This Sundaymarks 10 year sinceGame of Thrones changed the television landscape as we know it — kickstarting adecade of imitators , influence the path genre stories were told as prestige drama , and , for most of that ten , inflate itself into apop - cultural behemoth . Revisiting its first time of year is like stepping into a unknown world , one little and yet somehow just as complex .
disregarding ofhow you feltabout the direction Game of Thronesultimately ended , there ’s always something of a challenge in revisiting a story ’s past when burdened with the context of what that story will become . It feels strange , for example , to see the comparatively ground reality Thrones begin its fantasy story in . glimpse of an icebound zombie or the petite of dragons on Daenerys ’ shoulder joint were monumental evolutions of its world . By the show ’s end , we had regard whole Army of ice zombies , massivedragons incinerate cities to ash , and even acombination of bothfor good bill . Stranger still to see eccentric in their thematic infancy , knowing where they ’ll end up — grow from these places to titanic movers and shaker of not just their families , but the entire man .
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Ned Stark dispenses his own view of justice, as he opens himself up to a world where that justice has lost much of its meaning.Image: HBO
That ’s the thing about Thrones ’ first time of year that feels so radically dissimilar , even more so than the want of the fantastic roots that would sling the show to titanic scale of measurement as it progressed . Everything feel so small , and intentionally so — Winterfell feels like an wholly dissimilar world to King ’s Landing , not physically remote but spiritually and culturally , making the dividing line between the upshot in Westeros and the events across the sea with Daenerys all the more stark ( pun unintended , but , I ’ll take it ) . The problems multitude confront mothball into expectant consequence , but they ’re all intimately messy and personal , a small secret here and there , an human action of barbarism that is inadequate , acute , and in the moment . It ’s a season that only rarely ever lingers on these moments of tension or violence , instead take to ponder on the moment that come after . There ’s less , for want of a better phrase , torture porn , whether it ’s literal acts of savagery or putting persona through emotional wringer to hyper accentuate their grief . In season one , thing are normal , until very all of a sudden they are not .
Part of that intimacy is that , while there are a lot of proceed spell — something that would go on to spiral as it propelled a million more interweaving narrative threads as its titular game got more and more convoluted — it ’s the rarefied period of the show where it feels like there is a singular protagonist above the ensemble inSean Bean’sStark patriarch , Ned . While the larger show is the story of multiple personality , Daenerys and Jon in picky , season one feel like Ned ’s story above all else . In grounding itself through his eyes , Game of Thrones introduces us to Westeros through blinkers — not just in what the humans is intend to be versus what it would become , but in imagining a earth where thing are much , much clear cut than they ever really could be .
In Ned Stark , we have the almost prototypical fantasy hero , a good man just endeavor to do the right thing . He ’s not thoroughgoing , deliberately so , and we are forthwith confronted with that from the here and now we meet him , whether it ’s in his executing of the Night ’s Watch deserter from the show ’s prologue to the founding of his arm’s - length relationship withhis bastard son , Jon . But he ’s a mere military personnel who sees the world in a similarly childlike light . So far dispatch as he is in Winterfell to where his former best friend Robert Baratheon has end up in the world of King ’s Landing , Ned ’s world is a one of cause and aftermath , right and wrong , regulation and justice . It ’s what makes him so compelling at first , a man of honor in a public where honor feels hard to come by . But it also makes him a fascinating booster for what is essentially a slaying mystery , in which only one person really actually cares about the upshot of that mystery : Ned himself .
Image: HBO
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Jon Arryn ’s death is practically the stir up incident of almost every calamitous thing to total in Game of Thrones ; Cersei and Jamie ’s coverup starts a warfare that rip seven kingdoms to shreds , put waste to the ruling parliamentary law of the land , and demolishes a sense of orderliness just waiting for the White Walkers and Daenerys ’ grow influence in Essos to occur battle for its very fate . In hindsight , it ’s crucial because of the many Fats Domino it knocks over , not just immediately but throughout the show — and not merely the political radioactive dust pass over up by Cersei in King ’s Landing , but everything from Catelyn ’s pursuit to take Tyrion to the Arryn ’s hindquarters of power in the Vale over the course of this season , or the knights of House Arryn ride to Jon Snow ’s tending in the battle of the prick seasons by and by .
And yet , no one really cares about uncovering this closed book in the first season other than Ned . His family is there to take in the radically different cultivation King ’s Landing supply , the people in power either sleep together enough about Arryn ’s death to keep smooth or the estimation of why he would suddenly go is just part of “ playing the game ” that is Game of Thrones ’ cardinal conceit . Already our focal character , in being the only one really invested in “ solving ” Jon Arryn ’s execution , the show invited us to be as blinkered as Ned is in his worldview of Westeros throughout the first season . Even when we are pulled away from him and granted the freehanded picture he lacks ( until it ’s crucially too late ) , it makes the shock second of when the masses of real power pull in the rug from underneath him — the duel with Jamie , his meeting with Cersei , Littlefinger turning on him — hit much hard than they arguably should , and still tally even today .
Image: HBO
Ned , and our window into Game of Thrones ’ world , is naïve not just to contrast the hardness of sprightliness in the N to the excesses of the capital , but because that vast , physical aloofness between the two has isolated him so much from people he once know that their evolution into the characters they ’ve become is incomprehensible to him . That ’s the importance of musical scale in the show ’s first season , so much more than the high , world - ending stake and openhanded battles of previous entries in the series : Westeros is a world that feels so much larger and our case that much smaller , and parts of it are just so different and foreign , neither our Italian sandwich nor the consultation can genuinely notice until it ’s too late .
When it is too late for Ned , and we are given the stupor that catapult the show onto an entirely new level of pop refinement discourse — the destruction of our “ protagonist”—we’re given a fascinatingly simple lesson . Ned is never given the chance to evolve his worldview when the public he last in is give away to be much bigger , much more complex , and a lot less orderly than he thought it was . He just dies . That ’s his punishment , his reward , once the blinker are plagiarise they are just as rapidly permanently close . The reminder for us , beyond the surprise , is that this is a mankind where this kind of matter happens — after all , it ’s what happened to Jon Arryn , we just did n’t drop time with him . But because it robs us of our focal sixth sense into Game of Thrones ’ world it becomes something debilitating and hectic , the musical theme that everything is fine until it suddenly is n’t take again .
But it also present us with an unlikely link across season one ’s Brobdingnagian , yearning world that is likewise tardily build up over the course of the season ; on the spur of the moment , Ned Stark ’s character journey becomes clearly entwined with that of Daenerys Targaryen . While Ned is presented to us the audience as a man who has a horse sense of the world in which he lives — even as it becomes unclouded he very much doesn’t — Daenerys is introduce to us as an explicitly naïve eccentric . She is a tool to be used by the man around her , a bartering crisp first for her chum Viserys and a token to pillage a whole newfangled kingdom by her husband , Kahl Drogo . But while Ned stay unsighted to his own hurt until it ’s too late , Dany is repeatedly reminded of her role in the world and the plot of thrones . She interiorise that and at long last adjudicate she has the probability to toy it herself . In doing so , her advantage is endurance in the way Ned ’s was death , and in the process , she takes the chance to become someone else , literally converted in flaming as the prophetical mother of dragons .
Image: HBO
It ’s what makes season one work so well on its own , try as you might to separate it from the context of what Game of Thrones would go on to become as it fix its place with the zeitgeist of the 2010s . In a vast man , two characters so far apart they never intersect physically go on a journey of exploring that world ’s true state . No warfare , no rattling moment , no Dragon — well , no ginormous city - wrecker , just yet — Game of Thrones ’ first season is a story of infer power severalise by two people , engulfed in the greatness of a man so much great than them . And yet it ’s one that is grounded and made fascinating by its intimate view of those characters far more than it is the scope of that domain .
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Daenerys TargaryenFictionGame of ThronesJamieJon Snow
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