It happened eight years ago. The first Game of Thrones (GoT) episode that ever aired was all shock and awe. Bran, only a boy, climbs a tower to see Cersei, the queen, have sex with her brother Jaime. The siblings are ruthless. Jaime throws the boy down, crippling him for life. Incest, many felt, was going too far, but GoT, it became clear, had an insatiable appetite for breaking TV taboos. Like its many couples having sex, heads would also roll on the floor. Sons would also kill their fathers.
GoT borrows its universe from George R.R. Martin. While the writer’s fantasy series, A Song of Fire and Ice, is a mix of gore, sex, intrigue and battle, it’s the HBO adaptation of these novels that makes them indisputably radical. Abstractions on page, GoT renders brutality, familial love and zombies real. Reading about dragons is arguably not quite the same as seeing them flare fire from their nostrils.
For those who haven’t warmed up to GoT, the show is perhaps nothing more than a sum of its special effects and violence. A little perseverance, however, might somewhat redeem it. Though women are raped, beaten and humiliated, they regularly revolt from the margins they are relegated to. Daenerys, Sansa and Cersei all claim power that wasn’t meant to be theirs. They don’t just survive, they also rule.
Bodies are hard to count on GoT and the corpses often include men who would typically be our heroes. The first season, for instance, ends with the kind and formidable Ned Stark being decapitated and, a while later, his upright son Rob is brutally murdered at his uncle’s infamous Red Wedding’. Of the several rules that GoT breaks, it also snaps a moral one. There is no reward for good karma here.
According to HBO, a record 17.4 million viewers in the US tuned in to watch the premiere of GoT’s final season earlier this month. Everyone wants to know if Daenerys and Jon will save the world, but that question is moot. GoT has changed entertainment for good. Ours already is a brave, new world.
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