![game_of_thrones_scr[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/game_of_thrones_scr1.jpg?quality=83)
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Ex Think Progress editor Zack Beauchamp thinks “Game of Thrones” Season 6 proves that the show is about Climate Change. The following contains some spoilers apparently – so if you survived past season 3, look away now.
In “The Door,” we learned that the White Walkers were created by the Children of the Forest, as a weapon in a war against humanity.
The Children of the Forest are a nature-worshiping magical race who lived on Westeros before humanity’s arrival. After the humans came, they went to war with the Children of the Forest over territory. The creation of the White Walkers, powerful monsters specifically designed to kill humans, was the Children’s response.
So that means the White Walkers are a quasi-natural backlash to humanity’s growth and expansion. Today, they have spun out of anyone’s control and threaten the very foundations of human civilization. Yet humanity is ignoring the White Walker threat in favor of internal squabbling.
It sounds a lot, in short, like the problem of climate change (other than the part about the White Walkers being “designed”). This parallel has become increasingly clear over the course of the show — as this video shows:
The video which “proves” the connection:
Is Game of Thrones a metaphor for climate change? Maybe. But if the Game of Thrones White Walkers are a metaphor for climate change, they demonstrate once again that when Hollywood wants to make the climate scary, they have to make it cold.
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The show is not about and has nothing to do with AGW./CAGW.
It’s not about “climate change” per say, but there are messages in all shows now, be they SJW, Feminism or whatever, advocacy groups get their messages into shows.
Meh. If you’re worried about how a fictional novel written about a fictional land where its fictional characters are ignoring the bogeyman and you think it is proselytizing the innocent peoples of the world, then there is really no way to comfort the paranoia that haunts you.
Thank you. I thought I was the only one noticing the paranoia creeping around here.
The HBO show is little like the books.
The show for me ended at season three, it’s pure garbage now.
The books are certainly not about “climate change”
The longer the show goes the less like the books it is. Now it is a string of long uninteresting conversations, gratuitous violence and soft pron, yes I said pron to avoid possible filter 😀
This last episode, they put a man sausage right in my face lol Last week they bring a character back just so they can stick a knife in her neck and let us watch her dying spasms.
HBO have destroyed what started out to be a brilliant show.
the books for me ended after number three when most of the sympathetic characters got killed off. I haven’t watched the TV shows.
So was the Tempest and Wind in the Willows.
I’ve read through all the comments concerning “Game of Thrones” and I think everyone is missing an important part of the plot line. There is a very clear analogy to CAGW fear mongering and the role played by the evil, but sincere, High Sparrow. High Sparrow is the fundamentalist cult leader that Queen Cersei promotes to get back at her enemies – with full implementation of the law of unintended consequences. Not only are her enemies laid low – but so is she. She narrowly escapes by performing the “walk of atonement”, but is actively plotting to have the whole Sparrow faith destroyed (with extreme prejudice). I like to think that Queen Cersei represents our “right on” celebrity/activist classes (what Delingpole refers to as the “Wankerati”) who will probably react quite the same way when they realize that the CAGW movement exists to confiscate all their lavish houses, cars, aircraft and over-the-top lifestyles. So yes, GOT is definitely relevant to the current out of control Green movement …
That’s a bit of a stretch as neither of them have anything to do with the impending doom they all will soon have to face. Not to mention the White Walkers, whom can only survive in sub-zero climates, were created in response to the impending annihilation of a magical species (called The Children of the Forrest) 10,000 years ago when the ‘First Men’ came to Westeros.
Point taken: I just wanted to comment on what might be considered a parallel related theme in that the role played by the High Sparrow has analogies to some of our more fervent CAGW High Priests/Priestesses (Al Gore, David Suzuki, Naomi Klein, Naomi Orestes, etc etc)
Well yes I suppose, after letting what you said sink in, in that respect it does somewhat parallel the conflicts between various radical tribalistic factions we have here in the real world. However, I think it would be more inline with contemporary genderism and racialism and the many emotionally driven movements (BLM, CAGW, SJW, etc) that revolve around these highly bigoted pseudoscientific quagmires.
It seems to me that the only movements that bare any inkling of rationalism or humanism are all of the countermovements… Which have yet to form any platforms of their own?
So I guess in some respects, we’re all Tyrion Lannister!
Game of Thrones is set on a planet with an eccentric orbit which experiences predictable ice ages every few generations. Long enough for the very old to remember them, but also long enough for them not to be taken seriously by the young (mostly everyone else.) The Stark family has a tradition of preparing for the next one – partially because they’re effected first, living so far north.
So, yes, climate change is a big part of the story. Natural periodic climate change. It’s an interestingly scientific element of world building in a fantasy story filled with dragons, blood magic, ice zombies, clairvoyance, and other magical horrors.
Actually, according to their wiki it’s highly unpredictable:
http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/The_Known_World
I too thought that their climate was predictable since I was under the impression that their seasons last up to 5 years each but apparently that isn’t the case as I’ve dug deeper into the lore. =]
Ah well. I was just going on what I understood from reading the books. I expect the Wiki has better sources than me. It DOES seem like there’s a pattern of major ice ages and warm periods every few generations from the way the characters talk about the “Winter” that is coming.
No, it’s about natural variability. And forgetting the past.
Is there such a thing as a Degree in Liberal Smugness?
Read The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal by James Franklin (3rd JHU 2015) Much better than TV, an all-day sucker.
Love the Throne Josh
Is this a shtick which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A shtick of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There’s no such thing:
All sorts of magic in the Scottish Play, witches, ghosts, ghostly daggers, insoluble blood, walking woods …
https://www.google.at/search?q=steven+spielberg+climate+change&oq=steven+spielberg+climate+change&aqs=chrome..69i57.53983j0j4&client=ms-android-samsung&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Links to long –
http://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/16-pieces-of-pop-culture-about-climate-change-from-atwood-to-spielberg-to-the-pixies/
There’s no name for ‘the world’ that The Game of Thrones takes place in. But after rewatching all 4 seasons, before the 5th season came out, I came under the impression that their summers and winters are 5 years long. However, it seems it’s a lot more unpredictable than that:
“A major feature of the world the narrative is set in is that it experiences long seasons of varying length, usually lasting at least a couple of years each. Historically, the seasons have been known to last up to a decade in extreme cases, though these only happen once every century or so. The length of the seasons is completely unpredictable and varies randomly.”
http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/The_Known_World
The alternate explanation for the length of the seasons is that the writer is lazy and couldn’t be bothered to keep up with details like that, nor could he be bothered to come up with any coherent explanation for what he was doing.
I think that concept qualifies as a “major feature” of that world.
A fantasy novel involving ‘Children of the Forest’, giants, dragons and white walkers causing ‘climate change’….. I don’t know about the rest of you but that’s actually a more realistic argument than the current one!