Or in other words, you may have thought Game of Thrones was a good show, but you are wrong.Īnd where, really, do I begin? There are a thousand things large and small. To paraphrase Kant, I do not expect everyman’s assent, but I do demand it. Instead I will offer something which may be of some actual use, a definite value judgment supported by arguments.
In today’s world, there are far too many critics who do far too much of that already. So I will not merely describe my dislike of Game of Thrones. I am not vain enough to believe that my tastes and distastes are interesting to other people, and I would not waste anyone’s time with a mere rant. But I want to make a promise to the reader. The sense of perplexity has never left me.
This could not be the most popular series in America. This could not be the series all the country’s best – or at least best paid – intellectuals were scribbling about. The show everyone was talking about must be coming on right after the one I had watched: the one with the ponderous dialogue, dreadful plotting and bad cinematography. When I finally broke down and watched the show, I thought there must have been some mistake. French countered that “the Valyrian steel that stops the cultural white walker is pluralism buttressed by classical liberalism…” These are grown men. Domenech argued that cultural liberalism was like the dreaded White Walkers, an unstoppable force which cannot be politely argued with but must be forcefully opposed. Even while writing this piece, David French, Ben Domenech and Sohrab Ahmari could not manage to argue over the future of conservatism without a few choice references to the series. Every deferred conflict a “war to come.” Winter was always coming. Every looming threat became a White Walker. It was ransacked for metaphors that showed up in the most rarefied atmospheres of respectable opinion journals and op-ed pages. It provided a vocabulary for political arguments. People were not just watching the show people were taking it seriously. But over time I found the series increasingly difficult to ignore. When the show first aired, I remember remarking to a friend that I had reached a point in my life at which I was no longer interested in questing, and I would have been happy to leave it there. This is how it feels in today’s America to hate Game of Thrones. So I resume the struggle, running over old arguments and inventing new ones, trying to understand just how we got so far apart. Something tells me to be reasonable, that I’ve not yet thought of everything, that there must be something which I am missing, something obvious which would explain how everyone around me has come to such an opposite conclusion. But I always break this promise to myself. In moments of exhaustion, I resolve to leave it and live with the mystery. I find myself returning to the issue again and again. I find myself so unable to comprehend why my fellows act and believe as they do that I begin in some measure to doubt my own sanity. Such opposition is perfectly comfortable to me and causes no distress.īut every now and then some conflict seems to me special. I open the newspaper to find it makes as much sense read backwards or forwards and that I have virtually no comprehension of the people with whom I share a country. Most of the time I think the received wisdom on most subjects - be they political, social or artistic - ranges from misguided to catastrophically wrong.
I have always been a person out of step with his own, native culture.