As Game of Thrones continues to rise in popularity the audience is inevitably becoming more varied, more vocal and absolutely batshit irrational.
That's not me being a fantasy hipster. A fantasy Zane Lowe figure sitting on a pile of Discworld novels in a linen Gandalf gown, rolling my eyes and tutting as I listen to the delivery men over the road talking about how they'd like to bang 'the one with the dragons'.
I'm not that kind of Game of Thrones snob.
I haven't even read all of the books yet and I consider anybody who has to be...well.....sub-human scum actually. As you quite well know.
But Game of Thrones is now hugely popular, which means one thing.....loads of mentals are going to criticise it.
Foppish graduates working in social media, living in dripping damp East London bedsits where they sit eating their tea on a squeaky, creaky mattresses and tuck into slabs of hard cheese using stained, rusty cutlery.
Oddities in cagoules, Stevenage fans with yellow teeth.
Oddities in cagoules, Stevenage fans with yellow teeth.
Debauched striking teachers flitting between independent coffee houses, subsisting on a diet of brie and the smell of their own farts.
These hordes have discovered Game of Thrones and they don't like what they're seeing.
One of the leading Guardianistas hissed recently that they'd stopped watching altogether due to the rampant misogyny in the show:
"After yet another rape scene, I no longer trust the creators to bridge the gap of thoughtful conversation between action and intent – so I've given up on Game of Thrones for good...I’m exhausted by the triumph of men at the expense of women as a narrative device. "
We can quickly disregard this lady's screeching indignation as nonsense in two ways:
Firstly, the suffering in Game of Thrones is genderless. If you moan about a dubious rape scene but totally ignore previous scenes where a tortured Theon has his turnip crunched off; Joffrey [a mere child] chokes to death after a gruesome poisoning and Westeros' true king, Viserys, has a bowl of boiling gold poured over his mush, if you ignore that the violence is nondiscriminatory you come across as being selective in your outrage...and a bit of a smelly Guardianista hypocrite.
But secondly, and most importantly, this is a medieval fantasy series loosely based around the events of the War of the Roses with snippets from Ancient Rome. There was unchecked rape, murder, incest, adultery galore during these time periods. Although Game of Thrones is a totally fictional world, it would be utterly disingenuous and....well...absolutely shit...to exclude these aspects from the narrative. It would cheat the audience.
As Ramsey Snow says - if you want to watch a program rife with political correctness and sweet sugary niceness then download a John Lewis staff relations video.
Let's be truthful here, it's never been art's role to teach society how to behave.
Art should be unrestricted.
You're saying Game of Thrones isn't allowed to reflect a time period of cruelty because it might upset some giggling simpleton sitting in a glass office stuffing her face with Angel Delight?
I say to her - switch the channel over.
Put something bland on if you can't contemplate viewing that which challenges your rigid line of thought.
I hear Downton Abbey is good this time of year.
It's always problematic to apply morality to history, and to art, and especially to something that is a blend of the two.
We've recently seen the Masters of Slaver's Bay rounded up and crucified for participating in the slave trade. And whilst many contemporary Game of Thrones viewers saw this as justice, I couldn't help but feel sorry for them.
Can you take your ethical code from 21st century Western Europe and bash the colourfully clothed Masters over the head with it? I'm not so sure.
Slavery is abhorrent to us, but if you were there in Slaver's Bay, if you were born into a Masters' family and all you ever knew was their social order...the chances are you'd go along with it. You'd find it the norm.
Would you deserve to die nailed to a cross?
Would you be 'evil', or merely a product of your time?
In many ways the Masters, with their grey hair and their sad faces reminded me of our 70s entertainers.
That sad bunch currently being hunted down, rounded up and retrospectively punished by a cold new world mechanically immune to tactile characters, applying 2014 post-feminism justice to 1970s bum-slapping.
You might have seen a Ken Barlow, a Freddie Star or a Jim Davidson in those turquoise tunics, shuffling along the streets of Meereen in their leather brown sandals.
All three found innocent in our world, but in the world of Daenerys, condemned to the nails and the cross without trial.
How many of us would face our doom at the cross if a Daenerys arrived on our doorstep tomorrow and frowned on the practice of eating meat for example, or she dictated that kissing women on the cheek is sexual assault? Would there be many of us left?
Ask not if the bell tolls for the Masters, it tolls for thee.
Of course our Guardian correspondent would hail Daenerys as the bringer of justice and divine retribution for the 'evil' practices of the Masters. The mass slaughter of hundreds of them would be perfectly justified, because here in 21st century Britain we know that slavery is terrible.
Yet there is no nuance in this line of thought and besides, we've established that this journalist is a bleedin' idiot anyway.
The Masters weren't all evil. Aye, some must have been dodgy, but others would have been fairly reasonable people; and yet they all succumbed to the same brutal death.
This is the problem of making rash outbursts like that of Daenerys or the Guardian columnist, [two raging symbols of the terror of unregulated feminism] you simply end up chucking the baby out with the dishwater. Or the dishes out with the bathwater, or whatever the expression is.
Firstly, the suffering in Game of Thrones is genderless. If you moan about a dubious rape scene but totally ignore previous scenes where a tortured Theon has his turnip crunched off; Joffrey [a mere child] chokes to death after a gruesome poisoning and Westeros' true king, Viserys, has a bowl of boiling gold poured over his mush, if you ignore that the violence is nondiscriminatory you come across as being selective in your outrage...and a bit of a smelly Guardianista hypocrite.
But secondly, and most importantly, this is a medieval fantasy series loosely based around the events of the War of the Roses with snippets from Ancient Rome. There was unchecked rape, murder, incest, adultery galore during these time periods. Although Game of Thrones is a totally fictional world, it would be utterly disingenuous and....well...absolutely shit...to exclude these aspects from the narrative. It would cheat the audience.
As Ramsey Snow says - if you want to watch a program rife with political correctness and sweet sugary niceness then download a John Lewis staff relations video.
Let's be truthful here, it's never been art's role to teach society how to behave.
Art should be unrestricted.
You're saying Game of Thrones isn't allowed to reflect a time period of cruelty because it might upset some giggling simpleton sitting in a glass office stuffing her face with Angel Delight?
I say to her - switch the channel over.
Put something bland on if you can't contemplate viewing that which challenges your rigid line of thought.
I hear Downton Abbey is good this time of year.
It's always problematic to apply morality to history, and to art, and especially to something that is a blend of the two.
We've recently seen the Masters of Slaver's Bay rounded up and crucified for participating in the slave trade. And whilst many contemporary Game of Thrones viewers saw this as justice, I couldn't help but feel sorry for them.
Can you take your ethical code from 21st century Western Europe and bash the colourfully clothed Masters over the head with it? I'm not so sure.
Slavery is abhorrent to us, but if you were there in Slaver's Bay, if you were born into a Masters' family and all you ever knew was their social order...the chances are you'd go along with it. You'd find it the norm.
Would you deserve to die nailed to a cross?
Would you be 'evil', or merely a product of your time?
In many ways the Masters, with their grey hair and their sad faces reminded me of our 70s entertainers.
That sad bunch currently being hunted down, rounded up and retrospectively punished by a cold new world mechanically immune to tactile characters, applying 2014 post-feminism justice to 1970s bum-slapping.
You might have seen a Ken Barlow, a Freddie Star or a Jim Davidson in those turquoise tunics, shuffling along the streets of Meereen in their leather brown sandals.
All three found innocent in our world, but in the world of Daenerys, condemned to the nails and the cross without trial.
How many of us would face our doom at the cross if a Daenerys arrived on our doorstep tomorrow and frowned on the practice of eating meat for example, or she dictated that kissing women on the cheek is sexual assault? Would there be many of us left?
Ask not if the bell tolls for the Masters, it tolls for thee.
Of course our Guardian correspondent would hail Daenerys as the bringer of justice and divine retribution for the 'evil' practices of the Masters. The mass slaughter of hundreds of them would be perfectly justified, because here in 21st century Britain we know that slavery is terrible.
Yet there is no nuance in this line of thought and besides, we've established that this journalist is a bleedin' idiot anyway.
The Masters weren't all evil. Aye, some must have been dodgy, but others would have been fairly reasonable people; and yet they all succumbed to the same brutal death.
This is the problem of making rash outbursts like that of Daenerys or the Guardian columnist, [two raging symbols of the terror of unregulated feminism] you simply end up chucking the baby out with the dishwater. Or the dishes out with the bathwater, or whatever the expression is.
A decent leader would have gradually faded out the practice of slavery by introducing wages, better working conditions, holidays and dress-down Fridays.
A nice bit of human rights legislation.
But then again, give it one hundred years and the grandchildren of these oppressed slaves would be sitting in their Homebase jacuzzis, sipping Grey Goose Vodka and bemoaning all this 'bureaucracy' around these days and how the old times were best.
Sometimes you can't please them.
They'd slap each other on the backs and pledge to vote for a party of former Masters posing as common people....EssosKip.
So maybe a decent leader, on taking the city, would have just maintained the traditions of Meereen and turned a blind eye to the slave trade. A move that would have at least avoided the future ball ache of the newly freed ranting and raving about referendums, failing to realise how good they've actually got it.
There is always a lot to consider in these tricky ethical issues. It's never the apt course of action to just crucify everyone or call for a ban on Game of Thrones.
This is the brand of irrationality that will see you working for the Guardian in perpetual outrage, hurling DVDs out of the window because they contain something that might possibly offend somebody, somewhere.
And by the lord of light, you don't want that, believe me.
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