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Why is Game of Thrones suddenly so popular? Fans at various stages of obsession weigh in.
Jamelle Bouie
A Song of Ice and Fire, the fantasy series by author George R.R. Martin has been in publication for more than a decade, but 2011 seems to be the high water mark for it's popularity. Not only did the first book, A Game of Thrones, reach the top of The New York Times' bestseller list for the first time in its fifteen-year publication history, but an HBO series based on the book was aired this spring to large critical acclaim. Martin himself has been profiled by the New Yorker, and after a six-year wait, the fifth book in the series will be released Tuesday.
It's not hard to see why the series has moved from fantasy circles and into the mainstream, HBO's advertising notwithstanding. With its morally ambiguous characters, complex political machinations, and clear-eyed perspective on power and its use, it appeals to our culture's current fascination with realist fiction, whether it's superheroes (like Christopher Nolan's Batman) or law enforcement (The Shield and The Wire, among others).
With both the books and the series, Martin has subverted the traditional fantasy archetypes of (among others) honorable hero, brave knight and noble queen, and presents a fascinating world where honor isn't always respected, "the right thing" doesn't always pay, and so-called "bad people" have motivations that are understandable, if not sometimes admirable.
At least, that's why I think our D.C. circles have been so fascinated with the television series and the book. What about it grips you guys?
Daniel Foster
Jamelle, I had a creative writing professor who once went on an extended rant about the predisposition of his students toward exhaustively listing the mundanities of everyday life in prose or verse and calling it realism. "Realism," he said, contra my generation's legion of fifth-rate Hemingways, "is an effect." That is, realism in prose is every bit the carefully constructed artifice as, e.g., Romanticism--or fantasy. George R.R. Martin, or Grrm as we affectionately call him, not only gets this, he takes it to its logical extreme. His Song of Ice and Fire series takes place in an alternate Middle Age full of dragons and zombies and yet it is profoundly realistic. His characters are painted in a moral grayscale, with very few living long at either extreme. They grow, they change, and yet theirs are not "arcs" in the traditional sense but zigs and zags and circles: there is no "hero" in any of the books who could not be a villain in its sequel, and vice versa. His world, like ours, is a brutal, perverted, and capricious place, but it is not without its redemptions. The promise--and it may yet prove empty--of these redemptions is what keeps us turning the pages.
It's the series' realism that makes it appealing outside the ranks of fantasy nerdery. Take me: Growing up I read my share of pulp sci-fi and superhero comics, but I always thought fantasy was too cheesy and twee for my sophisticated tastes. I was prodded into reading the first book sometime into 2004 and loved it so much I ended up finishing all three (at the time) in the space of a month. A fortiori, I have a dear old friend--a far-left pinko, you guys'd love him--whose idea of cutting loose is taking in a minor Eugene O'Neill play and then settling down with a book about postindustrial decay in Paterson, New Jersey. For frame of reference, when I was sixteen I asked him what he thought of a short story I had just written for our high school lit mag--a story which was well-received enough to secure me the affections of my first real girlfriend. "Sentimentalist drivel," he replied, without a single trace of mischief on his face. This is a guy who, to this day, has never seen more than five minutes of any Star Wars film and could not tell you who Saruman the White was. And yet he loved season one of Game of Thrones. He's even thinking of picking up the books. Grrm is obviously doing something right.
Adam Serwer
Jamelle, speaking of subversion of fantasy archetypes, yesterday George R.R. Martin gave an interview with the Atlantic in which he describes the scouring of The Shire in Lord of The Rings, which occurs after Sauron's ring has been destroyed, as an inspiration for Game of Thrones:
I was very satisfied with the end of the Lord of the Rings, let us say. Talking about predictability here--I had a sense, even as a kid, that the ring was going to go in the volcano. They weren't going to let Sauron take over the world. But he surprised me in that Frodo couldn't do it. Bringing in Gollum the way he did was an amazing part of the ending, and then came the scouring of the Shire. And when I was 13 years old, reading this, I didn't understand the scouring of the Shire. They won--why are there all these other pages? But I reread these books every few years, and every time my appreciation for what Tolkien did there grows. It was this kind of sad elegy on the price of victory. I think the scouring of the Shire is one of the essential parts of Tolkien's narrative now, and gives it depth and resonance, and I hope that I will be able to provide an ending that's similar to all of that.
Martin is talking about the conclusion to the series here, but the series itself dwells on the concept of what happens after the war in which "the good guys win." Game of Thrones is like if Tolkein had gotten involved in the messy politics of post-conflict stability: Imagine Middle Earth being flooded with Hobbit refugees whose home no longer produces enough food to sustain them, or King Aragorn facing a crisis of legitimacy as the aftermath of the war causes an economic downturn he's powerless to ameliorate.
This I think, is my favorite act of fantasy genre subversion on Martin's part--not just his realistic portrayal of human suffering, but the way in which that suffering drives political trends that even both "good guys" and "bad guys," conniving or honorable, are powerless to control. Instead, just as those of us in the real world, they're forced to make the best of what they have--decisions that make clear judgments about good and evil much more difficult.
Peter Suderman
I suspect I am the only person in this group who hasn't read the books, so I'll have to confine my comments to the first season of the television series (though I would imagine that they apply to the books as well). What makes the series work so well is a simple insight: Every character works primarily for his or her own interest. The reason this insight is so compelling is that's it's not usually applied to high fantasy, a genre that tends to be populated by principled noble warriors and determinedly evil masterminds.
But in Westeros, there are no higher moral virtues, no grand ideologies, no timeless beliefs on display. The characters aren't defined by some innate virtue or lack thereof. They're defined almost entirely by their alliances, by what they want out of their own lives, and by the demands they place on the world they live in.
If anything, the characters in GoT are remarkable for the clarity of their self-interest. As even most casual observers of Washington (or fans of The Wire) know, the powerful frequently cloak their selfish desires in false piety and righteousness. But none of the show's nobles bother to mask the fact that what they want is power, stability, longevity, and wealth--and, if necessary, at the expense of their rivals. The closest thing to real virtue that any of them seem to desire is the preservation of their own families. But that's mostly because in Westeros, family strength is a strong proxy for individual power. The raw quest for power is what drives most of the show's characters--and what makes it so riveting to watch.
Stacy Cline
The Game of Thrones books have had a cult following for years. I first heard about them in 2004, when my Comic-Con/World of Warcraft/Buffy loving friend gave me a copy of the book. I was trying to catch up on the Harry Potter books back then and had no time for an obscure 1000 page fantasy book.
Fast forward to 2011, and Game of Thrones kept popping up all over twitter. I watched the first episode of the new HBO show and was immediately hooked. The opening scene of the show is possibly the most beautifully eerie scene in television history. The plotline moved quickly, and the episode ended in a tragic cliffhanger. It took me about 10 days thereafter to finish the first book.
The most compelling aspect of the series for me is that the plot moves in a logical direction. I'm not sure it's realism--it is, after all, a series with dragons and sorcerers and zombies. Rather, actions have realistic consequences. If characters behave stupidly, their actions have unfortunate results, and people don't get by on fate alone. While there are many moral ambiguities and no real heroes, there is a kind of justice to the realism that is lacking in other fantasy books.
I think this series would appeal to people who read the Harry Potter books and preferred Hermione and Snape as characters to Harry and Ron. It hardly seems fair that Harry saves the day, when he basically spends all his time playing quidditch and goofing around with his friends. In this world, Hermione and Snape would be the only characters to survive. People stay alive in the Game of Thrones books by being smart and skilled.
Of course, the series raises important questions about whether survival alone justifies the means, or whether we need a world with virtue. I'm looking forward to reading what everyone else thinks!
Patrick Caldwell
Like many in the Prospect's office, I was a nerdy kid. Starting when I first picked up the Hobbit at a young age, fantasy and science fiction novels became my main extracurricular reading until I reached college. I first got my hands on a copy of Game of Thrones early in high school, just when I discovered the literary classics in English class, while outside of school I grew tired of the post-Tolkien retreads in fantasy. AGOT was a needed bold departure from the standards of the genre When the show premiered on HBO this spring, critics compared it to The Wire, for good reason. Both feature a wide cast of compelling characters who are neither truly good nor evil, but fall somewhere in the murky area between. These are stories of power -- not of the power of the individual to triumph, rather it is the way societies restrict action no matter people's best intentions. Ned Stark is the closest character Martin has written to the noble hero archetype, and even his good intentions cannot save him from the executioner's chopping block. Instead of a period piece on drug war Baltimore, Martin's characters are bound to the political realities of feudal society. The medieval European landscape is a favorite setting for fantasy authors, but novels in the genre take their storytelling cues from the old Greek and Roman myths. Characters are subject to the whims of the fates, with prophecies augured ages before the events depicted. A Song of Fire and Ice has its fair share of overarching prophecies (I, for one, cannot wait to see the fans' reaction to Melisandre's introduction when the TV show returns next year), but characters are restricted by Westeros society, not the whims of the Seven Gods or R'hllor. Magical elements are built slowly throughout the course of the series, almost entirely absent in A Game of Thrones except for the book's beginning and end. Martin's books are less the tale of Stannis Baratheon as Azor Ahai reborn than a story of Cersei Lannister's subverting a woman's role in Westeros through controlling her children on the Iron Throne or whether Robb Stark can maintain his alliance with the Freys. I'm just beginning to tackle A Dance of Dragons, but the struggle of individual power versus societal restrictions should pervade the book, particularly in Daenerys' segments as she fights to end slavery in Meereen, a city whose economics are bound to the trade of humans as property.
