Check out some of the FCC complaints people file about Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones is notoriously violent and depicts a wide variety of deaths, sexual acts, and generally “adult” content. Most of us air out our feelings, good and bad, about this type of content through social media or blog posts or op-eds. But some decide to take a more direct route and target what they think is the source of this material: the FCC. MuckRock, a news site whose mission statement is to make politics more transparent, posted a selection of FCC complaints about Thrones a few days ago.
It’s quite the list of complaints, too. Predictably, sex is high on the list; one viewer was disgusted by the “open homosexual perverted sex acts” and requested that HBO be forced to warn viewers of its inclusion in an episode ahead of time. (HBO already has a warning label for “sexual content”; apparently that’s not enough for this person.) Another complaint uses the teaser trailer for Netflix’s Marco Polo as a jumping-off point to push back against the “steadily increasing usage” of nudity and sex in entertainment, begging the FCC to stand up for the “people out there who are not warped and perverted.” The us-versus-them language really takes away from this person’s argument (which itself is underdeveloped and fails to take into account double standards for men and women vis-a-vis nudity and depictions of sexuality, among other things) but as the message seems more like a call to arms than an attempt to address and solve a specific problem, that’s to be expected.
The most entertaining part for me is the two people who directly name Comcast as the cause of their problems, with one person writing “The blocking of HBO Go is in direct conflict with the free flow of data as per the recent net neutrality decision.” Harsh words, but not a surprising sentiment. After all, complaints about Comcast’s service are about as old as one of the most famous list of grievances ever published: the U.S. Declaration of Independence. MuckRock has the full complaint letters if you’re looking for some light reading.