Show of hands: how many people believed, back in 1997, that George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire would become a full-blown cultural phenomenon?
Anybody?
I didn’t think so.
And yet, here we are. In one week, the fourth season of Game of Thrones will premier on HBO. These ten hours of television are, perhaps, the most anticipated of the year. Game of Thrones is epic fantasy gone mainstream.
In these last weeks leading up to the premiere, Game of Thrones has received the Vanity Fair treatment, thrown a massive premiere gala (complete with faux dragon skulls) in New York City, been the subject of innumerable write-ups in entertainment mags, and has run neck-in-neck with a Malaysian plane crash on Twitter. This is, unequivocally, not a “niche” or “genre” show anymore.
What I’d like to know is…why?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a massive ASOIAF fan. I’ve read the books as they’ve come out, and I was over the moon when I heard HBO had greenlit the show. When it premiered, I thought it was the best adaptation a fan could have wanted. But I never in a million years expected it to get this big.
Part of my amazement stems from years and years of being the only reader of fantasy that I knew. Sure, kids had read Tolkien and some had even read Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon, but no one I knew could talk Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms or Eddings. Fantasy was weird. Plain and simple. That weirdness was part of the draw for me. Now…not so weird, is it?
Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, Battlestar Galactica, J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, the Marvel Cinematic Universe—all of these things are mainstream. Much like Star Wars won over a generation in the late 70s and early 80s (a generation, by the way, that is now consuming media at a rate never before seen in history), Game of Thrones has won over the current viewing public. Strength of material certainly plays a major role—Martin’s books are, in a word, amazing—but so, too, does the time in which we’re living.
A push for realism has been a hallmark of the first decade and a half of the 21st Century. Look no further than the rise of reality television. I would argue that the success of Game of Thrones (and The Walking Dead, and everything Marvel is doing) is a reaction to the reality-as-entertainment movement. I’ve said in this space before that, for me, the appeal of fantasy has always stemmed in part from escapist desires. I’d argue that the millions of viewers HBO draws for Game of Thrones prove that my theory can be extrapolated to a larger portion of society. We live reality. A reality that is increasingly stark (forgive the pun) and disturbing. So an hour a week watching zombies or dragons or oddly Shakespearean motorcycle gangs provides a welcome respite from the difficulties inherent in 21st Century living.
Maybe I’m completely off base. Maybe millions of people are tuning in for the occasional nudity. Maybe mainstream media is being bought off in some type of HBO-initiated payola scheme. Or maybe…just maybe…the world at large is figuring out what we always knew: that the world of fantasy is one rich with story, characters and emotion. That magic and dragons do not always equal “kids’ stuff,” and that sometimes, reality is overrated.
