I never got into Game of Thrones. I know I should have: it is a huge part of mainstream culture, and, fantasy and sci-fi geek that I purport to be, I should have sat down to watch it from beginning to end, but that would have meant making an effort to go get the DVDs, sitting down to watch them on a regular basis, and, well, you know…Anyway, I sort of lost interest once they killed off Sean Bean’s character at the end of the first season.

Nonetheless, today I just want to flag this interesting Irish Times piece up. Apparently, people are starting to compare Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings, asking which is better. Fans of Game of Thrones say their text is more nuanced, complex and multi-layered; whereas in Tolkien’s work characters are either entirely good or entirely evil. While I see where they’re coming from, as the article points out, it’s not quite that simple. There’s plenty of nuance in Tolkien’s dramatis personae: look at Gollum, for one. How much more torn and schizophrenic can a character get? Then there’s Boromir, a good man brought down by sheer temptation. Thus, if you look at the text properly, I don’t think the accusations of simplicity and reductivism hold.

Besides, I don’t think such comparisons are useful. They always crop up in fandom, of course, most famously in the Star Trek Vs Star Wars debate. Yet the two are separate texts; they differ in style and form, and tell us different things. Both may be works of fantasy, but they were written in different eras and styles. LOTR was born of the wreckage of the first and second world wars, whereas GOT is more contemporary. Thus for GOT fans to try to start criticising LOTR for being too reductive, and to try to say theirs is somehow superior, strikes me as childish. In fact it reminds me of the Ghostbusters vs Turtles fights I used to have with my school friends when I was about five. We should instead ask what either text reveals of the human condition in it’s own right.