The show has gone off a cliff and is threatening to take the books with it.

I don’t think people are put off by density. I think they’re put off by the obvious Dark Towerization of the series. Most authors do their best work in early adulthood and middle age. Martin’s put himself in a Stephen King situation where he’s an old man in very wealthy, comfortable circumstances trying to wrap up a series he started when he was much younger and more driven.

The show has pretty consistently been better than the books have been since Storm of Swords. Brienne is completely tolerable on-screen. We’re not constantly having our time wasted with Bran chapters.

Though personally my brain fogs over whenever the scene shifts to Dorne

Those crypto-Sapphic Dornish shield maidens are hawt!

Though personally my brain fogs over whenever the scene shifts to Dorne, I think many people do the last two books a great disservice.

People who object to them seem almost universally to be people who started the books years ago when they were much younger and now they’re older, they have a lot more on their minds and they simply don’t have the time or the attention to devote themselves to something that is only getting denser and denser, and, in the last one, with huge tracts of real utter grotesquerie.

Martin is laying out an entire world here that will live a very long time after him, and though I think he has said he wants no one to continue them if he dies, you know someone will, probably a lot of people. In reading them I’ve often thought there were parts that could make really excellent movies just by themselves, independently.

So, yes, he does owe at least something, a good-faith effort to finish the book.

So sue him. Oh wait… disgruntled fans have no legal standing to do so.

Martin certainly could screw things up for others with a high-profile incomplete.

If Martin croaks before he is done his estate and publisher will certainly step in and hire another trash fiction author to complete the story. Hell it could go on for another dozen books and movies if other fictional series are any indication.

“He doesn’t ow[e] us anything.”

He sold a multi-part book series to his publishers and to his readers with the expectation that the story would be completed. So, yes, he does owe at least something, a good-faith effort to finish the book.

The other aspect of this is that since Tolkien’s great success w/ his trilogy (which was completed before the first book went to market), a lot of fantasy writers have used the format of one story in multiple parts. Presumably, the financial advantage is that the author gets paid while still writing. Not all fantasy writers are Oxford professors. Martin certainly could screw things up for others with a high-profile incomplete.

FWIW, I too immensely enjoyed the first three books, but I skipped the last two after numerous negative reviews convinced me GRRM had lost it and that they were not worth the time. I stopped watching the show after season 3. Given GRRMs age and from outward appearances at least being in the best of the health, I’ll be surprised if he finishes the series.

Dude, he released ADWD in 2011. Hardly years on years of slack since. He puts out a book every ~5 years. And frankly it’s his life. He can do what we wants with it. He doesn’t own us anything.

He’s had years and years on end of slack. So much slack that he’s essentially given up. The point at which the show gets past the narrative of the books is the point where I despair of him ever finishing the books with anything like the quality of the first three.

You’re right that I’m being ungenerous towards him. But that’s mainly because he’s squandered and abused book-fan patience for over a decade now. A decade. If I didn’t love the first three books so much, I wouldn’t be so upset with him now.

Allowing the show to move past the books is the last straw – he no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt. He’s either lost the ability of will to finish his epic. It’s either sad or upsetting, take your pick.

Martin just can’t be bothered to finish his epic. Just can’t be bothered. So you know what? Fuck him. Fuck his Jets-loving, bearded, pudgy ass. Fuck the books. As a fan, I no longer consider them the canonical Song of Ice and Fire.

That’s a trifle ungenerous to say the least. It is hard work keeping dozens of balls in the air while writing prodigious amounts of text. He also has been distracted by the TV show. Cut the guy some slack.

Vox has a good take on the “fork” concept and why it is a good thing.

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/12/8391953/game-of-thrones-review-season-5

I think I’m done with the books. The first three were unbelievably well-conceived, but the last two were meandering, formless wastes of time. Martin clearly just got lazy. I remember before Dance with Dragons came out I had to read a refresher on each of the books because it’d been so long that I’d forgotten a ton.

Martin is truly doing a disservice to his early fans, the one’s who read GoT in the 90s and got hooked. These fans made it a cult classic, and built up an audience (through word of mouth) large enough that producers at studios like HBO thought it might be worth taking a shot at putting it on-screen. Yet, now that Martin is rich and critically acclaimed, he not only takes his sweet time producing more product, he’s pretty much shitting on the people that helped get him recognition in the first place.

I haven’t watched the show, but kept up enough with commentary to discern that, through season 4 of the TV show, the differences between the two weren’t so enormous. Those who had read the books still knew what was coming more or less. (And it did make sense to split Storm of Swords into 2 seasons, as that meaty book was so chock-full of awesomeness that it warranted 20 episodes or so.)

I remember thinking that maybe, just maybe, the success of the HBO show would finally make Martin get off his ass and finish the series quickly. After all, there was no way HBO could film a season based on a book that doesn’t exist yet, right? Once they ran out of material, Martin HAD to produce a new book, right?

But no, Martin’s laziness won out in the end. He wasn’t content to produce two poorly constructed books, going off on major tangents that had only the most tangential relationship to the original (first 3 books) plot, introducing seemingly major characters past the halfway point in the epic, and overall adding more and more threads without resolving a the huge amount of plotlines that he’d built up already. He wasn’t content to take 5+ years between these enervating tomes.

In the end, he just decided to say “Fuck it, let the HBO guys write the rest. I’ll give them my basic ideas, and they’ll do the heavy lifting.” The HBO guys realized that waaay too much time was spent in Mereen, that obviously Tyrion had to meet up with Khaleesi right quick, that there was no point in introducing Aegon this late in the narrative, etc. So they’ve cleaned that all up.

Martin just can’t be bothered to finish his epic. Just can’t be bothered. So you know what? Fuck him. Fuck his Jets-loving, bearded, pudgy ass. Fuck the books. As a fan, I no longer consider them the canonical Song of Ice and Fire. As far as I’m concerned, the events of books 4-5 are fan-fiction. They’re like novels set in the Star Wars universe – perhaps interesting to fanboys, but inferior to the screen-version.

When I finally get HBO, or the show is made available on Amazon Prime, or otherwise becomes accessible (without piracy), I’ll watch the show, and as far as I’m concerned, THAT’s the canonical story – alterations and PC nonsense included. At least it will fucking end, and will move along reasonably swiftly.

Razib – Martin can’t give a shit about how much you, I, or anyone else who read them before it was cool, enjoyed the books. How much time and perhaps even emotional investment we put into the characters and the world. He doesn’t give a shit. And you know what else? He doesn’t really seem to give a shit about the world he created, either. So fuck him. Don’t buy any more of the books, get rid of the old ones, and act as if the show is all there is.

I agree. What TV Sansa has done has strengthened her enemies. What the show writers did was to swap her plot for the book plot of another character and it doesn’t fit very well.

Christopher said that his father had begun outlining a post-Aragorn Middle Earth. Unfortunately, his father couldn’t see any logical plotline other than increasingly fractious schisms among the Kingdoms, with roving bands of outlaw men pretending to be Orcs. So his father abandoned any effort at a sequel.

Heroic fiction is best ended with the “final” triumph in which the good vanquished the evil and the world is restored to order. Anything beyond that is no longer heroic.

When I was growing up, I loved the Frank Herbert sci-fi novel “Dune.” I was just ecstatic about the ending. A triumphant victory for the protagonist, a noble, suffering, exiled hero. And then I read the subsequent books and began to appreciate more deeply what Herbert created when he wrote of the misfortune of a people to be “afflicted with a hero.”

Stories of being afflicted with a hero after his triumph just doesn’t sell as well with the general public… which is why you frequently (not always, but most of the time) see saccharine happy endings in movies (“sad” endings don’t test well with audiences).

I watch the TV show. I have not read the books, and never will. So, while I have no problem about plot divergence between the two medium, I do have a problem with what I see as stupidity/lack of commonsense displayed by TV characters that is apparently missing in the book characters.

For example, I read on the web that the book’s Rob Stark never brought his wife to Walder Frey’s house for the Red Wedding (so as not to offend him and further remind him of his oath-breaking). The TV Rob does. That’s just stupid for someone who is seeking to smooth over the ruffled feathers.

Same thing for the TV Sansa character. All that “cunning” training from Little Fingers, and she places herself into that situation willingly? It just doesn’t make sense.

One thing is for sure: when winter fully descends on Westeros and Danerys’s host arrives from across the sea, there will be some serious aerial flamethrowing by the dragons upon the frigid Others during an epic battle.

My big question here is, will GRRM be brave enough to plot his own way once the show is over, or will he feel that he cannot break too much from it? I am sure that he will be writing the series for a good 10-15 years yet, and he will probably think of better ways to progress than whatever ends up in the show. Or it may all end up like those crappy prequels where everything is just an excuse to end up in a known place.

I’m feeling all the more smug about my decision several years ago to put off reading the books until Martin was dead so I could be sure that they’d stop coming and there’d be no (further) waiting. Hey, it worked with the Aubrey-Maturin books (don’t point out that I didn’t actually hear about those until POB had already passed)!

Somewhat more seriously though, it was a few books ago that I read premonitions that he’d never manage to tie up all the loose ends and it all looked to be getting away from him. And there’s two more books now?

I’ve never watched the tv show but I’ve read all the books and the more I read about the tv show the worse it sounds. I simply do not remember what sounds like a tremendous parade of rape in the books. There is plenty of violence, certainly, but it’s violence with variety, and much of the imagery I’ve accidentally seen looks claustophobic and unreal, ‘dark’ slopped on like pancake makeup.

This is apocryphal, but I read a comment once from somebody who said he attended a lecture by Christopher Tolkein, and that Christopher said that his father had begun outlining a post-Aragorn Middle Earth. Unfortunately, his father couldn’t see any logical plotline other than increasingly fractious schisms among the Kingdoms, with roving bands of outlaw men pretending to be Orcs. So his father abandoned any effort at a sequel.

No apocryphal. It’s titled the New Shadow, is 13 pages long, and was published in The Peoples of Middle Earth.

It would not surprise me that Martin, a typically deracinated Boomer, is having trouble figuring out what he wants to do.

He’s planned all the major plot-lines for the major characters, but not necessarily for the minor ones, and he’s actually disclosed all of his plans to the show’s producers. That’s where this week’s controversial scene came from apparently.

Hence the impetus for Razib’s post today.

The reality is the show has “forked” substantially, and GRRM has been pretty explicit about that. The mistake (as others have pointed out) was that the producers let slip that this scene in particular was not forked.

To me, the series reads as if Martin has still not worked out the grand denouement.

Tolkein’s LOTR and Lewis’s Silent Planet trilogy, and Lewis’s charming Narnia series all follow a logical, thoughtful and satisfying path to the end. The whole thing hangs together because these two lovers of English literature and language knew how they wanted things to end up: weaving the pre-Christian mythos of their British Isles into the modern, Christian era.

It would not surprise me that Martin, a typically deracinated Boomer, is having trouble figuring out what he wants to do.

OT: This is apocryphal, but I read a comment once from somebody who said he attended a lecture by Christopher Tolkein, and that Christopher said that his father had begun outlining a post-Aragorn Middle Earth. Unfortunately, his father couldn’t see any logical plotline other than increasingly fractious schisms among the Kingdoms, with roving bands of outlaw men pretending to be Orcs. So his father abandoned any effort at a sequel.

Martin said that the path of the show and of the books diverge but will be reunited at the end. I frankly don’t mind that the show is taking shortcuts because in the last 2 books some characters and the narrative were wandering aimlessly. Plus, it’s more fun to watch the show and occasionally not know what is going to happen than seeing the books faithfully followed.

http://grrm.livejournal.com/427713.html

“How many children did Scarlett O’Hara have? Three, in the novel. One, in the movie. None, in real life: she was a fictional character, she never existed. The show is the show, the books are the books; two different tellings of the same story.

There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one. And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes. HBO is more than forty hours into the impossible and demanding task of adapting my lengthy (extremely) and complex (exceedingly) novels, with their layers of plots and subplots, their twists and contradictions and unreliable narrators, viewpoint shifts and ambiguities, and a cast of characters in the hundreds.

There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large (if you doubt that, talk to the Harry Dresden fans, or readers of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, or the fans of the original WALKING DEAD comic books)… but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email.

Prose and television have different strengths, different weaknesses, different requirements.

David and Dan and Bryan and HBO are trying to make the best television series that they can.

And over here I am trying to write the best novels that I can.

And yes, more and more, they differ. Two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose… but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.”

Also, having read the books and watched the TV series as well, it’s not as bad as people are making it out to be. There are differences that can be appreciated. The density that books allow are nice, but the visual and auditory feedback of the TV series is a strength that others might appreciate.

Might as well not have theater productions of plays and novels as well if we instinctively assume that the novel/script will always be a superior experience.

There’s an article in grantland arguing basically that Martin doesn’t know how to end the series and the HBO guys are more or less making it up, and not doing a great job. I won’t quote the argument because I think our host is avoiding the show, but here’s the link and a non-substantive quote.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/ask-the-maester-dragons-human-sacrifice-and-more-dragons/

Of course bad things happen on Game of Thrones. But when you arrive at those things through contrivances, it cheapens the shock. It’s about consistent storytelling.

Agreed. With the quality of the story declining it has really become painfully obvious what a stylistically bad writer Martin is.

Some major characters are taking completely different paths (Jaime, Sansa, Brienne). Other major characters appear to have been completely written out (Arianne and Quentyn Martell, Aegon Targaryen, Euron and Victarion Greyjoy, Lady Stoneheart). There’s still a chance some of these characters end up in the same place, but everything seems like a fork with large plotlines cut out in order to save time.

AC, I’m not sure the butterflies & dragons comment is anything more than an acknowledgement that smallish differences in the two stories are about to become enormous.

In any event, I think Martin has lost the thread of his story – the last two novels have really bogged down into the literary equivalent of trench warfare.

This experience has also led me to the position that I will only read series by dead authors from now on.

We know that it’s a fork.

Sadly, D&D have “spoiled” in a recent “behind the show” interview that recent events on the show with Shireen are indeed a taken from GRRMs preview of the books. Nothing GRRM says will be able to undo the damage of their arrogant, hamfisted clumsiness.

But we also know that they’re increasingly divergent (or as I like to think of it, wrong) on other aspects of the story. GRRM has been particularly clear in his recent blog post:

There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large (if you doubt that, talk to the Harry Dresden fans, or readers of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, or the fans of the original WALKING DEAD comic books)… but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email.

Prose and television have different strengths, different weaknesses, different requirements.

David and Dan and Bryan and HBO are trying to make the best television series that they can.

And over here I am trying to write the best novels that I can.

And yes, more and more, they differ. Two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose… but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.

In the meantime, we hope that the readers and viewers both enjoy the journey. Or journeys, as the case may be. Sometimes butterflies grow into dragons.

That last sentence, like much of what GRRM says and writes, is a foreshadowing. A fourth dragon is about to be revealed.

[…] I don’t really feel like blogging anything which takes any effort at the moment. So despite having enough material from The Psychology of Personnel Selection, which I finished a few days ago, and Impact of Sleep and Sleep Disturbances on Obesity and Cancer, which I’ve yet to finish, for at least a couple of posts, I’ll cover a novel instead. I read two novels this weekend, Harper Lee’s To kill a Mockingbird and Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots – I’ll blog the book I liked best. I found Lee sort of boring in a way, although I don’t exactly think the book is awful (it’s probably overrated, but that’s different) – there was way too little George R.R. Martin in that book and way too much Tolkien. […]

“(One imagines the conversation going something like this: “Incestuous sex next to a dead body after a funeral in a church? We need to make that more edgy. Hmmm…. I know, lets make it incestuous rape next to a dead body after a funeral in a church!)”

I was rethinking this comment over the weekend, after having recapped the series a bit for my wife as she sets out to read the book since she’s working fewer hours than usual this week and can’t engage her usual running habit because of a mother’s day snowstorm.

Honestly, consensual incestuous sex is probably edgier and more assumption challenging than incestuous rape. Our intuition is that rapists are generally evil perverts who do awful things that their victims don’t welcome and an incestuous rape scene doesn’t challenge that preconceived worldview. Siblings who have grown up together and know that they are siblings yet welcome incestuous sex without either consider themselves to be victims is more worldview challenging.

Turning that scene into a rape scene may have made it more palatable and cliche to television audiences, rather than less palatable and boundary pushing for television audiences.

The Lord of the Rings is set during a general war, when a lot of issues have simplified down to “Whose side are you fighting on?” We see the elves at their best and the orcs at their worst. It’s like WW2, where the times demanded we treat Stalin as a friend and Finland as an enemy.

The Hobbit is a lot more morally ambiguous, with Thranduil’s mean-spirited imprisonment of the dwarves and Thorin’s refusal to return any of the hoard. Even the orcs aren’t as irredemptibly evil: when they capture the dwarves Thorin’s first reaction isn’t “Well, may as well die fighting,” it’s “Well, may as well try talking them into asking for a ransom or something.” It’s only when the orcs notice Thorin is carrying a famous orc-killing sword that the mood turns ugly.

One reason for sexual violence to receive more attention from George R. R. Martin than from J. R. R. Tolkien, and more still in the television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s books than in the books themselves, is that understanding sexual violence in the context of our larger understanding of sexuality in general, may be more salient to modern audiences than to earlier ones.

J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings before the sexual revolution at the tale end of a long period of relative stability in understandings of human sexuality, and ensconced at Oxford was well removed from the cultural transformation in these understandings that were in an embryonic state in flapper speakeasies in America and “Rosie the Riveter” filled war time factories during WWII.

George R. R. Martin was writing after the sexual revolution at a historical moment when all assumptions about human sexuality (and about the true historical role of women in historical processes) were being radically reconsidered, so an examination of these extreme cases of sexual violence can provide a laboratory to explore the intersection of consent, force and sexuality to address questions about what is really important about human sexuality that weren’t even being asked or considered in Tolkien’s time.

Since Martin’s books have been published, our society has worked through much of the re-examination of human sexuality and gender roles that the sexual revolution and feminism have given rise to since the 1960s. But, while our norms about the kinds of jobs that can be performed by women which were in radical flux in the 1960s and 1970s have now stabilized, our society’s efforts to make sense of human sexuality and in particular sexual violence in a post-sexual revolution world continues to evolve. Chastity as a uniformly shared publicly claimed norm gave way to free love which gave way to a feminist conception of rape that expanded the traditional definitions of what constituted this crime (e.g. including not just force but non-consent, and being possible between married couples) and has since dumped us at the present in an unstable middle ground that routinely confounds tradition oriented GOP politicians and provides a fluid moving target for acceptable conduct among people seeking sexual relationships right now.

Scenes depicting sexual violence become salient ways to explore our larger norms about human sexuality at times when the way that we conceptualize sexual violence is actively in flux among target audience members. And, HBO has learned from a variety of its more successful series that audiences are attracted to more sexually edgy content that their free broadcast network competitors are allowed to offer to the public. This competitive edge demonstrates that the salience of these kinds of scenes to audiences is real.

I personally believe that the real driver of most compelling and good fiction is the set of moral challenges that audiences work through vicariously while viewing them. As issues related to consent and sexual violence loom larger in many TV viewers’ lives as rape is redefined in a post-feminist age, it is hardly surprising that people are more interested in exploring these issues. People don’t have to be depraved perverts who are busy carrying us to hell in a hand basket as our society becomes ever more decadent and prone to collapse to have an interest in these scenes in the context of our currently evolving shared understandings of this very issue.

Helen Castor had a really good piece on the Guardian on March 31 first on the historical parallels for much of the brutality shown in the show. (I’d post the link but I’m unsure of the correct tags to do so here.)

Frankly, I think it’s more disturbing that people prefer to hear the latest gossip on Jennifer Aniston’s love life and to ignore anything that breaks their pleasant reveries.

In terms of how many people I know who had their heads cut off and a wolf sewn on… that scene was based in part on the Glencoe Massacre, which was perpetrated by members of my family, so… yah. Never trust a Campbell. Sewing the heads back on to people who were decapitated for treason was definitely a thing though. Ask Charles the First. There was a report of a girl in Iraq having a dog’s head sewn on to her decapitated corpse during the insurgency there too, though I’m not sure if that was ever more than a rumour.

The most brutal act on the show and books came from a character being brutally castrated, and unfortunately that has plenty of historical basis too. Bishop Wimund for example.

If Game of Thrones isn’t your cup of tea that’s fine, but I don’t think you need to lose sleep over the state of society because of its popularity. Shows like Judge Judy and the Big Bang Theory still consistently beat it in the ratings, and frankly that worries me more.

I actually agree with much of what T. Greer says regarding the nature of the appeal of GoT and other modern entertainments. I just don’t really see what the problem is, or why hand-wringing over violent TV shows is necessary, other than providing another subject to fill some opinionator’s article-quota for the month. Cliche, I know, but ultimately if you don’t like it, don’t watch it.

“why this thirst for a ‘reality’ that is utterly alien to the values, experiences, and world of the audience? Why do people want to lose themselves in barbarity?”

I think you answer your own question here:

“The world of GoT is very *unlike* the world most of its readers/viewers come from. The Western world has not had anything close to Westeros for centuries. In truth, there are very few places anywhere that might be described as ‘like’ Westeros. It presents something very alien to its modern viewers….They allow the viewer to witness cruelty or barbarity without any of the emotional baggage that comes from participating in, suffering from, or simply witnessing these things in real life.”

Perhaps some find this thirst for vicarious barbarity personally distasteful. That’s fine. But I don’t see how it’s not natural, or has had any ill effects, or really worth the worry. I find Faces of Death videos on the internet personally distasteful too. But I can’t say my friends who have watched “1 lunatic 1 icepick” are changed for the worse in any way afterwards. So I can’t bring myself get myself too reflective over GoT or other “barbaric” entertainment I happen to enjoy. It really just doesn’t matter. There are more meaningful things to worry about in life.

Disclosure: A few years ago I read the first two books in the SoI&F series. I stopped reading midway through the third one when I googled Marin, found out how old he was and how long it took him to write the most recent book in the series (at that point book 5?) and decided it was not worth it to invest anything more time o mental energy I figured would never be finished.

At the time I was uncomfortable with a great deal of the book’s contents; since then I have grown much less tolerant of graphic descriptions of sex and violence and have felt no desire to return to the series.

(Also, my reference to the experiences I’ve had helping folks who have experienced the trauma of barbarity in the real world reads a little bit more stuck up than I meant it. I don’t believe in using personal experiences as argument-ending trump cards; I include them here simply to provide context for my comments.)

Continuing on:

“Again, you’re getting Game of Thrones the show confused with a Song of Ice and Fire the books.”

OK, fair enough. We can amend it to, “how many people do you know who have had consensual incestuous sex in a cathedral after a funeral?” or “how many people do you know who have been decapitated at their wedding and had an animal’s head sown onto it?” or any of the other gruesome or taboo-breaking episodes in the books.

I think you understand my point. The world of GoT is very *unlike* the world most of its readers/viewers come from. The Western world has not had anything close to Westeros for centuries. In truth, there are very few places anywhere that might be described as ‘like’ Westeros. It presents something very alien to its modern viewers.

(As an aside: if someone did make a HBO series on one of those parts of the world with a Westeroan feel, would anybody watch it? Would Game of Thrones: Liberian Warlords be a best seller?)

And this is why I find the claim-implicit in this post’s title, stated by CupOfNoodles earlier in the thread, and repeated often when I bring up my distaste for the show to friends-that GoT/SoI&F is so real to be quite interesting. This is an issue that extends far past GoT. We’ve reached a point where a story will not be hailed as authentic, deep, and “real” if it is not also dark, gritty, and violent. But what is it about grittiness, darkness, and violence-something few of the viewers of the average HBO show have ever experienced in a real sense-that makes something “real?” Why is a show that has incestuous rapes in cathedrals more realistic than a show that does not?

Or to put it another way, CupONoodles said earlier: ” In GoT, it’s the story, the characters, and the varied emotions they invoke that grab people’s attention.” If this is true, why is all gruesomeness (or, for that matter, all the nudity) necessary? Why is a world of grisly barbarity the only setting for morality plays modern audiences find acceptable?*

As I suggested earlier, this question is much broader than GoT. It applies with equal force to almost everything HBO and the other drama channels produces Breaking Bad is the perfect example. Even more than any of the GoT leads, Walter White is a character HBO (and AMC) audiences can relate to. Like them, he is smart, white, and comes from a pretty tame life. But then he is thrust down into a world of violence and perversity that is utterly unlike anything they have experienced or ever want to. The desire to see that world up close, to experience its intrigues and evils without having to bear any of its consequences back in real life, is part of the show’s appeal.

I don’t think this is all that different from what motivates people to watch the Saw movies. The difference is not of kind, but degree. Speaking of GoT, CupOfNoodles suggets, “Particularly in the books, but to an extent in the show, a lot of the horror isn’t there to thrill, but rather to disgust.” I submit that is exactly what Saw, Hostel and the rest of those films are about to. Saw is all about seeing the most disturbing set of images a film maker can imagine without real world repercussions. The viewer is supposed to feel disturbed, betrayed, and disgusted.

A very similar suite of feelings comes with GoT’s more graphic episodes. They are not as physically disturbing or graphic as Gorno flicks, but they don’t need to be, since the viewer has established an emotional connection with the characters being tortured. The fates of the characters are emotionally disturbing.

This provides suspense. But perhaps these feelings are an end to themselves. They allow the viewer to witness cruelty or barbarity without any of the emotional baggage that comes from participating in, suffering from, or simply witnessing these things in real life.

*OK, this might be a slight exaggeration. Downton Abbey exists. But I cannot think of many other similar shows…

It’s HBO. Their popular shows are mobster shows, or some variation with bleak settings and brooding, violent middle aged men.

Since GoT at first would not appear to be geared for the target audience, they put some accents on the violent/bleak features of the book to pull that demographic in.

It’s still a really good show. Nowhere near the perversion of the books you would read on some fansites. In some cases it’s actually more economical with the storytelling and less prone to GRRM’s obnoxious meandering on the later books. Reading the Red Wedding and watching it on the TV series is a particular example where the TV medium shines because the casting on the show is superb and the actors bring layers of emotional resonance that I feel the book cannot match. You miss some detail from the book, but in exchange you get more visceral moments.

“Martin’s world feels just like the real one? Just how many people do you know who were raped by their brother next to a corpse in a cathedral?”

Again, you’re getting Game of Thrones the show confused with a Song of Ice and Fire the books. The TV show is not Martin’s work, It’s Weiss and Benioff’s work, based on Martin’s novels. Many of the things you’re complaining about weren’t present in the books, or at least were presented differently.

“We live in strange days. Violence is at global lows, prosperity at global highs. Yet modern upper-class Americans, living at the height of the richest, most productive civilization in history, have succumb to the idea that “real” can only be found in the gruesome, the lewd, and the heinous.”

Yet peel back this veneer of civility, and what do we become? Though I can’t really comment on the mindset of Americans as I am not one myself.

I appreciate and respect your wealth of personal experience with the unfortunate consequences of humanity’s dark nature. I really can’t say I’ve had anything but a comfortable pleasant life. Respectfully though, I’d suggest we’re kidding ourselves if we think that whatever dark corner of human nature that would lead someone to pour acid into an innocent man’s eyes is somehow absent from comfortable Western societies. It may manifest differently and less frequently, but I seriously doubt it’s not there.

“Much like the Saw films, GoT allows the viewer to revel in depravity from afar.”

As a fan of the show and the books (though with some caveats), and as someone with a lot of friends who enjoy both too, I can assure you that has nothing to do with the appeal for the vast majority. I think you’re seriously misreading why people watch it. In fact, I think the appeal of Saw is the exact opposite of the appeal of GoT. In GoT, it’s the story, the characters, and the varied emotions they invoke that grab people’s attention. Saw has no story and no characters, and I don’t really get what emotion it invokes for people. Perhaps the thrill of breaking a taboo? I found the first one boring and took a pass on the rest personally. Not my cup of tea.

Particularly in the books, but to an extent in the show, a lot of the horror isn’t there to thrill, but rather to disgust. You’re supposed to feel disturbed and uncomfortable. It’s like watching parts of Django Unchained. You’re supposed to be uncomfortable watching the portrayals of the horrors of slavery.

Martin makes you really root for a lot of these characters, as imperfect as they may be. They don’t all die horribly, but the fact that some could means you really feel concerned and in suspense, as you really don’t know what will happen on the next page. It’s unpredictable. I don’t think there are many other fictional series out there that can claim that.

“Stimulating indeed.”

There are a lot deeper themes than the nature of violence in the series. They’re there to explore for people who are interested. I’m assuming you haven’t read the books? Give them a shot. They might pleasantly surprise you.

Another respect in which Martin’s novels are atypical of the genre (only Kate Elliot, e.g. in her Jaran series, really comes close) is that a large number of important characters remain relevant to the plot while simultaneously being parents whose struggles as parents are explored in the story, rather than just serving as window dressing.

It is fitting that speculative fiction for adults has characters who actually are more than young adults themselves in it.

“Changes made during adaptation aside, do you really feel that the levels of depravity depicted are any worse than those occurring in war-torn areas and failed states today?”

I once met an elderly gentleman from Liberia. He was living in a poor hovel with four children and 10~ grandchildren. His most treasured possession was a braille bible. It was the only book he had. He needed it because a decade or two before he had refused to join with the local warlord’s march on Monrovia. In retaliation, the warlord had sen thugs into his house one night. They ripped him from his wife’s arms, threw him into the street where he could be seen by the other people in his town, and then poured acid into his eyes. He was blinded for life.

I spent the better part of two years working an living with Cambodian refugees from the Khmer Rouge. I am friends with a person who founded an organization to collect and tell their stories. Since then I have made a point to read every memoir those years of horror produced.

It is not hard to find examples of depravity much, much worse than we find in Game of Thrones in our world today.

But the tone and content of these works – the memoirs of refugees, soldiers, exiles, and victims – are nothing like GoT. They make no attempt to be entertaining, for one. But it is their emotional timbre that really sets them apart. They are tragic. They are full of sadness or of hate. Their is a realness to these kind of books that GoT cannot hold a candle to–and when you have met the people who write these kind fo books you realize how insulting the comparison is.

” I think the appeal of Martin’s work isn’t in any sort of escape to another world, but rather because his world feels so much like the real one”

Martin’s world feels just like the real one? Just how many people do you know who were raped by their brother next to a corpse in a cathedral?

The lives of those who watch and read GoT bare no resemblance to the fictional lives of its characters. Indeed, it is most popular with the demographic whose lives are the least like the show. It does not correspond to any ‘reality’ they know about-except at a very abstract, intellectual level.

Thus my question: why this thirst for a ‘reality’ that is utterly alien to the values, experiences, and world of the audience? Why do people want to lose themselves in barbarity?

“Martin’s work aren’t escapism….”

You are right, escapism is not the right word. “Voyeurism” is a better one.

GoT’s profligate sexuality is one of its hooks, of course, but that is only part of the voyeuristic impulse that drives the show. The allure of GoT is the allure of seeing the worst of humanity, viscerally depicted, without leaving the comfort of your living room. Much like the Saw films, GoT allows the viewer to revel in depravity from afar. GoT is not as gratuitous as Saw and the other Gorno flicks, but its perversion cuts deeper because the viewer has a stronger emotional connection with Martin’s characters. This is Martin’s central literary strategy: get the audience emotionally invested in the characters, then abuse them as graphically as possible.*

We live in strange days. Violence is at global lows, prosperity at global highs. Yet modern upper-class Americans, living at the height of the richest, most productive civilization in history, have succumb to the idea that “real” can only be found in the gruesome, the lewd, and the heinous.

Stimulating indeed.

*A slight reworking of what Peter Lee said here.

“he offers a world where your morality is almost entirely pre-determined at birth” – that’s probably true.

T. Greer – “If the rape scenes were really about Martin’s desire to “create a world with more ethical ambiguity” then why were they not included in the books? The simplest answer is to that Martin and co. are not including them for any philosophical reason, but simply for a shock factor.”

FYI, Martin isn’t the one running the show. That’d be Weiss and Benioff who made the decision to change consensual acts to non-consensual ones. I don’t think it’s correct to read much into Martin’s intent based on decisions that were not.

“With that said, that description applies to pretty much everything Martin has written for the series. I am unconvinced that the extreme levels of violence, torture, sex, or the constant betrayals and ‘plot twist’ deaths have any other motive than astonishment and emotional shock.”

Changes made during adaptation aside, do you really feel that the levels of depravity depicted are any worse than those occurring in war-torn areas and failed states today? What I think is dishonest and troubling is the portrayals of war and conflict that gloss over these horrors for the sake of romanticizing things that really do not deserve to be romanticized.

Martin’s world is a pretty crappy place to live, but that’s because the real world is a pretty crappy place for a lot of people too. It can be especially crappy for women, a fact that those young 223 girls in Nigeria can attest.

“In this sense the comparison with Tolkien is instructive. Tolkien did experience barbarity and inhumanity (or whatever else you want to call the horror of the first world war) personally. ”

I think it’s instructive too, but not in the same way as you. Martin was a conscientious objector during Vietnam. If you watch his interview, he certainly accepts that there can be necessary wars (he says he would certainly have been willing to serve in World War 2), but he does not accept that there are good wars. Martin’s books are written from a standpoint that is, if not explicitly anti-war, certainly very close to it. The reverse is true of Tolkien.

“A more interesting question: in 21st America, why are the dark ages such a popular escape?”

Martin’s work aren’t escapism. You can admire characters like Jon Snow, Arya Stark or Daenerys Targaryen, but no one in their right mind wants to be them. I think the appeal of Martin’s work isn’t in any sort of escape to another world, but rather because his world feels so much like the real one. Good guys don’t always win. Crappy people sometimes do good things, and good people sometimes do crappy things. What Martin offers is his own critical and unflinching views of human nature and the world we live in. I find that far more stimulating than what Tolkien offers.

That’s not to say Tolkien is bad in any way. I love Tolkien’s works. They’re just something entirely different.

“It seems the kind of person who thinks Middle-Earth is antiseptic objects to the very existence of moral absolutes and the possibility of being completely good or evil. I would venture that Tolkien actually offers the more sophisticated view; rather than completely denying the existence of absolute good and evil and the possibility of anyone ever being able fall into one or the other category, Tolkien offers a vision of all three categories: the good, the bad and the “ugly” (morally ambiguous).”

That’s the thing though. No one in the real world is entirely good or entirely bad.

What Tolkien offers is even more simple than that – he offers a world where your morality is almost entirely pre-determined at birth, with entire races of people being either wholly bad or almost wholly good (though subject to temptation).

Tolkien’s works are fantastic and I absolutely love them, but what they offer is something entirely different from Martin’s works. Tolkien’s world just isn’t very real, and it isn’t supposed to be either. You can pretty much guess from the first chapter of the Lord of the Rings that Frodo will succeed and survive to the end. Ned Stark doesn’t make it even three quarters of the way through the first book. These are entirely kinds of fiction wrote for entirely different reasons.

I wouldn’t say Tolkien’s world is antiseptic, if by that you mean that the “good” guys are absolutely good and the “bad” guys absolutely evil. To be honest, I wonder whether those who repeat such claims have ever actually read the book, or at least read it carefully enough to make such judgments. I can list several characters who commit both good and bad deeds: Gollum (basically evil but does some good), and Boromir, Frodo and Bilbo (basically good but they commit some evil).

I would agree, however, that his universe does hold up good and evil themselves as absolutes, and there are characters who do seem to be completely good (Aragorn, Gandalf) or evil (Sauron, Saruman). It seems the kind of person who thinks Middle-Earth is antiseptic objects to the very existence of moral absolutes and the possibility of being completely good or evil. I would venture that Tolkien actually offers the more sophisticated view; rather than completely denying the existence of absolute good and evil and the possibility of anyone ever being able fall into one or the other category, Tolkien offers a vision of all three categories: the good, the bad and the “ugly” (morally ambiguous).

I’m quite a fan of Fu Hao (婦好) myself – there’s something about a female military leader presiding over human sacrifices that really appeals to my sense of fairness. The Shang were equal opportunity employers, obviously.

I can’t wait until they discover the History Channel’s “Vikings.”

A few thoughts:

1. Part of the issue, as I understand it, is that at least two of the rape scenes-including the most recent one-in the TV show are reworkings of consensual sex scenes in the book. So people are asking: whats up? If the rape scenes were really about Martin’s desire to “create a world with more ethical ambiguity” then why were they not included in the books? The simplest answer is to that Martin and co. are not including them for any philosophical reason, but simply for a shock factor.

(One imagines the conversation going something like this: “Incestuous sex next to a dead body after a funeral in a church? We need to make that more edgy. Hmmm…. I know, lets make it incestuous rape next to a dead body after a funeral in a church!)

2. With that said, that description applies to pretty much everything Martin has written for the series. I am unconvinced that the extreme levels of violence, torture, sex, or the constant betrayals and ‘plot twist’ deaths have any other motive than astonishment and emotional shock. This is what makes the show engrossing-you get the emotional package of voyeurism, the worst gorno flicks, and unexpected personal betrayal all wrapped up in one neat, upper-class approved package!

In this sense there really is nothing different about the rape scenes and every other depravity depicted on the show. What is worse about filming a rape of a main character after a funeral for shock value than filming the decapitation of the main character during a wedding (and the massacre of all of his guests, and the subsequent sowing of his head onto an animal) for the same? Depraved all the same.

3. Depravity is not new to the human condition, of course. But the comparing these scenes to passages from the Iliad or verses from Numbers misses something important about the Game of Thrones books and television series. What makes these shows (especially the TV show) different from those ancient works is the intensity of experience they portray. Game of Thrones is gratuitous in a way Homer never could be. It is gratuitous in a way accounts of real world horrors are not.*

In this sense the comparison with Tolkien is instructive. Tolkien did experience barbarity and inhumanity (or whatever else you want to call the horror of the first world war) personally. He saw humanity at its worst and most wretched quite close up. He wrote Lord of the Rings in the midst of a more ruthless conflict. His generation knew what words like ‘cruelty’ meant in a way that George R.R. Martin-or his audience-does not.

“Who would want to escape to the Dark Ages?” you ask. Well, the 6.6 million people who watch the show, I suppose. A more interesting question: in 21st America, why are the dark ages such a popular escape?

*I’m thinking of books like Vadney Ratner’s (amazing) In the Shadow of the Banyan, Hang Ngor’s Cambodian Odyssey , etc.

Isn’t it a little strange that sexual violence is so much more controversial than other forms of violence? I mean, people can have their heads chopped off, etc., but rape is supposed to be so much worse. But we make jokes about men being raped in prison, of course.

Sort of like how Donald Sterling gets fired for his comments, but Jay Z can own the Nets despite his lyrics.

This state of affairs seems so natural to people, but we should realize how weird it is.

Same thing with video games. Lots of killing, even of civilians like in GTA. No rape though.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that rape scenes are giving modern feminists the vapors. I’m sure they must fan themselves mightily and be escorted to the study, or perhaps to take to the bed. But as commenter Alan noted above, brutal violence done to men seems A OK.

Razib -

I had the same eye-roll when I read the NYT piece. But then to read the NYT is to have at least 2 or 3 eye-rolls per week in regard to the delicate sensibilities of people who agonize over which peppercorn has been raised in a more ‘holistic’ fashion.

Why in the blazes is anyone watching GoT if they have issues with rape, pillage and plunder? But the thing that struck me is that they’re totally fine with men hacking other men to bits or chopping off their heads and sewing the head of the victim’s pet on in its place. Or, female characters happily sacrificing male victims to their bloodthirsty gods….. but two or three incidences of sexual violence against women becomes “rape’s reoccurring roll…”

If delicate female sensibilities are offended by such depictions of barbarism and war, then perhaps we should not allow them to watch such things. Maybe their male relatives should supervise their television viewing. And since rape, pillage and plunder has been known to happen in the real world too, perhaps the best protection for women is to cloister them away at home and forbid them to roam the streets freely.

I started reading Martin with his first short story collections, A Song for Lya, say. The hero tended to sit around Being Sensitive about his ex-girlfriend, who left him for some guy with testosterone. None of the characters were creeps, and it was well-written. . . Then he wrote the best rock and roll novel ever, The Armageddon Rag, and a vampire novel almost as good as Saberhagen, Fevre Dream. Tuf Voyaging was a good fix-up of some pretty good space opera stories, and Portraits of His Children was one of the best short story collections in SF. But when he got lazy, he just described a nice character and did something nasty to them and called it a story. I got fifty pages into one Game of Thrones and every single character was a creep, and they were all suffering nasty events. Well, I’ve got real life for that.

I enjoyed Dance, and would probably give it 3 stars: Good, not great. What concerns me is the ratio of read time to wait time, as I finished it in 5 days (international flights are great reading opportunities), and waited more than 5 years. I don’t think I’ll anticipate its sequel quite as much.

Perhaps HBO will find some way of holding GRRM’s feet to the fire. Neal Gaiman to the contrary, GRRM became my bitch when he undertook this work as a promised series.

Razib, and what did you think of this approach to evaluating a new book by reviews? If I recall correctly, your plan was to read it if it reviewed better on Amazon than Feast, but it failed that test in the end. Did you read it because the earlier reviews were more positive? or were you caught up in the excitement of the release and unable to keep to the plan? Was the book as you expected from the reviews? Was it a good plan?

I just finished it. I agree with Razib mostly. I can understand why people gave it 5, and why people gave it 1 and I would give it 3. On itself it is relatively good. But not a lot happens and it’s mostly teasing for the next book.
But when you know some people had to wait 6 or even 11 years for this book, and now we will have to wait at least 3 and probably more years for the next one – yes this is a letdown. I myself only started the series in 2009 so I am not angry. I even did not understand why people hated the 4th book so much because I did read all the books together. Now I do.

This is why I feel that a trilogy should be the outer perimeter for a series; if you can’t do it in three fat books, don’t do it at all.

I’ve not read Dragons yet, waiting for the paper back version to come out (which should correspond to a drop in the kindle-version price too, I hope. Granted, Feast of Crows was not the best book in the series- but it was still a good worthwhile read.

I think one factor to consider is the HBO series.

I don’t know how many TV watchers saw that and went out and grabbed the nearest GRRM book off the shelf- that would have been Feast Of Crows (and more recently Dance With Dragons). I’m sure there are more than a few disatisfied TV watchers who picked up in the middle of the series reading the books- or perhaps were disapointed that their brain had to read words instead of opening the book and hitting a play button.

Overall though- I think it may come down to “plot fatigue” – all series of stories, in whatever media, eventually hit it. In Britain a lot of hit series are never published beyond a second season no matter how successfull because the makers don’t want to risk it setting in.

Perhaps Martin has just hit the “plot fatigue” threshold and can no longer milk the Westeros world. After so many years on this story you’d think he could get some better ratings.

This is why I stopped reading Wheel of Time as well. It got so bogged down in the ever expanding character webs that nothing of any consequence seemed to be happening. IIRC, the last book I read was 700 pages for less than 24 hours of world time (minus some bookends). I didn’t feel my money or time investment had been well spent so that was the end of it.

Sad to see this is headed the same way.

Overall I preferred it to Crows, as there was nothing like the rather pointless Brienne plotline in the earlier book. I think the low ratings are simply because he spent 900 pages building up to two major events (at Meereen and Winterfell, and that’s not really a spoiler) and then didn’t show us the events.

No matter how brilliantly these events are recounted in the next book it won’t have anything like the same impact as it would have done to have them now, as in 5 years time we will have forgotten half of it. The build up and the climax have to be in the same book.

As an aside, I only read the first three (in about 2003) because I thought that it was a trilogy. Normally I only read a series once they are all out, and I recommend this to anyone who hasn’t started the series yet.

When I started reading the Wheel of Time, books 1-7 were already out. I had to wait a year or so before book 8.

It was a disappointment. It was slow. People wandered around, talking about things that had happened in the past and considering how those events would change their future decisions.

There was one chapter in particular that seemed almost insulting. “An Uneventful Ride.” Twenty to thirty pages of characters complaining to each other about how bored they were.

Upon my first re-read of the series, before book 9 came out, I found book 8 to be just as bad. Book 9 was similar. Huge, world-shattering events occured at the end of book 9, but everything except the very end was more of the same.

I didn’t read book 10 when it came out. About a year after book 11 was published, I re-read the series again. This time, knowing that I had two more books to read after books 8 and 9, neither of those were that boring. They weren’t action packed or anything like that, but they were filled with important information and characterization. I didn’t mind them anymore.

When a single book has a hundred pages or so where nothing explosive happens, it’s not a big deal. Maybe that’s what Jordan and Martin are having to deal with (had to deal with, re: Jordan), with their thousands upon thousands of pages. Just a lull in the story where nothing that flashy was actually going on. And, like the Wheel of Time, perhaps when ASoIAF is complete, these books won’t even be seen as “the bad ones.”

But yeah, it kinda sucks waiting for years and getting a thousand pages of foundation building.

I found myself skipping over vast sections of Dragons, all the while asking myself, Where is the satisfying turn of events? I think he’s stalling. To what end…it’s not difficult to imagine-and in fewer words!

Martin is a good writer — must admit that — but I can’t read his books. Too grim and depressing.

Tastes differ Or, as the Scotsman said, “If we all liked the same thing, think what an oatmeal shortage there would be!”

The Amazon reviews just aren’t trustworthy at this early stage – there are people out there with severe and hilariously hyperbolic axes to grind against Martin that skew things, other people who are posting 1 star reviews for some fairly random reasons and a whole load of others who I doubt have actually read it.

I personally don’t give a lot of credit to Amazon reviews. Nothing proves that these people have the same tastes that I have, that they are educated, intelligent or whatever.

I mean just look here:

http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Deathly-Hallows-Book/dp/0545139708/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310560113&sr=1-1

Harry Potter 7 got a 4.5 grade with over 3600 reviews. Not only was this book maybe the worst of the 7, but all the HP series is a waste of time anyway ! So that gives you an indication about the value of these reviews – at least the grade. The text can be informative.

Furthermore, as you noticed, 20 reviews is really a low number and I expect the figures to be very different when we reach the hundreds.

It may be useful to mention that 1 is the best score on these charts – I was puzzled to read that Storm of Swords was a “fan favorite” with a majority of 1s – which I first took to mean “1 star on Amazon”.

It is my understanding that DwD is essentially the other half of AFfC. The two books were originally one but got too big to publish as one. Now, the fact that he took so many years to publish DwD worries me. That said, I’ve already preordered the hard cover for the book shelf and will get the Kindle for the train.

Am I a horrible person for thinking that this is more melodrama if not soap opera than solid plot? I get the impression that the author was hot for a girl in high school who was dating an alpha-male named Stark and this series is a revenge fantasy. What he does to that family seems to glorify punishing the righteous.

Sure, this isn’t a Disney movie where the villains wear black and are eeeeevil and the just and good are given every good thing in life after a short but always successful clash with the bad. But the Lannisters are every sort of corrupt and they only benefit from it. And the damage they do to the Starks is considerable and grotesque.

If this is commentary about other works in the genre being overly goody-goody and preachy, the point is lost on me. A condemnation of chivalry?

I’ve seen more compelling evil characters, several of which have made for compelling TV. Dexter, Deadwood, Rome, any of the vampire lit/tv from Anne Rice to TruBlood all managed to make fundamentally immoral characters compelling if not appealing. Is there anyone out there on Team Lannister? They seem all around vile and annoying.

Maybe I’m missing something.

I’m loving the HBO series. My take on the strange concave map in the intro comes straight out of the world’s ficion– it’s a literal interpretation of the fable told about the world existing inside the blue eye of a giant.

Maybe I’m a terrible person but I’m waiting for GRRM to either finish the series or die. I don’t want to get sucked into several thousand pages and then have to wait years for more of the story.

I recently read all 21 Aubrey/Maturin books and they were wonderful — but looking at the copyrights I can’t imagine having read them contemporaneously and having to go years between installments. I guess I am a terrible person, or at least a terrible book lover.

The HBO series has definitely gotten me re-interested in GRRM’s work, though I don’t remember anything that happened after the first book. I’m thinking about waiting for more of the series to come out before reading the last book. They have a lock on the next book, at least. So far, the show has been quite true to the books (moreso than any other movie based book that I can think of).

Ezequiel;

I know Martin has gone on record saying the seasons thing will have a magical explanation without sci-fi elements. But of course that could just be classic author double-speak.

In the opening credits for GoT (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzTletpyuEE), you can clearly see that they pictured the world as concave. I got so excited: does this mean that the whole thing happens in a Dyson sphere? A ringworld? A generation ship? Many interesting implications there. Could explain the weird seasons.

But this interview of the makers of the credits (http://www.artofthetitle.com/2011/05/12/game-of-thrones/) states that this was a design decision from them, nothing from GRRM. Oh well.

My mistake is to do with the fact that Rico was a White Argentine (I wasn’t sure whether he was Brazilian or Argentine when I wrote my comment) rather than Filipino in the movie adaptations of Starship Troopers and the fact that I didn’t read the book but watched the first film (I wrongly assumed the films were faithful to the book in the choice of characters). Rico is played by Casper Van Dien, a pretty Nordic guy.

Yes, he was a White Brazilian as far as I can remember.

Filipino? I thought he was Brazilian. Weird. An excuse to read it again, I guess.

Re the Euro themes in fantasy, I have written a couple of fantasy novels. My main characters are certainly not Euro/Nordic what-have-you. On asking readers to describe the characters, they are described as Euro anyway. Doesn’t matter how many times a character is described as dark, black hair, black, or whatever. People see what they want to in a novel. Read sf or fantasy with an eye to details and you’ll find plenty of non-white characters, and not all stereotypes. But…Jordan’s mains, and Martin’s, are, to my memory White. I suspect they were writing for their expected audience, mainly White Americans. It’s a sales question.

Martin’s a good author, but looking back on the first few books of Fire & Ice (which were all I read), while well crafted, feel in retrospect more like a strange kind of really detailed alternate world historical novel about feudalism, without much in the way of fantastic elements, and that I probably should have just read some historical fiction instead.

I’m finding I’m increasingly preferring fantasy that is built on a base of reality but occasionally has more of a deep tinge of the fantastic and raw irrationality to it, like Gene Wolfe does at times (for all his intentional and often pointlessly obfusticating difficultness), and less tries to emulate the real world in terms of having a deep underlying logic (strange, as I’ve got a lot of interest in detailed historical chains of cause), while I appreciate all the maturity that Martin tries to bring.

(I agree with the kudos to Robin Hobb as well btw, although I couldn’t read it past my teenage years – she basically took all the female and teenage girl centered Romantic Fantasy cliches and structures, swallowed them whole and gave them depth and made them something adult and worth it for reasonably emotionally mature teenagers and young adults to read, which is no small deal.)

As a reader of both Martin and Jordan, I have decided to wait until both series are finished to finish reading them.

I guess I am not as up on politics as the rest, but I found the interaction of the characters in WoT fascinating and engaging. Making the attempt to figure out what was going to happen next, or what the little clues sprinkled through the text meant have kept many reader on their toes.

Then there was several incidents that no matter how many times the books were read and discussed that we could not decide who the perpetrator was. (Who killed Asmodean was the major one for at least 6 books, and only answered in the glossary of the last one.)

If you have not started reading Martin, a warning. Do not get attached to the characters. He has a tendency to kill them off.

Razib, after reading this post, I’m going to have to give Martin another try. I can’t remember which one of the early volumes I tried some years back–but I put it down after a couple of chapters. It may be that I was unduly influenced by my just-prior reaction to another writer, Robert Jordan, whom I had just thrown at the wall.

So I love Game of Thrones, but is it COOL to compare any other fantasy novel disfavorably to LOTR, because (honestly!) while Tolkein’s ideas are certainly innovative, his writing style is certainly dull and not all that grasping. Love lord of the rings, but he wasn’t the first fantasy novelist, and probably not the greatest, even though he was loved by hippies.

Is it racism or simply lack of originality? It seems that authors of the Fantasy genre tend to be far less imagintive or flexible then Sci Fi authors in regards to their characters’ ethnicity and race going back to Robert E. Howard and the Conan series. Even when you get non-Eurocentric plots, the cultures are still vaguely Asian or Middle Eastern. Fantasy writers tend to fix their main characters in cultures that are spin offs of Medieval Europe. The non-whites are then, by default, villains or, at best, secondary characters.

Howard, btw, I’d argue was racist in an Gobineau kind of way, whereas Tolkien probably picked up his more gentile anti-Eastern bias from ancient and medieval laments over Hunnic or Islamic attacks. C.S. Lewis resembles Tolkien in this. Both are way too medieval to be Social Darwinians.

Sci Fi writers, on the other hand, are far less earth-bound. I’m not just talking about Star Trek let’s add a skull protusion and make a new people kind of way or Star Wars. They seem to be more willing to experiment with believable hominid variations. Think Jack Vance or Frank Herbert. This is probably because they were more scientifically aware, and less hostile to Natural Science and more open minded than a tenured, luddite Professor of Anglo-Saxon literature. I love Tolkien and don’t mean to discredit the imagination he showed in creating his legendarium, but the guy’s ideas for a well-ordered society are unrealistic.

On a side note, Martin does show some genuine originality with his description of the Northern barbarians and non-humans.

“the racial aspect is pretty obvious in the silmarillion. tolkien asserted that his secondary world had no close correspondences with the real world of the time (e.g., is mordor industrial communism and fascism?” RK

Tolkien rejected an allegory to modern times but he imagined middle earth as prior age of this earth, with gondor, arnor and rohirrim roughly coresponding to modern europe in geography.

Tolkien Described the orcs as
“…squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”

Now I think a straight racist reading of this very much misses tolkiens point but there is certainly a level of ethnocentrism and even more so religiouschauvinism, the free men off middle earth are the antecendants of later day christendom which is probably more important to the devoutly catholic Tolkien then the racial differences he portrayed.

On the subject of Martin I have to agree in a sense he signaled the rise to maturity of the fantasy genre and while I think other authors were moving in the same direction its interesting to see how many good authors in fantasy have been working in a similar direction. R. Scott Bakker, Joe Abercrombie, Robin Hobb, J,V jones its a good time to be fan of fantasy.

That’s very interesting. I have never heard of Durham. I think you are right in that many people like to be able to picture themselves in myths, if not, they are not interested. To be honest, I have always like Greco mythology very much. I just don’t care for the Dark Age dragon-knight stuff, but I’m not sure I can tell you exactly why. Maybe I will give some of it a second look.

I’m a huge fan of the series but I’ll probably totally avoid the TV series unless it gets amazing reviews. I am kind of skeptical of the ability to translate such a large multi character plot to TV. It’s like when you hear of plans to turn Steven Erikson’s malazian empire into a film…… 10 books, 1000 pages each and enough characters to populate a small European city…. Right

I saw the 14 minute preview online, looks alright, but not like anything I have not seen before. I don’t care for the genre to be honest. I don’t want to harken back to the old barbaric days of Europe. I especially have never had an interest in “magic”and other such nonsense. I do like sci-fi quite a bit, but that is because I’m somewhat of a futurist. I hope that one day the things I read and see in sci-fi will be possible. I know the stuff I see in Tolkien-like media HAVE NEVER existed and will never.

Also as you correctly cited, the predictable story line. It does seem though that all these writers, and likely Dark Age peoples, believed in HBD. They are always going on about “blood lines of warlor…I mean ‘kings’”. Hell this likely goes back to proto-Indoeuropean myth concerning those having the “blood of God’s” and do miraculous things, only to find out their father is a god (usually a rapist one) or was a just king (murdered by someone evil), etc.

Keep in mind Razib…in Tolkien, all the bad stuff comes from the “”East””. haha Some type of genetic memory of Asian hordes? My cousin once told it to me like this (someone who read a lot of this stuff as a kid)…”once upon a time, everything was peaceful, and Euro” then the “darkies” came and messed it all up from the East. haha That’s probably an extreme take, but I had a good idea that the past sucked, I like to hope that the future would suck less.

I once accompanied a friend to a genre convention. Mr. Martin was the only author present whose work I had read, but I got to talk with him, and it was a delightful experience.