Bad Dads In Armor

This past April, I started reacquainting myself with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, spurred by the start of Season Six of HBO's "Game of Thrones."  When not actually watching the show, I spent my time searching  Reddit and Imgur for Game of Thrones memes, reading new theories about Jon Snow's parentage on Quora, and listening to the audiobooks on my iPhone. My family got used to the sight of me walking around our apartment with headphones on. If they asked me a question, I'd roll my eyes or grunt in annoyance. Being summoned back to the real world was such a drag.  

Normally, I would say that a man in his forties spending this much time on sword and sorcery fantasy stories is a man trying to escape something—such as the pressures of fatherhood.

I did not try to get my sons to watch "Game of Thrones" with me. Despite all the sword fights, magic and adventure--exactly the type of thing that a guy raised on comic books would want to share with his two pre-teen boys--"Game of Thrones" is wildly inappropriate for children. Like a lot of HBO's previous hit shows--The Sopranos, the Wire, Deadwood--GOT is gruesomely violent, overtly sexual and emotionally brutalizing. A lot of characters die, and those who don't are just as likely to end up burned, raped or crippled. I'm happy to say that my sons are not yet desensitized enough to enjoy this type of thing. 

What's more, neither seems terribly interested in the fantasy genre. The elder, who is 13, is really only concerned with social media, Drake, and his hair. The younger one, almost 10, likes to play Minecraft and memorize the Billboard charts from the Eighties through the Oughts. Different strokes, etc.

Even if you have never watched "Game of Thrones," you've probably heard that the writers regularly kill off the main characters, often at moments when the audience least expects it. This is in keeping with the source material. George R.R. Martin has made a point of subverting the narrative expectations set by fantasy classics like The Lord Of The Rings, particularly the idea that the hero will survive to the end of the story. 

My children, on the other hand, hate surprises, especially nasty ones. Years ago, I read my son, as a bedtime story, a chapter from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This particular chapter features a plot twist right out of the Martin playbook: a character who we've come to know and started to like, Cedric Diggory, is suddenly killed. When I read this scene, my son got quiet for a few moments, then started wailing so loudly his mother rushed into the room. It took another hour for her to get him to sleep and afterwards she yelled at me so loudly she almost woke him up again.  

It's just as well my kids don't discover "Game of Thrones" now anyway. The most powerful force in Westeros, far more destructive than dragons, ice demons and sorcery, is family. Both the show and the books are full of awful patriarchs: Tywin Lannister, whose dedication to maintaining his family's power and reputation warps his children in terrible ways; Stannis Baratheon, who burns his own daughter alive in order to help him win a battle (and it doesn't work, which only compounds his bad judgment); Craster, the "wilding" who weds his own daughters and gives his baby sons to the demonic White Walkers; and even Ned Stark, the protagonist of the first season, whose stubborn sense of honor costs him his head, and arguably the lives of his wife and several of his sons.

My children already get plenty of examples of incompetent fathering from my day-to-day interactions with them--I see no need to provide more.  They have their whole lives to discover the shitty parenting so ably celebrated in the world's art and literature--from Hamlet's mom to Homer Simpson.  For the moment, then, "Game of Thrones" will remain a private pleasure, no-kids-allowed, like alcohol, expensive restaurants and curse words.

Spoilers Ahead

My kids are incredibly spoiled. I don’t mean “spoiled” in the traditional child-rearing sense; they aren’t brats (at least not that often), nor do they expect to get something for nothing (at least not that often). But they are spoiled in a pop culture sense. Last fall, I started reading the Harry Potter books with my older son, who is just about to turn nine. After we finished the first book, he went over to the shelf, picked out the seventh book and immediately read the Epilogue, thereby defusing the suspense that gives the series much of its allure. It didn’t bother him in the least to know (spoilers ahead, if you’ve been living under a rock since 1997) that Harry defeats Voldemort and Ron marries Hermione and Professor Snape is a good guy after all. What’s more, he regularly asks me to spoil things for him. “Daddy, who kills Sirius Black? Does Hedwig die? Does Snape become headmaster in book 6 or 7?”

Certainly these are not the most awkward questions a parent gets asked, but the reader in me balks, and my answers are invariably shifty. “Ohh… we don’t know yet. We’ll have to see.” Invariably this produces an irritated response. “Just tell me!” he wheedles. I want to say: “Be patient. Savor the surprises and you’ll enjoy the experience more.” But I know I’ll sound like Andy Rooney (“Remember carbon paper? It was so much easier than this new-fangled Xerox thingamajig.”)

My son doesn’t want to wait for a story’s plot to unfold in the way the author intended.  He wants all the answers now. Not only is he immune to the charms of an unexpected plot twist, he actively hates surprises. My own attitude is exactly the reverse. I expend a great deal of time and way too much energy trying to avoid spoilers. Up until about five months ago, for instance, I had ignored Breaking Bad (“What’s that? Oh, like Weeds, but with meth? Pass.”). When I finally gave it a chance, I couldn’t stop watching, and I devoured the first three seasons on Netflix. Now I’m frantically trying to avoid any information about the fourth season, which finished airing in the fall. My success has been limited: the show’s getting a lot of attention lately. I now know the shock image from the season finale, if none of the narrative context that surrounds it.

Spoilage can leap across genres and formats. I decided to delay watching HBO’s Game of Thrones until I read the George R.R. Martin fantasy novels on which the series is based. Later, while idly skimming an IO9.com post called “The Most Undignified Deaths In Sci-Fi and Fantasy,” I stumbled across a paragraph that covered the HBO show and spoiled the end of the first book (and a good deal of the second book as well.)

Perhaps my son has the right idea. His disregard for—even distrust of—the traditional narrative structure fits well with the hyper-linked, everything-all-at-once philosophy of the current information age. Maybe one day soon it will be impossible to remain unspoiled—not only impossible, but beside the point.

(Image from BadtvBlog, via Sick Chirpse.)