1 00:00:03,980 --> 00:00:07,459 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So I'm just going to get up slides for our next speaker. 2 00:00:07,460 --> 00:00:12,030 Who. Doesn't need no introduction because it's Caroline. 3 00:00:12,030 --> 00:00:17,669 Professor Caroline Harrington, who obviously is one of the co-organizers and developers of this summer school, 4 00:00:17,670 --> 00:00:23,190 and Caroline is going to pick up on George Martin's Song of Ice and Fire. 5 00:00:23,490 --> 00:00:26,940 Thank you very much. Um, yeah. Uh. 6 00:00:28,300 --> 00:00:32,700 Actually, I'm not going to talk all that much about George R.R. Martin here. 7 00:00:33,120 --> 00:00:46,470 Um, largely because A Song of Ice and Fire is something that was kind of bubbling along, something that a considerable community of, 8 00:00:47,070 --> 00:00:55,500 oh, I thought it was a forum, a considerable community of Martin readers who people who read his sci fi, his other fantasy work, 9 00:00:55,830 --> 00:01:04,380 and some other kind of quite niche fantasy readers were very keen of Song and Ice and Fire, but I'm going to confess I had never heard of it, 10 00:01:04,770 --> 00:01:12,990 and I'd never heard of George R.R. Martin till Game of Thrones came along, and it was Game of Thrones that hooked me into this universe. 11 00:01:13,770 --> 00:01:21,240 And I then went back and read the books. Uh, I still have hopes that there will be more books to read. 12 00:01:21,300 --> 00:01:25,980 Um, but when I interview George R.R. Martin here in Oxford last year, 13 00:01:26,010 --> 00:01:33,389 the one elephant in the room question that we were trying not only not to ask ourselves, 14 00:01:33,390 --> 00:01:39,360 but to prevent anyone in the audience from asking, was, what's happened to winds of Winter, George? 15 00:01:39,840 --> 00:01:43,560 Uh, we didn't quite get away with it, but he he made a joke about it, 16 00:01:43,710 --> 00:01:48,330 which nobody thought was very funny because they were all sitting there going, come on, George, come on. 17 00:01:49,560 --> 00:01:55,560 So what I really want to talk about in this talk is exactly what I say on the slides here. 18 00:01:55,830 --> 00:02:06,149 How the Game of Thrones change everything for big budget fantasy, and particularly how also why why Game of Thrones? 19 00:02:06,150 --> 00:02:11,549 Why was it such a massive success? And how could that be replicated? 20 00:02:11,550 --> 00:02:18,990 Might be one of the questions that if anybody in the room can come up with a recipe for how to produce the next Game of Thrones, 21 00:02:19,440 --> 00:02:22,770 um, we can all go to HBO and make ourselves rich. 22 00:02:24,360 --> 00:02:32,000 So, um. First of all, I'm going to come to some facts and figures about the show itself a bit later on. 23 00:02:32,450 --> 00:02:35,479 Um, but I think one of the things that's quite interesting, 24 00:02:35,480 --> 00:02:45,440 and maybe here we have to go back to the pre-COVID world of the show, when it was in its heyday from 2011 to 2019. 25 00:02:45,860 --> 00:02:55,100 Though it's also important to remember that during the pandemic, a whole new audience trapped at home suddenly found they had 70 hours of free time, 26 00:02:55,370 --> 00:02:59,270 and they all started watching Game of Thrones thinking like, this is my chance. 27 00:03:00,200 --> 00:03:06,140 But it's important, I think, to remind ourselves of what a huge cultural phenomenon it was back then. 28 00:03:06,620 --> 00:03:15,349 Um, it. McShane here, who was cast as brother Ray in seasons six seven, I think it was now. 29 00:03:15,350 --> 00:03:22,940 Maybe it was six. Um, word got out that he'd been cast and he said, yeah, but I'm only in one episode. 30 00:03:22,940 --> 00:03:27,560 And everybody went, wow. Spoiler. Spoiler alert. And then he said, but yeah, this. 31 00:03:28,370 --> 00:03:29,650 Well, what's the big fuss here? 32 00:03:29,660 --> 00:03:38,630 It's only [INAUDIBLE] and dragons, which is possibly not what will be great for a title for a collection of essays on, um, Game of Thrones. 33 00:03:38,930 --> 00:03:42,020 But everybody said, no, no, it's so much more of that. 34 00:03:43,190 --> 00:03:47,840 Um, and that raises the question kind of, was it the [INAUDIBLE] and dragons that sold the show? 35 00:03:47,870 --> 00:03:53,450 Was it the sex? Uh, which was particularly, um. 36 00:03:54,520 --> 00:04:02,409 I was going to say in your face, but perhaps that's not quite the right phrase. Well, just particularly in the early seasons, there was a lot of sex. 37 00:04:02,410 --> 00:04:11,290 There's a lot of sexual violence. There was famously sex possession where Little Finger did the huge info dump 38 00:04:11,290 --> 00:04:15,640 about his history while a couple of prostitutes are cavorting in the foreground. 39 00:04:15,650 --> 00:04:22,090 So if you weren't that interested in what he was talking about, at least the male gaze had something to look at. 40 00:04:22,990 --> 00:04:32,200 And it's also important here, too, I think, to, uh, register the term HBO effect, which is something that media theorists would come up with. 41 00:04:32,740 --> 00:04:40,299 Uh, US terrestrial TV doesn't allow anything like the amounts of sex and violence or maybe violence, 42 00:04:40,300 --> 00:04:44,379 but certainly not the amount of sex that you can have after the watershed in Britain. 43 00:04:44,380 --> 00:04:45,910 No, more generally in Europe. 44 00:04:46,720 --> 00:04:59,620 Uh, but HBO was a kind of pioneer among cable, um, organisations to pull in audiences by showing stuff you couldn't get on US terrestrial TV. 45 00:04:59,890 --> 00:05:07,090 Um, this has been known as the HBO effect. So the show was about all those watchers. 46 00:05:07,240 --> 00:05:13,660 Um, but also it was a huge transmedia franchise as well, which as we know, is still rolling. 47 00:05:13,660 --> 00:05:16,750 Um, so it was video games. 48 00:05:16,750 --> 00:05:25,239 It was merchandise. Um, still, I don't spend a lot of time in duty free in Heathrow, but when I'm passing through, 49 00:05:25,240 --> 00:05:28,840 I just check whether they're still selling Game of Thrones whiskies there. 50 00:05:29,350 --> 00:05:35,889 And they do. And actually, interestingly, a not very scientific sample tells me that it's the dragons. 51 00:05:35,890 --> 00:05:38,410 It's the tall carrion whisky that sells out. 52 00:05:39,280 --> 00:05:45,520 Um, I don't know if it's a taste issue, but I think it probably has something to do with the, the, uh, of the Dragons. 53 00:05:45,730 --> 00:05:49,510 Um, possibly since they're it's the nearest it's whisky in effect. 54 00:05:49,510 --> 00:05:54,409 Maybe some [INAUDIBLE] come into it as well. Um, we have wikis. 55 00:05:54,410 --> 00:05:58,490 We have the invaluable wiki of Ice of Fire and the Game of Thrones wiki. 56 00:05:58,820 --> 00:06:03,590 We have fan sites, we have comic cons, and we have YouTube channels as well. 57 00:06:05,710 --> 00:06:10,770 So some basic facts about Game of Thrones. We had 73 episodes. 58 00:06:10,780 --> 00:06:17,220 There were 566 characters. It ran for 69 hours and 26 minutes. 59 00:06:17,230 --> 00:06:22,600 And when I was doing some book tours with my first book on Game of Thrones, Winter is coming. 60 00:06:23,130 --> 00:06:28,420 Uh, a lot of enthusiastic people would say to me, oh, I haven't watched it, but it sounds marvellous. 61 00:06:28,840 --> 00:06:37,780 And I would say that 70 hours out of your life, anyone who's under 40 would then say, yeah, I can do that in a weekend. 62 00:06:38,200 --> 00:06:43,600 And anyone who is over 40 would say, life is too short. So but then the pandemic came along. 63 00:06:44,580 --> 00:06:48,510 The total show budget, as you can see, was $1.5 billion. 64 00:06:49,050 --> 00:06:52,830 The cost to HBO for each viewer. 65 00:06:53,850 --> 00:06:56,400 For the whole show was $30.90. 66 00:06:56,730 --> 00:07:08,550 That's pretty cheap for those eyeballs to be looking at the advertisements that were cropping up during the show and, crucially, bookending it. 67 00:07:09,120 --> 00:07:12,839 And you can see they made 3.1 billion. 68 00:07:12,840 --> 00:07:17,010 So they more that they almost. Yeah, they more than doubled their money. 69 00:07:17,700 --> 00:07:23,280 And these two figures for HBO is very hard to capture more global figures for, for it. 70 00:07:24,470 --> 00:07:30,350 So it started off, and if you watched the show, you remember what the first season looked like. 71 00:07:30,350 --> 00:07:34,070 And this is what you get for $6 million per episode. 72 00:07:34,560 --> 00:07:40,820 Um, that's denarius with the Dothraki riding through the Northern Irish countryside. 73 00:07:41,270 --> 00:07:48,110 Um, so the 50 men and the dog somewhere, and they all look pretty miserable because it's probably raining. 74 00:07:49,050 --> 00:07:56,100 When you got $15 million per episode in season eight, you got loads more Rocky. 75 00:07:56,400 --> 00:08:00,180 We're in Morocco, so everybody's quite a lot warmer and quite a lot happier. 76 00:08:00,480 --> 00:08:04,410 But also there's loads more CGI present here, 77 00:08:04,770 --> 00:08:11,040 and you can probably see those white horses that we've got in the foreground sort of recurring in the background as well. 78 00:08:11,880 --> 00:08:20,400 So the show is broadcast in 207 countries, and the 194 of those countries were broadcasting on simulcast. 79 00:08:20,400 --> 00:08:28,950 That is, they were showing it for the first time at the same time, 9:00 US Pacific Coast time. 80 00:08:29,550 --> 00:08:40,980 So people who were in Europe were having to get set up or stay up at 2:00 in the morning for those watch shows, 2:00 in the morning here in Oxford. 81 00:08:41,220 --> 00:08:46,530 Um, I wasn't stupid enough to do that, but there were many people who were 3:00 in the morning in Europe, 82 00:08:46,800 --> 00:08:53,640 and already by the next morning you would have commentary appearing online of what people thought about the episode. 83 00:08:54,360 --> 00:08:59,310 So US average figures for season seven were 32.8 million. 84 00:08:59,880 --> 00:09:05,940 Um estimated 140 million per episode of illegal downloads for season seven. 85 00:09:07,380 --> 00:09:13,170 Again, these are U.S. figures because you just can't capture what was going on globally, 86 00:09:13,170 --> 00:09:18,630 particularly the number of people who are watching commonly or recording or watching it again later and so on. 87 00:09:20,180 --> 00:09:25,870 So. Well, Game of Thrones really, I think, brought into the real world. 88 00:09:25,870 --> 00:09:35,980 And it's one of those things that we have to, um, think about when we think about whether fantasy is escapism versus is fantasy world changing? 89 00:09:36,370 --> 00:09:45,939 And, um. I did a little bit of research to find out whether it's world changing in the the sense that matters in a capitalist world, 90 00:09:45,940 --> 00:09:53,590 and that is, does it make money for other people as well as for HBO and for the, um, merchandise people and so on. 91 00:09:54,700 --> 00:10:00,279 And I came up with these, uh, figures again, they're a bit out of date because I had to do this research, 92 00:10:00,280 --> 00:10:04,180 um, when Game of Thrones was still kind of hot, as it were. 93 00:10:05,620 --> 00:10:17,950 £250 million. The Northern Ireland economy and the Northern Irish government gave them £15.95 million to subsidise the production. 94 00:10:18,460 --> 00:10:21,930 Um, that was a good investment for Northern Ireland. 95 00:10:21,940 --> 00:10:26,500 It has to be said. The Game of Thrones tours industry is still going strong there. 96 00:10:27,080 --> 00:10:34,510 Um, this at the top is the Game of Thrones tapestry, which is on display in the uh, Belfast Museum. 97 00:10:35,080 --> 00:10:42,399 And it has there's a dedicated team of embroiderers who would watch every episode, 98 00:10:42,400 --> 00:10:47,290 and within a week would have a little summary of that episode up in the panel. 99 00:10:48,760 --> 00:10:54,200 Uh. And it shows. The whole thing from start to finish. 100 00:10:54,200 --> 00:10:56,330 And it's beautifully basically done. 101 00:10:56,930 --> 00:11:06,680 So, um, back again in 2019, you had 350,000 people going to Northern Ireland per year to do Game of Thrones related activity. 102 00:11:07,280 --> 00:11:11,630 So ongoing, £30 million a year for the tourism sector. 103 00:11:12,530 --> 00:11:16,849 Uh, Dubrovnik also saw an increase in tourism. 104 00:11:16,850 --> 00:11:20,240 Not necessarily welcome in the case of Dubrovnik. 105 00:11:20,570 --> 00:11:25,250 Um, they already had a very, um, strong tourist industry with the cruise traffic. 106 00:11:26,150 --> 00:11:31,160 I'm getting a lot of Game of Thrones enthusiasts kind of clog the streets even more, perhaps. 107 00:11:31,850 --> 00:11:40,580 Um, in Iceland, the visitor numbers went up, as you can see in this staggering way between 2009 and 2018. 108 00:11:40,940 --> 00:11:47,870 Again, the sampling wasn't possible to find out how many of those people had gone to Iceland for Game of Thrones. 109 00:11:48,290 --> 00:11:51,380 Um, you can see there that I'm being stopped by a wildling. 110 00:11:52,010 --> 00:12:02,090 Um, just at the the waterfall where, um, Drogon kills the child and when he's out hunting goats. 111 00:12:02,720 --> 00:12:06,170 Um, Game of Thrones tours are still going on in Iceland. 112 00:12:06,170 --> 00:12:14,240 I was quite surprised to learn from some guides last week when I was asking them whether Game of Thrones was still so popular, and it seems it is. 113 00:12:16,120 --> 00:12:19,780 And then, um. This took a long time to get going. 114 00:12:19,870 --> 00:12:25,030 Game of Thrones studio tour. But there it is. The latest investment from Northern Ireland here. 115 00:12:26,860 --> 00:12:31,660 But why? What was it about Game of Thrones that was so popular? 116 00:12:31,780 --> 00:12:35,560 Why did it have this social media following you? 117 00:12:35,710 --> 00:12:41,020 You probably can't read these tweets here, and I can hardly read them myself. 118 00:12:41,020 --> 00:12:48,819 But one of them says, uh, as regards the the Red wedding, I'm having an anxiety attack over pretend people. 119 00:12:48,820 --> 00:12:52,149 My mom says Game of Thrones has broken me. 120 00:12:52,150 --> 00:12:57,760 I'm now so listen dead inside in bed sobbing cause Game of Thrones. 121 00:12:57,760 --> 00:13:00,760 So that's the the person with the very smudged mascara there. 122 00:13:01,840 --> 00:13:07,330 So it was. These were responses largely to major plot twists, which, if you hadn't read the book, 123 00:13:07,570 --> 00:13:12,820 you didn't know were coming up, the execution of Ned Stark, for a start. 124 00:13:12,820 --> 00:13:17,500 I think, um, for me, I hadn't read the books at the point when I saw that. 125 00:13:17,500 --> 00:13:20,680 So I was among those people. I wasn't sobbing, but I was going. 126 00:13:21,520 --> 00:13:30,550 I did not see that coming because I believed in in the kind of plot armour that turned up in some of the later seasons, but not at this point. 127 00:13:30,850 --> 00:13:39,640 Then we had the Red wedding, then we had the death of Joffrey. All of these were kind of major hoax to attract fan emotion, fan comment, fan debate. 128 00:13:41,410 --> 00:13:41,860 So. 129 00:13:43,950 --> 00:13:54,390 One of the things, I think, which contributed to Game of Thrones success was this very strongly imagined medieval social and historical background. 130 00:13:55,110 --> 00:14:01,919 Uh, Martin was a journalism major when he studied, but he was a he did a history minor. 131 00:14:01,920 --> 00:14:06,720 And he's always been fascinated by history, particularly medieval history. 132 00:14:07,320 --> 00:14:15,209 He also read an early stage, the series later moved by Morris to go on, um, The Accursed Kings. 133 00:14:15,210 --> 00:14:25,320 And in fact, when they were reprinted in translation by Harpercollins, his publisher, uh, Martin blurbed them very enthusiastically. 134 00:14:25,650 --> 00:14:30,090 If you like. If you like Game of Thrones, you will love the accursed kings. 135 00:14:30,480 --> 00:14:40,950 And he took quite a lot from that that series. So unlike Tolkien, and as we've heard before, this is the kind of question about Aragorn's tax policy. 136 00:14:41,580 --> 00:14:45,690 Uh, as we were hearing, um, earlier, nobody much cares. 137 00:14:45,690 --> 00:14:51,509 Probably Tolkien certainly didn't care about Aragorn's tax policy, but Martin does. 138 00:14:51,510 --> 00:14:54,750 And that's why the world is so. 139 00:14:55,810 --> 00:15:00,040 Strongly built, at least in a number of kingdoms. 140 00:15:00,700 --> 00:15:05,020 You have some of those places in Athos yet, for example. 141 00:15:05,380 --> 00:15:11,480 Or a kingdom whose? Whose name I forgot. But the main thing is they worship a black goat there. 142 00:15:11,500 --> 00:15:16,300 And you can see at that point most of the kind of run out of of ways of characterising. 143 00:15:17,340 --> 00:15:20,820 So the medieval why the medieval is a question. 144 00:15:20,940 --> 00:15:25,920 Um, because Tolkien is usually one answer to that. 145 00:15:26,250 --> 00:15:34,620 But it's also, I think, because we know a lot about the medieval society says there's considerable popular interest in the medieval, 146 00:15:34,890 --> 00:15:41,580 but also people don't know a whole lot about it unless the medievalist who sit and watch and get cross about things. 147 00:15:42,150 --> 00:15:47,070 Um, its image is multiple, fragmentary and visually unclear. 148 00:15:47,550 --> 00:15:58,140 And we also have this idea that the medieval period was a time when which was particularly brutal, um, particularly sexualised in some ways. 149 00:15:58,420 --> 00:16:05,400 Taboo images and actions, particularly around the body and what might be done to it, or how it might be displayed. 150 00:16:06,330 --> 00:16:13,790 And Helen, who's speaking later today, says that this kind of fantasy is marked by low levels of magic. 151 00:16:13,800 --> 00:16:20,460 And it's striking, perhaps, that we don't get the dragons until the very end of the first season of Game of Thrones. 152 00:16:21,000 --> 00:16:26,460 High levels of violence, in-depth character and character development, and medieval lists. 153 00:16:26,490 --> 00:16:29,670 World that have plenty of rain, blood and mud. 154 00:16:30,030 --> 00:16:39,419 So the medieval is familiar, is unfamiliar, but it's not too unfamiliar because we already know what castles are, what knights are, um. 155 00:16:39,420 --> 00:16:46,290 How medieval society works. Got an idea about feudalism, and that takes quite a lot of worldbuilding work. 156 00:16:47,460 --> 00:16:53,250 Um, so we have all these institutions from medieval society. 157 00:16:53,280 --> 00:16:59,159 We have, for example, the Knights watch who look pretty much like the Crusaders, 158 00:16:59,160 --> 00:17:05,310 who were trying to bring Christianity to northern Europe, to Lithuania, something like the Teutonic Knights. 159 00:17:06,090 --> 00:17:12,210 Um, we have the sparrows who are kind of weird cross between mendicant orders like, 160 00:17:12,270 --> 00:17:16,800 um, the Franciscans, but also suddenly turning into the Inquisition. 161 00:17:17,550 --> 00:17:21,450 In about season five, we have the, um, Bank of Braavos, 162 00:17:21,840 --> 00:17:30,630 which in some ways looks and it's been argued that this looks like the development of an early modern banking system and cash economy. 163 00:17:30,870 --> 00:17:38,220 But the free Cities are a place where the Renaissance has kind of already happened, at least the Italian Renaissance. 164 00:17:38,640 --> 00:17:45,930 Um, but we have to remember that the banking system developed in Italy, um, already in the 14th century, 165 00:17:46,230 --> 00:17:51,120 and they were lending vast amounts of money to the English crown for their endless wars, 166 00:17:51,330 --> 00:17:57,450 kind of like Westeros having to go with a begging bowl to fund the War of the Five Kings. 167 00:17:58,440 --> 00:18:02,840 And we also have the institution of slavery and this rather difficult, um, 168 00:18:03,000 --> 00:18:10,530 white saviour complex that we see with denarius as the, the liberator of the slave city is in essence. 169 00:18:11,480 --> 00:18:19,370 And one of the most interesting single things I think, that's been written on Game of Thrones is this, um, piece. 170 00:18:19,370 --> 00:18:23,810 By saying that to affect change in Scientific American, 171 00:18:24,410 --> 00:18:31,220 and if you want to know the real reason why fans hate the last season of Game of Thrones, you might have many reasons of your own. 172 00:18:31,730 --> 00:18:36,110 But, uh, uh, two factories argument is essentially that. 173 00:18:37,140 --> 00:18:41,760 Up until season five. This is a world that is densely imagined. 174 00:18:42,090 --> 00:18:44,370 It's a world with these institutions. 175 00:18:44,370 --> 00:18:54,210 It has houses, it has banks, it has nights watch and so on, all of which affect and indeed kind of condition and constrict people's lives. 176 00:18:55,540 --> 00:19:02,050 And if you live in King's Landing and you're poor, you have very, very few life choices. 177 00:19:02,620 --> 00:19:10,099 If you're a member of, um, of the Lannister house, you also have pretty constricted life choices. 178 00:19:10,100 --> 00:19:15,910 So your life is probably quite a lot nicer. And so says to factory. 179 00:19:16,450 --> 00:19:25,690 The problem with the end of Game of Thrones is that, as George R.R. Martin's notes began to dry up and disappear as to what was happening, 180 00:19:26,140 --> 00:19:32,770 and partly because the the showrunners had their sights fixed on a Star Wars. 181 00:19:33,820 --> 00:19:41,860 Gig. Everything speeded up and they had to constrict and to, um, compress those storylines. 182 00:19:41,860 --> 00:19:46,160 They had to get rid of a whole lot of characters who they weren't interested in. 183 00:19:46,180 --> 00:19:51,100 Dawn went out to the window, and from this richly imagined, 184 00:19:51,790 --> 00:19:58,480 deeply thought through characterisation of people who are responding to these institutions, 185 00:19:59,350 --> 00:20:08,230 it went straight back to the Hollywood cliche of the hero's journey they're all going off to find themselves or get killed, obviously. 186 00:20:08,440 --> 00:20:12,490 Um, you had redemptive arcs. Um, you have failed redemptive arcs. 187 00:20:12,910 --> 00:20:16,480 You had a few people getting killed, but possibly not enough. 188 00:20:16,990 --> 00:20:22,780 Um, and then you have an ending which was unsatisfactory in all kinds of ways. 189 00:20:22,780 --> 00:20:35,849 I think we can now say. So this is just to remind us of the the scale of the medieval, um, world and the in some ways slightly early modern world, 190 00:20:35,850 --> 00:20:41,880 but also the pre medieval world that Martin and the showrunners built between them. 191 00:20:42,240 --> 00:20:52,830 You have the, the North, um, which in a sense looks quite like Anglo-Saxon England has a different social system from King's Landing, 192 00:20:52,830 --> 00:20:59,670 which is a late medieval, um, European court, very much like like the court in London in the 14th century, 193 00:21:00,000 --> 00:21:06,600 though with some obvious, um, omissions, like there's no civil service, no bureaucracy, 194 00:21:06,600 --> 00:21:12,330 there's only the small council and weirdly, no lawyers, which I always think is interesting. 195 00:21:12,600 --> 00:21:20,190 You've got the Dothraki being very much like the Mongols, but also, says Martin, with an input from Native American culture. 196 00:21:20,700 --> 00:21:28,170 And you've got Maureen as, uh, a kind of orientalist fantasy of of the Near East. 197 00:21:31,360 --> 00:21:34,540 We also have to remember when we're thinking about how. 198 00:21:35,940 --> 00:21:37,710 Game of Thrones was put together. 199 00:21:37,950 --> 00:21:46,410 And that's something I mentioned on the first day, is that people creating these worlds are not only reading medieval sources, 200 00:21:46,860 --> 00:21:53,790 but primarily, perhaps reading other people's takes on medieval sources. 201 00:21:54,210 --> 00:22:02,490 And so when I first came across, um, the detail in the books, we didn't get this in the show for fairly obvious reasons. 202 00:22:02,790 --> 00:22:06,810 But in the books, we're told that Balon Greyjoy in his youth, 203 00:22:06,990 --> 00:22:16,770 could run along the shores of a long ship being rowed at full tilt and not lose his balance, which is a pretty neat thing to be able to do. 204 00:22:16,980 --> 00:22:24,809 I was impressed by the way that George R.R. Martin had obviously been reading the The Saga of Ola Patrick Wilson in Old Norse, 205 00:22:24,810 --> 00:22:32,270 and I thought, because this is something Ola Patrick Wilson could do, and I thought, this is this is pretty recondite reading from Martin. 206 00:22:32,790 --> 00:22:37,890 And then, of course, I realised it just came straight from the 1958 Vikings movie. 207 00:22:38,460 --> 00:22:44,340 And you can see there Kirk Douglas actually doing this stunt, uh, in a Norwegian field. 208 00:22:44,550 --> 00:22:48,290 I'm not sure how much vigorous rowing is going on here. 209 00:22:48,290 --> 00:22:52,890 It looks to me like, well, actually there is some movement in that back or so. 210 00:22:53,130 --> 00:22:57,720 Perhaps they're rowing reasonably slowly, but that's Kirk Douglas tossing along there. 211 00:22:58,170 --> 00:23:07,850 And so Carol Robinson and Pamela Clements, um, in a useful study, talk about the way that what we can call neo medievalism, 212 00:23:07,850 --> 00:23:17,460 more kind of postmodern medievalism is not only feeding on the medieval past, but also on earlier iterations of medievalism itself. 213 00:23:17,790 --> 00:23:23,580 And medievalism was fully aware and celebratory of the constructed nature of its worlds. 214 00:23:24,510 --> 00:23:34,379 And that will feed into questions. I think this was raised earlier yesterday at some point as to whether Game of Thrones is history and 215 00:23:34,380 --> 00:23:41,160 whether it's medieval ness and whether the the more outrageous things that happen can be defended by. 216 00:23:41,310 --> 00:23:45,510 Well, back in the medieval period, all sorts of awful things happened. 217 00:23:46,080 --> 00:23:53,100 So it's entirely licit to have sexual assault, horrible violence, torture and so on, or it's all made up. 218 00:23:53,940 --> 00:23:54,810 There are dragons. 219 00:23:55,080 --> 00:24:05,310 So when historians start complaining about the fact that you would not normally have a noble woman treated in the way that Sansa was by anybody, 220 00:24:06,240 --> 00:24:10,049 um, the showrunners could say, yeah, but there are dragons. 221 00:24:10,050 --> 00:24:13,560 So this is all made up and we don't really care about historical accuracy. 222 00:24:15,860 --> 00:24:26,330 So another thing I think, which worked in Game of Thrones favour, was that it encompassed as epic fantasy does a whole load of genres. 223 00:24:26,570 --> 00:24:34,400 It's primarily a buildings romance. It's a story about these young people and how they grow up, how they mature, 224 00:24:34,820 --> 00:24:42,260 how they become not their parents, and an important kind of point of identification. 225 00:24:42,980 --> 00:24:48,680 The characters points of view are distributed along with quite a lot of other point of view characters. 226 00:24:49,040 --> 00:24:54,440 So we follow their stories, and we also follow the stories of a whole lot of other people as well. 227 00:24:55,370 --> 00:25:01,429 And that means that if you're tired of one storyline, you don't have to worry because another one will be along in five minutes. 228 00:25:01,430 --> 00:25:07,010 You can go and make a cup of tea if you don't want to see any more of what's going on in Dorne, for example. 229 00:25:08,170 --> 00:25:12,630 But as well as the buildings were, man, we have things like the buddy movie. 230 00:25:12,640 --> 00:25:21,610 If we think of those road trips of Aria in The Hound, for example, or Jamie and Bron wondering about, 231 00:25:22,000 --> 00:25:27,010 um, trying to do something often quite pointless as far as the text is concerned. 232 00:25:27,310 --> 00:25:32,560 Or you have that kind of magnificent seven expedition where they all go up to the north to catch 233 00:25:32,560 --> 00:25:39,100 a white for for reasons that are not really terribly clear to the work out to persuade Cersei. 234 00:25:39,700 --> 00:25:53,229 Um, we have a bit of a kind of romantic foot with that romantic thing going on, perhaps with, um, uh, Rob and whatever her name is in the show, 235 00:25:53,230 --> 00:26:01,090 which have completely forgotten because it's different in the books, and they have a very cute meeting and it's love and so and then book Red wedding. 236 00:26:01,090 --> 00:26:06,700 So that's the end of that. Um, and we also have, uh, Brienne and Jamie. 237 00:26:06,700 --> 00:26:12,909 But let's, let's not talk any further about that. But we do have, um, some of that going on. 238 00:26:12,910 --> 00:26:18,160 We have a great. And John, of course, perhaps the the classic tragic, uh, story arc there. 239 00:26:18,700 --> 00:26:23,410 Um, we have a basic detective fiction who killed John Aaron. 240 00:26:23,560 --> 00:26:29,110 Um, can we even remember? This is important by the time it's solved in season four? 241 00:26:29,290 --> 00:26:39,580 Well, kind of, because, um, when Littlefinger explains that he's been conspiring with Lisa in the area, a lot of things suddenly drop into place. 242 00:26:40,620 --> 00:26:43,620 And then you have some amazing battle scenes too. 243 00:26:44,100 --> 00:26:52,920 Um, you have this kind of epic sweep. And you have also some quite highly comic moments as well, but many of which are involving Tyrion. 244 00:26:53,130 --> 00:26:56,610 So it's not all the Grand high epic storyline. 245 00:26:57,090 --> 00:27:00,470 Um, Martin learned from Tolkien. 246 00:27:00,480 --> 00:27:05,250 I think that you have to leaven all of this with some light relief. 247 00:27:06,990 --> 00:27:10,950 So what Martin and what what Martin was doing. 248 00:27:10,950 --> 00:27:20,940 And I think what the showrunners were even more conscious of to a certain extent, was that they had to update the tropes that they found in Tolkien. 249 00:27:24,400 --> 00:27:32,469 The, uh, Martin and the showrunners knew that you multiple heroes works really well because you can have a larger world. 250 00:27:32,470 --> 00:27:41,410 You can have different adventures going on in different places. But with all due respect to the professor, you need more women doing stuff. 251 00:27:41,860 --> 00:27:47,740 And they can't just be damsels in distress or healers who one dream from time to time, 252 00:27:48,190 --> 00:27:54,580 or even you need some fighting women like Brienne, and you need some at the centre of the story. 253 00:27:55,850 --> 00:28:01,339 Um, so he the show has these parallel story structures and interlace. 254 00:28:01,340 --> 00:28:05,870 You have some kind of repetition of of some of the storylines coming through again. 255 00:28:06,530 --> 00:28:15,139 Um, you have queering, um, you have inclusivity, you have more characters of, of colour. 256 00:28:15,140 --> 00:28:21,320 So it's got to be said that mostly the actors of colour were unhappy, but probably quite happy. 257 00:28:21,320 --> 00:28:25,220 Moroccan extras running around being joyful slaves. 258 00:28:25,940 --> 00:28:33,950 Um, but it's also important to note, I think, that the the romance between Missandei and Grey Worm isn't something we get in the book at all, 259 00:28:34,340 --> 00:28:43,280 and in the show they get okay, not not the most fully fleshed out storyline, but they do get the story of their own. 260 00:28:43,310 --> 00:28:50,120 So there's some thinking about those issues there. And you have me with his hand cut off, of course. 261 00:28:50,450 --> 00:28:55,070 And he struggles to come to terms with with living with that sort of disability. 262 00:28:55,380 --> 00:28:58,290 You have a unit, you have a dwarf, you have, 263 00:28:58,310 --> 00:29:09,200 and a dwarf who's not really being played for comic effects as you as tends to be the case with the grumpy dwarves of other types of fantasy. 264 00:29:09,620 --> 00:29:19,850 And then, as Megan was just sort of pointing out, you had this possibility of a very strong relationship and being being, um. 265 00:29:21,350 --> 00:29:25,489 Hinted that there between Yara and Denarius, 266 00:29:25,490 --> 00:29:31,040 and there's a lot of excitement when there's this kind of frisson when they meet and they hold hands too long. 267 00:29:31,290 --> 00:29:33,440 Woo! Is there something good to happen there? 268 00:29:33,800 --> 00:29:43,160 Uh, it didn't, but it's kind of a classic fanfic moment that that's a possibility, but that fans could go off and elaborate a bit. 269 00:29:46,810 --> 00:29:53,650 What was it all about? Well, it was about power, fundamentally, and the struggle for the Iron Throne. 270 00:29:53,680 --> 00:29:55,780 You can see that the the one true, 271 00:29:55,780 --> 00:30:04,420 worthy rumour that the Iron Throne managed to find this in the pub in Northern Ireland and assume my rightful place on it there. 272 00:30:04,960 --> 00:30:14,620 Um, you can see also that the kraken's with stake some kind of claim, because there's the Greyjoy banner behind it was about identity. 273 00:30:14,620 --> 00:30:22,840 And that's the the point in this episode, the buildings woman is finding yourself and forging a new kind of identity, 274 00:30:23,080 --> 00:30:30,840 not only in terms of the normal processes of growing up, but by responding to all the things that happened to you and Ari. 275 00:30:30,880 --> 00:30:38,830 A storyline, I think, is a case in point, that the kind of great learning curve and the acquisition of skills that that forms her story. 276 00:30:39,610 --> 00:30:45,819 It's about family and particularly the strength of the bond between the SoC siblings. 277 00:30:45,820 --> 00:30:49,420 They're looking, um, really unusually cheerful, except for Bran. 278 00:30:49,450 --> 00:30:55,239 Of course, who I don't think ever cracks a smile after he falls in the towel. 279 00:30:55,240 --> 00:31:00,880 Possibly. Um, so all the rest of them are grinning cheerfully, but Bran is not having any of that. 280 00:31:01,660 --> 00:31:07,030 Um. So these are important things and I think this is part of the appeal. 281 00:31:07,030 --> 00:31:16,480 In fact, a lot of the appeal of the show on the kind of global scale that everybody is interested in how political power works. 282 00:31:17,400 --> 00:31:20,820 Do we have a ruling class? Who cares about the masses? 283 00:31:21,180 --> 00:31:25,730 And we have a marvellous moment in season. Two. 284 00:31:25,750 --> 00:31:31,420 I think it is a little thing that says, okay, the Riverlands are upset. 285 00:31:31,420 --> 00:31:34,749 There's more in the river lives, there's no food coming to the capital. 286 00:31:34,750 --> 00:31:36,640 But yeah, yeah. So a few more people died. 287 00:31:37,450 --> 00:31:46,120 And then we have Marjorie, who goes out giving distributing alms to the poor in a very ostentatious and performative way. 288 00:31:46,420 --> 00:31:52,180 This is not the first time we've seen any members of the ruling class care about the the proletariat. 289 00:31:52,660 --> 00:31:59,440 So people are interested in power and how it's transferred from one set of people to another. 290 00:31:59,890 --> 00:32:02,350 They're interested in identity. Of course. 291 00:32:02,350 --> 00:32:10,240 Everybody is interested in how you become the person that you are, and everybody is interested in how the family works. 292 00:32:10,750 --> 00:32:18,100 Um, some scholars have suggested that obsession with the family is particularly in American interest. 293 00:32:18,100 --> 00:32:22,120 If you think about many of the great HBO shows, um, 294 00:32:22,120 --> 00:32:29,609 The Sopranos is kind of a case in point that you've got the power struggles going on in one place, but you've also got the family relationships. 295 00:32:29,610 --> 00:32:34,990 So it kind of uncooked, um, the, uh, the key family together. 296 00:32:35,890 --> 00:32:43,150 Um, what happens to the family in the show turns out to be very interesting as as we'll see in a moment. 297 00:32:43,690 --> 00:32:49,450 Um, but nevertheless, across the world, people live with, um, parents, like, 298 00:32:49,510 --> 00:32:55,120 um, Tywin Lannister, if they're really unlucky or nice parents like Ned Stark, 299 00:32:55,390 --> 00:33:01,150 who then disappear, or difficult mothers like Cersei, um, 300 00:33:01,150 --> 00:33:09,340 or complicated sibling relationships like the ones that we have between Cersei and Jaime and Tyrion, for example. 301 00:33:09,580 --> 00:33:12,700 So all of this contributed to its popularity. 302 00:33:14,240 --> 00:33:24,230 Um, that's a kind of, uh, truism that the epic fantasy pretends to be about the past, but it's always really about us and what we're doing now. 303 00:33:24,440 --> 00:33:33,180 These are kind of alarming because they're from, um, the time when Game of Thrones was still being broadcast, but actually kind of alarmingly. 304 00:33:33,200 --> 00:33:39,140 Go ahead. Tell you, uh, tell me your name is much more relevant, perhaps, than it was. 305 00:33:39,170 --> 00:33:42,530 Um, but when the meme was created, um. 306 00:33:42,530 --> 00:33:45,950 Theresa may. Theresa may, you may remember, um. 307 00:33:47,660 --> 00:33:50,719 Not so long time a prime minister, but nevertheless, 308 00:33:50,720 --> 00:33:58,580 she did make this gesture that everybody absolutely loved at the Conservative Party conference in 2017. 309 00:33:58,580 --> 00:34:02,120 I think it was. And yeah, maybe there is some similarity there. 310 00:34:02,330 --> 00:34:06,620 If you haven't seen Winter is trumping this show. It's on YouTube. 311 00:34:06,950 --> 00:34:13,550 I think it's still up and it's it's terrifyingly worth having a look at, I would say. 312 00:34:14,780 --> 00:34:23,600 And lastly, we've got, um, Dean Erickson, her miserable, um, remaining Dothraki turning up at outside cough, 313 00:34:24,200 --> 00:34:28,370 uh, the, the the year that this was broadcast in season two time. 314 00:34:28,880 --> 00:34:35,420 Um, it was the kind of the height of the migrant crisis in Europe and those debates about who do we let in, 315 00:34:35,420 --> 00:34:41,809 who do we not let in with regard to, to Syria, um, became really crucial. 316 00:34:41,810 --> 00:34:49,670 And as you watch this and you watched the debates among the those sinister, blue lipped magicians in call, um, the show, 317 00:34:49,670 --> 00:34:56,210 I think, kind of unconsciously, but nevertheless was inviting people in Europe to think about what was going on. 318 00:34:56,450 --> 00:34:59,509 And that question, of course, of borders and porous. 319 00:34:59,510 --> 00:35:03,320 And this again, is even more, um, relevant today. 320 00:35:04,580 --> 00:35:10,340 And then there's the war, which I'm going to skip over for reasons of time, but I'll just say, um, 321 00:35:10,910 --> 00:35:17,600 Martin tells us the war was inspired by Hadrian's Wall, that to a wall is an awful lot bigger. 322 00:35:18,020 --> 00:35:24,049 And but what was really being was very much in Martin's mind, I think, 323 00:35:24,050 --> 00:35:28,879 when he invented the wall was that and he says about Hadrian's Wall is the Berlin Wall, 324 00:35:28,880 --> 00:35:38,810 which had only just come then as he began to write, um, as some advice and thought and the political implications of that. 325 00:35:38,810 --> 00:35:41,690 And what happens when you open the wall was, I think, 326 00:35:41,690 --> 00:35:48,590 much more on his mind than Hadrian's Wall and how effective it was keeping up Picts, Scots and monsters. 327 00:35:50,030 --> 00:35:53,359 So what did they achieve in narrative terms? 328 00:35:53,360 --> 00:36:01,550 By the time you get to the end of the story, well, we've got the re-establishment of a kind of new order. 329 00:36:02,090 --> 00:36:08,450 Um, but if we look at the the people wearing the, the small pencil, we've got Brienne, 330 00:36:08,510 --> 00:36:13,030 who thoroughly deserves, I think, to be captain of the Kingsguard. 331 00:36:13,640 --> 00:36:18,560 We've got Bronn, who I think is whose, uh, policy seems to be. 332 00:36:18,770 --> 00:36:25,700 Let's reopen all the brothels as quickly as possible. Uh, which I don't think is necessarily the best way forward. 333 00:36:25,940 --> 00:36:30,980 We've got, um, Daryl Davis Seaworth, who's also earned his place there. 334 00:36:31,370 --> 00:36:38,990 We've got some, um, who seems to who is a kind of interesting case they'll come back to in the moment. 335 00:36:39,350 --> 00:36:48,590 And then we've got Tyrion is handed the king. Um, we've got Bran wandering off to do a bit of scrying to find out what's happened to Drogon. 336 00:36:48,980 --> 00:36:54,440 I'm not confident the it's going to be the greatest king that Westeros has ever seen. 337 00:36:54,860 --> 00:37:00,799 Um, we've got a kind of deferral of the problem of political succession. 338 00:37:00,800 --> 00:37:04,070 Um, the, the fight between the different houses for power. 339 00:37:04,340 --> 00:37:07,700 Oh, now we have an elective kingship that will solve everything. 340 00:37:08,040 --> 00:37:12,040 I we even have to look at the history of Germany or the Holy Roman Empire. 341 00:37:12,320 --> 00:37:19,270 That's not necessarily the case. There's a great deal of mourning of what has been lost at this point. 342 00:37:19,780 --> 00:37:26,860 Um, poor John Snow is trudging off back north of the wall again, and we have the complete destruction, 343 00:37:26,870 --> 00:37:32,649 the horrifying destruction of King's Landing, which, in contrast, 344 00:37:32,650 --> 00:37:37,600 when Searcy blew up the great set by the beginning of the next season, 345 00:37:37,600 --> 00:37:45,970 nobody in King's Landing seemed to be bothered that their queen had unleashed this kind of huge bomb in the middle of the capital city. 346 00:37:46,420 --> 00:37:54,310 But we do have a sense of what warfare can do to a place and the people at the end of the show, I think. 347 00:37:54,670 --> 00:37:57,730 But interestingly, we don't have any weddings. 348 00:37:58,180 --> 00:38:06,430 Um, this, I think, is is striking when we think about the end of epic fantasy generally. 349 00:38:06,730 --> 00:38:12,820 Um. While talking was expected as part of his you catastrophe, I think, 350 00:38:13,150 --> 00:38:19,390 is at least when you have these different couples wandering around in the show that some of them would get together. 351 00:38:19,750 --> 00:38:24,310 But we can say Spencer is never going to get married again. That's for sure. 352 00:38:24,820 --> 00:38:29,410 I'm the only person who sees her, got happily married and saw through the family. 353 00:38:29,740 --> 00:38:37,870 It's Sam who has got together with Gilly, the wildling, and they've got a couple of children, Little Sam and the other one. 354 00:38:38,440 --> 00:38:48,430 Um, but I think I would guess at this point Sam appears to be a master, which means that he's kind of committed to celibacy and learning. 355 00:38:48,850 --> 00:38:50,320 Um, so Gilly is. 356 00:38:50,380 --> 00:38:57,430 I'd like to think she's living in the house in North Oxford, raising the children, and he's living in college and coming home for dinner occasionally. 357 00:38:57,430 --> 00:39:03,520 But I'm not too sure we have that family reunion among the stocks. 358 00:39:03,520 --> 00:39:09,520 At least they finally got all back together. Um, and then they go their separate ways again. 359 00:39:09,680 --> 00:39:12,850 Sansa's off to the North is going to discover America. 360 00:39:13,090 --> 00:39:18,100 Jon's going north to the wall. Um, planets wandering around looking vacant. 361 00:39:18,100 --> 00:39:28,749 So, um, that kind of great explosion of joy, which I think, um, Tolkien would have recognised there in the reunion, 362 00:39:28,750 --> 00:39:34,090 is this family that's been struggling to come together ever since. Season one doesn't really last. 363 00:39:34,480 --> 00:39:40,190 There's no return home. Um. Santa goes back to Winterfell. 364 00:39:40,490 --> 00:39:45,470 King's landing is in ruins. Those two very important places are not what they were. 365 00:39:45,500 --> 00:39:51,320 They're not the the homes that that in other than not the Shire, let's say. 366 00:39:51,780 --> 00:39:57,560 Um, even if the Shire is changed by the time, um, Bilbo and Frodo get back there. 367 00:39:57,980 --> 00:40:02,090 And so what we end up with and this, I think, meshes into, uh, 368 00:40:02,090 --> 00:40:11,810 to French's point about the the Hollywood journey of the hero story is that we end up with a kind of American frontier style individualism. 369 00:40:12,050 --> 00:40:17,120 They're all going it alone. They don't, in the end, need each other. 370 00:40:17,120 --> 00:40:20,990 Exactly. Santa is just going to rule the North, and that's that. 371 00:40:21,290 --> 00:40:23,120 Aria is going to command her crew. 372 00:40:24,050 --> 00:40:31,880 And even the small towns have got their own roles, their own agendas, and we can get a sense of kind of coming together to rebuild. 373 00:40:32,330 --> 00:40:37,310 Uh, but in a more positive note, we have some women in charge. 374 00:40:37,680 --> 00:40:41,360 Uh, the mothers, one of the lot has disappeared, fortunately. 375 00:40:41,360 --> 00:40:50,180 But I think Santa is probably going to make quite a good Queen of the North in particular, because in those final seasons, 376 00:40:50,870 --> 00:40:56,090 in contrast to what we had in some of the earlier seasons, some some things about logistics. 377 00:40:57,000 --> 00:41:01,800 When the dog, Raphael, turned up in Winterfell, he thinks, who's going to feed them? 378 00:41:02,430 --> 00:41:06,030 I don't think the showrunners thought that, um, because they're all CGI. 379 00:41:06,030 --> 00:41:11,219 So the elements are. Well. Um, but she's the one who's got a head on her shoulders. 380 00:41:11,220 --> 00:41:19,920 She's my girl, I couldn't care. So, um, Tracy is going to be talking about people some sequels later on, 381 00:41:20,340 --> 00:41:29,910 but I think it's interesting just to think a little bit about what happens when, having had this massive hit, what do you do next? 382 00:41:30,720 --> 00:41:39,270 Um, um, what what happened was that, uh, HBO decided to go back to a prequel because George wasn't writing any sequels, 383 00:41:40,110 --> 00:41:49,230 and they decided to, I think, as prequels quite often, do try and fix some of the things that didn't work so well in the first show. 384 00:41:49,590 --> 00:41:53,400 So we've now got a lot more important black characters. 385 00:41:54,560 --> 00:42:01,010 Um, we've got a power struggle again for the thread, which is basically between two women, 386 00:42:01,550 --> 00:42:05,660 and that's where we kind of ended up being in Game of Thrones. 387 00:42:05,660 --> 00:42:12,350 But these two women are not as mad, let's say, as Sersi and Daenerys turned out to be. 388 00:42:13,130 --> 00:42:21,560 Um, but it's also, I think, important to note that what prequels do besides pulling things in, um, 389 00:42:21,560 --> 00:42:29,600 fixing some of the mistakes or problems that were noted in the the kind of mothership story, the original story. 390 00:42:30,780 --> 00:42:35,580 Is that it? I just figured what I was going to say. 391 00:42:35,960 --> 00:42:42,660 Um, yeah. What it's offering is kind of the same, but different. 392 00:42:43,230 --> 00:42:48,260 So you've got the struggle for the throne. You've got complicated family relationships. 393 00:42:48,270 --> 00:42:51,000 You've got questions about what kingship actually means. 394 00:42:51,390 --> 00:42:58,260 You've got managing dragons being really at the forefront in the way that genetics, again, had to learn. 395 00:42:58,890 --> 00:43:07,410 Um, but it's also, I think, learned from, uh, most of the time from some of the plays by, 396 00:43:07,620 --> 00:43:14,550 from gain points by not partly to do with Covid, again, not having a whole lot of locations in different places. 397 00:43:14,880 --> 00:43:20,250 Season one is particularly kind of tightly focussed in King's Landing, 398 00:43:20,250 --> 00:43:25,830 because that's where they had to film with masks on all the time, so of course they couldn't go travelling about. 399 00:43:27,220 --> 00:43:31,540 So how's the driving? The figures are good, but they're not as good. 400 00:43:31,540 --> 00:43:39,970 This Game of Thrones, I think, uh, whether it's going to kind of snowball as the show goes on is an interesting question. 401 00:43:41,110 --> 00:43:49,060 Um. What next? Well, there's going to be House of the Dragon three Knight is definitely coming next year. 402 00:43:49,750 --> 00:43:54,850 Um, is there going to be a Game of Thrones movie? I wouldn't put money on it, but you never know. 403 00:43:55,420 --> 00:43:59,830 Um, 10,000 ships. Um, which is. 404 00:44:01,230 --> 00:44:08,070 I can't remember what 10,000 ships is about. Um, but that's, uh, something that's recently been revived. 405 00:44:08,310 --> 00:44:13,050 Um, and then there are some other possibilities, too. But that question for. 406 00:44:14,160 --> 00:44:20,340 Okay, um, that question about how do we get the next Game of Thrones, Rings of power? 407 00:44:20,370 --> 00:44:25,320 I don't think it's the next Game of Thrones. The Witcher is not the next Game of Thrones, either. 408 00:44:25,920 --> 00:44:28,950 Um, and Kate Jamieson's Broken Earth trilogy. 409 00:44:28,950 --> 00:44:35,370 They're talking about filming. Could be. But they need to actually make it king and conquer everything King Kong. 410 00:44:35,370 --> 00:44:39,580 Correct? That does not mean that it's Game of Thrones. 411 00:44:39,980 --> 00:44:44,740 I only lasted one episode of that and I testify that it is history. 412 00:44:44,740 --> 00:44:50,510 But honestly, Paul Hmhm. And so that is where I'm going to stop. 413 00:44:50,900 --> 00:44:56,540 Um, so I'm really interested to hear what you think might be the next Game of Thrones. 414 00:44:56,840 --> 00:45:02,240 And if you have any further ideas about what it was about Game of Thrones, that made it the biggest thing ever. 415 00:45:02,390 --> 00:45:08,020 Thank you. Hi. 416 00:45:08,030 --> 00:45:14,870 Um, that was really good. And, um, I really enjoyed your take on everything, but I could kind of tell that you were disappointed. 417 00:45:14,870 --> 00:45:20,509 And, like, I think a lot of watchers and readers were with the ending and how you think. 418 00:45:20,510 --> 00:45:26,090 And if you think it's going to play out differently if we do get the books and the final ending. 419 00:45:26,510 --> 00:45:31,120 Um. And kind of what your take on that is. 420 00:45:31,120 --> 00:45:38,110 And if you think that the, uh, decline in popularity due to the last season has affected the prequel series as well. 421 00:45:39,160 --> 00:45:42,280 Yeah, that's a really good question. Oh, two really good questions. 422 00:45:42,550 --> 00:45:52,540 Um, do I think, well, Martin always says that the show ended up where he always thought the books were going to end up, 423 00:45:53,050 --> 00:46:01,330 but the route taken to get there is going to be different. Um, and I suppose this means that he always intended Bran to be king. 424 00:46:02,050 --> 00:46:05,290 Um, I'm not sure that's the wisest choice, to be honest. 425 00:46:06,230 --> 00:46:12,530 And so yeah, when I was writing my second book on, um, the TV show All Men Must Die. 426 00:46:12,920 --> 00:46:15,980 Um, which I was finishing just as the show finished. 427 00:46:16,460 --> 00:46:22,520 I had to I wanted to be quite careful in not saying, oh, what a car crash, but season. 428 00:46:22,520 --> 00:46:30,290 I could try and find some positives. Um, I think you can see how the showrunners did some work, and they make Tyrion and, uh, 429 00:46:30,680 --> 00:46:35,839 and various have lots of conversations in season eight about how weird the narrative is getting. 430 00:46:35,840 --> 00:46:40,940 And remember, her father was a bit and and so on to try and explain the kind of big heel turn. 431 00:46:41,460 --> 00:46:47,350 Um. What would have been a better ending is an interesting question. 432 00:46:47,680 --> 00:46:57,910 And I think actually you can kind of see, um, that what House of the Dragon has done is not be too bothered about incest. 433 00:46:59,050 --> 00:47:04,000 Uh, and that that's the obvious answer for Game of Thrones is you get John and Denarius together. 434 00:47:04,030 --> 00:47:09,730 Yeah, she's she's his aunt. But, um, that's also, you know, Siegfried and Brunhilde. 435 00:47:10,270 --> 00:47:16,290 And I guess the problem is that Jon is too moral and a little photog. 436 00:47:16,340 --> 00:47:19,330 Aaron, he's not getting enough to go along with incest. 437 00:47:20,370 --> 00:47:28,230 So I think Martin kind of wrote himself into a corner with that one, because the two of them would make pretty good rulers, I think, of Westeros. 438 00:47:28,950 --> 00:47:36,460 Uh, so I don't know how Martin is going to resolve that one, because I think he's the characterisation Johnson is. 439 00:47:36,480 --> 00:47:41,130 He's strong just to go, oh yeah, and look at bear in love. Um, so who knows? 440 00:47:41,940 --> 00:47:48,329 Um, so someone from online has written, um, to what degree do you think the absence of visible and explicit magic. 441 00:47:48,330 --> 00:47:54,900 Sorry. Uh, the absence of visible and explicit magic supported Game of Thrones to be accessible to a broader audience. 442 00:47:56,010 --> 00:48:04,589 I think that was really important too, because the kind of, I think the truism of, um, epic fantasy and world worldbuilding is you build the world, 443 00:48:04,590 --> 00:48:14,610 obviously, but you want to get get the readership or the audience who recognise that this is a world where impossible things can happen. 444 00:48:15,060 --> 00:48:20,160 And having it like, you know, at sea, for example, you have a school for wizards now, 445 00:48:20,160 --> 00:48:22,860 you know, there's gonna be lots of magic of various sorts in the chat. 446 00:48:23,430 --> 00:48:29,250 Um, but all we have in Game of Thrones is whatever happens just before the credits. 447 00:48:30,240 --> 00:48:33,750 Um, where you have that scene in the haunted Forest. 448 00:48:34,110 --> 00:48:39,990 Then you have some Walking Dead people in about episode five, and then suddenly the dragons are back. 449 00:48:40,410 --> 00:48:44,459 And it's this, um, idea of the numinous rushing in. 450 00:48:44,460 --> 00:48:51,210 As John Coots says in his his piece about thinning in the encyclopaedia, that that world where magic is dead. 451 00:48:51,390 --> 00:48:55,080 Very much a kind of intrusion fantasy motif. 452 00:48:55,560 --> 00:48:57,150 Magic is not dead after all. 453 00:48:57,420 --> 00:49:07,140 But I think in the meantime, the politics, the relationships, the characterisation that we got in season one pulled in a lot of people who. 454 00:49:08,190 --> 00:49:12,509 There are such people, apparently, who are not that keen on dragons, who don't care about dragons, 455 00:49:12,510 --> 00:49:17,580 but they're interested in the character development and the kind of politics of the show. 456 00:49:17,850 --> 00:49:24,390 So I think the rationing of magic was a really smart move on the part of the showrunners at that point. 457 00:49:24,690 --> 00:49:25,140 Thank you. 458 00:49:25,650 --> 00:49:34,590 I was wondering, why do you think the spinoffs so far seem to be so focussed on the Targaryens, especially when in landing A Game of Thrones? 459 00:49:35,220 --> 00:49:37,450 Then they're gone. They're no longer really important. 460 00:49:37,470 --> 00:49:44,700 But why do you think that's where, like the executives or like whoever makes those decisions wants to keep placing the story? 461 00:49:45,510 --> 00:49:53,320 Um, I think it's partly because the history of Westeros in Fire and Blood is the history of the tall variants. 462 00:49:53,340 --> 00:49:56,070 At least that's that's what's fleshed out there. 463 00:49:56,610 --> 00:50:06,690 Um, so that's what they've got notes for is the the story the throne and the throne has been claimed by telcos ever since Egan turned up. 464 00:50:07,620 --> 00:50:12,360 Um, even though there's been fighting over it. So that's one kind of narrative. 465 00:50:12,570 --> 00:50:17,100 Another answer is, of course, um, now you can do dragons much more cheaply. 466 00:50:17,460 --> 00:50:23,370 You can have much more dragon time if you're focusing on, uh, the Targaryens. 467 00:50:24,300 --> 00:50:26,370 So I think there's that as well. 468 00:50:26,580 --> 00:50:36,989 But this is it's kind of a bit detrimental to the the richness of House of the Dragon that we just locked in this world of Targaryens and Hightowers, 469 00:50:36,990 --> 00:50:42,150 and occasionally a stark or a Lannister will pop up and you go, oh, you you have your family. 470 00:50:42,420 --> 00:50:44,040 But then they sort of disappear again. 471 00:50:44,400 --> 00:50:52,500 Um, and that has to this narrowing of focus that, that has to the dragon has, which I think has in some ways limited its appeal. 472 00:50:52,860 --> 00:50:56,969 I just wanted to get your thoughts on how the huge cast of, again, 473 00:50:56,970 --> 00:51:01,980 over 500 characters helped it become quite broadly appealing because there could be quite 474 00:51:01,980 --> 00:51:05,330 a few liberties taken with some of the characters versus how they are in the books. 475 00:51:05,340 --> 00:51:13,499 My understanding was that Tyrion is quite a different and not quite so amicable character in the books, to put it mildly, because I'm reading, 476 00:51:13,500 --> 00:51:20,610 um, the First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie, and I just feel like how disgusting those people are are so inherent to the plot. 477 00:51:20,610 --> 00:51:24,210 You couldn't do the same thing with that limited cast of characters? 478 00:51:25,920 --> 00:51:35,000 Yeah, I think it's important to have these parallel storylines going on and this kind of, uh, very medieval interlaced structure. 479 00:51:35,040 --> 00:51:39,689 Again, this is something I think that Martin, he got it from Tolkien, obviously, 480 00:51:39,690 --> 00:51:43,170 where you have the quest to the ring and the fellowship going on the same time. 481 00:51:43,500 --> 00:51:50,100 You also got Gothic for Maurice Troll, who has 2 or 3 plotlines going on through The Accursed Kings, 482 00:51:50,250 --> 00:51:53,139 and you're always having two chapters with this person, 483 00:51:53,140 --> 00:51:59,370 and then you go off and and find out what's happened to the orphan boy, and then you come back and look at something else. 484 00:52:00,420 --> 00:52:09,629 So I think having multiple characters for Martin is just a way of thickening his world, making it more believable, 485 00:52:09,630 --> 00:52:15,780 but also generating a whole lot of characters that kind of like, you know, find itself when they turn up. 486 00:52:15,900 --> 00:52:20,970 You think, do I have to care about this person or not? You can leap ahead a bit and get, okay. 487 00:52:21,300 --> 00:52:25,260 Um, we're never going to see them again so I can forget this person ever existed. 488 00:52:25,710 --> 00:52:29,780 But in TV, you can't do that because you can have to pay these people to hang around. 489 00:52:29,790 --> 00:52:34,740 So there's always going to be that kind of compression. And there's also questions like, 490 00:52:34,980 --> 00:52:40,620 the children all had to be aged up because you couldn't put them through the kind of thing 491 00:52:40,620 --> 00:52:45,960 that they're going to do in the show if they were the age that they were in the books. 492 00:52:46,530 --> 00:52:53,100 And you also, I think, had to well, the showrunners, I think, were quite sensible in to trying to find somebody. 493 00:52:53,580 --> 00:52:56,969 Oh, a couple of people who yes, they make mistakes. 494 00:52:56,970 --> 00:53:04,740 Yes, they behave atrociously, but we actually quite liked and I think Tyrion is really that character. 495 00:53:05,250 --> 00:53:15,180 Um, and in the books you can see how his story develops some sympathy, a lot of sense for him, given the way the family's treated him. 496 00:53:15,720 --> 00:53:25,290 Um, but it hasn't turned out to be quite as wise and quite as, um, as funny, I don't think, in the books as he is in the show. 497 00:53:25,290 --> 00:53:28,740 So I think that's a kind of hawking audience empathy move. 498 00:53:29,250 --> 00:53:35,070 Um, thank you for your talk. I was just wondering, given how big, uh, franchises like Lord of the rings and Harry Potter have been, 499 00:53:35,340 --> 00:53:42,300 do you think the advent of Game of Thrones, um, sort of helped cement fantasy as an adult genre? 500 00:53:42,360 --> 00:53:45,990 Like it helped validate that adults could also enjoy fantasy? 501 00:53:47,460 --> 00:53:58,260 Yeah, I think that's. That's true. And one of the things that was very striking about Game of Thrones is I think that the first and this is the show, 502 00:53:58,260 --> 00:54:05,400 not the for the first couple of seasons, were, I think, designed for the kind of typical. 503 00:54:06,740 --> 00:54:12,800 Hollywood imagined demographic. So it was young men, probably gamers. 504 00:54:13,250 --> 00:54:22,400 And so you had lots of sex, lots of violence. And that was supposed to get that core audience onside, which so sometimes it did. 505 00:54:22,760 --> 00:54:31,190 But then the showrunners realised when they got got the audience because the women were watching it too, because they had these interesting, 506 00:54:31,190 --> 00:54:38,750 strong female characters, and it had quite a lot of talking about things and not just people whacking each other with swords. 507 00:54:39,290 --> 00:54:43,070 And once they realised they could get that female demographic as well, 508 00:54:43,490 --> 00:54:49,930 and that the age range was much, much bigger than the youth market, they were thinking about that. 509 00:54:49,940 --> 00:55:01,489 I think the showrunners deny it is when they started tweaking things a bit and duck diving, then the sex scenes and the sexual violence in particular, 510 00:55:01,490 --> 00:55:08,360 because the commentariat will say, oh, we'll just stop watching Game of Thrones is this was so awful, I could never watch it again. 511 00:55:08,360 --> 00:55:13,310 It was a big thing in 2015. Um, but then, you know, people, people came back. 512 00:55:13,460 --> 00:55:19,070 So I think it's, it's that unexpected demographic that. 513 00:55:20,040 --> 00:55:30,690 They captured. And I think other, um, fantasy media of media fantasy producers are also thinking, how can I get that demographic as well? 514 00:55:31,440 --> 00:55:35,009 And no one has been quite so successful. 515 00:55:35,010 --> 00:55:41,480 I don't think, um, Amazon are investing heavily in trying to get that demographic for Rings of Power, but, uh, 516 00:55:41,790 --> 00:55:47,370 I don't think I'm not sure how much that they're releasing by way of figures, because I think they're disappointing. 517 00:55:48,540 --> 00:55:53,489 So we've had, um, one question come through about, um, saying that during the summer school, 518 00:55:53,490 --> 00:55:57,000 there's been a lot of emphasis on how to make your fantasy characters believable. 519 00:55:57,420 --> 00:56:02,190 Um, and the question is about whether the I think you called it the [INAUDIBLE] in the violence. 520 00:56:02,430 --> 00:56:05,489 Um, actually, dragons, [INAUDIBLE] and dragons. Well, maybe not the dragons, 521 00:56:05,490 --> 00:56:13,230 but the [INAUDIBLE] and the violence actually helps with making believable characters because they're things we don't often see on TV. 522 00:56:13,590 --> 00:56:16,950 Um, but, uh, in daily lives. 523 00:56:17,970 --> 00:56:24,090 Um, luckily, my daily life doesn't include very much of the, the violence that we see in Game of Thrones. 524 00:56:24,150 --> 00:56:28,530 Uh, so does it does it help make it believable? 525 00:56:28,530 --> 00:56:38,250 I think in a real world context, not particularly, because what shows like this is doing is giving us a medieval past, which. 526 00:56:39,210 --> 00:56:45,930 Is over from our own past. So on the one hand, we can kind of look back and go, wow, you know, 527 00:56:45,930 --> 00:56:50,910 in those days people said what they thought, you know, if you had a problem, somebody could kill them. 528 00:56:51,120 --> 00:57:02,220 Um, well, yeah, maybe things not so different. Um, but there's a kind of good old days nostalgia, which Martin works really hard to dismantle. 529 00:57:02,670 --> 00:57:06,629 Uh, people in the show always being rude about romance and series. 530 00:57:06,630 --> 00:57:09,930 Way too many romances. And then he falls to Joffrey. 531 00:57:09,930 --> 00:57:11,130 And look how that ended up. 532 00:57:11,160 --> 00:57:23,940 So, um, you can see how there's a real kind of, um, critique of, uh, of 19th century ideas of medievalism as Mary, Old England's going on in the show. 533 00:57:24,240 --> 00:57:31,680 But we also, when we think about the medieval period, there's that kind of abjection that we put in it, all of the violence, 534 00:57:31,680 --> 00:57:39,060 all of the sexual violence, all of the horror that we don't want in our own lives and go, wow, those people, they did this kind of thing. 535 00:57:39,480 --> 00:57:47,280 Um, we can think about it. We can watch. We can have to experience it by by bringing it into our own lives. 536 00:57:47,640 --> 00:57:54,719 And then we can end up at the end of Game of Thrones going, Thank God I don't live in Westeros, which is, uh, 537 00:57:54,720 --> 00:58:02,040 I think somebody mentioned this the other day that most of the time when we close our fantasy world, we think that was amazing. 538 00:58:02,040 --> 00:58:05,220 But I'm so glad I don't live. There. 539 00:58:06,660 --> 00:58:10,200 Thank you. It was really interesting to to hear your perspectives. 540 00:58:10,620 --> 00:58:18,960 Um, I'd just like to ask some questions around kind of the increasing, um, romanticising market. 541 00:58:19,080 --> 00:58:25,440 Um, and how I'm increasingly kind of seeing George R.R. Martin's, um, 542 00:58:25,440 --> 00:58:32,520 kind of explicit sex scenes as a wonderful bite back to the how only women write about sex for women, etc. 543 00:58:33,090 --> 00:58:43,290 Um, I'd be interested in your perspective in how far you think things like the TV show popularising it influenced 544 00:58:43,290 --> 00:58:48,720 kind of the increase in romance to see books on the market and people's willingness to read them. 545 00:58:50,000 --> 00:58:53,480 I don't know a whole lot about romance. I'm going to confess here. 546 00:58:53,500 --> 00:59:00,190 In fact, when Rebecca Yarris, whose latest book came out, a journalist contacted me to see if I would comment, 547 00:59:00,200 --> 00:59:05,299 and I said, I've never heard of Rebecca Yarrow, so I don't really know what romance is. 548 00:59:05,300 --> 00:59:09,290 So that saved me a lot of grief. Um, now I've read since I must not. 549 00:59:09,290 --> 00:59:11,930 I have a better idea of of what romance is. 550 00:59:12,530 --> 00:59:22,159 Um, so I think that possibly what's going on here is off the top of my head that Martin is, as I suggested, 551 00:59:22,160 --> 00:59:30,480 really coming from a historian's perspective that he's interested in, as you can see, important blood in Viking Chronicle. 552 00:59:30,530 --> 00:59:36,980 This happened, this happened. This is how power struggles work. This is how big political history is written. 553 00:59:37,550 --> 00:59:41,600 And he's he knows he's got to put in some personal relationships. 554 00:59:41,600 --> 00:59:50,450 And I think he thinks quite a lot about the family. But I don't think he's he's that interested in romance, in heterosexual romance. 555 00:59:51,080 --> 01:00:00,200 Um, and he, he understands how many have got to kind of bring a little bit of that into, into the story. 556 01:00:00,680 --> 01:00:10,850 So I think what's, what's happening maybe is fighting back against this kind of, um, large scale army power, um, 557 01:00:10,850 --> 01:00:21,319 very masculine model of fantasy with something which is much more to women's feelings and not simply disregards them, 558 01:00:21,320 --> 01:00:26,570 as in the case of Denarius and Drogo in the show is, I think it's a bit different in the books. 559 01:00:27,590 --> 01:00:37,969 Um, but women writers, because it's women, the writing, the romance, they are trying to reshape the genre into something which, um, 560 01:00:37,970 --> 01:00:43,070 caters more to a female readership, perhaps, um, which, um, 561 01:00:43,070 --> 01:00:49,100 I think they've already got permission to write sex scenes, not from Martin, but from 50 Shades of Grey. 562 01:00:49,130 --> 01:00:52,520 I think that's probably the kind of game changer in that respect. 563 01:00:54,610 --> 01:00:59,200 I think we're probably in time now so far. All schools in the Carolinas.