There is something about Game of Thrones that seems to appeal to the American audience. As the most watched TV show ever on HBO, what happens in fictional Westeros might not always stay in fictional Westeros.
The fifth season bloomed like a spring flower earlier this year, before quickly passing again, and now every fan is craving more incestuous intrigues, nudity, and blatantly violent deaths. Or is that really what the show is all about?
The long wait for more episodes has dragged fans to many online forums, where some fans debate as to whether female roles and climate changes in the show are explicitly meant to challenge modern day society?
In 2012, Manjana Milkoreit, a senior sustainability fellow at Arizona State University, studied a number of blog authors and their connections to Game of Thrones and climate change. Her research paper describes how winter in the Seven Kingdoms is something many should fear, as it is associated with major, long-term changes affecting temperature, lifestyle, agriculture, and thus crops. But the lack of response from the rulers of King’s Landing reflects our own political inaction to global warming, these bloggers argue.
“The people [in Westeros] tend to ignore this threat, tend to not pay attention to the people on the wall who send these messages,” Milkoreit told the Pacific Standard Magazine. “Instead, they are fighting over political power and struggling to run the continent and worrying about foreign enemies who have weapons of mass destruction — like dragons.”
But not all bloggers want to draw such conclusions between fiction writing and the sustainability of the earth.
“I don't think G.R.R.M.'s purpose is to be didactic,” said Steven Attewell, a blogger of Race for the Iron Throne who believes the saying "Winter is Coming" isn't meant to persuade people to be more active in climate change politics. “It's more meant to represent ‘the bigger picture’ that gets overshadowed by the short-term struggle for power,” he said.
However, Attewell agrees the author certainly has some intention to incorporate modern society struggles into his fiction.
“I do think that G.R.R.M. is raising certain questions about social mores, using a medieval setting to throw into harsh relief our treatment of people deemed ‘outsiders’ by their birth, their gender, their disability, etc,” he said.
Truth is, the TV show has made certain viewers believe females in the show earn more powerful roles than in many other series for a reason.
“The writers make sure that each one of the main female characters are driven,” said Jeniel Tererro, a junior Broadcasting major at LIU Post and fan of the show, “even more so during times of weakness." Terrero argues that this embodies today’s growing feminism movement in the West.
However, there is still explicit material shown in more or less every episode, especially portraying female nudity, which is why the series has been talked about as a medieval porno that may not always answer to gender equality.
“The nudity and violence is simply commercial pandering to the general audience," said Jon Fraser, professor of Theater and Film at LIU Post. “It's not a bad thing per se, but speaks volumes about the society for whom it’s produced.”
Having only seen part of the now five-season-long series, Fraser does not want to read any specifics into Game of Thrones. Although he believes that female roles are becoming more important in modern filmmaking.
“But most modern films still flunk the ‘Bechtel Test’,” he said, describing that a film can be called a feminist or woman’s film if there are a) two female leads; b) that are talking to each other; and c) about something other than men.
So is the show intentionally playing on our society’s values? Fraser doesn’t think so, explaining that most films don’t challenge societal structures as much as they support the status quo.
“People in the U.S. who go to the movies, in general, don't want to be challenged,” he said. “They want to be told that their life and world outlook are good and correct.”
Perhaps Game of Thrones is just a fictional scene after all. But how would the world map look like if the series was for real? Not very different, I’m afraid.
