While I am a fan of fantasy, I’ve only seen a few episodes of the original Game of Thrones and its spinoffs. One reason for this was and is practical: streaming services are expensive. I also resisted watching the series because some of my friends gushed about the grittiness and were enthused over the evil of most of the characters. Other friends condemned the shows for the same reason. While my experience with the show (and spinoffs) is limited, my friends were right and I understand why some liked it and some loathed it. I ended up in the “meh” camp, not liking it enough to make an effort to watch more but interested enough to watch episodes when they were available for free and I had nothing better to do at the time. Or episodes were inflicted on me.
Having taught aesthetics, I know that practical aesthetic taste is like one’s taste in food: what one finds too bland, another finds too spicy and so on. I am also mature enough to recognize that what I dislike might be liked (even loved) by others and that there might be merit in such things. But I do not subscribe to aesthetic subjectivism so I do not accept that aesthetic discussions end after one has expressed one’s like or dislike. As such, I will endeavor to present a rough discussion of fantasy and evil.
To set the stage a bit in terms of my own biases, my love of fantasy was shaped primarily by writers like Tolkien and by games like AD&D, which is usually called heroic fantasy. While such fantasy worlds do contain evil (such as Sauron and Orcus), evil is of a different sort than that of Game of Thrones. In Game of Thrones, the evil of classic fantasy is wedded to perversion, depravity and other such horrors that are seen as making evil “gritty and real.” This is, of course, not limited to this series. The idea of presenting evil characters in this manner is rather common and a case could be made in its favor.
When I first watched some episodes of Game of Thrones , I thought it broke the rules of the fantasy genre by presenting and seemingly glorying in this sort of evil. This was one reason I was not drawn into the series. To be fair, one criticism made of my view was that I liked fantasy as an escape from the nasty evil that exists in the real world and this is a defect in my character. This took me back to my youth when I was criticized for reading fantasy and sci-fi as a form of escapism; presumably it was assumed that people should stay engaged with boring and awful reality until it killed their soul or them. But I digress.
There are two easy and obvious replies to this alleged problem. First, heroic fantasy is but one of the many legitimate sub-genres within the fantasy genre. While the genre does require fantasy elements to be present to a degree greater than zero, it can be argued that there is no moral requirement that needs to be met to classify as a proper work of fantasy. Obviously, this series is not heroic fantasy, but it seems sensible to say that it is still legitimately fantasy. After all, it does include the seemingly supernatural white walkers and dragons (unless they are non-magical aliens or something) and the technology is at the sword and bow level (although guns are now a common weapon in fantasy and one should not forget the sci-fi fantasy of Shadowrun).
Second, the evil portrayed in the series is taken from the real world. So, the series meets Aristotle’s view that characters and actions should conform to what is probable. As Aristotle argued, what has occurred is obviously possible. It could even be argued that this series and others that embrace gritty realism are better than the more classic works because they are more realistic. This could form the basis of a counterattack, namely that it is heroic fantasy that is defective because presents the powerful characters (humans, at least) in a way that is improbable (that is, being mostly heroic and good rather than mostly depraved and evil).
One response to this argument is that fantasy works by their very nature need to break with reality. After all, if they are strictly realistic, they are not fantasy. As such, by presenting humans in what is taken to be “gritty and real”, a work is failing to be a work of fantasy and instead is realism, only with a monster or two thrown in to create the appearance of fantasy.
This raises the obvious concern about what sort of realism a fantasy work should include and what it should reject. While traditional fantasy typically rejects much of the reality of evil, it can be argued that this merely defines that sort of sub-genre rather than defining the entire genre. As such, a work can be very realistic in some ways, if it contains at least the necessary conditions for being a work of fantasy. In the case of Game of Thrones, it can wallow in evil while also being legitimate fantasy.
While I obviously prefer my fantasy with less evil (or at least with less of the sorts of evil in the series), I must concede that the inclusion of such evil is compatible with the fantasy genre, though obviously not with the traditional heroic fantasy. Interestingly, I have been told that my own preference for classic heroic fantasy shows that I am lacking in maturity and adult sensibilities. That is, it is a defect on my part to not prefer the gritty realism and evil of Game of Thrones to works like The Lord of the Rings. My self-righteous reply is that I prefer good over evil, which brings me to a second point, namely the matter of corruption.
In Book X of the Republic Plato argues that art is dangerous because it appeals to emotions and encourages people to yield , in harmful ways, to these emotions. For example, someone who watches works filled with lust and violence might become more inclined to yield to lust and violence in real life because of the corrupting power of art. This is the foundation for most censorship arguments, such as Hilary Clinton’s attack on video games. No, Hilary, I will never forget that. But lest anyone think I favor censorship, I do not.
While I have known about Plato’s arguments for years, I found them unconvincing until I played Grand Theft Auto III. Unlike the usual violent games I had played, GTA III casts the player as a bad person doing bad things for bad reasons. I am not sure how many police cars I had burning in the street or how many hookers I had killed before I felt the corrupting influence of the game. I dropped the controller, popped out the disk and never played that sort of game again. I did, however, continue to play violent video games.
When thinking about Game of Thrones and similar works in the context of my old GTA III experience, I knew that it was not the violence that bothered me. After all, I enjoy violent video games, I play D&D and I like fantasy novels that are replete with battle. In the case of Game of Thrones (GT), my analysis is roughly the same as that I made of GTA III.
In heroic fantasy, the heroes are trying to save the world by fighting evil. There is a clear moral purpose, even though violence is the usual means to the moral end. In the case of Game of Thrones, the focus seems to be on characters doing bad things for their own selfish ends, or (in some cases) simply because they are psychotically evil. So, in heroic fantasy, the heroes are acting in the right way towards the right persons for the right reasons. In the “gritty and realistic” works, the characters typically act in the wrong way towards the wrong people for the wrong reasons. As one might gather, I find an overabundance of evil unappealing, and I am concerned that exposure to such material can (as Plato argued) have a corrupting influence on people. After all, what people watch and experience shapes their cogitative processes and being exposed to an unrelenting tide of virtual evil would seem to have an impact on people. On the other hand, one could say that it is just a show and it would be silly to think that media can affect how a person thinks and acts.
Since I am a proponent of freedom of expression, I always feel odd arguing against artists doing as they wish in terms of the ethics they present in their works. However, I have never held that artists are exempt from morality (which, I am sure, would be vigorously argued against by someone like Oscar Wilde). I do, as might be suspected, agree with Aristotle that “things are censured either as impossible, irrational, morally hurtful, contradictory, or contrary to artistic correctness.” I did like the two episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms I saw while flying to and from my home state of Maine. But this was mostly because Dunk seems to be a good person and thus offsets the evil of the other characters.
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