What is dark and full of terrors?
During the five years, five seasons, and 50 episodes that HBO’s Game of Thrones has been with us, no character has verbalized the show’s main theme as perfectly as power broker Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in season three. Speaking to fellow behind-the-scenes master manipulator Varys, Littlefinger dismisses the realm of the Seven Kingdoms as “a lie.” Varys tells him that the lie is necessary, without which there will only be chaos, “a gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.” Littlefinger replies with a series-defining monologue:
“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try it again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse, they cling to the realm, or the gods, or love, illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”
Game of Thrones begins its sixth season in a couple of days, just in time for the chaotic final weeks of election season. The war of words is heating up, both among candidates and among the electorate, claiming casualties in the form of logic, objectivity, and basic human decency. Meanwhile, the next six years of the country hang in the balance, split among a murderous misogynist, a corrupt ex-mayor, an inexperienced politician with dubious citizenship, an insensitive and oft-defensive administration bet, and a perennial turncoat whose bluster is all that remains of her withering relevance.
Game of Thrones — a medieval fantasy tale with the realism of a modern political drama and the heartlessness of a gangster movie — is the perfect viewing companion to the 2016 presidential elections. Never has a story with fire-breathing dragons and ice zombies been this relatable to Filipinos. Westeros is a hyperbolic Philippines, where lands are ruled by clans, where alliances are made — not based on principles, but on sheer convenience — and where the only true currency is power. The ruling elite wield control over this currency while the poor and marginalized are either suffering in the streets or literally walled off. Violence is tolerated by a populace that no longer believes in real justice, only the unquestionable force of power.
Game of Thrones is overtly fictional and yet it reminds us that Philippine politics is a lie. Alliances, campaign promises, personality politics — they’re all illusions. Only the ladder is real.
Not everyone wants to think this way, of course. Most of us want to believe in something — messianic myths, empty platitudes, impressive promises. But faith has very little to do with reality. Ned, Robb and Catelyn Stark believed that justice was on their side. Tywin Lannister believed in protecting the family interest. The Hound believed in the law of the jungle. They’re all dead now.
Hope greets every new season of Game of Thrones, which is odd because it always ends in destroyed dreams. The frame-by-frame clues-hunting precipitated by the latest season’s trailer yielded flickering evidence of hope: Look, Sansa’s wearing the Stark sigil again; hey, the wildlings are teaming up with some Northern houses to fight the Boltons; cool, Arya’s got some new fighting moves; aha, Jon Snow (or at least a vague faraway figure that resembles him) is alive!
Election Season
Election season functions the same way — it is a hope-filled Game of Thrones trailer, with snippets of the promising parts edited to rope you in, making you think that maybe this time, justice will be served, and the good guys don’t end up dying. But the Littlefinger in all of us knows better. We’ve seen too many treacheries, too many slit throats and decapitated heads to even entertain the prospect of things turning out differently this time. To paraphrase Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons: Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Duterte, Poe, Binay, Roxas, Santiago — they’re all spokes on a wheel. “This one’s on top, then that one’s on top, and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground.”
We’ll still be watching the new season anyway, not only because it looks really awesome, but also because it’s the therapy we need in this effed-up summer. Seeking relief from a bleak fictional world that reminds us so much of ours may seem counterproductive; we’re probably better off watching something truly escapist, like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, or Cat Vines. But Game of Thrones works because it places our absurd political reality in a realm where it truly belongs. If you find Duterte’s casual misogyny and murderousness too jarring for the real world, then there is comfort in watching Walder Frey, apparently back for season six, taking medieval boorishness back home to his filthy castle. Turned off by the meaninglessness of our political party (non)system? Then watch the Lannisters make allies of enemies and enemies of allies over and over again in a practically lawless land where such opportunism makes sense. Tired of bad guys winning elections all the time? Then I present to you Roose and Ramsay Bolton, two soulless regional leaders who make mass murder and power-grabbing seem normative within the amoral walls of House Bolton. These characters reclaim the evil we know in real life and take it to its natural fictional habitat where we can view it safely from a distance, and for an hour a week, it looks so harmless.
So stop typing angrily on your devices, dig yourself out of the infinite circles of Internet hell that make up the comments section, cleanse your mind of all things political, and gather around the TV or laptop or whatever tiny screen you use for entertainment these days for another soul-soothing season of Game of Thrones. This election ultimately won’t matter anyway because winter, or in our case, irreversible global warming leading to extinction, is coming.
* * *
Tweet the author @ColonialMental.
