Lions and dragons and wolves, oh my
Jul. 16th, 2011 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileSo... I finished rereading all four A Song of Ice and Fire books. Much like the first time around, they were long, but not long enough for me, and they were alternately hilarious and horrifying, and they were rockin' the dark an' gritty thing hardcore-style, and they were full of surprising plot twists that made me fall out of my chair and go "WHAT WHAT NO YOU DIDNT" and yes, that happened even though I'd already read the books before. See, the two best things about this story is (a) it is immense and complicated to the point where your average 200-level history course looks oversimplified, and (b) it is chock full of really surprising trope-exploding (or sometimes just awesome) twists. This means that there are big, important, heart-stopping, cruelly ironic twists that I'd managed to forget over the past two years because there are just that many. I had forgotten which of my favorite characters died, in some cases. I was trying to have a conversation with Josh about the series at Faire, and we kept talking past each other, because I'd totally forgotten what happens to Arya after she kills the singing Watchman, even thought that is kind of a big deal, and Josh had forgotten the missing piece of the story about Tysha that Jaime tells Tyrion, even thought that is also a big deal. Although I guess both of these things happen at the end of Crows so there hasn't been much follow-up to either of them to make them stick in our brains. At least we both remembered which Starks are dead and which ones aren't (and which ones are, uh, kind of both).
Attempting to explain what A Song of Ice and Fire is about is nearly impossible. It will take me forever, and I really can't even start telling you much of anything plot-related at all without giving away some of the most delicious twists, because it is that twisty. More or less, it's about a multi-factional civil war in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, a land heavily patterned off late fourteenth/early fifteenth-century Europe except that everything is bigger and older and longer. Far to the North of the Seven Kingdoms lies the Wall, a seven-hundred-foot-tall structure of ice that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the icy northlands, where live wildlings ("uncivilized" people) and from whence there is emerging a vague threat of scary ice zombies, called White Walkers or Others. These things haven't been seen since something called the Long Night, several thousand years ago. You'd think that fighting the ice zombies and preventing another Long Night would be the top priority in this story, but actually, pretty much nobody gives a shit except the actual men of the Night's Watch on the Wall, because, in true real-people fashion, most of the rest of the kingdom is busy scheming, making ill-thought-out power grabs, hating on each other, and basically sucking at life. The King, who was apparently some sort of Conan the Barbarian type back fifteen years ago when he rebelled and took the throne from the aptly named Mad King Aerys (who liked to roast people in their own armor and fun stuff like that), has become a silly and temperamental old drunk who, despite the realm's general prosperity, has driven the crown six million dragons in debt to feed his taste for throwing big tourneys and stuff. He has a superlatively beautiful but even more superlatively bitchy Queen, Cersei Lannister, a member of the most rich and assholish family in the realm. Cersei has two brothers: the dashingly handsome and hilariously smug Jaime, known as the "Kingslayer" because it was he that actually gave old Mad King Aerys the chop, and the clever but sadly birth-defect-laden Tyrion, known as "the Imp" because he suffers from an unfortunate combination of dwarfism, hunchbackedness, misaligned legs, mismatched eyes, and general ugliness. Their father is Tywin Lannister, the meanest hardass in the entire kingdom, who is so wealthy he is rumored to shit gold.
King Robert's bestest childhood buddy was Ned Stark, now the Lord of Winterfell, the northernmost part of the kingdom. He has a wife, Catelyn, originally from the Riverlands, who is mostly awesome except the fanbase all hates her because she dislikes Jon Snow. Ned has six kids: Jon Snow is his bastard from some woman he refuses to talk about, and there is a lot of speculation that Jon might actually not be Ned's at all but his dead sister's, which would be just the sort of cruelly ironic thing GRRM would do, because that would render all of the otherwise-kindly Catelyn's years-long dislike of him irreversably misplaced. Ned and Catelyn have five trueborn Stark kiddies: Robb, the eldest, is basically the sort of dude a lord's son should be like, and is just and fair and charismatic and a good fighter and stuff. Sansa, the elder daughter, is a silly little thing who likes stories about brave knights and fair damsels and all that other fairy-tale shit, and would probably have a room plastered in Disney Princess paraphernalia if she lived in our world. Arya is the tomboy: bad at sewing, good at swordplay, likes making friends with her social "inferiors." Bran is the fourth child and second boy; his trademark personality trait is that he likes climbing all over the outside of the castle, which is unfortunate as somebody throws him out a window within the first hundred pages, but that is okay because he eventually ends up being the only Stark that has any bloody idea that he's a warg and goes about properly training for it. Rickon is a baby; he's not very interesting. Early in the story they all find pet baby direwolves, and they all form very strong attachments to their wolves, which is because they are actually all wargs even though most of them never figure this out.
Your other main group of characters is on a different continent. The two youngest children of the dead Mad King Aerys are Viserys, who is kind of a douche, and Danaerys, his teenage sister whom he sells/gifts to a Dothraki (grassland horselords; basically Mongols) khal named Drogo in exchange for the promise that Drogo's army will help him reconquer Westeros. Things do not go according to plan AT ALL, but I will not tell you how.
These are all your main characters in like... the first quarter of the first book. All of them remain extremely important throughout the series, although how alive they remain varies greatly. Later on we meet awesome people like the eunuch Varys, master of whisperers; Lord Peter "Littlefinger" Baelish, the master of coin; Stannis and Renly, King Robert's very different brothers; Ser Loras Tyrell the Knight of Flowers and his frequently wed but supposedly still maiden sister Margaery; and Brienne of Tarth, a ridiculously tall woman who everybody in Westeros hates because she's ugly and gender-subversive (she is a knight!), but who everybody in the fandom loves to pieces because she is so incredibly awesome.
The plot is a complex mess of enmities and alliances, battles and betrothals, magic and plain old human stupidity and greed. In brief (very very very brief!), A Game of Thrones concerns Ned Stark's appointment as Robert's Hand of the King, and his attempts to figure out who murdered the previous Hand and why. A Clash of Kings covers the escalation of the War of Five Kings; A Storm of Swords, the biggest, starts to focus more on the fragmentation and strife within each faction of the war and escalates the magic and the really weird alliances. A Feast for Crows is largely about the rise of several queens following the chaos and multiple regicides at the tail end of the War of Five Kings, and the widespread devastation from the war and autumn. Also, winter is coming.
George R. R. Martin said his intent in this series was to combine fantasy with history and historical fiction; Rolling Stone claims ASoIaF invented the genre of the "realpolitik fantasy novel," and various other people smarter than me have attempted to describe this series in a number of different ways. This series is NOT just a regular doorstopper fantasy with extra grit and grimdark pasted on. This story is a weird mix of being an epic high fantasy and being a searing metacritical commentary on everything wrong with the fantasy genre.
This is most evident in the character of Sansa, Ned Stark's eldest daughter. Sansa is silly. Sansa believes in silly shit. Sansa believes in the sorts of tropes that show up a lot in fairy tales, myths and fantasy epics that aren't explicitly supernatural but are still, basically, fantasy, in that they are unrelated to any type of realistic worldview. Over the course of the series, Sansa repeatedly finds out the hard way that things Aren't Like They Are In The Songs.
Now, I read a lot of fantasy, and I think a lot of it is pretty good, and one of the things that makes good fiction good is that there is some sort of truth buried in it. That said, genres tend to lend themselves to basically telling the same type of stories over and over again. So the truths that fantasy has tended to be "about" over the years are limited: David and Goliath stories are the moral keystone of the genre, or, as Galadriel tells Frodo, "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." The importance of friendship--lifelong, undestroyable friendship--is another popular theme, giving us memorable pairs and small groups of characters such as Sam and Frodo, Merry and Pippin, and Legolas and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings; and Harry, Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter. Children's and YA fantasy tends towards strong messages of questioning adult authority and the virtues of inquisitiveness. These are all great things. However, due to Western fantasy's basis in European Medieval fairy tales and most people's general historical illiteracy, fantasy frequently tends to uncritically regurgitate some pretty medieval worldviews.
1. Black and White morality: of the Big Sweeping Epics particularly have a clearly defined side of Good and a clearly defined side of Evil, with the side of Evil usually being widely identified with the modifier "Dark" and more often than not characterized by extreme ugliness or terrifying imagery. Sauron the big flaming eye, with his grotesque Orcs and burned-out wasteland of Mordor, fits this trope. Lord Voldemort, despite his beginning as a handsome young regular dude and the whole theme of his having once been basically just like our hero, fits this trope during the "present" of the series. The Dark is Rising series is literally just about the Light versus the Dark, with the Light rarely seeming in any way nicer than the Dark, it's just that the Dark is Dark because they're Dark and they like, y'know, power and murdering everybody and stuff. ASoIaF, on the other hand, might have some scary ice zombies on the periphery, but mostly you have a lot of morally gray people squabbling with each other. Some individuals suck more than others. Throughout most of the series the reader tends to be pretty pro-Stark and anti-Lannister... except for Tyrion. And eventually we lighten up on Jaime. And sometimes you can even feel bad for Cersei, shrieking cartoon harpy bitch that she is. Also, Tommen and Myrcella are adorable... You end up rooting for Tyrion's efforts to succeed on the Battle of the Blackwater, even though he's working for his family (and we hate his family, even Tyrion hates his family) and we know that Stannis actually does have the claim to the throne (and Ned tried to give the throne to Stannis! And Ned was our hero!) and... yeah. Like most wars in history, this one just happened because there was a throne and everybody wanted to sit on it, and from there it got pointless.
2. Feudal-agrarian absolute monarchies are a totally functional and non-oppressive way to run a society: Yeah, there's a reason we stopped having the Middle Ages as soon as we remembered how. ASoIaF might be about the game of thrones, but it spends a lot of time with the "smallfolk" and the way that the feudal system makes their lives terrible and the total pointlessness of leige loyalty. The songs may sing about Robert and Rhaegar battling it out nobly on the banks of the Trident for the woman they both loved, but in these books we also get the story told by one of the other thousands of men in that battle, in this case a former potboy armed with a sharpened hoe or some shit who was there because his landlord was leige to some lord who was sworn to some lord who was sworn to either Rhaegar or Robert, and this dude doesn't even remember what side he was on, because what the hell does he care if Rhaegar stole Robert's girlfriend? But if certainly uprooted his entire life and killed half his family.
3. War is glorious: Songs about noble and brave battles have been around forever, particularly in warrior societies (I had to translate some bloodthirsty doozies out of Anglo-Saxon back in my History of the English Language class) but I still largely blame Tolkien for its unrelenting prevalence in modern fantasy. Tolkien was a veteran of World War One, a technological mess in which soldiers dug themselves into dank trenches and dropped mustard gas on each other, and ground was very rarely actually captured or gained, and soldiers were at least as likely to die of trenchfoot and stuff than to actually get killed in battle. The impersonal miserableness of this new type of warfare sparked nostalgia for the old type of warfare as being more active, or more noble or honorable or something, like there's some sort of virtue to riding out to meet your enemies on the field face-to-face and getting your hands dirty having to actually kill them yourself individually. This sounds all well and good and it may have been marginally better than fighting in World War One, but war stays the same more than it changes. Traditional medieval fighting was brutal, messy, frequently pointless, involved a lot of boring positioning and making camp (and sometimes seige, which must have been just as dull as trench warfare), and basically involved thousands and thousands of unwashed men and their masses of camp followers (which involved cooks, laundresses, and other support staff, not just prostitutes) camping out for ages, eating the land bare and producing lots of refuse, and catching and spreading nasty diseases. You were still just as likely to die of bloody flux or an infected scrape as you were to get cut down nobly in battle. Also, even the armies of "good" guys didn't just wage war on the enemy leader and his soldiers--land gets plundered when it's conquered, civilians are slain (particularly when cities are taken), rape is a frequently used tool of war. It's not unusual to target an enemy's supply lines or support staff before or even instead of engaging the troops in battle. Your troops and bannermen are entirely likely to desert, change allegiances, refuse to rally in the first place, break and run away and become outlaws the second it looks like the battle's going badly for your side, not have any idea who you actually are or why in hell you're fighting, or be completely unaffected by your cinematastic pep talk about how one day the world of men may fall but it is Not This Day. Particularly when you are not actually fighting to save the world of men; you're fighting because there are rumors that some snotty boy-king's parentage is suspect. War also tends to disrupt harvests and cause mass displacement and famine.
4. Knights have honor: No. No they don't. Really. Chivalry is totally optional for knights. The ability to sit on a horse and kill people is the main requirement.
5. The flip side to Knights Have Honor, Damsels Are Fair And In Distress And Everybody Totally Respects Them, See, We Gave Her A Flower: One of the big draws of ASoIaF for a lot of women, and part of the reason it has such a huge female fanbase, is that Martin really puts a lot of effort into showing exactly what is horrible and miserable in the feudal hierarchy, and he does a lot of it through the point of view of the people most hurt by it. In addition to having POV characters that are illegitimate, poor, physically disabled and/or disfigured, etc., a full half of his major player/viewpoint characters are women. (Just like in real life!) These women run the entire moral spectrum, from scheming, selfish Cersei Lannister at the "evil" end to Brienne, who just wants to serve and be loyal and honorable and keep all her oaths, on the "good" end. (Danaerys is on a one-woman quest to end rape and slavery throughout the entire world, which you'd think would put her as Most Goodest Woman, but she's a lot more complicated than that. She has, uh, good intentions?) They also run the gamut of femininity--there are "tomboy" or "mannish" women, like Arya and Brienne, or the wildling women like Ygritte; there are hyperfeminine "good girls" like Sansa (who is a one-character study in why teaching girls femininity is crippling and bad for them); there is Cersei, the femme fatale (who apparently hates every minute of it and hugely resents that nearly every other form of attempting to bribe, buy off, coerce or manipulate men falls flat in the face of their desire to bang the Queen); there are a weird variety of "mother" characters--Catelyn, the mother who tries to raise her kids to be functional and independent adults; Cersei, the aggressively overprotective parent who also wants to use her kids to fulfill her own dreams (in this case, to be the boss of everyone); and Dany, the symbolic mother of monsters, misfits and social rejects. All of these noblewomen have their own ways of attempting to protect themselves and/or self-realize and/or gain power in a hyperpatriarchal society in which their main job is to be sold from family to family for political reasons and bear them heirs. Lower-class women, of course, do not get even the fake courtesies that pass for respecting upper-class women, and tend to hold actual jobs, including jobs that are not being a sex worker. (There are quite a number of sex workers, too, some of whom are fairly well-developed characters with backstories and things. And a very wide variety of views on their jobs.) Rape is a constant threat and if you are very, very privileged, you have maybe a fifty percent chance that some dude may have enough of a problem with that to ever protect you. Instead of one token warrior maid in the whole series, there is basically a token warrior maid in nearly every group of people: Arya in the Stark family, Brienne in Renly's host, Asha in the Iron Islands, Maege Mormont and the other women of Bear Island in the Northmen's host, even Chaella of the Black Ears in Tyrion's gang of hillman chiefs. Some of them are sexy warrior ladies; some of them are not.
6. Bloodlines and Destiny Are A Really Big Deal: There are only two ways in which it can be a big deal--when people make it a big deal, and when hereditary insanity runs in your family. Much of the fighting over who has the hereditary right to what thrones under which sets of rules of primogeniture shows up how utterly arbitrary it all is, particularly since most of these systems produce 'rightful" heirs that are a far cry from Aragorn. Dany is probably more or less the "rightful" heir to Westeros, if you dismiss Robert's entire rebellion as illegitimate (which you don't), but only because Viserys got his arse killed by an angry warlord. If you accept Robert's rebellion, the rightful king is Stannis, who nobody likes and who is in the thrall of some weird monotheistic fire worship religion. (We particularly dislike him in ADWD, since now he is all up Jon Snow's arse and we like Jon Snow.) There's a bizarre sort of "might makes right" sentiment in which more and more of the Seven Kingdoms will straight up say that bloodlines are less important for demanding submission as having a pet dragon.
7. My Enemy And My Other Enemy Are Totally Friends/Big Unified Conspiracy: Everybody in Westeros believes this, and they're usually wrong. As opposed to the popular storytelling convention of having lots of unrelated things all turn out to be part of the same enormous conspiracy, Westerosi characters tend to see conspiracies and united fronts among people who can't stand each other and can barely work together at knifepoint. The most hilarious example of this is when Brandon Tully, Catelyn's uncle, thinks that the Lannisters are behind Jon Snow's election to Lord Commander of the Night's Watch because the Tullys are fighting the Lannisters and also Brandon loves his niece, who never liked Jon. Meanwhile, the Lannisters are pitching a grand mal hissy fit that "Ned Stark's bastard!" got elected instead of the dude they'd actually sent to steal that election, and the reader is sitting around going "Wait wait, when did we establish that Brandon Tully is DUMBER THAN A ROCK?" And they do this all the time. And they are ALWAYS wrong. And there is always infighting and betrayal on their "side" too, but it never occurs to them that other factions might be having the same problem. Dany's the only one with any excuse, being two continents away and having learned all of her family history from Viserys, but it didn't stop me from snorting tea out my nose when she said "Stark, Lannister, what's the difference?" Dramatic irony and misinformation run so high in this series you're liable to choke on them.
8. There Is Totally A Big Difference Between Civilized Countries And Those Primitive Places That Still Have Slavery And Stuff: It's not that the slave cities don't suck, it's just that Westeros isn't really any less barbaric. Everyone's got their own idea about what makes those other people barbarians, but the least shitty culture is probably the wildlings. They hang out in the cold far north and periodically steal shit (and sometimes people) from the Westerosi, but they have a fairly democratic society and if a dude "steals" a woman and she doesn't want to be "stolen" it is entirely within her rights to kick his arse (or slit his throat) and leave, and the "spearwives" are usually perfectly equipped to do so. They're hardly "noble savage" types, though, and their freedom comes at a price--wildling life is extremely dangerous. Also: rebuilding an economy after you ban slavery is really hard.
This... really doesn't even begin to cover it, really. You could probably write a master's thesis on ASoIaF as metacriticism. Someday I hope to actually do so. A lot of fantasy work is "pseudo-medieval"; ASoIaF may be the first fantasy work I've ever read that I'd class as "semi-medieval" instead--technically, politically, and socioculturally, it's very heavily based on actual feudal Europe.
All the things we love about reading fantasy are still there though (except "epic battle between good and evil"; a lot of people specifically like that one; it has the clarity of childhood): epic battles, dragons, zombies, tantalizing bits of another world's history, young useless people rising up to become awesome, a fat sidekick who becomes awesome in his own right, regicide, plots to commit more regicide, a funny dwarf (although a very different kind of funny dwarf--in this case, it's a caustically witty human person with dwarfism), a long-lost exiled Rightful Monarch (sort of), some wargs, some quests, a lone few "true knights." If you're me and you grew up reading Tamora Pierce and stuff, the Lady Knight feels like a familiar fantasy staple. There is a young boy with Mysterious Parentage, and there is a big "bringing magic back to the land" story arc. Also, big scary but also adorable magical familiars.
This post may have been totally incoherent, but trying to review four thousands pages of a story made of spoilers without spoiling too much is just beyond my skill as a reviewer. You should probably just go read the books instead.
Attempting to explain what A Song of Ice and Fire is about is nearly impossible. It will take me forever, and I really can't even start telling you much of anything plot-related at all without giving away some of the most delicious twists, because it is that twisty. More or less, it's about a multi-factional civil war in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, a land heavily patterned off late fourteenth/early fifteenth-century Europe except that everything is bigger and older and longer. Far to the North of the Seven Kingdoms lies the Wall, a seven-hundred-foot-tall structure of ice that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the icy northlands, where live wildlings ("uncivilized" people) and from whence there is emerging a vague threat of scary ice zombies, called White Walkers or Others. These things haven't been seen since something called the Long Night, several thousand years ago. You'd think that fighting the ice zombies and preventing another Long Night would be the top priority in this story, but actually, pretty much nobody gives a shit except the actual men of the Night's Watch on the Wall, because, in true real-people fashion, most of the rest of the kingdom is busy scheming, making ill-thought-out power grabs, hating on each other, and basically sucking at life. The King, who was apparently some sort of Conan the Barbarian type back fifteen years ago when he rebelled and took the throne from the aptly named Mad King Aerys (who liked to roast people in their own armor and fun stuff like that), has become a silly and temperamental old drunk who, despite the realm's general prosperity, has driven the crown six million dragons in debt to feed his taste for throwing big tourneys and stuff. He has a superlatively beautiful but even more superlatively bitchy Queen, Cersei Lannister, a member of the most rich and assholish family in the realm. Cersei has two brothers: the dashingly handsome and hilariously smug Jaime, known as the "Kingslayer" because it was he that actually gave old Mad King Aerys the chop, and the clever but sadly birth-defect-laden Tyrion, known as "the Imp" because he suffers from an unfortunate combination of dwarfism, hunchbackedness, misaligned legs, mismatched eyes, and general ugliness. Their father is Tywin Lannister, the meanest hardass in the entire kingdom, who is so wealthy he is rumored to shit gold.
King Robert's bestest childhood buddy was Ned Stark, now the Lord of Winterfell, the northernmost part of the kingdom. He has a wife, Catelyn, originally from the Riverlands, who is mostly awesome except the fanbase all hates her because she dislikes Jon Snow. Ned has six kids: Jon Snow is his bastard from some woman he refuses to talk about, and there is a lot of speculation that Jon might actually not be Ned's at all but his dead sister's, which would be just the sort of cruelly ironic thing GRRM would do, because that would render all of the otherwise-kindly Catelyn's years-long dislike of him irreversably misplaced. Ned and Catelyn have five trueborn Stark kiddies: Robb, the eldest, is basically the sort of dude a lord's son should be like, and is just and fair and charismatic and a good fighter and stuff. Sansa, the elder daughter, is a silly little thing who likes stories about brave knights and fair damsels and all that other fairy-tale shit, and would probably have a room plastered in Disney Princess paraphernalia if she lived in our world. Arya is the tomboy: bad at sewing, good at swordplay, likes making friends with her social "inferiors." Bran is the fourth child and second boy; his trademark personality trait is that he likes climbing all over the outside of the castle, which is unfortunate as somebody throws him out a window within the first hundred pages, but that is okay because he eventually ends up being the only Stark that has any bloody idea that he's a warg and goes about properly training for it. Rickon is a baby; he's not very interesting. Early in the story they all find pet baby direwolves, and they all form very strong attachments to their wolves, which is because they are actually all wargs even though most of them never figure this out.
Your other main group of characters is on a different continent. The two youngest children of the dead Mad King Aerys are Viserys, who is kind of a douche, and Danaerys, his teenage sister whom he sells/gifts to a Dothraki (grassland horselords; basically Mongols) khal named Drogo in exchange for the promise that Drogo's army will help him reconquer Westeros. Things do not go according to plan AT ALL, but I will not tell you how.
These are all your main characters in like... the first quarter of the first book. All of them remain extremely important throughout the series, although how alive they remain varies greatly. Later on we meet awesome people like the eunuch Varys, master of whisperers; Lord Peter "Littlefinger" Baelish, the master of coin; Stannis and Renly, King Robert's very different brothers; Ser Loras Tyrell the Knight of Flowers and his frequently wed but supposedly still maiden sister Margaery; and Brienne of Tarth, a ridiculously tall woman who everybody in Westeros hates because she's ugly and gender-subversive (she is a knight!), but who everybody in the fandom loves to pieces because she is so incredibly awesome.
The plot is a complex mess of enmities and alliances, battles and betrothals, magic and plain old human stupidity and greed. In brief (very very very brief!), A Game of Thrones concerns Ned Stark's appointment as Robert's Hand of the King, and his attempts to figure out who murdered the previous Hand and why. A Clash of Kings covers the escalation of the War of Five Kings; A Storm of Swords, the biggest, starts to focus more on the fragmentation and strife within each faction of the war and escalates the magic and the really weird alliances. A Feast for Crows is largely about the rise of several queens following the chaos and multiple regicides at the tail end of the War of Five Kings, and the widespread devastation from the war and autumn. Also, winter is coming.
George R. R. Martin said his intent in this series was to combine fantasy with history and historical fiction; Rolling Stone claims ASoIaF invented the genre of the "realpolitik fantasy novel," and various other people smarter than me have attempted to describe this series in a number of different ways. This series is NOT just a regular doorstopper fantasy with extra grit and grimdark pasted on. This story is a weird mix of being an epic high fantasy and being a searing metacritical commentary on everything wrong with the fantasy genre.
This is most evident in the character of Sansa, Ned Stark's eldest daughter. Sansa is silly. Sansa believes in silly shit. Sansa believes in the sorts of tropes that show up a lot in fairy tales, myths and fantasy epics that aren't explicitly supernatural but are still, basically, fantasy, in that they are unrelated to any type of realistic worldview. Over the course of the series, Sansa repeatedly finds out the hard way that things Aren't Like They Are In The Songs.
Now, I read a lot of fantasy, and I think a lot of it is pretty good, and one of the things that makes good fiction good is that there is some sort of truth buried in it. That said, genres tend to lend themselves to basically telling the same type of stories over and over again. So the truths that fantasy has tended to be "about" over the years are limited: David and Goliath stories are the moral keystone of the genre, or, as Galadriel tells Frodo, "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." The importance of friendship--lifelong, undestroyable friendship--is another popular theme, giving us memorable pairs and small groups of characters such as Sam and Frodo, Merry and Pippin, and Legolas and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings; and Harry, Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter. Children's and YA fantasy tends towards strong messages of questioning adult authority and the virtues of inquisitiveness. These are all great things. However, due to Western fantasy's basis in European Medieval fairy tales and most people's general historical illiteracy, fantasy frequently tends to uncritically regurgitate some pretty medieval worldviews.
1. Black and White morality: of the Big Sweeping Epics particularly have a clearly defined side of Good and a clearly defined side of Evil, with the side of Evil usually being widely identified with the modifier "Dark" and more often than not characterized by extreme ugliness or terrifying imagery. Sauron the big flaming eye, with his grotesque Orcs and burned-out wasteland of Mordor, fits this trope. Lord Voldemort, despite his beginning as a handsome young regular dude and the whole theme of his having once been basically just like our hero, fits this trope during the "present" of the series. The Dark is Rising series is literally just about the Light versus the Dark, with the Light rarely seeming in any way nicer than the Dark, it's just that the Dark is Dark because they're Dark and they like, y'know, power and murdering everybody and stuff. ASoIaF, on the other hand, might have some scary ice zombies on the periphery, but mostly you have a lot of morally gray people squabbling with each other. Some individuals suck more than others. Throughout most of the series the reader tends to be pretty pro-Stark and anti-Lannister... except for Tyrion. And eventually we lighten up on Jaime. And sometimes you can even feel bad for Cersei, shrieking cartoon harpy bitch that she is. Also, Tommen and Myrcella are adorable... You end up rooting for Tyrion's efforts to succeed on the Battle of the Blackwater, even though he's working for his family (and we hate his family, even Tyrion hates his family) and we know that Stannis actually does have the claim to the throne (and Ned tried to give the throne to Stannis! And Ned was our hero!) and... yeah. Like most wars in history, this one just happened because there was a throne and everybody wanted to sit on it, and from there it got pointless.
2. Feudal-agrarian absolute monarchies are a totally functional and non-oppressive way to run a society: Yeah, there's a reason we stopped having the Middle Ages as soon as we remembered how. ASoIaF might be about the game of thrones, but it spends a lot of time with the "smallfolk" and the way that the feudal system makes their lives terrible and the total pointlessness of leige loyalty. The songs may sing about Robert and Rhaegar battling it out nobly on the banks of the Trident for the woman they both loved, but in these books we also get the story told by one of the other thousands of men in that battle, in this case a former potboy armed with a sharpened hoe or some shit who was there because his landlord was leige to some lord who was sworn to some lord who was sworn to either Rhaegar or Robert, and this dude doesn't even remember what side he was on, because what the hell does he care if Rhaegar stole Robert's girlfriend? But if certainly uprooted his entire life and killed half his family.
3. War is glorious: Songs about noble and brave battles have been around forever, particularly in warrior societies (I had to translate some bloodthirsty doozies out of Anglo-Saxon back in my History of the English Language class) but I still largely blame Tolkien for its unrelenting prevalence in modern fantasy. Tolkien was a veteran of World War One, a technological mess in which soldiers dug themselves into dank trenches and dropped mustard gas on each other, and ground was very rarely actually captured or gained, and soldiers were at least as likely to die of trenchfoot and stuff than to actually get killed in battle. The impersonal miserableness of this new type of warfare sparked nostalgia for the old type of warfare as being more active, or more noble or honorable or something, like there's some sort of virtue to riding out to meet your enemies on the field face-to-face and getting your hands dirty having to actually kill them yourself individually. This sounds all well and good and it may have been marginally better than fighting in World War One, but war stays the same more than it changes. Traditional medieval fighting was brutal, messy, frequently pointless, involved a lot of boring positioning and making camp (and sometimes seige, which must have been just as dull as trench warfare), and basically involved thousands and thousands of unwashed men and their masses of camp followers (which involved cooks, laundresses, and other support staff, not just prostitutes) camping out for ages, eating the land bare and producing lots of refuse, and catching and spreading nasty diseases. You were still just as likely to die of bloody flux or an infected scrape as you were to get cut down nobly in battle. Also, even the armies of "good" guys didn't just wage war on the enemy leader and his soldiers--land gets plundered when it's conquered, civilians are slain (particularly when cities are taken), rape is a frequently used tool of war. It's not unusual to target an enemy's supply lines or support staff before or even instead of engaging the troops in battle. Your troops and bannermen are entirely likely to desert, change allegiances, refuse to rally in the first place, break and run away and become outlaws the second it looks like the battle's going badly for your side, not have any idea who you actually are or why in hell you're fighting, or be completely unaffected by your cinematastic pep talk about how one day the world of men may fall but it is Not This Day. Particularly when you are not actually fighting to save the world of men; you're fighting because there are rumors that some snotty boy-king's parentage is suspect. War also tends to disrupt harvests and cause mass displacement and famine.
4. Knights have honor: No. No they don't. Really. Chivalry is totally optional for knights. The ability to sit on a horse and kill people is the main requirement.
5. The flip side to Knights Have Honor, Damsels Are Fair And In Distress And Everybody Totally Respects Them, See, We Gave Her A Flower: One of the big draws of ASoIaF for a lot of women, and part of the reason it has such a huge female fanbase, is that Martin really puts a lot of effort into showing exactly what is horrible and miserable in the feudal hierarchy, and he does a lot of it through the point of view of the people most hurt by it. In addition to having POV characters that are illegitimate, poor, physically disabled and/or disfigured, etc., a full half of his major player/viewpoint characters are women. (Just like in real life!) These women run the entire moral spectrum, from scheming, selfish Cersei Lannister at the "evil" end to Brienne, who just wants to serve and be loyal and honorable and keep all her oaths, on the "good" end. (Danaerys is on a one-woman quest to end rape and slavery throughout the entire world, which you'd think would put her as Most Goodest Woman, but she's a lot more complicated than that. She has, uh, good intentions?) They also run the gamut of femininity--there are "tomboy" or "mannish" women, like Arya and Brienne, or the wildling women like Ygritte; there are hyperfeminine "good girls" like Sansa (who is a one-character study in why teaching girls femininity is crippling and bad for them); there is Cersei, the femme fatale (who apparently hates every minute of it and hugely resents that nearly every other form of attempting to bribe, buy off, coerce or manipulate men falls flat in the face of their desire to bang the Queen); there are a weird variety of "mother" characters--Catelyn, the mother who tries to raise her kids to be functional and independent adults; Cersei, the aggressively overprotective parent who also wants to use her kids to fulfill her own dreams (in this case, to be the boss of everyone); and Dany, the symbolic mother of monsters, misfits and social rejects. All of these noblewomen have their own ways of attempting to protect themselves and/or self-realize and/or gain power in a hyperpatriarchal society in which their main job is to be sold from family to family for political reasons and bear them heirs. Lower-class women, of course, do not get even the fake courtesies that pass for respecting upper-class women, and tend to hold actual jobs, including jobs that are not being a sex worker. (There are quite a number of sex workers, too, some of whom are fairly well-developed characters with backstories and things. And a very wide variety of views on their jobs.) Rape is a constant threat and if you are very, very privileged, you have maybe a fifty percent chance that some dude may have enough of a problem with that to ever protect you. Instead of one token warrior maid in the whole series, there is basically a token warrior maid in nearly every group of people: Arya in the Stark family, Brienne in Renly's host, Asha in the Iron Islands, Maege Mormont and the other women of Bear Island in the Northmen's host, even Chaella of the Black Ears in Tyrion's gang of hillman chiefs. Some of them are sexy warrior ladies; some of them are not.
6. Bloodlines and Destiny Are A Really Big Deal: There are only two ways in which it can be a big deal--when people make it a big deal, and when hereditary insanity runs in your family. Much of the fighting over who has the hereditary right to what thrones under which sets of rules of primogeniture shows up how utterly arbitrary it all is, particularly since most of these systems produce 'rightful" heirs that are a far cry from Aragorn. Dany is probably more or less the "rightful" heir to Westeros, if you dismiss Robert's entire rebellion as illegitimate (which you don't), but only because Viserys got his arse killed by an angry warlord. If you accept Robert's rebellion, the rightful king is Stannis, who nobody likes and who is in the thrall of some weird monotheistic fire worship religion. (We particularly dislike him in ADWD, since now he is all up Jon Snow's arse and we like Jon Snow.) There's a bizarre sort of "might makes right" sentiment in which more and more of the Seven Kingdoms will straight up say that bloodlines are less important for demanding submission as having a pet dragon.
7. My Enemy And My Other Enemy Are Totally Friends/Big Unified Conspiracy: Everybody in Westeros believes this, and they're usually wrong. As opposed to the popular storytelling convention of having lots of unrelated things all turn out to be part of the same enormous conspiracy, Westerosi characters tend to see conspiracies and united fronts among people who can't stand each other and can barely work together at knifepoint. The most hilarious example of this is when Brandon Tully, Catelyn's uncle, thinks that the Lannisters are behind Jon Snow's election to Lord Commander of the Night's Watch because the Tullys are fighting the Lannisters and also Brandon loves his niece, who never liked Jon. Meanwhile, the Lannisters are pitching a grand mal hissy fit that "Ned Stark's bastard!" got elected instead of the dude they'd actually sent to steal that election, and the reader is sitting around going "Wait wait, when did we establish that Brandon Tully is DUMBER THAN A ROCK?" And they do this all the time. And they are ALWAYS wrong. And there is always infighting and betrayal on their "side" too, but it never occurs to them that other factions might be having the same problem. Dany's the only one with any excuse, being two continents away and having learned all of her family history from Viserys, but it didn't stop me from snorting tea out my nose when she said "Stark, Lannister, what's the difference?" Dramatic irony and misinformation run so high in this series you're liable to choke on them.
8. There Is Totally A Big Difference Between Civilized Countries And Those Primitive Places That Still Have Slavery And Stuff: It's not that the slave cities don't suck, it's just that Westeros isn't really any less barbaric. Everyone's got their own idea about what makes those other people barbarians, but the least shitty culture is probably the wildlings. They hang out in the cold far north and periodically steal shit (and sometimes people) from the Westerosi, but they have a fairly democratic society and if a dude "steals" a woman and she doesn't want to be "stolen" it is entirely within her rights to kick his arse (or slit his throat) and leave, and the "spearwives" are usually perfectly equipped to do so. They're hardly "noble savage" types, though, and their freedom comes at a price--wildling life is extremely dangerous. Also: rebuilding an economy after you ban slavery is really hard.
This... really doesn't even begin to cover it, really. You could probably write a master's thesis on ASoIaF as metacriticism. Someday I hope to actually do so. A lot of fantasy work is "pseudo-medieval"; ASoIaF may be the first fantasy work I've ever read that I'd class as "semi-medieval" instead--technically, politically, and socioculturally, it's very heavily based on actual feudal Europe.
All the things we love about reading fantasy are still there though (except "epic battle between good and evil"; a lot of people specifically like that one; it has the clarity of childhood): epic battles, dragons, zombies, tantalizing bits of another world's history, young useless people rising up to become awesome, a fat sidekick who becomes awesome in his own right, regicide, plots to commit more regicide, a funny dwarf (although a very different kind of funny dwarf--in this case, it's a caustically witty human person with dwarfism), a long-lost exiled Rightful Monarch (sort of), some wargs, some quests, a lone few "true knights." If you're me and you grew up reading Tamora Pierce and stuff, the Lady Knight feels like a familiar fantasy staple. There is a young boy with Mysterious Parentage, and there is a big "bringing magic back to the land" story arc. Also, big scary but also adorable magical familiars.
This post may have been totally incoherent, but trying to review four thousands pages of a story made of spoilers without spoiling too much is just beyond my skill as a reviewer. You should probably just go read the books instead.
