Games Of Thrones More Brutally Realistic Than Most Historical Novels?

I've only seen the first two or three episodes of Game of Thrones--and enjoyed those. It does seem like Martin put a spin on real history, some of it quite recognizable. I think the point in the article is a good one: most the time, in historical novels/movies, we know how it ends. In Game of Thrones, we don't.

Still, I don't agree that Game of Thrones evokes the past more effectively than historical fiction. I haven't read the books, but I know there are many historical novels that evoke their time periods very effectively.

Still, intriguing article.

GRRM is a fan of Bernard Cornwell and he is fairly brutal in his HF books to the MC's of his stories.

I think for TV cable shows, it all started with Rome, showing the horrors of war, politics, and more than an occasional nude shot, including male genitals...

Now we have the Tudors, Spartacus, the short lived Camelot, and A Game of Thrones. I suspect this level of showing graphic violence and nudity on cable has and will influenced shows with more modern settings. Why? Because it sells...

I've never seen an episode of Game of Thrones, but any time I have read or heard about it, my first thought is to wonder what a historical fiction / TV series based around Gregory of Tours' history of the Merovingian kings would be like.

Talk about brutal...

It's a strange article: the guy is comparing a TV fantasy series to historical novels. Different media, different genres, different expectations.

I couldn't get past the first book of the Game of Thrones for many reasons, one of them being the ridiculous lack of realism. The lady of the castle behaving very much like a person who has only a bunch of kids to manage. The king who is too stupid to be able to stay on the throne more than 5 minutes. The bastard son who angsts over his status instead of trying to count his blessings. The feast where no food is mentioned other than meat. And this was only the beginning.

Yes it feels very dark, very grim, also very simplistic and hamfisted in its super darkness and grimness. People were not as defenseless and powerless, not even peasants. Peasants were the lord's wealth. Yes there were rapes and tortures, but not more than now, and the cost of human life was not so low. And how long can you go hacking people to death? It's hard physical work. Oh my. This stuff is about as realistic as My Little Pony, only we are supposed to believe that if something is brutal, it CANNOT BE UNREALISTIC. Come on dude.

I've thought about this a lot because I've read all the books and watched all the episodes. I have a friend who is super, super into the whole fictional world (and is by education an art historian), and she loves figuring out the real-world inspiration.

I, on the other hand, don't. I feel kind of annoyed sometimes at how ruthlessly GRRM plunders history to make his plots. Of course his world seems more realistically brutal if he is only taking out the most obvious, well-known acts of brutality in history. I don't think that your average, everyday person in the middle ages, for example, experienced this level of violence as daily life. Likewise, I think it's disingenuous not to realize that lots of people still today experience that level of violence as daily life, all over the world. It's a weird sort of premodern/modern divide about violence that makes me uneasy. I see it a lot in popular HF and I find it puzzling. It's this strange sort of glorification of violence while still relying on our supposedly modern disapproval/shock of it. (I've started calling it violence-as-world-building.)

I do think there's a point to be made about knowing how it ends. That is the pitfall of historical fiction. However, a good novelist is going to find a way to handle that. This is why we use fictional characters, in part. This is also why we try to write as though events aren't inevitable.

Anyway, this is something I think about. Thanks for sharing the article!

Tocotin said:

Yes it feels very dark, very grim, also very simplistic and hamfisted in its super darkness and grimness. People were not as defenseless and powerless, not even peasants. Peasants were the lord's wealth. Yes there were rapes and tortures, but not more than now, and the cost of human life was not so low. And how long can you go hacking people to death? It's hard physical work. Oh my. This stuff is about as realistic as My Little Pony, only we are supposed to believe that if something is brutal, it CANNOT BE UNREALISTIC. Come on dude.

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I bolded the part I particularly agree with. Thanks for saying this. That's what I was trying to get at.

I never saw the series, but I read the books. Liked them too, although I lost interest after 1/2 of the 4th book because OMG, it dragged.

Anyway, I dunno about historical fiction but GoT certainly doesn't beat the historical non-fiction I read for violence - descriptions of horrid tortures, mass murder, ghastly executions, the habitual dishonouring dismembering of dead enemies...

As for realistic; no, it's not. It's clearly fantasy, and such mundane things as believable eco systems and a functional economic system are blatantly absent. The problem is when people are taking a fantasy setting as a depiction of a real historical period which is not... But, really, I don't think the brutality makes it either realistic or unrealistic per se. There have been times in history when the civilian population has been treated every bit as horribly brutal as in GoT (the 30 Years' War, for example), but it's not at all true for all periods before our "civilised" (and yes, those quotation marks are meant to imply irony) era.

People enjoy melodrama, violence and sex – nothing new there. That's not to say all historical fiction should be violent or epic; just that maybe the enthusiasm for GoT shows there's a demand for violent and epic historical fiction... And obviously, in a fantasy setting you can use a "greatest hits" approach to history that real settings won't allow you, which is what I think (?) is what Tom Holland drives at.

I think the main selling point of grimdark fantasy is that the author is giving a warning about not recessing back into a romanticised ideal. It is, for writers and readers, a provision of social commentary for what cannot be told in science fiction, as science fiction recesses into simple romances and dreaded prediction.

Game of Thrones is not realistic, but it certainly trashes romanticism and for some that is realism.

No, its just blatant soft-porn for the masses

gwinstra said:

I've never seen an episode of Game of Thrones, but any time I have read or heard about it, my first thought is to wonder what a historical fiction / TV series based around Gregory of Tours' history of the Merovingian kings would be like.

Talk about brutal...

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It's odd, but that's one of the first things I thought of...all the Merovingian skulldrudgery.

Which seems more interesting to me by far than Game of thrones. As in what happens to a sacred priest king (of the originally Pagan Merovingian type) when a new order of the sacred (various forms of Christianity) arrives? 300 years of nastiness and then Charlemagne?

Xelebes said:

I think the main selling point of grimdark fantasy is that the author is giving a warning about not recessing back into a romanticised ideal. It is, for writers and readers, a provision of social commentary for what cannot be told in science fiction, as science fiction recesses into simple romances and dreaded prediction.

Game of Thrones is not realistic, but it certainly trashes romanticism and for some that is realism.

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Nothing annoys me more than the belief that "realism = dark."

For me it's just cynicism masking itself as maturity. As it's been mentioned before, yes history has been terrible, and rape and mass killings happened. But History is populated with people, and a noble, no matter how much of a dick he is would refuse to save his own peasants, as that's his main source of income right there.

That being said, I do enjoy GOT.

Just enjoy these series for what they are, soft porn or the masses

I never got the "brutally realistic depiction of medieval life" part about Game of Thrones. Yes, they're loosely based on the War of the Roses, but there are plenty of things that aren't authentically medieval: hay bales, all the girls reaching puberty and being married off by their very early teens, the trade and travel that exists between continents, telescopes, the level of medical knowledge, the slave trade and so on. Some of these actually resemble the early modern era (or later) in some ways, in spite of the lack of printing presses and gunpowder.

And the architecture and clothing and so on depicted in the TV show don't seem terribly medieval either.

Here's an article about how AGoT etc. isn't authentically medieval.

But it's fantasy, so who cares if it's perfectly realistic? The only time it becomes annoying is when someone uses the "but it's realistic" notion to justify something some readers criticize in their work (like no interesting women as characters, which to be fair to Martin, he doesn't have a real issue with), or to show life as unrelentingly bleak and people as unrelentingly cruel (even in the real middle ages, I suspect that there were some bright spots and at least a few good deeds that did go unpunished from time to time, and a few friendships and love affairs that worked out).

I suspect that grimdark has been popular lately, not because of it's "realistic" portrayal of the middle ages, but because people are actually pretty cynical and pessimistic about human nature in our own times.

Netflix has a Marco Polo miniseries coming and the trailer makes it look VERY Game of Thrones-ified (with some martial arts thrown in cuz...Asia I guess?)

Roxxsmom said:

I never got the "brutally realistic depiction of medieval life" part about Game of Thrones. Yes, they're loosely based on the War of the Roses, but there are plenty of things that aren't authentically medieval: hay bales, all the girls reaching puberty and being married off by their very early teens, the trade and travel that exists between continents, telescopes, the level of medical knowledge, the slave trade and so on. Some of these actually resemble the early modern era (or later) in some ways, in spite of the lack of printing presses and gunpowder.

And the architecture and clothing and so on depicted in the TV show don't seem terribly medieval either.

Here's an article about how AGoT etc. isn't authentically medieval.

But it's fantasy, so who cares if it's perfectly realistic? The only time it becomes annoying is when someone uses the "but it's realistic" notion to justify something some readers criticize in their work (like no interesting women as characters, which to be fair to Martin, he doesn't have a real issue with), or to show life as unrelentingly bleak and people as unrelentingly cruel (even in the real middle ages, I suspect that there were some bright spots and at least a few good deeds that did go unpunished from time to time, and a few friendships and love affairs that worked out).

I suspect that grimdark has been popular lately, not because of it's "realistic" portrayal of the middle ages, but because people are actually pretty cynical and pessimistic about human nature in our own times.

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Very much of this. The way the past (real or fantastical) is portrayed in fiction is as much a reflection of the time the fiction was made as the time the fiction is portraying. Think of the earliest of films (er, Birth of a Nation) and how different that vision of the past is from the vision of recent films (er, Twelve Years a Slave). Right now, in spite of much of the world living in greater wealth and safety than ever before, there's a great fear of regression (as reflected by the glut of dystopian/apocalyptic stories) and of the human race's capacity for evil. I don't quite prescribe to that viewpoint; I find it terribly cynical and inaccurate. But you can see the result, in that people feel that something like Game of Thrones, where pretty much everyone is evil or sleezy or both, is an accurate reflection of reality, when in truth there's much more light in the world than that.

I mean, let's be real. With the body count in GoT, it's a freaking miracle there's anyone left alive in that world! Wouldn't that world be utterly depopulated with this death rate?

Also, doesn't anyone die of natural causes? Even in the midst of warfare, disease has always been the number one killer, not violence.

The thing is, though, that GoT is a fun romp. I can forgive all the darkness not because it's realistic but because it isn't. There are dragons, for Pete's sake. It is not realistic in any way. It's a fantasy world. This world is dark; it is not our world.

angeliz2k said:

Also, doesn't anyone die of natural causes? Even in the midst of warfare, disease has always been the number one killer, not violence.

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Historical correctness is when most deaths in an army are caused by bloody diarrheas.

Flicka said:

Historical correctness is when most deaths in an army are caused by bloody diarrheas.

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When we see an epic historical fantasy called: Fluxes, scours, scourges, and purges?

Roxxsmom said:

When we see an epic historical fantasy called: Fluxes, scours, scourges, and purges?

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Game of Porcelain Thrones?

Patrick.S said:

Game of Porcelain Thrones?

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Though I do believe the HA version would be Game of the Latrine Pits. The real game of kings: move your pawns across the board before they succumb to E. coli?

Randomly, the Swedish Army Museum quite often writes pretty funny and grim stuff – they had a campaign this summer with slogans like "Relax in the hammock? Sure, but first 500 years of suffering" – and they blogged a recipe for stew a while back, meant to be adapted for the Swedish army in the Thirty Years War. It went something like (I don't remember the exact ingredients or rations but the general gist of it): "Find three villages. Pillage and burn and steal their cattle. Slaughter the cattle and dig about a kilometre of cooking pits. Chop down a bunch of trees for firewood. Take 30 sacks of flour, 50 sacks of turnips, equal amount of cabbage and a few kilos of salt and boil everything in water for five hours. Eat."

That's grimdark, right there!

If I ever wrote a historical style fantasy where toilets figured prominently, it'd have to be set in the Roman Empire.

They knew how to do the pre-industrial potty thing.

I mentally append "and everything smelled like open cesspits" to every description when reading historical fiction.

gothicangel said:

I've just been watching HBO's Rome and I don't think I've ever seen the penis used as a weapon or implement of torture before.

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I just rewatched that show. So good. Interesting to put it in historical context as a show that laid the groundwork for shows like Game of Thrones. And I just adore Kevin McKidd as Lucius Vorenus.

What scene is the penis-weapon scene??