No, this is not a critique of the Song of Ice and Fire TV show, A Game of Thrones. At this point, "critiquing" the show would be like complaining about someone pooping in your salad, except more sexist. Really? You don't like this obviously horrible thing that happened? Wow! Tell me more!
Instead, as the show inexplicably grows more and more popular, I'm going to take a look back at the show's source material (a series of long books that, very roughly, is a mashup of the War of the Roses and fantasy like Lord of the Rings, with a strong focus on the former) which remains unfinished and now appears to conclude in a radically different way from the show. This fact has been decried by many, who look at the show's many changes and lament the shift away from the superior source material.
And they're right! The show has either botched or completely cut most of the book's best characters and storylines, and the fodder that they've replaced them with usually makes no sense or is boring/gross as heck. "Gross" is a good word for the show's fixation on the wrong aspects of the books, mistaking the inclusion of intensely violent or sexual elements as a key focus. This leads to sequences like the masturbation-inception moment from season 2, or Littlefinger simultaneously directing prostitutes to make love with one another and give a monologue about his disdain for the warrior caste, that are distracting and cringe worthy. Oh, and super sexist, which this show is all about. Every single female character in A Game of Thrones has either been sexually objectified or casually subordinated or stripped of agency in favor of a male character's storyline, and with the lone exception of Brienne of Tarth, none of them are more interesting than their literary counterparts. So, yes, the show is a mess.
But just because your last salad had human feces in it, doesn't mean you have to settle for one where the dressing is cat pee.
The stunningly poor quality of the show, especially with regards to its treatment of women, has led many forum-dwellers (and people I know) to bemoan the glory days of George R. R. Martin's original works. Ignoring the fact that Martin has actively participated in the travesty of the HBO show (including the penultimate episode of last season, whereupon the show hit a new low. Yes, worse than using a prostitute's death to show off her breasts), this point of view surprises me, because the more I think back on the books, the more I realize that their direction isn't exactly stellar either. Less sexist, certainly, but so littered with aggravating story decisions and bad writing that as someone that wants to love these books I can barely tolerate the later ones. Naturally, this carries over to writing about these problems. Writing about something so simultaneously flawed, dense, and close to my heart is a challenge, and ultimately I settled on just hashing it out with the source. That's right*, here** exclusively*** on Jabber Blerg, author George R. R. Martin himself**** has agreed***** to talk to me about why his books make me want to pull my hair out!******
Sam: Thanks! My name isn't Samwell, though. I don't think anybody spells it like that.
GRRM: I know, but if I spell it slightly different, that makes it cool and more fantasy-y. How come you get to do bold text?
S: Well, I'm the one that's typing. Besides, we already agreed who got to be bolded and who didn't in the contract******* we both signed.
GRRM: That's fair enough. So, what do you want to talk about? Are you going to yell at me to write more before I die?
S: No, not at all! I actually want to start by talking about how amazing your writing is!
S: Right? Game of Thrones is masterful in how it blends creating an interesting world, telling an interesting story, and deconstructing fantasy and storytelling tropes!
GRRM: This is turning out very different than how I thought it would.
S: You do an amazing job of giving just enough information about the world's history and characters that I understand the history of Westeros and what motivates each noble house, but not so much that I'm bored or overwhelmed. In fact, you do this with everything; you show enough of each location, each character's motives, that I understand it on a broad level, but leave enough to the imagination that I can enjoy imagining what certain districts in King's Landing might look like, or what Catelyn might have done after the birth of her second child.
GRRM: Okay, but now you're going to segue into attacking me, right?
S: And the buildup to the big twist--to Ned Stark's death as he investigates the death of Jon Arryn, his predecessor as the king's advisor--is a masterful deconstruction of the plot armor most main characters have. It complements the story rather than defining it, all while being incredibly obvious. The only thing preventing a reader from immediately putting together what's going to happen to Ned is their pre-conceived notion that he's the main character, and therefore invincible. The first time I read that book, I was speechless in the best possible way.
GRRM: Really? You're not even going to talk about how shitty the sequel book is?
S: No way! A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords are both amazing! I mean, I think Game of Thrones is still the best, but the new characters, world details, and deconstruction of tropes those books prevent are still great. And the stuff that happens in the plot is pretty good too. Daenerys' storyline in A Storm of Swords had me pumping my fist, I was so psyched.
S: Yeah, I know.
GRRM: I mean, at first I thought I would only need three books total, but it seems like my stories run away from me a little bit.
S: You don't say.
GRRM: Yep. But I think it's well in hand. I didn't even need the timeskip! A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons just fill in the time period that I designed to be boring enough to just ignore, and that was fine, right?
S: Well, let's just talk about some pacing stuff for a bit, then. So, Sansa Stark starts the first book as a naive child, who earnestly believes in fairy-tale style handsome princes and happy endings for fair maidens. But after her life turns into a living nightmare at the hands of the prince she was betrothed to, who kills her father, declares war on her brother, and drives the rest of her family out of the city, it becomes clear that her arc is going to focus on her learning the actual way the world works. She's going to advance her agenda by playing the Game of Thrones.
GRRM: Yes, exactly! I mean, we get to see what life is like as a hostage through her, as well.
S: Yeah, sure. So in the next book, she's still a little unsure, a little lost, but she's looking for a way out, right? Asserting herself? Learning to be subtle?
GRRM: Well, no. She resists internally by staying kind, by refusing to let the world's abuse break her down, but she mostly just goes with the flow.
S: For the whole book? It's like a thousand pages.
GRRM: Yep.
S: Okay, but in the next book, she starts doing her own thing a bit more, right? The narrative's not just using her to show whatever location she's in instead of her story?
GRRM: Oh yes! Her act of kindness to a drunken knight pays off when he leads her out of the castle, allowing her to escape!
S: Awesome!
GRRM: And then she's with the treacherous trickster Littlefinger, where she mostly sits around silently while he does literally all the talking.
S: Oh. Well, she's learning stuff, I guess. And she uses that in the next two books, right?
GRRM: Nope! Just sitting around doing nothing. I mean, she stays kind and everything, but that stuff is basically the same from book two onwards. Literally nothing new. But if you read the chapter from Book 6 that I released, you'll find that she's starting to manipulate people and play the game!
S: But aren't there only seven books?GRRM: Yes, that's the plan.
S: So you waited until the second to last book before letting Sansa actually grow beyond "I remain kind?" That seems unfair to her, don't you think? You couldn't have done something more interesting to the reader and more active for the character?
GRRM: Well, Sansa's chapters offer the reader a respite from the intense, plot-progressing action of the other chapters. Especially in the latter two books.
S: Like Samwell's journey in A Feast for Crows.
GRRM: Yes! Samwell needs to travel from The Wall to Oldtown, where he can train to be a maester.
S: And you chose to show us his entire journey by boat.
GRRM: Well, yes, because it's vital to his character.
S: That part where the boat is at sea and he's thinking about how bored and scared he is, that's vital character advancement?
GRRM: Well...
S: Or when their boat is stuck at port in Braavos, and he gets his courage up and yells at his crewmate who doesn't want to leave?
GRRM: Yes! Yes. Because he's brave!
S: But we knew that. He killed an unkillable snow-monster in the last book.
GRRM: But his romance with Gilly advanced.
S: Yeah, enough for a weird sex scene where he drinks her breast milk. Then she leaves, and he arrives at school. But the school's really cool! There's factions, and magic is starting to come back, and it seems like stuff is about to happen! It seems like there's a lot of room for deconstruction of Harry Potter-type tropes, too.
GRRM: Yeah, it's great! It's too bad I burned through hundreds of pages on all of that nothing happening. Guess you'll have to wait for me to finish the next book to find out what the interesting stuff is!
S: So what other big action is there? Brienne of Tarth?
GRRM: Yeah! Isn't the way she wanders around aimlessly and does nothing great?
S: No. The way her journey ends is sort of interesting, though. A brutal, throw-down fight with a crazy prisoner who mangles her face, before getting threatened and possibly killed by a zombie bandit!
GRRM: Yeah, but I couldn't wrap it up. Too much time spent on all of that nothing happening. Guess you'll have to wait for me to finish the next book to find out what the interesting stuff is!
S: The Kingsmoot, then? Is that the big, exciting thing in Feast for Crows?
GRRM: Yes! The Ironborn, a fiefdom of ruthless viking raiders, meet in an ancient ritual to determine their new king. Will it be the rebellious young daughter of the old ruler? His traditionalist brother? Or the exile armed with magic and wild promises? Who knows whose argument will---
S: So it's a meeting.
GRRM: I'm sorry?
S: I mean, don't get me wrong, it's interesting, but it's also a meeting. A bunch of people in a room, talking. These books have dragons and snow-elves and normal elves and like eight wars going on, and the most exciting thing you could write is a meeting?
GRRM: I'm starting to think you might not be as agreeable as I thought.
S: So, okay, whatever. Boring shit happened all the time in that book. But that was because you saved the good stuff for the next book, right? You don't have crippling pacing problems at all!
GRRM: Right, right! Like Quentyn Martell
S: Like Quentyn Martell! The least interesting child of the Prince of Dorne, sent off on a mission we know he will fail! The whiner who kills a tenth of the book by doing nothing but whining at a dry dock, whining on a boat, planning on an exciting infiltration mission which he executes offscreen, whining when--surprise--it turned out he failed his mission, and dying like an idiot having done literally nothing.
GRRM: Hey, all of that was necessary! I had to show what happened to that character because I mentioned him in passing twice in book four! People would have rioted if they didn't know!
S: Yeah, so he dies, and the characters in Meereen around him start doing interesting stuff, but oops! The book ends before the big battle you've been foreshadowing the whole time. Guess we'll have to wait for you to finish the next book before all of the interesting stuff starts up, right? You know, almost as though nothing interesting is happening in this period of time you wanted to skip over anyway? But I'm sure you wouldn't waste our time with bullshit, right George? RIGHT!?
GRRM: Hey, you seem a little tense, guy. Calm down. I'm sure if you just re-read the Daenerys chapters in A Dance of Dragons, you'll find that plenty of--
S: OH YES! I ALMOST FORGOT! The great, superbly written Daenerys chapters. On the heels of breaking oaths and burning men to death to steal an army, and using that army to crush the regimes of three ancient, powerful hives of slavery, Danerys decides to administrate the strongest one, and to just...do nothing as her soldiers are attacked.
GRRM: Well, what can she do? The terrorists that are attacking her men and the freed slaves, the Sons of the Harpy, are mysterious, and fade into the night like ghosts.
S: They're the nobles.
GRRM: How do you know?
S: Because it's totally fucking obvious that they're the nobles. Their political agenda matches up with the nobles, the nobles refuse to help in the effort and are the only ones who benefit, and when she asks one of the nobles to stop the attacks he does so effortlessly.
GRRM: See? She uses her skills to outwit and identify their leader!
S: SO SHE CAN MARRY HIM AND CAVE TO LITERALLY EVERY DEMAND HE MAKES INSTEAD OF DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT
GRRM: What happened to your punctuation?
S: Like, fighting pits? Re-opened. Hostages? Nothing bad'll happen to them. Slavery in the city? No, but you can bring in slaves and sell slaves inches outside of the city gates, so clearly this will help people, right?
GRRM: Okay, relax. She's only a teenager. It's only natural she'd be a little inept, or hesitate to hurt anybody.
S: IT'S A LITTLE LATE TO WALK BACK AN INCREDIBLY SUCCESSFUL MASSACRE, TWO WELL-EXECUTED MILITARY CAMPAIGNS, AND OVER A HUNDRED CRUCIFIXIONS, GEORGE
GRRM: Well, when you say it like that, it does sound like maybe that's a little out of character.
S: OH YOU THINK SO, GEORGE? YOU DON'T FUCKING SAY? SORT OF LIKE HOW WHEN HER DRAGON COMES BACK--BY THE WAY, HER DRAGONS START EATING PEOPLE AND HER SOLUTION IS TO DO NOTHING? LITERALLY NOTHING? THERE ARE BOOKS IN GAME OF THRONES GEORGE SHE COULD TRY READING THEM
GRRM: I'm scared
S: SO WHEN HER DRAGON COMES BACK SHE TAKES ABOUT TWO SECONDS TO ABANDON THE PEOPLE SHE DECIDED WERE WORTH BECOMING AN IDIOT FOR, AND IT FLIES HER BACK TO THE DOTHRAKI SEA, WHERE SHE GETS SURROUNDED BY A NEW KHALASAR AND IT'S THE FIRST BOOK AGAIN GEORGE. IT'S JUST THE FIRST BOOK AGAIN. ALL THAT PROGRESS, THE SLOW BUILDING OF SOURCES, JUST A FART IN THE WIND FOR YOU
GRRM: I want out of this this isn't what I signed up for
S: IT'S NOT ENOUGH THAT WE'RE NOT MOVING FORWARD, YOU HAVE TO MOVE US BACKWARD NOW? REALLY? WHY STOP THERE? WHY NOT HAVE NED JUST WAKE UP BECAUSE HE WAS SLEEPING THE WHOLE TIME? I MEAN THAT WOULD COMPLETELY GO AGAINST WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED AND EVERYTHING THAT'S GOOD ABOUT YOUR BOOKS BUT FUCKING WHY NOT GEORGE WHY NOT GEORGE WHY NOT WHERE ARE YOU GOING
Believe it or not, my all-too-brief, but totally real******** conversation with George R. R. Martin didn't touch on all of the frustrating things in his books that people seem content to ignore as long as he doesn't fill the space by murdering prostitutes and describing their boobies. The descriptions of background stuff like meals and architecture get unnecessarily longer and longer with each book, Arya's story also feels like it should have just cut past hundreds of pages of material, and boy is it hard to get invested in anything when interesting, engaging storylines and characters are just cut short by horrible murder because "fuck tropes." But these problems are spreading. Hollywood writers are pitching anything fantasy-related as "Game of Thrones but _____," TV shows about similarly gruesome and edgy subject matter are growing in popularity and frequency, and fantasy series that have followed you are increasingly likely to focus on the political rather than fantastical aspects of their world, and shake up their plots with "shocking twists." You set out to kill tropes, George, but now you are the trope. And I really, really wish I didn't care as much as I do.
Winds of Winter will be available here on Amazon when it eventually gets announced. I'll be the one that posts a one-star review but buys every version so I get the different cover art.
*Not true in any sense
**Not here in any respect
***Actually available on his own website and several others
****Please don't sue me George R. R. Martin
*****I'm sorry I just wanted to be funny surely you can understand that we can keep the lawyers out of this
******This is true
*******This is not true
********Not real
No comments:
Post a Comment