Season Eight of “A Game of Thrones” Premiers tomorrow night on HBO.

(Note: This post mentions several incidents and characters from the first seven seasons of “Game of Thrones” so if you haven’t seen seasons 1-7 yet…well, in that case I doubt you’ll be watching season eight!)

Medieval human kingdom uses fire-breathing Dragons to fight army of ice zombies! If you think about it, that’s really the whole plot of George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Fire and Ice” the series of seven novels that became the basis for HBO’s long running series “A Game of Thrones”. Everything else has just been subplots and character arcs.

But what subplots and character arcs. Let’s just take Daenerys Targaryen as an example. The daughter of a murdered king whose throne has been usurped, she starts the story by being married off by her brother to a barbarian chieftain. She receives three dragon eggs as a wedding present which she hatches to become ‘The Mother of Dragons”. Then she has to protect those baby dragons for about five years until they grow big enough for her to try to use them to regain her father’s throne. Except that she is then forced to make peace with the usurpers in order to fight the ice zombies.

That’s a brief summary of about one tenth of everything that’s happened that’s happened to Daenerys so far! I could easily name another dozen characters whose story lines have been equally eventful. That is the characters who are still alive after seven seasons because Martin has justly acquired a reputation for seducing us into caring for a character only to abruptly kill them off.

All of these different lives weave in and out to form the intricate tapestry that is “A Game of Thrones.” As a viewer you get caught up in the story of one or two characters and before you know it you’re sucked in to the entire saga, waiting breathlessly for the latest installment.

Part of the lure drawing you in is the detailed fantasy world that Martin has created in his setting of the nation of Westeros. Like many fantasy authors, Martin has started with a society similar to feudal Europe; the war over the iron throne has many parallels with the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses.

Even some of the characters seem based on characters from medieval literature. For example I think Brienne of Tarth has to be a female version of Don Quixote. Think about it, she talks about chivalry and honour more than any other character in the saga and for the first several seasons in which she appears she’s unsuccessful at everything she tries to do! She’s even given a page who in many ways is just a younger Sancho Panza.

To this feudal base Martin then adds in his fantasy elements. Some are tried and true like his dragons while others are wholly his own creation such as the three eyed raven or the disguises used by the assassins who serve the faceless god. Some of these magical plot devices work better than others.

As an example, in one episode Jorah Mormont was infected by the stonemen of Valyria and his body began turning to stone. After a little more than a season wandering around looking for a cure he finds Samwell Tarly the scholar who finds a possible cure in a library and just cures him. We never find out anything about the stonemen or Valyria, we don’t even get a good reason for why Jorah went there. I have a feeling Martin thought the stonemen were a great idea but then couldn’t figure out how to tie them into the rest of the story and since he need Jorah later on he decided to just get that whole subplot over with.

Of course loose ends and subplots that don’t work are going to happen when you’re writing a huge epic with hundreds of characters spread over an entire world. So we shouldn’t be too hard on Martin if Bran Stark completely disappears for six episodes while just going from Winterfell to the wall. Martin had so many good ideas for things that could happen to other characters that Bran got lost for a while.

A bigger problem, at least for me is the unrelenting bloodshed, it really becomes depressing at some points in the story. Now I know that the historic Hundred Years War and War of the Roses were terribly violent but there are times when Martin just seems to be piling it on. Even in his most violent plays Shakespeare still managed to have a few light moments to momentarily relieve the gloom, check out the clowns in Act V, Scene i of Hamlet.

The epic “A Game of Thrones” has often been compared to J. R. R. Tolkein’s monumental “The Lord of the Rings”, even by George R. R. Martin himself. In my opinion “A Game of Thrones” has a good deal more diversity, both in types of characters and societies than “Lord of the Rings” while at the same time not being built around such a heavy Good versus Evil basis. On the other hand Tolkein’s deep history of his imagined world, especially the many languages Tolkein created make it the more elaborate tapestry.

 

So that’s where we now are. The army of the dead is past the wall and moving south. Amongst the living there is still distrust, envy and a thirst for revenge. Will they unite in time? Winter has come, will humanity survive it. Season eight of “A Game of Thrones” is about to begin.