Preview of A Game of Thrones

The books are so good because the series does not follow the standard fantasy tropes . . . No "good heros go on an impossible quest against the ultimate evil" plot lines. Instead, it is a story of complex political maneuvers and the deadly results. The larger kingdom is made up of seven former kingdoms, and has numerous threats from inside as well as two huge threats from outside, one of which has some semblence of legitimacy. The characters are driven by realistic motivations: power, greed, lust, selfishness, justice, family, revenge, and in some cases, stupidity. Many are simply trying to survive in a difficult world. While there are "good guys" and "bad guys," all of them have shades of grey, and many of the not-so-nice characters have a damn good reason for acting the way that they do.

Magic is minimized in the earlier books. In much of the story, magic is part of the background but does not play a huge role in the lives of the characters until later books. Dragons play a small but important part as the series goes on.

And some of the good and honorable people do last . . . at least so far. One of the things that makes the series so good is that you never know who will survive. Just when you think that this is a major character who will carry the story to the end, he or she gets killed off or some other significant thing happens to fully change that character. People who seem like minor characters become major characters while other major characters fade into the background.

While I appreciate the ennobling quality that high fantasy can offer, sometimes I'm concerned that in featuring elves and wizards so prominently, it may instead distract us from what we're capable of precisely as human beings. Stepping outside our shortcomings through the imagination to create fantasy races with idealized qualities can place virtues and vices in sharp contrast, but this can also overshadow the complexities of human existence.

The obvious expample is of course Tolkein's obsession with elves over portraying recognizably human characters - the Eldar virtually embody perfection in contrast to the stiffly rendered race of Men. It took Sean Bean to add some recognizable depth to the character of Boromir in Lord of the Rings, so there are high hopes he can do the same for Martin's epic.

Perhaps King Lear and Richard III should be avoided on those grounds, but such is the tragic point of view, where the bad end unhappily and the good unluckily - and the final body count is rather high.

You did mention the recent examples of Libya, Egypt, Iran, to say nothing of the headlines of, well, the past decade. I suspect that in this context, some portion of the viewing audience just can't engage with uncomplicated escapism and unquestioned idealism any more. The Lord of the Rings movies' success came at the beginning of the decade, after all.

For the record, I think Dexter is a profoundly intellectually dishonest show, despite individual actors' performances in its favor. In adapting a series of thrillers, it's trying to have its cake and eat it too when attempting to portray a pure sociopath as a vigilante - a fantasy of a very different nature. It's also impeded from real growth by the success of its formula, which it now is struggling to find variations on since Showtime can't afford let one of its best-rated shows come up with a concluding arc. This is the kind of trap that A Game of Thrones will at least avoid if it manages to stick to the one-season-per-book schedule.

The difficulty in studying history, apart from its natural resistance to dramatic conventions, is the real-world baggage we inevitably bring to topics, no matter how far removed. (It's surprising, say, how bitter the French are about Azincourt and Waterloo.) Fantasy can supply a little distance for analagous topics it wishes to explore.

On the contrary, you're raising some interesting issues that at least part of Game of Throne's potential audience will no doubt share, to say nothing of the mainstream audience.


EDIT: I certainly did cite Lord of the Rings a great deal here, but mainly because it remains the gold standard of fantasy adaptations in film, in both fidelity and mainstream success, not because I regard it as the best fantasy series.

I have to say that, at this point, if he kills off Tyrion I may become disinterested in the rest of the series.

Oh, I kind of disagree about the portrayal of elves in LotR, simply because yes, they are being held to a different standard, but the only reason men are lower down the scale is because they brought about their own downfall. And when you weigh in that the novels are set during a period when it's Men who are going to have the dominion of Middle-Earth, and only one man, and one man who embodies the very best of humanity who can lead them, I find that speaks profoundly about the human experience. We can rise above the worst of our natures and embrace the best. We can forgive, we can inspire. And given the alternative I've seen in the history of this planet in the last one hundred years especially with the rise of the Third Reich...I know which one I think I want to influence me.

I personally think Viggo Mortenson did more to be a human character than Bean, because his Aragorn was conflicted (unlike the novels) and uncertain. He was cheerful, likeable, wise, passionate, and yet could make the hardest of decisions and felt deeply any losses he had. It seems unfortunate that there's this current tendency to look to the more 'normal' of us (and in forty-three years, I've yet to find a definition of the word that fits anyone I know), as if the best of our ideals can't be done. That's not idealism, that's a goal to aspire to.

As far as Lear and Richard III is concerned, I've studied and like them both. But that's the thing...even those are dramatisations of real events, and we know simply because of dramatic license that even Game of Thrones abides by those conventions. Martin presumably could choose not to kill off a given character, but because he does, it's a dramatic license he builds into the story. And I write this with surprise now noting that the major thing I know about the story is just that. He writes a cast of interesting characters and then kills them. Not that the world is well described or alluring...or that there are moments I would be touched or heartened by. As I type this, there's a documentary on, complete with dramatic music and voiceovers talking about the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. And it's enthralling. Like I said before, I think any story pales in comparison to the real world.

When you say the audience can't take escapism or unquestioned idealism, is that to say that they are jaded or lacking any sense of hope? Because it sounds to me like the real world has been so terrible that that's what we'd seek in our entertainment, which by its definition is escapism. It's what we do, we escape from the real world for a while. I think I would feel very sad if I felt I couldn't just step away for a while to somewhere else, and think a set of ideals or some morals are good ones that I don't have to think about because I know they're good ones. I think it's when perhaps you do have to question your idealism it's because you inherently know there's something wrong with it.

The questions you raise over Dexter are ones I totally agree with, but I think you'll find Game of Thrones won't escape things. Absolutely no work of fiction survives intact to another medium, and this won't be any different. Peoples familiar with this story won't recognise some things, and will wonder why some things and parts of the story aren't there at all. Look at our prior point of Lord of the Rings and you can see in the movies how much had to be stripped away and altered to make it work for a broad audience. Even with the author on board this project, I can guarantee you there'll be things followers of the books will object to. It's the nature of the beast. And HBO brought us the magnificent Rome and it barely managed two seasons in the end. Stories are one things, budgets are another.

If the story can't grab the mainstream audience, you may only ever get one or two seasons. And at very worst, not even one. So I don't know what variety the story can offer, but modern audiences have tremendously bad attention spans. I'd expect a lot more action and such (look at Spartacus and now Camelot, prime examples of how to 'sex up' stories...getting a second season approved before the pilot of the first is what producers kill for) in place of anything considered 'slow' or 'unnecessary'.

Lastly, I agree we bring baggage to our history, but we also bring it to fantasy for those very same reasons you cite. What's Martin doing after all if not taking what we know and writing what he wanted to see happen?



S.

...we can walk when we could've flown. Aragorn, dude, seriously, TAKE THE GIANT EAGLE.

It's not that some people forget but rather that they're simply not invested in imagining a quasi-Luciferian supernatural entity with air support from a group of cursed ghosts in an allegory of the temptations of power.

For them, the entirely human motivations of greed, lust, honor, and sacrifice and the political machinations of dynastic rivalries in Game of Thrones will probably be much more to their taste.

That's not the goal, at least according to the producers. They're already talking about splitting Storm of Swords into two seasons. GoT is one of the more self-contained (and shorter) books; it sounds like they will evaluate the others on a case by case basis.