‘Game of Thrones’ and climate change

By Dan Bloom

Danny Bloom
Danny Bloom

CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — With the fifth season of the HBO hit series Game of Thrones starting this week, the Reuters News Service in London published a story the other day asking in the headline: ”Is ‘Game of Thrones’ aiding the global debate on climate change?”

The reporter on the story was Kyle Plantz, a senior at Boston University doing a winter internship with the news agency, and he wrote a very good article. He’s just 21 years old, and his news savvy shows just how aware this new generation of college students is.

So is “Game of Thrones” cli-fi? I asked Peter Sinclair, a former syndicated cartoonist from Michigan who is now a fulltime climate activist and runs a video website called “Climate Denial Crock of the Week.” The title says it all.

Confirming that he is a fan of the series, Sinclair explained: “Part of the fascination is examining a fictional society so completely involved in struggles for power, wealth, ego, and influence, that it ignores an impending existential threat. Are we Westoros?”

Sinclair isn’t the only one who is hooked on this show. Some 20 million viewers worldwide are watching. We even get the program here in Taiwan on HBO’s Asia network. And by the way, a sidenote for the cultural archives: GoT’s two creators are Jewish guys, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Not only that, but the cult fantasy show uses material sourced from a French-Jewish Russian immigrant novelist named Maurice Druon.

Druon, who was born in France in 1918, according to Debra Kamin at the Times of Israel website, gained acclaim in the 1950s when he began publishing a series of historical novels called Les Rois Maudits (The Accursed Kings) about the French monarchy in the 13th and 14th centuries. George RR Martin read Druon’s work and sat down to write his own version of the story, which is what “Game of Thrones” is based on.

And another side note: Debra Kamin is the daughter of my fellow San Diego Jewish World columnist, Rabbi Ben Kamin.  Small world!

So is the HBO series a Jewish show? No. Is it one of American television’s first cli-fi hits? Yes.

As you know, and as Reuters tells readers in last week’s wire story, “Thrones” takes place on a continent called Westeros where ”humankind is coming under threat from a zombie-like race from the north — but also from an ominous impending winter.”

Reuters contacted me by email before they reported the article, to get some background information about the rise of the cli-fi genre in literature and in Hollywood, and I told Plantz what little I knew.

He then contacted a top scholar at the University of Arizona, Manjana Milkoreit, who told him what became the focus of his article: “Game of Thrones” is a cli-fi show, according to dozens of bloggers around the world, from New York to Ireland.

“A growing number of U.S. bloggers think the show could also be a way to make the threat of climate change more vivid to a wide audience, a new study suggests,” Reuters reported.

Milkoreit said in a recent  academic paper that, according to her recent research, bloggers are using the show ”to trigger public discussion about the dangers of global warming.”

And then the kicker I was waiting for, verbatim from the Reuters wire: “The HBO show is the latest in an expanding genre of TV shows, films and novels that touch on the genre of climate change fiction, or ‘cli-fi’.”

“Climate change can be a scary and overwhelmingly difficult topic that people want to avoid,” Milkoreit told Reuters. “(But some bloggers) want to help people become engaged in climate change by showing that it can be fun by talking about it in terms of the show and how there are actually solutions to solve this global problem.”

John Cullen, a blogger in Ireland, told me that he believes “Thrones” is really about the global warming predicament we face today on planet Earth.

“As viewers, we can only look on in fascinated horror and wonder about the fate of those in the show for whom ‘Winter is Coming.’ But are we really talking about ourselves?”

For those who see things in a cli-fi way, the TV show’s “Winter” could very well be seen as our approaching global warming threat.

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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer and is credited as the man who coined and popularized the expression “Cli-Fi.”  Your comment may be sent to dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com, or posted on this website per the rules below.

 
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