{"id":274,"date":"2016-06-30T21:30:28","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T21:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=274"},"modified":"2016-06-30T21:30:28","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T21:30:28","slug":"stark-knight-rises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=274","title":{"rendered":"The Stark Knight Rises"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span class=\"dropcap\">T<\/span><br>he just-concluded sixth season of the popular fantasy epic <em>Game of Thrones<\/em> has left me with an empty late night Sunday slot to fill with some very confused ideas about who exactly our heroes and villains are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I thought it was a fairly cut and dried thing: The hero is the guy who does the good, honorable thing and the villain is the guy who does pretty much anything \u2013 evil or otherwise \u2013 that he feels like doing. And then Sansa Stark feeds a prisoner to a pack of fierce dogs, Ned Stark wins a duel after his opponent is stabbed in the back and Tyrion rationalises the continuation of slavery while working for a queen called &#8220;The Breaker of Chains&#8221;. Watching on, like the rest of the world, every Sunday\/Monday, I found myself questioning why exactly I was cheering for these characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Call me old-fashioned, but I like my heroes with a strong streak of heroism. I\u2019m not sure I like being served protagonists who buck the trend of upstanding behaviour. You may accuse me of being out-of-touch (you certainly won\u2019t be the first), but I think it\u2019s important that the heroes of our most popular stories convey a clear message about what\u2019s right and what\u2019s wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ours is a twisted, crowded, warped world, where it can be hard to find real heroes or villains. There\u2019re always nuances, circumstances and layers of context that stop you from calling out black or white. Fiction (at least fantasy fiction) has always provided a release from that unpalatable reality. In fiction, we know our heroes from our villains. Sansa Stark is a good person. I liked Sansa Stark, and so did millions of others. She\u2019s grown from a child lost in fancy into a strong, powerful woman. But when she killed a bound prisoner by feeding him to feral dogs, something should have snapped. The character should have lost our love for crossing a line. But she didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This season of <em>GoT<\/em> left me wondering if the landscape of fantasy fiction \u2013 that once clean land where good always triumphed over evil \u2013 has changed forever? I\u2019ve always relied on fantasy to give me hope and relief from an otherwise cynical view of the world. Neil Gaiman once said: \u201cFairy tales are more than true \u2013 not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.\u201d Fantasy is meant to be inspirational and uplifting. It\u2019s supposed to demonstrate that sometimes, by doing the right thing, events sort themselves out. But Sansa\u2019s brutality was far from the right thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There was a time when that kind of action would put an irredeemable blot on a character. What you might scoff at as an outdated sense of morality is what has kept \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d on top of bestseller lists for several decades, while \u201cA Song of Ice and Fire\u201d (the literary series that <em>GoT<\/em> is adapted from) remained a niche favourite that needed a show filled with attractive naked women to catapult it into the public consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The moral fibre of the characters in LOTR remains undamaged. Frodo and Sam spare Gollum\u2019s life despite every reason and opportunity to not do so \u2013 not because he was winning them over, but because they just weren\u2019t murderers. As heroes, their legacy remains untarnished and gets retold generation after generation. Sansa Stark killing Ramsay Bolton like some kind of James Bond villain, is not likely to leave behind a legacy. Her story will go as far as water cooler conversations the next day, and then get retired to listicles like, \u201cMost Shocking Moments On GoT This Season!\u201d<br><blockquote class=\"quote--center\">The awesome, grounded aesthetic that was minted by Christopher Nolan\u2019s <em>Dark Knight<\/em> trilogy has been rendered redundant by the law of diminishing marginal utility.<\/blockquote><br>The fact that today\u2019s audience views Sansa\u2019s departure from her ideals as just revenge goes to show how we\u2019ve decided that being righteous and honourable is optional as long as we get our way. Overcoming adversity by any means necessary trumps learning and growing from difficulty. When a show with such a message dominates our cultural landscape, it serves as a mirror to our times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s a common phenomenon; you read a book, or play a video game, and you start supplanting the protagonist with yourself. Their past and motives are filtered through the lens of your thought in a symbiotic relationship. Eventually, if the storytelling is immersive enough, you can understand, empathise and even predict a character\u2019s actions. But we can no longer do that. This greying of lines, this questionable morality, has changed our approach to consuming fiction. We no longer read books or watch movies to draw inspiration from a hero\u2019s struggle; we begin to consume media to satisfy our baser instincts. We watch TV that titillates, excites or enrages us without taking away any learnings from the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The trend of gritty realism has wormed its way into nearly every facet of popular culture. In the realm of fiction and entertainment, being \u201cinspired by true events\u201d is almost a prerequisite for films come awards season now. The awesome, grounded aesthetic that was minted by Christopher Nolan\u2019s <em>Dark Knight<\/em> trilogy has been rendered redundant by the law of diminishing marginal utility. Armour-clad, sword-wielding <em>Snow White<\/em> comes to mind, and that was a Disney film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When we live in a world where the reality is inequality, suffering, poverty, misery and strife, do we want to perpetuate the notion that right and wrong are arbitrary, and have no bearing on outcomes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As the dust settles on this season finale and you meme and tweet and share posts about GoT, remember this. Cersei is a terrorist, Sansa is a murderer, Daenerys is a dictator, Tyrion is a slave driver and Jon Snow is the Undead. They\u2019re not our heroes because they don\u2019t celebrate the best of us. They represent the worst. I don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019m not up for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fantasy is meant to be inspirational and uplifting. But after this season of Game of Thrones, I found myself questioning why exactly I was cheering for these characters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":275,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[62,63,64,65,66,67,483,71,72],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-arre","tag-arre-digital-platform","tag-arre-originals","tag-arre-reads","tag-arre-text-articles","tag-arre-website","tag-got","tag-web-series","tag-web-shows"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Stark Knight Rises<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Fantasy is meant to be inspirational and uplifting. But after this season of Game of Thrones, I found myself questioning why exactly I was cheering for these characters.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/?p=274\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Stark Knight Rises\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Fantasy is meant to be inspirational and uplifting. But after this season of Game of Thrones, I found myself questioning why exactly I was cheering for these characters.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/?p=274\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Arr\u00e9\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-06-30T21:30:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1467196824-scaled.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1352\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dushyant Shekhawat\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"The Stark Knight Rises\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Fantasy is meant to be inspirational and uplifting. 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