What Game of Thrones is Really About

this video is going to have Game of Thrones spoilers up until season 8 episode 3 Game of Thrones has it's fair to say captured a lot of attention and while it is of course about the characters and their loves and trials and concerns and unpleasant fates it's ultimately about people fighting for power in the shadow of a looming external threat that cannot be bargained with and indeed can only be escaped through the expenditure of tremendous resources basically if there's any real-world analog to Game of Thrones it's the geopolitics of global warming this isn't even really conjecture george RR martin has said as much in a very broad sense there's a certain parallel there where we're fighting our own battles we're fighting over issues important issues my new foreign policy domestic policy but none of them are important if like we're dead and our cities are under the ocean when the Song of Ice and Fire begins Westeros is live and large a ten-year summer the longest in living history has brought the nation so much prosperity that there's plenty of resources left over to invest in armies and backstabbing and war and so there are armies and backstabbing and war the focus is on who can win power because there's nothing else to worry about but even without the threat of inhuman cold men no one will let you forget remember winters in Westeros are a thing outside of White Walkers they come at random they last sometimes for a year sometimes for many years and if you're not prepared people die preparing for winter is a thing in Westeros it's a collective action that people take to avoid famine and death and if you go to war right before a winter feed all of your grain stores to the golden company and torch the crops of your enemy's winter for the continent is not going to go well and we start out Game of Thrones with academic experts assuring people that this winter is going to be a bad one stocks are all's right eventually the strong will be long and we continue with no one heeding those warnings because short term geopolitics feels much more important after 10 years of summer but then of course it turns out more than just winter is coming that's when we move right into the stages of threat denial number one no one believes it the fishermen of Lannisport say they see mehmed's number two people who have any right at all to know all agree but they are completely incapable of convincing those who benefit from the status quo or who will be asked to sacrifice a substantially how do I convince people you don't know me that an enemy they don't believe in is coming to kill them all three the people who actually have good information go above and beyond to convince everyone for the people who benefit from the status quo finally accept that the threat is real but are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices because ultimately that would weaken them you pledged our forces to find our common essence a whatever I need to say to ensure the survival of our house it's a kind of prisoner's dilemma no matter what the best thing for any individual is to not expend resources facing the challenge if other people do and the problem gets handled you're all good and you got there for free if the challenge is not overcome you are still better off than the people who spent all those resources but of course the analog is not perfect and I want to discuss three reasons why because I think that it sheds some light on the magnitude of the difficulty of the problem of climate change number one you can't beat global warming Fox also did a video on Game of Thrones and climate change and they had this to say stopping it requires the world's biggest nations like China India and the u.s. to sacrifice a little in the short term and put away their political competition with each other unfortunately this is a little bit ludicrous the reality is that we don't have to sacrifice a little we have to sacrifice a lot we like flying to visit our parents we like living in 2,000 square foot homes we like it when gas isn't $5 a gallon and we like eating hamburgers and many people who don't currently get to do those things would be rightly frustrated if suddenly we decided that no new people were allowed access to that lifestyle and so in this way our problem is worse than the night king as much as people would like to pretend that this isn't the case there is a cost to leaving fossil fuels in the ground it is not as great as the fossil fuel companies and the politicians who are paid by them would have you believe but it exists we don't get to throw a Dothraki horde of the problem there's no boss man we can stab and be done with it John in your last video you talked about how a goalie in soccer has to scramble every time even though 95% of the time it will make a difference because the 5% matters but the thing about hope and sports is that at the end of a soccer game someone wins and that feels good and so it is with battles and White Walkers but with global warming we will spend resources and we will do it indefinitely but we will not do it to win we do it to make life on average a little bit better and for me that is the thing with feathers not a binary switch but a constant push on the bell curve of suffering because every millimetre that thing moves is a mother that doesn't lose her child to waterborne illness or a family that doesn't have to flee their home our night king is maybe unsurprisingly ourselves and our Battle of Winterfell is shoving on that bell curve of suffering every day until we're dead which brings me to number two we are fighting ourselves climate change is literally the first global scale collective problem our species has ever faced it's not surprising that we don't know how to face it we like solving problems that look familiar problems we know how to solve tyrion says as much white walkers the knight king army of the dead it's almost a relief to confront a comfortable familiar monster like my sister like this our changing climate video on global warming and Game of Thrones says we concentrate our efforts on the Cersei Lannister zuv the world problems that we can understand and for which there are established solutions but this is not a familiar problem it's not a familiar conversation and even more than any of that climate change isn't evil it's not immoral we can say that the problem is big dirty evil fossil fuel companies but we say it at conferences that we flew to in planes and buildings that are cooled by coal even if we live a pleasant green lifestyle now even if we do make that conversion we will only have been able to do it because of the tremendous surplus created by the last hundred years of burning ancient sunlight the White Walkers are at least evil and ugly the night King wants to kill us global warming doesn't want to kill us it simply on effect of humans doing their best to make life better for themselves and their children no one really likes to talk about this because it's not a clean-cut story but ultimately there is less suffering in the world because of fossil fuels attempting to turn them into an amoral thing while exonerating the humans who used the resource ultimately can never ring entirely true and last number three you can touch a white so White Walkers want to do us harm while global warming does not but that's not even the biggest problem here you can also like see and touch them and we try to do that here on earth with graphs and visualizations and dramatic footage of glaciers but that is not the same as being nearly eaten by a zombie if Westeros was a perfect analog for our world they'd be having three different arguments right now one about whether the white was just a dramatic hoax one about whether there's even anything we can do about it and a final one about whether there are enough of them to even concern ourselves with because of this difference Season eight has been able to take this analogy to an interesting geopolitical place ultimately seeing the threat some people who disagreed with each other did come together and sacrificed tremendous resources to end the threat despite the fact that it will significantly decrease their ability to continue to fight a war and to feed people as even if the White Walkers aren't coming the winter still is but the person in the best situation is the one who did nothing to combat the looming exterior threat she let everyone else spend their resources and kept all her own and that it turns out was the right choice and isn't that the most frustrating thing because while the psychology of White Walkers and global warming is different the geopolitics is basically the same any individual nation that makes sacrifices hurts only themselves while helping everyone equally while any nation that doesn't gets the gains with none of the sacrifice and so even in a world where we understand the threat and appreciate its magnitude which were still a long way off from the game isn't stacked in favor of Sue Lucian's the best course of action for any individual is to do nothing while everyone equally reaps the benefits of the people who sacrifice this is the lesson of Game of Thrones and now you're probably thinking well I suppose it's hopeless then maybe our heroes figured something out in Fantasyland and we'll all have to imagine that they find some way coming back from their losses but here on this planet ah we're hosed but there are also ways in which our problem is better than the problem that Westeros has we have a massive malleable planet that is much less unpredictable than theirs and it has huge amounts of resources and we have extremely advanced technology that is already pushing the boundaries of what we thought possible in terms of pace of change we have brains made for problem solving in the last five years 16 percent of coal plants in the US have closed down there may never be another one built in this country again in 2017 we lost four gigawatts of coal power in the US and gained seven gigawatts of wind this shift is gonna take decades even centuries but it's happening now and so there's kind of a fourth difference between our situation and theirs this isn't a battle we're not here to win or lose but we do always change we move forward and that's something that it seems like we're actually way better at than Westeros John I'll see you on Tuesday

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 341,767

Rating: 4.7741385 out of 5

Keywords: global warming, climate change, game of thrones, got, a song of ice and fire, cersei, jaime, tyrion, sansa, danaerys, jon snow, donald trump, vox, our changing climate

Id: ibg1-0gfwjI

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/julianpratley]

I'm not a fan of GoT but this was a brilliant video.

[u/zurtex]

This is a good video but following both nerdfighteria and ASOIF communities very closely I have mixed feelings. It skips over so much nuance of George's universe which I understand why but it's hard for me to watch without being able to inject or get clarifications.

This is a difficult analogy, one reason inparticular the difference between the show and the books, and the comparison here cherry picks from both. There is no "Night King" in the books, as of yet at least, and "the Others" are an analogy both of unstoppable death and also very directly "the Other" in the philosophical sense.

Further one thing to understand, George often says contradictory things and changes his mind over time. I am pretty confident there is a quote of him out there saying that he was not directly thinking of today's understand of climate change (or global warming as it was called when he started writing ASOIF). But it fits the overarching theme of an unstoppable disaster we are all ignoring so of course it now an analogy. You kind of get that from the short snippet played in this video, he doesn't really say "Yes it is...".

I'm not saying that this analogy is flawed or that George is flip-flopping, just writing a book series over several decades is hard and thoughts and opinions on things change for any human. He's also a very intelligent writer and there many analogies embedded in the white walkers in the books to real world problems, climate change is just one of them. I don't feel like D&D are approaching the story line with that kind of viewpoint, so it's difficult to give an appropriate analogy across 2 difference source materials.