I have to agree with Mathew Walther on this:
My goodness. I’ve just spent an hour watching to see if a guy who raped a teenage girl at bow-and-arrow point is going to be eaten alive by the animals he has spent the last few seasons subjecting to forms of cruelty that make Michael Vick look like a PETA ambassador or beaten to death in the freezing cold by his victim’s half-brother. Thank goodness the guy who set his terminally ill daughter on fire in a pyromantic oblation to a heathen god at the behest of a witch who never seems to wear any clothes is not around to prevent justice from being carried out here — the woman whose size makes her the frequent butt of bestiality-related jokes killed him just in time! Lucky that she has a wealthy and well-connected benefactor in a one-armed knight whose hobbies from childhood on have included killing people and sleeping with his queen sister — including in a church right next to the corpse of one of their unacknowledged sons — to whom we were first introduced when he pushed the little brother of the above-mentioned rape victim out of a window to conceal his incest from her drunken prostitute-addicted domestic-abuser husband! Almighty God has made me in His own image and endowed me with faculties of reason and sense perception and given me free will so that I can tune in next week to see whether the unidextrous dueling champ’s royal sister sets her daughter-in-law and the rest of her extended family on fire or just a bunch of priests. Hallelujah!
Go here to read the rest. It is a shame too, because among the porn and violence laden dog’s vomit there are such gems as this:
Most forms of entertainment have objectionable features in them. Shakespeare is filled with them, and yet I relish Shakespeare. George R.R. Martin is a lapsed Catholic and a left wing loon as well as a writer of some skill. In Game of Thrones he has created a world as Tolkien did, but without any aspect of the Catholic worldview that prevented Tolkien’s tale from being literally one damn thing after another. That is the essence of the hopeless and spiritually deadening world that Martin has created and which so many people avidly mentally inhabit.
I guess this is simply more evidence that a civilization based on Judeo-Christian values is worth preserving. Maybe President Trump was on to something in his Warsaw speech?
I forget where I saw it, but somewhere I saw it written that Martin avoided serving during Vietnam, and went on to write a Dungeons and Dragons fantasy laden with porn, gratuitous violence and general filth. Tolkien survived the hell-pit of the Somme and penned an epic story of soaring beauty and depth. Something like that. Perhaps there is something to why the works are so different. I don’t think it’s the objectionable material in a work as much as why it’s there. And what balances it out.
Martin got CO status during Vietnam and did alternative civilian service in Cook County in Illinois. It is impossible to overestimate the impact of World War I on Tolkien. In 1918 he noted simply that almost all of his friends had been killed in the War. Tolkien saw the world at its absolute worst in the War but could see beyond the blood and carnage. For Martin there is little but blood and carnage, laden with sex.
Another reason I don’t pay for so-called premium cable TV.
From the little contact I have had with this genre of garbage, it seems to be adolescent prurience spewed by pencil-necked nerds that never even got themselves into a fist fight or a tackle football game, much less a shooting war.
Tolkein and the “Lost Generation” were grounded in patriotism, religion and tradition. Today, the snow-flake, venal generation is grounded in less than BS.
Heck, I rejected it at the books…from running into plot details on TV Tropes.
….Every single one had a pattern of author influence to make it more depressing.
To heck with that; at least Lovecraft didn’t try to keep the thing going for long.
I heard someone defend it as more realistic for historic times and civil wars. Heck you might be able to find examples now in some of the god-forsaken places in the world.
I don’t know for sure. While I may agree that maybe things in the past weren’t as well-behaved as LotR depicted (humans can be outright bastards), even my cynicism wonders that man can really be bad as GRRM shows. If we were, there’s a question of how our species survived at all to this point, it seems like we should have all been dead by now.
To throw even more red meat onto the board, I present this interesting video essay.
What’s the difference between the sadism of Game of Thrones and the sadism of the Roman Coliseum? I cannot bear watching any of it.
*snickers* I had the misfortune to be in the area of a couple of historians when someone did that… it didn’t go over well.
Short version?
The individual events frequently have some sort of inspiration, but then they go further than even historic accusations, and there are no consequences. The “invite everyone to a feast and then kill them” thing?
That would get the person doing it wiped out, because they’d just PROVEN they cannot be trusted, ever, in the most mild of things. You could never let them in your house, if their armies moved it would be an attack….
Foxfier: Sounds interesting. By all means post the long version sometime as I’d like to know more.
Unfortunately, I’m not good at catching things on the fly. 🙁
I could probably find real life versions of pretty much everything but the dragons– and even then, you could probably substitute in vicious animals of a generic sort for a similarity– but the main take-away was that yeah, stuff like that happened, but not all right on top of each other and it had consequences.
Game of Thrones is history-type outrages with modern type consequences.
If I was a betting man I’d say the dragons are probably representing new technological developments which give a group an edge in conflicts. (i.e. chariots)
Hm… I’m not expressing it very well….
In modern times, breaking “the rules” will get you punished by the authorities. There just isn’t much social pressure– there are actual lawsuits around things like “yes, I went to jail six times for stealing from the till, but don’t you dare discriminate against hiring me as a cashier.”
More accurate historically would mean that breaking the rules put you outside their protection.
Because everybody had to actively enforce them, to have a hope of getting the protection.
Foxfier, The “invite everyone to a feast and then kill them” thing? Look up the Black Dinner in Scottish histor, inspired Martin..
😥 it is the worse thing to ever be on tv……so violent….im amazed we are here if they were our forefathers….fore mothers etc
Yes, foxfier, read about the consequences to the 10 year old principal at the Black Dinner, including another savage murder and establishing his family as unchallenged Kings of Scotland, and later England too, for 200 years.
You might have to revise your ideas about modern and ancient consequences.
The Black Dinner is most likely a myth:
http://iainthepict.blogspot.com/2011/11/earl-of-douglas-and-black-dinner.html
Scottish “history”, the further back one goes, is a tangle of fact and embroidery by balladeers and clan mendacity.
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For those curious, Shamus Young’s website, has an entertaining ongoing nit-picking article series on Game of Thrones. Quote of the day from there:
Yes a lot of filth and violence and sex. However as a woman the sex scenes to me are porno but I flip over them (we have the DVDs). It seems to me that the earth was like this in pre Christian times. Germany,France and England not to mention Rome sacrificed live children and babies to gods. Barbarians pillaged villages and raped the women. You only have to read about sone I’d the earlier saints( who by they way we’re martyred by the countrymen in horrible ways) much like the characters in this series. As late as the 16th century priests were drawn and quartered in Nerry Old Engkand. The Aztechs murdered babies, and may gave still fine this if not for Our Lady if Guadalupe. This is not my favorite series, but the acting is superb and there are “gotcha” moments. So yes, I will still watch this as its not an occasion if sin for me compared to some of the risqué movies out today with no plot but plenty of violence and sex. History shouldn’t be looked at with rose tinted glasses. Attila the Hun could very well have been one of these characters as well as Nero ( the boy king resembled him in sadistic behavior and cruelty). By the way I’m 73 years old and know the cruelty if men in the last war via concentration camps and gassing. Some things never change.
Why is major league baseball inviting fans to participate in this? I had no idea what Game of Thrones even was.
We are what we watch, what we read, what we see, what we hear. Those who thrive on watching violent porn need to admit to the darkness within themselves. What I have noticed is that those who are following the Lord, would never watch this filth and those who don’t, well, they gravitate to things the enemy brings them to. Something to think about.
*sigh* Wish that I was getting dang emails for new comments….
Yes, I *HAVE* heard various stories that hinge on violating hospitality where a host kills a guest or guests. It’s a pretty standard way to establish a group as really evil. That is, in fact, one of the things I was thinking of for being able to find similar events in history.
Even if it were not a legend, that doesn’t answer the actual argument I made.
Deblette, I agree with your statement. We are what we watch, read, listen to . . . Kind of scary to think of how many people are “Game of Thrones” on the inside.