Castles, Swords, Dragons, and Dirt

How about a democratically-elected cloud realm president? 

I tried.  I am, in fact, still trying.  My wife and watch Swords and Boobs, or it’s common name outside of my house, Game of Thrones, when the DVD’s come around on Netflix. I am somewhere in Season 3.  I can safely say I am 5% less lost than I was in previous seasons.  I just keep losing interest in the middle of each episode.  There are too many characters with unusual names and plotlines that do not emotionally resonate. I want to clearly state that I believe this TV series is well-acted, well-written and the production is amazing.  It deserves all the hype and all of the fans.  It is the overall genre of fantasy, in its most generic form, with swords, castles, maidens, knights, kings, English accents, dragons, and beheadings that I have just never liked. 

I used to believe it is because I have a lot of Irish ancestry.  Maybe something in my DNA made me averse to English accents.  Later I learned to like the accent, just not the fiction.  I remember trying to read The Hobbit and immediately giving up.  I think the early obsession with Star Wars cemented me as a fan of science fiction first, with a dash of fantasy for variety.  I certainly liked to be swept away to another world. I loved hero stories and dragons are always cool.  There are just some tropes and standards in the genre that turn me off.

Life has little to no value.  Heroes and villains are willing to kill and die at the drop of a Renaissance fair hat.  Women are raped, kids are executed.  Women especially are garbage; they’re either brood mares or disposable toys with no rights or place in the world.  Carnage is everywhere. Dead bodies are displayed in a grotesque manner, and simple arguments are commonly solved with a sword in the eye. I mean, I like Die Hard and action movies and all that, but rarely do they actually put heads on spikes.  There is violence in most fiction, but in fantasy it is Shakespearean.  Lives are tossed aside and there is no regard for humanity at all.  Happiness and compassion are weaknesses: peace is for pussies. War is the default setting. Brutality and ambivalence to all forms of empathy are the bread and butter of the sword-swinging crowd.

It’s not democratic.  This is a personal reaction.  I know these stories emanate from some fictional era before modern day government constructs, but the undercurrent of antiquated belief is too much to ignore.  The idea of royal families is just dumb.  A child on a throne leading thousands of men to their deaths is ridiculous.  These ideas are at the core of British society, but I am too ignorant and American to sort them out in a goofy essay.  The characters are commonly royalty or nobility, and people along the hero’s journey have unspoken allegiances to a stranger.  The social constructs are just too silly and foreign for me to take seriously.  Why are they bowing to this asshole? There a thousands of ways to tell a hero’s tale.  There is just something about the knights and princesses part of this equation that rubs me the wrong way.

Honor is a dubious virtue.  These stories are in the style of the ancient tales of honorable men doing honorable things for his Honor, the King…or some such bullshit.  Blind devotion to a lunatic just because he has the correct last name is insanity.  Murdering your fellow man simply because he carries a different-colored flag is the same problem we have with modern-day gangs.  It is meaningless.  Sometimes fantasy stories feature a rebellious hero that wants to infiltrate the system; or one kingdom is peaceful versus one that is a just bunch of dicks.  Those stories are all right, I guess.  Honor among men is what keeps a society together. Honor with no personal connections and lacks a moral purpose supersedes logic and fairness and it is not something worth building a society around.  You can make fiction surrounding it, but I just don’t care about any of the characters whose primary purpose is fulfilling debts and saving face.

The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films are exceptions.  They are the first fantasy films I ever cared to watch and I enjoyed them immensely. Maybe they were light on the kings and queens and heavy on the dragons and battles for survival against monsters. Something in those movies worked for me.  It was not enough to get me to read the source material, but it was something.  I also loved Harry Potter stuff.  It took place in modern day, and Harry was just as lost in the world as the reader.  Maybe I don’t like to be too far removed from today. It is one thing to be in a far-off world, but if the people there do not act or react like anything familiar, I lose interest.

And lastly, it’s usually dirty.  I don’t mean sexy, I mean dirty. Gruel and livestock poop. No bathrooms or forks or garbage pick-up. Nobody bathes, they sleep on the bare earth, and they eat moldy bread with yellow, nasty teeth. Barf.