Some Distasteful Cultural Necromancy

A brief interlude.

The Bocksten Man bog body, via Wikimedia Commons

Stand you here within this circle. You will be quite safe. But no matter what you hear or see—do not step outside the circle.

Surely you wonder why we are here, at night, in the mists and vapors beside this treacherous marsh. Should we not be at a cemetery to raise the dead, you may ask? Would we not find the ghost of a dead king in some royal tomb?

Indeed we might. But we are after something darker.

This stinking bog is the final resting place of the Thrice-Killed King, who ruled for eight seasons, and then betrayed his people so completely that they sought to destroy him—nay, to erase him—throughout time: past, present, and future. Thus was he brought here, cudgeled, stabbed, and strangled all at once, and sunk into these murky depths, never to be spoken of again.

But soft! The hour is nigh! There are eerie voices upon the wind, and the time is right.

Here be the Symbols of Secret Things, the standards, the ensigns, and the banners, of God the Conqueror; and the arms of the Almighty One, to compel the Aerial Potencies! I command ye absolutely by their power and virtue that ye come near unto us, into our presence, from whatsoever part of the world ye may be in, and that ye delay not to obey us in all things!

Come ye forth, Game of Thrones!

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Lord, but I don’t want this to be yet another Pop Culture Critique Blog.

I particularly don’t want to go down that road by discussing something as reviled as Game of Thrones. Yes, I know, they made a new show and it’s supposed to be alright. It’s not like the Thronesiverse is entirely gone. Yes, granted. But goddamn—it’s hard to think of a narrative that absolutely dominated our culture for so long (people were naming their kids after the characters!) and then was so quickly and vehemently disowned. Up until 2019, if you said “winter is coming” with a knowing wink, everybody would think you were being clever; say it now, and you’re asking to get sucker-punched and hurled out of whatever company you’re in. Or dropped in a bog.

Anyway. M (my wife) pointed out that Game of Thrones was a near-perfect illustration of the Big Story. She’s right, of course. (As usual.) It’s too perfect to ignore, even if it is a wet fart in the elevator of our collective imagination.

So now I have to talk about this goddamn thing.

There are, of course, two Games of Throneses: the eternally unfinished books (A Song of Ice and Fire, or ASIF) and the cursed TV series (HBO’s Game of Thrones, or GoT.) These are two strands in the same narrative rope, inseparable in people’s minds. George R. R. Martin is now living proof that the Curse of the Monkey’s Paw is real: he created one of the most popular narratives of the past century, got fabulously wealthy from it—and is doomed to never finish his story to anyone’s satisfaction. He’ll die knowing that his legacy will forever be “the guy who helped write that stupid TV show and never finished the book,” or, “the guy whose ending to the book pissed off millions of ex-fans who were expecting something better than that stupid TV show.”

I’m putting my marker down now: he’s never finishing those books. He can’t. Better to spend eternity in a golden sarcophagus, remembered for all the things you didn’t do, than to wind up in a bog because you screwed up the ending¹.

He can’t finish the books because he doesn’t have the stones to take the narrative to its logical conclusion. (Prove me wrong, George.) He’s teed himself up so perfectly to upend the Big Story that he either has to challenge the comfort of his readers, to write a genuinely subversive story—or give them what they think they want, which the midwits at HBO have already delivered, to deafening silence.

I’m sure he sleeps comfortably enough, on his levitating bed of pure cash. I still don’t envy him.

Here’s how A Song of Ice and Fire has to end: Westeros has to fall completely.

(If you don’t know the story by this point, I absolutely won’t make any jokes about “living in a cave.” You’re better off, really. You could find a primer to read somewhere else online—or you could just stop here and go for a walk outside. I’d encourage you toward the latter choice. This essay isn’t good enough to justify doing homework about a broken story.)

All the elements of the Big Story are in ASIF. In Westeros, The Strong rule over the land within The Wall, alternately protecting and exploiting The Weak, fighting with one another over who has the right to power. The designation of the “Bad People” is entirely dependent on perspective—who’s trying to hold onto power where, and who’s threatening them—rather than a moral absolute.

Incidentally, this is treated much more realistically in the books. Television demands heroes, so the show necessarily raised up some characters as inherently Good. The books, by contrast, focused much more on the realpolitik of power in the Big Story: you can be strong or weak, but almost never Good. The dynamics of power at that level don’t allow it. Characters who try to be Good usually end up dead; the Bad People—or at least the morally complicated people—march onward.

Beyond The Wall is the Frontier, where the Free Folk live. This is treated early on in the narrative as the existential threat to the kingdoms of Westeros: not some powerful Big Bad with an unstoppable army, but an opposing ideology that challenges the idea of rulership altogether. The wildlings seem to have things worked out pretty well. They live outside The Wall, close to the natural world, according to its rhythms and expediencies. They cultivate influence within an environment they can’t control. They’re not savages: if magic is an analog for power, they’ve developed a type of shamanism that’s at least as effective as the High Church magic of the Seven Kingdoms. The books are almost too successful at making the Free Folk not just sympathetic but admirable: who’d want to live inside the Wall, with all its savagery, when you could just get a warmer coat and go hang out with the wildlings?

Who indeed?

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The Free Folk put Big George in a bit of a pickle, narratively speaking. A story about people in an authoritarian system gradually coming to their senses—hopping over The Wall to go party with the anarchists in the woods—would be hard to publish. Too much against the grain of the Big Story².

So Big George did the obvious thing: he created an antagonist that would make life outside The Wall impossible.

With the addition of the White Walkers—supernatural adversaries who mercilessly hunt and kill the living—there is no alternative to life inside The Wall. If you try to live like the Free Folk, it’s only a matter of time before you suffer a fate worse than death: being hacked up and brought back as a reanimated corpse³ to pursue your comrades. This leaves the Free Folk no choice but to get back inside The Wall, as fast as possible, and join the conflict between the kingdoms of The Strong.

This put Big George in another pickle. (Big George loves pickles.) If everybody runs back inside the safety of the impenetrable Wall, the story reaches a bit of a stalemate: Westeros goes back to the Big Story, politics as usual, while the forces of Death Incarnate just sorta hang out and ruefully shake their bony fists. That’s a big loss of narrative momentum.

So The Wall has to come down.

And this is where we find Big George now: wedged tight into the pickle barrel, with his little fisherman’s cap perched precariously on his head.

The TV series brought The Wall down. The Army of the Dead needed to be almost absurdly powerful to break into Westeros, but it had to be done. And now, here they come, with the White Walkers and their ever-growing zombie horde—their goddamn zombie dragon—driving the increasingly desperate armies of the living in front of them as they romp across the continent. The board was set; there were only so many ways to move the pieces and keep the narrative going.

How do you bring that conflict to a satisfying resolution?

It was a bigger challenge than the grifters at HBO were up for. They took the coward’s way out and contrived some off-the-shelf heroic ending, pulled directly from the textbook of the Big Story: power is nothing if not the capacity to dispense violence, so let’s have our hero… I don’t know, sneak up on the Grim Reaper and stab him really hard?

If you’re playing by the rules of the Big Story, which are also the rules of entertainment media, that’s the move. Conflicts can only be resolved by violence. There has to be a climactic battle, after which our heroes can all sit around the big table and backslap and make jokes about democracy. So if your conflict is with an elemental force of darkness, well… shit. Somebody better have a magic sword or something.

That’s the card HBO played. And people haaated it. Viscerally, deeply hated it. Hated it so much that they bundled up the whole eight-year narrative and tossed it into the swamp, never to be spoken of again.

Which leaves Big George, still in the pickle barrel, trying—or maybe not trying—to finish his books. He’s a better storyteller than the mooks at HBO. But now he’s seen the trap he’s laid for himself, Cassandra-like, played out before his eyes: how do you stop an unstoppable evil within the confines of a realistic power struggle?

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To be fair—Game of Thrones outran the books around Season 5, which is probably when the story presented in the TV shows started to go off the rails. But Big George was involved in the first four seasons of GoT; it’s reasonable to assume that he gave them a general outline of the story from the beginning, even if they veered off in some spots. I have a hard time believing that the HBO writers made up the character of the Night King out of whole cloth.

The books definitively established the White Walkers as a supernatural threat who are a) calculating and strategic, b) extremely difficult to kill, being undead, and c) able to reanimate corpses in order to build their army. I’m assuming that was more or less what Big George planned for the books.

The books consistently portrayed the kingdoms of Westeros as being unequipped to deal with anything other than their petty domestic squabbles—the endless recursion of the Big Story. They were only ever fighting each other in the world within The Wall. The Free Folk had been dealt with: keep them outside The Wall, and kill them sharpish if they get too close. Easy. Then comes the Army of the Dead. But the rulers inside The Wall don’t know it yet. Big George evoked some very satisfying narrative tension by splitting perspectives between the wars inside The Wall and the looming threat outside. The reader was constantly yelling at the idiots killing each other over who got to sit in which chair, while the Apocalypse gathered steam just beyond their borders: Stop, you fools! And they didn’t stop, because they couldn’t. The logic of the Big Story wouldn’t let them.

And then The Wall fell down.

How do you end that story without breaking its rules?

Nobody was prepared to stop the White Walkers. You can’t kill death. Nobody was in any position to stop the fall of Westeros: the armies and the weapons they’d built up to fight each other only bolstered the forces of the dead, strengthened the enemy with every single fallen soldier. Power by violence is not just useless but self-destructive in the face of death itself. There was no Gandalf figure waiting in the wings to swoop in and save the day; a few characters showed some promise, but they were always scattered amidst the fighting, their power compromised in one way or another. Nobody was presented as a credible challenger to the White Walkers’ unyielding advance.

I’m about to discuss the plot hole that the TV show fell into, and I want to be clear: it’s not because I’m emotionally invested in the quality of the show. The show was always going to self-destruct. “Let’s write a quick ending for this really popular story that the author himself has worked on for decades without completing” was an insane proposition from the jump.

Instead, I’m using it as an illustration of the Herculean task that Big George set himself by making his main antagonists supernaturally, inhumanly powerful, out of an explicit need to get past the impenetrable Wall that he built.

The cavernous plot hole that GoT couldn’t escape was this: the whole triumphant ending rested on the notion that the Night King would get impatient.

What’s the plan to defeat the Night King? “Well, I guess they’ll lure him inside the castle and—”

Wait a minute. Lure him inside the castle? According to the lore of the story, the Night King has been biding his time up in the Winterlands for thousands of years. Literally just chilling up there, waiting for the right time to make his move. Just standing on the same snowbank, glowering ominously, until he was ready to start his deliberate, implacable, glacially patient assault on the land of the living. And the plan is to treat him like a Scooby Doo villain? Trick him into standing on a giant red X?

“No, but there’s this one character he really hates, so if we get him to—”

Nooope. You can’t get him to do anything. If there is one thing the story has made very, very, very clear about the Night King, it’s that he literally has all the time in the world, and he knows it. Whats-his-name is inside the castle, and the Night King wants to kill him? Cool.

Now it’s winter.

Forever.

Supplies are running low, which is a problem for the living people. And there’s an army of the undead outside. They’re not getting hungry, not getting bored, not deserting because the crops need to get taken in or whatever: again, very literally just chilling, until the castle falls or Hell freezes over. And every time somebody inside the castle dies—from disease or starvation or suicide or any other siege-related problem—oopsies, there goes the ol’ raise-the-dead trick. Now there’s another monster loose inside the walls. How long do you think that’ll last?

This motherfucker has defeated death itself, and he knows it. How long do you think he can wait to snuff one neurodivergent teenager with mobility issues?

And once that castle falls, he can just take a leisurely stroll around to every other castle in Westeros, and do the same thing again, and again, and again. The only clock he’s running against is these Iron Age peasants inventing tactical nukes. Until then, he can hang back in the cut and let his zombie army take care of things. He’s doing just fine.

The only way it ends, when the survivors have a chance to rally and make one last stand, is after the whole continent is laid to waste.

And that means the Big Story has to end.

No more Wall. No more kings. No more kingdoms. Only a bunch of survivors struggling to stay alive in a world that they no longer control.

This forfeits any chance of a conventional happy ending. Happy endings in the Big Story only happen when control is restored to the righteous rulers of The Strong. No matter how the White Walkers are defeated—if you let that narrative momentum run its course, there is no merry band of heroes left. Westeros is a charnel house. Nobody’s sharing drinks and dividing up the spoils. The world has been destroyed. The only work left to do is burning the towering heaps of corpses and rebuilding from the ashes.

Big George created a world that had to end.

Ending it in any way other than bleak horror means imagining something different.

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I’m not saying it’s impossible.

There’s magic in the story, obviously, so a creative solution is still workable. Big George could still pull something surprising out of his little cap.

But bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion on its own terms would have been much easier before he made his Faustian bargain with HBO. Now everybody’s expectations have been keyed toward a conventional ending. Sure, the one we got with the show was trash, but it was still the heroic triumph that the Big Story prescribes. Now everybody’s got their faves. So if Big George tries to do the right thing—keep the grim realpolitik tone of the books going, do justice to the terrifying antagonists he created in the White Walkers—he’s not just killing a bunch of characters who were doomed from the start. He’s killing Maisie Williams, Kit Harrington, Peter Dinklage and Sophie Turner, and all the rest. He’s killing our faves.

Maybe he’ll pull it off, if he manages to finish the last book before the last book finishes him. I’m ready to be surprised. The story itself has the right drive and velocity to be genuinely subversive, if he can find a credible way to defeat the Army of the Dead without turning it into The Road. But still—it’s a good illustration of how hard it is to escape the event horizon of the Big Story. George R. R. Martin is one of the most successful writers of the past century, and he hasn’t done it yet.

I think the big mistake wasn’t letting The Wall fall down: it was building it in the first place. Narratively speaking.

And speaking of satisfying endings—now that I’ve dragged one of the most successful writers of the past century—let’s see if I can wrap up this essay series with some worthwhile ideas about how to move beyond the Big Story.

Hopefully I don’t end up in a bog.

1. Several of the bog mummies that have been unearthed in northern Europe show evidence of the threefold death: ropes still cinched around their necks, cracked skulls from heavy blows, deep gashes from blades across their throats. A few of them seem to be highborn folk, killed young, with their last meals still in their stomachs. Finding one body that shows this level of violence might be a particularly vicious murder/robbery; finding several bodies in similar condition suggests something of wider spiritual significance. The mainstream theory is that they were human sacrifices. My personal belief is that they were storytellers who fucked up everybody’s favorite fireside tale: after building it up, night after night, everyone breathless with anticipation, the poor bard botched the landing and ruined the ending—the whole story, really—for everyone. So they dragged him out to the swamp and really drove the point home. “Bard? What bard? No bard around here that I recall.” As the gods intended.

2. This sounds conspiratorial only if you imagine a cabal of publishers meeting at the mountaintop lair of the New World Order, cackling about their organized suppression of dissent. It’s not like that. (Probably.) This all functions as a self-regulating system: the combined decisions of many people reading the temperature of the room, and divining whether what they’re putting out will be more trouble than it’s worth, for any number of reasons. If saying or publishing the wrong thing has a very real financial cost, you’ll play it safe. That’s how we get metanarratives and ideological uniformity at the top of any financial-political structure.

3. There’s something really interesting about the imagined threat beyond The Wall—not just in GoT, but in so many of our popular stories for the past couple decades—repeatedly trending toward the unquiet dead. Might be a topic for a future essay.