Game of Bones and the Fraternity of the Ring

SPOILER ALERT for Game of Thrones

I was surprised when a number of women, from 20 to 50-somethings, told me they liked Game of Thrones.  Guess I had stereotyped them, thinking all the seemingly gratuitous female nudity and sex scenes (prompting one blogger, Jane Dough, to suggest renaming the show "Game of Bones"), would be a turn-off.  And I had assumed that this sword and sorcery fantasy would be far more appealing to males than females.

This may be true for the books.  According to Barna, just 3% of Americans have read one or more of the GoT novels, and males account for 2/3 of the readership.  This balance is quite different for those watching the HBO series.  15% have watched it, again according to Barna, and Wired reports that women make up 42% of viewers, and 1/2 of social media activity.

Data from the 3rd season.
From http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/women-game-of-thrones/

Why shouldn't this be surprising?  Writing for the Persephone Magazine, Elfity ("Shocker (Not): Women Like Game of Thrones") recognizes the patriarchy and misogyny in the stories, but says, with a tad of condescension, that

those of us with higher-level thinking skills can see it for what it is. The payoff, of course, is that we get to see amazing feminist characters like Daenerys Targaryen, Arya Stark, and Brienne of Tarth do amazing feminist things.

Arya Stark

Women can watch the show just because it's good story-telling, but they can also use the show as an occasion to talk about feminist issues, and to appreciate GoT's "nuances of gender relations."

Elizabeth Muhall at Literati.com doesn't buy this argument ("The fans doth protest too much, methinks: Is Game of Thrones Really Feminist?").  Sure, the female characters are complex, nuanced, but that on its own doesn't give the show a feminist bent.  And, she notes, "[f]or every female character demonstrating power there seems to be an accompanying weakness."  Arya's a "badass," but still has to pass herself as a boy for a time, and is a child, limiting her power. Brienne can beat up men, but joined Renly's guard because she had a massive crush on him (and, ironically, he's gay).  As for Daenerys,

Her demonstrations of power are almost always balanced out by observations about her nubile body and general boob-havingness.  Cracked writer David Wong notes how Martin, writing from Daenerys’ perspective, somehow manages to bring her breasts into the scenario...

Catelyn Stark

The HBO series does the same, though we could guess that there are women who don't mind seeing all the beautiful bodies in GoT and the steamy sex.  I think a problem here, or a question, is what do fans and critics of GoT mean when they say feminist?  Jane Dough gave higher marks on her "Feminist Leadership Board"(based on the 3rd season)  to Catelyn Stark for consulting with her son on military matters, for keeping him check, though then adds points for how well Michelle Fairley played her role (?).  She knocks Daenerys for her obvious attraction to a new military ally, Daario, and Ygritte for getting dumped by Jon Snow.

Catelyn's final (?) scene was incredible.  But it was a confirmation of her son's military plans that ends up in a horrific trap.  And what was she reduced to?  A final, awful scream, and killing Waldor Frey's wife--another error.  She thought misogynistic Lord Frey would actually care enough about her to stop the massacre? (and we could note that her mother instinct produced another huge error--letting Jaime go back to King's Landing with Brienne, without telling her son, in order to get her daughters back...).

So what's a feminist?  Smart, capable mothers?  Women who don't fall for beautiful men who are likely to betray them?  But for others the feminist point in GoT, particularly the HBO series, is that women can play the "game of thrones" just as well as men , and other examples of women doing what is usually reserved for men--mainly warrior stuff (see, for example, Kate Arthur's "9 Ways 'Game of Thrones' Is Actually Feminist" who adds that the HBO version gets points for having far fewer rapes than the novels--high praise...).

Brienne of Tarth

So GoT is feminist because women can be as politically devious and deadly at arms as men?  I don't know.  I'm thinking that rather than mine GoT for feminist gems--especially when there's confusion about those gems look like--we can appreciate the show for provoking a useful discussion of gender roles (as Elfity suggests)--though there's been far more talk of women than men.  There's not been much gender-bending among male characters, except for perhaps the short-lived King Renly and his boyfriend, Loras Tyrell--one of the best fighters in Westoros (though Brienne defeats him).  Robb Stark perhaps is another.  He appreciates the strong women around, like his mother, Catelyn, and his wife, Talisa Maeger.  Maybe Sam Tarney's another--but he's an old trope, the ungainly coward who proves himself by living off his wits rather than non-existent brawn.  Tyrion might be another, but he's actually just channeling the fantasy of geeks everywhere (including, I suspect, George R.R. Martin) that unlovely boys who grow up suffering pranks, name-calling, and worse, turn out to get the beautiful women, out-smart everyone, and even save the city.

There are far more prominent female characters in GoT than LOTR of course, but the latter has far less objectification of and violence against women.  There are few memorable women, though, such as Éowyn, the warrior niece of the king of Rohan, and Galadriel, one of the most powerful elves in Middle Earth and leader of the Galadrim along with her mate, Celeborn.  For Cath Eliot

"...Éowyn is up there with all the best kick-ass feminist heroes.  She's brave, she's rebellious, and most importantly of all, she's gender non-conformist. In fact, it's her refusal to bow to patriarchal conditioning and accept her designated gender role that ultimately saves the day."

Éowyn Takes on the Lord of the Nazgul
By Craig J. Spearing

Well, this is true to a point.  She does kill the Nazgul king, but she gets into that battle by disguising herself as a man (which Tolkien needs as set-up for the surprise).  And how does Tolkien end her part of the story?  She gives up the sword and shield, and her huge crush on the unattainable Aragorn, and marries herself off to Faramir.  Pretty conventional.

Galadriel is a remarkable character, but except for the time the Fellowship hangs out in Lothlorien, she just doesn't get to make many appearances.  LOTR is a thoroughly "man's world, woman's place" universe, to use Elizabeth Janeway's phrase.  Overwhelmingly, men are the politicians, the business owners, the intellectuals, the artists, the workers, the killers (except for Shelob, a female spider--there's gender equality for you!).  And there are a lot of absent females--the Ents lost their Entwives, and who in the world is reproducing the dwarves, or the constantly "multiplying orcs?"

Peter Jackson seemed to flirt with the idea of making Aragorn's love interest, the elven Arwen, a notable female character.  The screenwriters put in her place of a male, Glorfindel, and we get one of the best scenes in the movie, her flight to the ford of Bruinen with Frodo, where she takes on all nine of the Nazgul.  But over the next two movies, she's turned into a simpering, sad woman who has a difficult time standing up to dad (though she's an adult several times over), and who can only envision her life married to Aragorn and having his baby.  Again, pretty conventional.

But male characters in LOTR, mainly the hobbits, whom Tolkien clearly loves, show us something that GoT does not do with its men (except for maybe, just maybe, the Stark men)--the ability to show affection toward one another, to weep, to do stereotypically unmanly things without worrying about losing their manliness.  Jackson doesn't mess with that in his version of LOTR.

George Zimmerman. Plucky Hobbit, Awful Troll, or Wannabe Knight?

SPOILER ALERT for Game of Thrones

I've been thinking about how Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and Game of Thrones (GoT) compare in terms of race, but the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin controversy seems to render that comparison trite.  But maybe not.


J. R. R. Tolkien grew up in an era when both physical and social scientists ascribed characteristics to people based on their national and racial origins (that kind of ascription has hardly disappeared).  Thus Middle Earth is thoroughly racialized, not just in the sense of different races of sentient beings (humans, elves, dwarves, etc.), but in how Tolkien defined the enemies of all the good "free folk."  Who sided with the Dark Lord?  Dark people--the "Southerners," the "Easterlings," the "swarthy" and the "slant-eyed."  The "black-skinned" orcs are irredeemably evil.  And on and on (you can see a debate about this at Tolkien Gateway).

As New York Times writer, Elvis Mitchell, hilariously suggested, Peter Jackson dealt with races in LOTR by turning them into yesteryear's rock bands:

Mr. Jackson apparently feels that the way to keep each of the fighting groups separate in the audience's minds is to provide them with hairstyles reminiscent of 1970's bands. The hobbits all have heads of tossled curls -- they're like members of Peter Frampton's group. Aragorn and Boromir have the long, unwashed bushes of Aerosmith, and the flaxen-maned Legolas has the fallen-angel look of one of the Allman Brothers. (The tubby, bilious and bearded Gimli could be a roadie for any of them.) ''Fellowship'' plays like a sword-and-sorcery epic produced by VH-1.

Mitchell doesn't apply this to the LOTR's bad guys, but orcs wouldn't have been out of place as back-up bands for Kiss or Alice Cooper.  Racial cues remain, though.  The "fighting Uruk-Hai," with their dreads, are a black rasta band, the elves are over-the-top Aryans, and the movies are replete with the old equations of white and light with goodness, black and dark with evil.

So one could imagine that if Trayvon Martin had wandered into Tolkien's Shire, some hobbit might justifiably mistake him for an "evil creature," follow and confront him, get in over his head, and escape by killing him.  That's Tolkien's social world, but in his moral universe, if we eliminate the connections between race and character, then this hobbit would be clearly be in the wrong (indeed, it's near impossible to imagine this scenario even unfolding in Hobbiton).

But Trayvon Martin died in Tolkien's social world rather than his moral universe.  Despite having evidence on hand of manslaughter, the Sanford police department didn't arrest Zimmerman until forced to do so.  People like Juror B37 can think George Zimmerman is guilty of nothing more than poor judgment, or that Trayvon is just as responsible for his own death, or that can dismiss the credibility of the prosecution's witness, Rachal Jeantel--a young black woman--because she didn't talk good American.

Does GoT move beyond Tolkien's racialized Middle Earth?  Hmm, sort of.  Accept for a one kingdom, the Starks of Winterfell, and maybe Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryon, everyone's pretty awful in GoT, no matter their color--though all the principle characters are white, as are most of the minor ones, except for Daenerys' growing multi-racial retinue of followers.  But the HBO series, like the books, gets around racialized characters by avoiding race-talk.  While there is plenty of derisive class and gender talk, this fantasy is grimly realistic in everything but race.  Interestingly, the nightmarish white walkers are, well, white, with blue eyes even.  But none of the trash-talking invokes racial differences--surprising for a story that pretends to be brutally frank.  Queen Cersei openly disses the poor and creeps like the Lord Walder Frey treat women as nothing more than something to screw and get pregnant.  But no racial aspersions.  Westeros is apparently post-racial.

Hardly.

As others have pointed out (e.g., Saladid Ahmed and Raffit Sani), what characters do people of color play in GoT?  Prostitutes, pirates, duplicitous merchants, or Dothroki savages.  And who saves all the dark-skinned slaves in HBO's season three?  The whitest of the white, Daenerys.  An old trope, and an old debate.  As if white people led the Birmingham boycott, resistance in South Africa to apartheid, indigenous resistance to Ladino oppression in Guatemala, among other examples (tons of criticism of stories To Kill a Mockingbird and Mississippi Burning on these grounds).

Does that mean GoT should be unwatchable?  No.  It should be occasion for what US Attorney General, Eric Holder, called for, and honest discussion about race, though he was reflecting on the George Zimmerman acquittal and not GoT.  As for GoT, had Trayvon Martin blundered into Westoros, he would have likely been one of the numerous casual casualties, though in his case, there would have been no tumultuous outcry about his death, or the legal wrangles around it.  Just another minor extra gone.  George Zimmerman the hapless knight who kills him only because he's armed with something more than concrete.

Only the powerful get to start conflict in the GoT universe, and get away with it--apparently in both Westoros and Sanford.

Those Scary Three Rs

Blog Song for the Moment

Don McLean, Everybody Loves Me, Baby (American Pie, 1971).

Heard Jack Lessenberry's commentary last week about opposition in the Michigan State Legislature to adopting the Common Core.  He called this opposition, to my surprise, the "lunatic fringe."  Lessenberry's a pretty moderate guy, so for him to label it this way was strong stuff.

What's the Common Core?  Basically, it's what they, way back when, used to call the "Three Rs." Reading, 'riting, and 'rithametic.  According to the Common Core website,

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt. The standards are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit bearing entry courses in two or four year college programs or enter the workforce. The standards are clear and concise to ensure that parents, teachers, and students have a clear understanding of the expectations in reading, writing, speaking and listening, language and mathematics in school.

In other words, this is a pretty conventional attempt to assure that high school students are better prepared to enter the workforce or higher education.  The standards try to ensure, given the now wild mobility of Americans, and that some states were cheating on their report cards, that college admission officers and employers across the country can have some sort of solid expectation of what a high school diploma actually means.  It's also an effort to make the US education system more competitive in the global arena.

But this Common Core has run into the localism that has long prevailed in US education.  Michigan adopted it back in 2010, but renewal of its funding comes up in August.  A Republican faction in Michigan opposes that, and a Tea Party Republican on the Michigan House Education Committee, Tom McMillin, took the lead, slipping some lines into the budget bill that erase funding for Common Core initiatives.

In an op-ed, McMillin presents the Core--what some right-wing wits are calling "obamacore"--as a federal takeover of education, an opportunity for the Feds to steal student data, but what really has pissed him off was the lack of transparency around the development of the Core.  At the Statehouse hearings, he badgered  Department of Education officials, repeatedly asking about the process by which the Common Core was adopted, to such an extent that a chair, a fellow Republican Tim Kelly, cut him off.

After the hearing, Kelly said it was "unfortunate when you have some members that aren't listening to the answers that are beingprovided. You may not like the answer, but that doesn't mean you keep repeating the question."

Other legislators (both Republican and Democrat) wondered whether the federal government would use Common Core implementation to gather data on individual students.  There are more hysterical critiques out there, too.  Predictably,  Glenn Beck has labeled it "an extreme leftist ideology," connecting the dots of Obama, Common Core, and a retinal scan kerfuffle in a Florida school district.

It's odd that McMillin focuses on the process rather than the content of the Common Core.  No questions about whether the Core will improve educational outcomes, just veiled unsupported accusations that the Michigan officials lied about public input in the development of the standards, and that they represent a massive federal intrusion in local governance.  He bases his argument on two members of the Common Core Validation Committee who refused to sign off on the final version, neglecting to mention that there were 27 other members who did sign off, along with a bipartisan executive committee of six governors and four state superintendents.  This is a very centrist, technocratic policy proposal that only in feverish minds constitutes a left-wing conspiracy.

But there are good reasons to question the Common Core.  It is a top-down effort, orchestrated by governors, top education officials, academics, and funded by an array of organizations, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the NEA to the Aspen Institute and the New American Foundation.  So I suppose one could dismiss the Core as yet another elitist effort that is not in touch with the daily grind of education.  In other words, how capable are school districts of implementing the Core, and will it ameliorate or exacerbate the growing inequality in our country's educational system?  Also, The No Child Left Behind Act has already incentivized 'teaching to the test,' and will the Common Core standards turn into goals that teachers end up mechanistically trying to realize?

As well, the Obama administration made a political mistake, I believe, in contributing funds to the Common Core initiative, and in compelling states bidding for "Race to the Top" education grants.

But, heck, I'm just sniping here.  There is faction of Americans that will criticize the Obama administration for whatever it does, and I'm glad some people with expertise and money have tried to do what so many local school boards have failed to do--raise the bar on education outcomes.

American Tolkien? How about American Hobbes: a comparison of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones

Blog Song for the Moment

Marian McPartland, Willow Creek, Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz Fest (2002)

(WARNING!  Some spoilers for those who haven't moved beyond the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones)

A couple of years ago I wandered through the five (soon to be seven I gather) Game of Thrones volumes, and found intriguing the characters, the story-line, and the grim political realism.  I also watched HBO's adaptation, and enjoyed them more since the screen-writers pared away George R. R. Martin's often turgid prose and sometimes tedious dialogue.

Lev Grossman at Time dubbed Martin the "American Tolkien" when reviewing the first book of the series--A Feast for Crows--back in 2005, and said

Martin has produced--is producing, since the series isn't over--the great fantasy epic of our era. It's an epic for a more profane, more jaded, more ambivalent age than the one Tolkien lived in.

The "great fantasy epic of our era?"  That's rather overblown and, really, later generations will have to determine that.  Will Game of Thrones be as widely read and appreciated sixty years from now, as is the case of Lord of the Rings trilogy today?  Doubt it.  Martin's writing is not in the same ball park as Tolkien's.

That said, Martin does give us a fully-realized fantasy world, as did Tolkien (both highly derivative).  And his characters are more multi-dimensional than those in LOTR--capable of right and wrong and everything in between, along with making whopping mistakes that are inevitably fatal for them, or those close to them.

And in contrast to Tolkien's rather static characters (good ones generally stayed good, the bad, bad) the Game of Thrones characters sometimes change in surprising ways--those that live long enough to do so, that is.  There's Tyrion Lannister, a remarkable character in the book--full of witty repartee and whose brain and heart are bigger than those of most anyone around him.

The Hound

There's the Hound, Sandar Clegane--no one can accuse Martin of coming up with boring names--one of my favorite characters, an intriguingly confusing mix of selfish brutality and nobility.

Jaime Lannister

Or there's Jaime Lannister, who seems to be growing a heart once he lost his hand.  You know, "It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell..." (Matthew 5:30).

Melisandre, the
Lord of Light's
high priestess

Despite efforts to create a totally "pagan" world, Martin can't escape his Western Christian heritage. Actually, he sort of trashes religion in general.  There's the bland "Faith of the Seven"--a state religion full of regalia, but of little substance apart from sanctioning royal marriages, and providing priestly fodder for raging urban mobs.  There are the "Gods of the Forest," who don't do much more than offer quiet solace to the various Stark family members who are wondering why their author is picking them off like flies.  The "Drowned God" in the Iron Islands is really just a set of rituals designed to confirm over-the-top macho violence.  The one religion that so far demonstrates tangible power is the "Lord of Light," who gives the dead life and provides demons to kill the living, a twisted version of the Jesus myth ("Light of the World"), and I doubt it's an accident that the one clearly nasty religion is monotheistic.

Tyrion Lannister

George Schmidt, over at Religion Dispatches, caught this difference in a thoughtful discussion of the "moral universe of the Game of Thrones."  Though there is no overt religion in LOTR, it is, as Schmidt notes, suffused with early Cold War Christian idealism.  Holding onto one's principles, whatever the cost, does matter.  The good guys win because they are good.  The evil-doers pay--even the good who momentarily lapse into evil (poor Boromir, for example, and even Frodo loses a finger when he briefly lets the temptation of the ring get to him at the end).  Drawing on the Protestant realist, Reinhold Niebuhr, Schmidt suggests that Game of Thrones is all about the tragedy of trying to do good in an evil world.  Hence anyone with a lick of idealism in the land of seven kingdoms finds out that virtue at times can be a vice, and vice-versa.  Thus the awful end of the "Hand of the King," Eddard Stark, the idealist.  His replacement in contrast, the diminutive and brilliant Tyrion, cunningly manipulates those around him on behalf of the royal household, but also himself. But are these the choices, blind idealism or cold-hearted realism?  Schmidt muses that Christian realism would be some sort of blend of both, and wonders if Daenerys Targaryen might be that blend.  She's a "liberationist" who frees women and slaves, yet is not above subterfuge and violence to achieve her ends.

I don't know.  Perhaps Schmidt, currently working on his Master's degree at Union Theological Seminary, is so immersed in his theological studies that he sees it everywhere (I remember doing the same in my grad school days).

Queen Cersei, who tried to school
Lord Stark in the Game of Thrones

For me, Martin's take on religion is just too relentlessly cynical.  It is not much more than an instrument of politics.  That is a rather simple way to view an aspect of human life that has been around since the ancients took time out from surviving to wonder about the meaning of things.  But then, everything in Game of Thrones is just a playing piece, even those trying to avoid that role.  As fervent fans like to quote, "When you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die."

Wow.  Like, deep, man...pass me the pipe, and are you up for some DnD, or what, man?

And that's sort of how I read Game of Thrones.  A really smart Dungeons and Dragons player with enough writing ability to get some adventures down in print, drawn from a DnD world where it's all about winning.  Rather than being reminded of Niebuhr, the story makes me think of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) in which he argues that in a state of nature, there is no power (no "Leviathan") to restrain people from constant "quarrel" due to their ambitions, self-interest, and mutual suspicion.  In this state of nature

No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm enjoying the HBO series based on Martin's story-telling.  As with previous HBO series (e.g. The Wire, Deadwood), these are well-crafted shows with great acting.  And its array of distinctive, fascinating characters, and all the political intrigue, have me hooked.  But watching the story on the screen makes Game of Thrones seem more epic than it does on the page, and the story does not (so far anyway) leave us much to dream about or for--which is what I suspect caused LOTR to become such a phenomenon in the US starting back in the Age of Aquarius.

That said, LOTR has its own problems, namely in the areas of race and gender.  Game of Thrones does, too, but I'll leave these matters for another day...