Why I adore Game of Thrones

From the very first chapter I knew I was in trouble. There were five books. Each of them were over 800 pages and some were even so long that they were split into two parts to make them more palatable to the reading public. 

I had work to do and this was definitely going to get in the way.

Over the next few weeks I became obsessed. I could speak of little else. I bored everyone around me to tears with conspiracy theories and plot points. I cared more about a bunch of fictional characters than the real life people walking in and out of my life.

I watched in horror as they stumbled into intrigue after intrigue, ensnared in a plot they could not possibly escape. I was elated when a miracle happened and bereft when it did not.

The emotional upheaval was almost unbearable. But the machinations of an implacable author who dispatches beloved characters with a godly roll of the dice was not the worst part. 

The worst part? It wasn’t even finished. When I reached the end of the five books there would be no conclusion, no understanding of what it was all about. There would be no reason to have spent weeks reading “just one more chapter” at 2am while cursing that tomorrow would be a washout.

So, an indifferent creator … a story full of twists and turns … beloved characters ripped from us too early or whose journey moves away from our own …. an elaborate series of crisscrossing plotlines whose meaning is maddeningly out of reach to those desperately seeking it….

Is this sounding familiar to anyone else? Anyone? Yeah, me too.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I was attending my cousin’s wedding a couple of weekends ago and I couldn’t help but think of my Game of Thrones obsession. If you’re a thrones fan I know you understand why.

(For everyone else, A Game of Thrones wedding usually brings unbearable drama, and not the who-kissed-who kind, and it always ends in bloodshed, and not of the drunken dancefloor accident variety.) 

Happily, there was no slaughter or intrigue at my cousin’s wedding (although I hear there was a drunken dancefloor accident) so why was I finding parallels with George RR Martin’s world? Well, I was thinking about the very episodic way that he tells his story and how that mirrors the way we experience the lives of the people around us. 

All of the chapters in the books are written from the point of view of one of the main characters. When we finish the chapter, we move on to another character’s viewpoint. This means that we sometimes see the same event from two different character’s point of view. Sometimes we see it through one character’s eyes and then we hear the story told to one of the other characters in the following chapters. So we know when someone is getting misled or just getting the wrong end of the stick. 

We see just how vulnerable our world view is and we start to think about all of the assumptions we make all the time about other people. And just when we think we are starting to understand something about a character, the chapter ends and we have to move on to someone else’s story.

Again, familiar isn’t it? Once we leave the close relationships of school and university and spread around the country or even around the world, we start to see the lives of our friends and family in episodes. We only get to see small pieces. A wedding here, a christening there, a birthday party or a visit for a few days. 

Our lives become just as maddeningly fractured as George RR Martin’s world and though we can do our best to keep in touch, in the end we have no choice but to accept it. We never get to see the whole thing, just fragments that we do our best to fit together into patterns that fit. The strands of our story pull us away from and then back together with the people that mean something to us. 

Sometimes the important players are yet to make their entrance. Sometimes a character makes a bold entrance and dazzles us for a while, only to disappear from the story just a couple of chapters later. Sometimes an old favourite pops up from nowhere and sometimes a villain becomes a lover … or a friend.

And I love this about life. Because you don’t have a clue what is coming next. Hopefully it’s not a violent end at a wedding but you never know. 

Maybe it’s something wonderful. 

Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, good or bad, it won’t last. The chapter will end and you’ll move on to something new.  

This is how I create my images too. They are a fragment. A moment in the life of a nameless character. A single moment in which their story comes into focus, before disappearing into the ether again. We don’t get to see the whole thing. We can dream about it, we can imagine what it might be, and perhaps that is more enjoyable anyway. 

For a time I am that maddening creator who won’t show you the ending you want, who won’t tell you what it’s all about because I know that a lot of the enjoyment comes from the not knowing (cue evil chuckle)

You’d think this would make me more sympathetic to George RR Martin and his glacial pace in writing his (as yet) unfinished masterpiece. But you’d be mistaken. I want to get to the end just as much as everyone else. I want to get there so badly that there are times when I wish I could kidnap George RR Martin and keep him prisoner until he finishes it (but without the horrible torture he inflicts on his characters…..maybe)

But maybe being a creator myself helps me to realise that the ending doesn’t really matter all that much. Don’t get me wrong, I need to follow it through to the conclusion. Even if there is no redemption to be had I feel the need to know what happens, all the while knowing that it won’t be satisfactory. There will be characters I love that will disappear because the story moves away from them and there is a distinct possibility that it won’t end in the way I want it to. Undoubtedly it will end without me understanding what it was really all about, or maybe it will be about nothing much at all. I will have to accept that too and perhaps it doesn’t matter.

In the end, just like our lives, all that matters is the time spent with the characters we love, the insights we get into their lives and how that brings clarity to our own.