Grey of Thrones

            I don’t know if anyone has ever read or seen Game of Thrones, but I have. Just for the record, that means that the majority of this post will be around that topic so if you plan on getting into that fandom I suggest that you take a moment to think about whether or not you want to enter into my land of spoilers. I repeat: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

            Okay anyway, in class today we were talking about the biased language and connotations of words that were in an exert form a history textbook about American History, more specifically, Native American and settler issues. Our conclusion was that the author’s bias was clearly towards the Native Americans as the good guys and white people as the bad guys (Don’t get me wrong I know we were jerks back then) but it also made me think back to when we were studying the Cold War last year as well as Stalinist Russia and how everything in history seemed to be laid out so black and white: communist bad, capitalist good, or capitalist bad, communist good, Indian good, white person bad, and it all seemed so simple. But how, you might be asking, how does this relate to Game of Thrones?

            When I gobbled up the books and the television series like Nutella To-Go I knew that I loved the series but I couldn’t figure out why I loved it so much. I mean, it basically is about a war caused by two twins who couldn’t keep it in their pants and the author keeps killing off all the characters. But, when I really thought about it, the reason why I loved that series so much is because it is everything that we aren’t used to seeing. Instead of being a bad guy and a good guy, you don’t know who to root for. Do you believe in Tyrion, the awesome imp who ever lived who just happens to be on the side of the twins who do each other? Do you go with the Starks, who seem like your average good guys but who all are basically dead by the end of book 5? Or do you go with Danaerys and her dragons who will probably get to Westeros by the time they invent cell phones? I love those books and those episodes because they are what history is like. History is not just this guy did this, thus he is evil and the other dude is good. No, history and our perspective on it really depend on where we are and how our culture functions. 50 years ago, there probably wouldn’t even be a section about Native American culture in textbooks because how they felt wouldn’t have mattered. Anyway, I’m sorry if this was a bit long, but I really hope that when and if you read a history textbook or watch a movie, challenge yourself to think about how the other half lives.