No One Gets to Be the Hero
I’ve never had any patience for knights. The whole medieval package—servants dying for their lords, endless horseback riding, swordfights in muddy forests, a world where life expectancy was about as generous as a slumlord—held zero appeal. I said this confidently and often, right up until I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones.
HBO’s ten-part first season tells the story of seven kingdoms under the shadow of an approaching winter so long and terrible that nobody alive has seen its like, which makes it easy to dismiss as myth. While the noble houses Stark, Lannister, and Baratheon maneuver around a dying king’s throne, the dead are waking up beyond the great Wall in the north, and to the south the Dothraki—nomadic warriors with no discernible interest in mercy—are beginning to move toward the land of castles and politics that has no idea what’s coming.
The source material is George R.R. Martin’s novel A Song of Ice and Fire, but the show wears it more like a brutal soap opera than an epic fantasy. This is not a criticism. Incestuous siblings. Beheaded traitors. A child pushed from a tower window. The world of Game of Thrones is neither for the faint-hearted nor for background viewing—it demands full attention, a working memory for faces and allegiances, and a stomach for sudden violence applied to characters you had just started trusting.
There are also—constantly, unapologetically—breasts. Prostitutes move through scenes while witch burnings and village raids happen just offscreen. A lecherous dwarf with a gift for dialogue competes with a statuesque blonde for the audience’s attention and wins it. The show is unsubtle about its appetites, which works because the underlying architecture is so disciplined: every piece of spectacle is in service of a world that feels genuinely ancient and exhausted in exactly the way the real Middle Ages must have felt from the inside.
What the first season does, and what I didn’t expect, is refuse to sort its characters into heroes and villains. Everyone is compromised. Everyone is making choices that will cost them something. The show earns its reputation as the one where no one is safe—not through random carnage, but through an honest accounting of what power does to people over time.
The season just ended in the US. I’m not going to describe the finale. What I will say is that whatever comes next—the White Walkers beyond the Wall, the dragons growing somewhere in the east—Game of Thrones has already done the hardest thing: it made me care about a world I had absolutely no intention of entering.