Lessons Learned From a Wedding

I wonder where they registered?

I would warn of spoilers, but at this point, I think, the cat is out of the bag, has been beheaded, and is currently adorning the walls of the Red Keep, as the events of the ninth episode of Game of Thrones are being widely discussed on the intra-web. However, I will warn people anyway… SPOILERS TO FOLLOW…

I sat staring at the television screen. The credits rolled by, like a meaningless crawl of foreign symbols and marks too beyond comprehension to read. I did find the wherewithal to shut off the television before their end so as not to disrupt the black quietness I was feeling. I had just watched the events of the now infamous Red Wedding. (It was so infamous that the TV show never once mentioned the name, Red Wedding, yet everyone knows it.) I was alone and feeling scared and disturbed. So like a woman who had reached the bottom of her Ben & Jerry's I called my friend to talk. I have to admit, I didn’t see the episode's end coming, (a hard feat for me these days,) though in hindsight I should have. We all should have.

Remember when they chopped off Ned Stark’s head in Episode 9, Season 1. He was the fraking main character and they killed him without thought or remorse, (and by they, I mean George R. R. Martin.) When that happened it announced to the world that nothing was sacred. No one was safe, and in response the world rejoiced at the trill of it, (except for poor Sean Bean, who seems destined to play heroically tragic figures that die near the end of the first installment of any epic fantasy genre series.) The viewing public watched Ned die and went, “Anything can happen! This is awesome.”

The reaction to the events of the Red Wedding was similar if you don’t account for voice inflection, “Anything can happen! Hold me.” Yet, why is it we feel this way when we were so clearly warned? I think that at the crux of the answer to that question, we will find the greatness of Martin and the TV series. I do not want to discount the book series, which is quite amazing in its own right, but I would argue not as a unique of an experience in comparison to the TV show. In books, we find authors with more free reign to do as they please with characters and settings, but in the embittered and political realm of TV, the rules tend to be a bit more predictable. Viewing audiences like to be surprised, but don’t like to be uncomfortable. Shows should take risks, but only up to a certain point. If you go too far, you’ll lose the crowd. A series should be clever and complex, but not so complex that the audience gets confused or feels frustrated. However, time and time again, Game of Thrones has broken the rules and the we cannot get enough.

The death of Rob Stark, his mother, and the entire King of the North storyline, (told you there would be spoilers,) is epic because it took the greatest risk of all, it stayed true to the book. In a world where the audience is sometimes protected from harsher realities, we live in a TV world where the hero is saved at the last minute by some miraculous stroke of deus ex machina that arrives just in the nick of time to make everything okay. Martin doesn’t adhere to that. Be sure that he dangles such possibilities out there, but always brings us crashing back to cold hard (fictional) reality with sobering frequency. We are left (all the more) bitter for the trick, the last glimmer of hope we clung to, as its falseness is confirmed. In fact, in an interview he gave he said that The Song of Ice and Fire was about subverting expectations. The death of the Ned, and the failed revenge of his son, are all so hard to believe because it goes against our expectations, and that’s a good thing.

Even more so, the show did not shy away from using its visual aspect to fully drive the point home. Notice that with the death of Ned in the first season the violence was contained and censored. The audience was not yet ready to see the graphic death of everyone’s favorite protagonist, but by the third season, the series was ready to not only show you the death of people you cared about, but never flinch or turn away. That is important, as more than anything it drove the point home. It proved how invested people were in the story and how much it could affect them. It showed how well written it all was and maybe even how important the characters were to us (Even if they were no one's top three.)

Even now as I think back on the stunning moment I cannot get the visual of Rob’s wife being stabbed. It was that shocking moment that started the violence, and delivered an image that was burned into my mind despite how much I wish it wasn’t. It affected me on an emotional level. In fact the entire sequence brought me through a range of grief and emotion: sadness, anger, desperation, hopelessness, and fear. I did not want to see Rob or Caitlyn or any of the Starks die, anymore than I would have wanted to see my friends or family murdered in their steads. Yet, it happened, and it affected me on a level I was not prepared for. I wasn’t alone either.

Clever things make people feel  stupid,
and unexpected things make them feel scared

Judging by the raw shock and sadness that spilled over onto the social media, I cannot deny how deeply people were affected. I wonder how many people said, “I’m never watching this again,” but we all know that you can’t stop. You won’t, because those words were just spoken in the heat of a vulnerable moment. They aren’t any truer than the time you told your mother you hated her or when you called that guy on the parkway a racial slur that you didn’t actually mean. (Seriously though, you’re not supposed to drive on the damn shoulder… I don’t care how much traffic there is.) I suppose what I am trying to get at is, that this is good. This is real and extremely impressive, and this kind of mass emotion is something I would have never expected from a TV series.

I did not have a conversation for a full week that did not start with, “Did you see Game of Thrones on Sunday?” usually spoken with a haunted and desperate look. People wanted to talk about. They needed to talk about it. It was palpable grief that needed to be let out into the air and discussed, as if we were all looking for answers to a shared tragedy. Yet, there are no answers, and that is the point of it all. Sometimes life doesn't make sense and sometimes death and destruction steps in at the most inopportune times to remind us of that. People will come back to watch Game of Thrones not just despite this event, but because of it. 

Good writing affects people. It makes us care about characters and events, like how we cared about Cat and Rob and his quest. Their death doesn’t diminish our caring it just gives us more emotion, (different emotions,) about it. Yet those aren’t bad either, because if there is something out there that can affect us, (and not just one or two of us) this deeply, then you know it has to be good. Martin says the end to it all will be, “bittersweet,” but that is for the future. Life is bittersweet, but when you really think about it, you don’t live life to get to the end. You live it for the experiences and the ride. That is what Game of Thrones is, and that is why we will keep coming back. Because, much like life, what other choice to do we, but to keep on going.