winter is coming

[raven]

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. Cersei is a classic villain, but I think that's okay - she's a ruthless, fabulous villain, with characterisation and dimensionality. But where are the other women who aren't evil? Sansa is weak and silly - and I particularly hate, in her case, that femininity, which by the way universe let me remind you has no moral value is what's demonised; Arya is saved from her sister's fate by behaving like a boy, which doesn't help with my whole women-are-evil thing. Lysa Arryn is both femme and female, and we're encouraged to despise her: for her choice to keep her son safe from a world where people get stuck with swords a lot. And that's the author's problem, he can write well, well enough so you're nodding away at a section and then have to sit down and go, ....what?

Even Catelyn Stark, who comes as close as possible to being a well-characterised not-evil female protagonist, has the whole thing with Jon Snow, which seems so out-of-character with the rest of her behaviour, attitudes and motivations, that it's almost like her evil is pasted-on-yay. And while I appreciate that Daenerys does get empowerment as her arc, and that's cool, the degrees of fucked-up in how she gets there are, well, epic. She saves a woman from being raped and is duly punished by the narrative for it. I mean. Seriously.

Oh, and brown people! There are none. The Drothraki would count if they had characterisation and weren't continuously described as animalistic, but neither of those things happen. And what bothers me is that this isn't historical fiction - you can forgive a lack of brown people in, say, Regency-period romance. This is a fantasy novel where everything, from the geography to the culture to the stars in the sky, are set to the author's fancy, and it was published in the nineties, for heaven's sake. There should be brown people; there should be non-evil women. (Maybe non-evil brown women! Wow.)

But then - I figured out round about page eight hundred that, well, that's part of the fantasy, right? "Heroic fantasy" means a world of escapism, a better world for the reader: that means swordfighting, and magic, and no one who looks like me.

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!

Comments

[forthwritten]

Write the AU! After all, remember what happened last time? WHAT COULD GO WRONG.

Despite knowing nothing about Game of Thrones and not following this year's Premier League drama, I am immensely pleased that this exists. Someone has done this. I really hope there are football fans thinking up fic.

[isis]

I would so read that AU! And I totally agree that Aral and Ned would be soulmates.

Without spoiling you (I have read all the books so far, although I have not seen the HBO series) I will say that the women's arcs become more interesting as the series continues. In particular, certain characters I disliked in the first two books become vastly more nuanced and interesting later on.

As far as the color issue goes, again, there are other people of other colors (not just the Dothraki) who you will meet in later books. It's very land-based, i.e., Westeros is White People (although the people of Dorne in the far south are perhaps less relentlessly white), but people of other colors come from other countries which you haven't encountered yet.

[raven]

They would, wouldn't they? They'd get through a LOT of wine. I am pleased that the portrayal of women improves, but not particularly impressed by the other thing. The white people at the centre and others in other places is such a tired fantasy standard, and always makes me wonder whether the authors have ever actually looked at the real world, or if they have and they just don't care.

[marina]

Ahaha so I read the books when I was 18-19 and am watching the HBO show now. No spoilers, but I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaated Ned Stark (and all the Starks really) when I read the books. Like, I was stuck at a military base when my BFF thrust those books at me and I kept repeating "I don't like fantasy" and she went "READ IT" and I started book 1 and spent half the time wanting to chuck it at the wall because OMFG NED DIE ALREADY. DIE DIE DIE I HATE YOU. And my friend kept preventing me from doing it and going "KEEP READING" and then I did and well, book 1 ended the way it did and I went "huh, um, I guess I can... give this thing a chance?"

So like, I loved Cersei (and haaaaated Catelyn) and didn't see her as a villain at all (like, there are no villains in those books, nor heroes, to me, at least until book 4). I thought the books were just... interesting explorations of why people are the way they are, how circumstances and privilege shape us, and how we and the narratives we create shape history. They have many failings, but that's what I felt they were trying to do and they were successful enough to keep me reading.

It's worth pointing out that the first 3 books really are a complete arc with a beginning, middle and end. And much of the point of that arc is that Things Are Not As They Seem. Characters you start out liking turn out to be idiots or villains, characters you take for villains turn out to be not-so-bad or even completely misunderstood by the other characters/historic narrative.

So it's tough to tell you where the strong women are without spoilers :) But while there aren't nearly as many women at the center of things as there should be (I love how no one in Martin's world ever has more than one daughter except Catelyn and her sister, EVERYONE ELSE HAS ENDLESS SONS) there are a lot of really interesting women, it's not just Cersei and Catelyn and her kids. The number of awesome women grows from book to book (this is also part of why I hated book 1 so much, NONE OF THE INTERESTING CHARACTERS WERE FEATURED IN IT), BUT honestly I think what happened to Martin was that in the 90s he had all these grand plans for writing really subversive epic fantasy and he kind of tried to be as ~subversive~ as he could, and then the first three books were major, major hits aaaaand then 10 years later when he wrote book 4 he was... a far, far more conventional and conservative writer than he'd started out as.

So I mean, when I was done reading book 3 I was actually really pleased with the amazing, complicated, varied women he set up - again, I don't see any heroes or villains in his books so they were all complicated, all various shades of grey - but then by the end of book 4 (and with my predictions for book 5, which all turned out to be true) I realized that he simply wasn't going to do anything interesting with all these women he's set up. I HOPE THIS ISN'T A SPOILER! Plus it's just my opinion. But all the potential for awesome I saw by the end of book 3... dissipated after the next 2 books.

(We won't even mention the racism, except I want to warn you that the HBO show makes the racism A THOUSAND TIMES WORSE than it is in the books - I know you think that isn't possible, but I promise you they manage it through a lot of effort and dedication - so you know, FYI if you keep watching. Also the HBO version makes the gender issues and rape (which is already very present in the books) UNBELIEVABLY, HORRIDLY worse. By season 2 there is seriously a pointless sex scene of exploitation and sexy naked women's bodies in every episode.)

[raven]

This is interesting, especially as it seems clear we view the books so very differently.(Part of the reason I like Ned Stark so much is that he seems like the only character with any view to a bigger picture - although that said maybe I am asking too much, with a heroic fantasy novel, to have characters with any awareness of institutional politics.) I am enjoying them! But I am wondering if women-with-agency later on may not balance out against OMG RACISM.

[marina]

Whoa whoa, wait, man, Ned Stark came off to you as someone who thinks of the bigger picture? Or the only person in the books who thinks/sees the bigger picture?

Maaaaan >_< I AM TRYING SO HARD not to bring out the spoilers (I won't! I won't!) but the reason I really disliked Ned Stark was that he was the worst politician in that universe (arguably second only to Catelyn), he had no understanding of how the world works or how anything works and he basically spent his life living in his lalaland of ignorance and privilege.

Like, there's no one at King's Landing who sees the big picture LESS than Ned Stark, except maybe Robert, but then Robert was put on the throne by Ned to begin with, so. Robert is 100% the product of Ned's short sightedness and propensity to live in a fantasy realm rather than real life.

Much of the thing I love about the books was, as I said, the descronstion of how we create narratives, how we create history, and a lot of that was having to listen to Ned classic-fantasy-hero Stark explain the world to the reader in book 1 and then spending the next several books realizing how wrong, deceitful and deluded Ned was. Basically NOTHING HE EVER SAID was actually true - at best it was partially true.

Which, again, these books are meant to be subversions of classic heroic fantasy. I like to think they're in direct dialogue with Lord of the Rings. So Ned Stark is a straight up LOTR hero. He's kind and gentle and noble and just happens to be a knight and a lord. But the problem is that he's a LOTR character in the real world - and in the real world he's actually privileged and stupid and his concept of honor means he doesn't see the shades-of-grey reality in front of him. In the world of LOTR he would have ruled over a kingdom for all time. In the world of A Song of Ice and Fire he gets his head cut off in 0.5 seconds. In AFOIAF the characters who make it and thrive are people who understand reality, who understand politics and compromise and who have usually not had the privilege of Ned's black-and-white perspective, afforded to him by his loving, functional family and his money and status.

Once you get to know the Lannisters, for example, you suddenly realize what happens when people who ARE actually good at politics and at seeing the big picture and at ruling and analyzing and making things functional deal with real problems such as fucked up family dynamics, structural misogyny, gender expectations, etc. THAT's when the books are at their most interesting to me (I mean the books are never less interesting to me than when Starks are involved because seriously THE STARKS ARE BORING. They grew up privileged in their little kingdom and as soon as they have to face the real world they're like D: D: D: and I'm all "bye, I'll go read about people who've been doing stuff for the last 20 years, kthnx").

So, IDK, maybe you won't like the books or maybe you just haven't gotten to certain parts yet or maybe you'll finish them and see them radically differently, but the general consensus (and certainly the way I read them) is that they are meant as a subversion of epic, classic fantasy (they are occasionally successful in this and occasionally not so much) so characters like Ned Stark are... a kind of decoy. They make you think you're reading LOTR and then... well, you're really really not. Which, you know, was absolutely my favorite part! But totally doesn't work for a lot of people.

[raven]

Absolutely, because I just, I cannot read these books as a subversion of the genre when the sort of subversion that really matters to me, fantasy-world racism, doesn't get a look-in. I mean, I get that there are lots of interesting things to be done with dealing with LotR's fundamental assumptions about the world, but because of the race angle, I find it very hard to care enough to enjoy that reading, you know? So I suspect you're right and I may just not make it through the rest of the series. I liked the idea of a slightly modernised trashy fantasy, and it gets boring for me as it moves away from that.

Re: Ned Stark's view of things, I really did mean what I said: he's the only of the viewpoint characters who's in a position to see more than the world immediately around him. The rest of the characters live in much smaller worlds. I don't disagree that he doesn't make the best choices with the information he has access to! I like very much that Tyrion, put in exactly his position, achieves what he might have had he gone about it differently. (But I still maintain that Tyrion could wander into Blandings and make sensible life choices, so.)

Now you shut up before you spoil me. :P Back later when I've read further.

[gavagai]

The conclusion I am drawing from all of this is that all modern fantasy should be written by China Mieville. Pls try to ignore the fact that I can look at a blueberry muffin and draw that conclusion.

(OK there are some things that aren't great even in his books but seriously hey girl, The Scar.)

[carthaginians]

what marina said! alternately Tyrion in a Wodehouse novel sounds lovely too :D

[megaptera]

Thank you for saving me from wasting time reading these. ;) I love heroic fantasy but it's probably because my first taste of it was from the Sword and Sorceress anthologies. Regardless of what Bradley did in her personal life, these books were amazing.

[noldo]

So I kind of loathe these books and cannot take them seriously as A Subversion Of That Awful Genre, but oh my goodness I would read your AU foreeeeeeeever. (I would also read a Wodehouse novel about Tyrion Lannister!)

[moralrelativist.livejournal.com]

I would read your Game of Thrones AU so hard. :) Seriously, it sounds brilliant!

[elanid.livejournal.com]

Your AU sounds fabulous, and I too would read it forever and ever! (More seriously, I agree with all your criticisms and wish...well, heroic fantasy, it would be nice if you'd stop punching me in the nose, I suppose is what I wish. But.)

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

Oh, oh, yes to it all. I've been plowing through the books the last few months, and I'm partway into book 4 so I'm going to try hard not to spoil you.

1) I would read your AU so hard.

2) I have moments where I like the books and endless times where I can't seem to stop reading, but I'm often not sure if I *like* them. I think partially because I hate admitting the realism of the people who plot and scheme coming out on top and the honorable ones like Ned Stark ending up screwed over for it.

3) I'm so with you on Sansa. I've seen so many things around fandom of people loving Sansa and how she fights in her own way with her femininity or chivalry or whatever, but I don't see it. Arya, however, I absolutely love. And aside fro Catelyn's weirdly obsessive hangup with Jon, I grew very fond of her too. Both Catelyn and Arya (and, I admit, Cersei) try very hard to make their own agency however they can.

4) I got the impression with Lysa that the problem is less "she tried to protect her child" and more "she is batshit insane" but, *shrugs*

As to your other problems, I think you'll be happier about some of them as you continue and I'm going to stay exactly that vague.

I read somewhere that George RR Martin wrote this as a commentary on heroic fantasy - sortof a "this is how miserable things could be in those shiny happy worlds you want to pretend about" which casts on interesting light on the whole thing. I have no idea if that was Martin's actual intent or just a fannish idea, but it's intriguing to think about.

[fyrdrakken]

Agreed on the brown people in ASoIaF front -- the Dothraki were hitting a lot of stereotypes, and it remains to be seen how the movie will be casting the other peoples of the eastern continent. (So far this season, one character whom I don't remember having been indicated as being of color in the books has been cast as a black man, so there's room for hope.)

As for the women all being evil, I have a whole list of objections I want to make but need to save them until you've read the rest of the books. Just -- don't judge the character arcs until you've seen more of them, the first book is pretty much just set-up anyway.

[sophiahagia.livejournal.com]

I would totally read that AU.

Also, re: lack of diversity, I hear you. I can't decide if Tyrion is awesome or if he's a horrendous depiction of a disabled character.

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

I personally think Tyrion is a remarkably good depiction, though I could understand arguments in the other direction.

Yes, a lot of people make snap judgments about him or treat him a specific way because he is a dwarf, but I think the narrative treats him as a person who happens to have a disability, rather than a character who *is* his disability. I also think that, in general, the people who are more "villains" in the narrative tend to treat him poorly, while the ones who treat him better are the more grey-area or good characters, if that makes any sense. The people who can look beyond his dwarfism are the ones shown in a better light.

And the type of world he lives on is not one likely to look kindly upon dwarfs, or people with other disabilities, so it's sadly not surprising he'd be judged harshly for it. I think the fact that he proves competent, again and again, both physically and mentally, to the readers, means a lot, even if it doesn't always work well for him in the story (which, well, things go well for very few characters in these books...)

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I tried reading the books years ago and never made it through, but I just needed you to know:

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 would so read this, especially written by you.

[selkath.livejournal.com]

I would also absolutely read this AU! It sounds fantastic (far better than the actual thing, which I like significantly less than most other people on the planet. Almost not at all, actually--I quit after about 1.5 books for various reasons.)

[nnozomi.livejournal.com]

Oh you made me laugh. That means that, having once upon a time been a Cornell faculty brat, I would have gone to high school with the Starks junior and Jon Snow... I would so so read that AU.
(random passerby commenting, also a big fan of your fics in several fandoms. thanks for much reading pleasure.)