It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss-partly because they are genuinely bad at it. What Storytelling It Was and What It Became in GOT Let’s first go over what happened to Game of Thrones. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence-but more on all that later. I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing-technology and society. This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.
What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.Īfter the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.Īt its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn go way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes).
Indeed, most of the reviews and fan discussions seem to be pondering where the acclaimed series went wrong, with many theories on exactly why it went downhill. Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it seems that a substantial portion of those millions are loathing the season. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days.
0 kommentar(er)
