A city in flames: King’s Landing as artistic archive in HBO’s Game of Thrones

Abstract

As a study of the final two episodes of HBO’s epic medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones (2011–19), this article seeks to examine the ways in which formal analysis of the televisual text can offer an insight into how the showrunners Dan Benioff and D.B. Weiss situate their production as an artistic archive. In this essay, I explicate my definition of the artistic archive as one in which directors and the showrunners service intratextuality by referring back to previous episodes in the series, alongside other intertexts in their construction of the series’ dramatic denouement, one that involves the destruction of the show’s primary city setting: King’s Landing. As part of this process, I analyse how the episodes respond to conventions set by Hollywood genres of the medieval film and the war film, with Robert Burgoyne’s notion of the ‘body in peril’ providing a lens through which to ascertain intertextuality pertaining to the latter.