How are Game of Thrones charcaters portrayed in the the books?
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Speaking as someone who really, really doesn't like fantasy, my dislike of fantasy is actually big part of why I actually had fun with ASOIAF, although I'd never defend it as a "good" example of literature. A lot of it is clearly written as a kind of reaction to fantasy and its genre conventions and tropes. In fact, my main criticism is that it doesn't go far enough in this regard. Despite Martin's reputation for killing off characters, you can quickly tell who the fan favourite characters are and these are protected both from death and from having to make any kind of difficult moral decision. It kind of undermines the themes, honestly.Spade Lead said:
While I would certainly agree with the argument that it's gratuitous, and certain passages did make me very uncomfortable (in a bad way) I wouldn't go so far as to say it's dark for the sake of being dark.twistedmic said:
I mean, most fantasy is set in what is ostensibly a medieval world (although it's more typically a renaissance world with medieval elements) but one which is heavily santized and clear of a lot of the more unpleasant elements of actual medieval life. Lord of the Rings is a great example, because it's essentially a vehicle for a lot of Tolkien's very reactionary views. The past is an idyllic countryside paradise where happy peasants labour under the the wise judgement or rightful kings who are never cruel or oppressive, not like the harsh and cruel modern world full of machines and pollution and tyrannical modern states.
But the actual medieval world was horrible, particularly during wartime. One thing I found myself enjoying about the books is how often it started to resemble a post-apocalyptic setting, because that's really what it is (except it's a pre-apocalyptic setting, instead of all the social institutions and laws which keep us safe and happy suddenly being gone, they don't exist yet). That struck me as an interesting insight and a rebuttal of the genre conventions of a lot of other fantasy which is, to put it bluntly, politically very weird.
Feudal monarchies are not a good system of government. They are not nice to live under.
Okay, so I had to unpack what I meant a bit and I realised I probably expressed it wrong.Silvanus said:
Firstly though, have you noticed how (other than the one off characters in introductory chapters) only one POV character has actually died? And yeah, grey areas regarding what counts as "death" but for a gritty world in which noone is safe, a lot of people seem to be remarkably safe.
But yeah, difficult moral decisions is the wrong way to put it, because the characters do make difficult moral decisions. I think what bothers me is that they are protected from the scrutiny to which other characters are subject.
And I don't think it's entirely Martin's fault. I feel like he wrote himself into a corner with some characters, and seems almost to be writing himself out of it. It's like, hey, did you not get that Tyrion strangling a teenage girl who he paid for sex and convinced himself he was in love with because, essentially, she didn't love him back was a shitty thing to do? Well, here's him sexually threatening a Lysene bedslave for the terrible crime of being in sexual slavery. No wait, here he's having sex with a heavily traumatized catatonic woman. Do you get it, do you get what a shit person he is yet! The thing is, the audience never gets it, and while partly that's their own fault and partly it's because Martin continues to frame Tyrion in conventionally heroic terms. He does bad things but is never allowed to be a bad person because the focus is always kept firmly on his own sense of being wronged and the fact that oh, he's really clever and important guys. That comatose woman he fucked probably wasn't as special and important as him, was she?
And this bothers me, firstly because it breaks with the dramatic realism which is the supposed selling point of the series. Dramatic realism is the idea that a story resembles real life, without pre-established roles for heroes and villains but where people are instead defined by what they do. Many characters in ASOIAF fall neatly into this, Melissandre is an uncompromising religious zealot who does terrible things because she believes they are necessary. A less interesting book would use this character much as the TV show does, as a straightforward villain or moral lesson about the dangers of religious extremism. The book specifically avoids that level of simplicity, we see Melissandre both through other people's eyes and through her own perspective, and we are allowed the possibility that her perspective may be right, or at least partly right, but in a way that doesn't compromise the fact that she's horrible to other characters.
I mean, if you've hung around the ASOIAF threads, you've probably seen me do the little schtick about Littlefinger actually being the best character, because his story is essentially a heroic narrative in which the hero fails. Partly that's just me stirring the pot, but there's an element of truth in it. Littlefinger murders people. Tyrion murders people. Littlefinger has a creepy relationship with women. Tyrion is a misogynistic, abusive rapist. And yet, littlefinger is a villain, Tyrion is a hero. There is no getting around that, it's the way the characters are framed. Tyrion gets away with everything he does because the plot never requires him to ask any hard questions of it, it's never allowed to compromise the fact that he's a poor persecuted little thing who just wanted twoo wuv!
Maybe there will be some payoff to this and I'll be wrong and completely blown away, but at this rate it'd have to be a pretty big payoff. The same goes for Miss Colonialism and Grizzly McBlandbastard.
This isn't true; outside of prologue/ epilogue characters, there are four POV deaths: Eddard, Quentyn, Catelyn, and Ser Arys Oakheart. Arys is a one-off, but that leaves three. Jon Connington's death is also all but certain. It also seems odd to exclude non-POV but otherwise very major and/or sympathetic characters, many of whom die.evilthecat said:
This seems to me a slightly odd line of reasoning. You seem to be arguing that the books frame Tyrion as a hero, but also portray him doing (and saying) pretty dreadful things. That is part of the framing; everything he is shown to do is part of the portrayal.
When a character is shown to act heroically at times and to act terribly at others, that doesn't mean the character is straightforwardly a hero that just gets excused by the author; that's a character with light and dark to them. And, frankly, that's realistic. The alternative is to write a cast of heroes and villains who act solely within their archetypes, which I would find rather staid.
Certainly the other characters do not consider Tyrion a straightforward hero, including his allies. It is not the author, either, who has taken the time to highlight his flaws and immorality. That leaves the readers. And I, certainly, do not consider anybody in ASOIAF to be anything but shades of grey (well... except perhaps Samwell Tarly). I don't think we're meant to. It's not that simplistic a story to apply the term "hero" to, even with Jon, whose decisions are the subject of pretty strong debate within the readership.
As someone who read the first two Malazan books and found next to no enjoyment in them whatsoever, I think the lack of description is specifically, and massively, to the books' detriment. Because the books (ones that I read anyway) span entire continents with a cast whose size rivals that of ASOIAF, I completely forgot who was supposed to be who. More in the first book than the second, but both were still confusing as all hell. The characters' appearances were described maybe 1-3 times at the beginning of each book, and that was it. I wouldn't even have realized Tattersail was supposed to be chubby/overweight if someone hadn't pointed it out on this very website. The whole group of thieves (I think I remember a guy named Crokus) just blurred into a bunch of dudes in cloaks because the author never seemed to differentiate them from one another with descriptions. All I remember from the second book is that Felisin was attractive, the priest had tattoos (because the book would never shut the fuck up about his "woad tattoos", and it certainly didn't help that I had no idea what the word "woad" meant) and that's about it. The best I could do to try to picture the characters in my head was to gauge their personalities from their actions and try to form a picture in my head of what such people would look like.twistedmic said:
To each his own, I suppose. I didn't need repeated and detailed descriptions of the characters to start to like them. I enjoyed the Malazan books, though I will say they got much better with the third one (Memories of Ice) and the first two are not really my favorites.bartholen said:
As for characters, Crokus was the only thief from the group at the Phoenix Inn- the others being an assassin, a courtier and a disgraced drunken former nobleman.
And in regards to Heboric (tattooed priest), his tattoos have some importance to the overall story of the novels.
I'd literally forgotten that those were POV characters, and in Quentyn's case that was genuinely bad of me because sure, we spent a bit of time with him. However, I'd literally remembered Arys Chapter as an Arianne chapter, perhaps because the purpose of that chapter is primarily to introduce her (a character who is actually important). As for Caitlyn, no. That specifically does not get to count. You do not get to keep the emotional impact of having killed a character off if you then go and do that.Silvanus said:
Sure, but the framing isn't just what the character does in the narrative, it's the way they are presented to the audience. Books are designed to be read, they are not simply histories of fictional events but have to appeal to their audiences emotions and needs. Sure, some people will have a strong reaction to a character's in universe behaviour simply because they are familiar with or have experienced similar behaviour in their own lives, but that isn't a function of framing at all. Framing is the tools by which the author leads the audience along an emotional or thematic journey through the story, as well as the literal things they have their characters do.Silvanus said:
And that's the problem here.
Sure, as I mentioned there are a lot of characters in ASOIAF who do this, who are sometimes bad and sometimes good, or who have comprehensible or even good intentions but are flawed or misguided. The point is that these characters can be presented to us in a wide variety of ways. We can be encouraged to gloss over their misdeeds and to understand that for all their flaws they are sympathetic or redeemable, or they can be presented to us as merely complex villains (as opposed to less complex villains like Ramsey Bolton or Euron Greyjoy). In a multi-protagonist narrative like ASOIAF, a lot of this will have to do with which perspectives we are allowed to see on a given character.Silvanus said:
And here's the thing, the way Tyrion thinks is quite realistic and nuanced. The fact that he is persecuted and emotionally wounded, and the psychological toll this takes on him, is believable. In real life, though, abusive people are often emotionally wounded and have sense of real or imagined persecution. In real life, abuse, cruelty or bullying is often motivated more by insecurity and unhappiness than by deliberate sadism, because abusive people also need to protect themselves from realising that they are abusive.
But that's all in-universe. As an audience, we only see Tyrion through his own self-narrative in which he is perpetually excused of responsibility for his own horrible actions, but we never see him from the perspective of someone who is hurt by him, or even who recognises him for what he is. When other characters think of him, they are either bigoted (and, importantly, are supposed to come across to the audience as bigoted) or they find him impressive/interesting/surprising. No character ever stops and goes "nah, this person really is a shitbag". We can infer that this might be what some characters are thinking, but only through Tyrion's own perspective, in which he is eternally absolved of any wrongdoing.
When characters in universe hate or fear Melissandre for being a cruel zealot, they are right. When people in universe hate and fear Littlefinger for being a power-hungry wildcard who will betray anyone to anyone, they are right. When people in universe hate and fear Tyrion because he's an ugly dwarf, they're simply wrong. The audience knows all of these things are right or wrong, even if the characters don't, because they have been lead by cues in the narrative. Tyrions narrative has few to no moral cues to signify that his horrific behaviour is supposed to be horrific.
Alright, we can discount it from being affecting in the traditional way that a major character death is affecting.evilthecat said:
Your original point, however, was about how POV characters are safe. She was not safe. Her ordeal is arguably worse than a clean death. Ditto, Theon Greyjoy.
You are making a rather drastic judgement call on how you interpret Tyrion's framing, which is my point. I do not agree that Tyrion is framed as a straightforward hero, and would argue that the writer makes that abundantly clear by bringing attention to his cruelty and the poor outcomes of his decisions. Those are the tools the writer has chosen to illustrate what a (dark) shade of grey he is.evilthecat said:
I'd even say it's a rather odd conclusion to draw that Tyrion is supposed to be framed as a hero. It seems to ignore a breadth of evidence the writer has gone to some effort to provide, in order to fit him into some rather archaic boxes.
Indeed-- so so far, we have a realistic depiction of the sources of harmful behaviour.evilthecat said:
So what?evilthecat said:
We are not so narrow-minded that we require a victim to tell us an action is bad, surely: it is evident in the event, and the impact we see it have.
The direct POV of a victim has not been required in fiction for decades: not in A Clockwork Orange, not in The Wasp Factory, or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or The City and the Pillar. The respect has been afforded to the audience's intelligence to evaluate the morality of a character without that-- even the point of view.
When they hate him for being an ugly dwarf, they are wrong. That prejudice is a major theme in his story, and the resentment has had a clear and direct impact on his behaviour: breeding violence, entitlement, and narcissism among other psychological issues.evilthecat said:
Are we to eschew this exploration of prejudice, because it offers a partial explanation for his poor behaviour? Of course not.
Can anyone explain your opinion of Kit Harrington's performance as Jon Snow?
Is it practically dead on spot?
I ask because people tend to look down on Jon Snow mostly because they see Kit Harrington as a wooden actor.
But is Jon Snow in the books from his dialoge and such a bit of a wooden charcater aswell?
Is it practically dead on spot?
I ask because people tend to look down on Jon Snow mostly because they see Kit Harrington as a wooden actor.
But is Jon Snow in the books from his dialoge and such a bit of a wooden charcater aswell?
Eh, kind of. Jon Snow is arguably the most 'vanilla' major character in the settings - conventional good guy who does the right things for the right reasons, and like Ned, gets killed for it (resurrection aside). I like Jon, and I think Kit's performance is fine, but he's arguably a blander character when compared to the more esoteric ones.Samtemdo8 said: