The Game of Thrones Effect

I vividly recall a day in late fall as I waited at the middle school bus stop many years ago. My friend Garrick, a freckled boy with dusty brown hair was sitting atop his trumpet case with his hands clamped around the handle as he guarded his position for dear life. A few of us had been attempting to kick the case out from under him for 10 minutes with no avail when after many patient requests he stood up in a fit of rage. His face gushed red in a way that was difficult to take seriously yet you knew he was mad. At the moment it felt like his anger brought upon the calamity which was to strike only a few moments later. A few seconds passed and the wind around us started to pick up and what could not have been anymore than thirty seconds, the wind speed accelerated to about 75 MPH. As a lanky 6th grader, I weighed in less than 60 pounds at the time and I remember hunching down on the ground and moving to the fence to hold on. It started to pour rain, but to us it felt like bullets.

We got hit with a phenomenon known as severe straight line wind and as we all rushed back to the closest house, this quaint town in southern jersey got battered for 15 minutes straight. By the end of it all, electric lines were strewn on the street, trees had fallen, and backyards were a mess leaving the small town out of commission for a week.

One of my best friends lived in the house adjacent to mine and a massive tree had uprooted during the storm and lay dead across the surface of his backyard.

Something like so:

Being 6th graders in the 90’s, we discovered that because of the uprooted tree, clumps of hard dirt were to be found in the area that was raised up by the roots. We began to use the clumps of dirt to chuck at one another at speeds which would cause 2017 liberals to have a heart attack. The dirt clumps would often come with surprise rocks which if you got nailed in the head, a major concussion was a risk, and a minor one was pretty much guaranteed. We spent the next four days organizing dirt clump battles with as many of the neighborhood guys we could muster.

Looking back, it was one hell of a week.

I miss those days of discovery when adventure and thrill was found in your very backyard. When you didn’t have to prove fun to anyone else and you could have the time of your life slinging dirt clumps and ducking flying rocks. Yet now, I must validate my fun with what is socially acceptable. If I don’t quiver with excitement at the mention of Game of Thrones, I am an ingrate who just doesn’t appreciate the opiate. If I have no desire to visit Mali or Belarus than I must be an imbecile who hates adventure and seeks to live in a box.

Trust me I love adventure, and I sure as hell love it more than the assholes deep sea diving in Zanzibar. But my adventure lies in licking my fingers after eating cheese fries on a whim purchased from a hood chicken spot in the dead of winter. I believe adventure lies not in the distances you travel or the wonders you see, it is hidden in those pockets of intense emotion that lay just perched around the corner from normalcy.

Yet I can’t disclose my adventures because Game of Thrones won’t let me.

The GOT Effect is a social observation I’ve coined in which the loudest most obnoxious voices are the ones who deem what is correct and what must be the truth. The name comes because I’ve found this idea illustrated quite nicely by GOT fans who month on end have digital orgies on my feed when the latest cliffhanger is arbitrarily written and revealed. They’ve made it a social norm now to love the show, and at the very least you must be respectable in your attitude about it else you’ll be ousted from social circles and considered benighted.

We are inundated, and indoctrinated slowly into loving and at the very least accepting Game of Thrones and it’s not a conspiracy or a plot. It’s us. We constantly listen to the loudest voices and we forget our very own. We must now own the cars, the houses, the clothes, the careers and the jobs which the loudest voices have driven us towards. We feel almost guilty, almost sub par when we reveal in a room “no, I don’t watch Game of Thrones.” It’s the same effect many people experience when they say “no, I don’t believe there are more than two genders” or “yes, I believe in God.” And the only way past it is to ground yourself in what you truly believe in and hold onto that belief.

The reason is because there will always be loud voices and they will always lead you in changing directions that dictate what is better or worse. I was once told a story of Imam Malik (May God be pleased with him), a famous teacher of Islamic Jurisprudence.

I am paraphrasing the story but it goes as follows:

Now the reason I presented this story was not to highlight anything of theology but really a principle of life. Anyone can come along and topple another generally in debate if they’re more skilled in language, rhetoric, and being in the right place at the right time. If you change your opinions based on what others believe, dictate, and follow then you will be like a leaf in the wind blowing from one patch of grass to another until you eventually wither away and crumble.

These debates exist in every interaction today where it’s hard to pick hard beliefs to define us by because there is always a person ready to debate. The internet has made this tremendously worse since you can’t have an opinion about anything without some comment picking a debate with you. Now again I bring the GOT fans, because you can’t possibly have the audacity to say you don’t like GOT, without someone challenging you to debate. They bring forth many good arguments and I concede that there are some redeeming qualities. Yet this is the trick of the GOT fans of the show and of society. It’s how people get swept up in the effect.The loudest voices whether they be in politics, science, or society always have some good qualities to their show and many times we mistaken those good qualities to be wholly correct and instead of taking the good and leaving the bad, the GOT Fans force you to swallow the whole thing because it’s unacceptable that you don’t like it and many of us don’t put up much of a fight.

This is why even though we can’t afford the two car garage townhome, we get it anyway. Even though we hate slaving for corporate employers, we can’t lose the status that it comes with or the respect that it brings. Even though we think the Boy Scouts should remain ‘Boy’ Scouts we stay silent because we follow the code of conduct laid out before us even if our values say otherwise.

No matter how much thrill and adventure the GOT Fans push in my face, the 6th grade me knows the real deal of adventure. He doesn’t get pushed around and told that his dirt clump battles are no good, he ignores the voices and listens more to his own. The Game of Thrones effect is only harmful when you forget that the loud voices are only voices. They aren’t the truth, nor are they even correct. They aren’t evil nor are they all good. You may be one of those voices today without realizing that you’re under the spell, or perhaps you’re one of those that knows it, breathes it, lives for it, and swears by it. Then for you my friend, brace yourself, winter is coming.

Salaam.
Muin

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