Thrones'n It Down
20 Years of A Song of Ice and Fire
So there’s a “30 Years of Tolkien” piece in my drafts to go along with my other 30 years pieces, the kind of fantasy trifecta that has informed so much of my life, but I got off track on that one.
I also have a piece on Spider-Man as it relates to my book, but that one kept turning into me talking about my 20s and my volatile relationship with my dad, and in the last 2-3 weeks I’ve watched a ton of movies I’d love to write about, including the trifecta of Red Sparrow, Christy, and Smashing Machine (themes baby, THEMES!!!) but…
But my writing time is limited because I’m working on my second novel. And listen folks, this one is a fantasy novel! That’s right/it’s about time, and while I’d also be writing a 30 Years of Drizzt Do’Urden piece, one I’ve already written… and hold on a second…
I was thinking of bringing footnotes back for this one in no small part because, well, we’ll get there, but I decided against it.
Anyway 1995 was a big year for me in terms of culture so I could have also written about 30 years of Highlander the Series, or 30 years since I quit comics that one time, or even just 30 Years Since I was 13, and all of the above would have been a footnote but I didn’t want you to have to keep jumping back and forth and losing the plot.
Speaking of losing the plot, while I’ve read more individual prose novels by Drizzt creator RA Salvatore than I have any other offer, and while you don’t get much high fantasy nerdier than DnD novels, here’s the thing…
I don’t, broadly speaking, actually like the fantasy prose genre.
(But boy do I love a good elipsis and a good parenthetical.)
Now if you know me (you do… see, LOVE THEM) then you’re probably not too surprised by that, what with me being a pretentious contrarian hater and all, one that especially tends to hate my peer groups.
It’s true, I tend to not like the majority of other nerds, and I tend to not enjoy nerd stuff for the same reasons. You can see this especially in my comics taste and my lack of interest in some of the most celebrated big ideas creators out there. And that’s the thing really, I don’t care about big process driven concepts like “what if all the X-Men characters lived on a mutant island utopia together”, or Watchmen, or I can keep going, but what I care about is character and story, and if those things aren’t first then the big systems based concepts won’t interest me.
You might be thinking, “But wait Max, Watchmen is…” let me stop you right there. Watchmen is a polemic and people take it seriously because they historically didn’t take comics seriously. I’ve gone over this before. See, this would have been another footnote.
I don’t care about the majesty and wonder of dragons or magic systems, or the endless onion of world building that takes foreground over narrative, and I hate, I hate, I hate jargon. I hate jargon so much.
Tolkien has this thing about hating allegory, that’s me and jargon.
My partner is polyamorous and I’m not, and I jokingly “refuse” to learn her poly jargon. This right here, perfect footnote.
When I read fantasy, especially a lot of high fantasy (more fantastical) a lot of it tends to feel like one of my favorite stand-ups (and future wives… I’d explain that but we have to keep going here or Winds of Winter is going to… fuck… I should explain that joke.. no, okay, we’re done) Iliza Shlesinger doing her witch pharmacist bit on War Paint.
"Take one… one… one… on the seventh solstice of the third vernal equinox… It’s two different times of year, but it’s just a bit. Then once in the presence of a righteous man with the blood of a virgin, also with crackers so you don’t upset your tummy.”
That word-salad of nonsense is fantasy genre jargon, and I say this as someone who is both writing a fantasy novel and making their own high fantasy role-playing game.
Also I was so struck with how funny Iliza is that I didn’t realize how hot she was for like a year. I mean, she was obviously pretty, but I was too busy laughing at “Do you know what renaissance fairs are? Of course you do, there’s white trash everywhere.”
Another perfect footnote.
And all of that, yes all 787 previous words bring us to this.
I put Game of Thrones down the first time I tried reading it.
I thought it was boring, trite fantasy bullshit. I mean, the prologue was cool but then it was meeting the solemn king-ish guy and his red headed wife, and the girl being sold to the Mongols, and then the king-ish guy’s kids all had a magical connection to magic wolves, and the moody bastard was the main-ish character… and I had just read Robin Hobb’s Assassin trilogy about a bastard with a magical power to talk to animals including his wolf friend and I just did not give a single fuck.
Just none at all.
My friend Zach had given me a spare copy of the book, telling me I’d love it, so did my roommate Brennan, but I figured those guys who both have a higher fantasy tolerance than I do, we just off the mark
Then, realizing I was going to be flying to Germany in a few months and I would need something to read, I picked the book up and started again, no not from the start but from about where I left off, where the King was coming to visit.
I still didn’t really care about anyone yet but the writing wasn’t bad, especially when it got into conversation. Then, I made it to page 98 and everything changed.
What happened on page 98 that made me change my mind about everything (except Dany, I never cared about her, just a boring ass side plot that took page time away from where my actual interests were), just everything about the book?
A grown man threw a child out a window for catching him and his twin sister, the Queen, fucking.
I was all in.
Well, except for Dany, and I skimmed a lot of Sansa, and so much of books 4 and 5, but let’s not get too far ahead.
The point of A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) is a deconstruction of the fantasy genre via characters acting from a more human, more naturalistic perspective. This is often described as realism but what it actually is is believability. When I say naturalistic above I’m referring to the literary style, and when I say believable I refer to characters acting from the whole range of human emotion, and not from the archetypal/romantic narrative heroic range where the character is almost wholly external and of a type.
It’s the kind of stuff you think about when you think about classic fantasy (not to be confused with sword and sorcery, which is its own thing.)
So there’s a fantasy world with lots of shades of grey, and looming existential threat, murder, betrayal, incest, and I cannot stress enough that when Bran got shoved out the window by Jamie it showed just how hard this book was going to go.
This is now the most shocking moment in entertainment history of a blond guy throwing a brunette through a window. The previous most shocking moment was…
I loved the books and read all four of them before my flight, so that plan failed, but I was all in. This was 2006 so shortly after book 4 came out, and my buddy Phil was super into the books so we really got to bond over them. I read the Red Wedding scene on the bus, would read on my breaks, and just couldn’t put them down… in part because I kept skimming the characters I wasn’t interested in.
I re-read the first 4 books in 2010, because I was a year off from when book 5 was coming out so I just jumped the gun. Second time through I tried to give Dany and Sansa more of a chance, but… but everyone else was more interesting and there was nothing intellectually or emotionally compelling to me about those character arcs. I also skimmed pretty much every new character introduced in books 4 and 5, any character that wasn’t in the central Westros plots or that wasn’t Arya. Just zero interest in anything or anyone across the sea or in the island.
(I fast forwarded a lot of Dany scenes on the show too. It’s not really a gender thing for why I was less engaged with those two, it’s the lack of connection to the narratives I was invested in. My Sansa skimming came when after she fled with Littlefinger. Sansa’s lack of agency is a function of her gender, as is the nature of the abuse constantly visited on her, and her constant suffering is boring, especially as the later books spin out of control. Sometimes every page in a book dedicated to a character you don’t care about feels like a waste and a denial, and not always in a measured way of control pacing and tone.)
And this brings us to my great overarching perspective on the book series.
Martin wanted to do something bold with books 4-6, but he was also bound to the fact he had pre-existing characters with unfinished and pressing stories.
His aspiration to create a different, second trilogy that would take in and out with the first one (I was told this by Phil), combined with the above and with audience investment and expectation, made him both write himself into a corner in book 4 then try and write himself out of it in book 5, while not getting any closer to a clear way out of the situation he was in.
He’s also said as much in different ways around Dany’s army getting stuck in a quagmire, and things just not lining up timeline wise. It’s the burden of a big, complicated, popular story, you end up with a lot of masters to service, not the least of which is the story itself and what you set out to express, tell, and create.
Then a year after book five came out season 1 hit and here we are today.
I was thinking of bringing footnotes back as an homage to one of my non-fiction influences Bill “The Sports Guy” Simmons, not just to steal his bit, but because he launched Grantland in 2012? Yeah, 2012, and some of the podcasts associated with the site moved with him when he was fired fro ESPN and started The Ringer. These podcasts went on to branch out and then have facebooks groups associated with them, and there in the throes of the depression that defined my 20-teens, I spent a lot of time sharing my combative takes on the declining quality of the Game of Thrones TV series.
In fact, some of you are reading this now because we met in those places and you liked me enough to become friends with me, or at least stay in touch with me.
(So me talking about Game of Thrones is a tried and true passion, and those Facebook groups were where I first dropped hte Sansa Was Right pic.)
Now, 20 years removed from my first time reading the books we’re on our third Game of Thrones show. While House of the Dragon (wrote about how much I hate it) is everything wrong with both fantasy and late season original Game of Thrones, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is everything that was right about the early seasons.
It is honest, visceral, human, and already written. Also, while it is not as cruel as what we expect from the franchise, it is still unflinching in its portrayal of violence with the the consequences of it matching the extremity of it, keeping the stakes high and the emotional reality grounded.
In short, this show fucking rules. I have pumped my fist and/or wept multiple times, because it captures what I love in fantasy; courage, hope, cool fight scenes with swords and armor, and a space to explore the human condition with a slightly different setting than our day to day world.
I don’t read fantasy to “go back”, it’s not history, it’s fiction with a different level of technology and different rules of physics. I read fantasy because the concept of a knight is cool.
So obviously I love this show.
Anyhow, if you haven’t seen it yet (or are not going to watch the show), watch this trailer to see why this is obviously my shit right here!
And as much as I loved A Song of Ice and Fire I don’t love it nearly as much as the works of Joe Abercrombie. The first time I read his first trilogy (2008-2009) I had a visceral response to them that was “Well this motherfucker just wrote the books I wanted to write” and after that I mostly set down the idea of writing a fantasy novel. I had one idea come my way but it didn’t really have legs, and then I was off to turn the comic idea into my book and spending years doing that.
Then, last summer an idea finally came to me… after I read Abercrombie’s most recent book. While I didn’t have clarity on the entirety of the story I had clarity on what I wanted it to be.
How I wanted it to feel came as I started to write, and the story has been working itself out as I’ve been fully on the grind on this one.
Sometimes the power of fantasy comes from it existing at a remove, from having layers of abstraction that create different permission structures for characters. This is one of the reasons Game of Thrones’ subversion and deconstruction can be so effective, because you don’t expect the handsome and seemingly heroic prince to whip a kid out a window.
Sometimes the power of fantasy comes from that abstraction and remove by removing overt touchstones of modern society. It allows you to tell stories that are present and modern, even showing you things that you recognize from our world, while also removing the specifics, allowing the audience to find analogy and understanding.
Fantasy, like all fiction, allows us to tell stories about life with all the boring parts taken out, all the exciting parts ramped up to 11 (with swords, and magic, and whatnot) and to even have tragedy, loss, and defeat become beautiful moments of victory, where courage and sacrifice last past the moment, and where what a character does can mean something in equal measure to their passion.
That’s why I love fantasy, it tends to exist in the same emotional equilibrium I do. It’s like metal that way, even when it’s considered and small, it’s still big and loud.
And now that I have a substack piece done I can go back to writing my tale of… sorry gang, you’ll have to wait for that.