Game Of Thrones is the heart-breaking overtime loss by the underdog of books/TV shows.
Everytime you start to root for a character/think the over-arching plot is actually going somewhere, they die/it doesn't.
I'm actually a little bitter that GoT is so critically acclaimed and widely watched. Screw George RR Martin and his 'homeless Santa' beard.
I haven't read the books but my understanding is the big metatheme is deconstructing the common tropes of fantasy writing. Hence all the badasses laid low in the most mundane ways, buildups to epic confrontations that fall apart or take an unexpected turn, and "good guys" who really are just a different shade of gray than the "villains".
For what it is, I like it a lot. The characters feel more like humans than one-note archetypes, and it's very hard to tell what's going to happen next, except for a few telegraphed events like Danaerys torching the slavers and the major characters I think are going to die very soon (not a book reader, but the signs are so clear to me that I don't want to name names).
The thing about GoT (or more aptly A Song Of Ice and Fire, the books..the TV show has Peter Dinklage and I can't get mad at him) is that the whole idea of the 'meta deconstruction' by killing off major characters spontaneously, or having large moments occur spontaneously (the death of ___ ____ at the end of the most recent book is a great example of this, or the death of ____ _________ by his ___ while he escapes after _____ _______) or the moral apathy of _____ _________'s actions the closer he gets to his eventual goal are great examples of flying in the face of traditional fantasy. It's absolutely a valid observation of the works.
But, because of that pattern, there is no central story. You start out the very first book with the white walkers. You start out the second book with the white walkers. White walkers happen sporadically throughout the rest of the books. Guess what we know about the white walkers after 4300 pages or, in my case, over 200 hours of audiobooks? Nothing! We know nothing, Jon Snow!
But meanwhile, all this other crap is going on that ultimately amounts to nothing more than B-stories when there isn't an A-story. And that's not all bad, it happens in a lot of series. Robert Jordan's life's work the Wheel Of Time series has that stuff happen fairly frequently.
But the nagging feeling you'll get if you read the books and, like me, tend to critique what you're reading as often as you enjoy reading it, all the 'meta' garbage is really just a facade to get you to read an elongated novelization of All My Children, with dragons and swords, and gratuitous sex scenes. Its guy-soaps (which is unfair to the women who also love these books..its fantasy-nerd-soaps)
It would be like if you were to write a series of books, with a strong male protagonist and multiple strong female protagonists. None of them are your barbie-doll types, they're intelligent, self-aware, and they all happen to be maddeningly in love with the male protagonist. Also, there is magic and blood and sex and stuff.
And people would say, 'wow! look at how deftly he shrugged the 'guy meets girl' paradigm, look how he defies the barbie doll female archtype!'
But you know its just a glorified harem.
Topic: A Game of Thrones (contains spoilers) (Read 416242 times)