The Shape of Power and of Pain in Game of Thrones

To obliterate history from any narrative model, you must flatten that model so that no temporal change is possible. One way to do this is to remove instances of conflict, another is to render conflict perpetual. The latter is the move made by Game of Thrones, a television drama treated here as an antiutopian text, a model of twenty-first century epic fantasy in its surrender not of morality but of historicity.