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THE GAME HAS CHANGED Wrinkled fingers chop raw meat with a cleaver. The sky is gray and a crow caws with each dull impact of the blade. Seen through an array of metal bars, Jon Snow ascends a staircase to have a conversation with the hoary butcher. Jon opens a wooden container to find fresh viscera in a heap, the darkest red that blood can be. “Love is the death of duty,” says the old man. He wears a black cloak with a large linked chain draped around his midsection. He is blind. Jon throws some scraps of meat to the crows. Their conversation is serious and heavy with concepts like duty, honor, loyalty, family, and humanity. Tensions rise as the strings crescendo in the background. Jon gets upset and the old man speaks of his dead brothers, and reveals that he is Aemon Targaryen. Jon is facing a decision that splits his life between family and duty. Aemon lets Jon know that the choice he has to make is his to make alone, and he must live with it for the rest of his life, “as I have.” Queue foreboding drums. This scene unfolds in the ninth episode of the first season of Game of Thrones, an HBO series written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss based off George R. R. Martin’s series of fantasy books. The scene just described is typical of the style of the show, and occurs in an episode that challenges convention by unexpectedly killing off a main character. This, though, is also typical of Game of Thrones. Viewers (or readers) soon find out that this series plays for keeps. Stylistically, Game of Thrones uses a color pallet with low saturation; everything is somewhat
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Text // Ian Clayton
washed out, and the sky is usually overcast. Most people are dressed in maroon, gray, or bronze. White (or grey) hair is quite common, as a large amount of the characters skew older given the fact that it focuses an on array of realistically flawed, mature characters. Grim reality is the name of the game, maintained even in the high fantasy setting. Game of Thrones reminds viewers frequently that life in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros is bloody, toilsome, and often short. The soundtrack is orchestral, composed by Ramin Djawadi, and emphasizes drums and strings to lend the show an often melancholy, and intense feel. Costume design, as mentioned with regards to color, fits with the aesthetic by having armor on the conservative side of fantasy and clothing quite realistic for the period. The style knits together well and manages to carve out an aesthetic of its own in a genre prone to repeats. Though Game of Thrones is high fantasy, it avoids a lot of Tolkien-esque clichés, mostly within storytelling. The show refuses the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, present in so much of science fiction, fantasy, and fiction in general. Game of Thrones instead puts more emphasis on character interaction and development than the grand journey that has become the norm. It also denies the good versus evil dichotomy that so many fantasy stories subscribe to, opting for political and familial conflicts with validity on both sides. Sure, some characters are nastier than others, but they aren’t divided into two camps to face off for all time and
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