Game of Thrones: The Cool is Not Enough

es: Interior of Monestir de Sant Pere de GalligantsGame of Thrones filming locations and production sets. Photo by Rafa Esteve via Wikipedia Commons

One of my favorite OT pieces of 2020 was Mike Siegel’s recent piece on Star Wars, Star Wars And the Rule of Cool.

The upshot of Mike’s argument is this – we are willing to suspend our disbelief in an improbable fictional universe if the stuff we’re seeing on the screen is cool enough.

TV Tropes puts it this way:

The limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness.

And I mostly agree. While Mike already discussed the technical details in his piece, I find the Willing Suspension of Disbelief stretches farther, into things like wardrobe choices, distances crossed, character personal hygiene, their physical endurance, and the passage of time.

Since Mike used The Empire Strikes Back, I will too. Did you ever notice that although Han and Leia are taking however long to get to the Bespin Mining Colony, for some reason, when they get there, they’re wearing the exact same clothes? Yet during the same time period Luke undergoes his Jedi training with Yoda…and I mean, that’s got to have taken weeks, at least ~A~ week, right? And Han and Leia didn’t change clothes, not even once? Then somehow at the end of the movie, immediately after the action, Lando is wearing Han’s clothes, even though Han was frozen in them. Does Han have closets full of matching clothes on board the Falcon somewhere? And like, did Lando spill blue milk all over his original clothes or what?

It doesn’t make sense, any sense at all, and yet I don’t care. I don’t care how long Leia and Han were in transit. I don’t care what clothes they were wearing. I don’t care if they really needed a shower or what they were eating in the interim. Everything else carries me past those minor nitpicks and curiosities. The magic still works. None of those minor details prevent The Empire Strikes Back from being my fave Star Wars movie by a country parsec and in fact one of my favorite movies ever.

But I am of the opinion it is not truly coolness that matters. The reason I don’t believe in “The Rule of Cool” is because I have seen too many programs in which The Rule of Cool was strictly applied, and yet it still sucks. I call this “The Cool Is Not Enough” factor (maybe there’s an already-coined term in use for this, but I couldn’t find one. Hit me up in the comments if you know one.)

An overreliance on coolness is a plague on modern day storytelling. My quintessential example of The Cool is Not Enough is in the JJ Abrams reboots of Star Trek (let alone in the JJ Abrams reboots of Star Wars – PLEASE someone STOP THIS MONSTER).

You can just SEE the writing process as it occurred in JJ’s head. “You know what would be cool, is if Sulu had, like, these katana on his back, only they were, like, SPACE katana?” Or “You know what would be cool is if Kirk and Khan had to base jump from ship to ship, like, through SPACE?” Or perhaps worst of all, “What if Kirk had to ride a motorcycle for some reason, only it was a SPACE motorcycle”?

And these things ARE cool (ok not the motorcycle, in my opinion, that was just cringeworthy). But the problem is that JJ Abrams et al wrote the script NOT to tell a story about some characters engaging in a journey to overcome a series of obstacles in order to obtain a goal, but in order to string together a random series of cool images. So, every scene that WASN’T something cool, was simply a setup for something cool. There was no theme, no characters, no plot. Those things were sacrificed on the altar of coolness in a retroactive attempt to make a series of completely unrelated scenes hang together.

This is where I part company with Mike about the Rule of Cool. I don’t think people like The Empire Strikes Back because it’s “cool” – at least not ONLY for that reason. I think people like Empire because it tells a relatable human story against a backdrop of coolness. It is the relatable human story that grabs you and holds you and makes you forget all those minor inconveniences like impractical AT-ATs and the characters wearing the same clothes for weeks on end. It is not the cool stuff that works the magic, it’s the journey you take to GET to the cool stuff that makes you forget any missteps along the way.

If you put JJ Abrams charge of The Empire Strikes Back (and please don’t) you’d have a freaking train wreck. Like any train wreck, it may be very exciting at times, but the rest of the time you’re just sitting there bored out of your skull and wondering when you’ll get to the station because you have a lot of shit to do today.

The best use of cool stuff is as a punctuation mark. If you write a sentence that is incredibly boring, and you deliver it in a monotone voice, it doesn’t matter how many exclamation points you put at the end of it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It still sucks. And in fiction, when stuff starts sucking, the audience’s minds start to wander, and they end up searching for things they can complain about, like exactly how long DID Luke train with Yoda for, anyway? A bored audience is a nitpicky audience, and you can’t rely on the occasional flashbang grenade to get them interested in an otherwise dull or nonsensical story.

But of course this is not a Star Wars or a Star Trek article. This is a Game of Thrones article. As most of us who watched GoT are all too aware, or will be by the time I finish this series, Game of Thrones started off pretty good – possibly even a contender for the best show ever, at least for horse and sword geeks like myself – and got terrible by the end.

What happened between Season 4 (awesome) and Season 8 (terrible) of Game of Thrones? Well, The Cool Was Not Enough. Once the GoT writers ran out of books and started to deviate from the story and characterization that GRRM laid out for them, all they had was cool stuff, strung together by very badly done exposition. Once they deviated from the published books, showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss didn’t have the chops to pull it all off; evidently, they’re from the JJ Abrams school of storytelling.

As David Benioff once famously said, “Themes are for eighth grade book reports.” So too, apparently, is plot and characterization.

There are undoubtedly some wicked cool things that happen in the last half of Game of Thrones. (Viserion seriously OMG!) But in between those cool moments, what is there? There’s a setup for the next cool thing, and the next, and the next, with occasionally a lame joke tossed in – or should I say one joke, told so many times it becomes completely unfunny and not at all cute anymore (Tormund, Brienne just ain’t into you, bro. I don’t understand it either.)

Drama emanates from two things – plot and characters. Not just their existence as a means to an end, but in their interacting with each other (the plot affects the characters’ choices and behavior, and the characters’ choices and behavior affect the plot) over stakes that feel real and true. It doesn’t come from cool stuff, even if the cool stuff is superultramegacool.

Anyone who has ever seen a Fast and Furious movie will attest that the coolest stunts in the world get boring if there are no stakes. Same with anyone who has ever watched CGI dragons fighting other CGI dragons in a really bad snowstorm for reasons that are not entirely clear (and nor is the footage. Can the Lord of Light maybe swing by with a flashlight or something?)

Look, I like the dragons. I dig the concept. I get that we want the dragons to fight each other. But the reasons they’re fighting are not borne naturally from the story, they’re forced in there because the IDEA of dragons fighting is a cool one. And I really just did not care that much, when I should have been totally geeking out over it. I was like “oph, there’s flying dragons, fly fly fly, fight fight fight, and oops, someone fell off.” Contrast this with several moments of Breaking Bad, Daredevil, Buffy, pretty much every second of The Queen’s Gambit (in which people were playing the quiet and cerebral game of chess and it was more interesting by far than two dragons fighting, how is that even possible), and even moments of GoT earlier on where I was literally riveted to the screen and did not even actively inhale for several minutes (the Red Wedding, Joffrey’s death, when Melisandre pops out that weird demon thing that kills Renly and Brienne gets framed for it).

The Cool Is Not Enough. Especially since we’re all inundated by fictional coolness constantly, including widespread access to the coolness of the past. If I am not invested in what is happening in my fiction-of-choice, I can go watch any of 10,000 other options in which people are fighting with swords or spaceships or superpowers or yes, even flying dragons, and get a bunch of cool stuff strobe-effecting itself directly into my brain, accompanied by some plot and character development that I find so much more engaging.

How bad were the last couple of seasons of Game of Thrones? Some of the episodes were nearly entirely comprised of cutaway shots between people talking in one castle and people talking in another, all of them dedicated to the proposition of setting up something, like, SO TOTALLY COOL you guys. We counted them once for fun and there were fourteen shots in a row of people in one castle talking cutting away to a group of people in another castle talking. And they weren’t talking about anything interesting, oh no. They were saying “I think we should go to this other castle and talk some more there” and then the other people were saying “Hmm, I wonder what is happening in this other castle, perhaps we should build some ships to sail over there.” Then another castle came on the screen and the people in that castle said, “It is very important that we get the assistance of the people in the first castle.” Fourteen shots in a row of that before something cool happened, and the cool thing wasn’t even particularly cool. Then they went right back to talking again.

Now characters talking is not a bad thing, not a bad thing at all. As some of you guys know, I am a passionate fan of dialogue. I love it, I adore it, capturing the natural rhythms of how people actually talk on the page is pretty much my fave thing to do as a writer. Characters talking is not boring when it is done right. Characters mulling over their circumstances adds massive amounts of dramatic interest because it enables you to get into their heads and understand their motivations, their hopes and dreams and fears, to learn their history and their plans, so when things happen to them, you give a crap. Please do not take my criticism here against dialogue in shows. I love dialogue beyond any other form of exposition.

But on Game of Thrones, mind-bogglingly, oftentimes right when a character might have said a single thing even remotely of interest to me, unless it was directly linked to something “cool” happening, the scene ended like a soap opera, cutting away with a pregnant pause and a concerned facial reaction. Right when it got to the interesting part. My husband kept yelling at the TV again and again “BUT HOW DID THAT SCENE END!?” Imagine if you got to the part where Ygritte is supposed to say, “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” and rather than saying that, she just made a frowny face and there was a swell of dramatic music.

You don’t have to imagine, either Game of Thrones does it constantly in the last few seasons. The show cuts away not only when Jon tells Arya and Sansa he’s really a Targaryen, but also when Sansa tells Tyrion Jon is really a Targaryen. I wanted to know what happened! What was their reaction to that incredible news? Who knows? The writers punted when they should have took the ball in for the TD and spiked the hell out of it.

Not only did their soap opera approach to writing leave my curiosity unsatisfied, knowing how the characters reacted to any given revelation was of critical relevance to the plot. There is supposed to be some tension between these characters – they may betray each other, may be plotting against each other, may be trying to mislead each other. We are talking about a show whose entire purpose is people playing a game of intrigue, trying to win a throne by forging alliances. And yet we are allowed to see none of the game being played, being shown instead a much duller scene in which the same characters drily discuss their upcoming journey to Castle Wherever where they’ll have another discussion with some other character that will undoubtedly cut away right when they get to the good stuff.

Setup with no payoff is terrible!

But who cares, I guess; the cool had been established, and Benioff and Weiss decided we needed no more information. The characters’ motives were irrelevant, the reasons underlying the plot twists didn’t matter. All the writers were doing was trying to get from Cool Point A to Cool Point B using the barest minimum of scenes. And it showed.

Something we talk about a lot in writing is “fingerprints”. It’s a goal of most writers to keep their fingerprints – the mechanical underpinnings of their writing that are obvious to the audience, as unobtrusive as possible. Not style, mechanics. You can have a highly stylized work of fiction like Sin City or Breaking Bad or anything Quentin Tarantino or David Mamet ever wrote where the writer is practically a character themselves. I am talking about seeing the man (or woman, even though hardly any women wrote on Game of Thrones) behind the curtains pulling the strings, sending characters to this place or that on the thinnest of pretenses, relying on coincidence and deus ex machina to advance the plot instead of more elegant, less obvious solutions.

There were several fascinating arcs of both plot and character the writers of Game of Thrones sacrificed at the altar of The Rule of Cool. I could give literally 5000 examples without breaking a sweat but the worst of them, IMO, was “Cleganebowl”, in which brothers The Hound and The Mountain were supposed to fight each other.

Cleganebowl was originally a fan theory and I’ll admit, as originally envisioned by Redditors, a clever one; the idea was that Cersei, rather than blowing up the Sept of Baelor, would get her desired trial by combat. The Hound, who had recently gotten religion, kinda sorta, would fight for the Church, and the Mountain would fight for Cersei. That would have been cool, I admit. But the way the GoT writers did it was AWFUL.

If setup with no payoff is terrible, payoff with no setup is even terrible-r.

After spending the entire show sending the Hound on a redemptive arc in which he learns, somewhat, to overcome the demons of his past, including the abuses of his bullying brother, and ends up as a somewhat inspirational figure to Arya Stark in terms of overcoming old vendettas, and had a pretty intense relationship with Sansa as well but apparently everyone must’ve forgotten that even though it is critically important in the books, the writers inexplicably send the Hound back to King’s Landing to take on his brother…why exactly? Well, because some people thought it would be cool, and David Benioff and DB Weiss weren’t telling a story in which interesting characters did interesting things in ways that told a coherent story, they were simply stringing together a chain of scenes they thought would be cool.

Now, I can envision lots of scenarios where getting those two crazy kids together would have made a lot of sense. If I had to pick one, I would have had Cersei slyly fulfill her promise to send help to Winterfell when the Night King was coming, by sending ONLY the Mountain rather than the rest of her army. Then, rather than having the Hound run around Winterfell pointlessly to help Mary Sue…er, I mean, Arya, the Hound and the Mountain could’ve been facing off in the middle of the chaos. The Mountain would be invisible to the white walkers (since he wasn’t exactly quite alive himself) and the Hound would be contending with not only the Mountain but the white walkers too, and in addition his paralyzing fear of fire. Let Beric and Melisandre get Arya where she needed to be rather than wasting them utterly, and let the Cleganebowl commence.

That would have been cool, too, and it would have made more sense with the plot and the characters. It’s not how I would personally have done it, but if you gotta have a Cleganebowl, that would have worked way better than what they did – both in terms of the character development they spent several seasons investing in, only to kill the Hound off anyway in a way that undid all the personal progress he made towards being…well, not a good person, exactly, but certainly less bad…and also in terms of the Battle at Winterfell, which was widely and rightfully loathed.

Look, cool is awesome, and there is a lot of cool stuff in Game of Thrones, even the less-good episodes.

If you doubt it, cue up this clip to :30 and enjoy.

Great moment, awesome, I love it, how can you not love that, but it’s the high point of what is considered by many the worst episode of GoT ever filmed (though they are wrong, it’s totally the Winterfell one) and it lasts all of two seconds.

The Cool Is Not Enough. Cool cannot exist in isolation. Cool must be supported by a good plot and good characters and an overarching theme or you may as well watch YouTube videos of explosions set to Rob Zombie music. The coolest stuff in the world matters not if you aren’t pulled into the story and you don’t give a rat’s ass about the characters. If you aren’t drawn into the universe the writers are creating, you’re gonna see too many fingerprints in between the outbreaks of cool to be able to suspend your disbelief.

Coolness is like Axe Body Spray. A little is ok, even good sometimes. But if it’s all you have to offer, it just assaults the senses without turning anybody’s crank.