GAME OF THRONES SPECIAL . Time to break the wheel

The week began with an innocuous Starbucks cup uniting the internet in good-natured laughter. It’s about to end with the world on tenterhooks, anticipating the grandest, bloodiest onscreen battle ever filmed.

Yes, it’s all in a week’s work for Game of Thrones (GoT) , the biggest TV show on the planet and HBO’s crown jewel. An estimated 17 million people watched the ongoing final season’s première last month, across television and streaming platforms — the very first episode, aired back in 2011, garnered a relatively modest 2.5 million. In the intervening years, David Benioff and DB Weiss’s show, based on the American author George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, has won over a legion of fans worldwide.

How did this happen, and why are we collectively obsessed with what is in some ways a rather old-fashioned swords-and-sorcery fable, with VFX-fuelled zombies and dragons thrown in for good measure?

Consider the facts: GoT is basically a show about political intrigue — the more Machiavellian, the better. The families central to the plot — the Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens, Baratheons, Greyjoys, Martells, and so on — are all concerned, in general, about who gets to rule the fictional medieval continent of Westeros by sitting on the Iron Throne, a remarkably ugly chair made up of the swords of surrendered warriors. The Starks in the North are associated with old-school courage under fire, the Lannisters are known for their wealth, while the Targaryens are considered powerful and volatile.

However, in one way or another, almost every major surviving character in GoT is a person who has defied family, king/queen and basically every imaginable kind of structural or institutional bidding.

Daenerys Targaryen, the daughter of the so-called “Mad King” and ‘mother’ to three dragons, is fighting to free the world from tyrants like him. Jon Snow, looked down upon as the bastard son of a Stark, becomes the people’s hero. Tyrion Lannister, son of a Lord yet shunned because of his dwarfism and his bacchanalian ways, survives all manner of catastrophes in order to support Daenerys’s push for the throne. In the most recent episode, Lord Varys, the spymaster often called the Spider, confesses to Tyrion that he will continue to serve the “nameless, faceless millions” above any king or queen (he has helped dethrone a few, from the inside), no matter what the personal cost.

The motivations and actions of all these characters are a step towards what Daenerys calls “breaking the wheel” — essentially, finding a way out of a notoriously resilient political system, one that rewards “hard bastards who’re good at killing people”, as Bronn, easily the show’s most cynical character, proclaimed last week.

This is one of the biggest reasons behind the popularity of GoT . By April 2011, when the show had just started off, US president Barack Obama had ordered close to 200 drone strikes in Pakistan alone during his two years in office, over four times the number authorised by his predecessor George W Bush across eight years (so much for Hope and Change). It was also the year of the Arab Spring — Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi were ousted, among a host of other strongmen who had tested the patience of their people for too long.

In the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street crash, folks were not happy with big banks receiving bigger bailouts. Wherever the eye went, it would seem, one of two things was happening — either the blinds were falling from people’s eyes, or they had already fallen and the people were out on the streets to do something about it.

It was time to break the wheel, and GoT delivered just that, with a TV-friendly veneer of twist endings, frequent lovemaking and gratuitous, eye-popping violence. And as the show has grown from strength to strength, the world has sunk further and further into the quicksand of authoritarian, misogynist, xenophobic politics.

No wonder GoT can get away with just about anything in these last few weeks of its existence — including subpar writing, major deaths amounting to little more than war props, or even leaving the aforementioned Starbucks cup in a banquet scene as Daenerys addressed her victorious troops.

Also, it must be noted that while the show profited off anti-establishment sentiments, its tone and tenor spoke more to liberal rather than radical politics. Daenerys’s claim, despite her personal accomplishments, still rests on her lineage; ditto Jon Snow’s. Even in the latest episode, Lord Varys says that over and above Snow’s other merits, he will make a better monarch than Daenerys because the existing Lords, men all of them, will take to him better. “Yes, cocks are important, I’m afraid,” Varys (who’s a eunuch) says pithily, only to be reminded by Tyrion that he seemed to be doing alright without one.

And so the juggernaut rolls on, even as fans continue to lap it up. Over the next eight days and the last two episodes, we will continue to be bombarded with GoT memes. Our collective desire to break the wheel has resulted in meme after meme of the wheel being burnt to cinders — by dragon fire, no less — and that’s okay.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based freelance writer

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