GENIUS OF THE IRON THRONE
AUTHORS REVEAL HOW SECRETS TO GAME OF THRONES’ TV SUCCESS LIE IN THE RULE-BREAKING WRITING TECHNIQUES GEORGE R.R. MARTIN MASTERED
As television events go, they don’t get much bigger than this: on April 17, 2011, the first season of Game of Thrones finally made its debut. In the same year, the fifth book in author George R.R. Martin’s planned seven-book fantasy series, on which the TV show was based, had been released.
Book fans were already hungry for more but the uninitiated also went wild for HBO’s lavish adaptation which brought Martin’s swordplay and sex, power politics and sweeping landscapes to life as rival houses of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros fought to the death for the right to claim the Iron Throne. Throw in fire-breathing dragons and the brooding menace of an undead army converging on the lands of the living and it was truly epic, must-watch television.
As fans of the TV series prepare to mark the 10-year ‘Iron Anniversary’ on April 17, many are still grumbling about 2019’s eighth and final season. But book fans as well as those who only watched the TV series would doubtless agree that Martin’s still incomplete tale exploded traditional storytelling tropes and helped popularise the dystopian and violent fantasy genre.
Australian author Jay Kristoff, whose new series launches with Empire of the Vampire in September, admits GoT encouraged him to take more risks with his writing.
“It broke one of the cardinal rules of storytelling,” he says.
“It’s a pretty pat and perfect hero’s journey until you get to the part where (spoiler alert) Ned Stark is killed. It was a palpable shock; it was breaking a rule I’d never seen done before. The hero is supposed to win in the end. But the rules had fundamentally shifted and all bets were off.
“If you can kill the hero … if you can kill Luke Skywalker, you can kill anybody and we became genuinely frightened for the characters and genuinely worried the villains you hated were going to win. Feeling that unsafe is great and exciting.
“And then there’s the Red Wedding (where Ned’s wife Catelyn and son Robb Stark are killed by a rival house) and that was
Ned times two.”
Kristoff says that while the books were popular, the TV show “jumped boundaries” and became part of popular culture in a way not seen since Star Wars or Harry Potter. “It felt like entirely new TV,” he says. “People who weren’t nerds, who were not even readers, were absolutely enjoying it.
“You would go into work and they were talking about the latest footy game around the water cooler, and in the kitchen they were talking about Daenerys Targaryen. It was that ubiquitous.”
He is curious as to how Martin will end the book series but warns those who are expecting a happier ending might be disappointed.
“Daenerys and Jon are two of the few heroes remaining in the narrative and the expectation is one of them will end that journey on the Iron Throne,” he says.
“But I think George has plans to subvert those expectations, as he has been subverting traditional Western archetypes of storytelling for years”
While there was a strong fan reaction to the ending of the TV series, Kristoff doesn’t think Martin will allow that to change his plans for the final books.
“I suspect the madness of Daenerys was planned for some time,” he says.
Ultimately, Kristoff says fiction writers are grateful to GoT for bringing so many people back to reading and opening their eyes to the possibilities of the fantasy genre.
Fellow Australian author Dervla McTiernan, creator of the Reilly crime books who has a new stand-alone book coming out in March 2022, is another huge fantasy fan who acknowledges a debt to Martin.
She bought her first GoT book in 2003 and describes it as “really special storytelling”.
“With some television shows, audiences can go into a stupor — they sit there looking at their phones because they know what’s coming,” she says.
“With Game of Thrones you just didn’t have a choice. You can’t half-arse it, you have to give your heart and give everything.”
McTiernan points out that Martin was not the first author to kill characters and subvert storytelling tropes, as fantasy writer Robin Hobb also challenged those ideas. But GoT certainly embraced it with gusto, starting with Ned Stark’s death, then topping it with the slaying of his son Robb and widow Catelyn.
“We really cared about these characters because they had been given room to develop and for us to fall in love with them; then they were taken in the most horrendous ways,”
McTiernan says.
“GoT is not about having a nice little pretty, safe battle where the hero gets to win and then go home. The pain and brutality are real, the heroes don’t always win and, if they do, the good guy is fundamentally changed by what he has gone through.”
McTiernan vividly remembers the reaction she had to reading the Red Wedding.
“I threw the book across the room — but of course you have to go back to it later,” she says.
“You hate it for what it makes you feel but that’s what it’s all about. The books I’ve cried over are the ones I take out and read again years later.”
Having multiple main characters gave Martin the ability to get away with killing off several, argues author Claire McKenna, whose Deepwater King, the second book of her Deepwater Chronicles, is out in June.
“I do like the idea that you can have a character who is very important in one book but you can kill them in the next,” she says.
Martin destroyed the idea of “plot armour” — where a main character is able to somehow emerge unscathed from impossible situations.
But Martin’s genius doesn’t just lie in killing characters.
“I find in some TV shows, if they kill off or replace a character, that’s where I get off the show,” McKenna says.
“By the Red Wedding we were all behind Robb, but when Robb bit the bucket, at the same time Jon Snow was moving beyond The Wall and he took up those reins.
“You can’t just kill someone off, there has to be someone to pick up the slack and be the hero.”
McKenna also praised GoT for never “talking down to the audience”.
“It has strong characters and a really strong storyline and it dragged fantasy out of that juvenilia that we had, where it was all about young people — such as the Hobbits in JRR Tolkein’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy — growing up and going on adventures,” she says.
“This was completely different; older people doing really gritty stuff.”