What Game of Thrones Changed About Its Big Antiwar Speech, and Why It Matters

"If this dynamic seems familiar, congratulations: You’ve been watching The Walking Dead and its Fear the Walking Dead spinoff. On these shows, the misadventures of Rick Grimes, Madison Clark, and their respective bands of friends, family, and allies consistently present the characters with a false binary: Peaceful, conciliatory conduct inevitably leads to torture and death, while greeting all newcomers with near fascistic suspicion and lethal hostility is the only means of survival. The problem isn’t that these shows take place in and portray a world of brutal violence; that’s a perfectly valid artistic choice, given the genre (though it’s by no means the only possible choice, and zombie horror is a weaker field due to practitioners and audiences who insist that it is). The problem is that the alternative is always shown to be foolhardy — naive, stupid, all but a sign that you deserve to fall victim to the brutality of others. This makes brutality meted out in kind the only justifiable moral position; to put it in the vernacular of Donald Trump’s tribalism, which shares its cynical exploitation of fear of outsiders, deal from strength or get crushed every time. The fate of Ray and the Hound’s relapse into violence appear to create a similarly rigged closed system.

But there’s more to the episode than just one sequence, and more context than just the relevant passage in the books. Much else in “The Broken Man” mitigates the apparent justification of vengeance and violence that the Hound’s hand on that axe suggests."

read the analysis by Sean T. Collins >>

Why’d Game of Thrones’ Antiwar Speech Change? -- Vulture