[Smart Pop; 2012]

As another season of HBO’s Game of Thrones draws to a close, it is worth asking what makes this series so damn fascinating. Why do we want to spend so much time with a work that challenges the most beloved aspects of a genre known for its ability to transport readers away from the cares, both mundane and brutal, of the real world?

There are no dark sorcerers in Westeros (the continent that contains most of the action), no boy wizards; no magical trinkets or talking dragons. George R.R. Martin does not absorb us in a sweeping Tolkein-esque mythos, where lust and shit do not seem to exist, or the comforting embrace of Hogwarts, where evil never triumphs for long. He does not offer us “a green alternative to each day’s madness here in a poisoned world,” as a 1973 introduction to Lord of the Rings promises. In Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the book of essays about the series which features the preceding quote, the authors analyze a world that is, if anything, more corrupt than our own.

Game of Thrones is set in a world where the narratives accepted by the characters and the audience can be ripped away in a moment. The beautiful princess Sansa Stark believes herself in a courtly romance, but winds up an abused political pawn. The slow-burning War of Five Kings refuses to adhere to the plans of any of the contesting noble houses, and their armies, rather than clashing in glorious battle, are more likely to fragment into bands of barely distinguishable brigands. Most disturbingly, sexual violence is widespread and commonly used as weapon of war.

In a recent interview in Rolling Stone, Martin notes that his love of historical fiction is an influence, but so is his experience of his friends’ return from the Vietnam War. “One of the key things I took away was that it didn’t matter in Nam if you were the best shot or if you could do the most push-ups. Anyone could be killed at any time.” Martin has become infamous for his willingness to kill almost any character, no matter their role in the story. “The hero never dies, though. I must be the hero,” one minor character tells himself, before promptly dying.

“[T]he message of A Song of Ice and Fire may be that nothing is certain,” Adam Whitehead writes in his contribution, “An Unreliable World” (where he shows our initial understanding of Westeros’ recent history to be riddled with bias and rumor). True. But the fantasy genre is surely one of the last redoubts where this observation is notable. We accept this fact in most fiction, philosophy, our everyday lives. There is no authoritative version of events; the powerful can be stupid and cruel, no matter the color of their banners; good people can die for bad reasons or no reason at all.

So much popular fantasy is structured to reject such a worldview and that, in part, is what appeals. It is a shelter from cold, hard facts. My twelve-year-old self certainly felt that way, when he threw down A Game of Thrones in disgust because “the bad guys” kept getting away with literal murder. The horrific pervasiveness of sexual violence in this world is particularly disturbing and not even remotely fun to hear about. Why read a fantasy novel for that when I can read about the reign of Henry VIII, or pick up today’s New York Times?

The answer lies, in part, in Brent Hartinger’s essay “A Different Kind of Other,” which considers the way that the failure to live up to societal norms both torments and empowers a host of characters in Game of Thrones. “The sprawling cast of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series includes a surprisingly large number of major characters who are considered social rejects, if not outright freaks,” Hartinger argues. We witness the struggles of a little person, the disabled, the overweight and, most commonly, women within an oppressive social structure that has little place for them.

But beyond witnessing their struggles, we see these characters as well-rounded human beings, with ambitions, complex familial obligations, and even sexualities, a near-universal attribute that is noticeably lacking from the depictions of most non-beautiful, heterosexual beings in fantasy. (Peter Dinklage said this was one of the reasons he gladly accepted the role of Tyrion Lannister, who is a genetic “dwarf,” not the underground-dwelling, gold-loving, axe-wielding mythical creatures that populate most fantasy novels).

Most fantasies revolve around strong white male heroes — from Lord of the Rings through Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. But whose fantasy is it? As Saladin Ahmed writes in Salon, where Martin’s Dothraki hordes are no more vicious than the knights of Westeros, Tolkein imbued Sauron’s savage human allies with the exaggerated characteristics of Africans and Middle-Easterners. (The latter were still in evidence in Peter Jackson’s films.) Or in Hartinger’s words, “If the hero has a thousand faces, why are almost all of those male? And straight? And of average height? And of average weight? And why do they all follow accepted gender norms?”

The world Martin describes is viciously misogynistic and deathly cruel to those who do not fall within its social norms, but as a work of art Game of Thrones treats these characters a with a respect. Martin has created a diverse fantasy world that smoothly expands the parameters of the genre, within the confines of an oppressively tyrannical social order, one not too dissimilar from the actual confines of Medieval and early modern Europe. In a recent blog post on Think Progress, Alyssa Rosenberg notes, “What’s powerful about Game of Thrones for those of us watching from aeons away: this is the secret history of Westeros, the filth and blood that will be smoothed away into the official record, expunging dwarves, and bastards, and little girls along the way.” (Rosenberg’s Beyond the Wall essay argues that Martin’s treatment of rape is a sweeping indictment of a society that doesn’t value half its population.)

Game of Thrones is both a critique and an expansion of the fantasy genre. It allows those who can’t stomach the crap pumped out by the Terry Goodkinds of the world and can handle only so much of Rowling’s soothing universe to lose themselves in a fantasy landscape that is actually challenging and thought provoking. It’s a world beyond good-versus-evil, but it isn’t a moral morass either. There are plenty of characters the audience cares for and allegiances that stir the blood even as we understand that the evil queen doesn’t exist in a vacuum — that the oppressively uniform social order takes its toll on everyone.

The television show, at its best, strengthens this multi-faceted worldview. The complexities of Cersei Lannister’s character, the evil queen in question, are revealed much sooner and in a more sympathetic light than they ever are in Martin’s novels (largely because we don’t see things from her point of view until book four, while the TV series is able to do away with the POV format). Her arranged, loveless marriage, punctuated by drunken rapes by her hated husband, has clearly damaged her deeply, and inspired her to fight to ensure no one will be in such a position of power over her again. Consider also the awful awkwardness of the attempted sex between Margaery Tyrell and the would-be king Renly Baratheon, who is in love with her brother, which reveals yet another oppressive social norm that afflicts even the most powerful in the realm.

The adaptation’s willingness to invent scenes, dialogue, and characters is a definite boon. Characters like Renly and Robb Stark, who are never allowed chapters of their own in the books, get to be real people in the television version. The prostitute Ros, who is barely mentioned in the books, is a fully-fledged character on the show, providing a human face to the non-noble women who suffer so much abuse at the hands of, well, everyone. The show is not enthralled to the novels and, if anything, expands the diversity of perspective. The one exception is its handling of the Dothraki in the first season, who never become much more than a vehicle for Daenerys Targaryen’s maturation — a weakness the novels share, although to a lesser extent.

The best essays in Beyond the Wall deal with questions of genre and gender politics, which is appropriate for a series that stakes so much on the (winning) gamble that fantasy can compellingly depict realistic problems while still remaining a transporting experience. Daenerys’s attempts to revolutionize societal attitudes toward slavery and rape are hugely compelling, even more so than her attempts to train her fledgling dragons. Martin’s success in wedding these elements doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for pure, non-shit splattered fantasy. (I love hobbits as much as the next nerd.) But Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire will hopefully allow the genre room to grow, allowing a greater diversity of perspectives and more worlds where questing white boys don’t hold all the answers.


 
 
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