Dress up pornography with good costumes and a good script, and it’s still pornography.
Granted, South Park has crossed its share of line too.
But I’ve not watched HBO since Not Necessarily the News was a thing.
GoT has had a lot of torture porn as well as regular porn.
Just considered artistically: GoT would have been better, tauter drama without it.
Compare GoT with “I Claudius”.
The (real) things that Caligula did were just hinted at in that show: you got the horror without the brutalisation.
>>Dress up pornography with good costumes and a good script, and it’s still pornography.<<
I saw a skit (in passing — I don’t even remember who did it) where the posited the “Creative Director” for GOT was a 14-yo kid.
They kept asking him questions about different plot lines, story arcs, etc.
His answer to every question was “More Boobies!”
Based on the 6 episodes I got from Netflix and watched — yeah, that pretty much covers it. That and killing one of the “regular cast” every couple of episodes.
The story lines might have been able to carry it but I find the gratuitous sex and violence much too distracting. I am not a prude but it is, as you say, just pornography with nice costumes and complicated stories. But still just porno.
I don’t preach against nudity and adult beverages, among other things.
But I can’t indulge in neither.
I am programmed by childhood experiences to react to each in negative ways becoming loud and angry with booze and to indulge in solitary sex with any depiction of real nudity or the illusion of nudity with pixels and so on.
The truth is painful in my experience, but its there and I can’t walk away from it.
No booze, no looking at naked people.
Otherwise, I go in the wrong direction and in the context of my faith, I SIN.