So, now the “woke” crowd have Game of Thrones in their sights. The show has previously attracted the grim attention of gimlet-eyed social justice warriors for its sexual politics, but now it’s its racial politics which are drawing down the wrath of the right-on inquisitors.
This latest outburst of social justice self-rigtheousness is hilarious on two fronts: firstly, the showrunners have bent over backwards to shoe-horn “woke” narratives into the story, and, secondly, their “progressive” critics are not only utterly clueless about the story, but end up shooting themselves in the foot. Quote:
Where once it seemed like Game of Thrones had something to say about the topic of immigration and the introduction of new populations to the staid old continent of Westeros, I’m no longer sure it’s interested in such heady ideas anymore. It continues to burn up entire ethnicities like kindling in the fire of expensive battle scenes, revealing that it only introduced them in the first place to populate its numerous bloodbaths. Entire peoples with proud, interesting histories have been given the send off of a random red shirt cadet in Star Trek. End of quote.
The “proud, interesting history” of the Dothraki, this nong seems to forget, consisted almost entirely of robbing, raping, enslaving and murdering just about everyone else. Their economy is built solely on marauding and slavery. Their only city is the original “shithole country”: “a pile of mud. Mud and shit and twigs,” littered with the stolen work of the civilised people they have murdered, enslaved and robbed.
The Dothraki come to Westeros as unapologetic invaders whose only purpose is destruction: “I will kill the men in iron suits and tear down their stone houses! I will rape their women, take their children as slaves and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak!
Essos isn’t sending its best.
Then there are the Wildlings. Quote:
The group was hated by many of those in Westeros simply because they had been hated for years. It was tradition. While, of course, we know now there was actually a very good reason why the wall had gone up in the first place, most of the characters in the show didn’t believe that White Walkers and other assorted supernatural threats beyond the wall actually existed. Most of them had come to believe that wall was simply there to keep the Free Folk out. The show then spent several seasons humanizing the Free Folk, tracking the peace they eventually came to with the Northerners, and exposing centuries old bigotries as nonsense in the process. End of quote.
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Yet, literally the first thing the Wildlings do after they pass Brandon the Builder’s big, beautiful wall is massacre and cannibalise entire villagers of peaceful Northerners. The Northerners’ dislike of Wildlings seems less like “nonsense” and “bigotry” than sensible foreign policy.
If you’re going to tout the wonders of mass immigration, using literal invaders, looters, slavers, rapists and cannibals as your poster boys probably isn’t the wisest move.