There has been a ton written about Game of Thrones over the last few weeks, and I mean a TON. TV critics way smarter than I am have been exploring all sorts of interesting things about the show itself and how it reflects the current TV landscape. You probably won’t find a bigger advocate for the show than me, but I wasn’t really planning on writing anything about it because I didn’t have anything unique to bring to the conversation…and then all of a sudden, I did.
XKCD had a brilliant comic a few weeks ago titled Umwelt. http://www.xkcd.com/1037/. Umwelt is a pretty cool theory that I hadn’t heard of before. According to XKCD:
“umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up different things, different animals living in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit—from your ideology to glasses prescription, to your web brower.”
What made the XKCD comic so clever was that it was actually a completely different comic depending on which web browser you are using to view the page. Jump to a couple of Sundays ago, I’m watching the Game of Thrones second season premiere with a friend of mine. We’re both big fans of the show, but I’m also a big fan of the books, and my friend has never read them. As much as I’m trying to enjoy just watching the show, I can’t help but focusing on how successfully it’s adapting the books. I wish I could just turn off that particular critical part of my brain and enjoy the show for what it is, but my brain just doesn’t work that way. When I say I’m worried about how successfully the show is adapting the books, it’s not that I particularly care about little details being the same. Rather, because it’s such a complex story, I’m constantly concerned about how well the adaption allows the part of the audience who’s never read the books, specifically my friend sitting next to me, to follow all the intricate plot points and relationships between characters.
It’s no revelation to point out that fans of the books are watching the show differently from those who have never read the books. In fact, a lot of what has been written about the show in the last few weeks has touched on the different expectations and different levels of enjoyment between the two fan bases. But, it all of a sudden occurred to me, is it more than just watching the show from a different perspective? Because our perspectives are so very different, are my friend and I effectively watching two very different shows…is this umwelt?
My friend is coming at Game of Thrones entirely fresh, with no expectations and no preconceived notions about where the story is going. Whereas I, no matter how hard I try not to, will always be comparing it to the books and will always be worried about how well its adapting the source material. I will never be able to divorce my knowledge of how the story has originally been told from the way I perceive the television adaption. It fascinates me to think that my friend and I could be sitting just feet away from each other, literally watching the same exact thing, but because of our different perspectives, be experiencing it in ways that are so completely alien that we are essentially watching two different shows. Unfortunately, there’s no way to really ever know, but it certainly is fun to think about.
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