I was right about the feminist, when did such a beautiful movement go the same way as GOT.....
Why I'm furious about (and obsessed with) 'Game of Thrones'
By Kate Maltby
Posted at 5:53 PM ET, Wed May 15, 2019
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How Daenerys claimed her power on 'Game of Thrones' 01:28
Editor's Note:Kate Maltby is a broadcaster and columnist in the United Kingdom on issues of culture and politics, and a theater critic for The Guardian. She is also completing a doctorate in Renaissance literature. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN) — Once upon a time, millions of people around the world worshipped the television show "Game of Thrones." It seems like another era. But, in fact, only a month back we were all eagerly waiting to see how the eighth season would wrap up the series.
Disappointment and fury are now the status quo for longtime fans.
USA Today's review of Sunday's penultimate episode was headlined "The series just burned itself to the ground." In the UK, leading TV critic Michael Deacon titled his "The series has been ruined beyond repair." And BuzzFeed is running a slew of articles with headers such as "The New Snapchat Filter On The 'Game Of Thrones' Cast Will Make You Forget How Terrible Last Night's Episode Was."
They're not wrong.
Kate Maltby
Kate Maltby
I can't remember the last time I invested as much in a TV show as "Game of Thrones." Over 71 hours watching 72 episodes; extra on behind-the-scenes featurettes; wasted afternoons poring over fan websites like WinterisComing.net and A Wiki of Ice and Fire. (And no, I'm not proud.) Like many of the show's fans, I dreamt up (so I thought) sophisticated ways the show could finish, close-reading the language of prophecies to predict characters' fates. Now it feels like the writers left in custody of my fantasy world have been slipshod in their care. The process is a bit like grief.
But aren't we all getting a little bit carried away? It's been reported that super fans have "google-bombed" the series' showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, rigging internet search results so that their pictures appear when users search for "bad writers." Which feels, frankly, a bit like bullying.
Yes, there's plenty to be angry about. The storylines of women and non-white characters have collapsed into cliché.
Benioff and Weiss seemed to have learned their lesson when the rape of a major character, Sansa Stark, was framed foremost as a traumatic experience for the man forced to watch it. As Vanity Fair's Joanne Robinson put it, "the last thing we needed was to have a powerful young woman brought low in order for a male character to find redemption."
Related Article: Theon's redemption shows the flaw in 'Game of Thrones'
Despite that outcry, in the current season Benioff and Weiss made an almost identical mistake handling the storyline of a woman of color. The final shots of Episode Four closed in on the tortured face of Daenerys Targaryen, a powerful white woman, as she reacted to the execution of her black aide Missandei.
Missandei, a former slave, might have had a real story arc of her own, but first she inhabited a classic "black best friend" trope and then she became a plot device to spur a white protagonist's revenge. As Sansa to Theon Greyjoy, so Missandei to Daenerys.
Daenerys' own arc has been similarly frustrating. In a fantasy culture short of complex heroines, Benioff and Weiss spent seasons building Daenerys into a woman with whom we could identify. Yes, she demanded absolute loyalty. Yes, she was vengeful to those who had wronged her. But she consistently protected the weak. Her first experience of warfare, as a child bride, saw her berate her husband's soldiers for their rape of civilian women.
Suddenly, last episode, Daenerys embraced the thrill of genocide, specifically targeting civilians with dragon fire. Personality changes happen in fiction, but not with such lack of subtlety -- not to characters the writers respect and understand.
We'd been promised that "Game of Thrones" had become a feminist show, but the corruption of Daenerys played into the oldest sexist tropes in the book. The idea of the woman ruler as inconstant goes back to old fears about women's changeable menstrual cycles. Just consider Virgil's "Aeneid," where the unpredictable goddess Juno, bringer of storms, repeatedly contrasts with the rational Jove.