“Game of Thrones’” overstuffed finale

Ser Jorahs face grew thoughtful as their horses trod together down the godsway. When I first went into exile, I looked at the Dothraki and saw half-naked barbarians, as wild as their horses. If you had asked me then, Princess, I should have told you that a thousand good knights would have no trouble putting to flight a hundred times as many Dothraki.

George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

Epic fantasy sprawling stories full of swords, castles, magic, kings and lots and lots of white people is slowly finding its way into Americas cultural mainstream. In the age of the anemic box office, Peter Jacksons films of J.R.R. Tolkiens Lord of the Rings trilogy remain a gold standard of blockbusterdom and his forthcoming version of The Hobbit will almost certainly follow suit. Newer writers like Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss have sold hundreds of thousands of their door-stopper tomes of wizardry and courtly intrigue. And tonight, countless viewers will be glued to their sets for the return of what is arguably the hottest show on television, Game of Thrones, HBOs adaptation of George R.R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels.

This is all a bit odd for those of us who grew up with maybe even got beaten up for an obsession with these sorts of books. Accustomed to being mocked for our profoundly uncool fixations, many fantasy nerds, myself among them, have an almost nurtured notion that our love of the fantastic and the pseudo-medieval is something that the rest of the world Just. Doesnt. Get.

But now, as our beloved genre finds its way into normal peoples hearts and minds, fantasy fans are increasingly confronted with an inversion of this notion a question that I, as an Arab-American fantasy fanatic, have been wrangling with for years: If the mainstream doesnt get fantasy, just how well does epic fantasy, with its lily-white heroes, get the multicultural real world of 21st-century America? As some of the most popular works in the genres history works that shed any pretension of being childrens fare A Song of Ice and Fire and its wonderful TV spawn are particularly useful springboards for this question.

When it comes to inherited conventions regarding race in epic fantasy, Game of Thrones is, in a sense, standing on the shoulders of dwarfs. The Lord of the Rings is the most obvious predecessor to Martins work, and its not hard to find subtle rhetorical responses to Tolkien in his books. When Time magazine dubbed Martin the American Tolkien, it highlighted not only Martins rather astonishing genius in world-building and narrative scope, but also the ideological baggage that all of us writing in the genre have inherited from our shared progenitor.

And its heavy baggage indeed, however much we love Tolkiens creation. His half-sublimated wranglings with race are more complex and fraught than either his shrillest detractors or his most fawning defenders would have us believe. But there is some irreducible ugliness in his masterpiece that really cant be convincingly redeemed. The men of the global East and global South (black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues) are monstrous and evil, naturally and culturally inclined to bow to Sauron, and to make war on the good men of the North and West. The bestial visages of orcs bear a striking resemblance to racist caricatures of African and Asian facial features. Above all, to be dark-skinned in Middle Earth is to be part of a savage horde whether orcish or human rather than to be a true individual.

The savage hordes described by Tolkien have been imported by his dozens of imitators over the years, becoming a mainstay of fantasy in books, movies and video games. Its a convention that Martin both takes up and departs from in depicting the Mongol-inspired Dothraki. As a people en masse, the Dothraki value only their horses, treating life cheaply, and reveling in violence:

Across the road, a girl no older than Dany was sobbing in a high thin voice as a rider shoved her over a pile of corpses, facedown, and thrust himself inside her. Other riders dismounted to take their turns. That was the sort of deliverance the Dothraki brought the Lamb Men.

The HBO production which has been so remarkable on so many fronts has exacerbated this hard-R-rated cartoonishness, bringing out some of the novels more unfortunate tendencies. The shows depiction of the Dothraki has been positively cringe-inducing. In the novels, Martins quasi-Mongol warrior culture is depicted in a problematically essentialist, but still complex fashion. But HBO has nudged Martins creation fully into racial caricature by casting a seemingly random variety of colored people, and apparently raiding productions of both Hair and Braveheart to clothe them.

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“Game of Thrones’” overstuffed finale