as the person who actually works with the people, is the only person talking about, hey, we should have supplies and food for the Winter hey, we should probably have our armies rest a little bit. That she's actually managing things and she is stepping up into a role of an actual lady through her experience.

36:34 Mark: Is she leaning in? Is that what's going on?

36:37 Dylan: Yes, exactly. She leaned in. And what's interesting that the identifying with power, I don't know if that's always the case. I think that a lot of people can identify with vulnerability. I think that Brienne is a very empathetic character for a lot of people because a lot of people have felt out of place in the way she has and the ongoing saga of her and Tormund and Jaime and how these two guys are clearly into her and she doesn't know what to make of it. That's something that a lot of gals and a lot of especially nerdy geeky gals who were growing up dealt with, that they felt like nobody would like them, they weren't pretty, they weren't the way that people liked women and girls to be.

And then when a guy comes along who genuinely likes her for her, she doesn't know how to deal with that because that's an impossibility to her. And so in Brienne's vulnerability and in her fear, I think that a lot of people connected to her. And in the latest episode, the big thing that really got me was seeing Daenerys alone at the feast and the camera taking her perspective and looking around at all of these people who knew each other and celebrated each other and seeing people celebrating Jon. And she's lost one of her dragons, she's lost Jorah Mormont, one of the closest people people to her, and she is sitting all alone.

And that scene really hit me in her vulnerability, her lack of power and

38:01 Wes: raging manic obsession with power.

38:04 Dylan: Everyone accuses her of that, but I don't agree with that.

38:08 Wes: Well, let me just go to Brienne. So there is always this dynamic. So if you're going to have a wish fulfillment fantasy in which you're identifying with power, the power is a vindication of some sort of vulnerability. So I'm Batman, then I'm an orphan and terrible stuff happened to me. But now I'm strong. And Brienne has her being a warrior, She's a great warrior. She's also a badass. And that's the thing that we're asked ultimately to admire about the character. Part of the problem with all this, with identification with something more complex, is that we're not really following any one of the characters deeply as a protagonist.

And any of these internal psychological arcs they're not all that deep. You know, if we followed one person through a novel we can get, or even a film, then we can do a lot with that. But there are so many characters in this, each of them inviting our attention and so anyway. But the other part of that, compare this to a work of literature in which it's not essentially a vigilante fantasy where I'm vulnerable and become physically powerful in some way, but in a way it goes in the opposite direction. So arguably the other way to go about things is to get people to identify with their fundamental powerlessness and the fact that that actually never changes, that's the human condition and there's a working through to that position.

I'm not going to say that literature always does that, but I think that's the contrast that I'm trying to draw. So whether or not Brienne is vulnerable, we're never going to essentially see a transformation in her where she's coming to terms with something like that. Something like I've described.

39:48 Mark: Can I just bring up when I would play as a kid fantasy play with other kids, more often than not, I would not be like the badass superhero. I would be like wounded. Somebody has to take care of me.

40:01 Wes: And that's another.

40:01 Mark: Yeah, that was the fantasy, apparently is being cared for. I don't know if my mom was too cold or something like that that I was compensating for. But you know, when I'd write myself in a story or something like, I don't get actually killed, but I get sidelined and cared for in some way.

40:19 Dylan: Did you ham it up a lot and scream in pain and flail and beg for help?

40:24 Mark: I don't. I don't think so. I don't remember that part. But yeah, there could be something in terms of, of course, any kind of complex character like. Well, that's just what literature is like identifying with a complex, well drawn character. So. But the question was like, is this fantasy? How much is this playing with fantasy tropes? And it sounded like. It's been my hypothesis here that, you know, the show plays more straightforwardly with fantasy tropes and inviting you to identify with parts of characters like even Tyrion. Right. The character that you're sort of.

Wes was saying, you know, you get sucked in a lot of the geeky guys. At least this is the character. So brainy, this is who you identify with. Then he's committed this horrible act. I haven't read the books in a long time and I refuse to go back to them in Any detail until they're all fricking written. I'm just not. I'm not gonna.

41:13 Dylan: Of.

41:14 Mark: We'll see when the next one comes out. If I go reread them all up to that point, because I want to torture myself. But all the characters, Daenerys, Tyrion, for sure, Arya, like, do worse stuff in the book such that it's harder to then straightforwardly, like, I think just like Batman, you're being invited. When you're having the fantasy of the power to ignore sort of only a partial identification, you're identifying with the power part, and maybe there's overcoming adversity as part of that, but you're not actually, you know, invited. Like this whole Theon thing, the passion of the Theon, which is just a crazy thing that they actually included that to the extent that they did in the show.

Because, like, it's just one of those things in the books that you're like, you might have been with it to this point, but now you just gotta stop. Because, like, this is not fun. Nobody's gonna want to identify with this in any way. It's more being presented. I think Martin's thing is like, well, we're just being mimetic. We're just presenting things in sort of a realistic way, and real damage happens to people and life sort of sucks. And we're inviting you to immerse yourself in that. Having an experience, having a fantasy of living some other life, but not a particular fantasy of being in power, not a particular fantasy of being the hero.

This kind of stuff.

42:30 Dylan: Yeah. The issue of Theon and his treatment, I find it kind of interesting, and I'm not pointing at you in particular, but it's interesting how people will happily read through all of the other types of scenes where women are denigrated or abused or used or made fun of or raped, assaulted, things like that. And they'll just kind of keep on watching. And then something bad happens to a male character that is horrific. That is terrible. And then it's like, well, okay, now I've had enough. I gotta check out. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I think that that's a great opportunity to have some reflective empathy and to go, wow, this happened to someone who I could identify with.

Or, now this is really getting serious and this is feeling really uncomfortable. Maybe that's an opportunity to think back and go, wow, I wonder what other things have happened in this show or in these books that might have been horrific to other people. And I try to hold out Hope that there are opportunities for that. A recent article I read said something about how people who read books are better at empathizing. And so, you know, I hope that maybe something like this can, after you've gotten over some of the horrificness of it, get somebody to kind of reflect on this and say, wow, horrible things are happening to lots of people in here.

And I'm going to kind of pause to think about it. But at the same time, it's really easy to get caught up in the emotion of all of this, because I think Wes might have mentioned revenge family fantasy. And this has been rampant throughout, in watching the fans getting sucked into the mentality of people in Westeros. Cersei with the walk of shame, oh, I hate this person. They should be flayed alive. I wish that they would get, you know, burned at the stake or whatever.

44:11 Wes: Well, I saw someone on Twitter. Yeah, Twitter yesterday. Said because of Cersei's DID on the show last night, said, you know, something like, burn everyone in King's Landing alive. You know, like all the innocence that Tyrion was worried about. Fuck them. Burn them all.

44:28 Dylan: Yeah, it's kind of scary seeing people getting sucked into this. And especially when George R.R. martin had said he wants to subvert some of these tropes, which include legitimacy and legitimate heirs, which is kind of a different topic. But seeing people again falling into the trap of asking who is the legitimate heir, or falling into this trap of revenge fantasies, I find that fascinating, maybe a little bit disturbing. I think it also speaks to how powerful this work is that it is able to draw people in like that.

44:56 Mark: So the fourth book, people did not like as much, partially because it just decided we're only gonna cover half the plot lines. He wrote it with all the plot lines and was like, this is getting too long. I'm just gonna shed half the plotline. So it's like Brienne and Pod traveling around the south and Jaime traveling around the south. A lot of the point of it is just that we've been talking up to this point about the Clash of Kings and what's going on with the intrigue. And now just here is the ravages that have been wreaked on the countryside.

And so we get a little of that in the show with, like, the Hound and Arya going to the farmer's house and stealing his gold because he's going to die anyway. And there are a couple other little things like that where you kind of get the idea that Beric Dondarrion's group has gotten big enough that there are some people within it that are just going around and killing all the hounds, friends, this religious group. But, like, that's kind of like. Like nearly a whole book in the series is to just try to get you to dwell on how crappy war is for the small people, you know, which is something that Varys says on the show, and you sort of get to see it, but, like, they don't dwell on it.

And I think that's why the Theon torture is so disturbing. It's because it's dwelled on in real

46:05 Wes: time and it's a main character. Yeah.

46:08 Mark: As horrible as the Sansa abuse. Like, if that had been played in real time over multiple episodes, people would have been fleeing from that show. So much of it is just, like, purely, how much screen time do you make people squirm for? And that's just, you know, anything that involves torture, like, oh, just running a sword through somebody's head, that's fine. A whole family burning alive, you know.

46:31 Wes: But if you dwell on it, it arguably becomes sadistic.

46:35 Mark: Yeah, exactly.

46:36 Dylan: The spectacle. That's an interesting subversion that so much screen time was spent on Theon's torture and his objectification and all of that. And some could argue that's a bit of a subversion of the standard tropes where the camera instead likes to watch the woman getting raped and watching bad things happening to them and such. But it's horrific regardless, and it's generated a lot of controversy by a lot of people, and there's definitely a lot of shock factor involved in that.

47:03 Mark: Yeah, I know. Looking at the, like, after the show, talking to the creators thing where they're like, yeah, with the Theon thing, you should get to the point where you're like, why the hell am I watching this? Like, that is the intention that you should actually get to that point was to make you physically uncomfortable, maybe not wanting to watch the show anymore, which is an interesting thing.

47:24 Dylan: It didn't work. Apparently. They're still watching it.

47:27 Mark: You couldn't do that during the premiere, say.

47:31 Wes: But they are setting you up for a very delicious point of revenge when. What's his face? Is it Ramsay?

47:37 Mark: Ramsay, Yep.

47:38 Wes: When he gets what's coming to him, it can make it as horrible as you want, because that's been set up morally. Right. So if we're going to enjoy seeing people get killed, there has to be something that generates the feeling that we're entitled to that, oh, they're a bad guy. But for us to be entitled to enjoy seeing someone get Eaten alive by dogs. I guess we don't really see that much of it. Right. But that whole idea, you've got to justify that, it doesn't really require all that, but it makes it all the more satisfying when he gets killed.

48:10 Dylan: I have to wonder how much of that was all to set up the punchline of Sansa's and the Hounds conversation that we got to have in the last episode.

48:19 Wes: What was it? Remind us.

48:21 Dylan: The Hound was basically doing his version of apologizing to her for all the bad things. And then Sansa said that, well, you know, Ramsay got what was coming to him, I killed him. And he goes, oh, how'd you do it? It was a moment of really dark humor, but it was also an interesting point of shared understanding. And so it was a point of irony, but at the same time, yeah, it was pretty horrific. But a lot of things in this world have been really horrific and it kind of becomes hard to try to tabulate them and try to measure and compare them.

48:52 Mark: I want to throw this open in terms of the function of the show is the fact that there's more interaction here, that people are not being passive. Is that a positive thing? I think Adorno would still say no, because you're being distracted. You know, it's a more complicated thing that's distracting you, but it's still a distraction. It is still not ultimately, when you're worrying about, like, was this payoff deserved. When you're sort of being a vicarious filmmaker, which is what all these people are doing, and like second guessing the decisions of the creators of the show and decisions of Martin, you're still doing something that is fundamentally.

Well, what do you think of this? I mean, that's a form of fantasy in itself, right? Being the author, being God manipulating. I'm not just the victim of whatever this story is gonna dish up to me. So it's this kind of like feeling of power by second guessing, by having critical reactions and stuff, but that, you know, somebody like Adorno would just really sneer at that. This is still not socially beneficial at all. Wes, you had sent us that article just to tease us. We'll link people to of. No, this is a bad show. This is bad for you.

49:57 Dylan: Oh, I had thoughts about that article.

50:00 Mark: It might not be fantasy in terms of a juvenile identifying purely with power, but it's still doing something that's still fundamentally juvenile. It's playing games. It's getting distracted by the internal logic of the scene. There are lots of ways to describe what's going on There when you're having discussions and second guessing the plot and deciding which was a good episode and which was not a good episode. But still none of these things I think think somebody like Adorno would see as morally redeeming.

50:28 Wes: No, he would definitely not. Yes, he would think it's fundamentally juvenile.

50:33 Dylan: I have to wonder if there's any way that he would be happy.

50:37 Mark: Of course, that was, you know, something we were worried about.

50:39 Wes: He offended the shit out of me reading that.

50:41 Dylan: Yeah.

50:42 Wes: Especially with Hitchcock. But I think he would have a point.

50:44 Mark: The more ordinary sort of moral objection to this is just there is torture, there is rape, there is all these horrible stuff and a lot of the press surrounding it is like, oh wow, the showrunners added in extra rape. That wasn't even in the books. They added in extra horrible stuff to sensationalize. And so the idea is that even if the show is saying tut tut, Ramsay is bad, you're still like being invited to be a voyeur on these horrible things. You know, just like a slasher movie or something like this. Or torture like Hostel, those kind of torture porn movies where it's a horror movie that is just so violent and so over the top and so dwelling on and that there's no morally positive thing that you could possibly take out of it. Even if the narrator is saying, oh yes, but that's bad. Like clearly the enjoyment is not uniformly condemning.

51:35 Wes: This article you mentioned, it's by Matthew Walther in The Week. Game of Thrones is bad and bad for you. Just to read you one of the lines. Popular culture in the English speaking world is in the grips of a downward nerd driven death spiral. Outside of the art house theaters of our major cities, it is almost impossible to find more than one semi decent film a month that is not an adaptation of some decades old picture book franchise about men in rubber costumes punching each other. I think that's great. Ultimately, what's the thesis or what's he arguing?

52:09 Mark: It's a bunch of degeneracy played for soap opera effects. That's, I think, the diagnosis.

52:15 Wes: Yeah, so something like that. He doesn't really get all that specific. It's sort of just. The only fun thing about that article is just his cleverness of his denunciations. If this were the only form of entertainment available to us in society, something would be deeply, deeply wrong. It doesn't perform the function of more substantive stuff. That said, it's Cheetos and entertainment wise, it's Cheetos. And so, yeah, I'm Gonna eat my Cheetos.

52:41 Mark: I'm guessing you don't agree with that. Sabrina, this is Cheetos.

52:44 Dylan: It can be Cheetos. The question is, what does a viewer take from it? Right? Because if you look at semiotics theory and such, there's always there's a thing that's being represented. There's the type of message and the ways that you represent it, and then there's the people who are actually interpreting it. And depending on how you interpret it, you could get lots of different types of value out of it. There are plenty of people who like the really spectacular, violent, lowbrow sorts of stuff. But there's also a lot of people like me where I saw the show and I said, wow, this looks really interesting, let me go find the source material.

And so then I went and I read the books and the books gave me the information I needed to be able to engage with people online who were talking about that higher level stuff about the political theory, about the physical theory of the world, about speculating on the characters and the psychology of them. And so this whole high, low culture dichotomy, we've been through this a lot of times and it's rubbish because you think about Shakespeare, Shakespeare's considered the epitome of high culture. And we know that if you actually read Shakespeare's work, it's full of all sorts of punning and jokes and references, bodily functions, insults, all of these things.

It doesn't sound as bad because it's in this, you know, the Queen's English. But it was really bad for the time. It was really provocative. And if we think about other parts of American culture specifically, but modern culture that are popular, think about sports, especially contact sports like American football. There have been lots of discussions now about the types of brain injuries and other sorts of harms that are coming to the players. Because we're having basically a modern day gladiator games that are going on that a lot of people get excited about and pay money for and cheer for.

And so I think that it's disingenuous to focus on this one particular show, to say that this is the lowest and we've reached the nadir of culture when if you look at media theory, we create media, but media also creates us. And so the type of show to succeed in this time may have had to have some of this. And look, we're talking about it. Other people have talked about how graphic and how violent this show was and that got people to check in. And unfortunately we all have our primate Brains that get really excited about this sort of thing. And it's up to us to engage in different ways and to interact with people on different levels and maybe even to exercise skills in trying to get past that initial emotional response and try to engage, maybe not non emotionally, but engage other types of emotions.

Lots of like empathy, you know, like sadness, like enjoying the small triumphs or enjoying seeing characters like Arya find their way in the world and come into themselves. I don't know. I feel like the author is coming at this from the bias that there's something wrong with nerds. One of the earlier sentences from that article, what is astonishing is that the shows last season attracted some 23 million viewers, most of them adults, seemingly well socialized, emotionally well adjusted taxpayers, contributors to our gdp. That implies that, oh well, this is a fantasy show.

This is a silly show for non well adjusted, nerdy people who are socially inept. And so the fact that they are, quote, surprised by this says something about the stereotypes that are still in place and that enjoying a show like this or enjoying these types of stories are bad. When if we think about this idea of obsessively reading 10 texts in close detail and knowing these things, academia does that all the time. Fantasy sports. I've talked to some friends who do fantasy sports. Oh my goodness, the statistics they memorize and the research that they do.

There's always activities where people are passionate and know lots of things and are super engaged. But it's just been in the past few decades, in the course of our lifetimes, that we've seen the shift of fantasy, of science fiction, of comic books, of superheroes coming into the mainstream when originally they were seen as being something that only a certain segment of not so great people did.

56:45 Wes: This is where I think you and I disagree. For me, it's not the criteria for high and low culture that doesn't depend on whether something's bawdy or violent or has prurient elements. It's really about a certain set of aesthetic criteria. And there's a reason Shakespeare is still famous and many of his contemporaries aren't. He's a truly great playwright and most people, even some of the very talented ones, just aren't. Take just the, you know, as a genre literary fiction writers are trying to do something much, much different than fantasy genre fiction.

Although I think there's something to be said for trying to combine those two. You know, try to do literary science fiction or literary fantasy. So we just discussed Brave New World. Very high literary quality in science fiction. And the difference is you know, literary fiction is, first of all, it's much more highly focused on the aesthetic, aesthetic criteria, just the beauty, you know, the beauty of the language and all that stuff. But also it's much more focused on the reflective and the thematic and, you know, having some sort of thesis. So when I say Game of Thrones is not about anything, you know, so for instance, Rosemary's Baby, which I think is an absolutely the original, fabulous movie, ultimately it really is saying something fascinating about the anxieties of married life and pregnancy.

Nominally, it's about having Satan as your baby. And it seems like not a very serious material, but yeah, it's about something. Or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Also science fiction film. But I wrote something recently. It actually is about the idea. Even if you're concerned that technology is ruining everything, film as a medium can be redemptive. Art and technology can actually play well together in some sort of redemptive way, which is kind of a counter Adorno point. But that's just an example. So there are lots of things going on in serious literary fiction, for instance, that are simply not going on in, say, a fantasy novel, which is focused mostly on wish fulfillment giving you certain kinds of thrills and satisfaction.

So this goes back to something we've talked a lot about on the podcast. Regardless of what you think of Kant and Schopenhauer and their analysis of the aesthetic, whatever criticisms we have of that, it's an important starting ground for understanding the difference between liking something because it's beautiful and liking something because it's gratifying and pleasing. So to like something because it's beautiful involves psychologically a fundamental withdrawal from gratification. It's precisely because it's not gratifying in the usual way. We take this sort of reflective distance from the aesthetic object and we get the sort of second level pleasure out of that.

It's like the difference I always use on the podcast many, many times difference between seeing a painting of the apple and appreciating it aesthetically and then wanting to eat and being gratified by actually eating an apple or by the thought of eating it. You might even look at a painting like it's sort of food porn and say, yeah, I'm going to eat that apple. That would not be an aesthetic experience. And most entertainment, most popular entertainment, is focused on not on the aesthetic and on beauty because frankly, it can be inherently boring, but on gratifying the audience.

And once you go that far in the direction of gratifying the audience, you've taken away well, you don't necessarily take away. Right. You gratify lots. But there's also something beautiful, and I think Shakespeare does that. But when I say Cheetos, I mean there isn't a lot of substance beyond the gratification. The aesthetic part is limited mostly to the visual. The dialogue is not poetry, and so on and so forth.

1:00:26 Dylan: Just what you mentioned there, that the focus is on the visual, doesn't that betray a bias towards a particular way of perceiving the world, of elevating vision over other senses and kind of going back to, I think, a Platonic idealism that vision is pure, objective sort of way of perceiving the world, when in fact it's one of many ways that we actually perceive. And. But even going with vision, if a cisgender straight man were to look at a woman's body, can you actually separate this higher aesthetic that is detached from gratification from gratification?

And I think that can be useful in certain groups and certain disciplines to talk about how are we going to analyze this literature? How are we going to measure it? But it's still a construct that we are trying to separate these out. When the reality is that we experience the world, when we experience enjoyment or excitement, we experience it in many different ways, and oftentimes they're mixed. And so I push back against that because I wonder if that, again, it can be totally useful in certain circles, but I don't see it as very useful for trying to apply to all of the world, because what if that were the only type of media available and people had a choice about it?

What if they. They just chose not to look at that and they created something else? I mean, cave drawings have had all sorts of interesting, not PG13 imagery for a long time, and people have always done this. A friend of mine is a Roman scholar, and he said most of the graffiti was the equivalent of I pooped here. So I wonder if there's a bit of a denial going on that there's always this varied and textured current of different types of aesthetic and gratification, that there's always all of it present in all of the works. But it's just that certain people decide that certain works have more value in these particular ways.

1:02:22 Wes: Yeah, I think that's where we differ. I think there are legitimate objective differences between the value of different works. So I think some things are great art and other things aren't arguments beyond the scope of what we're talking about. But I think there is a point that's important that you made, which is, yes, they have to be mixed, right? So you can't tell a story which is simply focused on beauty. It would be completely, just insufferably boring. And some literary novels are insufferably boring because they are so focused on simply on the beauty of the language. You have to sew it with the gratifying. So I think that is a good, important point.

1:02:56 Mark: So even admitting the distinction between high art and crowd pleasing, there's still the question of where this actually falls. And I think. I think, you know, I tend to draw the line at. Now, it's been a long time since I've read the books. I know some people criticize his prose. Certainly they're chock full of ideas. You know, even the show, as far as I'm concerned, it's not Cheetos. It serves a social function in that it is constantly challenging your moral intuition by not just giving you a straightforward good versus evil, by not letting you, you know, giving you these unambiguous heroes.

Then you're constantly asking, is the main character going crazy? How messed up is that thing that's just happened? And I think that that value is retained because the books are so. By making all the characters repellent in a way that you can't fully identify with them. Even the most lovable characters on the show probably did more horrible stuff in the books that creates that artistic distance that you're talking about, Wes, so that you can't feel like even just, oh, Ned Stark, he's so honorable. Wait a second. He cuts off a dude's head right at the beginning, even though he's like, oh, well, if I cast the sentence, I need to wield the sword.

Oh, how honorable that is. No, he cut off a dude's head. That creates the aesthetic distance right there, as far as I'm concerned. And just to me, this is a large scale meditation. Every character who's involved in the Game of Thrones part is voicing some different, slightly different version of Machiavellianism or Hobbesianism or, you know, some political philosophy. What are their attitudes towards the poor? How much should you care about gaining consensus versus just the difference between sheer power that is inherently unstable because it's really just, you know, a knife at the world's throat versus being respected as a legitimate authority.

Like, there is so much meditation by the various characters on these themes that that makes by itself not at all Cheetos to me. Even though that doesn't transfer in the show on an episode to episode basis, there's always at least some of that in there.

1:05:00 Wes: So you're saying in the book it's more meditative or are you saying some of that happens in the TV as well?

1:05:05 Mark: I think so, yes. But some of that does carry over. I mean, I think that's why the show is as successful as it is. And unlike a. I'm trying to think what is an example of a more pure, straightforwardly fantasy show that's actually good.

1:05:17 Wes: This is what I was trying to get at in the beginning, why I actually started watching this, which is that I didn't want to watch just a typical fantasy series because I did want sort of just characters who were representative good and characters who are representative of evil. You know, even though, say Tolkien is actually a great writer and there is actually a lot of aesthetic value, I think, to the Lord of the Rings, but I think it does feel like it's more for a child in a way. Or I like the fact that. That everyone is a terrible person in the show. I like the. If you want to call it the complexity of the characters. It felt like more of a thing for adults basically when it came down to it. And so I could forgive it for having dragons and magic and realize that, oh yeah, this is just a show about politics essentially among rich and beautiful people, powerful people and. Yeah.

1:06:04 Mark: Do you think that would have made it better to make the characters less

1:06:07 Dylan: beautiful, to make them look like they actually looked in the books?

1:06:10 Mark: Yeah, yeah.

1:06:11 Wes: No one would watch the show.

1:06:13 Mark: You could still have Daenerys be beautiful. You could have some of these characters, like that's kind of the point. Why they are charismatic leaders is because they're beautiful. But I don't know, there's still enough characters, the Hound or whatever, that are not beautiful.

1:06:27 Wes: You don't have to have everyone be beautiful.

1:06:29 Dylan: But.

1:06:29 Mark: Yeah, but there's still enough of that. That's why it does as well as it does is because you have enough hunky people that you know, even if Jon Snow meeting up with Rose Leslie, that Ygritte, like, why does she have to be so super beautiful? Like, that would still be a convincing plotline if she was just a female who had some good repartee with him.

1:06:54 Wes: Sorry, the wildling. Yeah.

1:06:55 Dylan: Yes, the wildling woman.

1:06:57 Mark: Yeah, but like, no, no, because it has to be a traditional romance for the viewers. You can't just have something that is average looking people.

1:07:06 Dylan: Well, and especially you can't have an average looking woman with a guy because that's not allowed. Speaking of wildlings, I really like the point you bring up Mark about challenging moral intuitions. And I think that this is something that I have really gained from both reading the books, but also watching the show because it does evoke more emotions in us. But one realization I had as I was, as I've been thinking about again, this big question that all the fans are sucked into and have been sucked into for over a decade now, is who is the legitimate heir to the Seven Kingdoms?

When the whole point of the show in many ways is that there is no one legitimate heir and legitimacy doesn't mean anything. We're left with the third and fourth string players from all of the different realms now, all the people who you were not expecting to be in charge. The bastards and broken things, basically. And then I stopped and thought and went, wait a minute. Of all these groups, all of these are. They're all monarchies, they all have nobility, they're all oligarchies, they've all got all these small folk who are getting screwed over.

The wildlings are the closest to how we are, at least in the United States. They're the most democratic, they're the most self reliant, they don't have kings and they're looking at all of the people down south and think that they're crazy and weird for all of their silly traditions. And Ygritte was a great introduction to that different morality.

1:08:26 Wes: The Canadians.

1:08:28 Mark: Sorry, that involved a lot of killing. Yeah, that's like the thing that you trade off that if you have a king, well, still the king can be arbitrary and send you to war. But like the ideal is, as Hobbes would advocate, is that, you know, at least you've monopolized the power and hopefully you won't have a Joffrey Dickhead running things who just cuts people's tongues out and whatever at whim. Whereas in the wildling society, it's not depicted as nasty, brutish and short, but it's certainly nasty and brutish.

1:08:59 Dylan: I see you've been reading the King's Landing propaganda. If we were to compare the body counts, it would be a hard argument to make.

1:09:05 Mark: By now we're seeing an atypical. Supposedly the monarchy has been more stable in past ages, that this is.

1:09:12 Dylan: It's just a bump in the road. Yeah.

1:09:16 Wes: And for the wildlings, though, it's kind of a lifestyle for them. Right. Whereas the average person in King's Landing is just living life. They're not warriors. Do I have the wildlings wrong or

1:09:26 Mark: it seems like they got whitewashed. Right. They killed off the Thenns, the actual cannibal wildlings, they don't involve the more troublesome aspects of the many tribes that make up the wildlings in the final seasons. Here in the final force is the one that you're the only one of them that you are actually supposed to identify with or find to be an amusing good fellow. Well, they didn't show them raping and reaving, but you'd think that that would be part of it as well. They were certainly going and killing whole settlements of the kid and his mom. I'm gonna. I'm gonna eat your mom and dad right in front of you, I guess. No, that was not torrent. That was the then who was saying that to the Ollie.

1:10:01 Dylan: On another point though, of challenging moral intuitions, one big thing that I went through, I mean, I mentioned how I didn't really like Sansa at the beginning, really thinking about and reflecting on Cersei as a character because at this point she is, you know, unquestionably mustache twirling villain. I'm sure she would get stick on mustaches for herself to fit in better. But as I was reading the books and watching the show and thinking, wow, she's horrible. She's so mean. And then I stopped and thought and said, well, how would I feel if I were in that society in her position?

And I would probably be really angry too. And it doesn't make me think that she's a good person. But it did make me reflect and ask myself, how do I judge different people as good people, bad people, as. As deserving of punishment as not? That was very powerful for me to reflect on. And so, I mean, I think that everyone has a level at which they can gain something and pause and think. They need to be encouraged to do that oftentimes. But I think that there is that opportunity to challenge those intuitions about what kind of rule do we want. Everyone's saying, oh, John will be a great ruler, but do we even want to have a ruler?

How has that worked for us the past several years kings that we've had? And I would love to see people in the fandom pausing and doing that sort of reflection and being able to grow from that a little bit.

1:11:27 Mark: Let me just refer, folks. I actually read through a good chunk of the Game of Thrones in Philosophy and the Ultimate Game of Thrones in Philosophy, two different collections that have come out over the years. And they're kind of the typical take some aspect of it. And like, what does this tell you about Sartrean authenticity? What does this tell you about about different concepts of authority. What does this tell you about Hobbes View? You know, a lot of it is kind of beside the point. Like, I think I'll give them to my son. Here's something to maybe rope you into learning about historical philosophy, but it's not so much actually illuminating things about Game of Thrones.

It's not actually pulling, you know, what are the original awesome ideas that come out of that? I also spent quite a bit of time in prepping this just listening to different Game of Thrones podcasts, and it's amazing how uniform so many of them are in terms of. You might like the personalities of the hosts more or less, but it's like here we're gonna walk through the episode and just converse about did you like that they portrayed Theon doing that thing? Did you think that the things were true to character? Or did you think that something was bullshit, that this could never have happened that way was the military strategy.

I listened to seven different episodes just talking about the Battle of Winterfell, the Long Night episode, which is just way, way too much. Probably two of them would have been sufficient to give me all the detail I could have possibly wanted. There was one Game of Thrones philosophy breakdown, if you guys want to search that, where they actually go through each of the episodes in the last two seasons and just ask what makes for an honorable death? This came up. Or when is it okay to break an oath and just reflect on oath keeping in general. And so the fact that they had no trouble coming up with an hour of conversation focusing on the issues in a particular episode, I think that really speaks to the richness of the source material.

I don't think you could just do that with. Maybe you could do that with like the Sopranos or something, but certainly very few, even like Breaking Bad or something, which I consider just to be a phenomenal piece of art as a whole. I think you'd be hard pressed coming up with that much philosophically to say about a particular episode of that I

1:13:36 Dylan: have a proposal that what stuck out to me from this last episode, and I was so glad that they finally had it, was the conversation between Tyrion and Varys not just about what a good leader was, but also what is their role as advisors to be in this. And my read of it was Tyrion was saying that he believed that the advisors should continue to work with Daenerys and help her to make better choices and become better. And Varys was saying, nope, I'm done with her. I'm going to jump ship and go pick somebody else. And so I think that there's some very interesting philosophy that could come from that.

And generally the question of how do we choose who's in charge? Does the individual's choice matter? Because Jon Snow's choice or lack of choice in whether he wanted the throne or not, that I think was also very important. So I'll volunteer those as. As some things that we could talk about. What is something that you think would help this podcast to stand out? I guess from the other shows what

1:14:34 Mark: we're doing right now, you're saying would help this to stand out?

1:14:38 Dylan: Okay.

1:14:38 Mark: Just the fact that we've been talking about it at a high level about what the form of the art is, I think that's really been the. As opposed to getting into so many of the details, I'm pointing out that if you want to learn more about philosophy in the Game of Thrones, a lot of people have thought about this and you can get into the specifics. When I was actually reading, you know, the article about Hobbes and yeah, so various actually is the kind of stand in for Hobbes. Like, really any king is better than no king. So like, no matter how bad the king is, stick with it.

Unless you could easily get to a better king, that would calm things. But like war, strife, that is the worst of all possible worlds. So you'd only see what happened in this because we're in the middle of a civil war, because there is no but even when he was on Team Joffrey, as long as Joffrey was there. Any other issues? Any other points you wanted to make, Wes here?

1:15:31 Wes: No.

1:15:32 Mark: Any last thoughts, Sabrina?

1:15:34 Dylan: I guess if I were to be able to offer some advice to people who want to try to get more out of this intellectual property and this story is to not try to rely so much on a particular outcome or one particular truth, but to instead look at what surrounds that and find truths that matter to you that you can draw from it. And I think that changing the goal which that podcast you linked us to had mentioned, I think that can help bring some fulfillment.

1:16:02 Mark: Yeah, certainly that's a good thing about something that is not univocal, that there's not just the narrator telling you, here's what to think about that. It's so many characters with so many different points of views and maybe the whole overarching story lesson is just everybody dies. So, you know, live as good a life as you can. You know, if you had to give an overall lesson or something, it's going to Be something very simple like that. But the joy of it is in the details. The complexity, I don't think is just, well, I guess this is an open question.

Can you have something that is not just simple, but still have it be ultimately kind of a waste of time, that if the complexity is of the sort of. That is not ultimately enriching, then that would just be. I guess it just depends what you think the function of art is supposed to be. And I'm very open ended as to what the function of art is. That each artistic work creates standards unto itself. And I think building a world like this definitely qualifies the fact that we could go quite a bit further in thinking about the issue of magic versus metaphysics.

And how do you treat magic in such a way that it becomes, as Wes was saying at the beginning, a little more like science fiction, like, oh, metaphysical fiction, as opposed to just pure fantasy fulfillment. I think this has the advantages of. They don't call it hard sci fi, hard fantasy. It's a high fantasy, right? I guess when it's the artsy kind, it's got that going for it. But I just find the mixture of that with the fact that it is a cultural phenomenon and did have to be dumbed down in some ways to be that and appreciated the fact that you could appreciate it on multiple levels and you really could get into it.

I don't know if there are viewers that fast forward through the dialogue heavy parts, or at least the dialogue heavy parts have enough sass in them that like, they feel like, oh yeah, that Olenna or whoever, that hound, they're just a bunch of dry wits that it still amuses in its own way rather than merely edifies. I think the most thought provoking part that we did not talk about yet today was actually the High Sparrow part that, you know, when he actually gets in and is talking about poverty, you know, it's obvious that there's still Machiavellian machinations going on.

But like, he's using true things about the world to convey these points about the complete bankruptcy of the feudal system and the class system. So hopefully they'll just end the story with a nice representative democracy. I'm sure that's going to happen.

1:18:36 Wes: All right.

1:18:36 Mark: All right. Next time we're going to do a performance, an audio play of something in the sort of Shakespearean wheelhouse, but it's by Pedro Calderon de la Barca from 1635. He has a play called Life is a Dream. So we have an audio performance of that and a full discussion of that come back for that. You can follow us on Twitter, you can go to our blog partiallyexaminedlife.com, give us responses, tell us what you thought of this episode, how stupid we were being and misinterpreting Game of Thrones and its value or lack thereof, and Facebook and LinkedIn and all that other stuff.

Our closing song was recorded by Tyler Hislop, AKA Sacrifice MC the Partially Examined Life and Nakedly Examined Music's Chief Audio editor. He wrote it just for this episode and he had me do a little of the singing on it. You can hear me interview him on Nakedly examined music episode24@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com and I want to remind you about the follow up discussion that Wes and I are having that will reflect our reactions all the way through the end of the series. We're going to get that out to you as soon as possible, but it's only available for Partially Examined Life Citizens or $5 a month Patreon supporters.

Check out those options at partiallyexaminedlife.com support so thanks Sabrina. Thanks Wes. Thanks everybody.

1:19:46 Wes: Thank you.

1:19:46 Dylan: Thank you.

1:19:47 Mark: Good night.

1:19:47 Wes: Have a good night.

1:20:18 Unknown speaker: I shall not mention the word they may have been prepping our but the legend is just as plausible the queen has injustice and lawful rule I shall not mention the word they might have been breathing the earth but the legend is justice plausible the king has injustice and lawful rule Take a seat upon the throne of man his time Stand aside I'm not a Viking over samurai I'm from a long line of wall dwellers Protect us from the frontier from those lost devils it's all settled with an axe to restore the imperial acts of the roar Interactions absorb without an act of remorse yet we keep playing this game between us Only a few years ago Would they believe us to concede Trust to the dollar A power grab the sovereign is proud of that But I'm in the hourglass Nothing but struggle trickling down at last with the sound of that combustion above us running for cover they carry us asunder no wonder we play with the forces of nature Confronted by judgment created as summer is waning from under they came and destruction abated until another invasion among us I'm praying ain't no legend to save us they're beheaded and naked with the crown in their tomb and the sounds of the truth the king what happens to the realm now that it's you I shall not mention the word they may have been breath in the earth but the legend is just as plausible the queen has injustice and lawful rule.

I shall not mention the word. They might have been breath in the earth, but the legend is just as plausible. The king has injustice and law for rule.