Ups and downs of Game of Thrones
Undoubtedly, the piece of fiction that grew to one of the largest and had the most influence on pop culture in recent times is the Game of Thrones.
Epic fantasy had existed for centuries and had infiltrated every mean of entertainment from books, TV shows, movies, video games and so on. World of Warcraft is the largest online video game in the world and there is no way you haven’t heard of J. R. R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings.
However, up until recently, this genre was still not ‘popular with the cool kids’. Don’t get me wrong, The Lord of the Rings trilogy is indeed one of the greatest ever made and that was proven many times over but many people were still not getting the charm it has to offer. Many watched it but rarely would you hear someone outside the fandom speak about it with passion and know more than just the movies. The mainstream audience wasn’t that much into nerd culture and you wouldn’t hear a future prom queen talking about swords, dragons, wars and castle intricacies.
Enter Game of Thrones.
Back in 2011, when the show started, I would see more and more people you wouldn’t really connect with geek culture talk about it, discuss theories, marvel at the story, characters, events. Following the good, old “book is better than the movie,” I’ve started reading them before watching the show, not wanting to spoil anything for myself, thinking how it’s “just another TV series.”
Boy was I wrong. Not only was it harder and harder to avoid any kind of conversation regarding the topic, making it almost impossible to avoid spoilers unless I was literally missing out on social gatherings but, eventually, I ran out of books. The show continued past them and I was “forced” to watch it (woe is me!).
Having binge-watched everything that came out in an embarrassingly small number of days I was proud that now I could finally enjoy being the part of the whole thing. And that’s when I’ve realized that is how the whole world feels. You are used to watching people get excited over a football game or a new song or an album, but this was the first time people went full geek, and it was amazing.
I’m not going to go into how great the writing and storytelling was, how realistic the show was and how even sex scenes felt completely in place and justified, chances are, you’ve probably watched the series. I’ll also keep the whole “fall” part of the show short because you probably know about that too. Once they’ve strayed from the books and ran out of source material, the quality dropped even though the production values went through the roof. Some people were satisfied, many were left wanting. But, without dwelling on the poor ending, we can still enjoy earlier episodes (and a bunch of mainstream scenes on sex sites) and thank the show for making geek culture mainstream.
