Hespire Wrote:
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> I've never seen Game of Thrones, and I don't feel
> any strong need for it,
Don’t worry, there really isn’t any.
> but it strikes me as
> unreal that a series with so many bland ideas,
> which actual European myths and romances would
> scoff at, could be hailed so much. Maybe it's just
> that well-written, which I'm willing to consider,
> though friends insist otherwise.
Well, the people that I know who went bananas over it a couple of years ago were going on about the characters, and especially how the show’s writers would kill off sympathetic ones without batting an eyelid. Nobody ever mentioned the fantasy elements. Or the naked stuff (then again, these were Europeans -- they tend to be less hung up on nudity than Americans).
Also, I suspect that what is ‘blandness’ to you and me is easily mistaken for ‘profundity’ by others. A bit like how lovesick teenagers write terrible poems that do not contain any specifics, but plenty of abstract nouns. Or ‘poets’ who get to read their work at US presidential inaugurations, come to think of it -- but let’s not go there.
(O my god this is shitty.)
> I'm rather packed with reading material at the
> moment, but this one paragraph tells me more than
> enough about this bizarre setting, and it
> satisfies me more than the usual dungeons and
> dragons! I might have to give it a try some day!
Michael Shea is so good IMHO, that I would recommend giving him precedence over the rest of your to-read list (which no doubt, like mine, is immense) at least for a book or two.
> The porn and melodrama explain it all to me. Those
> and violence are often all you need for an
> audience these days. Then again, I suppose
> Shakespeare might have filled a similar niche in
> his time. Minus the women.
I was about to mention
Titus Andronicus, which is indeed full of grotesqueries and was one of Shakespeare’s earlier works, just so I could comment that he’d started as a bit of a hack, but then really grew as an artist. But then I looked up the order in which it is assumed he wrote his plays and discovered that when he most likely wrote TA, he already had
The Taming of the Shrew and
Richard III under his belt. Whew!
For Elizabethan stage sex and violence, John Ford and John Webster are better options. There’s also
The Revenger’s Tragedy, formerly attributed to Cyril Tourneur, but nowadays more widely thought to be by Thomas Middleton (“Not that it matters,†as Morla the Ancient would say).