I honestly think Game of Thrones fucked up the media landscape just as much as Harry Potter, hear me out.
It started the trend of nihilistic defeatism and capitalist realism being presented as mature and adult. "The world is shitty, it can only every be shitty and trying to change things for the better is childish and leads to worse things than just accepting that you live in a shitty world."
I swear you can pin the decline of hopeful stories and happy endings in adult media to this shitty book/show that thinks it's deeper than it is. You can't have anything now without it trying to pull off a "totally deep bittersweet ending" in an attempt to be mature and subvert expectations.
Although, media literacy is so bad that this author thinks Trump is just like Daernerys Targaryan, who was about one of the only characters who wasn't a sex offender, so maybe libs haven't internalized GOTs shitty ideology too much
is 4d chess not cunning? i guess i just don't get the difference
I guess I worded it poorly. By 4D chess I meant building your way to power with mind games, connections, conspiracy spread across years. It was seen as a weakness and shunned upon.
Being cunning in ancient sense is similar to being street smart. Like dealing with the spontaneous situations and striking your opponent's blind spots. The ancient mythologies and medieval tales are full of this stuff.
The irony is that a lot of the events in the books have historical analogies. The problem is that Martin picked the most salacious, disruptive events in medieval history. So ASOIAF avoids the Tolkienesque “forces of pure good vs the evil orc horde” presentation of medieval history, but instead ends up with a version where every week decades are happening.