BW Media Spotlight

I get the feeling Leon isn’t a Game Of Thrones fan.

Neither am I, Leon. In fact, if it wasn’t for Literature Devil using so many other examples I’m totally familiar with, like Jean-Luc Picard and Superman, I probably wouldn’t post this video as my own frame of reference is discussions on YouTube channels I happen to enjoy. As it is, fantasy isn’t usually my genre, so it has to have something to grab my interest above the norm. The Game Of Thrones franchise is dark, depressing, and ruins anybody worth rooting for. Everyone seems to be a bad choice to run Westeros from my perspective so I’ve had no interest in watching or reading anything from it even if George R.R. Martin were capable of finishing it, which it doesn’t look like he is. Even the tales of Dunk and Egg, based on a graphic novel and praised for being almost anachronistic to the world of Westeros due to actually having a noble hero isn’t drawing me to see it.

That said, while Literature Devil uses the franchise as his opening framing, he goes a lot into the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Family” and Picard’s struggles with his time as Locutus of Borg. He goes into Superman and the false perception of being boring because of his nobility. He goes into the Punisher and who he won’t kill in his war against the mob. Nobility, virtue, the failed temptation of a hero versus the fall of the villain to temptation, are ultimately on the discussion block. So many writers today find the virtuous hero “boring” or “unrelatable”. These people scare me because it means they themselves are neither of those things, yet seek to lecture us on how to be a “good person”. They have no faith in humanity. I’ve seen the evils of man in my 50+ years of being on this planet, but I’ve also seen the good. I can’t believe that the human race as a whole are completely evil or completely good, though there are individuals who could claim something close to the title.

LD’s video runs a little over 45 minutes, but it’s a good watch to see just how these various stories approach good versus evil, comparing it to how it’s done these days, how (as the title states) Game Of Thrones betrays its heroes, and why punishing a character for their strengths and noble deed just brings everybody down, including the audience. It’s not a rejection. He goes over examples of the failed and fallen hero done well and he’s (as far as I’m aware) a fan of the franchise. However, he does make the point that, like Watchmen, writers fail to understand what makes it work and just devolve into cynical deconstruction in the beliefs that heroism is an illusion, and “good” and “evil” don’t exist. That is not good storytelling.

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