10 Problems With Game Of Thrones Nobody Wants To Admit

6. The Fighting Fantasy Is Kind Of Unnecessary

Right now the BBC are airing Wolf Hall, a historical drama based off of Hilary Mantel's award-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VII. They're fictionalised takes on real-life events, which eschew the soapy antics of The Tudors in favour of a fairly repressed, quiet series where power is wielded and undercut not with graphic sex scenes and violence but underhanded tactics and manipulation. The show is almost all dialogue, people discussing how they're going to get away with certain things and turn others around to their way of thinking, and it's one of the most engaging shows on TV right now. It's basically Game Of Thrones shorn of all the battles, the sex scenes, the dragons, and all of the more base fantasy tropes in indulges in. Which sort of proves that Game Of Thrones doesn't need any of those things. They're not there because they're necessary, like they naturally fit into the flow of things. They're there because that's the done thing in fantasy stories, and whilst the series mostly eschews those genre stereotypes, it sometimes falls prey to them. It's a little disappointing.