The Thrones Effect: How HBO's Game of Thrones Conquered Pop Culture by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Tonic Books Publishing
Published: 2019-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Didn’t Start The Fire

By Gil Kidron

Gil is a YouTuber, author, editor, blogger, and former journalist. Gil’s YouTube channel, Got Academy, focuses on quasi-academic breakdowns of pop culture products, drawing on history, psychoanalysis, science, myth, philosophy, and more to explore prominent TV shows, movies, and books. Even though he travels as often as he can, Gil is based in Tel Aviv.

All hail the master world builder and storyteller whose cosmic imagination gave birth to the spectacular world of Game of Thrones! Praise be on George R. R. Martin and the world he has created!

HBO’s global hit features dueling kingdoms fighting for the royal throne of a fictional medieval land populated with backstabbing lords hungry for power. Quite the creative premise.

However, Martin includes far more than just this. His genius gives us an order of scholarly men who sit in their ivory tower; a conservative religious establishment that provides kings with a divine legitimacy to rule over men; a big, beautiful (and magical) wall where civilization ends and beyond which live rapists, barbarians, shamanic forest/ice peoples, and big scary monsters. Some, I assume, are good people.

All of this makes for a compelling and epic fantasy story, but Martin is far from finished. His world goes deeper and farther than any fantasy tale ever had.

Across the sea, independent city-states thrive where once ruled an ancient and dominant empire that collapsed hundreds of years ago. Its successors display an astonishingly diverse culture, yet they still fall short of the long-gone empirical grandeur of their predecessor. And let us not forget the pillaging pirates and the bloodthirsty horse warlords, both of whom will take your stuff and perhaps your life if you are unfortunate enough to cross their paths.

This is Game of Thrones—innovative in its specificity. How did Martin come up with all this? Maybe in a history book?

Well, as comedian Steven Wright put it, “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal from many is research.”

Inspired by Real Events

And what do White Walkers, magical walls, and pyromancers have to do with actual human history anyway? Quite a lot. It is known that people have long believed in monsters, magic and witches, grumpkins and snarks, the only difference being that in Game of Thrones, these superstitious beliefs are true.

Westeros is famously modeled after the late European Middle Ages, and in particular the late English Middle Ages. The Westerosi continent is pretty much an inverted English map; the Starks and Lannisters are representations of the English noble houses of York and Lancaster, the two main proponents of the civil war known as the Wars of the Roses. The Dothraki are very much Mongolian (or their cousins, the Huns, Avars, or Hsiung-Nu), the Ironborn pillage like Vikings, and the wildlings resemble the Picts, who lived beyond Hadrian’s Wall, where it was said that giants and scary monsters roamed free. The Free Cities draw most of their inspiration from the Italian city-states of the early Italian Renaissance, while their “mother,” Old Valyria, is not unlike

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