While at New York Comic-Con, I took some time out from gawking at costumes, dancing Ghostbusters, and a Quidditch tournament to chat with Overthinking It reader and author Daniel Wallace. Daniel is the New York Times-bestselling writer of two dozen books including Star Wars: The Jedi Path, The Marvel Encyclopedia, and The Art of Superman Returns. In other words, he’s an Overthinker of the highest degree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpIsYHccWgo

We talked mostly about his two in-universe Star Wars Books, The Jedi Path and the The Book of Sith (coming soon, complete with super evil pyramid case). Dan also gives a hearty Vader “NOOOOOOO!” at the end of the interview, which, given that he wrote an entire book about Vader’s anatomy, is probably as accurate of a recreation you can get without a mechanical breathing apparatus.

You can get your own copy of The Jedi Path and pre-order The Book of Sith on Amazon.com. Check out the rest of Daniel’s books here.

Related Posts

• New York Comic-Con 2011: #ZombifyWallStreet
• Episode 172: Johnny Appleseed’s Seed-Shooting Gatling Gun
• NY Comic-Con 2011: Costume Photo Gallery
• Overthinking It at New York Comic-Con 2011
• Episode 119: Negative Capability

A pretty girl and her friend are playing in a quiet spot some ways from home. Unbeknownst to them, they are being spied on by a male figure in the bushes. At length he emerges — the friend shrieks and runs away, but the pretty girl holds her ground, even though she’s frightened.

This is how Odysseus meets Nausicaa in Homer’s Odyssey. It is also how Severus Snape meets Lily Potter in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — perhaps the only YA fantasy ever to open with a quote from Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers:

Oh, the torment bred in the race,
the grinding scream of death
and the stroke that hits the vein,
the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,
the curse no man can bear.
But there is a cure in the house,
and not outside it, no,
not from others but from them,
their bloody strife. We sing to you,
dark gods beneath the earth.
Now hear, you blissful powers underground –
answer the call, send help.
Bless the children, give them triumph now.

Once you start looking for ancient Greek parallels in Harry Potter, they show up everywhere.

Harry lives in a world described by prophecy and teeming with creatures pulled from classical myth: centaurs, spirits, basilisks, phoenixes, hippogriffs, and three-headed watchdogs. Circe and Mopsus appear on Chocolate Frog cards. Even the Sphinx makes a cameo appearance in Goblet of Fire.

On a more technical level, many of Rowling’s central characters have epithets, words or phrases that grow stronger with repetition until they attain an iconic resonance. Athena in the Iliad and Odyssey is often described as grey-eyed; in much the same way, Harry has green eyes — specifically, his mother’s eyes. There is Voldemort’s high, cold laugh and Dumbledore’s half-moon spectacles.

But it’s in the themes of Harry’s story that Rowling is most powerfully in debt to Greek epic and tragedy. The classical framework illuminates two otherwise puzzling aspects of the Potter universe: what is the significance of blood, and why is there no sense of religion in the wizarding world?

The Blood Paradox

Let’s start with the death of Dumbledore.

To anyone familiar with Greek literature, Dumbledore’s funeral may as well have featured a witch on a broomstick writing CHTHONIC HERO in ten-foot letters across the sky. A king or champion is laid to rest, and the grave makes the land hallowed and uniquely powerful. Dumbledore’s white marble tomb, with the pyre set alight by a phoenix and the appearance of centaur archers, is the same as the funeral of Hector, who died defending his towered city; the burial-place of Oedipus, old and wise, who makes victorious the land that accepts his body; and especially the sacred tomb of murdered Agamemnon, where the victim’s children plan their revenge.

Which brings us right back to The Libation Bearers.

The lines Rowling lifted from Aeschylus makes it plain that blood is both a curse and a cure, miasma and numen. The children of Agamemnon have a dilemma: if shedding kindred blood is evil, then how are they to take vengeance on the mother who slew their father? In one way, Harry’s problem is simpler: he does not have to choose between his parents. But he still must find a way to defeat an enemy with shared blood in his veins, blood that has been hallowed by Lily’s sacrifice.

To make things more complicated still, in the wizarding world there is a tension between the idea that Muggle-born wizards are no different than pure-bloods (meaning blood is unimportant) and the fact that Harry’s mother’s blood is his most powerful defense (meaning blood is hugely important).

What that Aeschylus quote helps illuminate is that it is not the purity of blood that matters, but what happens when blood is spilled by or for someone else.

Of all Rowling’s characters, Dumbledore best understands that blood’s great power does not come from some innate quality, but in blood’s ability to bind people even beyond the bounds of mortal death. Voldemort, on the other hand, fundamentally misunderstands this power of connection, as Dumbledore explains to Harry:

He took your blood believing it would strengthen him. He took into his body a tiny part of the enchantment your mother laid upon you when she died for you. His body keeps her sacrifice alive, and while that enchantment survives, so do you and so does Voldemort’s one last hope for himself.

- Deathly Hallows

Voldemort’s mistake is to think that shedding the blood of others will increase his power. In fact, it increases his enemies, as many of Voldemort’s victims have families and loved ones whose grief motivates their struggle against him. As in Aeschylus, there is a moral imperative to avenge a slain or injured relative. It’s as though kindred blood-ties become more activated by violence. This is why Narcissa Malfoy undermines Voldemort’s plans, why Neville refuses to join the Death Eaters and slays Nagini, why Aunt Petunia’s blood is capable of protecting Harry during all those summer breaks between books.

In this context, we can see the phrase ‘blood traitor’ as a red herring. Being related is nothing: all the pure-blood families are related, we are told. It is the spilling of blood more than the sharing of it that matters in the wizarding world. To shed blood by murder or to die in someone’s defense are both far more potent acts than simply existing in the same kindred network.

And this same connective power of blood allows Harry to be guided by those he has lost. In both Goblet of Fire and Deathly Hallows there are scenes where Harry is surrounded and supported by his dead parents and other victims of Voldemort. Both scenes also involve the shedding of blood: Cedric Diggory’s death and several jarring deaths during the Battle of Hogwarts. This is a remarkably clear parallel to the nekuia in the Odyssey, where Odysseus pours out blood for the dead to drink while he converses with them.

The blood link is Harry’s greatest asset against his nemesis. It is also the key to Rowling’s moral universe.

Where Do Bad Wizards Go When They Die?

Harry Potter is surrounded by the dead — the ghosts at Hogwarts, moving photographs and portraits, resurrected spirits, loved ones lost, and memories experienced in the Pensieve. And yet, aside from one conversation in Order of the Phoenix, very little is said about the afterlife. Capital letters are implied: when they die, wizards Move On to Some Other Place in the Beyond. There is no discussion of wizard heaven or wizard hell, or what Harry would have to do to end up in one rather than the other.

And really, should there be? Saintly behavior would not bring Harry’s parents back. Voldemort’s darkness will not be conquered by the shining purity of our hero’s spotless soul. Such an idea would diminish the agony and sacrifice of every wizard who fought him before Harry’s birth and afterward. And those sacrifices, Lily’s in particular, that define the ethical framework in which Harry grows up.

Because of his mother’s murder and the protection it gives him, Harry is both innately opposed to Voldemort’s brand of evil and uniquely positioned to fight it. Two decades of spilled blood cry out for vengeance, a palpable debt that only grows heavier as the series progresses. What Harry needs is not a list of abstract rules for virtue – witness the horrible absurdity of Dolores Umbridge’s I must not tell lies – but a concrete, practical sort of goodness. Harry constructs an ethical system around courage, loyalty, and altruism as an explicit response to his enemy’s cowardice, cruelty, and narcissism.

It’s pretty clear (in most cases) when a witch or wizard is good or evil, courageous or craven. And that moral status indicates something very substantial: whether or not the witch or wizard in question can be relied upon for help in battle. Good and evil actions have echoes not in the afterlife, but in the living world. Kinship is created out of a shared struggle and blood spilled for a common purpose. The Death Eaters have their brand, and Harry and his friends have their scars.

The greatest possible moral metric is how a witch or wizard copes with death. Lily Potter threw herself between her infant son and his would-be killer, even though she could have escaped with her life. Dumbledore engineered the precise circumstances of his death to protect as many people as possible for as long as he could. In contrast, Voldemort feared his own death so much he tried to kill a one-year-old boy. In a world predicated on courage and self-sacrifice, this is indeed the ultimate evil.

At the end, Harry bravely faces death — precisely the same death as Lily’s. “I’ve done what my mother did,” he tells Voldemort in Deathly Hallows. “They’re protected from you.” Harry’s reenactment of his mother’s sacrifice succeeds because he intends to die. And what he finds is not an afterlife, but a crossroads: he can Move On and be at peace, if he likes, or he can return and make certain that his enemy is conquered.

Harry chooses to go back and fight. There’s nothing more classically Greek than that.

Conclusion

This reading is not intended to suggest that Harry Potter is a pagan throwback completely free of Christian themes. (Because we could have a pretty long discussion about faith and martyrdom and Harry/Dumbledore/Snape, if that sounds fun!) But it is astounding to look away from the Christian lens and see Rowling borrow from classical texts to build a credible, complex system of ethics without reference to the rewards or punishments of the afterlife. It is marvelous to read a story where life and death really, deeply matter in this world and not the next.

Voldemort’s great weakness, as Dumbledore tells us, is that nobody’s death matters to him but his own. The great strength of Harry and the other heroes is that they feel death’s power but do not fear it. They shed blood on behalf of those they love and defeat evil. They find the cure in the house.

Alicia Aho never uses one sentence when there’s room for a second. She also writes historical romance under the name Olivia Waite.

[Does Harry's triumph over Voldemort break the cycle of death and vengeance? Will the Furies create a new form of government where the muggles can exert influence over wizards, like they did at the end of The Eumenides? Sound off in the comments! - Ed.]

Related Posts

• Open Thread for September 9, 2011
• Episode 159: Talking out of My Expelliarmus
• Open Thread for July 15, 2011
• Blood, Tits and Scowling
• Episode 125: The Midi-chlorian Fallacy

Actually, this game doesn't figure in this post. Never played it.

A “well-made plot,” in literary circles, is not simply a good plot, but rather a plot that runs on cause and effect, where the world, the characters, and the narrative arc all behave according to believable causality.  In fact, mere causality is not enough.  You could write a novel where event A leads to event B, which leads to event C and so on — all perfectly rational on the small scale — and end up with an event Z which is unrelated in all but the most mechanical of ways to any previous event other than Y.  This would not be a well-made plot.  Well-made plots must be teleological.  They require causality to function on the large scale, where it sometimes goes by the name of fate.  Finally, on a more pragmatic level, the well-made plot also assumes a certain minimum level of incident.  A novel that describes the experience of drinking a single cup of gas station coffee in bone-pulverizing detail could not be said to have a well-made plot, no matter how rationally it is worked out.  Well made plots need to have weighty narrative goals that are teased, built up to, and achieved. (Note here that the narrative goal is not necessarily the same thing as the protagonist’s goal:  heroes of well-made plots can fail, but as long as their failure is a decisive, causally inevitable moment, it can still be a narrative goal.)

Probably the genre most dependent on the well-made plot is is detective novel, or whodunnit. A detective novel that lacks large-scale causality cannot properly be called a detective novel at all, no matter how many people you have running around smoking cigarettes in fedoras.  There used to even be informal rules about this sort of thing, the idea being that a well-made detective story was one where an observant and intelligent reader could potentially solve the mystery as soon as the detective did.  Which means that you can’t have the detective notice something crucial and keep it to him/herself:  the reader needs to be informed!  All of the Encyclopedia Brown stories are well-made in this sense, even if the solutions are sometimes moronic.  (The Sherlock Holmes stories, incidentally, are not well-made.  Sherlock is forever noticing details which Watson, the narrator, is too dim to pick up on, with the result that neither Watson nor the reader gets the crucial clues until Sherlock has already given the game away.  And for a more extreme example, see Harry Stephen Keeler’s The Riddle of the Travelling Skull, for instance.)

Understanding how well-made plots work in detective stories can help us understand how they work in other kinds of stories, too.  In the mystery novel, the well-made plot is generally understood to be “about” answering the question of who committed the crime:  thus, the whodunnit.  But whodunnits are for the most part also howdunnits and whydunnits.  If we don’t learn the killer’s motive and modus operandi, we’re going to find the story unsatisfying.  And ideally, both of these are also going to be subject to the same kind of large-scale causal logic, and to the same “smart readers can work it out on their own” standard of narrative fair play. Those are the questions that occupy the reader of a detective novel:  who, how, why.  Other questions matter less.  What has been done is necessarily known — a murder — and where and when usually are, although all three of these can be destabilized over the course of the work so that we learn M. Body was actually killed in the hall not the conservatory, or that he was never killed at all.  Mysteries focusing on forensic science do tend to focus on when and where the victim was killed, but only in that it might lead us to the killer.  The information is of no use in itself.  A real whendunnit would have to be written from the point of view of, say, an insurance investigator, attempting to prove that the victim died hours after his policy had lapsed, right?

But actually, that’s not true at all!  Whendunnits do exist, they just aren’t detective stories — or aren’t necessarily detective stories, at least.  Rather, they are stories structured as flashbacks:  stories that begin by showing us that a certain important event has taken place, and then walking us through the circumstances leading up to it.  (Whendunnits are always also howdunnits.)  Nimród Antal’s thriller Vacancy was originally structured like this, before the studio cut it into a more linear and less interesting form.  It was supposed to open with a shot of a wrecked car, pulling slowly out to reveal that it had been driven into a hotel lobby.  Pulling out further, we see police milling about, and a number of stretchers with bodybags.  Then we see Kate Beckinsale giving her statement to the investigator — and then we flash back, and she’s riding in the unwrecked car with Luke Wilson.  That right there is a whendunnit.  We know that sometime before this night is over, that car is going into the hotel lobby.  We also know who is involved, at least in a nebulous way.  But we don’t know when or how.  When and how are the most important question with this kind of plot, just like who and how are the most important questions in the classic detective novel.  And both species of plot can be well made. Both have well-defined causal arcs that start out partially obscured and are completely revealed by the end of the story.  The viewer/reader should be able to work out the solution to both ahead of time.  Not always in a very articulate way, to be sure.  There’s no tell-tale clue halfway through Vacancy that points to the car flying through the window precisely twenty minutes before the end of the film.  But when those dominoes start falling into place, the viewer needs to be thinking “Oh okay, I get it, here it comes, here it comes!” or else the plot has utterly failed to function.

Normal plots – ones that aren’t flashback-structured, like the whendunnit, or post-facto, like the whodunnit, tend to be dunnwhats.  We know who will be doing things, because the main characters are established early on — usually even before we start reading.  Pick up a serious respectable novel off the shelves at your local bookstore, and I will wager you dollars to donuts that the synopsis on the jacket has a lengthy description of the main characters.  But we do not know what they will do. (An important variant, of course, is the exposition-of-character novel, in which what we learn is not so much what the character will do but who they really are on a deep psychological level.  Still, this is usually revealed through a series of critically revealing actions, so the label “dunnwhat” can still apply.)  In the well-made version of this, it’s possible to figure out what the characters will do before they actually do it.

In so far as they aspire to a well-made plot, then, all novels are mystery novels.  There should be information scattered in the early part of the narrative that in some way explains the crucial mystery that gets solved at the end, whether that mystery is who’s been murdering guests at the chateau, or whether the main character will find happiness despite stifling social pressures.  This doesn’t mean you can’t have plot twists!  A little uncertainty on the small scale is necessary to keep things interesting.  But if even retrospectively there’s no way for the reader to figure out what has been dunn, well… that’s a problem.  Not necessarily a crippling one, but a problem.  Take the Harry Potter books:  you keep thinking that Dumbledore is playing a deep game, and that when you’re finally privy to his plan — that is, when Dumbledore finally does the important “what” that his character arc has been building towards — everything will make sense.  But this never happens, which retroactively makes both the character and the whole series less satisfying.

Tension

We know something they don't know.

Despite these similarities, there are two big important ways that these kinds of stories differ from each other. One has to do with the role of the protagonist.  In whodunnits, the reader has to match wits with a detective character who is also trying to solve the mystery.  The detective serves as both a rival and a point of identification for the reader.  We’d like to beat them to the punch, but we understand that they’re on our side.  They feel about their world the way we feel about their world, the same desire drives them as drives us.  In whendunnits, contrariwise, the reader is and must be on their own.  We get to try to solve the whendunnit because we stand outside of the work’s timeline.  Kate Beckinsale doesn’t get to know ahead of time that the car is going through the lobby.  Uma Thurman may hope to Kill Bill, she may plan to Kill Bill, she may even be convinced that she will succeed in Killing Bill, but she doesn’t get to know that “Uma Thurman Will Kill Bill” was the tagline of the movie. The question for us is when/how, the question for her still has to be what/whether.  Whodunnits and whendunnits are on the opposite ends of a spectrum here.  “Normal” plots fall somewhere in between.  In most cases, the main characters don’t themselves know what they are going to do (or, for the psychological variant, who they really are), which puts them in the same shoes as the reader.  But they may or may not care about it.  There’s a very narrow subset of the novel of psychological revelation in which the character is actually trying to figure out who they really are, but in a great many cases they are simply going about their day to day business as a funeral home director, stick-up artist, or heir-apparent to a motorcycle gang.  The actions which are psychologically revealing to the viewers are to the characters completely unrevealing.

The non-psychological dunnwhat, which is more about physical action, tends to work more like a mystery novel.  Arya Stark wants to get home to Winterfell, but she doesn’t know what she has to do to make that happen.  The readers want her to get home to Winterfell, and we don’t know what she has to do to make that happen.  This kind of identification often slips back and forth a little bit — either we have information the character doesn’t, leading to dramatic irony, or the character makes a preparation that the author doesn’t share with us, leading to antidramatic irony — but for the most part it holds fast.  You could notionally imagine a text where a the reader wants to know what the characters will do, but the characters themselves are ambivalent… The Manchurian Candidate, maybe, sort of?  The Neil Gaiman Miracleman?  Weekend at Bernie’s? But as you can see from the examples, this requires some rather special effort on the author’s part.

The second big difference between these narrative forms has to do with the degree of narrative constraint.  Reverend Knox’s very first rule for a well-plotted mystery demands that the killer turn out to be a character introduced within the first few chapters of the story.  Unless these take the form of a phone book, then, a well plotted whodunnit will present you with a sizable but strictly limited number of solutions right off the bat.  Every character who is introduced could be the killer, but only these characters are allowed, which means that — like in a game of Clue — you can narrow down the possibilities over time and get invested in one possibility over another (a bad idea, in Clue, but possible).  For whatever reason, the fewer possibilities there are, the more intense our desire to know becomes.  It’s as if there’s a certain amount of water, flowing through a network of pipes, and as you close the valves on more and more pipes the water pressure in the rest of the system mounts and mounts and mounts.  The climax comes when there’s only one viable choice remaining… but note that this is not sustainable; it’s a moment, not a condition; if you wanted to extend the plumbing imagery, this would be the point where the pipe bursts and starts spraying raw narrative tension all over the shag carpet in your allegorical rumpus room.  So ideally you wait right to the end before letting this happen.  Also, you generally want the rate at which potential murderers are eliminated — at which valves are shut off, like — to increase rather than decrease over the course of the novel.  If there are twenty suspects, and seventeen of them die in the first ten pages of a two-hundred page book, that’s a problem.  It’s also a problem if they’re all viable suspects up until ten pages from the end, at which point, again, seventeen of them die.  You want to eliminate suspects at a steady rate, or on a gently accelerating curve.  And writers really get in trouble when they think they have two viable choices, but one of them is quite clearly not the guy — and then this gets extended for hundreds of hundreds of pages, resulting in, burst pipes, flooded basement, water damage, nasty mildew infestation all up in your crawl space.  (Take the whole Team Edward/Team Jacob business, just for instance.)

We also know something HE doesn't know. Maybe several things.

Whendunnits like whodunnits are constrained, but in a rather different way.  As soon as the meter drops on the plot proper (after the stakes have been established in the flashback, that is), the crucial event could happen at any time:  if the plot flashes back exactly one hour, then you’ve got exactly sixty minutes in which the events could occur.   But if they happen right away, the tension is basically zero, so nobody’s going to write it like that.  If you wait thirty minutes, that tension will build:  now you have only thirty minutes for the event to happen in!  And if you wait forty minutes?  If you wait fifty?  Any storyteller worth their salt, of course, will save the events for the fifty-eighth or fifty-ninth minute.  Just like whodunnits reach their peak intensity when you have the smallest number of potential criminals, whendunnits reach their peak intensity when the window that the crucial actions can fall into is as small as it possibly can be.  There’s something like an unexpected hanging paradox going on here, of course, but in practical terms this matters little.  We can safely assume that the important events in a whendunnit are always going to happen within the last twenty pages of the book or twenty minutes of the film, but knowing this does not protect us from experiencing the increased narrative drive:  “Oh okay, I get it, here it comes, here it comes!”  Once you’ve figured out the underlying narrative logic, it becomes clear that whendunnits don’t technically need to have flashbacks.  All you need is for the readers to have some knowledge of future events that the main characters don’t have, and for there to be a limited time frame in which these events can occur.   We know that the Power Rangers will destroy the rubber-suited monster of the week, we even know how – that one big diagonal slicing move with the power sword.  All we need to know is whether it’s time for it to happen yet in this episode, i.e. when it will happen.  And one of the interesting corollaries of this is that all whodunnits are also whendunnits.  The detective will figure out who the killer is at some point, because it’s generically required.  As you get closer and closer to the end of the book, the time window (expressed here as a matter of page count) during which this can happen gets smaller and smaller — and as a result, the intensity of the experience gets stronger and stronger.   Very often, these two kinds of narrative drive appear in a single work, so that the shrinking subject pool and the shrinking window of opportunity are neatly superimposed.  It’s not just in detective stories either — one particularly clear example of this is the flashback-structured romantic comedy Definitely Maybe, where we know that Ryan Reynolds has had a child with one of his old ex-girlfriends, but not which one.

Compared to these humming narrative engines, the relatively open-ended structure of the serious novel, in which a vividly realized character merely does… something… falls a little flat, which is part of why these books are typically not page turners.  Adventure stories, dunnwhats that are page turners, get around it by providing constraints on their narratives in a different way.  Rather than setting up a situation where the character has no predefined teleological goals, they set up a very clear goal which may or may not be attainable.  They are not dunnwhats but dunnwhethers.  Frodo will toss the ring of power in the volcano… or not.  Lizzie will marry Darcy… or not.  Tony and Maria will find a place for themselves, somewhere a place for themselves… or not, although arguably in this case we already know that they’re doomed, and it’s just a matter of learning when and how they succumb to that doom.  Narratives of this kind present us, like the whodunnit, with a multiple choice question, and therefore are typically considered more frivolous because real life mostly slaps us with short essays.   Many, many romantic novels, serious or trashy, have their heroines choosing between two or three guys — but in real life, it’s never that neat.  Rather, we face the implied choice between all guys, everywhere, and of course there’s a very real chance that even that queasy pseudo-choice will be made meaningless by factors beyond our control, such as whether the guy we choose is even interested, or whether he’ll get hit by a bus tomorrow.  Some life decisions really are unambiguous choices with meaningful results.  Plead guilty, or innocent?  Accept the marriage proposal, or reject it?  But these moments — which we might describe as narratively exciting life experiences — are pretty few and far between.

So to summarize, before we move on to some actual video games:

•  Well-made plots require a sense of long-term causality, or fate.  Typically they involve a who, a what, a when, a where, and a why, but some of these elements are unknown at the start of the story.  A smart reader should at least technically be able to work out the missing pieces ahead of time.

•  In non-interactive fiction, at least, we can distinguish between plots that primarily that are primarily about finding out who did some known thing, plots that are about finding out when some known future event will happen, and plots that are about finding out what some known person will do.  (There are probably other categories — figure them out for yourselves.  Could you imagine a pure howdunnit? )

•  In some kinds of stories, the main characters care about the same questions that the readers care about.  In others, they almost never do.  This has a pretty big effect on our experience of the work.

•  For all of these categories of plot, constraints on narrative tend to make the narrative more exciting.  Which is not to say better, necessarily…

•  There’s often both a plot and a meta-plot at work, so that on one level, we’re wondering who the killer is, and on another, we’re wondering when the detective will figure out who the killer is.  Ideally both levels of this should be well-made:  if we feel like the detective identified the killer only because the episode was about to end, that’s a non-trivial weakness.

Badly-Made Plots:  Videogames and the Picaresque

One could argue that the Figaro sequence matters in the long run because it motivates Kefka to get really really angry. One *could* argue.

Video game plots are almost never well-made in this sense.  On the one hand, you have plotless or near-plotless games, which don’t contain enough incident to qualify.  Tetris is about as causal as it gets, and sure, you can typically work out the ending in advance if you’re paying attention.  But a well-made plot it’s not.  On the other hand, you have plot-heavy games like RPGs.  Here, you run into the “A then B then … Z” problem, where the early stages of the plot aren’t connected to the later stages in any non-mechanical way.  Take as an example, the submersible sand castle sequence from Final Fantasy III née VI).  The main characters show up at a town called Figaro, pursued by the forces of the Evil Empire™.  The bad guys demand that the locals hand the heroes over, and the locals respond by activating the town’s special burrow mode and sinking into the sands.  It’s a pretty neat sequence, and — from the point of view of the gameplay experience — an important one.  It’s not just a random digression, as are the random fight scenes that make up %80 of the actual gameplay.  It’s a major cut scene, an important event in the ongoing plot.  And in the long term, it has no effect on anything whatsoever.  Or rather:  it only matters because it’s a pretext for Edgar to join your party.  And why does that matter…?  This is actually a rather profound question.  In grand narrative terms, Edgar doesn’t matter.  He helps the main character escape in this early sequence, he introduces you to another of the playable characters, and he has a couple of lines in the cut scenes.  But beyond that, he has no function.  We don’t learn anything important about him, he doesn’t do anything significant unless you happen to use him to peg one of the plottier bosses.  But from the point of view of playing an RPG, Edgar is super-important, because he’s a playable character — and one with some fun and useful abilities at that.  (“Flash” will save your ass, early-game.)  He’s important not as a person but as an object.  We care when we collect Edgar for the same reason that we care when we collect Pikachu:  you’ve got to catch them all.

Heavily narrativized games are lousy with characters and events like this.  In the original Final Fantasy, there’s a sequence where you need to feed a titan a ruby.  Why?  Because titans love rubies, and this one’s standing in your way!  In the proto-survival-horror game Alone in the Dark, there’s a point where you need to pacify a dining-room full of zombies by offering them a pot of soup.  Why?  Because zombies love soup, apparently! (Maybe best not to ask what was in it.) And in The Legend of Zelda:  Ocarina Of Time, you spend what I consider to be a frankly irresponsible amount of time, given the larger issues at stake, hunting down chickens for a random villager you meet.  On a local level, all of these tasks and characters are designed to be as colorful, evocative, and entertaining as possible.  But they build to nothing.  They derive from nothing.  They are powered, in narrative terms, by nothing.  Literature does offer a model for this kind of plotting, in which colorful episode succeeds colorful episode in turn until eventually, exhausted, the author calls it a day:  we call these novels picaresques, and their plots are not well-made.  All video games that have plots have picaresque plots.  And as a result, obviously, they can’t build up tension in any of the ways that well-made plots traditionally do.  Because the episodes that make up the picaresque, quasi-serialized plot of the game are disconnected from each other, there’s never a sense that they are building to an end.  There’s always room for one more — often quite literally, as a bonus stage or boss or dungeon or the like.  And as a result, the plot is never going to grapple with, or be energized by, a meaningful sense of constraint.

... I really am a talking mushroom, though. Honest.

All of the big narrative questions that figure in traditionally well-made plots can feature in video games.  There are games that revolve around murder mysteries, games with heavy foreshadowing, and even games where you’re trying to find out more about the psychology of the player character.  The old point-and-click adventure Déjà Vu is all three of these, in fact — and hey, I ended up talking about it after all!  But these narrative questions do not matter in the same way in games as they do in other stories.  We fundamentally care about something else.  Video games are only ever dunnwhethers, and rather than caring about the characters’ actions, we care about our own skill.  In this sense, the big overarching question for plotless Tetris is the same as that for plot-addled Final Fantasy, assuming we play Tetris on the B-Type mode where a win condition does exist.  Will I be able to beat the game?  The major constraints we deal with when we play video games — and this should be painfully obvious to anyone who has ever played video games — are the constraints of our own skill.  That’s the struggle, and the primary excitement, that we take away from the experience.

But is that really all there is?

Academic videogame critics sometimes like to separate the game as game (the ludic element) from the game as story (the narrative element).  I almost don’t want to bring this up, because the line I just wrote constitutes the sum-total of my knowledge of academic videogame criticism, and I’m over my head here enough as it is.  But the ludic/narrative division is one neat way to get around the problem I brought up in the last paragraph.  By this way of thinking, the game’s “plot” is its narrative, and responds with a few adjustments to the standard toolkit we use for other kinds of narratives.  The gameplay on the other hand is entirely non-narrative:  it’s a system of rules we can manipulate and master, and nothing more.  So when we care more about beating a game than we do about the psychodrama of the characters, that’s just a function of our valuing the game element more than the story element.  This is certainly a useful division, and there’s probably at least a grain of truth to it.  But I don’t buy it.  Because in my own experience, there is something distinctive and untranslatable about the way that story, specifically, operates in videogames.  My goal here is to tease out what exactly that is.  Today I’ve just laid in the groundwork — hopefully next time, I’ll get a little further.

Related Posts

• The Well-Made (Video Game) Plot, Part 3
• The Video Game Plot Scale
• Toward a More Perfect Build
• The Well-Made (Video Game) Plot, Part 2
• Episode 147: How Did It Make You Feel when You Got Hit by The Kobold?

We don’t usually do this thing, but I’m making a request.  I’m making a request to all you people out there in OTI land who think you can write a good article for our site.  I’m specifically addressing this to the wafer-thin Venn diagram intersection of the sets “video game nerds” and “fans of symbolist whaling literature.”  More specifically, I need someone to overthink the connections between Moby-Dick and Final Fantasy X.

It drives me crazy that there’s nothing on the internet about this yet.  The game is ten years old, people!  Someone other than me has got to have noticed this!

I can pick the low-hanging fruit myself.  For instance, Final Fantasy X and Moby-Dick are both about a ragtag multi-ethnic collective that travels around the world pursuing a quasi-mystical sea beast that leaves a trail of destruction in its wake.  Said beast is pale in color, with a twisted jaw (although the beastie designers at Square seem to have missed the memo, giving Sin a face that’s more blue whale than sperm whale).  And in both cases — spoiler alert — the whale turns out not to be what they’re really hunting after all, because it’s only a sort of disguise worn by God himself.  (Bigger spoiler alert:  “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.”)

"If a man will limit-break, limit-break through the mask!"

That right there would be enough for an OTI post and a half, I’m thinking.  We don’t even need to get into the fact that Wakka is totally Queequeg.  But wait!  There’s more!  Both show that gadding about after whales ends up destroying family relationships! (Tidus:Jecht::Ahab:Ahab’s unnamed son) Both involve reams and reams of scientific-ish trivia which in no way corresponds to reality!  (“Slimes are weak to the Firaga spell!”  “Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish.”)  And also, Wakka is totally Queequeg!  Or at any rate, he’s a cheerful and muscular Polynesian guy with devout religious beliefs, who, within minutes of meeting the hero, engages him in a playfully homoerotic wrestling match.  (Here I’m thinking of the Moby Dick chapter “The Counterpane,” and the bit in Final Fantasy where Wakka grabs Tidus in a full nelson and won’t let go of him until he agrees to join his underwater soccer team.)

Thirsty for more?  So am I.  The problem lies in the fact that I have not, myself, played Final Fantasy X.  I had a roommate who was pretty deep into it for a summer, and as you can see it made an impression on me.  But I’m not about to sink the 100+ hours it would take to properly research the thing (even if I had a copy, which I don’t), and I’m also not willing to half-ass the article.  The connections are so obvious that the article needs to be written, but it deserves to be written by someone who can give both Final Fantasy X and Moby Dick the kind of serious treatment they deserve.

Sincerely,

Overthinker Stokes

P.S.  I’m open to the possibility that the connections are not obvious at all, that I’ve completely misrepresented what Final Fantasy X is about, and that no one who’s ever played the game would think it was like Moby-Dick for a minute.  If that’s the case, please tell me off in the comment thread, so that I can at least get the idea out of my head.

Related Posts

• Toward a More Perfect Build
• A Slime Draws Near. Command?

When George R.R. Martin gets his hands on a phrase that he likes, he gets as much use out of it as he can. Repeated phrases or images – Ned’s promise to Lyanna, the vows of the Night’s Watch, the motto of the Starks – are one of his favorite tools. It can get amusing if you look for the seams in the furniture, or even frustrating. But there is a key to the way GRRM uses repeated language and dialogue, and A Dance with Dragons (hereafter ADWD) is no exception.

But It Takes So Long My Lord, My Leal Lord

ADWD is the first Song of Ice and Fire novel that I read on the Kindle. This has several excellent advantages over traditional hardback or paperback editions. First, I can publicly read a book that has the word “dragons” in the title without bringing embarrassment to the Perich name. No one on the subway will know! Second, I can bring the book just about everywhere without putting undue strain on my spine. This saves my back muscles so I can hunch over a keyboard for hours, writing overthought articles about the book I just read.

But most important, reading ADWD on the Kindle lets me do a quick search to find every instance of the word “leal.”

Homage is the duty every leal subject owes his king. Yet your father’s bannermen all turn their back on me, save the Karstarks. Is Arnolf Karstark the only man of honor in the north?

[...]

You have my word, all that I desire is to be leal servant of your dragon queen.

[...]

I keep no secrets from my kin, nor from my leal lords and knights, good friends all.

[...]

Do you want to go with them, return to your bleak isles the cold grey sea, be a prince again? Or would you sooner stay my leal serving man?

[...]

You would do best to walk a middle course. Let men earn your trust with leal service … but when they do, be generous and openhearted.

[...]

Roose Bolton summons all leal lords to Barrowton, to affirm their loyalty to the Iron Throne and celebrate his son’s wedding to …

Those are just the first six out of fourteen. GRRM turned over a new page on his Word-a-Day calendar and got stuck. Fourteen times in one novel and, to the best of my recollection, never in the previous four. I don’t have those books on my Kindle to verify this with a search. But I had to look up “leal” to see what it meant and I’d have looked it up sooner if I’d encountered it before.

Are ya LEAL, mon?

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us leal means what we think it means in context: loyal, faithful. If it sounds like it’s just the word “loyal” with a Scottish brogue, that’s because it is: it’s a Scottish term, descended from old French and Latin, that’s filtered its way into English.

“Leal” means the same thing as “loyal” when delivered by a Scottish speaker. It probably got a lot of use between 1502 and 1707, after the wars between England and Scotland finally ended but before the treaty that established “Great Britain” was signed. But “leal” has passed into the English lexicon as well. And it’s typically used to mean something different from “loyal.”

It’s not just GRRM who does it. Take for instance Charles Dickens in his 1864 novel Our Mutual Friend:

He had not only settled it with himself in course of time, that he was errand-goer by appointment to the house at the corner (though he received such commissions not half a dozen times in a year, and then only as some servant’s deputy), but also that he was one of the house’s retainers and owed vassalage to it and was bound to leal and loyal interest in it.

“Leal and loyal interest.” While Dickens was certainly known for padding his word count, he’s drawing a clear distinction. To be “leal” is different than being “loyal.”

Creon, in Storr’s 1912 translation of Antigone, says this about loyal subjects:

Whome’er the State
Appoints must be obeyed in everything,
But small and great, just and unjust alike.
I warrant such a one in either case
Would shine, as King or subject; such a man
Would in the storm of battle stand his ground,
A comrade leal and true; but Anarchy–
What evils are not wrought by Anarchy!

Here, while a case can be again made for padding word count in the name of preserving iambic pentameter, the choice of words isn’t accidental. “Leal” and “true” signify two different behaviors.

For a final item, consider the traditional Scottish song “Land of the Leal.” It comes down to us solely as a poem by Lady Carolina Nairne, so any musical reproductions by a modern band are reinterpretations. But we know that it was a song because there are contemporary accounts of it being sung: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women for one, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine for another.

Here’s Scottish folk ensemble Silly Wizard doing their rendition:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWUJBQ7xKsw
(if there’s a five-word phrase that gets more delightful with each successive word than “Scottish folk ensemble Silly Wizard,” I don’t know it)

The titular “land of the leal” is Heaven. The speaker is a woman on her deathbed, comforting her husband with the knowledge that she is off to Heaven, so dry your tears, you can come join me soon enough. In this case, reading “leal” as interchangeable with “loyal” doesn’t make sense. Is loyalty all it takes to get into Heaven? Loyalty to what? No, to vouchsafe your place in the clouds, you need to be not just loyal but leal.

Since GRRM’s the only person using “leal” in a sentence these days, we turn to him for context. In each use of the word in ADWD, “leal” describes a proper subject’s relation to his lord. Arnolf Karstark is a leal subject to Stannis Baratheon (or he at least claims to be). Tyrion professes that he’ll be leal if he can get to the court of Daenerys Targaryen. Young Griff, a/k/a the baby-swapped Prince Aegon, must scope out which of his men are leal and which aren’t. And so forth.

Perhaps I shouldna been sae LEAL.

It’s also worth noting that “leal” is not limited in geography, the same way the term is in the real world. No one outside of Great Britain or the English-speaking peoples would use the word “leal” today. But subjects from as far north as the Boltons’ keep and as far south as Dorne (Quentyn Martell) profess themselves to be leal subjects. A casual reader can write all of Westeros off as “fantasy England with zombies and dragons,” but Dorne, the Stormlands, the Riverlands and the North are vastly different nations. While the lords of the North may be the closest analog to Scots that Westeros has, all lords of the Seven Kingdoms seek for leal subjects.

While we may tease GRRM for his archaic vocabulary, no writer worth his salt uses a word like that fourteen times in one book by accident. It’s a deliberate choice. So why is he using it? And why now?

ADWD takes place during a brief respite in the wars racking Westeros. The armies of the North have largely been scattered. The Greyjoy raiders are holding more territory than they’re taking. Stannis Baratheon has parked at the Wall, waiting for his opportunity. And across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys Targaryen has halted her march of conquest and is trying her hand at ruling. The pitched wars of A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords are over.

None of the major players think that the fighting is over, though. Everyone is gathering their forces and recovering. New offensives are about to be launched. By the time the book ends, many are already under way: Stannis is marching on Winterfell, Aegon has landed on Westeros, Meereen is under siege.

When war is underway, you inspire your bannermen to fight. But between wars, when you’re catching your breath, you look to see who’s still on your side. You sound out your vassals, punishing some and rewarding others. You want a sound army behind you when you ride out to fight again. You want an army full of leal men and true.

Men can be loyal to each other, but they can only be leal to a master.

Oh, Oh, I Want to Know-oh, Where Do The Whores Go?

I don’t pretend to have my finger on the blood pressure cuff of the Internet, but I get the impression readers grew tired of Tyrion’s one-track mind by the end of ADWD.

Tyrion Lannister, everyone’s favorite dwarf, asks “where do whores go?” or some variation thereof fifteen times in ADWD. He asks it aloud and he speculates about it in his head. He asks it of wealthy merchants, seasoned travelers, common servants and a few actual whores. The man’s not good for much else.

Oompa, loompa, doompaty-do, I've got a whorish question for you ...

It gets a little tiring only because it’s not the Tyrion we’re used to. Tyrion Lannister was born to wealth but steeped in disrespect. He learned to use both his family’s gold and people’s tendency to underestimate him to his advantage. He has always been master of his circumstances, even if he wasn’t totally in control. And he’s always had an agenda.

So to see Tyrion wandering from port to port, repeating the same question like it’s an inside joke, can be a little disheartening.

GRRM clearly wants us to take note of this question (else why repeat it fifteen times?). So let’s consider what we know.

First, Tyrion asks this of almost everyone he meets. He first asks a mute cabin boy who’s cleaning him up before his visit to Pentos. He asks Illyrio Mopatis, the man behind the strings of several plots in the Free Cities. He asks the attendants in Mopatis’s estate. He asks the knight errant Duck, one of Young Griff’s coterie. He asks a whore in Selhorys. Tyrion doesn’t play his cards close to his chest, as he usually would. He spreads his inquiries far and wide. This in itself represents a departure from his usual mien.

Second, Tyrion asks a question that’s not all that mysterious. The blank stares he gets from most of the people he talks to should suggest as much. Asking where whores go is like asking “where are bricks?”. Whores are everywhere in Westeros and the Free Cities. There’s nowhere they’re not. It’s one of the few professions a free woman can enter that doesn’t require apprenticeship, wealth or marriage. It’s one of the few ways to profit off an army on the march. So Tyrion’s question either has no answer or infinite answers.

Third, Tyrion doesn’t really ask the question he’s after. He doesn’t want to know where whores go. He wants to know where Tysha went.

”Wherever whores go,” his father had said. His last words, and what words they were. The crossbow thrummed, Lord Tywin sat back down and Tyrion found himself waddling through the darkness …

But he doesn’t ask anyone about Tysha. He doesn’t describe her in much detail except to Penny, the jousting dwarf he gets bundled with after being kidnapped from Selhorys.

I'll stop asking! Just don't hit me.

Whence this ambiguity? Whence this hesitation from the normally canny dwarf? To find out what Tyrion has in mind, we may need to go even farther east than he does.

In Zen Buddhism, students may be guided to insight with the use of koans. A koan is a question which defies rational analysis. The cliched riddles of “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” and “if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” are popular examples. A koan is not meant to be unanswerable. Rather, it is the process of embracing the multifaceted nature of the universe that the koan contains that shows whether the student has achieved insight.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhEoKO1UIOg

The point of the koan is to meditate on it. Arriving at the answer and then stopping does not enhance one’s Buddha nature. Rather, pursuing the answer is as much a part of growth as finding the answer.

Tyrion’s not asking “where do whores go?” because he wants to know the literal answer. He’s asking it because he has no other purpose in life. When last we left Tyrion, he was Hand of the King. Then he was accused of poisoning Joffrey, locked up and condemned to death. He was given the hope of reprieve at the hands (or spear) of Oberyn Martell, then had that hope dashed. Having come to terms with death, he was freed at the last moment by Varys, departing King’s Landing with a brief detour to fulfill the Oedipal dream and murder his father. If it’s possible for a man to make sense of his life, everything that made sense of Tyrion’s was smashed in a few short months.

Tyrion Lannister is a man without purpose. The schemes, ambitions and simple hopes that made up his life have all been scattered. Having realized the illusory nature of possessions, ambition, status and even relationships, he’s in the perfect mindset to accept the nature of Zen Buddhism. To attain that state, he meditates on an unanswerable question.

All We Are is Words in the Wind

No examination of GRRM’s use of recurring language in ADWD would be complete without GRRM’s aphorism on language itself.

Gods above, more talk about language.

The phrase “words are wind” appears thirteen times in ADWD. Bear with me as I list them all:

1. “Words are wind. Who is this bloody savior?” says Tyrion, when Illyrio Mopatis hints at the true identity of Young Griff.
2. ”Words are wind, and the wind from Manderly’s mouth means no more than the wind escaping from his bottom.” So says Lord Godric, Lord of Sisterton, to Davos Seaworth. He’s referencing Lord Manderly’s vow to be revenged on the Freys.
3. ”Words are wind,” says a woman in Wyman Manderly’s court. This is in response to Davos’s claim (and Stannis’s) that Joffrey Baratheon is the product of incest.
4. ”Words are wind, even words like love and peace.” Daenerys Targaryen says this to Hizdahr zo Loraq, getting him to work his connections to bring peace to Meereen.
5. ”Men are men, vows are words, and words are wind.” Iron Emmett says this to Jon Snow, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, in response to his plan to keep wildling women along the Wall.
6. ”Words are wind [...] No words of yours will secure this peace for Meereen.” Hizdahr turns Dany’s phrase against her, suggesting it will take a marriage to convince Yunkai that she means peace.
7. ”That is good to hear [...] but words are wind.” These are Prince Doran Martell’s words to his daughters – the same ones who tried to kidnap Myrcella in A Feast for Crows – to compel them to swear obeisance to him.
8. ”Words are wind, and the wind is always blowing at the Wall,” says Jon Snow, to dismiss gossip being spread about him.
9. ”Words are wind.” Theon Greyjoy says this to the wildling woman Rowan when she denies the charge of having murdered a boy in the northmen’s company.
10. Words are wind, thinks Ser Barristan Selmy, comforting Missandei that Daenerys is safe and coming home soon.
11. Words are wind, thinks Cersei Lannister, enduring the mocks of the crowd as she staggers naked through the streets of King’s Landing.
12. She thinks this twice, actually.
13. Finally, Ser Kevan Lannister, Hand of the King, says it to Ronnet Connington, nephew of Jon Connington, who has just invaded Westeros as the story ends.

Someone said 'words are wind.' Drink.

Again, no writer uses a phrase thirteen times by accident. And this is a phrase used by people in the North, the South and on both sides of the Narrow Sea: Daenerys Targaryen, Barristan Selmy, Theon Greyjoy, the Martells, the Manderlys, Jon Snow and Kevan Lannister. Everyone says it. It’s on everyone’s mind.

What does the phrase mean?

A speaker says or thinks “words are wind” to suggest that someone’s speech has no weight to it. Wind has no mass. You can’t build a house on it or trade it. Davos can’t prove the truth of his claims, Dany can’t prove her good intentions and Jon can’t prove what people say about him isn’t true. Words last no longer than it takes to say them.

But note that people only say this about speech. No one ever says it about writing. A letter, a treatise or an historical tome all contain words, but no one ever accuses a book of being wind. Westeros is a largely illiterate culture. The words on a page might as well be 256-bit encryption for your average lord or peasant. Yet those words have weight and power. It’s Jon Arryn’s letters, plus the books he used for research, that started this whole bloody war. Speech, we have cause to doubt.

And yet.

Jon Snow dismisses the rumors that other members of the Night’s Watch spread about him. Yet before he can ride off in disobedience of his vows, the Night’s Watch descends on him, stabbing him with daggers and leaving him to die at the foot of the Wall. “Words are wind,” observed Jon Snow, yet these words helped to kill him.

(Sidebar: though GRRM leaves the ending unclear, and has been known to yank death from the jaws of ambiguity, I’m fairly confident Jon Snow is actually dead. He’s stabbed at least four times by hardened warriors of the Night’s Watch. These aren’t the sort of men to leave a job half-done. That said, there are at least three means for Jon to come back from the dead within a dozen miles of where his body falls, so he may not be out of the equation yet)

Don't ... stab ... the hair.

“Words are wind,” says Lord Godric of Wyman Manderly, and yet Manderly’s plans for vengeance against the Freys run true. He spares Davos Seaworth, defying Queen Cersei’s orders and sneaking him out of White Harbor.

Words are wind, thinks Cersei Lannister as she parades naked through the streets of King’s Landing. Yet the words the smallfolk hurl at her do their damage. Cersei can not rule the city with the same regal pomp as before. Rule has to fall to Kevan Lannister, her uncle.

For such windy things, words still seem to carry a lot of force.

Perhaps everyone’s taking the wrong meaning from this old saw. It’s not unheard of. People misuse the exception that proves the rule or begging the question all the time. Perhaps everyone in Westeros uses the phrase “words are wind” to mean the opposite of what it says. Wind is far from harmless, after all. Cold wind cuts Stannis’s ranks to tatters before they can reach Winterfell. Wind carries ships across the sea, bringing Davos to White Harbor and taking Tyrion away from Daenerys. Wind brings the sound of war and the vectors of disease.

And the text supports this:

On the window seat a raven loitered, pale, huge, its feathers ruffled. It was the largest raven that Kevan Lannister had ever seen. Larger than any hunting hawk at Casterly Rock, larger than the largest owl. Blowing snow danced around it, and the moon painted it silver.

Not silver. White. The bird is white.

The white ravens of the Citadel did not carry messages, as their dark cousins did. When they went forth from Oldtown, it was for one purpose only: to herald a change of seasons.

“Winter,” said Ser Kevan. The word made a white mist in the air.

Winter means a changing of the winds. Though we’ve feared the coming of winter since the first chapter of A Game of Thrones, this is the first proof we have of its certainty. Every army in the world has been preparing for battle against foes on all sides. No one has been preparing for this. And the cold wind of winter arrives on the wind itself: on the wings of a raven.

Immediately after learning this, Kevan Lannister dies.

How much do crossbows hurt? On a scale of 1 to 10. Just asking.

The wind means more than we think, especially in Westeros. So it is that words mean more than people think. Jon Snow neglects his vows (his words, as they’re often called) and is killed. Tyrion’s words turn Aegon Targaryen back from the road to Meereen and on his way to Westeros, precipitating another war. The words of the smallfolk of King’s Landing strip Cersei of her last vestiges of power. The words of winter mean the end of Kevan Lannister and the end of peace in Westeros.

To say that “words are wind” should mean that words can shift the balance between great houses. But no one who says that believes it. They ignore the wind, focusing on their petty schemes as the snow creeps up around them. And all the while, winter is coming.

Related Posts

• Episode 146: Does Boromir Poop?
• Game of Thrones: To Read or Not to Read? [Think Tank]
• Don’t Believe Your Eyes: Game of Thrones, Narration, and Adaptation
• TJ Maxx Flunks Old School
• Game of Thrones and the Aesthetics of Fascism

[Last week, with all the Game of Thrones posts on Overthinking It, I asked our internal email list whether I should declare "GoT Week." This is part of the email thread that ensued. (Spoiler alert for the first novel and the first season of the HBO series.) —MW]

Belinkie
Sounds great! But for the posts specifically about the TV show, we should ask commenters not to bring in spoilers from the books fair warning. I’m trying to avoid spoilers myself, which is stressful. (The Onion TV Club has an elegant solution of printing two reviews each week, one for “newbies” and one for fans of the book, where they can discuss what they know about the big picture. Interesting situation.)

Wrather
Are you not going to read the books?

Belinkie
I’m enjoying the show too much to read the books! I’ll read them in eight years, when the show is done.

Wrather
The books are better. Richer, more complicated, more fully developed. Less satisfying in terms of T&A — breasts are kind of a let-down when described, as opposed to viewed, and HBO has made them the unique value proposition of its whole network — but more satisfying in nearly every other respect.

But that’s fine, you just keep doing the dumb thing you’re doing.

Belinkie
But I feel like I wouldn’t have loved the series as much if I had read the books first. I totally didn’t expect Sean Bean to die! Seems a shame to know what’s coming in Season 2.

Wrather
First of all, congratulations on not knowing that they kill Ned. I agree, that was shocking when I read it (back in 1996)—actually literally: my heart started racing and my jaw dropped—and seemed to signal that this series would be a game-changer for epic fantasy. Still, it does seem like the stock example of a GoT plot twist—like the time in book 4 where Tyrion invents a time machine—so I’m surprised that it wasn’t quoted to you out of context.

Kidding, by the way. Tyrion doesn’t invent a time machine.

But let’s think through the implications. I propose that your argument boils down to this: “I take pleasure in the series, part of which is not knowing what happens. If I read the books, knowing the story would ruin the pleasure I take in the TV show. Enjoyment: Net loss.”

(The relationship of “spoilers” and surprise to narrative pleasure is a subject for another OTI article or ten, but let’s just assume that spoilers would ruin your enjoyment.)

What I’m saying is that you’d gain more than you’d lose. There are a (very) few things that the series does better than the books, but many, many more things the books do better than the series—just because there’s more time, and because you have access to unmediated information from a character’s own thoughts. Peter Dinklage does a great job (bad English dialect aside) on the show, but Tyrion is a lot more interesting in the books where you can actually follow his reasoning and understand his complicated relationships to his family.

This is not to deny the series its due. I hate to be all, “A picture is worth a thousand words” (especially since before I was all, “Don’t Believe Your Eyes“), but the hilarious, pitiful, oh-so-human sight of old Grand Maester Pycelle doing deep knee bends after the prostitute leaves him in s1e10 is definitely worth a couple pages of novel.

Also, at the end of the first season, the sight of the cute little dragon head poking up over Dany’s shoulder is pretty awesome, and managed to surprise and delight even me who have read the books a couple times. Martin himself has said on his livejournal (!) that he enjoyed being able to do things on TV that his narrative technique doesn’t allow him in prose, like the private confrontations between Varys and Littlefinger, which can’t be in the book because there’s no POV character to witness them.

Film presents a sensory world and approximates the internal world. Novels present an internal world and approximate the sensory world. I’m saying that in this case, it’s worth it to take the latter.

I also think you’re kind of participating in puritanical self-denial. We all agree that one of the things about GRRM is that he’s a good storyteller. (Not necessarily a great prose stylist… if I read about one more ruby “glistening redly”, I think I’m going to throw my valuable first edition hardcover across the room. And it’s kind of interesting that one skill — telling compelling stories — doesn’t necessarily map onto the other skill — writing prose of literary interest.) The story grabs hold and doesn’t let go. (OK, it wanders a little bit in the first half of book 4.) I’ll grant you that finding out what happens is one of the great pleasures of GoT.

Here’s what I’m saying: You can find out NOW! Today! One click on the Kindle, and you can learn the fate of The King In the North, what happens to Dany and the dragons, how things fare for Sansa and Joffrey, and Tyrion’s adventures in space. (Kidding about that last one.) If you enjoy the thing as much as you claim to, why wait?

Belinkie
I am absolutely looking forward to reading the novels, and I’m sure they’re all that and a bag of chips. But here’s something to consider: a great TV show is a rarer commodity than a great book.

There are literally dozens of books on my shelf right now I’m dying to read, but not that many TV shows that leave me counting the days until the next episode. Here’s something else to consider: reading the books before the TV show may very well take away from my enjoyment of said show (I’ve read many blog posts on this site and others testifying to that), but watching the TV show and then reading the books will probably only deepen my appreciation of how much better the books are.

If I read the books first, I’m inevitably going to be disappointed with what the show leaves out. But if I watch the show first, I’ll be dying to read all the cool stuff I missed.

And it’s not as if I’m vowing never to read a page until the series wraps for good and Peter Dinklage takes home his seventh Emmy. If the show is really covering one novel per season, then I can look forward to enjoying the show every spring, and the tackling another novel every summer. I’m a Utilitarian, and I think this way I get maximum enjoyment of both show and book. But hey, I was the kind of kid who would ration his Halloween candy to try and make it last to the NEXT Halloween. I get the sense that November 1 found you facedown in a puddle of chocolatey drool.

Stokes
It is true that your enjoyment of the series will probably decrease slightly if you read the books, because you will no longer be able to be surprised by plot twists. But your enjoyment of the books, when you get around to reading them, will also be reduced if you’ve watched the series, because you will no longer be able to be surprised by plot twists.

The question then becomes: to which medium is the pleasure of being surprised by plot twists a more important component?

And actually, I really don’t know. I planned to enter this argument on Wrather’s side—staying away from the books because you want to preserve the experience of the TV show seems like not eating any cake because you want to leave room for more icing. It’s like not reading Batman because you don’t want to spoil the plot twists from a crossover with Nightwing. Why privilege the subsidiary work over the backbone of the franchise? But I think TV might benefit more from plot twists than the books do. Which would suggest that you’re going about it the right way.

On the other hand. Let me ask you a question: Why was Sansa Stark unwilling to confirm Arya’s side of the story about Nymeria biting Joffrey?

If your answer is “I don’t really know,” you can probably go ahead and read the books in 2020. If you feel like you understand her motivations clearly, though, you’d better read them now. Because they did explain it in the books, but they didn’t explain it on the show, which means that if you’ve come to a conclusion about her motivations it’s based only on your own internal completion of the text, and when you eventually do read that passage (or any passage about the characters’ internal lives), you’re going to be thinking “Hey, wait a minute, it wasn’t like that at all!” Which will damage your experience of the books a lot more than knowing the plot twists in advance would damage your experience of the show.

Something similar happens with the introduction of characters. You know Tyrion’s mercenary buddy Bronn, right? Not the most important character in the world, but he’s been in a bunch of episodes now. In the books, he’s introduced alongside, like, twenty other characters who all get killed or wander off or become unimportant for some reason over the course of a few chapters. The fact that Bronn turns out to be an important supporting character is legitimately surprising in the book—it’s not a sudden twist, but it is… well, interesting, for want of a better word. In the series, they can’t do that: because they’re condensing, only the most important characters get to show up on screen. So if you wait to read the books until the end of the series, all of the other characters are going to seem like wasted paper. “Why in the hell am I supposed to care about Brynden and Edmure Tully?” you will wonder, as you read about them for page after page. And sometimes, these little disposable character moments build up to something much more important over time. (I’d name names but that would be spoiling…) In the series, they’re either going to have to leave those characters out entirely, or be much more straightforward about telling their stories, essentially elevating them to the principle cast.

Finally, the world of the series is still ethically flattened. You know Danaerys’ knight, Jorah Mormont, right? He’s been exiled from the seven kingdoms for slave trading. Boo, hiss! Makes him a bad guy. But maybe he can redeem himself by serving her, yeah? Okay, in the books his specific crime is selling the poachers to slave traders rather than either a) killing them, or b) sending them off to the wall, where they would have had to serve as soldiers for the rest of their lives. Not without pay, presumably, since we know that some of the watchmen hire prostitutes, but certainly without much pay, and certainly without being allowed to quit or leave. The Night’s Watch isn’t slavery, but it’s definitely in the same ballpark as slavery. Doesn’t make Jorah a great guy, but it makes his backstory a lot more complex than simply “Boo, hiss! Slavery!” And I would wager that I get more out of the scenes with Jorah, knowing what I know about him, than you do, knowing what you know. Even if I’m not going to be surprised when, in season 2, he and Tyrion join forces to fight a Klingon invasion force.

Belinkie
Okay, how about this for a compromise: I will start playing the Game
of Thrones card game.

I assume it’s just like Magic: The Gathering, except with no magic.

What do you think? Dive into the novels? Or wait a decade? Sound off in the comments.

Related Posts

• Words are Wind: Repetition of Language in A Dance With Dragons
• Don’t Believe Your Eyes: Game of Thrones, Narration, and Adaptation
• Episode 146: Does Boromir Poop?
• How far will you go to stay unspoiled?
• Think Tank: When Good Shows Go Bad

It is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism—more broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people, and it is dishonest as well as tautological to say that one is affected by Triumph of the Will and Olympia only because they were made by a filmmaker of genius. Riefenstahl’s films are still effective because, among other reasons, their longings are still felt, because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached…

—Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism”

Let’s just get this out of the way.  I am not calling George R. R. Martin, or any of the other authors discussed in this post, a Nazi. Nor am I calling them Blackshirts, nor connecting them with any other historical group of totalitarian assholes.  The aesthetic principles I’m discussing here are neither the result of fascism nor indicative of fascism, they just take advantage of the same emotional circuitry that fascism takes advantage of.   These are not politicized aesthetics, rather, fascism is aestheticized politics.  It’s not quite accurate to claim that aesthetic similarities don’t imply any ideological similarities at all, but that’s a lot closer to the truth than the other way around.

That said, it cannot be denied that the fascist aesthetics described by Sontag (and read that whole article here if you haven’t, or if you need a refresher) is a big, big part of the epic strain of sci-fi and fantasy.

Triumph of the Will, 1934

Star Wars, 1977

And it’s also an important element of the “Blood, Tits, and Scowling” genre codified by Perich yesterday,

Spartacus: Blood & Sand, 2010

at least in some of its more baroque manifestations.  And since the HBO Game of Thrones series is both of these things, it’s certainly worth considering the degree to which it partakes in the fascist aesthetic.

So yeah.  The fascist aesthetic.  What is that, exactly?

Fascist art depicts, in Sontag’s words, “unlimited aspiration toward the high mystic goal, both beautiful and terrifying.”  It “celebrate[s] the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistible leader.” It focuses on “the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical.”  It fetishizes “the holding in or confining of force; military precision.” Its characteristic subject matter is “vivid encounters of beautiful male bodies and death.”  In short, fascist art depicts the perfected, disciplined body in service of the perfected, disciplined state.  Its aesthetic principles are, in visual terms, clean geometric lines, chiseled physiques, and slow motion; and in musical terms, brass fanfares, pounding drumbeats, and pipe organs.  Its moral principles are strength, skill, obedience, order, joyful submission, and apocalyptic dissolution… and it’s this last that really set it apart from other aesthetics that glorify strength (of which, to be sure, there are plenty to go around).

Fascist storytelling always hinges on a moment of transfiguration, a one-way-only gate through which the agonized hero cannot pass without being transformed into a thing unrecognizable.  Crucially, what lies beyond is not something that we get to know.  It has to be utterly alien and eternally remote. It was not given to Moses to enter the Land of Caanan, but at least he got to look at it.  Fascist art contents itself with less.  We see the moment of transition, the event horizon as it were, but we get only the barest glimpse of what lies beyond. The proto-fascist mountain-climbing films described by Sontag arguably fail to capture this aspect, because mountain peaks are reachable.  (I mean, we’ve done it, you know? The peak of Everest is pretty well covered with litter.)  The ultimate fascist mountaineering narrative, then, would be that of Sisyphus — but a joyful Sisyphus who has chosen his own punishment.  Or better still, a thousand joyful Sisyphi.

And so stories of agonized struggle tend to end with ceremonies. The hero becomes the king, ushering in a golden age, but we don’t ever get to see the king, like, paying down the national debt, or building a lot of libraries, or doing whatever else a golden age would really entail.  Superhero franchise reboots tend to work this way as well, at least when they end with the moment where Peter Parker affirms once and for all that he is Spiderman.  We know more about the day to day business of being Spiderman than we do about the day to day business of running a nation-state (which may explain why our society is in decline), but nevertheless, there’s an important vacuum here.  You don’t get to see the day to day life of a superhero because that would be boring, and it wouldn’t solve all the problems of the world.  To make the audience believe that the heroic agonized body has ushered in a utopian society, you need to focus solely on the moment of transformation.  “I am Spiderman!” he declares, and then we see one more glorious swoop of the CGI-perfected disciplined physique in motion over the New York City skyline — and then credits.  In 2001, the moment of apotheosis is the stargate sequence, after which the movie rather pointedly just up and ends.  But this kind of creativity is pretty rare.  Other than coronations (actual or self-imposed, superheroic), there seems to be a certain limited repertoire of events that work well for this kind of apocalyptic closing gesture:  graduations, migrations, weddings, childbirth, sex (especially first sex, or first sex for that couple), and — this being the big one — glorified death.

Tolkien only ever dabbled in this kind of stuff, but it’s part and parcel of modern epic fantasy.  The main characters in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time are “ta’veren” which basically means they are magically empowered with a cult of personality that inspires — among other things — stalkerish devotion from their supporters.   All three of them start as farmers and end up leading nation-states. And it’s stated explicitly (and over and over again, I might add) that the two slightly-less-main of these characters have to dedicate themselves to supporting the mainest character of all in his apocalyptic showdown with the forces of darkness, in which he will (probably) sacrifice his own life.  They get to be heroes and kings pretty much as a side effect.  It ends up being a story of glorification through sacrifice and submission, which is probably the core of the fascist aesthetic.  An even better example is Terry Goodkind’s eminently readable but frankly appalling Sword of Truth series, which is all loyalty oaths and sadomasochism, and dodgy conflation of loyalty oaths and sadomasochism…  In the first book, the hero and heroine can never be, uh, intimate, because if they did he would be blasted and brainwashed by the magical puissance of her hoo-hah, becoming so devoted to her that his old personality would — hey, don’t look at me, people, this was an international bestseller.  At the end, it’s revealed that because the hero is already so completely in love with the heroine, her magic has no effect on him.  Again:  through submission, glorification.  Love conquers all, I guess, but sometimes love ends up conquering Poland.   (And yes, this hero too starts as a hayseed and ends up as literal king of the world.)

And then there’s Martin.  Game of Thrones starts out as anti-fascist in aesthetic.  There seems to be no such thing as a triumphant apotheosis, at least not in the first couple of books.  It’s not that the mountain peak can’t be reached:  it’s that the whole mountain was a delusion, and those who try to climb it are in for a nasty surprise when gravity kicks in.  Trial by combat fits into the aesthetic of fascism beautifully — justice carried out through perfected, muscular bodies engaged in a glorious mortal struggle — but it only fits if the trial by combat is glorious, and only if justice is actually served. There are two trials by combat in the books.  In the first, Martin makes a big point of showing how the fight is not glorious.  The second trial is a bit more poetic — but the wrong guy dies, and an innocent man is convicted.  Neither of these glorifies the state, or the body, or the attitude of submission.  Or take that scene from the season finale, where Robb’s supporters are bellowing “THE KING IN THE NORTH!” That would certainly seem like aestheticized fascism. But it takes the bloom off the rose when you remember that [and I think a secondary spoiler alert is justified here] most of the people in that room, Robb included, are going to get put to the sword by Roose Bolton and Walder Frey.  A shorter version of that whole cycle plays out within the first book alone, with Dany’s unborn son.  He was to be named “Rhaego, the stallion who mounts the world,” something which I read as “rides the world” when I read it back in 1996, and have now decoded more accurately as “f___s the world.”  The scattered Dothraki tribes would finally unite under his overwhelming strength, and then, exalted by their submission, they would cross the narrow sea and stampede throughout Westeros, slaughtering and raping as they went.  Under a value system that glorifies strength, this would count as a happy ending.  But the apotheosis is not to be:  the stallion who mounts the world gets taken out by a vengeful midwife before he’s even born.

Even that, though, is tragic, and tragedy always has the potential to shade into a glorification of sacrifice.  The real challenge to fascist aesthetics comes from the series’ unperfected bodies.  Some bodily abnormalities can be reconciled with fascist narratives — Jaime pretty clearly loses his hand just so that he can, through agonized struggle, climb the mountain, touch the peak, and reclaim his status as a perfected instrument of death.  Brienne’s harped-on ugliness is there so that we can focus on her bodily perfection in terms of skill and strength.  Varys’ castration is tied in with his utter dedication to serving the realm — the fascist body needs to be disciplined and perfect, but in all three of these cases bodily imperfections are just opportunities for more and further discipline.  But the same can’t be said of Tyrion.  He is quite precisely undisciplined. He drinks to excess.  He likes his food.  He has sex — he doesn’t make love, he has sex, and often, and never in idealized terms.  He pisses.  I don’t remember whether he shits or not, but others shit in his presence.  He cracks jokes.  He loses his temper and alienates his friends. All of this brings in the spirit of the carnival and the grotesque, which is the mortal enemy of fascist self-seriousness.  Much the same can be said of Samwell Tarly, with his gross fatness, his cowardice, and his incontinent lusts.  Robert Baratheon’s drunkenness, Doran Martell’s gout… This was the major initial attraction of the series, I think, to many, or at least to me.  It peeled off the gleaming facade of the fantasy novel to reveal a foundation crawling with termites.  And, critically, it found something beautiful in it.  The story is grim and violent.  Often, we are dismayed when we see people who should be good being bad:  a knight of the kingsguard punches Sansa in the stomach, Littlefinger turns on the Starks, or Joffrey, like, breathes or walks into a room, that asshole.  But with characters like Tyrion and Samwell, the story celebrates human weakness rather than despising it.  And that is the one thing that fascist art will never countenance.

However.  As the books go on, the fascist aesthetic begins creeping back in.  There are three main places where I see this happening.

1)  The kingsguard.

The Kingsguard is an elite military unit dedicated to, uh, guarding the king.  It’s made up of the seven greatest knights in the realm (so quite literally the seven most perfected and disciplined bodies), and they are fanatically devoted to the head of state.  They’re also celibate, adding the little whiff of sexualized restraint that any good fascist art needs.  And theoretically, at least, they are also spiritually perfect.  Because, you know, skill in combat and spiritual purity go hand in hand.  In the early books, much is made of how glorious the kingsguard looks, in their spotless white cloaks, but they are exposed as a bunch of brutish louts, save for Ser Barristan, who is noble but well past his prime.  So at the beginning of the story, the Kingsguard is about exposing the fascist glorification of force as hollow.  But over the course of the books, this begins to shift. When Jaime Lannister becomes the leader of the kingsguard, it pretty clearly saves his soul.  And one of the ways that we know this is that he starts taking the celibacy oath seriously.  Ser Barristan, who already had the spiritual purity thing down, gets a physical competence upgrade — turns out that even as old as he is, he’s probably one of the world’s greatest swordsmen.  And unlike his lesser brethren, who are still serving the series’ designated bad guys, Barristan jumps ship and goes off to worship the real irresistable leader, Danaerys Targaryen (for which see below).

2)  The Wall and the Watch.

Like the Kingsguard, the Watch is a military order.  And like the Kingsguard, they are sexless. (Institutional male celibacy seems to be kind of a thing for Martin.)  Unlike the Kingsguard, they aren’t elite.  In fact we’re told quite explicitly that you go into the wall as the scum of the earth.  But the order transforms them.  Their submission makes them into a swords, disciplined and perfected.  The brothers of the watch still have their failings and foibles, and the worst of them — deserters and murderous traitors — are as bad as anyone, anywhere.  But the redemption narrative is played straight often enough.  And then there’s the Wall, and the North beyond which it metonymically represents.  Sontag again:  “As usual, the mountain is represented as both supremely beautiful and dangerous, that majestic force which invites the ultimate affirmation of and escape from the self—into the brotherhood of courage and into death.”  And a key element of the continuing plot involves Bran traveling north, beyond the Wall, to achieve some kind of mystical apotheosis in the frozen lands beyond.  The threat of the White Walkers is also interesting here.  There’s always been a sense that the political and military struggles that make up the bulk of the books are ultimately meaningless, because, well, zombies, right?  It doesn’t matter who’s sitting on the Iron Throne when the dead are walking in the night.  And that means that everyone is eventually going to need to put aside their struggles, strap their armor on, and march north.  Which means that the apocalyptic vision of the Night’s Watch — setting aside all material concerns in favor of a titanic military struggle against a literally inhuman foe, and more importantly, being redeemed and perfected by that struggle — turns out to be the right vision.  It’s submission to an ideal rather than submission to a glorious leader, so it’s not quite fascist as Sontag describes it.  But it’s in the ballpark.  And speaking of glorious leaders…

3)  Danearys Targaryen.

Dany’s story in the first book is great.  The way she gets gamed by Mirri Maaz Durr is heartbreaking.  Mirri’s reasons for doing it are heartbreaking.  At the end of that book, Dany seems like the series’ most intensely vulnerable character — we’re not worried that she’ll get killed, necessarily, since she’s obviously so important — but there’s a real concern that she’s going down the wrong road, becoming a monster.

As the series goes on, however, Dany becomes more and more of a Mary Sue, which, considering that she starts out as the violet-eyed last scion of a dying house, is really quite an achievement.  She attracts a fanatically devoted army of  followers.  Every man she meets falls in love with her.  She becomes absurdly virtuous.  Abolishing slavery is a good thing, don’t get me wrong, but she seems to be literally the only person in the world who objects to it — it seems to be used as a crude way to establish that she’s the Good Ruler.  And the way that she gets it done is a little off-putting. She approaches the problem with a burning moral certitude, and backs it up with overwhelming physical force.  End of story.  There do not seem to be any negative (or even any complicated) consequences.  And then there are these ancient prophecies popping up, about how she’s going to unite and save the world…  the story begins to hit some very familiar beats.  The collapse of the prophecy about Rhaego made it seem like this was a series where all myths are false.  There is no preordained savior, no mystical leader:  people just muddle through the best they can, and make up stories afterwards.  But it’s looking more and more like the endgame of the books is going to be a struggle between Danaerys’ true myth, and everybody else’s false myths.  And that arguably makes it worse.  The charm of the series was that it deflated the fascist fantasy, demanded that we accept normal, fallible humanity as a story worth telling, even in a fantastical realm.  But what if Martin doensn’t think it’s worth telling after all?  What if all of the first four books were just an extended tour of the Weimar republic? What if the seven kingdoms, the Starks, the Lannisters, all of it, is just so much rubble to be cleared away by the cleansing fire of Dany’s ascension?  What if Game of Thrones was never really a departure from the fascist aesthetic after all:  what if Westeros was just waiting for the right führer to come along?

Related Posts

• Dark Side of the Moon PLUS Transformers: Dark of the Moon
• Episode 168: You have a choice, Ryan Gosling!
• Episode 167: Natural Brunch Talk
• The Biggest Mistake in the History of NASA
• Words are Wind: Repetition of Language in A Dance With Dragons

It seems more or less obligatory that a website so concerned with rehashing the popular films of the 1980s should have an opinion on MTV’s big-budget rehash of Teen Wolf.  With that in mind, I sat down the other day to watch the pilot episode, which was… fine, I guess, but not all that interesting, which is why this post is about twelve hours behind schedule.  The one aspect worth systematic overthinking is the radical shift in tone from the original franchise to its modern reworking, which is neatly captured by these images:

1985.

2011.

Special effects have come a long way in twenty-five years, right?  Except they haven’t.  There’s nothing going on in the modern version that’s beyond the capabilities of 1980s technology.  Take a look at Ron Perlman in Beauty and the Beast — that’s Rick Baker working in 1987, just two years after the original Teen Wolf came out, and it holds up as well as anything I’ve seen since (unfortunate wrestler-hair aside). No, the crapulence of the original makeup is a conscious choice, designed to highlight the central theme of the movie, to wit, that puberty is gross.  The old Teen Wolf movie is fundamentally about being unhappy with the very bodily nature of one’s own developing body.  It’s not body horror in the classic sense, where what you are becoming is abominable and terrifying to look on.  Rather, the monstrous body is funny looking. Not terrifying but mortifying, embarrassing.  Teen Wolf is also about getting past that – realizing that along with funny odors and hair-every-which-where, puberty also maybe gives you some enhanced basketball skills.  And maybe members of the opposite sex aren’t as weirded out by your new body as you are yourself. And eventually once you’ve grown up completely, you start shaving and wearing deodorant, and your testosterone-crazed fight-or-flight reflexes calm down a little, and you make out with your childhood friend rather than the unattainable cheerleader type, opting for love and companionate marriage rather than a more juvenile romance based on lust and status. (But that always felt a little tacked on, to be honest:  after all, they didn’t call the movie Teen Not-Really-a-Wolf-After-All.)

Hey Chuck Barry! Listen to this!

The new Teen Wolf is very different.  By making the wolfman dreamy (or if not exactly dreamy, at least cool looking), they are changing the game rather dramatically.

There’s an interesting scene in the pilot where the titular teenwolf is dancing with his designated love interest, and her proximity causes an uptick in his heart rate which almost triggers his metamorphosis. This is a not-so-subtle metaphor for becoming, uh, conspicuously aroused, which can be a real issue for teenaged guys when they are dancing with girls that they like (or at, you know, any other time of the day or night).  It’s really, really, really not a subtle metaphor.  His reaction is to run off and take a cold shower.

But heavyhandedness aside, this is interesting.  In the original movie, this would have been fodder for the comedy of humiliation.  Oh no!  SHE’S GOING TO REALIZE THAT I HAVE AN ERECTION!  Must… fight… embarrassment!  And the important lesson, of course, is that eventually you have to realize that these sexual drives are part of who you are, and if the girl likes you enough she’s not going to mind even a little.  But in the darker and edgier Teen Wolf reboot, the threat is not that she’s going to notice — rather, it’s that he’s going to lose control and tear her limb from limb.  Taking its (deeply sexist and problematic) cue from the Twilight series, Teen Wolf: The Next Generation suggests that teenaged boys are seething cauldrons of hormonal lust that are always a whisker away from exploding into a whirlwind of passionate, bodice-ripping… well, rape.  There’s not a nice or polite way to put it; that’s what the subtext is about.  And it’s meant to be sexy, which is kind of gross.  (Although do let’s recall that this well-worn fantasy, where the guy loses control due to the woman’s overwhelming sexiness, has but NOTHING to do with the motivations behind actual sex crimes.)  It’s also interesting that in the TV show, the hero’s first clue that something is happening to his body is the development of lacrosse-based superpowers.   So where Teen Wolf Classic is about learning that puberty has a good side, Teened By The Wolf:  The New Class is more about learning that the personality traits that make you a big man on campus also have their ugly side.

And this, by the way, is where the show loses me.  Because I find most of the “good side” of the protagonist’s wolfification pretty ugly to begin with — there’s nothing wrong with enhanced senses or physical speed in and of themselves, but he quickly and cheerfully uses his gifts to turn himself into a fratty douche.  The character’s name is Scott, but I kept wanting to call him Chad, or possibly just “Broseph.”   Who knows, maybe over the course of the series he’ll learn a valuable lesson about not being a hyper-competitive Type-A jagoff all the damn time.  Something very much like that does happen in the original, if I recall.  But unless that process starts reeeaaal quick, I don’t think I’m sticking around to find out.

Anyway, the similarities between Twilight and Teen Wolf:  The Chaddening have led me to determine the following formula for writing paranormal romance.  (Did you know that Twilight knockoffs are officially a genre now?  Yeah.) It basically works like this:

Step 1:  Select a classic movie monster.
Step 2:  Put your d!@& Make the monster wicked hawt.
Step 3:  Identify one of the the underlying social anxieties represented by the monster, and
Step 4:  invert it,
Step 5:  in a way that tends to reinforce societal norms of romance.

We’ve already pretty much seen how this works with Teen Wolf 4.0:  Live Free or Teen Wolf, right?

Step 1:  Werewolf.

Step 2:  Hawt werewolf.

Step 3:  Forget all the Marxist werewolf class-conflict stuff brilliantly exposed by Shechner here.  The big anxiety in this case is lack of control over our own bodily nature. Puberty is gross.

Step 4:  But in this case, the Teen Wolf has MORE control over his body, at least most of the time, which is what allows him to become an awesome lacrosse superstar, a ladies man, and an incredible bowler. Because, you know, dogs are so good at all of those things.

Step 5:  Getting bit by a wolf in this case has pros and cons.  The pros are:  being good at sports, loving the ladies, being more assertive and competitive.  The cons are — well, the con IS, I should say, that you might lose control over your manful sea of testosterone and do sex at your lady friend.  And I’m sure that just like with Twilight, they will find a way for this apparent con to get turned into a pro — having uncontrollable lusts will be okay, as long as it happens within the duly sanctioned confines of marriage, or true love, or going steady, or whatever.  (They’ve already floated the idea that there’s just one special girl out there who really gets the hero’s tail a waggin’.)  A similar approved outlet will probably be provided for the character’s anger issues and his overdeveloped sense of competition.

Twilight, just for the record, runs thusly.  (Oh, and spoilers, I guess.):

Step 1:  Vampire.

Step 2:  Hawt Vampire.

Step 3:  An interesting one.  We often hear vampires talked about as a metaphor for sex, or for old-world aristocratic power structures, or disease.  But I think it’s instructive to step back — and if nothing else, I’m glad I read Twilight because it provided this perspective — and consider the Dracula story from Mina and Lucy’s point of view.  They aren’t doing anything special or wrong at the beginning of the story. Well, maybe Lucy’s a bit of a flirt, but they’re still within the bounds of Victorian propriety.   Then along comes this strange, unappealing man, who wants to do horrible things to them.  Completely unprovoked!  There’s no rhyme or reason to it, all they had to do was be female at the right place and time, and suddenly they’re a target.  And yeah, there’s a certain horror to that.  I doubt that this accurately reflects modern female anxieties about male attention, and I wouldn’t even really want to bet that it’s an accurate portrayal of the female Victorian mindset.  But it’s DEFINITELY something that Victorian men such as Bram Stoker were worried about vis a vis the women they felt responsible for (sisters, daughters, etc.),  and there’s still plenty of of that rather specifically patriarchal sentiment floating around in our popular culture today.

Step 4:  But in Twilight, of course, the attention of strange monstrous men is entirely benign.  Because the Twilight-pires have teh moralz, you see, and possibly teh Jesusez.  So all he wants to do is hold your hand, sparkle in the daylight, and whisper sweet platonic nothings into your oh-so-fragile ear.  Even though he could tear you apart like a pack of tissues any minute, and is having trouble stopping himself from doing that because he is such a sea of throbbing hormones, you are totally safe.  (And of course it’s not like Bella ever gets special attention from a guy she finds desperately unappealing.  It’s all hotties crushing on hotties, here in romance land, even if in the end there can only be one.)

Step 5:  The crucial difference between this and Dracula, however, is that Edward’s attraction to Bella has nothing to do with her being female at the right place at the right time.  Rather, it’s a sign that the heroine is magically predestined to be with her special vampire boo for ever and ever, and a sign that the werewolf third leg of the triangle is magically predestined to be with one of her as-yet-unfertilized ova, which — hey, is there a reason why he didn’t fall preemptively in love with Edward as well?  Presumably half of Renesmee’s very special DNA is floating around in his sparkly vampiric sac, no?  But I’ve already answered my own question:  Jacob doesn’t fall in love with Edward, because that would not reinforce the societal notion of romantic love, and as we’ve established that’s against the rules of paranormal romance.

With this in mind, I offer a few treatments for Twilight and or The Teen Wolf Reloaded style reimaginings of other classic movie monsters.  With these in hand, writing the next smash hit paranormal romance novel will be easy!  Feel free to help yourself to any of them, just be sure thank me in the author’s note.  And if you do end up getting to quit your day job when your magnum opus shoots to the top of the New York Times Bestseller’s list, consider buying an OTI t-shirt.

1) Sexy Teenaged Mummies In Love

I wouldn't kick that out of the sarcophagus for eating crackers!

Unlike the vampire, which is pretty much always sexy, and the werewolf, which is at least animalistic (and therefore kind of sexy in an out-of-control way), the mummy is traditionally depicted as a withered and desiccated near-corpse wrapped from head to foot in bandages.  And while those wrappings would have obvious applications for the S&M and/or medical fetish crowd, that’s a few shades bluer than the paranormal romance genre is typically willing to work.  Luckily, the Brendan Frasier Mummy franchise presented us with a convenient way out, which is to just have the mummy look like a hot vaguely middle-eastern guy. (Well, South African, but who’s counting?)  So yeah, let’s go with that.  Since horror mummies are almost invariably aristocrats, our hypothetical Teen Mummy is probably hella rich, which is all to the good — the fact that the Cullen family was disgustingly wealthy was always a powerful argument in favor of Team Edward.   The traditional mummy plot, in which a person currently living is a dead ringer for the mummy’s old flame, would also translate nicely into a highschool setting.  There is one big problem facing this monster, though, which is that once you take away the Egyptian setting (which, for a set-in-an-American-highschool adaptation, you kiiiiiind of have to), and once you take away the desiccated corpse wrapped in bandages thing (which as we’ve established, is fatally unsexy), there’s not much left TO the mummy mythos.  They have ancient Egyptian magic, I guess?  They, uh, have curses on their tombs?  (A non-starter, unless you do something really contrived where the protagonist ends up getting cursed on a field trip or a summer trip to an archaeological dig.)  They cause a rotting sickness that does constitution damage over time?  Look, making up new random bulls%!# attributes for your monsters is an important part of the paranormal romance genre, but ideally you want your mythology to have a ratio of no more than 75% random nonsense.*  With mummies, you’re looking at 100% random nonsense, and at that point you really have to wonder what if anything you gain by calling your monster a mummy.  Still, let’s put it through the mill and see what happens.

Step 1: Mummy.

Step 2: Hawt Mummy.

Step 3: Anxieties, anxieties…  Uh.  Pillaging the treasures of the orient might have unwholesome consequences?  Like I said, updating this one for the modern day becomes kind of a problem.

Step 4: But since we’ve made our bed, fine.  The paranormal romance version has to be that pillaging the treasures of the orient actually has awesome consequences, like getting a magical boyfriend/girlfriend in see-through harem pants,

Step 5: who loves only you, and caters to your every whim.  And of course despite the harem pants, all the main couple ever indulges in is the occasional chaste kiss.

Already kind of exists because:

First of all, once you’ve run it through the formula, you’re basically looking at I Dream of Jeannie.  Second, the classic mummy plot referenced above was colonized by vampires in the later 20th century (showing up prominently, for instance, in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula — although it’s certainly nowhere in Stoker!), and the surprisingly watchable Vampire Diaries has already introduced the plot into the paranormal romance genre.  Third, Penny Arcade called this years ago.

Bonus fact:  Pills made of ground-up mummies were used for centuries as an aphrodisiac.  Which, like….  come on, humanity. Get your act together.

______________________________________________

* The 75% nonsense ratio is scientifically derived from the Twilight series, in which:
• every vampire has their own mutant superpower (nonsense)
• vampires sparkle in the daytime (nonsense)
• newly turned vampires are far stronger than older vampires, due to the amount of human blood still in their system (nonsense)
and, of course,
• vampires drink blood (actual mythology).

By the same token, werewolves in Twilight
• are all Native American (nonsense)
• have a body temperature of roughly 108 degrees Fahrenheit (nonsense)
• instantly recognize and “imprint” on their ideal romantic partners, even if they meet them as infants (ridiculous, creepy nonsense)
but nevertheless,
• are people who turn into wolves (actual mythology)

2) Sexy Teenaged Ghouls In Love

Technically, this is a "Sexy Ghul."

It’s a sign of how much Dungeons and Dragons has penetrated our popular culture that I’m guessing most people, if pressed, would think of a ghoul as a kind of souped up zombie with a paralyzing claw attack.  But actually they’re monsters from Arabic mythology that eat the dead.  Not to be confused with zombies, which eat the corpses of people they kill – ghouls hang out in graveyards and eat corpses after they’ve been buried.  In some of the legends, ghouls take on the physical appearance of the last corpse they ate.  And this strikes me as particularly ripe for erotic uhhh, paranormal romantic reapropriation.   You can’t have the hottie monster devouring entire corpses — too yucky — and having them look only like the last person they ate is too limited.  (What if they accidentally ate an ugly person?)  But what if by taking just one bite of deceased flesh, the ghoul has the ability to take on that person’s appearance whenever they want? There are some possibilities there, I think.  Imagine a love triangle between the totally ordinary guy (played by Shia Lebouef or Michael Cera, your call), his gorgeous cheerleader ex-girlfriend, and the exotic new girl in town.  That’s ex- as in ex-parrot, by the way:  she’s passed on, she’s pining for the fjords… and yet, for a girl who’s supposed to be dead, she but keeps on popping up in the oddest places!  Then of course the big reveal that apparent undead cheerleader actually IS the new girl, working her ghoulish shape-shifting mojo.  This is kinky as hell, of course, and even if you can get past the necrophagia (and wow, there’s a phrase not oft spoken), there are some dodgy consent issues in play here.  (If the boy kisses girl 2 only under the impression that she actually is girl 1…)  And of course you could turn it up a notch by making it so that girl 1′s personality, memories, and so on DO still exist when the ghoul is wearing that form.  I don’t know if you could spin a franchise out of this, but it would make for a good (if messed up) stand-alone novel.

Step 1: Ghoul

Step 2: Hawt Ghoul.

Step 3: The anxiety surrounding ghouls is essentially Cartesian.  It’s the difference between our thinking minds and our merely existing bodies.  Ghouls themselves can sometimes turn into hyenas (confusing the boundary between rational man and brute beast), and the idea that they eat corpses highlights the disconnect between our living selves and the pile of goop and keratin that will be left when we die.  It should be noted that hyenas are carrion animals.  Ghouls highlight our anxiety over the fact that, in the long run, we’re all on our way to becoming carrion.

Step 4: The inverse, obviously, is to set up a situation where ghouls allow people to NOT become carrion.  So yeah, we’re definitely keeping that idea about the people eaten by the ghoul continuing to exist in some form within the ghoul’s consciousness.

Step 5: Because this story turns out to be so squicky in so many ways, it’s probably the hardest to make conform to our general standards of romance.  It does, however, offer a neat way to resolve a love triangle happily for all three parties — well, sort of — without bringing up the dread spectre of polyamory, which is probably an even harder pill for most to swallow than the whole necrophagy thing.

Kind of already exists, because:

The pre-Islamic Arab poet/brigand al-Shanfara (literally, “the guy with thick lips”) boasted of having seduced and married a ghoul that he met in the Wadi Rum.  This was probably just a metaphor for his alienation from society, and in any case he does NOT describe her as sexy. And highschools in their modern form did not exist at that time.  But still.

Bonus fact:  al-Shanfara was friends with another poet, Ta’abbata Sharran, whose name literally means “mischief under his armpits.”

3) Sexy Teenaged Frankensteins In Love

Nothing homoerotic to see here, folks! Just move along.

Generally the sexy monster in these stories needs to be a mysterious outsider.  You can’t have the hero or heroine come in knowing that their lab partner is a vampire.  But the Frankenstein story isn’t going to work that way.  When Shelley was writing, the idea of life created by man rather than by god was existentially horrific in its own right, but this no longer packs quite the same punch.  And although the traditional Frankenstein monster is also loathsome to the eye, the paranormal romance version of the monster is going to need to be totally hot.  Which means that rather than chasing it with pitchforks, the villagers are going to be doodling hearts around its name in their marble notebooks.  For most people, there will be no difference between the monster and a regular dreamboat.   This means that you’re going to have to pair the monster up with someone who knows that it’s a monster, which basically means pairing it up with its creator.  Dr. Frankenstein (or rather, AP Chemistry student Frankenstein, I guess), can’t find the perfect prom date, she builds him, and it writes itself from there.  This one would probably end up having a much more traditional be-careful-what-you-wish-for moral, rather than ending with the kind of wish fulfillment that paranormal romance thrives on.  But hey, maybe not.  After all, prior to Twilight, vampire stories that traded that heavily on wish fulfillment usually weren’t found outside of fan fiction.

Step 1: Frankenstein Monster.

Step 2: Hawt monster.  (And also hawt Dr. Frankenstein — but probably not immediately identifiable as such.  If he’s a guy, he wears glasses.  If a girl, she has a severe and unflattering hairstyle.)

Step 3: Although I don’t think that people are as creeped out these days by the very idea of artificial life, there are still some weird anxieties about the proper relationship of the artificially created life form to its creator (c.f. I Robot, Splice, that one robot that beat all those people at Jeopardy, etc).

Step 4: Reversing this is really tricky, because you need to make the claim that the relationship of the creation and the creator is NOT problematic — that it is, in fact, the greatest romance the world has ever known.  And that’s a hard sell.  But hey, no one ever said writing the next paranormal romance blockbuster would be easy!  (Except for me.  I totally did say exactly that just a couple of pages ago.)

Step 5: One of the big important ideas that we’ve all internalized about romance is that it’s supposed to be a two way street.  The guy provides what the girl needs, and the girl provides what the guy needs too.  A situation where one of the partners never asks for or needs anything is not an ideal romantic situation:  we all want to be needed, not just to need.  So I think that’s the way you need to spin it.  The doctor character realizes early on that the monster is her ideal partner, but she can’t quite embrace the situation until she realizes, somewhere around the end of the third act, that she herself is also the monster’s ideal partner.  This would make for some excellent wish fulfillment, because I don’t think most people are quite comfortable with imagining themselves as anyone else’s idea of perfection.

Already kind of exists, because:

If you’re thinking that you’ve seen the whole “build your own prom date plot” before, it’s because you have, more or less, in Weird Science.  And, like, two different episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, at least.  And arguably My Fair Lady, sort of.  It’s durable.

Bonus fact:  This scenario would be an Oedipal nightmare of epic proportions.

4) Sexy Teenaged Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde In Love

There are plenty of sexier Jekyll and Hyde images out there, just not work-safe ones.

This works out to be sort of the mirror image of the Frankenstein plot.  This time, instead of building a perfect date, our teen chemistry whiz (we’ll make him a guy this time), is making a perfect version of himself.  The obvious way to play this is to make the Jekyll character a dork, and the Hyde version impeccably cool.  A slightly bolder and more interesting version would hew closer to Stevenson’s original vision, in which Jekyll isn’t trying to create an alter ego at all, but rather to repress his libidinous (and possibly homosexual) urges.  That’s an impulse a lot of teenagers can relate to, I’m sure.  One of the nice things about Jekyll/Hyde — well, one of the really problematic and gross things, in fact, but also one of the things that makes it a compelling story, is that Jekyll’s potion does seem to have the effects that he wants it to have, at least at first.  He really does purify his “normal” persona.  And in the versions where he’s provided with a love interest, she IS captivated by the new and improved Purity!Jekyll — there’s never a sense that completely repressing the Hyde persona was a bad idea in and of itself, even without the unexpected consequences.  So translating this into highschool terms, you need a guy who feels like he could get his dream girl to like him if he wasn’t constantly distracted by how much he wants to have sex with her.  He doses himself with Hormone-B-Gone, and it works!  Not just as in “his urges go away,” but as in “he totally does get the girl.”  Again, this plot is inherently kinky verging on creepy, since arguably what our teenaged Jekyll has done is to chemically delay the onset of puberty.

Step 1: Mr. Hyde.

Step 2: Sexy Hyde.

Step 3: Jekyll/Hyde is much less robust than some of the stories we’ve been looking at here.  ALL it can really be “about” is mankind’s failed attempt to control the baser urges of its nature.

Step 4: To reverse this, we need a plot where mankind SUCCESSFULLY controls the baser urges of its nature.

Step 5: So we end up with a Jekyll/Hyde plot where eventually there is no Hyde. Rather, Jekyll creates a perfected super-serum that completely eliminates every unworthy human emotion.  No bad side effects.  Okay, maybe it makes you sparkle in the daylight.  This being paranormal romance, I suppose it will have to turn out that lust is not an unworthy emotion (which is skirting pretty far afield from Stevenson’s original vision — but again, all you need is 25%).

Already kind of exists because:

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to working on my own paranormal romance novel, tentatively titled “Sexy Teenaged Shark From Jaws In Love.”  Hollywood, here I come!

Related Posts

• Episode 105: Twilight Celebrates Your Dependence Day
• The Overview: Twilight
• The Musical Talmud: Morning After Dark (Timbaland, featuring ShoShy and Nellie Furtado)
• Episode 73: Hello Kitty Theme Park
• Wolf-People of the World Unite! Socioeconomic Conflict and Classic Horror Creatures

Now, at this point about a quarter of you are thinking “wow, what a great story hook,” and the rest are thinking “that sounds like a ripoff of Battle Royale.” Both statements are true enough, although it actually works out to something like a cross between Battle Royale and My Side of the Mountain, since Katniss, the heroine, spends easily as much time struggling against hunger and thirst as she does trying to murder her fellow contestants.  That the concept is not totally original is entirely beside the point.  It’s still chilling, and in this case wonderfully executed.  Collins’ prose is sparkling and addictive, her plots are well structured and exciting.  Neither of these are universal traits in YA fiction (or any other kind of fiction), so that right there is something to celebrate.  If this was just Battle Royale fanfic, I’d still say it was worth your time and attention.

But it is much more than that. There is one element of The Hunger Games which I think is entirely original, for this kind of story — and when I say “this kind of story,” I don’t mean post-apocalyptic tales of children battling to the death, I just mean fiction directed at youth in general.

One of the big master narratives of fiction for the young is BE YOURSELF.   We’re constantly telling people that it’s bad to pretend to be something you’re not just to fit in:  if you learn to be yourself, people will learn to like you, or at least the right people will.  If you have to pretend to be someone you’re not to fit in with the cool kids, well, then to hell with them.  They were never worth paying attention to in the first place.  A slightly less after-school-specialish version of this narrative gives people a plausible reason for not just being themselves, but then adjusts the situation so that abandoning the pretense becomes the sensible thing to do.  Like, say you’re a teenaged wizard, and using magic outside of Hogwarts will get you expelled and possibly jailed.  A sensible person might want to, you know, keep his wand in his pants for the summer.  But Rowling sets up a situation where Harry has to reveal his true wizardly colors in self defense.  And of course the ministry of magic cavils and moans, and Harry gets to feel righteous about disobeying their stupid fussy laws.  They were never worth paying attention to in the first place, right?

To a certain extent, The Hunger Games plays right into this trope.  The Capitol wants Katniss to be one way, but she turns out to be the other way.  That’s the core struggle of the book right there:  government authority vs. individual autonomy.  No bonus points for guessing which one is on the side of right and justice.  No points for guessing whether she eventually triumphs over adversity — it’s still YA fiction.  (I feel like I can say this with 100% certainty even though I’ve not yet read the third book of the trilogy.)  But there’s an intriguing wrinkle built into the structure of the games, which is the main difference between the setup here and the one in Battle Royale.  In Battle Royale, the violent contest is staged for no very clearly defined reason.  It just sort of happens — that’s actually one of the most horrifying things about it!  There’s some suggestion that it’s a reaction against surging youth violence, or that it’s an attempt to keep the general populace cowed and terrified, but it’s by no means clear how the event would serve either end.  The kids just wake up on an island one day and are told that they have to kill each other.  Although we’re told that the battle was created as part of an education reform act (and can I just say, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during that subcommittee hearing), it’s not at all clear that all of the students in question even know about the program until they’re dropped into it.

In The Hunger Games, by stark contrast, the contest is televised. It’s the media event of the year, every year.  There are hosts and commentators.  People bet on it.  And you can support your favorite contestant by buying gifts which are parachuted into the arena.  Food.  Water.  Medicine. Bullets.  If you have enough fans, all this can be yours, and more…

This might seem at first like a cheap bid for relevance, updating the Battle Royale formula for the era of social networking and American Idol.   Not so.  Because it means that, for Katniss, putting on a good show for the audience is quite literally a matter of life and death.  And although this is not at all literally true for most teenagers… it sure feels like it sometimes.  This, for me, is the interesting thing about the book.  It follows the standard narrative as far as “people who don’t like you as you really are were never your friends to begin with,” but then takes a hard left turn:  rather than writing these people off as beneath your contempt, you have to work extra hard to deceive them, because otherwise they’re going to hurt you.  And to twist the screw even further, it’s not like all of the people Katniss is trying to deceive are horrible people.  There are plenty of good, decent people — people that she likes, people that she enjoys being around, people who bear her no ill will — that she still can’t be her real self around, because it’s vital to her survival that they think of her in a particular way.  And the book doesn’t flinch from the hardening and corrupting effect this can have on her psyche and her relationships.

To reiterate, the standard message of YA lit is that you should be yourself, because your real friends are the ones who like you when you are yourself.  The message of The Hunger Games is that if you have to put on a false face in order to interact with someone, even slightly, then that person is to that precise degree a threat, and therefore your enemy.  The change in focus is subtly, crucially — perhaps even transgressively — original.

Related Posts

• Open Thread for January 20, 2012
• Open Thread for November 18, 2011
• The Odds are Never in Your Favor: Pareto Efficiency in The Hunger Games
• Episode 173: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog of The Will
• Open Thread for May 6, 2011

In Wrather’s thought provoking post on Game of Thrones the other day, he points out that Daenerys Targaryen’s wedding is morally simplified in the televised version.  I’d had the same thought, and although I don’t want to put words into Wrather’s mouth, I think this aspect could do with some elaboration.

Daenerys’ arranged marriage to Khal Drogo (basically Genghis Khan with the serial number filed off), is a pretty traumatic event, both for her and for the spectator. There are several reasons why.

1) She’s thirteen years old at the time, at least in the book.  (They age her up a little in the series because they want to be able to show her naked.)

2) She’s never met her husband before their wedding day, and they don’t even speak the same language — her brother, an exiled prince, needs an army to retake his throne, and he’s basically sold Dany off to the highest bidder.

3) It’s not at all clear during the sex scene how much her consent is going to be an issue.

For Martin’s imagined setting, all of these make a certain amount of logical sense.  Plenty of medieval nobility would have been married by the time they turned thirteen — Shakespeare says as much of Juliet, and I once read a frankly erotic description of a woman by the 14th-century French poet Guillaume de Machaut that shocked me by ending with the line “and she was eleven or twelve years old, or thereabouts.”  Standards of decency change.  The fact that she hasn’t met her husband before the big day isn’t surprising either:  marriages of political expedience were more the rule than the exception, and although I don’t have a specific example in mind, I can almost guarantee that if you trace the current European monarchy back far enough you would come up with an example where the couple didn’t even share a language in common.  And as for the consent thing, marital rape was not a crime anywhere in the world before the 1920s, and in North Carolina not until 1993. So again, these aspects of Martin’s fictional world make sense.  That said, he had the option of creating a fictional world where none of this happened, or one where it only happened off camera.  Why have this scene?

One major purpose of the wedding sequence is to show how alien this culture is to our own.  Not just the culture of the savage Dothraki horse lords (about whom Edward Said would have, I think, a thing or two or three to say), but also the “European” culture of Dany’s Westeros.  It drives home how crappy women’s position was in feudal society:  even if you’re a princess, your main value is as a brood mare and a bargaining chip.  The age thing, the marrying-a-stranger thing, the lack-of-consent thing — they’re all just there to throw it into sharper relief.  To make the horrible more horrible, like.

But in the book, and only in the book, there’s something else that the scene is about too.  Because Dany accepts that this is her lot in life, and although she does get cold feet a couple of times, and even once begs Viserys to call off the wedding, she does not find the whole situation nearly as unnatural as we do.  She understands that this is part of being a noblewoman — it’s not what she would choose, but she goes through with it out of a sense of duty, not under duress.  And the reader is made to accept it too, on some level, because Martin throws another wrench into the gears:  all her life, Dany has been expecting that she will marry her brother when she gets old enough, this being a tradition of the Targaryen house (as it was for certain Egyptian dynasties).  And since incest is the ultimate in abject sexuality, and Viserys is already one of the most unmitigatedly loathsome characters in the entire series, suddenly an underaged marriage of convenience to a noble savage type begins to look like the lesser of two evils.  Finally, although there are several points near the beginning of the sex scene where Dany wants to stop and Drogo ignores her, it ends with this exchange:

He stopped then, and drew her down onto his lap.  Dany was flushed and breathless, her heart fluttering in her chest.  He cupped her face in his huge hands and looked into her eyes.  “No?” he said, and she knew it was a question.

She took his hand and moved it down [CENSORED CENSORED NAUGHTY BUSINESS CENSORED].  “Yes,” she whispered as she put [CENSORED CENSORED GEORGE SHE'S THIRTEEN WHAT THE HELL CENSORED CENSORED].

That’s right:  eventually, he does ask.  (Which is a more nuanced version of Khal Drogo than we see on the show, but we’ll talk about the show’s orientalism another day.) And eventually, she does give consent.  And we’re given to understand that the sex is not terrible.

This is extremely weird and uncomfortable territory for the viewer/spectator!  Our modern legal code is designed to treat this sex as rape anyway:  there’s implicit coercion involved, she said no several times before she said yes, and she’s underage, which means that she’s not legally capable of giving consent in the first place.  There are very good reasons for these laws.  But because and only because we are placed right smack inside Danaerys’s head while this is going on, we know that when she says yes she really means it.  She’s not thinking “I’ll just say yes because otherwise he might hurt me,” she’s not thinking “I’ve said no a hundred times and he’s worn me down so much that I just don’t care anymore,” she’s not even thinking “I’ll say yes because that’s what wives are supposed to do.”  She says yes because she’s been seduced — and part of that comes from the fact that Drogo does allow her the choice, which is more than Viserys ever did.  She’s still part of a system under which women are largely chattel, but her current position is better than her previous position, and that matters to her.

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether this bodice-ripping, consent-eliding, women-want-bad-boys-who-literally-don’t-know-the-meaning-of-the-word-no model of sexual desire is a harmful social script that shouldn’t be repeated in our fiction.  Leave aside for a moment the question of whether George R.R. Martin, by projecting consent and lust into a 13-year old’s head, hath made of himself a Humbert Humbert in his heart.  Leave these questions, and turn instead to another interaction that is flattened in the film version of the book, again involving a woman.  In the book, when Robert Baratheon offers Ned the position of King’s Hand, his wife Catelyn is the one who tells him that he has to accept it.  She’s an uncompromising realist, is Catelyn.  It’s not that she wants Ned to go, it’s just that she understands that you can’t turn down this kind of offer without insulting the king… and she’s not blind to the opportunities this would create for her husband, herself, and their family.  She’s no glory hound, but she’s an aristocrat.  Part of her job, part of being Lady Stark, is increasing the status of house Stark whenever possible.  The film version jettisons this interesting element of her character, in favor of a woman that just wants her man to stay at home with her (although I do love that line they gave her where she’s like “I’ll say, ‘Listen, fat man, you can’t take my husband’”). Then when they learn that John Arryn’s death was not an accident, Cat suddenly becomes terrified and desperate for Ned to stay — oh no wait, that’s the version from the series.  In the book, she’s even more insistent that he go to King’s Landing, not because they need to stay on the King’s good side, not because of the increased opportunity (which under these circumstances she couldn’t care less about), but because an old and dear friend has been murdered under circumstances that point to a treasonous conspiracy. She wants justice for her own sake, and as the Lady Stark, she wants to defend the realm!  And while there are certainly more self-actualized ways for a woman to handle these problems than to stay home and watch the kids while she sends her husband off to actually handle the problem, this is still a more progressive, and a far more interesting characterization than the one in the series, where she’s again all like “Oh no, Ned, don’t enter public life!  Stay home with me and take care of our baaaabiiieeees!” The book version of Catelyn does consider begging Ned not to go, once, after Bran has fallen from the tower.  But she immediately squashes that thought as unworthy and weak:  none of the reasons that Ned has to go have changed, and she knows that, so she keeps a stiff upper lip.  Not like in the series, where she breaks down sobbing, begs him to stay, and when he says he has no choice bitterly tells him “You do have a choice! And you MADE it!”  The actress delivers it splendidly, but it’s a terrible damn line.  And in the book, remember, she is the first one to realize that he has no choice.

The damsel in distress has been a stock character in melodrama for as long as melodrama has been around.  So has the long-suffering wife who pines for her husband while he’s off grimly doing what needs to be done in the public sphere.  There are elements of these stock characters in Daenerys Targaryen and Catelyn Stark.  (Dany even took a couple of levels in the “white woman sexually menaced by a swarthy ethnic type” prestige class.)  But in the books, this is not all there is to them, not even the main part of what there is to them, and in the series, at least in the pilot episode, it’s all that they are.  Why this flattening?  Well, both of these stock characters are women who have been damaged by a patriarchal system.  This is an aspect of Cat and Dany’s stories, so that’s fine.  But in the book, they are also a part of the same system that is grinding them down.  They’ve got a role to play in that system, and each of them accepts, excels at, and even to a degree relishes that role.  And this is too much complexity for a TV show to stomach, even an aitch-bee-oh TV show.  It’s like the writers are afraid that if Daenerys enjoys the sex, the audience will forget that politically expedient quasi-consensual child marriages are a BAD thing.  Or perhaps they’re afraid that the audience will think the writers have forgotten it.  Whatever the motivation, the televised version of these characters is sadly diminished.

On the bright side, though, I feel like they pretty much nailed Tyrion Lannister.  (Peter Dinklage should go ahead and buy a stand for that Emmy he’s got coming.)  And Cersei, who is one of Martin’s least well-realized characters, has actually grown in the adaptation.  And my guess is that the TV versions of Cat and Dany will get more complex over time — TV characters, after all, never spring forth full formed from the brow of the pilot.  Rather, they are created over the course of many episodes, and many seasons, shaped by many different writers and directors, and by the actor’s slowly evolving performance.  Even in the second episode, we see both characters take steps in the right direction.  The televised version of Game of Thrones is not yet the true steel, but all the necessary iron and carbon is there.  We just have to hope that the ongoing TV development process, always a pressure cooker, turns out in this case to be a blast furnace.

[Postscript: After I finished writing this, Wrather pointed me to Isaac Butler's excellent post, which makes several of the same points, and goes further by pointing out that the show's fumbling of Dany's wedding night is going to make her large scale character arc that much weaker. It's well worth a read]

Related Posts

• Think Tank: When Good Shows Go Bad
• We ARE out of touch with America: OTI’s POPULAR Popular Culture Survey Results
• Words are Wind: Repetition of Language in A Dance With Dragons
• Game of Thrones: To Read or Not to Read? [Think Tank]
• Game of Thrones and the Aesthetics of Fascism