So. Game of Thrones is finally over. Through ups and downs, good seasons and bad, it seemed like the entire world was watching. And when something has that much attention, even the smallest change gets noticed. This week on Waypoints, Austin brings us an article on how the final seasons of Game of Thrones shifted storytelling styles, and we discuss how those changes manifested in a season that has a lot of people scratching their heads if they're not outright disappointed. He's also brought an article asking what happens to website traffic when a cultural phenomenon ends, and why so many sites, regardless of focus, ran articles on Game of Thrones. Rob then brings us an amazing interview with Magic Johnson on why he spectacularly quit his job with the Lakers, and the crew discusses why he can just up and do that. Discussed: The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones, What Time Does the Game of Thrones Traffic End?, Magic Johnson says Lakers GM was 'backstabbing', Home Movies
So something I would really like some clarification on.
At the end they talk about how, by using Patreon you may be able to write the types of stories you want and pay your bills, but you are talking to a community that’s already converted. But by writing the GOT stuff you can bring new people in to see writing about broader topics and shift culture little by little.
I’m a bit confused though because they are also talking about how the articles about small games, or about anything without a built in audience does so so much worse than stories about AAA stuff.
So does that mean that important cultural discussion have to happen around Game of Thrones?
And to go back to that Errant Signal video they talked about, does that mean that there just isn’t a place for people to champion smaller creators? It seems like there are two ideas here that they bounce back and forth between discussing. I’d love to hear them do a deep dive on both.
On the conflict between sociological and psychological storytelling, I just realized a lot of the reasons I love The Witcher book series is that it actually manages to do both. It actually turns more sociological in the later novels as Geralt and Ciri disappear into the machinations of a world full of corruption and warring factions and tons of third party POVs. So even Ciri’s chosen one destiny narrative is a small piece of a massive pile of conspiracies and schemes, and ultimately they can’t stop any of that. You can fight off an evil warlord but the heroes still are beaten by deeper corruption and racism.
The games try to work that in just by having Geralt everywhere at once, so you lose a lot of that sense of the gears spinning in unpredictable ways that nobody can control. The player literally gets to pick an ending for the entire world in Witcher 3.
So hopefully the Netflix series does some of that, but I doubt it.
So even Ciri’s chosen one destiny narrative is a small piece of a massive pile of conspiracies and schemes, and ultimately they can’t stop any of that.
But how sociological is “a massive pile of conspiracies and schemes”? Usually, sociological thinking tackles things structurally, that means it’s about the underlying socio-economic and political relations leading to certain outcomes by incentivizing certain behavior, as it is the only one where you “succeed” in your societal role (for a contemporary example see: businesses having to put profit first, no matter who’s in charge, as the business would otherwise perish sooner or later due to market competition, making the needs of the environment and human beings structurally irrelevant to the economy).
Corruption/conspiracy explanations leave too much room for the “oh, if we would only have better people at the top” narrative, while a sociologist would rather say: “we need to get rid of or at least transform those relations themselves”.
I haven’t actually read the Witcher novels, so maybe this is what you mean. If yes, sorry for that.
It’s been like two years since I finished the series so forgive me if I don’t remember all of it. What I mean is that the novels change from being a story of a few people to a story about the entire world. I don’t really know if there’s a single coherent thesis that grows out of it. There’s talk of market early modern market capitalism, environmental change, racism, ethnic tensions. And the big climatic battle doesn’t really settle anything, a few smart actors in trade and politics just take advantage on both sides, the “bad guys” who are removed are replaced by other actors waiting their turn. All the structures stay in place for more tensions, the heroes just retire off the board.
It’s been like two years since I finished the series so forgive me if I don’t remember all of it.
Don’t sweat it. I know the feeling. Please don’t read my comments as a personal attack on you.
What I mean is that the novels change from being a story of a few people to a story about the entire world.
Yep, this is imo always a good sign that the story attempts to put the actions of it’s characters, as well as the phenomena they encounter into their social context. Something that imo, is required for, but doesn’t necessarily have to involve, “sociological storytelling”.
I don’t really know if there’s a single coherent thesis that grows out of it. There’s talk of market early modern market capitalism, environmental change, racism, ethnic tensions. And the big climatic battle doesn’t really settle anything, a few smart actors in trade and politics just take advantage on both sides, the “bad guys” who are removed are replaced by other actors waiting their turn. All the structures stay in place for more tensions, the heroes just retire off the board.
Maybe you misunderstood me. I was not talking about how a story needs to develop a coherent analysis and critique of the structures present in it’s world, it is fully enough to simply point to structures and not individuals being the root of the problems to engage in “sociological storytelling”, imo.
Showing that no matter who’s in charge, the problems persist, is a way to do that. The way you formulated it initially, just sounded a bit like the novels point to corruption/conspiracy (bad people doing bad stuff, because they are bad) instead, but this sounds much more sociological (be it subtle).
I think The Wire succeeds so well as an example of sociological storytelling in part because of its framework, which is that of a cop show. Cop shows, and cop fiction in general, are a perfect archetype of a world in which powerful and flawed institutions endlessly smash into each other, and how that affects the decisions and lives of those in them and governed by them.
One of the fundamental reasons The Wire succeeds where most other cop shows arguably fail is its strict adhesion to its core thesis, which parallels the original thesis of GoT: the game is the game. Every season of The Wire - and, in the end, the show itself - concludes with participants shifted about, strengthened or broken by riding the waves of the game or getting dashed beneath them, but the inexorable force of the game remains unaltered by the will of its participants. The corners are still open. The cops are still trying to shut them down. It is utterly indifferent to who plays.
I don’t think The Wire needs any more acclaim, but the reason it stands out is because so many cop shows have a hard time letting their characters be weak. There are probably zero cop shows in which a protagonist doesn’t skirt the law to enact what is unequivocally portrayed as “true justice” on a criminal who The System, dumb and indifferent as it is, allows to go unpunished. There might be a single cop show in which the protagonist “going rogue” doesn’t work out absolutely perfectly for everyone, save their captain who has to swallow an extra bottle of Pepto from all that dang stress. There are slightly fewer cop shows in which a protagonist doesn’t reform their department by either moving to a position of power where they are an honest and benevolent leader, or otherwise proving that someone in charge is a crooked asshole and getting them fired.
I love cop shows, but I can’t think of any in which everybody either barely scrapes out a small victory for themselves or flatly loses, which is closer to the reality of working within these institutions. (The Shield might be the only example, but only because of its psychological cynicism.) Stepping back and examining cop shows this way, it’s actually startling that The Wire stands out so starkly in a sea of cop shows for being the only one I can think of that never falls to the lure of fulfilling some fantasy viewers invariably project on cop shows: to be powerful, to be just, to fix the system.
In abandoning its shared thesis in the final season and ending as it does, GoT fails by succumbing to the allure of all of these fantasies.
I really enjoyed the discussion around the GoT web traffic article. Austin has talked before about how the hits from a single article on eg. a Mario game helps pay for lesser read articles and they finally got a chance to dive into that more here. Hearing them talk about this model possibly not being workable moving on sounds scary but also not unexpected. The ad traffic business has always seemed shaky at best given how much the metrics can be gamed by bots and bad actors. Dealing with bad actors will always affect serious publishers and creators, as exemplified by Youtube. Within those systems creators exist in meta-stable states, hopefully making a living within a downwards trend.
It was also interesting to hear Austin’s thoughts on how being independent can limit your audience and reach. That’s a perspective I hadn’t considered in itself and haven’t seen brought up in full before. Related sidenote is that even independent creators, whether on Patreon or Youtube, are still limited by having to drive engagement. Some have gained large enough audiences that they can do more passion driven projects full time but in the end their money comes from people coming back in large enough numbers. I’ve seen many small and marginalized creators say that they cannot afford to branch out from what their existing audience expects from them. They may still prefer that to being forced by a manager but independence isn’t simple.
I was glad Rob pointed out the ways in which the show did actually flounder when it ran out of novels to refer to, even if it’s not as simple as “what was good about the show just came from the books”.
To my mind, Martin gets way, way too much credit. This is illustrated well by Patrick’s assumption that the “Mhysa” scene would play as critical from Martin’s pen, when in fact the white saviour imagery comes the books fairly directly.
I don’t even think the (dreadful) summation of Sansa’s arc misunderstands what’s happening in the books, particularly - Martin is just unlikely to have it spoken so directly. (Or, actually… https://twitter.com/jameswheeler/status/621939474931556352)