"What’s Behind Our Obsession With Game of Thrones..." Topic

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"A series known not only for its brutality but shocking brutality, Game of Thrones has sucker punched viewers several times over the last few years, in grisly scenes that stole some of the most beloved characters from the show. And each time its done it, we've seen the internet littered with videos of fans gasping, weeping, and shouting all manner of profanity as someone they rooted for met a cruel end.

In the wake of the most recent Game of Thrones episode, we saw it again…"
Full article here.
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Amicalement
Armand

I will miss Joffrey…

A regular series not matter the danger main charactors survive …here not so sure . Boobies , dragons, boobies , swordplay , subplots, boobies, murder, boobies

No you won't.

He got what he deserved.

Now the Red Viper will be missed.

But just wait until his daughters get involved in the show.

He has quite a few of them and they are call the Sand Snakes.

link

Though I doubt most will stay alive but that happens.

I was attracted to the books because I was tired of Goodkind's and Jordan's unkillable wonder boys. If a character is weak, does something stupid, or is just plain unlucky he dies and the show has done a great job representing that. The brutality and depravity is totally believable in a world were if there are no witnesses it didn't happen and if you have enough gold witnesses don't matter.

One of the few books I couldn't finish and set aside. Have no interest in the show as a result. Have watched a couple of episodes with my daughter, which reinforced my poor opinion of this show.

They are taking too long to develop stories in favor of simply introducing new people to kill off. I'm all for a good blood letting mind, even applauded them for killing off Ned Stark, but when they consistently kill off so many of the main characters I tend to lose interest and not get attached anymore. If this is what the books are all about I have zero interest in reading them. To me it all seems like sacrificing storytelling for sensationalism. With the show, they are going to have to do something really clever by the end of the season to keep my interest. Although banishing Jorah was a start.

For me as with most books the show/movie doesn't come close. That said the author does love to kill off most of his main characters so the hbo team has that down.

Hmm, popularity via public displays of torture and brutality worked for the Caesars, so why not for HBO?

They are just using the story line and deaths from the books.If they don't kill people off the same way and time they will change everything and have to write a totally new story and plot line. To me its like a Stephen King story spend 100s of pages building a character, make you like him. just to kill them off doing something dumb.

they are going to have to do something really clever by the end of the season to keep my interest.

They are going to do what happened in the books. They are not going to change things for the show to make it better TV. People want the books made into a TV show. killing for killing fight for fight, bad move to bad move. This is a story about how everyone can die even the people you want to win at the game.

Again, there are very few main characters killed off. I can think of three: Ned, Catheryn and Rob.

Rob's wife, Oberyn, etc…. These are all secondary characters.

One of the problems with T.V. Versus books is that the viewing experiences is much "flatter" than the reading experience. Everyone who is on screen for more than a few scenes carries pretty much equal weight in viewers' eyes.

Thus, when secondary characters like Oberyn get killed, people take it much harder. But in the books, Oberyn was about as important as Mace Tyrel and introduced at roughly the same time.

In the books, we see this through point of view characters and very few of them are killed. Up to book four, it is only Ned and Cathryn. There is thus much less wailing and gnashing of teeth among readers.

So there is no "spending a hundred pages developing a character just to kill him off doing something dumb" in the books. Or at least very little of it.

That said, I applaud HBO for their balls. Martin's goal is to create an anti fairy tale. What I am saying ashould be obvious by now, so it doesn't qualify as a spoiler to anyone with a brain, but all the charcters pretty much change 180 degrees from where they start the series.

Honorable Ned turns out to be a total putz who cannot even protect his family.

Arya, the plucky tomboy, becomes a coldhearted killer, almost a sociopath.

Niave Sansa gets schooled in how to play the game of thrones by a reigning master.

Innocuous Peter Baelish turns out to be the grand puppet master.

Waify little sexual violence victim Daenyrys becomes an utter badass and a queen, plus sees her visions and plans for a better world thoroughly ed on.

Wastrel Tyrion becomes his fathers only true son.

Playboy, -for-honor Jaime becomes a paladin.

Cersei, the old king's trophy wife, becomes the classic Evil Queen right out of fairy tales… And we learn to pity her and to see why Evil Queens do what they do, psychologically speaking.

The hound – a literal dog of a knight – is well on the road to becoming a renowned knight of song and legend.

Very few of the characters stay the way they were and even those who do intensify their traits as time goes on. Joffery, for example, goes from being a little to a psychotic murdering bastard.

Martin is writing a deconstructionist fairy taleand HBO is going right along wih it. At the end, hopefully, the genre will lay on pieces on the floor, totally rendered into component bits and beautifully dissected.

Now why is it gutsy to do this? Because most people REALLY hate deconstructionism. People love them some tropes. And nerds, who are the folks who really dig speculative fiction the most, live and die for tropes. Deconstructionism, done well, destroys and subverts tropes. It is a revolutionary praxis. And to do that to what is essentially one of the world's most conservative literary forms – the fairy tale – is to invite disaster in terms of one's popularity.

Martin is the anti-Tolkien. Tolkien took the ur forms of western fairy tale myth and polished them to a high sheen. Martin is taking a hacksaw, blowtorch and socket wrench to them.

GoT, the book series, owes its popularity to the fact that readers are by and large a much less conservative crowd than viewers. Anyone reading GoTs has certainly read Tolkein, almost certainly read Jordan and lord knows how many other fantasy door-stoppers where the heroes always win, victory comes at no real cost to anyone you love and the villains are resolutely eeeeeeeeevil.

For people who have read enough of that, GoT comes across as a huge breath of fresh air. It can surprise and excite us, which is something fantasy has long ago ceased to do. For me, reading GoT is like returning to being nine years old and reading LotR again for the first time. I don't know what is going to happen, or to whom. It has revamped my love for fantasy, which is a precious thing indeed.

(And unfortunately, this is already being spoiled by the legions of GoT immitators who are copying forms but not content or – more importantly – intent).

But viewers… Viewers are much more conservative. Most of them don't read alot of speculative fiction -or if they do, they haven't got to the point where it all begins to look the same. Viewers want more predictability in their tropes.

As GoT moves fsrther and farther away from the "typical fantasy experience" – as winter falls, in short (and boy does it fall) – more and more viewers are going to complain. The next two seasons are goig to be very grim, indeed. Fun for us who like deconstructionism and like a more realistic portrayal of life, desth, good and evil. Bad for the people who, in their heart of hearts, want to see shiny knights and golden princesses.

The Sansa Starks, in other words, are going to get increasingly disillusooned.

Three things will probably happen by the end of this season which will leave fans gasping like fish out of water and torn between crying and cheering. This mix will make them come back for more, much like the Red Wedding last year. These are (hints, but no spoilers):

You know nothing, John Snow.

Tyrion's fate.

The completely unexpected return of something long thought lost.

What HBO is doing is changing the pacing of the reveals to make the story that much more compelling for T.V. And this season's finale should be a doozy: the biggest and best of them all, if HBO is smart (and they mostly have been so far).

NEXT season – or rather, the next two books – is going to be the problem because not even Martin could utlimately figure out how to adequately pace events. It is a thousand pages of slog through civilization coming apart at the seams and Martin setting up his chess pieces for the end game.

Here, indeed, I think George could have used an editor. Too many new and useless charctwrrs appear and the ones we love don't do enough. So it will be interesting to see how HBO reworks the pacing for the next few seasons without losing viewers.

And, of course, Georeg still has to finish the bloody story. He just upped it to eight books, which to me is unfortunate, as it signals less tight control of the tale, which George already began to lose track of in books four and five.

And to answer the question posed in the title: we like to watch GoT for the same reason we like to watch zombie stories: because the apocalypse is compelling.

And given the current state of the world, and the fact that soeculative fiction, from Atlantis on, has been used as a means of thinking about the real world, it should be obvious why western civilization is currently obsessed with apocalypses.

I loved the books for the reason Zakalwe 64 pointed out. I have read Tolkien, read Jordan, read Weis and Hickman, Salvatore, Feist and Cunningham (Drizzt D' Urden was the biggest trope I loved to hate). I loved all of them but I got bored of the tropes. Now mind you at points even they broke the tropes (Salvatore's best book for me was Spine of the World, a book that was definitely different than most high fantasy). But Martin's stuff was refreshing for several reasons

i) The low fantasy theme. While I know he is slowly working to introducing more high fantasy elements, and partly lament that fact, Martin's was a refreshing pseudo mid-eval world.

ii) Actions have consequences. Martin is one of the first fantasy writers I read in which no matter how important or heroic you are if you do stupid things they will bite you. Sometimes this means death, and sometimes it means really bad things short of death.

iii) The politics makes some sense. Now Feist had pretty good politics in the earlier parts of the Magician trilogy in many of the books up to and including the Serpentwar saga. But Martin's is better. True he broadly copies historical wars, but he does it well enough and it makes his story more palatable to politic-nerds like me.

iv) The barbarians are not uber-men. One thing I detested in Robert Jordan and even Dune was the whole "people outside civilisation" are uber powerful. But in Martin's book the tough leaving Wildlings and even the Dothraki can be bested by more civilized opponents. Discipline, tactics etc count in his world, and effeminite slavers or knights of summer can give a thrashing to tough living types.

There are others as well. I think the HBO series has upped the violence and sex a bit compared to the books, but I still think it is a great sure.

Would I have preferred they had made a War of the Roses series with the same money, production volumes, casting and hell Martin as script-writer? YES. But I will take what I can!

I began as a fan of the books. Ned's fate, while shocking, made sense, and even much of the brutality fit the setting. I even agree that Martin was trying to be an "anti-Tolkien," in the sense of trying to create an epic fantasy without the myth side of it, or the myth stripped of its pretty gloss— "Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discover/ The bower of Astolat a smoky hut/ Of mud and wattle— find the knightliest lover/ A braggart, and his Lily Maid a " (Francis Brett Young)(EDIT: for the bleep, a word for a wanton that rhymes with "hut"). By giving us villains who aren't that evil (well, except maybe Cersei) and heroes who are foolish to believe in their own heroism, Martin created a shocking twist on convention, which is always fascinating… at first.

But, when it comes down to bras tacks, Martin isn't the writer Tolkien was. He's good, yes, and creates a highly believable and realistic world, yes, even more than Tolkien did, but for all Tolkien's excesses of style and indulgences of his own mythos-making (Bombadil, the superfluous Glorfindel cameo, etc.), the good professor knew that everything, every scene, every description, every word, was always about advancing the story. He knew that the tropes exist for a reason— that humans respond to them not because they are expected or comfortable, but because they represent a deeper wish embedded in our hearts— the desire that there be something more than the mundane, that there be heroes and noble deeds, and that somewhere down the road the pain gives way to a purpose we might not now see and a hope we now only hear as whispers. Martin is thus trapped in a chaos he can't escape— when he creates a character readers care about and then brutalizes and kills that character, he can really only do so if the reader (or viewer) believes that purpose and hope lie at the other end of it. If they don't, if all they see is futility and death, they will set the books aside and turn off the TV. He can't even make a villain relatable without this same effect, for once we relate with a villain, we root for the villain, if only for their redemption at the end. Thus Gollum, for a while, becomes a potential hero. Only if a villain is offered redemption only to reject it explicitly do we then accept a darker fate in a relatable character (again, Gollum), or if that darker fate is a sacrifice with meaning and redemption inherent in it (Boromir).
Martin is fighting against the expectation. Whether he wants it to be an anti-fairy tale or not, it remains a fairy tale, and we come to it, whether iconoclasts or not, with the expectation of a satisfying resolution— if not happily ever after, at least momentary happily and reasonably stable.
But as Martin progresses through his novels, he loses his grip on the need to forward the story, just as he loses crucial elements he has established as significant from the beginning (as the fate and purpose of the wolves and the off-stated Stark words "Winter is coming."). He complicates matters further by throwing brutality on top of brutality, leaving the reader (or viewer) to wonder if there even is a point to all this, and why the heck they should stick around to find out. And, for all that he is great at characterization and world building, Martin is not a great wordsmith. Yes, he's better than a Clancy, and there's never a moment when his language throws the reader out of the scene— Martin's never clumsy, and he does know how to write— but as for language that stays within the head or entices the tongue to repeat it? No, Martin never achieves that, aside from the pithy "Words" that serve as his House mottos. (Though indeed, only the haunting "Winter is coming" remains in my head. The rest are simply pedestrian boasts one might as much hear from a street gang as a lord.) People quote Tolkien because of his words. People only quote Martin to show they're "in the know."

My prediction is that, just as the books have lost readership with the pointless, story-less excesses of four, five and six (not to mention the unrelenting brutality), the series will lose viewership if they don't depart from Martin's excesses and begin a turn towards hope. Even in our anti-fairy tales, we want heroes. Even in our realism, we want the happy ending, if it's only bittersweet. Even as we ogle the titillating, we want the real romance of love. Even as we smile at the cleverness of the villain, or reflect upon his humanity, in the end we expect justice or redemption for his fate. If we do not receive these, or perceive that we will not, the story fails. We turn off the television. We set down the book. And we walk away.
I predict that very soon, HBO will see viewers walk away.

So good threads boys!. (smile).

Amicalement
Armand

Parzival I must disagree with your final point. There is a big enough bunch of the viewing public that do not want a happy ending and who like the senseless brutality. They are the fodder that keeps alive the slasher and terror film industry and I think they will stick through it. That said I do think Martin has bigger points. They are just a bit hard to grasp. I have a feeling that the big point or theme is that people who strive too much and break to many rules to get what they want get what is coming to them. Or maybe that Irony rules the world.

Think Tywin Lannister. Here is a guy who is all bout legacy and family. He has done terrible things to get it, and yet his progeny is the greatest threat to that very legacy, while that of his cousins which he makes fun off would had been much better keepers of it. There is something poetic in that, but it is hard to grasp I fear.

Ah, KTravlos, but even the horror and slasher movies typically have a hero who wins in the end. And typically, those who are killed "deserve it" in some way (at least as the movie presents it). Furthermore, these movies all follow a predictable formula in resolution, returning their "society" to a stable point; the killings end, the darkness is defeated, and order is restored… until the sequel… So, again, the effective resolution is expected.

I will concede that TPK style movies are out there, but is that audience the same audience as GoT? I'm guessing probably not, or only as a small percentage of the whole.

Mayhaps. Though to be frank the few I have seen are very bleak with no good resolution. Its why I avoid them. Even GRRM is not as much a sadist as those people. So it may be the difference in degree that helps him. And in many ways Martin does give resolution

Manderly is taking a terrible vengence on many of the the most despised characters in the series. And on a karmic scale some of the major characters are already punished (for example, Tywin not just by his death but really the dissolution of his branch of house Lannister. Robert by the fact that his blood does not rule the throne he got. Eddard helped destroy the Targharyen family, betrayed his liege lord. It is kinda fitting that his own family is destroyed and his poor son is betrayed by his vassal etc )

I don't really think there is an "obsession" for GoT…it is more like a pathological devotion that borders on a cult status. (I have been physically threatened for saying the series and the books are not that good…they are just provide moderate entertainment.) That said, it is an entertaining series. It is the only real mainstream television series with hardcore fantasy leanings that is out there.

In answer to some of the discussions above, I really don't think GRRM is doing anything original (with the exception of his "Winter is Coming" theme). All he has really done is go go back to beginnings. Most fairy tales have a macabre and somewhat gruesome beginning. Remember that the story of "Hansel and Gretel" centered around a witch that ate children. As for sleeping beauty:

"In one of the very earliest versions of this classic story, published in 1634 by Giambattista Basile as "Sun, Moon, and Talia," the princess does not prick her finger on a spindle, but rather gets a sliver of flax stuck under her fingernail. She falls down, apparently dead, but her father cannot face the idea of losing her, so he lays her body on a bed in one of his estates. Later, a king out hunting in the woods finds her, and since he can't wake her up, rapes her while she's unconscious, then heads home to his own country. Some time after that, still unconscious, she gives birth to two children, and one of them accidentally sucks the splinter out of her finger, so she wakes up. The king who raped her is already married, but he burns his wife alive so he and Talia can be together. Don't worry, the wife tries to kill and eat the babies first, so it's all morally sound."

(From: link

Sounds a lot like GRRM! All he is doing is stripping away the puritan coating of the stories. Which I personally like.

I think the interest we have is that we are getting that gritty view of the world (even in a fantasy TV series) that has been whitewashed for so many years. Just a thought.

I will continue to watch as long as we have a suggestion that winter will eventually get here…

You know nothing, Box of Rocs.

No matter how gruesome, fairy tales had a clear cut moral lesson to teach (even if that lesson is not in line with today's morals).

So what's the moral lesson of GoT?

Lesson i) Actions have consequences

Lesson ii)Just because you are honorable, merciful, good does not mean that when you do stupid things you will not be punished.

Lesson iii) Inflexibility of morality will lead to immoral results. Or more simply: don't be Robespierre!

Lesson iv)Everybody pays for their misdeeds in some way. Only those ways are not necessarily going to satisfy our sense of justice. Or more simply: Vengeance is a dish served cold and that is why it tastes like crap.

Lesson v) Write your books in a timely manner with solid revision and conciseness suitable to the story, or people will get bored.

Lesson vi) On the other hand, if you have enough sex in them. HBO will pick them up as a miniseries and then you can suck a whole 'mother bunch of saps into buying and reading your aimless wandering-around-in-search-of-a-plot bloatius opus, while you cash the royalties checks…

Correction to the above: that should be a "n" at the start of " 'nother ," not an "m." Autocorrect strikes again…

Zakalwe64 and KTravlas – its always great to read some intelligent remarks regarding what GRRM is attempting to create. But he's both smashing and creating tropes constructive destruction making something new but out of old parts. He keeps a deep touch of the romantic even why showing wars tendencity to create depravity in even the well intentioned. (I'm sorry Parzival that Martin feels compelled to remind you of war's consequences but that is very much part of the "moral" of Ice and Fire.)

I'm always amused when people insist he "kills off all his characters" but on the other hand there are "too many characters to keep track of". Most central characters are alive and well, we just did not know who they were and their roles in the initial set up. Apparently aimless plot points have a way of revealing there importance much latter – the Ice and Fire story is a complete cycle – just too big for some to percieve.

We are all entitled to our own fantasy world but this does not cause the real world to disappear. In the real world reviews, by even main stream critics, have improved with each book while viewership (and readership) for the (admittidly much inferior HBO serias) has balloned and has now passed the Spranos as HBO's most popular offering.

TomT

Thanls TomT. Again I will hold my final judgement on the series at the end because I do fear he will turn it into high fantasy (by the way if anybody has been reading Kentaro Miuras Berserk series, this was exactly what happened. From a grim-dark medieval world to a high fantasy one). For the time being I enjoy both the books and tv. Frankly for some reason, maybe naive i trust Martin to a) not pull a Jordan on us b) not pull a Salvatore/Feist on us

TomT, sorry, but I am well aware of what war is like, and the reality of it in the novels doesn't bother me. But, as an author myself, I'm also well aware of the elements of story that make for a compelling read, and the current spate of novels in the series simply don't. Aimless wandering in search of a plot is not a sign of thoughtful planning and storycraft, it's the sign of an author trying to stretch a smaller tale into a bigger one, and an editor who's forgotten the key role of an editor, which is to "kill all the author's darlings," as we say in the business. I have no problem with brutality or even pointless brutality as long as it contributes to the furtherance of the story. You can get away with pointlessness if pointlessness is your point. It's not Martin's.

I also am not one complaining about killing off main characters, as such. But I know that as you do so, you lose readership/viewership, largely because they do break the narrative conventions that readers and viewers expect. Breaking conventions is itself a convention of modern narrative, but nevertheless it is done at the author's peril. In the case of character deaths, the standard is neither convention or the breaking of the same, but whether such things shock the reader out of the story. Do so too severely, and the book fails. This is why so many react negatively to TV series that end in a manner outside the conventions of the series (particularly when fluffy comedies try to have a dramatic finale; it never works). Too much establishment of the "I'm not going to give you any heroes" trope risks causing readers to walk away from the tale, simply because they lose the connection with the story that a hero ( even a dark one) provides. Martin also makes this worse with his addiction to False Death Syndrome, in which situations are described that imply a character has been killed (or permanently disabled), only to have a surprise reveal later that "it was only a flesh wound," so to speak. That's clumsy, conventional tropism, and Martin does it a lot.

Finally, I walked away from the books only partly for Martin's excesses, but ultimately for his one cardinal sin: he bored me. I found better things to read and better things to write. I can forgive a lot in a tale, except boredom.