A Lesson in Nudity and Violence from Game of Thrones

Recently I’ve become addicted to a new television show. Don’t worry, this happens like once a month. I’ll hear something is a good show and then I’ll troll the internet (mostly Netflix) until I find all of the episodes ever and then I’ll watch them all one after another until I feel guilty about having gotten nothing else accomplished. If it’s a good TV show, normally I won’t feel guilty about this until I’ve watched all the episodes.

So, right, recently I’ve become addicted to a new show. I don’t know, maybe you’ve heard of it? It’s a little show called Game of Thrones. It’s summer, so I’m home, and my parents saw me watching an episode. For anyone else that watches this show (which should be EVERYONE), you know that along with all of its amazingness, it also has a ton of violence and nudity. So my dad is standing there watching a second of this with me and he says, “So why exactly do you like this show?”

This is a reasonable question when he is watching a bit in which in one scene someone gets his throat slit and in the next scene two women in a brothel are getting it on. But it didn’t take me even a second to think about it before I answered.

The writing is amazing.

Part of this is probably because the author of the books this series is based on writes some of the episodes and is a co-producer so he has a ton of creative control (always a good thing). Part of this is probably because the main writers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, have experience in both screen writing and in novel writing. This second part is the key bit. They both also write novels, which, when it comes to adapting a novel to the screen, seems utterly important to me but also utterly overlooked. Plus, I just finished reading David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves and it was incredible! So, you know, it’s good writing upon good writing upon good writing.

Okay, so fine, I like the writing. But there has to be more that attracts me to this than just the witty dialogue (although I could probably just listen to Tyrion talk forever). 

 

I think it also has something to do with the mix of violence/nudity and the extremely emotional connections we make to the characters. Game of Thrones is widely known to be that show that kills off everyone you like and never the people that you hate (which happens to be more than half the characters). This sounds evil, right? But it’s actually kind of brilliant. If you put those characters that fans hate in charge and always put the good guys as the underdogs, it is guaranteed that those fans will come back. They want to see their favorites succeed, but if they do, fans will feel satisfied and leave. So while all of us fans moan that Joffrey still hasn’t died and that not even Sansa deserved that, we all secretly kind of love watching all this violence and nudity and this horrible stuff happen. Not because it’s happening, but because we know that the best is yet to come.

Delayed gratification. All of our writing could learn a little from it. Or, at least mine could.

Bravo David Benioff. Bravo D. B. Weiss. But really. Bravo George R.R. Martin.