If you vote for me to be your dictator, I will imprison everyone who still likes Game of Thrones.
The zeitgeist is shifting away from morally gray slop for McDonald’s eaters.
Let’s rap about George RRRRRRRR Martin and his shitty stories for shitty dipshits.
Like most people, I went through a Game of Thrones phase. I read all five of those increasingly irrelevant books about 15 years ago. I also watched the entire show. (You did too. You don’t remember it, but you watched it.)
Popular opinion holds that Seasons 1 through 4 are still good. I don’t disagree. Most people loved the show. We even enjoyed seasons 5, 6, and 7 because we didn’t recognize the omens of what was to come.
Then Season 8 happened. Maybe if the series had ended on a high note I wouldn’t have been inspired to write this diatribe. Oh well, I guess the writers shouldn’t have turned into lazy assholes.
Moral Ambiguity Is Dead
Most popular media for the last 100 years has been propaganda specifically designed to dissolve the foundations of the safe, high trust societies where it was created.
Healthy societies don’t do this. Healthy societies don’t let agents of subversion into their cultural institutions. But the West is not a healthy society, hence all popular contemporary Western media has become antihuman propaganda.
That’s what Game of Thrones is. A cringe neckbeard pagan decided Tolkien’s work produced too many upstanding moral people, and Mr. Neckbeard hates that. So he wrote something that his sycophants fallaciously call “realpolitik.” (If you want “realpolitik” you should check out my immaculate masterpieces of political commentary.)
The ceaseless calls for “morally grey” characters and “ambiguous morality” are meant to destroy your society. They’re meant to drain our civilizations of all of the beauty and positive values that sustained us for thousands of years.
Quick side note: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are also part of this problem, but those shows are grand fucking slams, so I give them a free pass. That’s how my cultural criticism works. If I like your evil, soulless propaganda, you get off scot-free. If I don’t like it, I use my worthless university degree to describe all the reasons you should be imprisoned.
The pervasiveness of GoT in the cultural conversation was only partially organic. It’s like mumble rap or brutalist architecture. It removes things that had aesthetic and moral value, and deliberately replaces them with something that is soulless, ugly, empty, and nihilistic. It engages in this process because that’s what it wants to do to your society as a whole. As such, it is funded and promoted by the rulers of our nations.
But destroying societies is not its greatest purpose. Its greatest purpose is to destroy the soul. (Non-soul-believers are cordially invited to leave. Perhaps Reddit would suit you better.)
Your soul craves beauty. Beauty itself is a virtue. Hence, the beauty of classical architecture makes the architecture itself virtuous. Likewise with music and literature. Bach and Vivaldi show you the gates of Heaven. Cardi B claws at your eardrums and abrades your flesh with 40 grit sandpaper.
Tolkien and Lewis understood this dichotomy, and they tapped into something divine, which is why their works have lasted for nearly a century. It’s why people still know Bach and Vivaldi.
It’s why Game of Thrones will not be remembered in the 2100s. And it’s why mentioning Cardi B has already outdated this article. Nobody even remembers who that syphilitic gutter slut is.
You Will Never Fail as Hard as the GoT Showrunners
Keep this fact in mind. Remember that no matter how much you suck at writing, you will never make something worse than Game of Thrones Season 8.
Do you remember how big the franchise was? It was a constant topic of conversation. It was a cultural phenomenon. Everybody watched it, even people who aren’t into fantasy.
Side note: If you read fantasy books, you need to fucking stop, by the way. Lord of the Rings gets a pass because it’s Lord of the Rings. But every other fantasy series needs to be murdered. Vote for me and I will imprison every fantasy author, ESPECIALLY fantasy authors who write on Substack. (Could you please restack that previous sentence? I’m trying to start a war. Thank you.)
Game of Thrones was e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e. It would have been remembered forever. It would have held up as well as The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or early Simpsons.
It was that good.
And now? Nobody talks about it anymore. A few misguided YouTubers will make 45-minute thinkpieces about the show. A few Substackers will write articles about how GRRM will never finish Winds of Winter and that gives me the sad-sads.
And it’s always confusing. Like, wtf bro? Read the room. Game of Thrones is dead. The show was a plane crash that we all barely survived. GRRM is never going to finish the books (and even if he does, Feast for Crows and Dance With Dragons are 6/10 AT BEST.)
Nobody talks about it anymore, apart from conversations like these. It has been erased from the public consciousness. It was the absolute peak of television for a few years. And then in 2019 we all stopped talking about it. Nobody even watched it during the covid lockdowns. People watched everything BUT Game of Thrones.
Jaime’s story? Ruined.
Cersei’s story? Ruined.
Dany’s story? Who cares anymore? All we remember is that she fucked her nephew on a boat and was getting raped at 13 years old in Season 1 because George RR Martin is an agent of cultural subversion sent here to dissolve the foundations of Western society because he’s not a fucking human he’s actually a skinwalking demon and if you vote for me I will travel back in time and imprison GRRM in 1996 right before he published his first GoT book.
Jon? Do you even remember that he’s a Targaryen? Cuz I sure don’t. WTF is a Targaryen? He’s just an incest bitch who died and came back to life to report there’s “nothing” after death because, again, George RR Martin is an interdimensional time-traveling demon who probably travelled to Epstein’s island 400 times.
Tyrion’s story? He became a punchline character who said, “I drink and I know things” and “nOboDy haS a BetTeR sTorY ThAN bRan tHe BRokeN.”
Do you remember that the whole story is secretly a war between Little Finger and Varys? They were the guys behind the scenes fighting to control the chess board. Benioff and Weiss, the showrunners, kinda forgot that part.
Ultimately Game of Thrones died the same way Ned Stark did. GRRM tried to be an edgelord by beheading his only honorable character, and instead, his story is now forgotten.
It’s like Christopher Hitchens. After his global “God Is Cringe And Lame” tour, he got throat cancer and died. Poetic justice. GRRM was sent to subvert Western morality and kick Tolkien off his throne. Instead, he’s irrelevant and will never finish his neckbeard-ass dumpster fire magnum opus.
Cry harder, GRRM. This is a better fate than you deserve.
The New Zeitgeist
Game of Thrones arrived when moral ambiguity in fiction was at its peak.
Now we’ve seen how empty those narratives are. Everybody fucks their aunt and their sister and rapes 13 year olds and all the good guys die.
The new frontier for fiction is black-and-white morality. These are the bad guys, these are the good guys, and this is how we should build our societies in the future.
Let the filthy little pagans and shitlibs keep playing in the morally gray sandbox. The zeitgeist of the future is more Lord of the Rings than Breaking Bad.
Many on the right call for a rise of Christian fiction. This is a recipe for not getting your books read. Our culture is not advanced enough to support openly Christian fiction.
Instead, do what Tolkien did. There is no Jesus Christ in Middle Earth. People don’t quote the Bible. But Tolkien was deeply Catholic and used his worldview to write fiction that nudged people in the right direction.
Writers: You have a chance to be on the bleeding edge of the new zeitgeist.
Future generations will need to rebuild from the barren wasteland that we’ve bequeathed to them.
We can make life a little easier for them by providing narratives that explore the pitfalls of a society enamored with morally gray antiheroes.
“Here’s how we fucked up. Tell your descendants to remember what happens when you reject morality.”
P.S.
This is a perfect time for you to check out Infinite Ultraviolence. I promise you will never forget this book.