 So, the thing is, Game of Thrones was a hugely popular television show. Even years after it ended, any mentions will bring out swarms of Redditors who all pair at the same line about how no one talks about it anymore, followed by them talking about it for several comments. Whatever your thoughts on it, it was huge, and its influence continues to be felt. And much like Twilight and The Hunger Games, which I already covered, its influence gave rise to many copycats trying to cash in on the new audience. People wanted more big-budget shows that were dark and, quote, realistic, and had large casts of characters. This was more prominent in television than with books, probably because that's a bigger cash cow. Atlantis, The Last Kingdom, Nightfall, Barbarians, Britannia, Blacksales, Marco Polo, Vikings, Salem, Narcos, and the Bastard Executioner are all good examples of this. They're all big-budget shows that added lots of death and sex to try and create a similar tone to HBO's mega-hit. Now, these aren't all bad, the quality varies quite a bit, in fact, but they're all clearly GOT clones. On the plus side, it did kick off the trend of adapting fantasy novels to television, which was uncommon before that. With how GOT, we would have no wheel of time. On the negative side, this is basically the only type of TV show that gets a fucking budget anymore. On the book side, we have things like Chronicles of the Necromancer and other stuff you've never heard of. There are some straight-up ripoffs of Martin's work, just not as many as you would think. The fact is, he took a lot of ideas that had been around for years already and mixed them together in a new way, and other authors, while they may have made things similar to his books, rarely outright cloned them. Now that the intro part is done, it's time to get into the details. Beyond the surface level, what makes something a full GOT clone rather than something merely inspired by it? Well, let's answer that in the form of a numbered list. Beware of spoilers ahead. And also, here's a sponsored ad from Campfire. Hello there, I'm James Tullis. You might recognize me from my work on the internet. And you also might be wondering why I have this lit candle. You see, my house is currently being possessed by the spirit of a woman I murdered, I mean, the spirit of a woman who died under mysterious circumstances and I'm trying to perform an exorcism. Unfortunately, Father Joseph stopped returning my calls after the noodle incident, so I'm currently trying to figure out how to do it by myself and not having a lot of luck. But you know what, that's not important because today I'm here to talk to you about Campfire.com. More than 100,000 writers use Campfire to organize, improve, and showcase the writing. 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Plus, Campfire has massive updates on the way like more modules, an offline desktop app, a mobile app, and the ability to monetize your writing in Explore. Write better stories faster with Campfire. Click the link in the description to learn more. Jennifer? Are you listening? I need you to leave now. It's not my fault you were standing in front of me while I decided to practice my stabbing. This isn't your home anymore. I know you're still in the crawl space. I'll find you a new resting place soon. Number one, you need to kill a lot of characters, but not really. This is the most obvious thing that makes it clear writers are trying to make something like what Martin did. It's become a meme over the past 10 years that characters constantly died in Game of Thrones, which isn't inaccurate, but it is a service-level understanding at best. A lot of characters die, but more importantly, a lot of major characters die in situations where it makes sense for them to die. In the first season of the show, which coincides with the first book, Ned Stark is killed despite seeming like he'd be the protagonist of the series. Likewise, both Viserys and Drogo seems like they'd be the villains, but they're both gone by the end. All three of them died in ways that were surprising, yet made total sense in retrospect. Viserys was so obsessed with reclaiming his, quote, birthright, he decided to associate with an unstable, incredibly violent warlord. Then that warlord killed him for threatening his wife. Drogo murdered and enslaved everyone in an innocent village before one of the survivors killed him in revenge. It makes sense. It doesn't come out of nowhere. Later, people like Oberyn are killed in combat when they act stupidly. There's very little plot armor here, and that attracted a lot of people to the series. So it makes sense that those trying to capitalize it would try and do the same thing. Here's the problem. Game of Thrones had a huge cast that constantly grew bigger. So when someone died off, there was always someone different to focus on afterwards. They weren't replaced exactly because the characters didn't fall into easy understand archetypes the way they usually do, e.g. the hero, the villain, the sidekick, the mentor, the love interest, and so on. It wasn't as simple as the protagonist getting a new girlfriend. They all had a unique place in the story. It also had an unusual story structure in that the story had no structure. When something like the Bastard Executioner kills off characters, who are they supposed to kill? Obviously, you can't get rid of Brattle, he's the main character. The whole story revolves around his quest for revenge, and you can't get rid of these other guys because they're important to the story too. If they die, everything grinds to a halt. That's a direct consequence of making a more traditional story. So how did these more traditional stories manage to kill off a bunch of characters? The solution most came to is to have a core cast of characters who are never in any real danger surrounded by a cast of side characters who constantly get killed off and replaced. Probably the most egregious example of this isn't even from a GOT clone, it's The Walking Dead. Four or five people stuck around for season upon season while others came in only to die a few episodes later in, quote, dramatic ways. But things like Vikings and The Last Kingdom did have a similar problem. This gives off the exact opposite feeling that it's supposed to. It prevents you from getting attached to the side characters because you know they'll die sooner or later, and it prevents you from fearing for the main characters because all this just drives home how invincible they are. So in the end, there aren't actually any major character deaths the way there were in Game of Thrones. That's not important though. What's important for the marketing is that it seems like there are a lot of major character deaths. Number two, character deaths are for shock value, not an expression of their arc. When Ned Stark died, it was surprising. At the same time, it made sense as a consequence of his actions. He had multiple opportunities to take ruthless action that would have politically neutered the Lannisters, but he couldn't do it. His morals wouldn't let him. The deaths of other major characters like Drogo, Joffrey, and Oberyn Martell all fit this mold too. Their deaths were a result of their choices. This is not the case for the clones. There aren't that many major character deaths to begin with, but among both major and side characters, they just die because the writers decide they need to die. They're soon replaced by another character no one cares about so the cycle can begin again. Was Isael killed in The Last Kingdom because of anything she did or just because it made for a shocking visual? Why was she in the story in the first place? Hard to say since I couldn't even finish season two. What about this soldier guy who died around the same time? How does his death affect things? Well, I kinda liked him so I'm sad, I guess. On the flip side, Uhtred constantly does stupid shit like sneaking to enemy camps by himself. When he gets caught, that should result in his death or at least force him to cleverly escape. Instead, the enemy leader challenges him to a one-on-one duel which Uhtred wins, then a friendly army comes to his rescue. When the writers decide you should die, you die. When they decide you should live, you live. No matter how much or how little sense that makes. Rather than understanding how Martin managed to shock his audiences over and over, you have to do just not that. Number three, throw in some sex, then throw in some more. Do you know what people did in the Middle Ages? They fucked, apparently. Yes, even living in a time when birth control was crossing your fingers and premarital sex was almost as bad as taking a shit on a church altar, people were hornier than spring break coeds with gonorrhea. This is a great way to show off how dark and mature your show is. After all, when you need a filler scene, you could have a brief fight sequence, you could have two characters make banal conversation, or you could have two women go at it while their boss eggs them on. Why have a regular exposition scene when you could just have two people have sex in the woods while they come up with a plan? Want to show how Puritans in 17th century Massachusetts had fun? Orgies. I can't show clips here, so you'll have to take my word for it, but these are all 100% real. While there's obviously nothing wrong with sex, throwing it in at every opportunity is sophomoric. That goes for movies and TV in general, they just toss some boobs in there to grab our attention like jangling keys. Think about it, how often do sex scenes further the plot? Almost never. In this particular subgenre, the sex is only there to show how edgy the setting is. No one is stuffy and boring here, they're constantly killing dudes in sword fights, metaphorically and literally. My personal theory is that it's a backlash to the extreme censorship the religious right tried to impose in the 90s and early aughts on shows like South Park and The Simpsons. Writers and directors got tired of being told they couldn't make any sex jokes, so they went overboard with it. Number four, there must be fantasy elements. Only elements though. Fantasy is great. Magic, dragons, elves, I love that shit. It's a lot of fun, but much like Las Vegas, that fun comes with downsides. When you have the magic excuse, it's easy to write yourself into a corner and use it as a Deus Ex Machina. Not a guarantee obviously, but a risk. When Jason goes through an Isekai portal to Atlantis, in Atlantis, he finds a world with all sorts of weird monsters and shit. Within the first 15 minutes, he meets both Pythagoras and Hercules, which is weird because Pythagoras was a real person and Hercules wasn't, but nevermind that. From that point forward, the mystical elements are mere background dressing. The bulk of the plot and character beats are dominated by mundane human actions, because why have Greek myth with all the gods and magic when you could have Greek myth without all the gods and magic? If there are no fantasy or sci-fi elements, it's because it's based on real events. The Last Kingdom follows Danish attempts to conquer Great Britain in the 9th century. Narcos follows the life of Pablo Escobar. The Bastard executioner is about one of those 12 trillion Welsh rebellions during the Middle Ages. Nightfall is about the collapse of the Templar Order in the 14th century, and so on. As a matter of fact, there might be as many mundane Game of Thrones clones as magical ones. It seems like a natural fit at first, since GOT didn't have many magical elements and focused on politics in the pseudo-maneval world. By putting things in the real world, it saves time, normally dedicated to exposition. The problem is that part of GOT's success came from the wonder brought on by the fantastical elements. Knowing that snow zombies are coming to kill everyone, regardless of who rules Westeros, adds a layer of danger that just isn't there for many of the clones. Imagine if we never got Hardhome, which is one of the best episodes of television ever made, or any of the cool scenes with dragons or exotic cities with giant pyramids. The whole show would suffer. Budgetary constraints probably played a role in this, too. Just watch Atlantis and tell me that more fantasy and sci-fi should be made on a BBC-level budget. The words will catch in your throat. Number five, you need to be morally gray. But not really. Do you know how to make something dark and edgy and mature? You make it ambiguous whether the protagonist is good or not. In Game of Thrones, Ned Stark is generally a good person, but that blows up in his face, and after that, all the good guys wind up having to do some bad stuff in order to save the day, or just because they're angry. Tyrion negotiates with the masters of Slaver's Bay because if he doesn't, they'll just rebel and bring back slavery forever instead of just temporarily. He also kills his father because, frankly, he deserved it. But deserved or not, his death throws things further into chaos than they already were, leading to even more death and destruction. There are more examples like this. Good actions can have bad consequences, making it difficult to know what's right and what's wrong. The clones took this and thought it would be easy to replicate, but they didn't have a strong understanding of cause and effect, leading to a succession of choices which boiled down to, does this person in power deserve to die or nah? Whenever a major character does something morally gray, it's either unambiguously terrible or not really bad at all. Like when Utrecht just straight up turns on someone he allied himself to in battle, gets him killed, steals all his stuff, then starts cheating on his wife, who just recently gave birth, with a woman he found in Cornwall. What a paragon of virtue. I'm sure glad he's the main character. On the other side, there's Increase Mather from Salem who uses some unpleasant methods to catch witches, but witches are real in this universe. The reason witch trials were bad in real life is because innocents were the sole target. Whether the trials identified any or not, it wouldn't make a difference. In the show, identifying witches will prevent them from killing people and summoning Satan. This isn't as complex as they want it to be. The writing lesson here is that if you want to do something, commit to it. Make characters bad and treat them as bad, make them good and treat them as good, or make their immoral actions understandable. Number six, Medieval Life. Yeah, sure, close enough. As we all know, Medieval Life was nothing but constant death, suffering, and, as we mentioned earlier, sex. Back then, no one had any leisure activities, not even the aristocrats. No board games or sports or storytelling. Nope, just constant drudgery. As we all know, life before 1982 held no joy whatsoever unless you liked torturing peasants. Similarly, people had no access to any sort of birth control, but still only had two or three kids on average. This is science. Despite this, it isn't a very good look at what life was really like back then. There's no real examination of how bureaucracy or military life would function. Not that that would be very entertaining, but at least it would be something. GOT got away with this because it was a fictional world filled with magic and shit, and a very large one at that. Exploring it was part of the fun. Most of the others are just lazy. They're a surface level exploration of a world in life very different from our own. Number seven, what's the story? Uhhhh... But after all of that, I still haven't mentioned what the story needs to be about. What are the characters trying to do? What's the goal they're working towards? What is all the scheming and battling in service of? This is a problem George Double R. Martin has struggled with himself, which is why we're never getting the winds of winter. Lady Stoneheart and Young Griff and the Sand Snakes are all great examples of him just throwing in things that, while they seem interesting at first, barely tie into the major events and make everything more of a muddled mess. What's Game of Thrones about? Uhhh... So there's this pseudo-medieval kingdom, right? And people are fighting over who should be in charge, but there's also these snow zombies that are being held back by a bunch of convicts led by the bad guy from Call of Duty Infinite Warfare. Then there's this 13-year-old girl who gets sexually abused by Aquaman until he dies and then she frees some slaves. And these three storylines barely intersect until the last two seasons. The clones did this same thing often. What's Atlantis about? Some English dude is transported to this magic world that is also our world in the past, sort of, and then stuff happens. What's The Last Kingdom about? Some Viking dude kind of wants to help the Saxons beat off their invaders, but not really, and then he fights in some battles and then time moves forward a few decades. What's Marco Polo about? Some Italian dude goes to China, has sex with an Asian girl, and hangs out with Benedict Wong. These are all unfocused, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when you want to tell a big, epic tale, you need to pick what it's about and stick with it. The Night's Watch storyline is the best of the three because it's always about the white walkers, even when other conflicts are temporarily brought to the forefront. Some of the clones managed to avoid this trap completely by accident. The bastard executioner is bad and the story is stretched out, but at least it's simple to explain. Angry Welshmen try to get revenge on some English soldiers who killed their families. Great, that's an understandable, sympathetic motivation that they need to spend time working towards. With that as a foundation, more subplots can be introduced while still allowing the audience to feel like things are progressing. You know, I'm starting to think that George wrote a series of books that, while enjoyable, is deeply flawed and rose to prominence mainly through its novelty and strong character work. And that's all you need to know to write your own Game of Thrones clone. If you want to take advantage of this dark, edgy, unfocused TV show bubble before it pops, get ready on your sales pitch and bring it to a cable network or streaming service that's looking for content. Wait a minute. Are terrible GOT rip-offs just the adult version of the YA dystopia craze? There are some similarities in how both rose and then dropped off. Eh, whatever, I've had enough hot takes for today. And if you're going to ask HBO to remake the final season of a TV show you didn't like, you should have to legally change your name to Karen McKarenface. A huge thanks to everyone who bothered to watch this far for whatever reason. I don't know who would want to listen to me talk for half an hour, but especially a huge thanks to all my patrons whose names are on here, including the $10 and up patrons, Oppo Savilainen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotys, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Christopher Quinten, Dan Anceliovic, Echo Joel, Carcat Kitsune, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Marilyn Roxy, Microphone, Sad Martigan, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, and of course, as always, va-victus. Y'all are the best, really. Let me tell you that. Like, if you were here, I'd kiss you. I wouldn't actually kiss you, but you know, you're all pretty cool anyways, so just don't take my... Okay, yeah, goodbye.