By the way, since I'm currently reading these novels... I agree with your analysis about the protagonists and the constant subversion of expectation.
But I do find that the antagonists, at least the most reckless ones are not exactly subverted by Martin. Joffrey is your classic Nero/Caligula with very little deviation from his cruelty and stupidity. Cersei is motivated in that she loves her children, but asides from this, she is constantly cruel and mean, same with Tywin. I'd be curious to pick your thoughts on this, and perhaps also on how this could be linked with the white walker question that you are having.
To me, it seems that all POV characters are subverted, but because they are, there still needs to be a clear 'evil' moving the story forward, otherwise everyone would be neither dark or light and the reader would get lost.
I find it interesting, basically, to see that all the efforts have been made to subvert pretty much everything... But that at some level Martin couldn't completely make do with brutally negative antagonists that barely have anything human left to them.
Perhaps it's one of those things that makes the conclusion tricky, because while the arcs are subverted, Tywin still needs to pay the price, Joffrey still needs to pay the price, Cersei still needs to pay the price and perhaps the White Walkers do as well in some way...
I agree with your analysis about Eddard Stark, he is a white knight, but not as much as Jon Snow in my opinion. In fact, Eddard shows distinct elements of tragic flaw pretty early on. He is so stubborn and lacking any form of pragmatism that he almost becomes irritating. As a reader you want to shout at him to stop being so damn blind and monolithic.
Jon Snow, however is a true white knight. He has a noble heart and we pretty much agree with his choices on the whole. He is not really showing (in my opinion) a clear tragic flaw. It would be interesting to see how Martin manages to close his line...
Regarding the antagonists, I think it depends on what angle one looks at it from.
Joffrey, imo, was very much meant to destroy the Prince Charming archetype, something that was crucial to Sansa's story, which was all about her becoming disillusioned with the romantic views she held of life as a 'princess.' Plus, you kinda understand where Joffrey comes from - he's been mollycoddled and spoiled his entire life, never really disciplined. He's a recognizably human antagonist, in contrast to an archetypal being like The Night King. Same thing with Tywin. He's just a guy who's all about cold-hearted, almost sociopathic pragmatism. An antagonist, yes. But one-dimensional evil? I'd say not.
I'd say The Hound is also a subversive character, even though he's not POV. He seems to be a response to the idea of an evil character being marked by deformity. Yet, he turns out to be a far more noble and moral character than, say, his brother Gregor, whose sadism and cruelty seem unrivaled. He and other minor 'evil' non-POV characters like him (Biter) are arguably true to the sense of Medieval verisimilitude that Martin wanted to inject into a fantasy setting.
Jon Snow is the closest thing the series has to a traditional heroic fantasy protagonist. Nonetheless, it is evident that Martin is challenging that figure. Like Eddard Stark, Jon is coming up to the limits of trying to remain honorable and making just decisions in the face of political reality, especially in Dance with Dragons. He's already made choices that tarnish the White Knight image (eg. Janos Slynt) and I'm certain he'll make more before the story is over.
Just wanted to comment that I love the Hound for this specific reason. Most of my academic work has actually focused on this specific stereotype - the idea that disablement is used as a marker of villainy. And while in literature it is classically a physical impairment that reflects 'what is on the inside' (an evil soul) - here, we're talking about everyone from Richard III to Scar in the Lion King - we see variations on this in non-fiction / news coverage (e.g., mental illness and gun violence - which we can certainly connect to Batman villains like the Joker).
I don't think a character having a motivation and being multi dimensional means that they are necessarily subverted. In the case of Joffrey, for sure from the POV of Sansa he is a subverted charming prince, but there is no suspense for the audience as to whether he is or not, we discover him quite early on via descriptions as being cruel and vain. (I think Arya). He is presented to the audience as a classic Caligula archetype (Who was also motivated by tragedy btw) and apart from Sansa, everyone knows him as such (including his own mum). Had Martin wanted to subvert Joffrey for the sake of the audience, he would have turned him conscious and filled with guilt and then the stereotype of the cruel/mad/young/beautiful ruler would have been subverted. Which by the way is what happens with Jaime, who slowly turns into a positive character despite being cruel and vain for a full book--but then he stops being an antagonist.
But I appreciate that this can turn into a pedantic debate as to whose POV is subverted or not.
Still, I think that despite not being one dimensional, character like Joffrey, Tywin and Cersei are not subverting expectations from the audience's POV. Tywin might be pragmatic, but he has zero humanity, even Tyrion describes him as someone who never ever smiles. He is incurably cruel with his Tyrion and sometimes unpragmatically so--since it leads to his own downfall.
My point was that even in his attempt at subverting all the codes, Martin couldn't completely subvert the rules of narrative itself and had to keep a clear pole of characters whom we can safely dislike/yearn to see punished.
It's insane to me that there are no comments here. It's a great piece, well argued and written.
I myself always thought that the main problem Martin has is the show. I believe - conjecture only! - that he gave Weiss and Benioff all his well-crafted main plot points without specifying how did the characters get there. Then the showrunners wanted to hurry everything up being fed up with the series and screwed the motivations up. Now Martin has to either write something compeltely different or be ready for the fans; disappointment.
Ironically, one of the common criticisms of the last few seasons is that the showrunners forgot about the space and the geography of Westeros, which allowed the characters to seemingly "teleport" from place to place from one episode to the next, whereas in the previous seasons it took half a season to get somewhere different. This can be viewed as a metaphor for the characers arcs as well.
I'd actually say the comment thing is my fault. I published this before I started regularly putting 'leave a comment' calls and questions at the end of a post, which as it turned out is what really gets people to engage. So, I added the prompt only a couple of month ago I think after most of the novelty died down. Nonetheless, this is one of my more well-read pieces, so I'm not complaining.
I think you're likely right about that. But the showrunners also had to work with what the show was at that point, with their own attitude towards the magic (which they basically saw as a necessary evil) and with their own desire to quit the series due to the increasing stress and complexity of it. Honestly, I'm not surprised they wound up phoning it in for the final seasons because HBO was giving them no downtime between seasons and they were looking more and more burned out/dead each year.
Imo, the series would've tuned out better as a whole if they'd done slightly longer 12-13 hour seasons but had 18 months to 2 years between each season to recover and make the new episodes as well as possible.
I don't know if Fuller would be a fit for Zelazny's style but it'd be interesting, that's for sure! Really, Amber and his other works deserve more big screen treatment. 'Creatures of Light and Darkness' is a personal favorite of mine and it'd be like the coolest over-the-top black comedy ever if done right.
I don't know, I just think it deserves someone both amazing visually and capable of telling a complex multi-season story. But maybe there is a style clash.
Yes, "Creatures of Light and Darkness" was my first Zelazny's book, and remains my favorite as well. Peak imagination and playfullness. Hard to emagine it on a screen, though.
Loved this and shared it with all my Fantasy-reading friends! I had never considered this specific trope reversal, which makes so much sense. For years, I have largely been invested in the 'Meereenese Knot' narrative [that Martin is stuck on various geospatial storytelling challenges of getting the right people to the right places at the right times], but I also fundamentally believe that Martin's scrapped plans for a 5-year timeskip are the major source of his writing woes. I sometimes wonder if he procrastinates even inside the world of A Song of Ice and Fire (not just with other projects) - the hyperfocus on Dorne and the Iron Islands in Book 4 and the way that Books 4 and 5 are basically just one long novel split by geographic region seem to me to reflect a significant loss of focus rather than meaningful or exciting worldbuilding. This is the supposed halfway point in the series and yet it continues to expand forever (in terms of geography, POV, narrative focus and plotlines) instead of contracting as we might expect. Having lost a full year of writing on the timeskip version of the series, he then had to find ways to pad out time (and space) as characters are too young for his original plans, or too far from where they need to be.
This was a post I had wanted to write since GoT ended and I realized there was a pretty big gap between the storytelling logic of the adaptation and its source material. I'm very happy to see that other Song fans and fantasy fans have come to appreciate it.
I definitely think that the 5-year gap and the Meereenese Knot were factors in the writing woes but I'd say their main impact was still on Feast/Dance. This in turn considerably delayed the writing of Book 6, which, as I argue here, has its own specific set of challenges, some of which are potentially insurmountable.
The way Feast and Dance continue to expand the world and scope may also have been a way for Martin to avoid dealing with the key mytharc issues that are simply unavoidable in Winds and Dream. And it's likely that a chief problem is just trying to ensure that every major character has something 'to do' in each book.
One thing I definitely believe the 5-year gap would've allowed Martin to do is avoid actually delving into the specifics of the 'magic training' that we see with characters like Bran and Arya, which he's evidently loath to do and finds challenging to write.
Btw, if you're interested, there is a cool Reddit series that, among other things, delves into the earlier drafts of 'Feast for Crows,' which are (or were) available at the Cushing Library. Some interesting details there, like at one point Victarion Greyjoy was gonna die in Feast.
I am SUPER interested in these secrets :O. I feel like he should've stuck with the 5 year timeskip - I love those kinds of storytelling ideas - so I am keen to see what was potentially going to happen in an earlier Feasts. But also I came to close this tab and now I have four more T_T haha.
Another possible deconstruction could simply be for the Westerosi to lose. The White Walkers are a tolkienian high-fantasy menace who can only be defeated by tolkienian high-fantasy heroes, yes? Well, Westeros is fresh out of such heroes so they'll completely fail to recognize, much less unite against the existential threat and get curbstomped by ice zombies. The series ends with everyone dead and the Iron Throne either ignored by the new lords of Westeros and eventually ignominiously destroyed when the advancing glaciers of endless winter demolish the ruins of King's Landing, or claimed by the Night King.
Ha-ha! I like that idea but it would be way too modernist and unconventional for this series. Its overall approach is to find a middle ground between the extremes, to combine classical and modernist storytelling.
By the way, since I'm currently reading these novels... I agree with your analysis about the protagonists and the constant subversion of expectation.
But I do find that the antagonists, at least the most reckless ones are not exactly subverted by Martin. Joffrey is your classic Nero/Caligula with very little deviation from his cruelty and stupidity. Cersei is motivated in that she loves her children, but asides from this, she is constantly cruel and mean, same with Tywin. I'd be curious to pick your thoughts on this, and perhaps also on how this could be linked with the white walker question that you are having.
To me, it seems that all POV characters are subverted, but because they are, there still needs to be a clear 'evil' moving the story forward, otherwise everyone would be neither dark or light and the reader would get lost.
I find it interesting, basically, to see that all the efforts have been made to subvert pretty much everything... But that at some level Martin couldn't completely make do with brutally negative antagonists that barely have anything human left to them.
Perhaps it's one of those things that makes the conclusion tricky, because while the arcs are subverted, Tywin still needs to pay the price, Joffrey still needs to pay the price, Cersei still needs to pay the price and perhaps the White Walkers do as well in some way...
I agree with your analysis about Eddard Stark, he is a white knight, but not as much as Jon Snow in my opinion. In fact, Eddard shows distinct elements of tragic flaw pretty early on. He is so stubborn and lacking any form of pragmatism that he almost becomes irritating. As a reader you want to shout at him to stop being so damn blind and monolithic.
Jon Snow, however is a true white knight. He has a noble heart and we pretty much agree with his choices on the whole. He is not really showing (in my opinion) a clear tragic flaw. It would be interesting to see how Martin manages to close his line...
Regarding the antagonists, I think it depends on what angle one looks at it from.
Joffrey, imo, was very much meant to destroy the Prince Charming archetype, something that was crucial to Sansa's story, which was all about her becoming disillusioned with the romantic views she held of life as a 'princess.' Plus, you kinda understand where Joffrey comes from - he's been mollycoddled and spoiled his entire life, never really disciplined. He's a recognizably human antagonist, in contrast to an archetypal being like The Night King. Same thing with Tywin. He's just a guy who's all about cold-hearted, almost sociopathic pragmatism. An antagonist, yes. But one-dimensional evil? I'd say not.
I'd say The Hound is also a subversive character, even though he's not POV. He seems to be a response to the idea of an evil character being marked by deformity. Yet, he turns out to be a far more noble and moral character than, say, his brother Gregor, whose sadism and cruelty seem unrivaled. He and other minor 'evil' non-POV characters like him (Biter) are arguably true to the sense of Medieval verisimilitude that Martin wanted to inject into a fantasy setting.
Jon Snow is the closest thing the series has to a traditional heroic fantasy protagonist. Nonetheless, it is evident that Martin is challenging that figure. Like Eddard Stark, Jon is coming up to the limits of trying to remain honorable and making just decisions in the face of political reality, especially in Dance with Dragons. He's already made choices that tarnish the White Knight image (eg. Janos Slynt) and I'm certain he'll make more before the story is over.
Just wanted to comment that I love the Hound for this specific reason. Most of my academic work has actually focused on this specific stereotype - the idea that disablement is used as a marker of villainy. And while in literature it is classically a physical impairment that reflects 'what is on the inside' (an evil soul) - here, we're talking about everyone from Richard III to Scar in the Lion King - we see variations on this in non-fiction / news coverage (e.g., mental illness and gun violence - which we can certainly connect to Batman villains like the Joker).
I don't think a character having a motivation and being multi dimensional means that they are necessarily subverted. In the case of Joffrey, for sure from the POV of Sansa he is a subverted charming prince, but there is no suspense for the audience as to whether he is or not, we discover him quite early on via descriptions as being cruel and vain. (I think Arya). He is presented to the audience as a classic Caligula archetype (Who was also motivated by tragedy btw) and apart from Sansa, everyone knows him as such (including his own mum). Had Martin wanted to subvert Joffrey for the sake of the audience, he would have turned him conscious and filled with guilt and then the stereotype of the cruel/mad/young/beautiful ruler would have been subverted. Which by the way is what happens with Jaime, who slowly turns into a positive character despite being cruel and vain for a full book--but then he stops being an antagonist.
But I appreciate that this can turn into a pedantic debate as to whose POV is subverted or not.
Still, I think that despite not being one dimensional, character like Joffrey, Tywin and Cersei are not subverting expectations from the audience's POV. Tywin might be pragmatic, but he has zero humanity, even Tyrion describes him as someone who never ever smiles. He is incurably cruel with his Tyrion and sometimes unpragmatically so--since it leads to his own downfall.
My point was that even in his attempt at subverting all the codes, Martin couldn't completely subvert the rules of narrative itself and had to keep a clear pole of characters whom we can safely dislike/yearn to see punished.
It's insane to me that there are no comments here. It's a great piece, well argued and written.
I myself always thought that the main problem Martin has is the show. I believe - conjecture only! - that he gave Weiss and Benioff all his well-crafted main plot points without specifying how did the characters get there. Then the showrunners wanted to hurry everything up being fed up with the series and screwed the motivations up. Now Martin has to either write something compeltely different or be ready for the fans; disappointment.
Ironically, one of the common criticisms of the last few seasons is that the showrunners forgot about the space and the geography of Westeros, which allowed the characters to seemingly "teleport" from place to place from one episode to the next, whereas in the previous seasons it took half a season to get somewhere different. This can be viewed as a metaphor for the characers arcs as well.
Wow! Thank you so much for that!
I'd actually say the comment thing is my fault. I published this before I started regularly putting 'leave a comment' calls and questions at the end of a post, which as it turned out is what really gets people to engage. So, I added the prompt only a couple of month ago I think after most of the novelty died down. Nonetheless, this is one of my more well-read pieces, so I'm not complaining.
I think you're likely right about that. But the showrunners also had to work with what the show was at that point, with their own attitude towards the magic (which they basically saw as a necessary evil) and with their own desire to quit the series due to the increasing stress and complexity of it. Honestly, I'm not surprised they wound up phoning it in for the final seasons because HBO was giving them no downtime between seasons and they were looking more and more burned out/dead each year.
Imo, the series would've tuned out better as a whole if they'd done slightly longer 12-13 hour seasons but had 18 months to 2 years between each season to recover and make the new episodes as well as possible.
Absolutely. I think Martin suggested them to make 12 or so seasons to wrap everything up properly, but they refused.
Still, we have seasons 1-5 that are as close to perfect fantasy series as could be. Nothing else came even close.
(I have a dream of Brian Fuller running the "Princes of Amber" series, but chances are slim to none.)
I don't know if Fuller would be a fit for Zelazny's style but it'd be interesting, that's for sure! Really, Amber and his other works deserve more big screen treatment. 'Creatures of Light and Darkness' is a personal favorite of mine and it'd be like the coolest over-the-top black comedy ever if done right.
I don't know, I just think it deserves someone both amazing visually and capable of telling a complex multi-season story. But maybe there is a style clash.
Yes, "Creatures of Light and Darkness" was my first Zelazny's book, and remains my favorite as well. Peak imagination and playfullness. Hard to emagine it on a screen, though.
Loved this and shared it with all my Fantasy-reading friends! I had never considered this specific trope reversal, which makes so much sense. For years, I have largely been invested in the 'Meereenese Knot' narrative [that Martin is stuck on various geospatial storytelling challenges of getting the right people to the right places at the right times], but I also fundamentally believe that Martin's scrapped plans for a 5-year timeskip are the major source of his writing woes. I sometimes wonder if he procrastinates even inside the world of A Song of Ice and Fire (not just with other projects) - the hyperfocus on Dorne and the Iron Islands in Book 4 and the way that Books 4 and 5 are basically just one long novel split by geographic region seem to me to reflect a significant loss of focus rather than meaningful or exciting worldbuilding. This is the supposed halfway point in the series and yet it continues to expand forever (in terms of geography, POV, narrative focus and plotlines) instead of contracting as we might expect. Having lost a full year of writing on the timeskip version of the series, he then had to find ways to pad out time (and space) as characters are too young for his original plans, or too far from where they need to be.
Thank you so much, John! I really appreciate it.
This was a post I had wanted to write since GoT ended and I realized there was a pretty big gap between the storytelling logic of the adaptation and its source material. I'm very happy to see that other Song fans and fantasy fans have come to appreciate it.
I definitely think that the 5-year gap and the Meereenese Knot were factors in the writing woes but I'd say their main impact was still on Feast/Dance. This in turn considerably delayed the writing of Book 6, which, as I argue here, has its own specific set of challenges, some of which are potentially insurmountable.
The way Feast and Dance continue to expand the world and scope may also have been a way for Martin to avoid dealing with the key mytharc issues that are simply unavoidable in Winds and Dream. And it's likely that a chief problem is just trying to ensure that every major character has something 'to do' in each book.
One thing I definitely believe the 5-year gap would've allowed Martin to do is avoid actually delving into the specifics of the 'magic training' that we see with characters like Bran and Arya, which he's evidently loath to do and finds challenging to write.
Btw, if you're interested, there is a cool Reddit series that, among other things, delves into the earlier drafts of 'Feast for Crows,' which are (or were) available at the Cushing Library. Some interesting details there, like at one point Victarion Greyjoy was gonna die in Feast.
Early Feast Drafts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/yativy/spoilers_extended_secrets_of_the_cushing_library/
https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/z0x0qp/spoilers_extended_secrets_of_the_cushing_library/
https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/10cq27q/spoilers_extended_secrets_of_the_cushing_library/
More recent - AGoT early drafts: https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/1belw08/spoilers_extended_secrets_of_the_cushing_library/
I am SUPER interested in these secrets :O. I feel like he should've stuck with the 5 year timeskip - I love those kinds of storytelling ideas - so I am keen to see what was potentially going to happen in an earlier Feasts. But also I came to close this tab and now I have four more T_T haha.
Very interesting analysis
Another possible deconstruction could simply be for the Westerosi to lose. The White Walkers are a tolkienian high-fantasy menace who can only be defeated by tolkienian high-fantasy heroes, yes? Well, Westeros is fresh out of such heroes so they'll completely fail to recognize, much less unite against the existential threat and get curbstomped by ice zombies. The series ends with everyone dead and the Iron Throne either ignored by the new lords of Westeros and eventually ignominiously destroyed when the advancing glaciers of endless winter demolish the ruins of King's Landing, or claimed by the Night King.
Ha-ha! I like that idea but it would be way too modernist and unconventional for this series. Its overall approach is to find a middle ground between the extremes, to combine classical and modernist storytelling.