Winter Is Coming: The Realism Of Westeros

"I’ve always taken it as a code William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech from the early ‘50’s, where he said that the human heart in conflict with the self was the only thing worth writing about."
--George R. R. Martin [1]

I have recently been meaning to start rewatching Game of Thrones after being introduced to it last semester but only getting around eight episodes into the first season.  The show is derived from author George R. R. Martin's fantasy book series called A Song of Ice and Fire, the first entry in the series titled A Game of Thrones.  Focusing on a land called Westeros (and at times another land called Essos), the TV series presents an alien world--and yet one very much like ours.  Abnormally longer durations of the natural seasons help distinguish Westeros from earth, yet other aspects of the land are not so different.  The Game of Thrones show explores issues like ethics, politics, religion, sexuality, patriarchal social structures, and the unpredictability of future events in a manner that acknowledges just how varying human beliefs really are.

The show lays out, intentionally or unintentionally, the primary tenets of postmodernism [2], with various characters believing in conflicting narratives and ideologies that they wield to secure power, trapped in the subjectivity of their own experiences or preferences.  Viewers can identify Machiavellian, Kantian, skeptical, theistic, and Nietzschean ideas (and more I'm sure) scattered throughout.  The show is viciously honest in its portrayal of diverse human motivations and worldviews, with some characters living out values that they view as objectively binding, and others acting in a much more amoral, self-interested way.  Despite being fantasy, it is firmly realistic in its depiction of the chaos and uncertainty of human life--realistic apart from the mythical aspects, of course (such as the White Walkers).

In the TV series (or at least what I have seen of it) there is no single narrator figure or primary point-of-view character.  There is no grand metanarrative that unifies most of the characters, no single metaphysical framework that Westeros as a whole clings to.  Instead, there are many smaller ideological narratives that unfold.  Viewers are left with a host of perspectives and worldviews that are logically exclusive; for one to be true, others must be false.  Death is one of the few seeming certainties of life in Westeros, generously but randomly visiting its inhabitants.  If, as the show states, all men must die ("Valar Morghulis"), then how will we live--how should we live--given this plurality of contrary beliefs that we face in our relatively brief lives?  This is not a question that is irrelevant to our daily existence.  It is one of omnipresent importance.

Sometimes, even in today's connected world and its unparalleled access to information, people can forget just how non-uniform worldviews really are across geography and time.  Truth remains constant and the way things are, regardless of human awareness of it or desire for it.  Yet worldviews truly can differ wildly from person to person even within the same kingdom or city.  As a postmodern rationalist (and that's certainly not an oxymoron), I find fictional worlds like that of Game of Thrones very intriguing precisely because of the way that they address the reality of conflicting beliefs and motivations.  The ideological disparity and resulting political events fashion a sense of realism.

I've read that George R. R. Martin wanted to create a world without the more simplistic moral frameworks of some other fantasy stories (like Lord of the Rings) by including moral ambiguity and differing character perspectives.  He has specifically said that he wrote his series as a response of sorts to Tolkien.  Certainly, the web of actions in Westeros can be more difficult to morally appraise, since characters can be multi-faceted.  And certainly many in the show would be executed under Scripture's Mosaic Law for capital crimes like incest (Jaime and Cersei Lannister), rape (Khal Drogo), and murder (Ned Stark's death), to name some of the Biblical capital crimes that make an appearance in just the first season.

Even with the fantasy setting, the brutal, complex world of Westeros is not that different from our own.  Both are populated by a plethora of individuals with their own personal agendas, conflicting ideologies, and methods.  Both hold competing religions--religions that cannot all be true simultaneously.  Both house grand power struggles.  That one also features dragons and wights (reanimated corpses) does not detract from the other distinct similarities.

Do these things not mirror the status of our own world?  That is the effect of some fantasy tales, for despite all the foreign elements in their worlds they can still mimic and remind us of our own.

[1].  http://entertainment.time.com/2011/04/18/grrm-interview-part-2-fantasy-and-history/

[2].  Postmodernism is NOT relativism.  Relativism is a self-refuting, impossible denial of objective truth, whereas postmodernism is a skepticism about many conflicting truth claims due to the subjectivity of perception and limitations on human knowledge.  As long as someone's postmodernism acknowledges necessary truths and logic (logic alone being objective), it is a worldview that factually represents the human epistemological condition as it is.  I am a postmodernism and a rationalist, a postmodernist and a Christian.  There is nothing about these concepts that is intrinsically contradictory to the other aspects if they are defined correctly.