Time for an Angry Geek Girl Post...

It's been a while since I've had a geeky subject to rant about, but I think this particular situation deserves a little anger. For all of my aspirations to be in the publishing industry eventually, there has been all sorts of crazy drama lately. I'm not going to go into the Wicked Pretty Things anthology and all of its ridiculous shenanigans mostly because Cleolinda over on el-Jay did a much better job than I ever will. Click her name for the link to her overview of the haps.

What I want to rant discuss today, however is the very interesting (and by interesting I mean awful) use of demeaning language in an article by the New York Times. An illustrious institution, to be sure, but that's certainly no excuse for the callous and really insulting article they published.

The New York Times review of HBO's new series Game of Thrones (found at the link back there) starts inauspiciously with the interesting title: "A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms." Right off the bat, I'm on the offensive. Strange? That's a...strange choice of word for a review title, but I suppose it could work...

But the author of the review, Ginia Bellafante, takes this article as an opportunity to show how very little she appears to know about this show, the book series it is based on, and girls in general.

Let me clarify before I go further and explain that I do not like George R.R. Martin's Westoros (the land where Game of Thrones and its book series is set). I have tried on more than one occasion to slog through A Game of Thrones, the first book in the series, and I just cannot do it. I do not like the characters, I do not like the setting, and I have just not been in the mood to push through a book I do not like.

I want to like you George R.R. Martin, really I do...

This dislike of the series, however, does not make anything that Ms. Bellafante wrote any better.

She begins her article with speculation on how much the 10 episode mini-series cost to produce, referring to its "quasi-medieval somewhereland" setting and its "sweeping 'Braveheart' shots of warrior hordes." Already she has forced me to defend HBO's right to spend money as they see fit and the show itself (I don't want to do this. HBO spends a lot of money that could be used for other stuff). Quasi-medieval sounds pretentious in the best of settings. In this case, coming as the second sentence of her intro, it just seems mean. I get the feeling from the outset that she isn't going to give the show a chance, to judge it on its own merits, rather she has already pigeon-holed it as something she will definitely Not Like, and so her review is tinged with this repulsion from its inception.

And what, pray tell, is wrong with quasi-medieval, anyways?

Not a really good way to write a review, I think. But I mean, I get it. She doesn't like this kind of show. She concludes:

“Game of Thrones” serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no...relevant idea beyond... 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.

And that's fine. If you know anything about me and my blog, you know I'm critical of movies and their plots, and that I have no qualms about telling folk why I didn't like something. Ms. Bellafante is more than entitled to her opinion on this show, and I am glad she is privy to such a grand platform where she can share it.

The problem occurs when Ms. Bellafante attempts to make her review about something else: feminism. In a weird turn of events, Ms. Bellafante claims that the show is attempting to pander to a female audience by including sex and sexual-intrigue in this "boy fiction." She speculates that all of the sexual exploits (something I'm pretty sure HBO is known for doing...they can show skin so they do...) are something "tossed in for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps that no woman alive would watch otherwise."

Whoa... That is...wow. That is a huge claim right there. No woman alive?

Besides the fact that a statement that all-encompassing is a little nuts, it's highly demeaning to attempt to use feminist rhetoric for something that is so non-feminist. The series, so far as I remember and have come to understand from other reviews, is full of strong women doing their thing and doing it well. It's got its problems, yeah, but most things do. Ascribing to it a sense of pandering isn't really fair to it, and is also problematic in another way. By assuming that the sex is what's been added (not the case, btw: one of the reasons I stopped reading was because I couldn't take the sex in the book anymore...my delicate sensibilities and all) Ms. Bellafante is insisting that is what draws women to a show. Not the plotlines or the war scenes or even Sean Bean. It's romance that supposedly draws us, and by positing this, she's made her supposedly feminist-point rather soundly anti. Women only like shows/movies/books if there's love? Sheesh. This isn't the 1800s, we're allowed to like more than the Domestic Sphere.

If I were going to watch, it'd be to see Sean Bean be all scruffy and quasi-medieval.

Let me back up and comment on some of the other troubling turns of phrase Ms. Bellafante resorts to in her review:

In a sense the series, which will span 10 episodes, ought to come with a warning like, “If you can’t count cards, please return to reruns of ‘Sex and the City.’ ”

[On the climate of Westoros] "you have to wonder what all the fuss is about. We are not talking about Palm Beach."

The series claims as one of its executive producers ... author David Benioff, whose excellent script for... “25th Hour,” did not suggest a writer with Middle Earth proclivities. 

 I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first.

Do you see what she's doing? She's saying that "Middle Earth proclivities" are something to be ashamed of, that women don't read books like The Hobbit in public, and Heaven help a group of them who might be wanting to do so... She even posits that Sex and the City is the best choice of show for you if you can't understand the plot line...

We say that we as a country are moving forward, that we are losing our tendency to pigeon-hole and sort, to say that If you are a Nerd, Then you cannot be a Girl. There are a host of Geek Girls on the web who would love to take anyone who continues to think so erroneously to task.

But Ms. Bellafante is doing the exact same thing in her article that we accuse intolerant characters of doing. She is embracing something that isn't really a societal norm anymore (in this case poking fun at the "lowly geek") and asking us all to come along and help her in her fun-poking...

And by expressly saying more than once that no "real girl" would be caught dead watching this show, Ms. Bellafante is essentially belittling all of us Geek Girls that love fantasy-esque shows. The saga of Katie the Star Wars Girl really showed how big the online geek community is and how many of us have felt small and inconsequential in the span of our lives for what we like. I'm not trying to say Ms. Bellafante shouldn't have said these things, I just feel there has to have been a nicer way to go about it that doesn't involve essentially insulting anyone who has leanings toward the fantastical.

Someone with such an inherent dislike of fantasy and how it pertains to our real lives probably shouldn't have been asked to write a review on a show based on a series that is beloved by so many. I mean, did you see the Internet explode when it was revealed that the last book in the series finally had a release date? Pure, joyous chaos.

Book 5 in the series. This is FTW according to a lot of the Interwebs.

Ms. Bellafante's conclusion deals with the idea that HBO's strengths in original programming lie in, as she says, "its instincts for real-world sociology" as it has accomplished in such highly recognized shows as The Wire, Big Love, and Rome. She argues that shows with more fantastical leanings, like True Blood and now Game of Thrones feel "cheap."

What I think Ms. Bellafante fails to understand is that the point of fantasy is to make us consider our own lives. Well-written fantasy is one of the best explanations of real-world sociology there is, with the fantastic stepping in to really show the problems that we sometimes don't see in our day to day lives.  A book like Harry Potter isn't solely about the trials and tribulations of a boy in Wizard School. It's also about prejudice and judgement, love and family and trust, true friendship and the overwhelming terror of true evil. To only see the fantasy elements and miss how the book is merely couched in these to say something about overarching concepts, is to miss the point of the book.

So to say that fantasy does nothing but provide an escape for those who have no other way to do it (what I felt Ms. Bellafante was doing) is to completely misread the point of fantasy.

And if Ms. Bellafante doesn't understand that, she cannot be expected to understand the appeal of this show. I am left with the question, then, of why she was chosen to write this article. I can only hope that in the future there will be a modicum of tact used in reviews. By all means, slam something that is awful, just don't slam its fans (or all the tangential fans), especially when it hasn't even come out yet.

Game of Thrones premieres on HBO tonight, Sunday, April 17th at 9 pm Eastern. I won't be watching it for reasons I've already mentioned (plus, it's got all sorts of crazy sex...oh my delicate sensibilities lol) but if you're interested, by all means please prove Ms. Bellafante wrong.