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
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Meh.
Seriously though, empathy versus statistics is a false dichotomy. Empathy and statistics can (and should) both be used to inform the structure of law. For example, empathy may compel people to endorse a law banning abortion. Others may oppose that same law, out of empathy for the harrowing situation of the mothers involved. Empathy may compel people to ban the death penalty. Empathy for victims - anger expressed on their behalf - may compel others to pursue the death penalty instead. Empathy for parents of drug-addicted children versus empathy for drug-addicted children in jail versus empathy for children subject to peer pressure from drug dealers et cetera has created the current swamp of anti-drug laws. Empathy is a great place to start, but not much more.
So we get statistics involved. What are the aggregate outcomes for children born to mothers who would have chosen abortion? What is the cost to society? What is the total cost to the state to perform an execution, with all the appeals and delay, relative to life imprisonment? What are the consequences of vastly increasing the prison population for drug offenses? How often does recidivism occur? How much do rehabilitation programs cost relative to jail time and lost productivity?
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I'd like to think the fantasy genre has grown up beyond the fairy-tale stage.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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It is so unlike you to not do the required reading
That's nice.
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