The Disappointing Plot Arc of Reality
Why do people love fantasy epics like Game of Thrones so much? A complex, convoluted, highly-involved history of a place that doesn’t exist, featuring people who never lived, doing things that are, in many cases, physically impossible.
Sure, humans love a good story packed with great characters, but there’s over 5000 years of the recorded history of a whole bunch of civilisations to choose from. Why go with fiction?
The problem with actual history, of course, is that the story is often not very satisfying. So many great lives read ”first he conquered these people, then he invaded this place, then they gathered a great army against him but he defeated it... and then he fell o his horse and died.” Or ”at the height of her power and influence... she got sent to a nunnery and her nephew took over.”
The character arc of real historical figures can be so problematic, even a show like HBO’s Rome - which tries to recreate an ”authentic” sense of the lives of Julius Caesar and Augustus - omits certain battles and events. One example: During his rise to power in the Civil War, Caesar lost the Battle of Dyrrhachium against Pompey... which was totally out of character in the context of a TV show. So they skipped it.
It doesn’t help that recent history - specifically, the World Wars - reads very much like a Hollywood script treatment. Those wars give us a very skewed idea of what ”normal” history is like.
To any Westerner of the last three generations, because of World War II especially, humans appear to be divided neatly into Good Guys and Bad Guys. The Bad Guys are the ones who invade other countries and murder millions of people. The Good Guys are the ones who band together to defy, resist and eventually defeat the Bad Guys. Few wars have been as clean cut as World War II. Thanks to the black-and-white barbarity of both the Nazis and Imperial Japan, there’s no sensible way to argue that a German or Japanese victory could have had a good side to it.
The world wars also gave us this idea that historical events can have distinct beginnings and ends. War is declared, war is fought, victory is achieved and surrender (by the bad guys) is accepted.
But really, history is messy. Stories are interconnected and overlapping, and events that start in one place a ect events that are already happening in another. Nothing ever really ”ends”... and nothing ever really begins either. You just look around one day and realise, woah, the world is like this now.
Who knows how long it will take us to ”get over” World War II. At some point, its relevance as a defining part of our culture will wane. Someday, the side your ancestors were on during the Battle of the Bulge will be no more significant than the side they were on during the Battle of Waterloo.
Meanwhile, as contemporary events return to the historical norm of baffling, nonsensical complexity, we can take solace in our fantasy epics. Here, between the covers of our favourite books, sides are well-defined, the terms ”good” and ”evil” mean something, and you can be sure that by the final page everything will be resolved...
...unless you’re a Game of Thrones fan of course. Face it: those books are never getting finished.