We're making the same mistake as Game of Thrones

Different worlds, same crappy finale

Spoiler Alert: If you’re one of those people who has not seen GoT yet but still intends to, run away now.

Yes it’s 2022 and we’ve all lived through everything, but I need to talk about what went wrong with Game of Thrones. I’m just still not over it, and as I browsed Twitter recently, horrified at the deepening divides straining on the fabric of our society, I finally put my finger on why:

The writers got the damn battles the wrong way around.

For seven seasons, they wove an intricate web of politics, strategy, love and deceit between masterfully detailed characters vying for the throne. Meanwhile, we observed an enemy far deadlier than any of their power games grow in the North; a seemingly invincible army of hollow blue-eyed monsters that kills and absorbs any living creature in its path, its only goal to turn the world into a wasteland of death.

It seemed obvious what the final battle of the show should be. After all, what a powerful lesson: us humans always get so wrapped up in fighting each other, we fail to realize the true enemy: annihilation itself. An enemy that, if not tamed, will kill us all if we don’t overcome our differences and band together to defeat it. And as the penultimate season finished, my emotional investment was off the charts; after all, what a powerful metaphor for climate change! For pandemics! For misaligned artificial intelligence! For almost any existential threat you can think of!

But then in season eight, the writers do an inexplicable one-eighty: the epic metaphysical war of Ice vs Fire, Existence vs Oblivion — is neatly resolved by episode three (Existence survives, alongside all major characters, conveniently). The rest of the season then reverts to the Game-of-Thrones soap opera. And I dunno about you, but it was kinda hard to muster a single shit about either crazy blonde chick’s team when you’re just relieved anyone is still alive to play the game at all.

Which brings me to our real-world situation. Until a few years ago, I felt that the Culture Wars (or polarization, or tribalism, or whatever you want to call the phenomenon where seemingly any topic inevitably splinters along vaguely left/right political lines given enough time) was simply a passing fad playing itself out on social media platforms. It felt like an unpleasant but largely harmless adolescent phase that liberal democracies go through as they adjusted to life online, because surely we’d grow bored of all this in-fighting once we understood how clickbait headlines and echo-chamber algorithms were hijacking our emotions, right?

But I really underestimated our addiction to the soap opera. Even with the Trump circus now a year behind us, we’re binging on it harder than ever. From J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter reunion absence to Novak Djokovic’s visa status, barely a day goes by without a new dualistic opinion-war emerging between internet factions scrambling to signal their allegiance through profile picture sigils and hashtag battle chants.

And while some topics truly are deserving of such attention, it seems any single outrage-inducing event now has the potential to become an international political movement if the amorphous Media-System Monster so decides. And alas, the MSM’s decision-making apparatus isn’t exactly aligned with what’s good for the world. In fact, its objective — MAX(advertising$) — is orthogonal at best.

It’s therefore rare that the hashtag-du-jour matches up with what politicians actually should prioritize right now, like, I dunno, assigning appropriate resources towards preventing the next pandemic, or making sure authoritarianism itself doesn’t destroy our liberal democracies forever.

Just like our beloved Game of Thrones characters, we’re so easily distracted by our own cultural in-fighting, it’s no wonder the writers switched the final battles around. Why wouldn’t they assume we’d find the myopic soap opera more entertaining? But given how hard the show’s finale got dragged by even its most diehard fans, perhaps they misjudged us. Because people hated it. And that gives me hope that maybe, somewhere deep down, we know that the true enemy isn’t the other tribe, it’s annihilation itself.