I don’t have TV (and honestly don’t like Game of Thrones enough to bother with HBO Now, in spite of whatever Ross Douthat thinks about liberals and the show) so I won’t Game of Thrones but will rather wait until the season is over and available on iTunes, binge-watch, and as usual be the last medievalist to have seen the show. Either way, though, a recent trip to Prince Edward Island got me thinking again about the thread that unifies all of the things that add up to make me really dislike the show. So just a quick thought in advance of the start of the season:
Lots of fans complain use historical accuracy as a way to complain the inclusion of strong female and POC characters; although they never have a problem with the historical accuracy of dragons as medieval weapons of war. Click here for a good overview piece about the issue in media and fantasy series and games generally; it’s similar to the issues surrounding GoT specifically, which are the topic of this piece. This kind of complaint hinges on the idea that an authentic Middle Ages was mostly fully of white people, a complaint that has been debunked by scholars over and over again.
In light of those kinds of rageful complaint that come from Donald Trump’s America I don’t want to fall back on authenticity as the crux of own critique; but at the same time, a lot has also been written on the medieval inauthenticity of the show and the ways in which the show projects contemporary. ideas and desires on an imagined version of the Middle Ages that’s ultimately more modern than anything else (as here).
It’s not just the projection of modern desires on the Middle Ages that makes the show inauthentic, but the sloppy visual and linguistic shorthanding. For example: The Alcázar of Seville stands in for Dorne, the southern kingdom of Westeros that conforms to a variety of orientalizing stereotypes, beginning with using Spain as the setting for the place that is part-but-not-a-part of the kingdom in precisely the same way that convention wisdom has Africa beginning at the Pyrenees. The showrunners are very good about creating invented languages for people of different kingdoms and clans, but the people of Dorne instead speak the “Common Tongue,” English in the show, with an indeterminate accent rather than ever speaking their own language. The accent and the setting are tools for signaling to a general audience that the Dornish are alien to their own kingdom without having to take up time really setting up that characteristic or doing it within the framework of the series — it relies on marks of otherness from our wold in the Westerosi one.
My post-tenure trip took me to Prince Edward Island, Canada, where the beaches are mostly iron. The sand is red with all the iron content. With my toes in the water it occurred to me that the landscapes also rely on shorthand. The Island of Pyke in the series is meant to be iron but it is made up of crags of seasoned cast iron rather than the mineral as it occurs in nature. It’s a silly little observation, and maybe I’ll have more to say once I’ve watched the season through — #medievaltwitter seems to be atwitter about the depiction of chained libraries — but for now it struck me that cold, dark metal was the way to shorthand iron based on popular images in the real world without either building it up in the Westerosi world or even thinking about how it really is in our world.
It’s not medieval, it’s not real, but it’s also not fully fictional. What is it doing, in the end?
