winter is coming

So I kind of want to write a Game of Thrones AU about Eddard Stark, professor of political science at Cornell, asked by an old friend to run for the congressional district and gently pushed into it by his wife and six adult children, one of whom has just gone away to join the Peace Corps.

...I don't even know, okay.

Well, okay, I do. I am halfway through the second book in the series, and halfway through the first episode of the HBO thing, and I am enjoying them thoroughly with a painful consciousness of their many, many failings. (And also don't want spoilers? I appreciate the books came out forever ago, thanks for indulging me thus far.)

So far I like it all a lot. The worldbuilding is, if sometimes unoriginal, sometimes very impressive, and there are details, interesting grace notes, clever twisting plots, really good villains. The Stark family appeal to me on many levels - I love stories of families, and their ways of fitting and splitting, together and apart - and I particularly like Ned Stark. (On the flight back Shim read it too and we agreed that Ned Stark, intelligent, wry, and genre-savvy, is in a lot of ways a refugee from a very different book. (As is Tyrion Lannister - we eventually agreed that Tyrion could march mostly unchanged into a Wodehouse novel, gripe a little about his horrendous aristocratic family and then attempt to filch Anatole.) As for Ned Stark, I think we agreed that his closest relative might be Aral Vorkosigan, or at least they would have a lot to talk about, esconced in a bar somewhere with several bottles of red wine.

And Bran is the cutest, if possibly the most self-aware eight-year-old in the history of fiction. (I was pleased to note he was aged up slightly in the HBO version!)

But: the problem. The thing is - the thing is! - I do not like what is commonly known as "heroic fantasy". The women are always evil, for one thing. ( spoilers for the first book/series - mentions rape briefly )

So I do know, then, why my fannish engagement with this series probably goes like this AU where Ned Stark is married to his gorgeous South Asian wife Catelyn, who worships different gods to him, and they've got one kid who's a fashion designer and another who's a disability activist who yells at the TSA a lot, and Ned is an unwilling transplant into politics from the simple academic life even if it is really fucking cold up north. (Yes, Ithaca = Winterfell in my head, what of it.)

Also, I went to New Zealand. (Winter was coming there.) I have a lot of posts to make!