| “WE BOTH PEDDLE FANTASIES,” Petyr Baelish says to...

20th May 2015

“WE BOTH PEDDLE FANTASIES,” Petyr Baelish says to Brother Lancel. “Mine just happen to be entertaining.” Petyr’s joke was a rare respite in this week’s brutal episode of Game of Thrones. But this quip is also a provocative insight, a kind of metacomment on the show itself. Game of Thrones, like Petyr and Lancel, peddles fantasies. But are its fantasies entertaining? Are they satisfying? For whom?

Like the johns in Littlefinger’s brothel, viewers of Game of Thrones have thrown down money and time for the chance to indulge in an elaborate fantasy. Often, even when it’s been grim, it’s been satisfying too. But something is different this week. “Unbent, Unbroken, Unbowed” offered a fantasy that viewers seem unwilling to buy. Why not? Why was it this episode, rather than some of the even more graphic episodes, that ended up a sort of fantasy shark jumping?

The quick answer is Sansa’s rape: it was awful, and what’s more, it was disappointing: disappointing that the show would, yet again, see rape as it’s most effective plot device. (My brother put it to me this way: “Game of Thrones’s attitude seems to be, why jump the shark when you can rape it instead?”) For several reasons — because of the victim, the perpetrator, the witness, but also because of its overall plot — this time the show was not able to align fantasy and brutality. This wasn’t what we wanted; it wasn’t even what we wanted to reassure ourselves we didn’t want.

It’s hard to understand why Sansa’s experience registered the way it did without thinking about the entirety of the episode. How does Ramsay’s abuse of Sansa compare to the High Sparrow’s imprisonment of Loras, or to Jaqen H’ghar’s beating of Arya? How do all of these combine to render this show’s dark fantasy whole? How does situating a rape at the end of a story about identity, truth, lying, and desire seem like such a profound violation, not only of Sansa, but also of us?

To answer that question, I think it’s worth pausing a moment over the idea of fantasy itself. The word “fantasy,” when applied to Game of Thrones, refers both to a particular narrative genre — a story set in any kind of fundamentally pre-modern world — and to a kind of imaginative desire.These two meanings aren’t the same, but they’re often weirdly conflated, partly because many familiar qualities of the fantasy genre — Dragons, noble warriors, beautifully embroidered dresses — fulfill emotional fantasies as well. And, too, the “premodern” part of the fantasy genre has its particular appeal to many people’s desires: if modernity abstracts us, puts a careful ordering of society between us and our bodies, the premodern, we like to think, will return us to a life that feels a little more raw, a little more embodied, a little more real.

But things go a little sideways when the historical qualities of emotional fantasy are mistakenly justified by a sense of historical realism. There is a human past about which we can be truthful, be “realistic,” but we can never be realistic about Westeros because Westeros does not exist. Westeros plays by a set of established rules — fantasy novels are still novels, and all novels satisfy by contracting rules with their readers — but those rules are not “realism,” whatever realism is. If Westeros is similar to our world, it is because Westeros’s creators have made it that way.

Let me be clear: stories of all kinds can teach us, really, about the world. But they do it not through mirroring the world but through metaphor. They are aesthetic representations, and that is not a weakness. Their difference from the real is precisely the force they wield.

And yet the claim of realism has a powerful tug on the conversation aboutGame of Thrones. When people complain about rape in the show, or homophobia, or brutality, they are often met with the response that “that’s how it really was.” But of course, it can’t be how Westeros “really was,” because Westeros never was at all.”