Sorry to necro a bit here, but I never replied because I've been away for a few days and I feel like I've made some points which perhaps need explaining.
Innocent Flower said:
She isn't perfect in the books, but nor is she ridiculously incompetent and always wrong. you should also note that it doesn't make sense in the tv series to put her in charge of anything, much less cite her as competent.
True, but that's a point worth making I think. She's a queen, and therefore
noone gets a choice about whether she's in charge.
BloatedGuppy said:
I'm curious, though, what it is that you find overly traditional about the books?
Firstly, I should stress that I'm not a passive reader. I went in to both the book and the show actively looking for subversive things, and in both cases I found a lot of them. To expand on my point above, I feel like Martin's approach to monarchy is much, much less politically complacent than a lot of people who simply cribbed Tolkien without seriously considering the views which informed it. I liked that.. in fact there are a lot of things I liked in both, which is why I'm posting here and not rolling my eyes at another GoT thread.
However, I think there are certain things you probably can't get away from without radically altering fantasy (or perhaps trying to step outside of fantasy as a tradition and genre). For one, there's a kind of implicit conservatism which I find really grating, because ultimately.. and it's really weird how science fiction differs in this regard.. fantasy is almost never actually
about anything. There's this genre expectation of a fixed line between reality and fantasy which seems to prevent fantasy from ever really making a point. ASOIAF has lots of cool characters, and they go around in a cool world and dick each other over in cool ways, but that world exists for the sake of existing, it exists because it is cool. It isn't really a reflection or a commentary, it is simply an exercise in word-building. World building, in my opinion, has become a very dangerous preoccupation of the fantasy genre to the point that it's eclipsed everything else, and we can talk about how that unfetters the imagination but ultimately.. all it means that everything comes down to the rule of cool. Cool people doing cool stuff in cool worlds that don't actually have any relevance to anything outside of themselves.
I suspect the problem is that fantasy as a genre mostly grew out of the study of mythology and philology. The structure of the academic study of mythology at the time of Tolkien is essentially a bunch of Christians talking about how stupid other people's beliefs are and imposing a bunch of weird humanist assumptions onto the often very anti-humanist literature of non-Christian cultures. The fact that Joseph Campbell's ideas were so readily seized upon by fantasy authors as soon as they came along is not an accident at all, I don't think. The patronizing idea of a separation between truth and mythology (or between "reality" and "fantasy") is kind of inherent to fantasy, that weird pretense of getting inside the head of someone from a different time, place or world, of being able to impose order onto what they thought or believed through the philological method. That to me is the disreputable legacy of genre fantasy, and it's the thing I can't unsee when I try to read anything.
Mervyn Peake is always my prototypical example of a fantasy author I actually liked, and I seem to be part of a declining school of thought who rates him over Tolkien and wishes his legacy was more evident. I like him, basically, because there's not a trace of philology in his work. It's contrived and ridiculous, but it's also rich and full of thematic meaning and social commentary. I've encountered very few fantasy novels which meet that standard, in my eyes.
BloatedGuppy said:
They could have as easily given Theon scenes with a Stark, or crafted a three dimensional character in Ros's place.
But that wouldn't necessarily have worked.
I don't claim to understand the differences between writing for television and writing a novel, in fact I'm not entirely sure they are as big as some people claim, but I do understand the concept and need for an audience surrogate. The books are all in POV, so yes. If GRRM had wanted to characterize Theon (which in my opinion would have been a good idea) all he'd have to do is have one of the Stark POV characters talk to Theon. In a TV show, the audience is external to all the characters. They don't know them, they don't care about them and they can't just be given an info dump about what a character is feeling to make them care. That's a pretty major difference which has to be written around.
BloatedGuppy said:
The fact that brown people are apparently terribly uncivilized does not make the mission to civilize them unheroic, it merely reinforces the difficulties of doing so. Again, this is the road of trials, the trials can be very difficult and the hero may even fail some, but as long as the hero ultimately emerges to face the apotheosis at the end, as long as the trials ultimately serve to make the hero emerge, then the basic structure of the heroes journey is unchallenged.
What's far more challenging, and the direction the show seems to be hinting it, at is to pull a Heart of Darkness and to call into question the rationality of the "white man's burden" itself. I personally hope they run with that.
