#fandomfollowing

@fandomfollowing: eh it really wasn’t

Tonight is the premiere of the sixth season of HBO’s critically acclaimed Game of Thrones. The advertising is everywhere. I can’t visit a single website without seeing something Game of Thrones related. The hype is real and it is spreading.

I am not excited. At all. So here’s another rant for tumblr to swallow up.

I stopped watching Game of Thrones last season after Stannis burned his daughter Shireen. I should have stopped with the infamous Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken. I really should have, especially since I’d been extremely dissatisfied with my girl Sansa’s portrayal within the show since season 3.

I think what ultimately kept me watching was how much I wanted to love the show as much as I loved the books. For years all my family and friends would hear me gushing about how great a show Game of Thrones. I would give passionate speeches about the acting and the storylines in the show and how much I was starting to love the books. It was my top TV show recommendation for 4 years.

To my everlasting shame I got my mother to watch this show with me. After a yearlong strain in our relationship Game of Thrones was a much needed bonding experience for the two of us. Once we got past the awkward stage of seeing nudity on our screen we would spend hours talking about the different characters. She never did read the books, but that was okay because I pretty much told her everything that happened in them anyway.

tl:dr

And then came season 3 and the Sansa/Tyrion wedding. I was so excited. I wanted to see iconic scene where Sansa refuses to kneel to the Lannisters, where she shows that she has some steel in her spine, and still had enough self-love for herself to prioritize her own wants and feelings. Even if it was just for one night. That scene never happened. Sansa Stark kneeled and the episode ended with Sansa and Tyrion as uneasy allies.

I didn’t know how to react. This wasn’t what I had expected to happen. This wasn’t what I told my mama would happen. And then I started noticing other little things within the show that made me feel uneasy. What were they going to do with Shae? Her character was so different! She would never betray Tyrion and Sansa like book!Shae. Why was Jon Snow so boring? What about Arya’s compassion? What about Lady Stoneheart?

I was slowly disillusioned. Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t found @gotgifsandmusings and @theculturalvacuum going into season 5. I started quoting, almost verbatim, their essays about Game of Thrones to my mother and she would nod along as I tried to dissect my newfound feelings toward this show. But in hindsight, the only commentary she ever gave me in response to all the criticisms I had raised was about the absence of Arianne Martell.

“I don’t know why they had to do that.” She had told me. “Taking a woman out of a position of power.”

When I finally stopped watching the show (and started binging Agents of Shield as therapy) I thought my mother was going to stop watching too. I thought she agreed with me. That we were on the same page.

But as I write this ridiculously long post I can hear the the show playing in the adjacent room, my mother watching the show as if all of its sins had no bearing at all on its watchability. She’s even trying to draw me in to watching it again. Commenting on Sansa and Theon.

My mother is an intelligent woman. She knows and has made comments of her own about the writing of Game of Thrones but she still wants to watch the show. She’s still attached to the characters and invested in what might happen. I can’t really blame her. But it does hurt. It’s one thing for a cousin I hardly see or some of my friends to be ardent supporters of the show, it’s another when a woman I greatly respect and love continues to watch such a show as Game of Thrones.

For my mother Game of Thrones is just another show to take her mind off of work and family drama. Talking about it with her over the last month I’ve realized she never connected to the show and the source material like I had. She only knew the names of a handful of characters and knew absolutely nothing of the characters’ backgrounds. She didn’t spend hours headcannoning the socioeconomics the Free Folk or analyzing parallels between different characters. What was a world to me was just an early summer blockbuster to her.