Earlier this week Matthew Walther of The Week argued that “Game of Thrones,” returning soon to HBO, is bad for the soul — “ultra-violent wizard porn,” a wretched parade of “decapitations and eye-gouges and rapes and brother-on-sister grope fests” that should only inspire disgust or despair. The internet was not amused: It is one thing to denounce this or that aspect of the HBO drama for being unwoke or anti-feminist, but going the full Savonarola is another matter, especially since Walther swept the wider run of genre entertainment with his moralizing aesthete’s brush. And since he wears his Catholic religiosity on his sleeve, the rejoinders often suggested that his real problem with “Game of Thrones” is that the show is an extended critique of feudalism and knighthood and medieval patriarchy and hierarchy in all its forms — that it is, in fact, implicitly progressive and enlightened, and Catholics inevitably prefer the dark.

Now I agree with Walther’s critics that the show is 1) somewhat better than he allowed and 2) not ultimately nihilistic (even if I agree with him that its exploitative, porn-and-torture side might be corrosive to the soul). But I also think that there’s a touch of self-deception in the way certain “my art and politics must align” types watch the show and read the George R.R. Martin books, which after all belong to a popular genre that by its nature tends toward romanticism, nostalgia, and other dangerously reactionary sentiments. And so I snarked on Twitter that “the porn-y side of Game of Thrones helps keeps liberals deluded about why they like the show,” letting them tell themselves, “Oh, I like it because it’s deconstructing this patriarchal pre-modern world and showing how it’s sex and power all the way down.” But not so, liberals: “You like it because it lets you escape the flat dreariness of liberalism for a little while. Because deep down you want a king or queen.”

So that was a little bit provoking, and people were predictably quite provoked, and it was Twitter so I was exaggerating for effect and probably got the responses I deserved — while also gaining a new appreciation for the perverse pleasures of rightsplaining beloved forms of pop culture to their liberal fans.

But I also got some responses that are worth arguing with briefly, because I do think they reflect a kind of strong misreading of what Martin’s story and the show are offering. I’m thinking particularly of this one from Brian Phillips, a fine sports-and-culture writer formerly of Grantland and MTV; I’ll take the liberty of stringing Phillips’ tweets into the mini-essay that they are:

To say that Game of Thrones is attractive to liberals because of secret monarchical longings, you have to ignore…everything GoT is doing. GoT does not make being a Stark bannerman or a Daenerys retainer look fun! Those people get flayed and beheaded! GoT presents a vision of monarchy that is exaggeratedly dystopian even compared to most of the historical reality of monarchy. I think that dystopian exaggeration is in fact key to the show’s appeal to liberals in many ways. It lets you fantasize about the negation of your principles while simultaneously confirming their rightness. GoT presents a vision of a world in which illiberal instincts can be freely indulged, in which the id is constrained only by physical power. All the violent, nasty stuff liberal society (thankfully) won’t let us do, but that’s still seething in our lizard brains, gets acted out. And not just acted out — violence and brutality are the organizing principles on which the world is based. But this is where the dystopianism comes in, because the show chides you for harboring the very fantasies it helps you gratify. It wallows in their destructive consequences — makes that wallowing, in fact, simultaneous with the fulfillment of the fantasies. Will to power leads to suffering and chaos, which lead to more opportunities for the will to power to be acted upon, etc. This is a vastly more complex and interesting emotional appeal than “people secretly want kings.” The liberal order is always being implicitly upheld by the accommodation of our base desire for its opposite. To me, this is the most interesting ongoing thing about GoT, a franchise I’m otherwise completely tired of. Everyone wants to move to Hogwarts; only a lunatic would actually want to LIVE in Westeros. In an escapist genre, that’s interesting. It’s not subliminal royalism; it’s dark escapism, an escape that ultimately tends toward reconciliation with the existing order. And what do liberals secretly love more than an excuse to reconcile with the existing order? Westeros makes Prime Day look utopian!

To me, this is a very good description of what a lot of prestige television has done, in different ways — from “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” to “Breaking Bad” and many more. These shows invite liberal viewers into various illiberal or pre-liberal or just, I suppose, red-state worlds, which are more violent and sexist and id-driven than polite prestige-TV-viewing liberal society, and which offer viewers the kind of escapism that Phillips describes … in which there is a temporary attraction to being a mobster or hanging out with glamorous chain-smoking ’50s admen or leaving your put-upon suburban life behind and becoming Heisenberg the drug lord. But then ultimately because these worlds are clearly wicked, dystopic or just reactionary white-male-bastions you can return in relief to the end of history, making Phillips’ “reconciliation with the existing order” after sojourning for a while in a more inegalitarian or will-to-power world.

Some viewers — the “bad fans” who root for whackings and hate on Skyler White — don’t make that return because they like the will-to-power stuff too much; this is why these programs can be dangerous. But what the shows properly understood are doing isn’t a celebration of illiberalism; it’s an exploration of its attractions that ultimately confirms the liberal world and all its norms.

“Game of Thrones,” however, is somewhat different. Yes, it makes the current situation in Westeros look hellish, by effectively condensing all of the horrors of a century of medieval history into a few short years of civil war. And yes, it’s much darker and bloodier and has a much higher, “wait, I thought he was a hero” body count than a lot of fantasy fiction, which lets people describe it as somehow Sopranos-esque.

But fundamentally “The Sopranos” was a story without any heroes, a tragedy in which the only moral compass (uncertain as Dr. Melfi’s arrow sometimes was) was supplied by an outsider to its main characters’ world. Whereas “Game of Thrones” is still working within the framework of its essentially romantic genre — critiquing it and complicating it, yes, but also giving us a set of heroes and heroines to root for whose destinies are set by bloodlines and prophecies, and who are likely in the end to save their world from darkness and chaos no less than Aragorn or Shea Ohmsford or Rand al’Thor.

Put another way: On “The Sopranos,” there is no right way to be a mafioso. But on “Game of Thrones” there is a right way to be a lord or king and knight, and there are characters who model the virtues of each office, who prove that chivalry and wise lordship need not be a myth. Sometimes they do so in unexpected ways — the lady knight who has more chivalry than the men who jeer at her, the dwarf who rules more justly than the family members who look down on him. But this sort of reversal is typical of the genre, which always has its hobbits and stable boys and shieldmaidens ready to surprise the proud and prejudiced. And it coexists throughout the story with an emphasis on the importance of legitimacy and noblesse oblige and dynastic continuity, which is often strikingly uncynical given the dark-and-gritty atmosphere.

Consider that the central family, the Starks, are wise rulers whose sway over the North has endured for an implausible number of generations — “there has always been a Stark in Winterfell,” etc. — and whose people seems to genuinely love them. Their patriarch is too noble for his own good but only because he leaves his native fiefdom for the corruption of the southern court, and his naivete is still presented as preferable to the cynicism of his Lannister antagonists, who win temporary victories but are on their way to destroying their dynasty through their amorality and singleminded self-interestedness.

Then once the Stark patriarch is dead the three most important and sympathetic characters, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister, are all highborn heirs unfairly or unjustly passed over or deprived of their birthrights (Snow is a “bastard,” but not really), while their outright wickedest human antagonists, the Boltons to the Freys to bad King Joffrey, are respectively a rebellious vassal and his bastard son, a vicious wretch who breaks Westerosi society’s basic moral code, and a monarch who is not the rightful king twice over — he’s a product of usurpation followed by incest and deception.

Meanwhile the central secret of the stories (which is pretty easy to figure out) is that the two most important houses joining their bloodlines has produced a long-prophecied figure, double-dosed with monarchical legitimacy like some crazy Stuart-Habsburg hybrid. At the same time, the lower-born figures who we appreciate the most, from lesser lords to commoners, are the ones who find a greater lord to serve (Davos with Stannis, Pod with Tyrion, Sam with Jon, various figures with Daenaerys), while the lower-born nobles and commoners who seek power in their own right (Littlefinger, the High Sparrow) are generally much more morally ambiguous.

I could go on, and of course I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. My tweets notwithstanding I’m not a mindreader of the subconscious, so I can’t prove to you that any of the left-leaning people watching all this are just soaking in the “my Daeny lies over the water” or the “root, root root for the Stark restoration” vibes. (Though I was struck during last season by the way that so many of the show’s good liberal viewers were clearly rooting for Cersei Lannister, the embodiment of a ruthless aristocrat, against the rare — if, of course, self-interested — champion-of-the-common-people High Sparrow … because he’s a puritan, ostensibly, but I suspect also because of the show’s own version of bad fandom, in which the glamour of monarchy makes you root even for the wicked aristocrats if they have just a couple of sympathetic qualities.)

But this is the more modest, less-mindreading point that I would stand by. As I said above, fantasy from Tolkien to the present (in both its fictional forms and role-playing varietals) partakes by its nature of romantic and reactionary themes, often scratching the same anti-modern itch as certain forms of far-right and New Age lefty politics — and perhaps the same monarchical itch as certain forms of Macron-esque centrism as well. There are fantasy writers who completely deconstruct that tendency, but for all his beheadings and betrayals Martin — unless he has serious surprises in store in the last two books — is not one of them. Westeros is not as naturally appealing to liberal audiences as Hogwarts, yes (I have some thoughts on that as well), but still it is not a dystopia in the style of Gilead or an antechamber to hell in the style of Tony Soprano’s gangland; instead it’s a world in which the fabric of a feudal society gets rent and you root for a very particular set of noble families to regain their rightful place and help weave it back together while also saving the world from some ice demons according to a prophecy. As such its doorway into illiberalism is different in kind from the doorway offered by the Soprano crime family: In the end, whatever their politics in this world, both the show’s bad fans and its good fans are rooting a queen or for a king.