By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films (and occasionally TV shows), and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to HBO’s game-changing fantasy series Game Of Thrones, which sees more spin-off activity this week with the third season of House Of The Dragon.
Trends…don’t you just hate them? Selfies; hash-tags; talking incessantly about the cost of living and the housing crisis; beards, tattoos; glasses when you don’t need them; cafes that “everyone is raving about”; stupid videos “going viral”; the mere expression, “going viral”; K Pop Demon Hunters; K Pop in general; organic food; food shows…you know the drill.
Well, one of the biggest televisual trends of all time is unquestionably Game Of Thrones, the only TV show that guaranteed the dismemberment of at least one body part per week. Like pretty much any form of content that makes money these days, Game Of Thrones is now part of its own “screen universe”, with the follow-up shows A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms and House Of The Dragon, the third season of which is about to “drop” on HBO Max.
From 2011 through to 2019, Game Of Thrones was tagged as the “water cooler” show in Australia, even though we don’t really have “water coolers” here, and furthermore, nobody has ever been sighted standing around one in an office debating the merits of Off Campus versus Euphoria, or thinking out loud about what kind of fucked up shit Homelander will do next. People have those kinds of discussions on the internet under the veil of cyber-anonymity, and not around the non-existent “water cooler” at work.
Anyway, if people actually did stand around the water cooler in the office and talk about TV, they were once talking about Game Of Thrones, the small screen fantasy series where dragons swoop from the sky, badly peroxided hair is the order of the day, dwarves speak with bad British accents, brothers hump their sisters, prostitutes get tortured and killed, scheming eunuchs are everywhere, and old dudes get shot with arrows while taking a dump.
Apart from the fact that it’s packed with stuff that could be described as silly at best (snow zombie things? Giants? Witches?), and “boasts” plotting that makes little to no sense, while wearing its rampant sex and exploitative violence like a clawed-at badge of “coolness”, the worst thing about Game Of Thrones (and its follow-ups) was the manner in which it was wholeheartedly embraced by the world’s trend-chasing hipster sheep, who – in a desperate bid to remain part of the “cool crowd” – suddenly latched onto a genre they’d been scoffing at for years.
Yes, they might have swooned over The Khaleesi and Jon Snow, crapped on about the wit of Tyrion Lannister, and praised the “dark genius” of George R. R. Martin, but these are probably the same people who laughed at the kids at school who played Dungeons & Dragons at lunchtime…
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Jurassic Park, The Hurt Locker, Raging Bull, The Castle, Amelie, The Social Network, Argo, Gravity, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, The Artist, Only God Forgives, One Battle After Another, Birdman, Lethal Weapon, Blazing Saddles, Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
