Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones
A Case Study in the Decline of Fantasy
Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones are two of the most successful epic fantasy series in the history of the genre. While both have a reputation for wordiness (to a fault), unwieldy plots, and lengthy casts of characters, Game of Thrones is only five books long (so far – it remains unfinished, with the plan being for the sixth or seventh book to be the final one) and The Wheel of Time is fourteen books long (three of them written after Robert Jordan’s death).1 Later books in the series required a glossary stretching dozens of pages.
They make for a good comparison, if only because they each represent a different approach to the same fantasy subgenre (i.e., multi-book epic fantasy with complicated plot lines).
The protagonist of The Wheel of Time is the reincarnation of a powerful messiah who, in his past life, saved the entire world before going insane and in his madness bringing about an apocalypse which destroyed much of the world and killed his wife and family. During the events of the novels, he is in a polyamorous relationship, borders on insanity for large chunks of the storyline, and racks up a body count numbering in the four or five figures. Elsewhere in the novels, there is plenty of promiscuity, shocking violence, torture, betrayals, redemptions, etc.
And yet, the reputation in fantasy circles of The Wheel of Time is that it is a simplistic, moralizing tale, with uncomplicated characters who can never do the wrong thing or don’t have any flaws. To paraphrase one anonymous online fantasy fan, the heroes excrete gold bricks.
Why does it have this reputation?
Because for all their flaws, the heroes of The Wheel of Time are fighting for good. Their enemy is literally Satan, the devil, the dark lord, the source of all that is evil, and their struggle is nothing less than the fate of the world. The main character, for all his complications, is sent by the Creator (i.e., God) to do battle with creatures from hell. It is not necessarily a Christian story, but it takes place in a monotheistic world in which the religion is not only real, but the most important thing in the story and the driver of all the events.
For this reason, The Wheel of Time has a somewhat gauche or uncultured reputation among fantasy fans, who have moved beyond good and evil in their taste. The good guys aren’t always all that good, but they believe in good and they try to do good. Meanwhile, the bad guys are straight-up bad, and their master is the personification of evil itself.
It should be noted that there were also plenty of characters who started out good but became corrupted, or started out bad but were redeemed, or both. Just in case it wasn’t clear that the “cardboard cutout,” “simplistic” narrative about Wheel of Time characters is false.
The Wheel of Time typified an earlier era in fantasy. Although begun in the 1990s, Game of Thrones reached its peak in the 2010s (due to the television show) and typified a new era of fantasy fandom. Many argue the tropes of this new era better capture the complexity of real human beings (i.e., there are no “simple” tales of good vs. evil). I argue something close to the opposite. It would be hard to make the central characters in The Wheel of Time more “complicated” (i.e., flawed) without making them harder to like and harder to root for. Of course, that is partly the point. As it is, they are profoundly flawed, but you like them and root for them and know that their cause is just. Were someone to make an “amoral” version of The Wheel of Time, there would be a much rougher equality in likability (or dis-likability) between all of the characters,2 which would make picking and choosing who to root for much more a matter of personal taste on the part of the reader, nothing more, nothing less.3
Game of Thrones is much more along those lines. There are characters who are clearly worse and clearly better. There are characters who are objectively evil and there are even characters who are basically good. But it is hard to really like most of the characters in Game of Thrones, and it is hard to root for some of them (or against others). Even characters we want to like often end up doing something to make us dislike them.
Lord Eddard Stark, who typifies the old era of fantasy (he is obsessed with honor, raises his children to do the right thing, is honest to a fault, atones for his mistakes, believes in rules and self-control, etc.), dies in the first book. He is relentlessly mocked by other characters for his Boy-Scout-like attitude. After his death, most of the characters who live moral lives are weak or small (most of them are children).
George R. R. Martin doesn’t give readers easy characters to root for. There is more equality between all sides. For most of the books, none of the factions most likely to gain power over Westeros seem particularly noble or just (although some are worse than others). Who, then, do we like and root for?
One common answer is Tyrion Lannister. Tyrion isn’t a good man, but he isn’t a bad man either. He is cunning, but there are many things he is unwilling to do, and he seems to spend much of his time trying to prevent or undo crimes committed by his sister. But the reason most people root for Tyrion is because he’s smart and because he’s cool. There’s a sardonic quality to him which makes him both likable and edgy. Plus, he’s more intelligent than most of the other characters in the book.
When we put it that way, this seems to be a curious choice. We root for the most intelligent? Is IQ to take the place of moral worth in an “amoral” game of thrones? Or is coolness?
But when high moral stakes have been taken away from us, what we have left to judge the characters (and judge them we do, even though they are fictional characters and even though we have been taught not be judgmental) are qualities like intelligence and, of course, coolness.
The world of Game of Thrones is one of shifting alliances, backstabbing, and realpolitik. Human beings are shown without fail to be weak and flawed. This is what fantasy fans mean when they say they want “complicated” stories and characters, and not “simplistic” ones. But curiously, most characters in the novels seem to share the same exact flaws and weaknesses: sex and money. Character after character is outdone by their infidelity or their promiscuity. Some are outright sexually depraved. Others are just undisciplined. Weirdly enough, a surprising amount of this includes incest. One wonders what possessed Martin to make incest (over and over again) such an important plot point.
And if it isn’t lust it’s greed. These seem to be the only two flaws, over and over.4 If that isn’t a simplistic view of human beings, I don’t know what is. Eddard Stark is perhaps the only character genuinely motivated by honor, and he seems profoundly misunderstood because of it. In fact, because the world of Game of Thrones is so amoral, it is questionable as to how important reputation could possibly be when only one man cares about his honor (although Martin clearly understands honor only as “personal honor” or “integrity,” and not “reputation within a society”).5
It is a very modern thing to misunderstand honor and disbelieve that it could motivate someone. Which brings us to something else that George R. R. Martin misunderstands: religion.
In Game of Thrones, there are many religions. But they aren’t real. Almost without exception, nobody believes in them, including the priests (who are mostly frauds). This illustrates the classic mistake of a certain type of atheist who extrapolates the fact that religion feels unreal to him personally to mean that all religious people are playacting, whether they know it or not. Rather than adding complexity to the books, this breeds shallowness. Every new hollow religion introduced in the book is a cardboard cutout, lacking in substance. This betrays lack of understanding of human nature, rather than deeper understanding.
Complicated vs. Complex:
The word you commonly hear both writers and fantasy fans use is “complicated.” They prefer “complicated” characters. By which they mean “amoral” characters.
I put “amoral” in quotation marks, because it is unclear to me whether a human being can be amoral. One of the primary features of being a human being is that one’s actions carry moral weight, for good or for ill. Unlike animals, we are aware of the sins we have committed.
By “amoral” characters, fans mean characters who are neither good guys nor bad guys. Perhaps you think I am making much of this point. After all, presumably many fantasy writers and readers do believe that characters’ actions carry moral weight. But on the other hand, a desire for “amoral” characters, or characters whose actions are unhindered by any moral weight, indicates the opposite – for it is only in the context of entertainment, where we imagine that “it doesn’t matter,” that we find ourselves rooting for characters who are neither good nor bad (or even rooting for outright bad guys) merely because they are cool or funny or smart.
If I am to make much of one point, it is this: rather than adding depth to a novel, removing morality takes away a dimension and renders characters flatter, less relatable, and less realistic. “Amoral” characters may be “complicated,” but they aren’t complex.
I have written before and will probably write again for as long as I live, that complicated is not a synonym for complex, and simple is not a synonym for simplistic. F=ma is simple. It also explains the world in a way that √(7a*ei*m-πc3)-94=24F doesn’t. The latter is more complicated, but it is also meaningless gibberish. In fact, in real life, what is simple is often (though not always) complex, and what is complicated is usually simplistic. But the human brain is easily fooled by complication, so we fall for the complicated answer almost every time (hence the popularity of conspiracy theories).
The Larger Context:
I used to think this didn’t matter all that much. Perhaps you think I am taking fantasy too seriously. Perhaps I am. But I think that for a long time I didn’t take seriously enough the arguments I am about to make. I used to think that “it didn’t matter,” since we were talking about entertainment, and not something real. And especially since fantasy is the archetypical “unserious” genre (i.e., escapist). It’s all supposed to be harmless fun.
But everything has consequences. Some are good and some are bad. We can’t get away from consequences, as much as we’d like to live without them. The best we can do is to try to ensure the consequences of our words and thoughts and actions are good, rather than bad.
We live in a world of George R. R. Martins. We look back on the past and struggle to believe that people could be motivated by religion or honor. We wonder at superstition. How could people have been so naïve? Didn’t they know that there weren’t fairies behind every tree? Maybe they didn’t know what we know now: that the things they feared weren’t real, for the world is relatively harmless.
But maybe we are the naïve ones. Maybe the world isn’t as harmless as we assume. Maybe there really is more to the world than meets the eye.
This is perhaps one of the most important lessons the fantasy genre can teach us. Fantasy is an attempt to re-enchant the world. Alternatively, it is an escape from our disillusioned world to a world where the enchantment is real.6 In fantasy, the dragons are real.
I don’t believe that dragons are real, but I do believe that corruption is real, and I do believe that when we fail to see that there is more to the world than meets the eye, when we believe it is harmless and lacking in consequences, we are being very naïve. Even subtle human beings are often quite unsubtle on a subconscious level, and cynicism is very difficult to maintain. In other words, we come to believe the stories we tell. Over time, it is very hard for someone to maintain a perfect separation between fictional behavior which “doesn’t matter” and real behavior. We begin telling ourselves that it’s okay to root for the bad guys because it’s fiction, and we eventually come to tell ourselves that they aren’t really all that bad and their actions might even be good.
By no means does this always spill over into terrible consequences in the real world, although it may have minor ones. Violent video games don’t cause violence, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an effect. And if you believe, as I do, that human beings are in possession of a soul, consequences don’t have to manifest in the physical world to be weighty and important.
I’m not going to say something simplistic like, “And this is why all content needs to be good and wholesome.” But I do think people need to be aware of what they are consuming, and what effect it can have on them, and I believe that even the strongest personalities who are least prone to temptation should be careful. If we are aware that our entertainment has an effect on us, we are more likely to ensure that whatever we consume has a good effect on us. But if we are unaware of it, we might even be harmed by relatively anodyne content.
I didn’t want to believe any of this. I wanted to believe that human beings were strong and the world was harmless. But I don’t anymore.
It is hard to look around today and not see that culture has consequences. We no longer hold our leaders to any standard of character. By no means is the corruption of our entertainment the sole contributing cause of this, but we started by saying that it was okay not to hold our fictional heroes to any standard of character, and now we say it is okay not to hold our politicians, celebrities, university presidents, public health officials, religious leaders, district attorneys, musicians, businesspeople, and sports stars to any standard of character. It is only a matter of time before we go from saying that it is okay to allow our baseball players and cyclists to cheat, to saying that it is okay for our students to cheat.
But some already do that.
The message our brains seem to have received from our own consumption habits – whether or not we intended that message – is that “you can be a bad person, but if you are entertaining enough” that’s all that matters. The quotation in question refers to the archetypical example of this phenomenon, Donald Trump, but I do not mean to score a political point, and I have always believed this rot extended on both sides of the political aisle and throughout our society. Trump merely illustrates the phenomenon: because he is entertaining, all his sins are forgiven.
This is how we treat books and movies. If the characters are entertaining, they can get away with murder (literally). If the story is entertaining, we will forgive anything. I wanted to believe that never bled into real life, but it does. I still believe that most individuals are capable of reading a book, or watching a movie, without being corrupted, but only if we remember that we are capable of being corrupted.
To Bring it Back Full Circle:
It may seem I have gone far afield, but I haven’t. My larger point is that culture has consequences, and that therefore we must take culture seriously, whether we would like to or not. We must recognize that entertainment has consequences upon us as individuals and upon a society. And we must recognize that human beings exist within a larger context in which our actions carry moral weight. There are no amoral human beings and there can be no amoral characters in an amoral world (not really), unless that world ceases to bear any resemblance to a world we could understand, because we cannot understand characters and their actions absent any moral judgment.
The “amoral” trend in the fantasy genre stems partially from a belief in moral relativism. Some readers believe that while morality isn’t relative in the real world, it can be in the world of the book, which makes it “more fun.” Others do believe that the world in which we live has no morality save whatever conventions we invent. Morality is relative, and therefore it doesn’t matter what lessons our entertainment imparts.
Debating moral relativism is outside the scope of this essay, however I will just say that if we really are “beyond good and evil” because such concepts don’t exist, there is no reason why the strongest people shouldn’t do whatever they want and trample on the weak. Indeed, perhaps the redeeming lesson of Game of Thrones is that it doesn’t make us want to inhabit a world without good and evil, because this is precisely what happens. The stronger characters trample the weak and take what they want.
As you might expect, I prefer The Wheel of Time. I prefer it for a variety of reasons not relating to the content of this essay, however, I also prefer it because it has moral stakes which make it compelling. My principle objection to Game of Thrones is that at points there is nothing to compel one to keep reading beyond personal fascination.7 One can’t feel much attachment to a cause, and one has no positive vision for how the events of the story will work themselves out. Perhaps the better characters will win out over the worse characters, but will that mean anything? Will there be justice, or just an empty world, devoid of any moral resolution?
I also prefer The Wheel of Time because I believe that it more accurately reflects the world in which we live. There are such things as good and evil, and they are at odds. We are all profoundly flawed and tempted human beings, but we can be redeemed and we can try to choose to do what is right. Moreover, it is natural for human beings to prefer stories such as The Wheel of Time, in which there are good guys and bad guys, because we instinctively believe (or recognize) that we inhabit such a world. We are more satisfied by “simple” tales of good and evil than by complicated stories of “amorality.” In every story we tell, we naturally look for the good guys and the bad guys, whether we like it or not.
Real life is more complicated than simply a conflict between good guys and bad guys. But real life does have good guys and bad guys, and just like in The Wheel of Time, the bad guys sometimes do good things and the good guys sometimes do bad things. And unlike in A Game of Thrones, there isn’t a rough equality between all sides. The stakes of our actions, therefore, are not low.
I prefer stories with clear right and wrong. But I also think it is important to write stories in which there is clear right and wrong, and I wish my work to reflect that. It is sad that many fans’ tastes have evolved in an “amoral” direction, but for my own small part I will do my best to stand athwart that trend. We are a far cry from Tolkien’s consciously Christian Middle Earth,8 but there are always many readers hungry for “simplistic tales of good and evil,” otherwise known as stories with high moral stakes which reflect a conception of justice. The success of The Wheel of Time (and The Lord of the Rings) shows that stories need not be preachy or moralizing to satisfy that.
When Jordan’s estate tapped him to finish the series, Brandon Sanderson planned to write just one book, but found it impossible to finish in less than three thousand-page tomes.
Equality is the correct term here. Rand Al Thor and the Dark One are not treated equally in The Wheel of Time. Rand is the hero, and the Dark One is evil. Rand’s friends and allies are deserving of our sympathy. The Trollocs (a race of evil, monstrous creatures essentially bred in hell for the purposes of destroying the world) are not.
With roughly equal sides, the stakes in the conflict are actually quite low. What does it matter if one side wins or another side loses? What difference will that make?
Perhaps you could add alcoholism or something of that nature to the list, given that some characters are undone by their drinking.
To put it more clearly, Stark is a man who shows all signs of being from an honor culture. And yet, because so few characters in the book exhibit any care for honor (reputation), with the possible exception of Stark’s rival, Tywin Lannister, it doesn’t entirely make sense. One man by himself cannot make an honor culture. All Stark can do is uphold himself with integrity (and I would be the last person to say that he isn’t right to do this, even when he is alone), but the stakes are necessarily lower, because there are no reputational consequences to any misbehavior.
Disillusioned is an interesting word. We typically use it to mean “having lost faith in,” but it can also mean “having had its illusions removed.” Thus, a disillusioned world is a world in which the illusions (fairies behind the trees) are gone. The magic is gone. The fantasy genre is a genre about illusioned worlds, or worlds where the magic and the illusions and the fairies are real.
At times, the books grew boring and I only finished because I generally finish books I start. At other times, the writing was quite interesting, to the point where I enjoyed reading the books enough to keep reading long after having lost interest in most of the characters.
Tolkien didn’t write “Christian fiction,” and nothing in the books refers to Christ or the church. However, he consciously and deliberately wrote books deeply informed by his Catholic faith, books which take place in a Christian context. The “gods” of Middle Earth are angels.
I could discuss this all day. The fact that I believe history is often more fascinating that fiction does not mean I do not understand its key importance. What was Homer to the classical greeks or Beowulf to the Anglo Saxons? Stories that discussed illustrated virtue and failures.
For me Game of Thrones was the real 1455-1485 Wars of the Roses with zombies, magic and Dragons thrown in, something that Martin also noted. Many of his characters, by his own telling, had real life counterparts. Tywin was Edward I and the Mad King was Henry VI. What Martin was saying was that there are virtues and flaws in all of us.
And sadly, bad guys do win. Lenin Stalin, Mao all died in their beds and Hitler by his own hand. Gandhi, MLK, Rabin and Sadat (and Jesus for that matter) were murdered. But totally get your point, the people in Game of Thrones are especially venal. But so was the War of the Roses. In GOT there are not Elizabeth Tudor type queens, a real life figure who was a better ruler than her sister and a better person than her father. But there are two characters worth noting. I think Jon was a good man and I thought Stannis would have been a just and effective King.
That being said the godfather of fantasy, Tolkein, who in turn mimicked norse fables, certainly understand good and evil. But even his heroes are flawed. Frodo wished he could stay in the Shire, Aragorn questions himself, and Gandalf has to embrace his true nature to assume the power necessary to win. Some might see Sauron, a character who operates more as a device than anything living or breathing, as too narrow. But I was okay with that. I am not a fan of the anti hero, a Tony Soprano or Walter White of who we are supposed to cheer for despite knowing they are evil.