Game of Thrones Season 7: Unearned Plot Points

Something that's bugged me across the arc of Game of Thrones season 7 on TV is the series's reliance on unearned plot points. The writers have written a number of results into the season's plot that are unsupported by... well... the previous 60+ episodes.

This happens a number of times in season 7. Armies loyal to the queen score major victories... how, exactly? We're told they're depleted of soldiers and money from years of war. Meanwhile their enemy is numerically superior and wealthy. And in one case is holding a defensive position worth a significant force multiplier. Yet the queen's side wins.

The ridiculous victories happen off camera, of course. Some might point out that many great battles in the previous 6 seasons were fought off camera, too. How is this different? It's different because those previous fights were plotted out carefully. George RR Martin wrote painfully long books full of way too much detail about battles. (It's a failing of certain fantasy authors, I've noticed, to be battle obsessed.) Now that the showrunners are firmly beyond everything written in the books published so far, they're totally on their own and they're winging it.... Badly.

It's not just battle results that are unearned. The heroic rescue at the end of S7E6 was unearned. Writers flouted rules of time and space to accommodate lazy writing, then the director sneered at fans for calling shenanigans. The surprise with Petyr Baelish in S7E7 was mostly unearned, too. The writers included major characters suddenly having key bits of knowledge and, more importantly, tight coordination on how to act, without showing how either was accomplished. We can guess where the knowledge came from, but the coordination is hard to believe.

Do other shows take cheap shortcuts in writing to support desired plot outcomes? Of course they do. And I call them out when they happen in those shows, too. But the TV writing for Game of Thrones has been fairly tight in that regard, at least up through season 6. That makes the suddenly amateurish writing more appalling.

Red Wave Slowed to a Trickle

Some political pundits expected a "Red Wave" this election cycle, with the Republican party taking sizable majorities in both the House and Senate. The wave has turned out to be more of a trickle, though. With the vote tally for 3 Senate seats still undecided, Republicans have won (or are forecast to win) 49 versus Democrats' 48. Either party could eke out a narrow majority. In the House, Republicans are on their way to a slim majority— though enough races remain toss-ups that Democrats could retain a majority if they sweep the races currently too close to call.

Why was a "Red Wave" expected? There are a few typical patterns. For one, the party of the president usually loses seats in Congress in midterm elections. That's because the president's party usually sweep into majorities in Congress "riding his coattails" during the presidential election; then the electorate reverts to the mean 2 years later. Another typical pattern is that whenever the economy's doing poorly the party in power is punished. It's debatable whether the economy is doing poorly in 2022— on the positive side, job growth and wage growth are both strong— but there's definitely widespread dissatisfaction with inflation.

These patterns are not rules, just things that usually happen. Beyond these broad strokes, Democrats failed to control their own messaging this cycle. Republicans ran circles around them, redefining not only which issues voters should pay attention to but skewing voters' understanding of them through disinformation that Democrats failed to counter effectively. In the last weeks before the election polls suggested Republicans would sweep to majorities in both houses.

So, what happened to slow the red wave to a red trickle? It's still a bit early to tell. Not only are enough races still undecided that control of both chambers is still undecided, but the analysis on who voted how and why is not in yet. One idea I read today is that young peopled vote in stronger numbers than they have for the past decade. The younger vote skews Democrat normally, and in the current political alignment that's extra true. Key issues animating younger voters today— reproductive rights and climate change— favor the Democrats. But that's just a hypothesis right now. We'll see how it looks as more of the results come in.