Beginning of the End: Thoughts on the opening Credits for Game of Thrones Season 8

I recently applied for a writing job that asked me to produce some samples of work relevant to current media news. Naturally, I chose the just-released-season-premiere of Game of Thrones, since it was a topic hot as dragon-fire at the time. Well, in the game of writing jobs, you win a position or your article’s relevance dies.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get the position. However, as it still feels (mostly) relevant, I figured I’d share the shorter of the two pieces here:

 

Season 8 of Game of Thronesis finally here and winter has come at last! The final season promises all kinds of dramatic changes—something made abundantly clear before the first scene even started. To see just how different things are, you need only check out newGame of ThronesSeason 8 opening credits. Past seasons showcased different parts of the world map, but this season focuses on three specific locations. Here what the opening credits tell us.

 

The Wall

Dear American voters, walls don’t work.

The Wall has been breached. The one defense which previously separated the Seven Kingdoms from the threats of Wildlings and the Others now has a massive hole in it. The opening credits used to show the Wall from the southern side as the camera ascended along an elevator-like lift to the top, but now the cameras swoops in from the north through the breach, even as the tiles of the Earth are flipped upside down, representing how the invading army of the dead are turning the land to a frozen ruin.

 

Winterfell

I wonder what’s gonna happen to the dead beneath Winterfell when the White Walkers come…

For the first time, the credits show Winterfell as more than just battlements and a blossoming weirwood tree. The camera swoops beyond the weirwood grove through a series of castle gates before passing into the Great Hall, and then down into the crypts below Winterfell. Later in the episode, we see all the heroes have converged on Winterfell. This is a citadel about to be under siege, each gate forming a layer of protection against the Night King’s forces. Additionally, the Great Hall is where the characters gather to make their plans, even as the crypts honor the past of those dead characters like Ned and Lyanna whose legacy has been inherited by the surviving Starks. The past and present must be reconciled at Winterfell if they are to survive the siege.

 

King’s Landing

The seat of power might be built from the blades of fallen foes, but is just as likely to draw blood from anyone rash enough to sit carelessly upon the throne.

The battlements of King’s Landing clearly demonstrate the strength of the villains residing here. But now we go through the battlements, down a tower’s spiral stairway, through dungeons, and up to the throne room, where a Lannister lion is perched over the Iron Throne. Though Cersei thinks herself secure here, the emphasis on the city’s fortifications suggests the city will also be under siege, and that the strength of her armies will falter at the end of the season when a different coat of arms will appear over the throne.

War of the Realms: Making Peace With The Differences Between Marvel Lore and Norse Myth

This month began Marvel’s newest comic book event, War of the Realms. Written by Jason Aaron with art by Russell Dauterman, the two tell a story that has been building in the pages of Aaron’s work on Thor comics since he took over writing the character with Thor: God of Thunder issue 1 back in 2012. His work on Marvel’s Thor has been lauded with thunderous praise and hailed as one of the great runs of the character. That said, I have always had a problem with the character. Until now.

Let me give some context. To most people, Thor is a mythological character from the distant eras before Christianization. However, I’m not Christian. I was raised Jewish and today live a dual faith life. Part of my syncretic religious identity is worship of and honoring of the Norse gods, including Thor. While I do not consider the Marvel character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to be the same as the deity I worship, the clear influence of the original Teutonic myths on the Marvel character make it impossible to separate the two completely. Which, as a comics fan, is often a difficult phenomenon, especially when Marvel keeps hammering in the similarities.

 

Anytime religious figures appear in works of fiction, there will be a mixed reception. Arguably, it is the duty of storytellers to try and be as respectful as possible of the religious figures and tales they represent, just as they arguably should work to be respectful of the cultures and people they portray (there are plenty of counterarguments also to be made). I love Neil Gaiman as a writer, and his comic The Sandman is what made me a comic fan, but his depiction of Thor left me feeling let down. Similarly, I have a friend whose expressed mixed feelings of authors portraying (and misportraying) elements of her religious practice with the Orishas. Any book involving characters like Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha Buddha, or Lucifer is also likely to be controversial. Fictional works featuring deities from polytheistic religions often tend to be less than interested in exploring the religious and ethical precepts associated with these figures as they treat the characters with the same reverence that the movie Jesus Christ Vampire Huntershowed toward a certain Nazarene carpenter. This is just the nature of writing stories about religious figures.

 

No, Marvel’s character Thor is not the god Thor. I can enjoy a comic and separate the two in my mind. What makes Aaron’s writing so difficult for me is that he makes an effort to connect the Marvel character back to the original myths in a way few authors have attempted. The first page of Thor: God of Thunder opens in Viking-Age Iceland, and throughout the run of the comic, Aaron frequently uses Old Norse words as the character sails around with a crew of Vikings, even encountering deities from the Slavic pantheon worshipped concurrently with the Norse gods by peoples who warred, traded, and sailed with the Vikings. Aaron seems to genuinely try to be respectful of the original Norse lore as much as possible within the context of writing a Marvel superhero. Plus, it’s a well-written story!

 

Later during his run, Jason Aaron met with controversy when he made the character of Jane Foster into a magical superhero who assumed the mantle of Thor. Many reacted negatively to this for a variety of reasons. The worst of fandom erupted in hateful reactionary rhetoric attacking the diversity of Marvel heroes. It should go without saying (but sadly, still needs to be said) that such hate speech is both condemnable and an invalid form of literary critique. But there were other critiques to be made about this creative decision. I personally found the decision to use the name “Thor” as a superhero title rather than a personal name to be a jarring change (the original character Thor was referred to as Odinson during this title). However, this began a new era for the comic where Aaron partnered with Russell Dauterman. The Jane Foster Thor took on classic villains like the dark elf Malekith the Accursed and god-killing monster Mangog, smiting her foes in epic conflicts. (She also fought one of my favorite underused villains, Oubliette Midas, the Exterminatrix). The greatest of all her struggles during this time was her battle with cancer, a fight which sapped the strength from her but never broke her spirit.

 

Thor (both the original Marvel thunderer and Jane Foster) became involved in numerous major comic events, such as Original Sin, Secret Wars, and Secret Empire. Perhaps most significant to the character was the Original Sin story, in which secret histories of the Marvel universe were revealed. Jason used this as an opportunity to expand on the cosmography of the comics by adding a tenth mythical realm to that planar orrery of Marvel’s Asgardian characters. This tenth realm, Heven, was home to angels, just as Asgard was home to Asgardian gods and Jotunheim was the home of the frost giants.

 

These realms are rooted in Norse myths which have passed down through the ages to us in the form of thePoetic Edda and Prose Edda. I don’t know if Jack Kirby ever read translations of these original Norse texts but their stories clearly inspired his work (meanwhile, Stan Lee, for all his talents, famously took credit for others’ work and during an interview with film maker and comics writer Kevin Smith, claimed to have just made up the word “Mjolnir,” then proceeded to mispronounce the word). Mjolnir, Asgard, Jotunheim, Valkyries, Valhalla—these are all part of the original religious cosmology of Germanic peoples, passed down orally through the generations and preserved in the written Old Norse accounts like the Eddas during the thirteenth century.

 

It is the way Jason Aaron connects his Marvel scripts to the original Old Norse lore that makes his run so noteworthy, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in the opening of War of the Realms.

 

The first page is black with superimposed text.  Now, comic writers and artists are often paid by the page. A quick way some writers have found to get more content is to put text on blank pages, often creating dramatic beats, as Aaron does here. But just look at this powerful opening where we see the words reach back into the dawning of the world and echo through the ages like the sagas of old.

 

Aaron’s narration cuts through the dark even as it reminds us that everything began in darkness: “IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS ONLY DARKNESS. THE GREAT UNENDING NOTHINGNESS OF THE YAWNING VOID.”

This is directly harkening back to the story of the Ginnungagap, or the Yawning Void, which the Icelandic poet Snorri Sturlusson described in the section of the Prose Eddaentitled Gylfaginning, or The Beguiling of Gylfi. According to Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s 1916 translation of Snorri, “Ginnungagap, the Yawning Void … which faced toward the northern quarter, became filled with heaviness, and masses of ice and rime, and from within, drizzling rain and gusts; but the southern part of the Yawning Void was lighted by those sparks and glowing masses which flew out of Múspellheim.”

 

Notice how Aaron’s script succinctly repeats these words for modern audiences: “THEN FROM THE SOUTH CAME ROARING FIRE. AND FROM THE NORTH SWIRLING ICE AND MIST.”

Notice also Dauterman’s map, showing the Nine Realms of Norse cosmology. There is also Heven, the tenth plane which I mentioned earlier. But what I love about this is that bothcreators are actually invoking the Eddas in this opening! That stylized manuscript page might have some familiar details Marvel fans will note (like portraying Hel with a horned helm or featuring a certain wall-crawling smart-mouthed superhero from Queens dangling from a branch), but the page is actually drawn to recreate the style of medieval manuscripts. Just look at the image below from the Codex Regius—a medieval tome containing one of the oldest surviving versions of Snorri’s Prose Edda—and tell me you don’t see the similarities to Dauterman’s illustration.

I do not want to spoil much of the story. As the title indicates, there is a war between the different realms which comprise Marvel’s interpretation of Norse cosmography.  The final battlefield is Midgard—that is, Earth—which becomes invaded by various hostile forces, such as the fire-giants of Muspelheim and the dark elves of Svartalfheim. The Avengers, known as Earth’s Mightiest of Heroes, are completely overwhelmed by the might and magic of foes far stronger than anything they can contend with. It is essentially a superhero story.

 

Except, this doesn’t feellike just another superhero story. On the surface, it could be compared to The Kree-Skrull War or Secret Invasion or Age of Ultron or Infinity or however many other Marvel stories where an invading alien force wreaks havoc on Earth and completely overpowers the various superheroes sworn to protect it. There are, after all, a finite number of stories out there, and an even more finite number involving costumed superhumans solving their problems with violence. What makes this feel unique is the way Jason Aaron and Russell Dauterman really work to root this tale as much in the Old Norse tradition of the lore as the rest of the Marvel Universe. Often, when comic creators try to draw on medieval elements, it feels hackneyed. Not so here. Rather, all the elements seem to fall into place with huge battles, tragic twists, and a deep history all unfolding on the page.

 

At no point has Jason Aaron delivered a bad or even mediocre story in his run on Thor. Even when I’ve had personal reasons not to love the work, it has been consistently strong. But the clash of blades and the maelstrom of battle featured here make War of the Realms a cut above most comic events. The story has just one issue out at the time of my writing this, but in that issue, Aaron and Dauterman have achieved something worthy of the skalds’ praise.

Dealing With Climate Change

According to the UN Climate Report released last summer, we have just 11 years to address climate change.

So, it’s a good thing the US government’s taking this threat seriously and acting accordingly. Oh, wait…

For some reason, pointing out the scientific studies on man-made climate change is controversial. This shouldn’t be so, as we’ve known the facts for a while now. Agencies like NASA and companies such as Exxon Mobile have actually been monitoring the devastating effects of climate change for decades—with warming oceans, rising sea levels, and rising global temperatures being just some of the notable effects. Then again, Flat Eartherstraveled from around the globe to meet for an international conference in Colorado last year, so all bets are off when it comes to people accepting the scientific method.

Sadly, humankind’s greatest lasting achievement might be the destruction of this planet’s ability to sustain life. (Sorry, but the pyramids, the Renaissance, Sputnik, and even cat-memes just don’t compare to the last effects of planetary engineering achieved in a century of irresponsibly bombarding the atmosphere with CO₂).

Climate science is not something up for debate. People can disagree with each other—not with nature itself. There is no arguing with science (and those who argue about how to interpret scientific data need to be scientists). Denying science is like trying to stop a bullet by saying you don’t believe in Newton’s Laws. Objective reality is just one of those things not up for debate. And objectively, the facts are simple: either we act now to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius above what they were prior to the Industrial Revolution by the year 2030 or it will be too late.

Some might imagine unwashed crazy doomsayers carrying signs reading THE END IS NIGH. To anyone worried about this, let’s be clear: the end isn’tnigh. It’s already started. Climate change has increased the oceans’ acidity, created refugee crises, and is a major factor in the extinction of thousands of species in the Sixth Extinction.  But it’s not all despair. Oh no, see, total despair is what we have to look forward to in the near future. Experts at organizations ranging from World Health Organization to the United Nations the World Bank agree that the threat will devastate humanity.

This is not fearmongering or hyperbole. This is a consensus reached by the world’s experts on the topic. From William Vollman’s two-volume book Carbon Ideologies to David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth to the UN-backed global community of climate scientists have described looming apocalyptic scenarios.

We should listen to the experts. We pay trained doctors or lawyers for their specialized skillsets. It shouldn’t be any different for climate scientists–just as you wouldn’t trust some rando voicing strong opinions on the internet to perform open heart surgery, maybe don’t trust them when they claim to disprove the scientific consensus reached by the world’s climate experts).

However, for those unaware of the specific science, here are a few data points. Since 2001, the planet has had 18 of the 19 hottest years ever recorded. Carbon dioxide in the air has risen from 338 parts per million in 1979 to 405 parts per million in 2017—something never previously achieved in the 800,000 years observed in ice core records. Half of all of the carbon dioxide emissions ever put into the atmosphere have been released since 1989.

Reactions to the realization of climate change by experts and non-experts have been varied. Oil and gas companies have invested millions annually in suppressing the information despite being aware of the relationship between climate change and CO₂ levels since the 80s. Politicians in the pay of oil companies have likewise dismissed the phenomenon, as was seen with James Inhafoe famously claiming a snowball was proofthat climate change was a hoax or Diane Feinstein, who dismissed the pleas of children begging her to preserve the planet for a viable future. Children across the globe are striking in mass protests.Trump’s appointment to head NASA, Jim Bridenstine—a former denier of climate science—looked at the vast collection of data the agency had accumulated and changed his stance when he realized the data proving the effects of man-made climate change were undeniable.

Still, the scientific claims of experts in the field continue to be dismissed with the same callous ignorance with which Americans disregard the human rights violations the country perpetrates on a daily basis. What’s the end of the world next to quarterly profit margins and building a medieval fortification along the southern border, right? And tragically, attitudes seem unlikely to change. While the famous image of a stranded polar bear floating alone on an ice drift has become a cliché and people have lax attitudes about melting permafrost, it is hard to imagine what it would take wake people to action.

(Seriously, the permafrost is melting! PERMA-frost! Which we expected to be a permanent feature to the point that humanity built our seed storehouse meant to survive the apocalypse in Norway’s permafrost—it’s melting!)

The Green New Deal seems to be the best answer anyone has proposed.

The Green New Deal proposes to both create jobs and improve America’s infrastructure by promoting green technology. New technological developments have made green energy cheaper to produce than coal, creating an opportunity for economic growth—since saving the planet from destruction apparently isn’t enough incentive.

Critics of the Green New Deal have cited a report from the conservative think tank American Action Forum, which claimed that the proposed Deal would cost somewhere between $54 and $93 trillion. This claim has repeatedly been dismissed. And even if it did cost that much, this would be money that 1. is invested into the economy 2. to prevent a climate apocalypse that 3. would be much cheaper than the costs of the damage done if we fail to prevent climate change.

This last point was made by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(AKA, the legendary AOC) during a recent interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes:

“We could solve all the environmental issues in the world. If those climate policies and solutions are drafted onto the existing framework of economic injustice, then we will perpetuate our social problems…The Yellow Vests in France are a perfect example of what happens when you do not address economic and social justice in the same sweep as climate police, because what happens is A. the policy becomes unsustainable, B. society starts to fall apart—which is what happens in income inequality, and then C. we don’t actually solve the environmental issue.”

So, that’s the problem. If we solve climate change, we might also have to challenge our economic models that allow some people to profit from systemic injustice and income inequality. Well, better not let the poor have their way. Much better to let the world end, eh?

During the discussion, another panelist, the Policy Director for the Union of Concerned Scientists Rachel Cletis, followed up AOC’s comments by pointing out the direct link between climate change and class suffering as those who have the least are already suffering some of the most visible effects of climate change.

Other proposed solutions to climate change appear less productive. Republican Mike Lee’s unhelpful claim that babies are the answer to climate change ignores two major realities: 1. humans have a huge carbon footprint and 2. those babies will die horrible climate-related deaths if we don’t stop climate change in the next 11 years. The rising popularity of ecofascism has its followers advocating for racially discriminatory and often genocidal solutions, apparently believing that killing enough people will reduce the global carbon footprint. (Note: if your solution to reducing the CO₂emissions is genocide, you’re wrong. In fact, if your solution to anything takes its inspiration from Hitler’s Final Solution, you are actually the problem and eco-friendly).

And then there’s the most Matrix response that’s been proposed: blocking out the sun (no, it won’t STOP climate change, but could delay the effects, and it’s in keeping with the current trends to turn the planet into a grim sci-fi dystopia, which is an improvement to other solutions for even marginally rooted in science at all.)

The issue of tackling climate change (and acknowledging science is real) is now a partisan one in the US, with Republicans famously tied to Big Oil and denying the claims of climate scientists. President Trump has repeatedly denied the effects of man-made climate change, suppressed the publication of scientific findings on the topic, and appointed climate deniers to key positions in his administration. In her book No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years In Washington, the former Secretary of State Condoleeza Ricecriticizes then-President George W. Bush for knowing climate change was a threat but not taking it seriously enough. Sadly, such denialism clearly did not end with Bush.

However, it is unfair to criticize just one party for failing to act. Some Democrats oppose the Green New Deal as unrealistic, such as Senator Diane Feinstein, who has received in excess of $250,000 from the oil lobby. Hillary Clinton received a backlash from many on the left for her attempt to stay neutral regarding the brutal tactics employed against protesters trying to protect the Standing Rock Sioux from the Dakota Access Pipeline during her 2016 Presidential Campaign; that Clinton received $1.5 million from the Oil Lobby may explain some of this. (the Dakota Access Pipeline has also leaked five times in six months, so maybe we should’ve listened to the protesters instead of paying mercs to quell their last sparks of hope with freezing fire hoses.)

Thankfully, almost every Democratic candidate running for President supports the Green New Deal.

It is no longer acceptable to be on the fence about this because we are quite simply running out of time. For thirty years, the effects of CO₂emissions on the environment have been known. Now, the planet has 11 years to cut emissions in half.

There are many reasons to act now with a proposal like the Green New Deal. Green energy is easier and cheaper to implement now than ever before. The jobs created will stimulate the economy and combat systemic income inequality.  It will make Trump really angry when it passes (which is like a million good reasons for every rage-Tweet he makes on the topic). But those are all political reasons, and politics is a matter addressed among people with differing opinions. As we said before, science can’t be argued with.

The hard truth is this: we act to save the planet in the next eleven years or most of life on Earth will die. The choice shouldn’t be a hard one.