Game of Thrones : The penultimate Season

So Game of Thrones is beginning to reach its conclusion (on TV anyway) with the penultimate season about to commence broadcasting. I’ve seen some of it, the first series anyway, because when it became such a television phenomenon I bought and read the first book in the series, A song of fire and ice.

Based on that, I was given the first series on DVD. And there my interest dissipated. I found the DVDs only marginally captivating, and the book wholly uninteresting. Sorry, but I’ve said it. It read, to me, like something epic as written by an 18 year old. The writing simply wasn’t that great. Usually, books are better than the films/tv series they spawn (Tolkein’s Ring Trilogy being a case in point…although the films were epic in scale and did justice to their source material).

I persevered. Maybe I needed to read the second book, A clash of kings. Nope. Same feeling from it. Schoolboy writing, and I put the shout out not to be bought the second DVD box set.

And that was that. No more ‘Game of Thrones’ for me. Thereafter my only knowledge of it would come through newspapers as they ratcheted uptake sex, the nudity, the plot twists and turns.

Ah yes, the nudity. It seemed like most of the actresses in it appeared nude, or semi-nude at some point, and it was littered with scenes filled with topless ‘extras’. Granted, a couple of actors also appeared fully nude, and the old adage that ‘the nudity is central to the plot‘, something often rightfully sneered at by actresses over several decades, held water a little bit more than some gratuitous nudity in film, television and on stage.

When I started in Second Life, entire sims, ranges of clothing and roleplay was based on the Gor books by John Norman. There was, and remains, a lot of Gorean role play, clothes, sims around in SL. Before I played SL I’d never heard of Gor, but quickly got an education, via SL, on this. And as with GRR Martin’s Game of Thrones series, I found the writing quite childish in delivery. Indeed it was worse, because it played on that old ‘submissive female’ concept quite a lot (I know fans of Gor reject this reading: but it’s my reading of it. Your interpretation of it doesn’t impact on mine).

Gor and Game of Thrones remain very popular roleplay sims in Second Life.

I’ve not explored either in SL to discover how much nudity, specifically female nudity, is part of the role-play, but I’m guessing it does have a part to play. Whether that’s ‘gratuitous’ or not, I’m not equipped to be the judge.