So here we are, on the night Game of Thrones premieres on HBO, and the Internet (or my corner of it, anyway) is still howling with outrage and indignation at Ginia Bellafante’s staggeringly stupid assertion that fantasy is "boy fiction" that won’t appeal to women unless it’s tarted up with sex. (To say nothing of the baffling implication that men are apparently uninterested in sex scenes. Wow. Just imagine my surprise.)
Plenty has already been said on that topic. In Ms. Bellafante’s last two paragraphs, however, stupidity gives way to an all-too-familiar prejudice:
Since the arrival of “The Sopranos” more than a decade ago, HBO has distinguished itself as a corporate auteur committed, when it is as its most intelligent and dazzling, to examining the way that institutions are made and how they are upheld or fall apart: the Mafia, municipal government (“The Wire”), the Roman empire (“Rome”), the American West (“Deadwood”), religious fundamentalism (“Big Love”).
When the network ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga “True Blood,” things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters. “Game of Thrones” serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot. If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary.
Ah, there it is again–the notion that fantasy is a childish and stupid waste of time. Woe betide HBO, long a bastion of "real-world sociology," for having sunk so low as to allow sword and sorcery to pollute its precious bodily fluids.
I guess I’ve been a bit starry-eyed in thinking we had laid this condescending bullshit to rest years ago. When The Lord of the Rings swept the oh-so-stolid Academy Awards for 2003, I thought maybe–just maybe–it was a sign that the stigma of "fantasy" had faded to insignificance. Apparently, Ms. Bellafante didn’t get the memo; hence her sneering at a series that includes–gasp and swoon!–a made-up language. Oh, the humanity.
It ties into something that came up at ConStellation this weekend, a fundamental truth Ms. Bellafante seems incapable of grasping: all fiction is fantasy.
Let me say that again:
All fiction is fantasy.
It’s the very definition of the word, folks. All fiction–not just sword and sorcery, but romance, science fiction, mystery, literary, mainstream–it’s all fantasy. George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, Jodi Picoult and Lorrie Moore . . . fantasists, every one of them–all of them writing about people and places that never existed, events that never occurred.
Yes, even HBO, that mighty fortress of "real-world sociology," is riddled top to bottom with fantasy. The Henrickson family is every bit as imaginary as House Stark. Tony Soprano’s Bada Bing! is just as made up as Barliman Butterbur’s Prancing Pony.
Sorry to give you the vapors, Ms. Bellafante. Here, have a nice mint julep.
Oh, and there’s no Easter Bunny, either.
