So, because I know you're not sick of Game of Thrones nerdtime, my piece on GoT as the liberal's alternative to the Lord of The Rings' manichean universe (adapted from my blog post a few months ago) is up. The point is not that the books are actually liberal, since didactic art is boring, but rather that the complexity of its moral universe will appeal to liberals. Since LoTR was initially embraced by conservatives as emotional reinforcement for the war in Iraq, the rather more realistic assessment of post-conflict political struggle in GoT serves as a comparison.
Meanwhile, I'd like to take a second to respond to Ginia Bellafante's review at The New York Times:
The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin's, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.
[...]
When the network ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga “True Blood,” things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters. “Game of Thrones” serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot. If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary.
Look, I'm a geek. I like geek stuff. Not everyone likes geek stuff. That's cool. But the genre of arts review I hate the most is the kind when the reviewer, not content to savage the material itself, begins to express contempt for the audience they imagine might actually like it. With the popularity of fantasy subgenres like Harry Potter and Twilight, neither of which I'm particularly fond of, this sort of review has become less common. But it's still irritating and patronizing to the reader for the Times to publish a review in which the reviewer suggesting the audience is a bunch of loser guys in a basement tossing around 12-sided die and sharing each other's hopes and dreams of someday getting to third base, because women couldn't possibly like it.
