Having spent the past 5 weeks exploring the possibility of prejudice in A Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, the series draws to a close. Think of this as the obligatory fantasy appendix.
This started with a bad, bad article: though it featured the snappy, memorable summary “as well as being mightily entertaining, Game of Thrones is racist rape-culture Disneyland with Dragons,” Laurie Penny’s write up for the New Statesman was flatly wrong. She wrote challengingly that merely calling the series problematic was “an understatement so profound that it obscures more than it reveals”, but had no problem writing “the goodies are the rough, noble Northerners, the Stark family, none of whom have any discernible character defects, and the baddies are the yellow-haired Southern Lannisters” in the opening paragraph, when complaining of the simplistic plot. That’s the crow calling the raven black, to use the Westerosi phrase. Saying there’s only one plot? Which one is that? Danaerys’ plan to win the Dothraki over and reclaim Westeros; Ned’s investigation of murderous schemes in King’s Landing; Tyrion’s attempt to win approval and retain his head; Catelyn’s investigation into the attempt on Bran; The splintering of the kingdom? Reducing the houses to goodies and baddies?
Readers, I had my nerd rage on. Someone was wrong on the internet.
In an offsite post, I took apart the straight up factual errors – there being multiple, interlocking, unconventional plots, numerous factions and no such thing as goodies or baddies: The Starks have their own clear faults, the Lannisters their own virtues (I’m thinking mainly of Tyrion and Kevan here, though Cersei’s protecting of her own children and the twins’ mutual devotion count too). Taking apart the accusations of bigotry is more difficult, but Laurie Penny is still wrong.Particularly in genres, tropes abound, some of which are problematic. Debates still exist over whether a character fits a trope and what the implications of that are. Is Kendra’s appearance in Buffy season 2 token diversity or is she a step towards diversifying a superficially homogenous cast? Is her being killed off standard for a guest star or the black guy dies first trope? When Faith arrives, is she erasing BME characters further, or would Faith being BME have met the blackness = evilness trope?*
Yes, yes, yes, no, maybe, yes.
In Westeros, is having the ethnically diverse Dothraki Khalasar speak their own language and having their own culture othering or respectfully giving them an authentic culture? Is relegating most magic to Essos a logical, plot sanctioned way of grounding Westeros in reality or orientalism in practice? Is regularly noting that Summer Islanders are “ebon skinned” making too much of their race or making a point about the homogeneity of the higher echelons of Westerosi society? How many natural or praising references to the High Valyrian, Pentoshi, Lysene, Tyroshi & Braavosi languages are needed to make up for references to (BME) ‘Mongrel Ghiscari’?
A regular presence in this series, aside from that photo of Lord Baelish, has been the principle that depicting prejudice is not condoning it, and that the author can plant subtle focuses and phrasing to demonstrate their distaste for certain attitudes. You might conclude a more mature, more challenging author would let readers decide against an attitude themselves, without an author stand in to tell the moral of the story, especially in an unenlightened society where no large movement is yet fighting against prejudice. Do you need an author to tell you that racism is wrong? I hope not, but if you have certain privileges, you likely need an author to tell you what racism is.
Amid this swirling fog of gray areas, of whether a harmful trope is in play, whether a prejudice is condoned, we can ask how it makes us feel. I argued, logically, that the accusations of racism were misapplied, but I was far more able to find areas of misogyny, LGBT phobia and harmful depictions of disability. In other words, I was aware of problematic depictions of those categories that can describe me. It would be too easy to call it coincidence.
I feel that acknowledging these privileges is important, raising as it does the issue of who can accuse or redeem art of prejudice. I come from the position that George R R Martin’s opus has risked these accusations in being sure that he deals with an important part of his key theme: Power. That atrocious article at least noted, partially accurately, that the show is concerned with the question of the good ruler. More accurately, it’s concerned with the exercise of power. We see models of rule –Grand tribal Khalasars, small hill tribes, monarchy, factional monarchy, factional anarchy/libertarianism (depending on your interpretation of the free folk), Volantene democracy, Targaryan fascism, a Qaartheen oligarchy, etc. We see principles of power in Robert and Renly’s hedonism, Stark’s loyalty and fairness (fairness which results in massacres), Stannis’ righteousness, Lannister’s subterfuge, Varys and Littlefinger’s pragmatic understanding of power and ploys, divine right, fitness-to-rule, inheritance, might is right in both the Greyjoys and the Dothraki, etc.
Of course, the series would be much shallower in looking at who has power and how they use it if it ignored from whom power was taken and how it affects them. So, we get the depictions of inequality and societal racism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism and class privilege and details in every chapter of the uncomfortable positions unequal power forces people into.
The master of putting people in uncomfortable positions
A conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, Martin has included his concerns about injustice in both public interviews and his writing. Injustice matters to him, and I believe his care in filling Westeros with complex, flawed cultures is a way of examining injustice, not simply pandering to othering fantasy genre convention.
Already nearly 5 times the length of the Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire has two more volumes to go: we can’t know what conclusions Martin will come to on matters of just rule, if he even decides any system works. I think we can, however, accurately predict that social injustice will not be allowed to fade into the background. And by the gods he better make Ramsay Bolton suffer.
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