Of empathy, and good intentions gone sour

[airiefairie]

I'm sure the Game of Thrones fans have already watched the latest episode of the hit show on HBO. The show has gone into quite some controversy lately, what with all the gore displayed on screen, and the violence against women, and a number of other controversial issues. But last weekend's installment of the epic story provided yet another piece of

Comments

[garote]

I suspect this argument gives Game Of Thrones too much credit. As far as I can tell, the moral issues conjured by the series are no more complicated than a couple weeks' worth of soap opera programming from the 80's. But the show's setting is fashionable, to a crowd that was adolescent when the Lord Of The Rings films were a big deal. Now they're adults, so they get more of the same, but with the boobies and violence cranked up to 11

[mahnmut]

While Lord of The Rings is classic and I obsessively loved it, it's too unambiguous for the tastes of the modern public, which is soaked in information. There's the good guys, all beautiful and white and fair and noble, and they're fighting the Dark Lord whose minions are black and stupid and evil. We already know who wins in the end, even before we've turned page #2.

I'd like to think the fantasy genre has grown up beyond the fairy-tale stage.

[garote]

Is it "growing up beyond"? Or is it a return to form?

Old fairy-tales are full of blood, murder, and suffering, and often only end because the protagonists simply can't take any more. Also, Tolkien's work has been surrounded by 60+ years of allegorical interpretation. Is the genre a mere set dressing, or does it encompass all this history and development as well?

[mahnmut]

Return to which form? At which point in the history of the genre has it been so explicit and degtailed in terms of depiction of violence, and so focused on crafting complex characters and narratives that are ambiguous to unbearable levels, as opposed to clear-cut in black-and-white strokes?

There *is* suffering in old fairy tales, except it's depicted in a stylized, more symbolic way, leaving a lot to the imagination of the reader. Now we've got it all into our face, as if we're some kind of imbeciles who can't figure out what's what. I realize that in a way this defeats my point about the genre becoming more mature - but maybe it's the audience that has changed, and with it, its expectations.

As for allegory, GRRM has been ganking stuff from all across the historical and geographical board in order to create his world and the characters and stories that inhabit it. Nearly everyone in the genre does that, including Tolkien.

[garote]

I am responding to your claim that LotR was too "black and white", and that this was somehow equivalent to a "fairy-tale stage". My point is: If modern fantasy has departed from black-and-white plotting and morality, that brings it closer to a "fairy-tale" stage, not farther from it.

I don't know where you get the idea that old fairy-tales had "stylized" violence. People get their hands chopped off, they throw themselves in the sea and drown, they burn to death, they get ground up and fed to their loved ones, et cetera. Violence has always been explicit enough to appeal to the "cheap seats" in the auditorium. Your friend Shakespeare never wrote the worst of it into his stage direction but you can bet that directors snuck it in anyhow.

Really, though, I don't have a dog in this fight. Proust might appreciate Game Of Thrones for the size of the cast and their character transformations, but I'm the inverse of his Mme de Guermantes; I'm not keen to take a side for it's own sake, and I'm not enamored with the theater.

[mahnmut]

If modern fantasy has departed from black-and-white plotting and morality, that brings it closer to a "fairy-tale" stage, not farther from it.

How exactly does it do that? If I've been reading them correctly, most fairy-tales are about the good guys who are fighting for a just cause overcoming the obstacles that the bad guys put in front of them, and good prevailing over evil, thus teaching the reader some moral lesson. Can you tell me who the good and the bad guys are in GoT, what the just cause of the former is, what represents the good and the bad, and what the moral lesson is from this story?

[garote]

It is so unlike you to not do the required reading, my moravec friend.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/

Harrowing encounters that end in death, cruel origin myths, mortals learning harsh lessons, disfigurings, wily animals raising hell, and so on. Of course our modern canon only seems to have room for the "black and white" ones scattered around.

Game Of Thrones is a serial in its middle period. Like any other soap opera, no one EVER permanently learns a lesson, or remains locked in the role of hero or villain, unless they are stopped by death itself. Fairy-tales are short. Thus, they usually come to a point in due time.

Why would this surprise you, or strike you as unique?

[mahnmut]

It doesn't. What it does, is to tell me that the genre is constantly developing in response to the changing characteristics of the audience.

It is so unlike you to not do the required reading

That's nice.

[garote]

What, you're not a genetically engineered robot in a submarine, obsessed with Shakespeare, and I'm not an equally robotic Proust-quoting space-crab?

[mahnmut]

That space crab would've never made a remark about their interlocutor's proneness to do the required reading. That space crab was kind and mindful.

[garote]

He also made jokes, and might make another at this point about how a being engineered to withstand huge depths of pressure might have a thicker skin ;)

[mahnmut]

Good point, but on the other hand Wall-E is a pretty sensitive little robot.