I have a few additional thoughts on Game of Thrones and its ending.

I think it was good. It was probably really good, but it will be hard to tell that until all the poison has left the system.

By poison, of course, I mean all the commentary and opinions from the never-satisfied armchair and other critics. We’ve spoken in the past about the modern phenomenon of the social media pile-on, the pitchfork wielding mob that resembles nothing so much as Orwell’s Two Minute Hate from Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Honestly, who would be a creator these days? I once posted a video to YouTube of me making pizza in a not-very-good back garden pizza oven (the Uuni), and some complete stranger took time out of their doubtless busy day to post a negative comment about my pizza dough. On a video that had been seen by about five people, including the commenter.

I’m perfectly at ease with my own shouting into the void. If this was a blog that attracted, god forbid, regular comments from strangers, I’d restrict them even more than I do now. As it is, I allow comments on this blog for 14 days on each post, and then turn them off. It’s not that I don’t want to hear from people. It’s that I generally don’t, and if I do it’s someone I kinda know. The rest are either spam, or they’re from that guy, in which case I don’t approve them.

I’m not saying don’t post. I’m not saying don’t comment. I’m just wondering why you would bother to try to ruin someone’s day like that. Someone you don’t know, will never know, will never meet, will never (certainly not now) befriend online in any way whatsoever. It’s the conundrum of our times, a question that now goes back 30 years and more: what, exactly, do you get out of being that guy?

(And, really: don’t comment. Unless you have a pre-existing and cordial relationship, and certainly if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. That may sound anodyne, but it’s the golden fucking rule, isn’t it?)

They’ve had many names, these people. Trolls. At a basic level, someone who deliberately sets out to start an online argument is a troll. Most women with social media accounts are also familiar with the Reply Guy, the well, actually guy, the mainsplainer, the drooling flaccid cock of online harassment and attention seeking.

What’s the problem, really? Partly, its an over-developed sense of entitlement, of ownership, and a complete lack of self-awareness. As I titled the book of this blog’s archives: Nobody cares what you think.

Nobody.

I mean. If you read a review of something, a film say, in a mainstream newspaper, and it’s a film you’re looking forward to, a film you think you might love, and the review is negative: do you care? Will it stop you going to see it? Will you feel moved to post a comment below the line, directed at the reviewer, explaining why they’re wrong?

Take Bruce Springsteen. He’s releasing a new record this summer. I’ll probably buy it. I probably will like two or three songs on it, which is the usual rate. And some geezer in the Guardian will review it and give it three or four stars. And whether I agree or disagree, nobody will care what I think. And nobody really cares what the geezer in the Guardian thinks. He could give it two stars, hoping to provoke some comments below the line. That is what the Guardian does. They do it with Apple news and reviews. They do it with Game of Thrones. They generate clicks and hits and ad loads, and that’s how modern newspapers circle the drain.

When I was 18, Springsteen released The River, which (I’m about to controversially suggest) was his last unequivocally great album. And journalist Julie Burchill, writing then for the New Musical Express, wrote a sarcastic and biting review of it, highlighting the repetitively similar girls’ names (Julie, Mary, Wendy etc.), and sneering at all the songs about cars and trucks. It was less a review of The River and more of a not-buying-it critique of the Springsteen act and mythos. It upset me a lot at the time. I mean, I hated everything Julie Burchill wrote, but this hatchet job felt unnecessary and wide of the mark. 

Springsteen has since admitted that he wrote a lot of those songs about cars and leaving town whilst not being able to drive himself, and as someone who still lives within spitting distance of his home town. So, in a way, Burchill was probably picking up on something she felt was inauthentic. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The point was, I was wrong to care. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the record, and 39 years later, it still doesn’t. She might have been right, she might have been wrong, but the point then was that was exactly the kind of thing the NME did: deliberately give an album to someone who would hate it, and then sit back with the popcorn, knowing that their Letters page the following week would be full of Springsteen defenders.

These days, we call it trolling.

And people still argue about authenticity in music, and I suppose they always will. Personally, I stopped caring about that years ago, have reached the higher state of consciousness that means I’ve accepted the existence of the fictional character called Bob Dylan.

Anyway, Game of Thrones. It was good. I had an experience in the car today that meant I couldn’t listen to music or podcasts as I drove. Which is fatal, because the last thing I want to to when I’m driving long distances is focus on the distances. There’s a danger, when I’m driving through the night and everyone’s asleep that I start obsessing about the kilometre markers in the centre of French motorways, which count off every one hundred meters, so you can precisely locate yourself in an emergency. Literally: kilometer 288, kilometre 288.1, kilometre 288.2, etc.

And if you’re me and you start looking at those markers, you enter a fugue state in which time passes but you never get any closer to where you’re going, like something out of a dream. So I had to do something to occupy my brain in the absence of podcasts and songs, and for some reason I imagined myself in a situation where I was explaining the plot of Game of Thrones to my best friend.

It started something like this:

There’s this fictional world, made up of continents, countries, and seas. And at some point in the past there was a great civilisation, which has now fallen. All that remains of this lost civilisation are a few ruins, book fragments, and some remaining weapons: swords and blades made with some kind of amazing metallurgy that creates a special steel sharper and harder than any other steel. But nobody knows or remembers how it was done. So there are these swords, and these knives, leftovers from a vanished civilisation, and nobody knows how to make new ones. Anyway, that’s all background. You don’t know that at first, it’s just part of the world-building, the history of this place, which we first encounter long after this civilisation fell. And what remains is a rough and brutal mediaeval world. In particular, we’re in Westeros, a continent of seven kingdoms, which have been in an uneasy peace since a few years before the story begins. But again, we don’t know all this. When we first enter this world, it’s beyond the borders of Westeros, in the far North, where we see a patrol out in the bleak and cold country which lies North of this great wall of ice. What? Oh yes, there’s this amazing wall of ice which was built by the denizens of the lost civilisation to keep out some kind of threat, but again, nobody really knows what the threat is. Anyway, there’s this organisation called the Night Watch, and they man the Wall, and defend Westeros from this unknown threat, which they think is something to do with the people who live North of the Wall, who call themselves the Free Folk, but who are pejoratively called Wildlings. The Free Folk just want to live away from the mediaeval feudal system that exists South of the Wall. Anyway, the Night Watch isn’t what you’d call a force of highly professional trained fighting men. They’re people who have been sent there as punishment, as an alternative to a death penalty. Most of them. There are a few more decent types, who have self-exiled, but most of the Night Watch are murderers and cowards and thieves. Anyway, they’re out on patrol, and they come across something completely horrific…

And that’s just the background and introduction to the first five minutes of the first episode of Game of Thrones. The first five minutes of over four thousand minutes. It has been an extraordinary achievement in world building and television making, a global phenomenon of incredible storytelling, and visceral, action-packed, character-led entertainment. And it just ended in a way that is completely in keeping with the way it begins.

And the only thing that spoiled it?

The inter fucking net. And that guy. People who wanted to see messages tied to raven’s feet and people packing their bags in the last episode because otherwise it looks like a plot hole, but only if you think a plot should include all the boring bits as well as the exciting bits (and exciting tits and butts, it has to be said).

So in years to come, I hope to watch again without the madness of the social commentary that became, in the end, an industry in its own right. And they saw the end coming and lost their fucking shit because all their parasitical recaps and blogs and podcasts would be over. Luckily, my own blog, this one, has never just been about one thing, so I carry on regardless.