GOT is just not for me, book or tv. I’m happy for the fantasy fans who finally have a tv show that’s taken seriously, though. What annoys me in GOT discussions is fans who say it’s ‘better’ than LOTR. They make like it better, but I don’t think it is better as a work of art. They were written in different times, and clearly had different aims. Both succeed in what they try to do. Just because GOT has more sex, more main character deaths - doesn’t make it ‘better’.
Well, um, yes. That’s because it *set *those conventions in the first place, for the most part. There was precious little fantasy worth speaking of before LOTR - Conan the Barbarian, Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser… that’s about it, really ; and LOTR was very different from those both in tone and in themes.
Complaining that LOTR is generic predictable fantasy is kind of like complaining that Gibson wrote tired, unimaginative cyberpunk ; or that Jules Vernes rarely veers away from positively ancient Steampunk clichés.
The greatest thing about Game of Thrones, for me personally, is that my wife had told me she didn’t think she’d be interested in watching 24 because of the violence. After about 4 episodes of Game of Thrones, which she was really enjoying, I told her, “Trust me, if you can handle this, you’ll be fine with 24.” 
Hell no it didn’t. The tropes for medieval fantasy have been around for a LONG time. King Arther started with two dragons battling over a lake, had a wise old wizard named Merlin, etc. Ivanhoe, Roland, Der Ring of Der Nieberlungen … god, medieval fantasy is almost … medieval! Elves, dwarves, trolls, heroic knights, evil magical creatures, all very, very old stuff long before Tolkien started in.
Evil Captor - yes of course the tropes for medieval fantasy had been around before Tolkien. But his was the work the made the genre popular, and profitable. I’d be surprised if GOT would have been around without it.
What really annoys me is that people somehow think GRRM is unique in breaking these conventions. Glen Cook did it first, and China Mieville, Steven Erikson and a few others did it pretty much concurrently.
I read the first two books a few years ago, and the characters and plot-lines were pretty good, but it was ruined by GRRM’s writing style. IMO, the man has one of the worst writing styles I’ve ever read. Overly descriptive, overly focused on sex, awkward wording, subscribes to the “big words are better” camp. (BTW I haven’t read these in a few years so if any of that’s wrong I apologize).
It may have given the genre a shot in the arm in the 60s and 70s, but it sure as held didn’t SET the conventions as claimed in the post I was responding to. And I don’t think it was responsible for the success of Conan or the Gor novels or quite a few other fantasies, which were popular contemporaneously with LOTR. About all you can say about LOTR was that it was really popular, come to think of it.
Well, true enough - but that stuff was decrepit and uninteresting by the time Tolkien rolled in. Nobody wrote that any more.
And, to be perfectly fair, he did subvert it some - for example his notion that portly Englishmen, and by that I mean Hobbits, were actually *better *than your archetypal not-Norse warrior type by virtue of not giving much of a damn beyond 3rd supper, especially not about glorious battles and prophecies.
Also new, his concept of half-Scottish, half-Jewish dwarves (which you’ll be hard pressed finding anything different ever since. Dwarves are dour, fatalistic, alcoholic and industrious now. That’s just a fact). Same for immortal, non-absurdly dickish elves (elves as a general concept existed before Tolkien of course - but there’s a yawning gulf between the Daoine Sidhe, Ljosalfar and Elrond). Orcs are pretty much all his. And so on.
You say this as though you believe it’s a completely randomly-introduced element, and has nothing to do with the show’s success.
Question for any who can check: how many times was the phrase “Your Grace” spoken in the Season 4 premiere? I’m guessing it had to have appeared *at least *a dozen times.
This was not random. It was a case of Giving The Audience What The Audience Wants (namely, the fantasy of being called “Your Grace”). I’m not saying that fantasy is evil, by the way; simply that some of us find indulging in it not a good use of our time.
WTF? You think that Joffrey the evil king is one of the characters in the show, and is referred to as “your grace”, because the audience fantasizes about being the monarch of a kingdom and being referred to as “your grace”???
That is… odd.
Yes, but not as odd as the 8-year-old who’s still nursing. I really don’t want to hear the explanation for that.
I personally think all the oddity reinforces the alienness of the GoT world. Good on 'em!
I’m saying this as though I believe a series that would have focused on the day-to-day ghastly worries and pedestrian ambitions of a small village’s worth of medieval serfs who haven’t got a say in anything and no control whatsoever over their own destinies wouldn’t exactly have made for compelling television, I don’t think.
Then again, *Deadwood *was more or less that and it worked pretty well, so who knows ?
Well, I wouldn’t presume to speak for the show’s whole audience. But speaking for myself exclusively, anybody wants me to address them by “Your Grace” or “Milord” is getting punched in the dick as a matter of principle. Anybody addresses *me *as “Your Grace” or “Milord” gets punched in the throat. Y’all have been warned.
I kinda doubt the audience ever identified with Archicunt Joffrey, Fat Useless Drunk Robert Baratheon, Icy Bastard Tywin Lannister or Mean Tragic Bitch Cersei either.
For the most part, the “summer children” seem to have expressed sympathies for Ned and Robb Stark, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. And Tyrion, of course, because he rules. And keeps bitch slapping Joffrey.
Some of which ended grisly, others being deep in the shit, but none of which have gone through the typical white male power fantasy arc. Except maybe Dany but…well, admittedly all is going well for her right now in spite of all her FIYAH AND BLUHD retardedness and she seems to have somehow evolved from “I’ll take what is MINE (that I’ve decided was mine Because)” to “I ORDER all of you slaves to become FREE MEN under MY self-appointed autocratic rule !”. Not that she notices the self-evident paradox or anything.
But nobody with a brain actually likes her, so that’s fine 
Your grace?! It’s My Gracer** anyway. I mean… wait, what were we talking about?
Mostly I can’t stand Daenerys because
through five books, she continues to be the lone shining counterexample to the otherwise ironclad Martin rule that characters who repeatedly do stupid things die.
True 'dat. Everyone’s favorite part of WWII movies is all the sieg heils and mein fuhrers. Who doesn’t like a little authoritarian pageantry?
Because if there’s one thing GoT is about it’s glamorizing the nobility. Are you cereal right now?
BTW, OP, since it’s impossible to discuss this without spoilers and there are problems with spoilers for this series on these boards, it would probably be a good idea to ask the mods to add a spoiler tag to the title.
Anyway, I’m not a fan of fantasy in general, except comic fantasy and stuff set in the real world (like Buffy). I do love complex plotting, great acting and memorable dialogue, and GoT has all that. If you don’t like it, though, I don’t care.
There is too much sex and violence for me but it is mostly there for plot reasons. The only violence I really couldn’t take much more of was the Theon storyline, which was just horrific. Again, it was there for a good reason, but it was just too much for me.
I know you said it was a brainless show (or something similar) - does that mean you only half watch it? Because you’ve kinda got a lot of things wrong. They didn’t spend the first season telling us war is coming. They said “Winter is coming,” which it is, slowly. And the sea battle was in season 2.
There’s also a lot of character development. One of the reasons people don’t like Sansa is because she doesn’t seem to have developed. All the other characters have. Daenaerys (even if you dislike her, you can’t say she hasn’t changed), Tyrion, Jamie, Cersai, Arya, the Hound, Bran, Jon Snow, Theon (none of whom are dead yet) - etc etc. All have changed a lot.
There’s also the former smuggler who works for Stanis.
Daenaerys did ask the slaves if they wanted to come with her, at least. She even gave them the option of continuing to be slaves. No ordering at all.
Kudos to you all for…well…doing what we usually do when someone says, “I don’t get ______” and turning it into hopefully-helpful discussion of what we like about _____ (and this in spite of what’s-his-name’s thread+ saying, “You’re all clueless idiots who shouldn’t be so proud of the mundane stuff you don’t understand.”)
But, as almost a contrasting corollary* to that thread, I would say to the OP subject That’s okay. My best friend doesn’t understand the appeal of live concerts. I don’t get the appeal of NASCAR Racing, boxing, WWF, UFC, hockey or the big televised ___ball sports. My coworker doesn’t understand the appeal of comedies and drama when there’s so much reality to watch on CourtTV. My wife doesn’t understand why martial arts movies make any money at all.
The point is: If it doesn’t appeal to you, that’s fine. Tell us what does appeal to you and why. We’ll probably turn it into a discussion of what we like about it, too, and be less oppositional in the communicative exchange. As for GOT, there’s got to be enough threads on GOT to generate more words than the original books but nobody’s going to force you to participate in them if you don’t appreciate GOT or the genre in general.
–G
I can’t explain
the time it takes
to make you understand
…–Robin Zander (Cheap Trick)
…Never Had a Lot to Lose
…Lap of Luxury
+We seem to have drummed him out with our level-headed responses to that one, too.
*Is that possible, or an incorrect contradiction in terms?
This basic idea was expressed by a couple of people, so, to you both: there’s a misunderstanding at work here. An assertion (such as the one I made) that people enjoy identifying with lords, ladies, kings, queens, emperors, etc., is NOT an assertion of approval of every character who happens to be a lord, lady, king, queen, or emperor. Rather, it’s an assertion that people enjoy fantasizing about hierarchies in which they’re at the top. People enjoy hearing “your grace.”
They may dislike (for example) the character of “Joffrey” very much–while still getting pleasure from the depiction of power available to anyone who might find himself in the position of being (again, for example) King of Westeros.
Again, no specific approval or disapproval of particular characters is at issue, here.
Well, there you go.
I’m reminded of the attempt to get off the ground a “Lower Decks” spin-off of Star Trek: The Next Generation. On the face of it, a series about the young hopefuls and their struggles to rise in the Federation hierarchy had a lot of story possibilities. And of course the fact that it didn’t happen is traceable to more than one cause…but one of them is the relative lack of enthusiasm with which the idea was greeted. Those who’d have had to fund the series feared that viewers wouldn’t support a show about the bottom of the hierarchy with the same fervor given to the *‘Captain and heads of department’ *versions of Trek that had done so well over the decades.
Stories about those at the bottom are doable (as with your mention of Deadwood), but…iffy.
I have no idea what point you’re trying to make. Large numbers of works of fiction of all types throughout human history, even the ones that everyone agrees are super-high-quality, focus on people in positions of power.
There’s a reason that it’s “The Tragedy of Hamlet, prince of Denmark” rather than “The tragedy of Hamlet, serf of some city in Denmark”.
The most-respected TV shows of the past 20 years are probably The Sopranos (which focuses on a mob BOSS) and The Wire (which is quite similar to GoT in that its huge cast of characters includes people on both the top and the bottom of the various power structures that make up the city of Baltimore). (The Wire is probably a bit more bottom-heavy than GoT.)
The best movie of all time is frequently said to be Citizen Kane, which is about a rich and powerful guy.
So, please, spell out for us exactly what it is you think you are saying.