#class critique

Art school class critiques can really play some psychological tricks on you, if you let them. This shot is from a class critique back in 2006. You spend weeks and months with people who rip your work to shreds and find the smallest things wrong with them. Not everyone can clearly express their points of view, so you often get responses like “I like it” or “I don’t like it”, with no thought-out reasoning as to state why. Other people take pleasure in dissecting every minute detail they can find.  If you have a solid command on design concepts and references at play, you can really have some fun while playing devil’s advocate.

I'm getting a little more caught up with these quick-takes -- I read these around Thanksgiving. (Well, and a couple weeks before... and after. They're long!) I don't normally spend a lot of time in the genre, in part because it's so hard to make its conventions feel fresh.

The Game of Thrones series does pretty well on that score, with a large cast of distinct and memorable characters, a good balance of plot vs backstory/mythology (once you get past the beginning of the first one, which starts slowly), and giving us a little dose of supernatural/mystical elements to make things interesting without getting too baroque.

That said, I had a couple misgivings that interfered with my ability to just sit back and enjoy the series. First off, the racial politics suck. I understand that when you set your series in a loose allegory for medieval Europe -- with side-journeys to loose allegories for the Islamic world and the central Asian steppe -- it means that almost all of your main characters will be "golden-haired" or "flaxen-haired" or have "shining blue eyes" or other general features of white people.

Now,I'm prepared to let the "wow, nobody looks like me" representation issue slide, because nobody came here to relive my childhood traumas (least of all me). That said, Martin's books go a little bit overboard with the Other-izing of the non-Westeros-ian people: we get a large cast of unsympathetic cardboard characters whose cultures just happen to fall into some worn-out stereotypes. I can't say that I know the author's heart or anything, but it was pretty lazy, especially in light of the more complicated sympathies bestowed on the various factions of Westeros.

The other major misgiving I had is one that I think it's clear the author is aware of, but that defies easy resolution. Namely, when you're writing a book that gives a nuanced treatment of the thirty-or-so most powerful and important people in society, it's easy to lose sight of how the 95% of people on the bottom layer of the feudal pyramid feel about things. And like I mentioned in my post about "Nothing to Envy", an academic emphasis on the history of ordinary people means it's always in the back of my mind.