April 14, at 21:00 EST, the eighth, the last season of the legendary game “Game of Thrones”, based on George Martin's epic song “The Song of Ice and Flame”, kicked off.
The series (as well as the saga itself, which currently includes five voluminous volumes, not counting the pseudo-historical “Chronicle” Flame and Blood and a few prequel novellas) can be treated differently. In addition to the millions of TV version fans who did not read Martin’s books, there is an army of “Songs” fans who have not watched the show in principle.
There are people who don’t tolerate either books or their screen versions (and love to flaunt their “otherness” in companies and social networks), but there are those who enjoy reading and rereading the epic and revising its film incarnation.
I, perhaps, belong to the latter. Somewhere in late 2000, wandering between the shelves of the Moscow bookstore, I randomly picked up a glossy volume from an unknown author from the shelf (this was the first edition of PLiO in the Dragon Age series), opened it, ran through several pages ... and got caught. The wonderful world of desert snowy forests behind the colossal Wall, where night watchmen wearing black are hunted by ominous Others with ice blades who are sliding in darkness, captured me from the very first lines.
I became a devoted reader of Martin, advised his books to friends and acquaintances, registered on the 7 kingdoms forum, scolded translation inaccuracies and negligence of editors and proofreaders of the AST publishing house, while abroad, bought paperback volumes to read the saga in the original. When HBO started showing the show in 2011, I, like many other PLO fans, took it with caution: too much in the TV version was not the same as in the book, but much did not coincide with the perceptions of the world created during the years of reading .
But in the eight years that have passed since the first appearance on the screens of the heroes of the saga - the noble Ned Stark and his children, the cheerful drunkard King Robert and his insidious wife Cersei, the charismatic James, nicknamed the Regicide, the clever and charming dwarf Tirion and dozens of others (in the series more than forty conditionally "main characters", and in the books they are many times more), a lot has changed.
First, the series, which at first had rather modest ratings (the first episode was watched by only 2.2 million viewers, and by the end of the first season, the audience had grown by only 800 thousand people) turned into one of the most popular and box-office in world history .
The last episode of the seventh season was watched by 12 million viewers, and the average legal audience of the series in the United States grew to 31 million - given that many people are downloading the Game from torrents in a pirated way, this figure needs to be multiplied several times (according to the MUSO company that conducted around the world, for every viewer who paid for viewing, there are up to 30 “birds with one stone”, that is, the global audience of the “Game” is approaching a billion). George Martin does not sin against the truth when he claims that “The Game” is the most successful series in the world.
Secondly, the images created by the actors and producers of the series, firmly implanted in the mass consciousness, and even those fans of the saga, who for many years drew their own portraits of Martin’s heroes in their imagination, are now unlikely to imagine, say, John Snow otherwise by Keith Harrington, and Daenerys Targaryen separately from actress Emilia Clark (although the description of these characters in the book is significantly different from the screen images).
Third, whether someone likes it or not, but thanks to the TV series, the fantasy world invented by George Martin has become an integral part of the mass culture of the first quarter of the 21st century. And this means that many ideas and concepts of the American science fiction have penetrated the consciousness of people around the world, overcoming customs and ideological barriers. The fictional universe of the Game of Thrones has a very specific impact on our reality. For example, in 2016–2017, the flow of Chinese tourists poured into countries that were not interested in the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom at all - to Northern Ireland, Croatia, and even to cold Iceland. The reason is the growing popularity of the series “Game of Thrones” in China, many scenes of which were filmed in these places (and this despite the fact that the series in the PRC was shown in a form that was significantly curtailed by censorship).
In other words, George Martin invented a world that attracts millions (if not billions) of people all over the Earth. It is possible to compare it in this sense only with J.R.R. Tolkien, but the latter’s peak of popularity is already behind, and the influence of Martin and his Song of Ice and Flame on the mass audience is only growing and expanding, and there’s no end to it - after the end of the eighth season, the creators of the Game are going to release several prequel series.
All the more insulting that, unlike his idol Tolkien, Martin could not avoid the temptation to draw parallels between the characters of his saga and real political figures - his contemporaries. As you know, Tolkien never publicly spoke about the links between the events in “The Lord of the Rings” and world politics of the 20th century.
There are many interpretations of the image of Sauron, the One Ring and his destruction in the flame of Mount Doom, but Tolkien himself did not answer the direct questions of the interviewers and got off with hints at best. But Martin gladly goes to meet the journalists - and thus seriously lowers the bar of the epic he created.
“I said during the election campaign that Trump most of all reminds me of Joffrey. They have the same level of emotional maturity. Joffrey also loves everyone to repeat that he is the king, and he thinks that the crown gives him the opportunity to do anything. And although we do not have an absolute monarchy, as in Västerås, but a constitutional republic, Trump does not seem to know what this means. He also thinks that the presidency gives him the power to do anything. So yes, Joffrey is Trump, ”the writer said in an interview with the main speaker of American liberals, The New York Times.
Joffrey, if anyone does not remember, this is perhaps the only character in the saga, which Martin painted exclusively with black paint - a teenage sadist who became king after setting up his father's death during a hunt. He tortures animals, beats up his bride, orders to execute her father - in general, commits many vile and evil deeds, until he finally dies from poison at a wedding feast.
Trump's comparison with Joffrey certainly appealed to the NYT audience, but is it really justified? Trump has not done (at least for now) anything for which he could be branded as a murderer or a sadist. He did not unleash wars like Clinton or the father and son of Bushy, and did not even support the bombardment of a sovereign country (Libya) to overthrow the legitimate government, as the idol of the liberals Obama. It strengthens the US economy, creates millions of new jobs for Americans. It would seem, how can you object to reducing unemployment? It turns out you can, and how!
“There is a threat of climate change, which, in my opinion, has been convincingly confirmed by the majority of data and 99.9% of the scientific community is recognized,” Martin confidentially reports in the same interview. - This threat is quite capable of destroying the world, and we, instead of reckoning with it, are worried about the next elections and other pressing problems like jobs. Jobs, of course, are very important. These are all important issues. But none of them will be important if, for example, we die or our cities go under water. So the fight against climate change should be a task of paramount importance for any politician who can look beyond the next election, but unfortunately there are very few. ”
It is not difficult to guess who he means: all the same B.Kh. Obama, who, not sparing his stomach, was struggling with global warming (which eventually resulted in multi-million cuts of government subsidies by private companies that promoted "green energy").
Donald Trump, who came out of the Paris climate agreement, is, according to Martin, an irresponsible politician who cares only about his own re-election and therefore creates new jobs for millions of Americans. Just think, jobs! Who will need them if global warming destroys our entire civilization?
Of course, a super successful writer who, several years ago, bought himself a city cinema to watch his favorite films in the company of friends, can afford to reflect on the fate of humanity, and not on where his unemployed fellow citizens should go. But, I confess honestly, you expect more wise and balanced judgments from a person who created a world that fascinated millions of readers and hundreds of millions of viewers.
When Martin in the autumn of 2016 called Trump "the president of pussygrabber", it was still somehow explainable: at that time no one knew what political leader would turn out to be an eccentric billionaire, and his "sexist" statements were perceived in a liberal environment as dangerous shocking. But two years later (and an interview at the NYT appeared in November 2018), any unbiased observer could already conclude that, in the person of Donald Trump, America received one of the most energetic and caring about her well-being presidents.
But from the point of view of George Martin, Trump is still a mad sadist Joffrey. And the main idea of “Songs of Ice and Flame” (well, the series, obviously) is generally directly related to climate change. "Readers should have guessed that the main problem of the work is ignoring the protagonists of the threat of a global catastrophe." Only in the fantasy world of Westeros is this threat the onset of the planetary Winter (hence the already well-known expression “Winter is close”, originally the motto of one of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms), and in ours is global warming.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that global warming is indeed recognized by scientific fact by many scientists of the world, the Western press has repeatedly reported scandals associated with the juggling of data on climate change. For example, in February 2017, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officer John Bates leaked information that his agency had faked climate observations, simply destroying facts that prove that the average temperature rises from 1989 to 2013 on planet earth was not noted. This was done so that, at the Paris Climate Conference in 2015, alarmist environmentalists would be able to push through the very agreement that Trump subsequently went out of.
It is possible that sooner or later it will become clear: the whole scam with global warming was rigged by science bureaucrats (huge sums are allocated annually for research by the GP) and supported by countries interested in gaining a competitive advantage over the United States (primarily China). But in fact, it is not warming that threatens us, but - in full accordance with Martin’s books - the new Ice Age.
But George Martin himself, who put the universe invented by him at the service of the US liberal community, is unlikely to be happy with this turn of plot.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.