God of Speculative Fiction

Christian fundamentalists, militant atheists, and some of the more irresponsible corners of the media like to paint Religion and Science as two discrete forces in a binary opposition. To scientists, this narrative asserts, faith is a mendacious force wilfully blinding people to the truths of scientific endeavor and the methods of rationality; while religious believers bury their hands in the sand of the like-minded community or seek to discredit the facts that would falsify their faith or at least render it unnecessary.

Needless to say, I despise binary oppositions with the white-hot hatred of a thousand suns, and this one is an especial desk-denter. I'll not insult my readers' critical thinking skills by explaining how you can totes believe in God and evolution at the same time!!eleventy (though if you've stumbled upon this blog, say in a Google search for “rob bell gay” [spoiler: he's not!], consider fine-tuning your reading comprehension skills before commenting, ta very much).

Christian writer Alister McGrath observes that university Christian groups are often populated primarily by science students, and my own experience bears this out. I think there's an argument to be made for the intellectual humility of scientists, as opposed to liberal arts students like myself who arrive at university convinced that, if we don't already know everything worth knowing, we certainly will after three/four/ten years of studying Latin/gender studies/ancient Sumerian. McGrath's explanation, though, is that “scientists are used to talking and thinking about reality in terms of models, in terms of partial and conceivable representations of reality, and thus have little difficulty in handling the same tools when speaking and thinking about God”.

The same, I believe, applies to speculative fiction fans. Whereas the practice of scientific inquiry endows a way of conceiving reality that can be transferred to thinking about meta-reality, sci-fi and fantasy provide images that we fanpeople can use as our models for conceiving God. (And, before you ask, I have indeed uttered the sentence, “Dammit, Jim, I'm a speculative fiction fan, not a scientist!”)

It's not just that fantasy's Big Three – the writers whose worlds even haters of fantasy are familiar with: Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling – are all Christians whose culturally-ubiquitous works incorporate and recreate aspects of Christian mythology. It's that speculative fiction has a unique power to tap into our deepest longings, magic wands and talking animals and interstellar travel and time travel and epic quests and all the things that are OMG SO FREAKING AWESOME and I WANT TO GO TO THERE: things that transcend our everyday reality and echo back to our little earth-bound time-bound physics-bound lives some small taste of eternity. If you believe in the Christian story, with its great cosmic happy-ever-after, then it makes sense that you'll experience some profound yearnings for better, cooler, more miraculous worlds than our own.

For example:

Talking about God the Holy Spirit is difficult. This is the aspect of God that lives inside every believer. (If you thought the concept of the Trinity was a head-scratcher, consider that one of the persons of the Trinity is also a zillion persons. HEAD ASPLODE.) People just don't talk about the Holy Spirit as much as they talk about God the Creator and Jesus Christ, because it is one baffling concept. Here are some of the models I use for thinking about the Holy Spirit:

• my dæmon

• my Patronus

• my Iron Man armor

• my Spidey-sense

• my Green Lantern ring

• the Force

All images taken from nerddom; each one something every geek has longed desperately to have; each one partial and inadequate as a model, but taken together representing something of the power and awesomeness of literally having God living inside of you.

I think the parallels between fandom and Christianity are striking. How do we respond to Middle-Earth? Some with indifference; some with hostility; some with passionate love and longing. Some people are cautiously interested in the story itself, but grow to despise it on account of the intense nerditry of the fanbase. Some people are introduced to it by their friends, while others find it on their own. Some people are switched off by the story as presented in one medium, but love it in another. Some people think it is a load of crap and can't believe grown humans are wasting their time on a pointless fantasy world.

To those on the outside, the intensity is often alienating. But to those within the fold, all things are given through the connection that we share based on our deepest longings and the magical world that, for brief moments at a time, promises to meet and surpass them.

(Have I ever ended a prayer to God, you ask, with the words “I leave it entirely in your hands”? I HEREBY INVOKE WHATEVER IS YOUR COUNTRY'S EQUIVALENT OF THE FIFTH AMENDMENT.)

Game of Thrones Season One

My most-viewed blog post, by quite a large margin, is Drinking Game of Thrones. (I enjoy the thought of hordes of unengaged people idly googling “game of thrones drinking game”, finding my post, and then getting slammed by the stealth anti-racism.)

That was eight weeks ago, though, and now the first season of Game of Thrones has come to a close. I suppose this means I should have five times as many thoughts as I did back then. Here are some of them.

As a whole, I liked the show. It has its problematic elements, natch. For one thing, I could honestly go the rest of my life without encountering another male-dominated story. It's gotten to the point where, if I pick up a book thinking it looks interesting but see that the protagonist is male, I put it down again. Only a really cool premise, a recommendation from someone I trust, or an author I love can make me read a book about a man. And yet (as we shall see) just because Game of Thrones is set in a male-dominated world doesn't mean it's necessarily a male-dominated story (see also: Boardwalk Empire).

For another thing, GRATUITOUS NUDITY. HBO has a fixation with this. The trouble is that US network TV is so puritanical, HBO goes too far in the opposite direction just because it can – like a teenager from a strict home who's away at university for the first time and goes a little wild. Maybe if the rest of US TV would just grow up a little, HBO wouldn't feel the need to shower its programming with BOOBIES. It's as if somebody said, “All these characters are a little confusing. Every other episode we need a scene where some man monologues for ten minutes about things the audience would already know if they'd been paying attention. But how to make this unnecessary exposition palatable? Ah yes, BOOBIES!” Honestly, it baffles me. We live in the internet age. Every viewer can see all the boobies they could possibly want at the click of a mouse. Why do we need gratuitous porn in our TV shows?

And, of course, lest they be accused of unequal-opportunity pornifying, the producers slung in a couple of dick shots as well. Wow. You know, I hate cats and have never seen an episode of The L Word, and if that ever makes me feel like Not A Real Lesbian, all it takes is one TV schlong to assure me that I couldn't be gayer if I threw out all my skirts and changed my name to Shane. Seriously, my straight and bi sisters? You're... you're really into that?

“But Anna,” you are yelling, “enough with the nekkidness already. You've written 400+ words, and you haven't even mentioned racism!”

Well, quit yelling; it's annoying your housemates. As you know, I have serious problems with the crass Orientalism of the Dothraki storyline, but I think it takes great strides toward redemption with that devastating scene between Dany and Mirri Maz Duur (here be spoilers, if I need to say it). Dany can't believe the woman she so nobly rescued would betray her; Mirri Maz Duur icily describes everything that happened to her before Dany's oh-so-noble white-woman intervention: “Look to your khal and see what life is worth, when all the rest is gone.” Unlike in the book, this scene is separated from the one where Dany suffocates Drogo. As such, it has the space to emphasize Mirri Maz Duur and to speak unarticulated volumes about the relationship between conqueror and conquered.

That was arguably my favorite moment in the season; but, gratuitous nudity notwithstanding, there were plenty of other things I liked too. For all my whining about male-dominated stories, I think the show did some pretty great things with its female characters. Both Catelyn and Cersei were much more engaging to me in the show than in the book. In Catelyn's case, it might have been the fact that I didn't have to listen to her inner monologue carp about Jon Snow, which was all she ever seemed to bloody do in the book; but both women, thanks to excellent performances from Michelle Fairley and Lena Headey, had real depth to their characters that allowed them to exist as much more than just mothers and wives.

Even Sansa had a moment in the final episode that made me think she's not quite as unutterably tedious as she'd been up to that point. In her case, witnessing her thought processes gave me a good deal more sympathy for her in the book than in the show; without them, her progression from vapid teenager to shrewd and desperate survivor isn't as clear. I have high hopes for her in the second season, though.

And need I even mention Arya, and the 52 varieties of ass she kicks?

What I like most, though, is that what Game of Thrones is really about is “cripples, bastards, and broken things”. All the most compelling and sympathetic characters are the ones who are disadvantaged in the dog-eat-dog world of Westeros: women, PWD, a dwarf, a eunuch, an illegitimate son. The powerful non-disabled male characters, who think they hold the reins, are either flat-out evil or fatally myopic, and it's the people they continue to underestimate – Arya, Cersei, Tyrion, Varys – who will make them pay.

I think there's an interesting contrast here with The Walking Dead. Oh, how I hated The Walking Dead. (When its second season starts in October, I plan to finish a long-overdue blog post about how much and why I hated it. Sneak preview: one of the reasons is racism!) It's not an entirely fair comparison, because my familiarity with the source material gives GoT an advantage in my affections, but for two high-budget, highly-anticipated, highly-acclaimed TV shows, I've had very different reactions. And I think it's because TWD sidelines its cripples, bastards, and broken things, while GoT actually, despite what “starring Sean Bean” might lead you to believe, foregrounds them.

Drinking Game of Thrones

I bought a copy of A Game of Thrones two or three years ago. It spent those years languishing pristine, untouched, and accusatory on the shelf between my well-thumbed copies of Temeraire and The Name of the Wind, intimidating me by its 700 pages and its Tolkien comparisons. At the end of March, the imminence of the TV adaptation's première compelled me to finally pick it up. I raced through it in ten days and enjoyed the H-E-double-hockey-sticks (as my beloved TV wife Rachel would say) out of it.

We're two episodes into the TV show now, so it's high time I passed judgment. My ability to accurately assess a TV show after two episodes is incontrovertibly documented in my Very Secret Diaries, which you may not read, but here are some excerpts:

28^th September 2010 – on episode 2 of Lone Star: “I really liked it, but the ratings for it are so godawful that it probably hasn't a prayer of finishing out the season.”

2^nd October 2009 – on episode 2 of Flash Forward: “Flash Forward treats me like an eejit and I swear if it continues to be this bad I will drop it soon.” [One episode later, I did.]

25^th September 2009 – on episode 2 of Community: “[A]bsolutely terrific – a perfect balance of snarky humor and genuine character-based pathos. If it keeps going like that it has the potential to be a cult and critical favorite.”

See? I'm the new Alan Sepinwall. QED.

I've been watching Game of Thrones (the article appears to have been dropped) with my brother, who hasn't read the book. I can help him keep track of who the many characters are and compare the show to the book; he can offer me an evaluation of the show qua television. In places, though, it's an uncomfortable watch for a brother and sister, so we have developed a system for coping with all the squickiness. We call it “Drinking Game of Thrones”:

Incest? DRINK.

Titties? DRINK.

Buttcrack? DRINK.

Unfortunate Implications? DRINK.

Prince Joffrey (because he is such a little shit, I just hate him that much, that I have to drink whenever he is onscreen)? DRINK.

Something rapey happens? DRINK.

The thing is, most of the rapeyness and the Unfortunate Implications are taken straight from the book*. The show just highlights all of the aspects of the book that made me uncomfortable.

*Apart from that scene with Daenerys and her maidservant. That was entirely gratuitous and exploitative lesbian subtext, and I say this as a lesbian-subtext connoisseur and enthusiast.

I should point out that A Game of Thrones isn't half as sexist as a lot of fantasy books. It's still rapey enough for us to have nicknamed it, with a nod to Patton Oswalt, Rape Throne: The Throne That Rapes People, but women are present and they do have a voice. The first book cycles through eight characters' points of view, half of them female; and, while it's set in a medieval-style world that oppresses women, the female characters' personalities range from the controlling, Livia-like Cersei to the weak, submissive Sansa to the defiant, gender-non-conforming Arya. Arya is my favorite character in both the book and the show: she's only a little girl, but she's still a bona-fide BA (and not in the sense that I am).

The whole storyline with Daenerys, however, is rife with extremely uncomfortable implications in both iterations. Some of that is clearly intentional – the unbelievably creepy brother molesting his sister and selling her to be another man's wife – but the rest of it... well. In the book (minor spoiler, y'all), Dany comes to love her new husband devotedly. It smacks of Stockholm Syndrome to me, and I'm genuinely not sure if Martin intended that.

For example, take the consummation of Dany and Drogo's marriage. Bookside, Dany (who is just thirteen; I think – hope – they aged her up for the show) is completely terrified, and Drogo engages in a lot of foreplay to prepare her for penetrative sex. For some time, Dany finds the nightly sex painful, but gradually she comes to enjoy it.

In the show, though, Drogo just straight-up rapes her. I mean, not that I would characterize the book version as consensual as such, but he does at least wait until she tells him “yes”. Which is rapier: penetrating your new bride as she weeps and tries to cover herself up, or stroking and caressing her as she weeps until she's so aroused she invites you to penetrate her?

You see why I find it deeply problematic, right?

I think, for the most part, this is intended to be problematic. Obviously, not having read the sequels yet, I don't know how Daenerys' story will play out, but it's not implausible that she's deliberately written as a woman dealt a really crappy hand in life who does what she needs to do in order to cope psychologically. What's less explainable is the racial implications of this storyline.

As my brother said: “Racist undertones in a fantasy book?? Surely not!” Point taken, but I still think this deserves analysis.

It always bothers me when people excuse rampant rape and the erasure of POC in fantasy by saying, “It's authentic, 'cause it's based on medieval England/northern Europe!” Sure, but seasons didn't last for years on end and dragons didn't exist in medieval England, and I don't hear anyone complaining that dragons and years-long winters make it inauthentic. It's FANTASY. Shakesville articulated it best: “It says something interesting, and not at all pleasant, about our culture that we are willing to accept a complete reinvention of the planet's climate for the purposes of fantasy, but not the possibility of a culture devoid of sexual exploitation and rape”. Sub out “sexual exploitation and rape” for “white supremacy” and you have another, equally legitimate complaint.

Virginal, whiter-than-white maiden Daenerys is taken by a tribe of brown-skinned savages who live wild, shag like animals, rape her, and make her their queen (the only black character I've seen so far is her maidservant). It's fantasy, yes, but even a fantasy novel exists in the real world and is not divorced from real-world history: a history in which white people's colonialism oppressed and exploited people of color “for their own good”, in the name of civilizing the savages; in which predominantly white countries still invade predominantly brown countries “for their own good” whilst ignoring human rights abuses in resource-poor, predominantly black sub-Saharan Africa; in which the Jim Crow narrative of sexually animalistic black men preying on lily-white women was constructed by white men in order to perpetuate their control over both black men and white women. (Black women? Don't be silly, they don't exist.) These racist cultural narratives still persist. They persist in the international policy decisions of western countries; they persist in the difference in mainstream media coverage of stories about white people and stories about people of color; and they persist in fantasy novels and TV shows that recreate them.

I believe fiction has a duty, if not to show us a better world, then at least to be aware of when it's showing us terrible things. Game of Thrones is not aware of its own racism. As far as I'm concerned, this means I have to mention it every time I talk about it. I can talk about the successful character interactions, and the plot points that feel a bit awkward and rushed, and the sweeping moments that rouse fantasy-epic stirrings of excitement deep in my gut, and how God handcrafted every inch of Peter Dinklage out of the finest Olympic win – but I'm also going to talk about the racism.