#i have a really specific pet peeve about medical/injury unrealism in media

[weirwoodking]

i know we are on a got hate hiatus so this is a mockery meant as a joke it's not even rage filled. maybe you don't remember this because of how random and utterly hilarious that benjen saved jon snow from.... something... (? i wanna say wights) in s7. like he came back from the dead in s7, had a different hair colour (for some reason his hair was a horrendous red/orange??). so he throws jon on his horse, saves the day, maybe he dies but i'm not sure, and it is never explained what happened to him during the six seasons he was gone and his different hair colour. it's the funniest mystery i've ever witnessed. benjen stark deserved better <3

Firstly, we are never truly on a GOT hate hiatus, even if we’re not openly talking about it as much. Also, Benjen deserves better, present tense. And he’s gonna get that better story, in the books.

IIRC what they did with Benjen was turn him into the Coldhands figure in their version (even though GRRM has explicitly stated that Coldhands isn’t Benjen). Their explanation was like... he got attacked by wights and he was brought back by the singers as half-wight/half-human, and he can’t go south of the Wall so he’s just been hanging out up north since book 1 (apparently never caring to get in contact with anyone in the Watch, not even during the Great Ranging). And then in season 7 during that episode that made even casual show-watchers start to realize how ridiculous the writing was, he turns up at the last second to save Jon after he almost drowned and then he swings a little fireball around at the zombies (sacrificing himself) and sends Jon off on his horse. I don’t remember the hair color change, but it wouldn’t surprise me. They really did like giving the Starks the wrong hair colors.

Now, you’ve prompted me to go on a little rant, because what really pisses me off about that deus ex machina-Benjen moment is that Jon was somehow miraculously okay. So... he goes out on an expedition beyond the Wall (with no hat/scarf/clothing for his head or neck) and they immediately lose all their food and water. Then he’s stuck on an island in the middle of a frozen lake surround by the literal fucking gods of winter who “bring the cold”, so it’s probably sub-zero (Fahrenheit, I’m American) temperatures. Then he fights a battle after having not been eating or drinking water for like at least 12 hours. Then he falls into a frozen lake in multiple layers of heavy fur, somehow he gets out on his own (with his sword in his hand), and then is immediately put on a horse while still in sopping wet clothes and rides off into the cold wind. And then hours later he arrives unconscious on the horse (how exactly was he holding on?).

By the time he gets back to the Wall... excuse me but his organs are failing if they haven’t failed already, and, IIRC (I’m not looking up the scene to rewatch it), he wasn’t shivering when they got him off the horse, which means that his body is no longer trying to regulate his temperature and you’re not going to be able to fix this shit with just some blankets and the magic of wishful thinking. So, unless you’ve got some medieval form of heated IV saline and warm humidified oxygen, HE’S DEAD. VERY, VERY DEAD. Oh, and apparently he suffered no frostbite, not even on his nose or ears. Big shift from the books, where Jeyne Poole gets frostbite on her nose from the escape in the snow. (Also, if you want to try and make the excuse of “well maybe the power of R’hllor made him cold-resistant” or whatever… no. It’s not stated or implied that that’s what happened. Post-res Jon in the books may react differently to temperature, but in the show he was presented as just being a revived human with an unaffected body.)

The show is just all-around absolutely ridiculous in the portrayal of injuries, especially since they constantly talked up how much they prided themselves on the “gritty realism”. You’ve Jon getting shot like three times in the back and somehow not getting a punctured lung (and recovering fast enough to lead another ranging beyond the wall before the wildlings arrive from either side). You’ve got Arya getting deeply stabbed multiple times in the stomach and then jumping in a dirty canal (if the blood loss or organ damage doesn’t kill her, the infection definitely will). You’ve got very little or no armor (see: every Jon battle scene) and no appropriate cold-weather clothing. You’ve got Jorah having all the dermis (and hypodermis too, I think) flayed off his entire upper body. You’ve got Jaime somehow surviving getting tackled off a horse into a lake/pond in full battle armor and somehow coming out the other side completely unscathed and un-sunk to the bottom. I never saw 8x5 but weren’t a ton of main characters in KL as it was being burned? And no one felt any effect from the dust and smoke inhalation? The most fantasy-like part of the TV show was everyone’s miraculous plot armor against any sort of bodily harm. Unless, of course, you get stabbed once in the stomach with a dagger when you’re a woman getting put down like a dog, then you bleed out and die in 20 seconds.

The most infuriating thing is that the books are comparatively on a very strong level of realism with injuries. Just using Jon as an example (because he seems to be George’s personal punching bag), he suffers second degree burns from his right forearm to his fingertips, and he has to constantly flex and move his hand to keep the muscles from stiffening up. When he gets shot in the leg an entire chapter revolves around it being treated, and the injury has lasting effects on him, he has to walk with a crutch for weeks. When he gets assassinated, he thinks of himself as only having been “grazed” by Wick’s knife, but blood immediately wells between his fingers when he puts his hand to his neck, and the next moment when he tries to reach for Longclaw he’s suddenly too weak to grasp it. So we can infer that the slash wasn’t just a graze, the knife probably hit his carotid artery.

GRRM puts so much care into making the physical traumas and their consequences realistic, just like he does with the mental trauma of his characters. I know we joke about stuff like “the more she drank the more she shat” but I personally love that GRRM was like “nope, if you drink unclean water it’s not gonna end well for your digestive system”. The show just full on winged it and made different standards for reality wherever and whenever they felt like it, failing to portray physical trauma just as badly as it failed to portray mental trauma.