“Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone — they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?”
This is George R.R. Martin, author of the first half of A Song Of Ice and Fire, which has almost been completed as a story in serialized TV form by HBO, speaking in a 2014 interview with about about how his series more than the Lord of the Rings explores the necessity for those in power to wield power correctly. George R.R. Martin in his fantasy series about dragons and queens and ice zombies never writes about tax policies. But it’s interesting that he thinks he does.
Last night, George R.R. Martin’s story’s conclusion was about mostly told. You can debate over how much the show glosses over what essential development moments happen in the books, but the main event of last night’s episode will happen the same or it wouldn’t have been in last night’s episode. Our exiled queen Daenerys, who we follow for thousands of pages of narrative, does not triumphantly and righteously reclaim the throne, but instead goes crazy because of her isolation and atop her dragon burns alive thousands of innocents after they have already surrendered and she has won the war. The episode spends almost half its runtime showing the brutality of her genocide: bodies on fire, corpses covered in ash, her army slaughtering innocents in her wake. The final episode, while not yet released, can have no triumphant conclusion either: Daenerys must die, heroes Jon and Tyrion must kill her and probably die in the process. There is no narrative way that Jon, the secret true heir to the throne, will take it afterwards: he failed horribly tonight and can never rule. It all ends in despair.
But despair over what? What is even the sad part of this? That crazy people are going to be crazy? When media makes us sad, it isn’t because our heroes betray us and what they belive and do something evil. It isn’t sad to watch Daenerys genocide nameless people from a narrative perspective perspective because it isn’t reality and we can’t even think it’s real and it’s fine and good that we don’t. We aren’t reading fantasy for literal representations of what rulers would and wouldn’t do with power if they had dragons, even if personally slaughtering thousands for no reason were a literal representation of what the average ruler did.
But fantasy is afraid to defend itself on its own terms, and has to defend itself by use value standards ascribed to other fiction, namely that it “explores themes” and critiques reality. You can see similar attempts to ascribe value to more traditionally fantasy stories like Lord of the Rings with the reclamation of the “hero’s journey” terminology, making out every fantasy story to be a massive struggle against evil or a deconstruction of what it means to be in a struggle against evil. Recent superhero films react against the “superhero as pure force of good” with frequent exploration of the bystander casualties after their massive fights with the bad guys that level skyscrapers. Star Wars made an entire “real war movie” in Rogue One where the entire main cast had to die one-by-one on screen because war is actually hell not just laser swords clashing against each other.
War is real and really bad, and that’s kind of a separate thing. It’s difficult for traditional fantasy to speak critically about the violence and brutality of war as a side effect of their stories, because it still is a side thought on the main story they want to tell. It’s gross to see Daenerys brutally killing civilians on a computer-generated dragon for thirty minutes because out in the real world there are real wars where real people die, but this isn’t really commenting on those, especially because throughout A Song of Ice and Fire we’ve seen just and good wars too. No one was talking about civilian casualties when Robb was crushing the Lannisters in A Clash of Kings.
The most successful commentary on war in a fantasy book that I’ve seen is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which uses fantasy imagery to speak about a specific aspect of war that’s often uncomfortable to talk about (how sometimes violence needs to be forgiven or forgotten or else violence will continue but how it’s simultaneous impossible to forget brutality). Because The Buried Giant isn’t oriented on a real war, it avoids commentary on real events and is able to make its point precisely because it’s divorced from reality. But also, because The Buried Giant looks like fantasy from the outside, I doubt it will ever be taken seriously as anti-war text and read in college classrooms or elsewhere. And A Song of Ice and Fire will even less so ever be taken seriously as a comment on medieval ethics or brutality or whatever else it’s trying to say, but it says it anyways.
It says it out of fear of “the point” of fantasy which is that all of these side consequences can be ignored. It doesn’t matter that war is horrible and brutal because it isn’t a literal war that’s being fought. Traditional fantasy doesn’t address these things because it doesn’t need to. Fantasy is for children (or the child in all of us) and is meant to take the reader on a journey and maybe ascribe in them some feelings of self-worth. That’s it. It’s not bad that A Song of Ice And Fire attempted to counter these trends and point out that they do ignore the consequences of fantasy stories. But it doesn’t do so out of a genuine attempt to critique a naive worldview, it does it because it’s afraid to be the naive story it is and it has to be bigger than that. A conclusion where Daenerys claims the throne triumphantly and rules justly would be mocked because the story has always purported to be grayer than that. But it hasn’t always been, at least in many important ways: A Song of Ice And Fire still has a chosen one orphan boy who finds out that he is the rightful king, it still has dragons, it still has evil ice zombies, it still has prophecies that come true: it isn’t different but that’s fine. And it’s fine that Daenerys didn’t take the throne triumphantly either and that she did some bad things. I’m not calling for a new sincerity reclamation of the fairy tale. But we don’t have to be ashamed of fairy tales either. There’s no need to spend our time actively calling them out for plot holes and being stupid and naive and for babies. We can just move on and think about other things.
