Amazon, like other entertainment studios, has been looking for a hit as big as Game of Thrones for quite a few years. That series seems for now forgotten, but it has in fact already led to a successful HBO spinoff, so let’s first turn our attention to this show, which I reviewed for Acton, to remind people how popular it is & how it’s built on immorality for the young adult crowd.
There’s a new Game of Thrones series, created by novelist George R. R. Martin himself, called House of the Dragon, set a few centuries before the previous one & continuing its interest in decadence. Since the first season is over, it’s easy to pick out the major features of the stories & their tendency, & since this is a big success with at least another season to come, it will have an influence worth deploring intelligently.
I have three thoughts to share. The first, though obvious, is the most important. People have been watching Game of Thrones all over again, reaffirming, so to speak, that it’s the only really popular thing on TV. Tens of millions of fans by now have gotten used to a series that started more than a decade back, in 2011. The finale was a silly disappointment, all told, but people don’t care anymore. Nothing better has come along & people are going back for a refresher course, if you will. The viewers, of course, are following after tens of millions of readers around the world who have been devouring Game of Thrones novels, stories, encyclopedias, & graphic novels since the series started in 1996. HBO claims that, within a week, the first episode of House of the Dragon was viewed by 25 million people.
This is a very unfortunate thing, but we must face facts: HBO has succeeded in identifying popularity & prestige with immorality. Things that could not have been shown in prime time 20 years back are now the only prime time fare there is. The question left to ask is: How will this new habit be passed on to a younger generation? To that end, House of the Dragon continues the attempt of Game of Thrones to make incest a popular spectacle. I fear that decent people are afraid of even noticing it, & I have seen people try to explain it away; worse still, most are afraid of speaking up. I suggest, instead, you join me in condemning this madness. Hopefully, it is possible to stop it.
Next, Amazon’s attempt at winning over the young adult female audience, which does not indulge forbidden carnal desires. It’s built on something just as strange, utopian, but of a different character that raises no questions among our elites. I reviewed The Rings of Power for Law & Liberty. I explain the core demand of Tolkien’s storytelling to identify beauty & creation, why Progress is built on destroying that, & why it’s now coming for Tolkien’s conservative work. I also point out why the audience & the writing itself are vulnerable to this corruption, where a happy end or an “eucatastrophe” is not hard to twist into Progress.
We should simply accept that the series has nothing in common with Tolkien, except perhaps in the way of a parody. Tolkien may be the only very popular cultural force of an emphatically conservative character, & is therefore ripe for corruption. The assumption behind such an attempt is that the audience is really not interested in Tolkien & could easily be persuaded to watch a story in an entirely different spirit. If conservatives had wanted to prevent such a thing, they should have acted years back. They could have founded a film company & made good adaptations. If they care to do something now, let them speak up. But for my part, I guess that they are unable to act, indifferent, or irresponsible. They are victims whom it is very difficult to pity, since they did not learn from Tolkien how to fight, but only how to wish to escape their predicament.
Thus, with Amazon Tolkien becomes a new metaphor for Progress. The love between elves & humans becomes a metaphor for interracial marriage, for example, in the opening episode. The appearance of black hobbits & elves is merely another sign that the only thing we are to tell stories about is Progress as envisioned by a DIE committee. The opening episode’s focus on Galadriel—played as an angry, rebellious college girl—is also about Progress. Indeed, what else but this kind of Tolkien caricature can one expect in such circumstances?
Finally, Amazon’s much less costly & more successful alternative, which splits the difference between the other two, The Wheel of Time, which I’ve just reviewed for Acton. It’s almost as ugly & violent as House of The Dragon, but about as sentimental as The Rings of Power. It’s also very revealing about the problems of storytelling for this new generation—among other things, you can get a long look at the psychology of American kids.
Fans of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels have complained that the spirit of the story has been betrayed &, even aside from all the Progressive pieties suddenly intruding everywhere in entertainment, any concern for good & evil, for religion, perhaps, has been wiped out. Well, we have different elites now! Controversy is inevitable with such adaptations, but I’m not sure it matters.
Since it’s a hit, & since a generation has passed between publication & screen adaptation, we should try to understand how fantasy & popularity have changed the epic’s character. For his part, Jordan wanted to restore in his novels something of the high ambition of Tolkien, & even took up Tolkien’s problem—to connect the Christian idea of the struggle between good & evil defining the conscience to the pre-Christian world defined by magic & tragedy.
Tolkien built upon Norse mythology, finding a kind of heroic suffering there that could be interpreted as preparation for Christian sacrifice, perhaps because of the warlike orientation to Ragnarok, a world-ending battle. Jordan turned to the Eastern idea of cyclical time, hence the wheel, perhaps because the idea of reincarnation is the closest thing to an immortal soul in the popular imagination, distinctly not martial but oriented to enduring. We live in a society where people are bored of the Last Judgment, but karma is in common parlance.
The Wheel of Time mixes the two ideas, good & evil & cyclical time, by bringing back yet another very old idea, repetitive cataclysms that wipe out civilization, but not mankind. Every 3,000 years, a confrontation with a diabolic antagonist comes when a uniquely powerful magician is born; Jordan’s innovation is to split male & female magicians, the sign of nature’s reproductive power, & set them at odds. The “dragon” figure, possibly salvific, possibly damning, is always a male & hence unpredictable, chaotic; the major use of magic, however, is female—cooperative & in a way passive, hence fit to be institutionalized.