Daenerys Targaryen Will Save Spain: Game of Thrones, Politics, and the Public Sphere

Abstract

This article deals with the use of the American television series Game of Thrones (HBO: 2011–) as part of the political discourse of the emerging political party Podemos in Spain. First, we focus on Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, who, in 2014, edited a book devoted to analyzing this series from a political science viewpoint. We then move on to study ideologically charged symbolic gestures and the detailed analysis of the parallelisms between Daenerys Targaryen’s revolutionary enterprise and Podemos’s bottom-to-top quest to seize power. We then scrutinize how emergent political forces that threaten the enduring hegemony of traditional parties use popular cultural artifacts to intervene in the social fabric and how they attempt to tune in with the Internet-dedicated, socially networked younger classes. This article, thus, analyzes how the relationship between politics and serialized TV fiction has morphed within the Spanish mediascape, paying special attention to the impact of participatory culture.

Anarchy in the Game of Thrones

“…However, whereas scholars have argued that GoT serve to normalize sexualized violence (Clapton and Shepherd 2017), stabilize aggressive masculinity (Kaufman 2016), and simply to broadcast rape culture (Ferreday 2015), others have to the contrary detected in GoT positive portraits of gender diversity (Askey 2018), and female agency (Abbasiyannejad and Supian 2016; Mitchell 2018). Likewise, the world-political framing of the GoT-show carries not only a pedagogical potential to teach International Relations (Young et al 2018), but also to push for plural political agendas, such as climate change policies in the US (Milkoreit 2019), and left-populism in Spain (Virino and Rodríguez Ortega 2019). The GoT-show, then, seems to compose disparate narratives.…”

Phenomenon Of Mediaculture In The Modern Society: From Personal Interpretation To Commercialization

“…Since George R. R. Martin published "A Game of Thrones", the first novel of the epic fantasy trilogy, in 1996, and especially after its television adaption as an HBO serial, this work has been an object of close attention of specialists in various fields: literary and cinema critics (Carroll, 2018), historians, political scientists (a conclusion was made that even political opponents may use one and the same popcultural material for promoting different political programs (Milkoreit, 2019); analogies between the process of Daenerys Targaryen's ascent to power and forming the Podemos political party in Spain as an example of opposition between the traditional powers and the new wave of politicians (Virino & Ortega, 2018); it was recommended to use the long-term game modeling based of the popular TV show "Game of Thrones" to study various topics, like international relation and adjacent spheres (Young et al 2018)), culture experts (questioning of 240 respondents showed correlation between the presence of sex and violence and the spectators' attitude to the serial (Rojas-Lamorena, 2018); conclusions were made about the role of specially created language systems and the subtitles in the serial original for consolidating the characteristic of a people and its culture, and for developing links between series (Iberg, 2018)).…”