The other DrC and I haven’t ‘invested’ in HBO, there aren’t enough films we want to watch to make it pay. Consequently, we didn’t watch Game of Thrones when it was being broadcast, although we could scarcely escape stories about GoT.
Once it was complete, it became available in other venues. I binge watched the entire first season on a long transoceanic flight - LA to Shanghai, maybe - and enjoyed it.
So recently we purchased the entire oeuvre on CD and have been watching two episodes per evening. As I write we’re just finishing season 2. My reaction: Game of Thrones is pornography you can watch with your wife.
This series has something for nearly everyone. It has explicit nudity and gay, straight, and kinky sex, brutality, gore and violence, intrigue and double-dealing, family saga, foul language, magic, fantasy, mother love, and incest front and center.
Bizarros abound, weirdness is celebrated, women are no better than men. Heroes are killed. Good people do bad things, bad people occasionally do good things, dragons exist, as do things-only-partially-human.
GoT is a medieval head trip, a Brueghel grotesquerie come to life. The only reason the kitchen sink isn’t included is that, in Westeros, plumbing hasn’t been invented.
One suspects the author sat down, made a list of every taboo in the Anglosphere, and decided to violate each inventively, energetically and with relish. Humor seems to be the only thing largely missing so far.
