In the final moments of the epic, and epically dark, third episode of the final season of “Game of Thrones,” the figure who’s cast a long shadow over the entire multi-year series, the Night King, leader of the Army of the Dead, was rather abruptly eliminated —and with him, the Left’s hope that the whole show was really supposed to be about the “existential threat of climate change.” Some climate change alarmists are predictably not happy about humans rather easily defeating this enemy, including the folks over at ThinkProgress.
“Game of Thrones is not about climate change after all as HBO wimps out,” bemoans the leftwing website in a piece posted Monday (h/t Twitchy).
“The huge HBO hit Game of Thrones has long been seen as a metaphor or parable for the climate crisis — and the author of the original books, George R.R. Martin, said as much last year, calling his story ‘a great parallel’ to modern day climate change,” ThinkProgress’s Joe Romm writes. “But in the show’s eighth and final season, as the TV series races far past where Martin left the story in his still unfinished book series, HBO’s writers and show runners have literally shattered the entire metaphor.”
Martin made the “great parallel” comment during an interview with The New York Times in October 2018, in which he said that while he created “the winter is coming” theme “long before anybody was talking about climate change,” he fully embraces the connection:
It’s kind of ironic because I started writing “Game of Thrones” all the way back in 1991, long before anybody was talking about climate change. But there is — in a very broad sense — there’s a certain parallel there. And the people in Westeros are fighting their individual battles over power and status and wealth. And those are so distracting them that they’re ignoring the threat of “winter is coming,” which has the potential to destroy all of them and to destroy their world. And there is a great parallel there to, I think, what I see this planet doing here, where we’re fighting our own battles. We’re fighting over issues, important issues, mind you — foreign policy, domestic policy, civil rights, social responsibility, social justice. All of these things are important. But while we’re tearing ourselves apart over this and expending so much energy, there exists this threat of climate change, which, to my mind, is conclusively proved by most of the data and 99.9 percent of the scientific community.
But, to the great disappointment of ThinkProgress, that “great parallel” was utterly annihilated with one quick jab of a knife by a single character rather than “all of the major powers” fully uniting to thwart the enemy.
“One of the show’s heroes single-handedly ended the existential climate threat with a clever knife trick — abruptly returning the storyline to a conventional tale of humans fighting among themselves for political power,” writes Romm. “In the real world, climate change is far too challenging a threat to be ended by one person — or even one battle that doesn’t include all of the major powers.”
“Ultimately, HBO wimped out, and left us with a simple, fantastical solution to their existential climate threat,” Romm concludes, ending the piece on as moralizing and dark a note as he can muster. “Our climate crisis, however, will not be defeated anywhere near as easily. We will require all the major polluters, including the United States, to join this battle if we are to have a serious shot at avoiding a catastrophic outcome.”
Related: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Author George R.R. Martin Backs Joe Biden 2020