Fantasy_After_Representation_D_and_D_Gam

Fantasy Ater Representaion D&D, Game of Thrones, and Postmodern World-Building Fantasy After Representation Ryan Vu My essay is premised on the observaion that while canonical theories of fantasic genre icion (fantasy, science icion, horror) proposed by criics such as Tzetvan Todorov and Darko Suvin center on epistemic aporia, most recent examples in popular culture reject fundamental diference, alterity, and the unknown in favor of postmodern play within a limited set of generic convenions. I argue that today, tabletop roleplaying game systems (RPGs) provide a superior hermeneuic for understanding how the fantasy genre operates in mass culture than does tradiional genre theory. Ater providing a brief overview of the historical development of fantasy gaming out of wargaming and mass market fantasy literature in the 1970s, I show how RPGs formalized fantasy’s generic tropes into a modular system that enabled paricipants to produce icions across and between genres. Through a reading of Poul Anderson’s use of the “muliverse” trope in his novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, the noion that reality consists of an ininite number of interconnected worlds, I argue RPGs completed a reorientaion toward the fantasic begun by mass-market fantasy literature. Epistemological concerns, disincions between fantasic genres, and individual authorship are de-emphasized in favor of established formal convenions, a shit which encourages a paricipatory model of consumpion and ease of transmission across diverse media. I then use the HBO adaptaion of George R. R. Marin’s Game of Thrones novels as an example of how this paradigmaic shit in the fantasic has moved beyond the niche markets of fantasy icion and roleplaying games to manifest itself today as a hegemonic cultural norm. There is a vast archive of critical debate over the precise distinctions between different non- or extra-realist genres, particularly the big three: science iction, fantasy, horror. Today it is increasingly clear that the force of these differences, and their collective opposition to realism, is a historically bounded and rather recent phenomenon. SF novelist and critic John Clute considers the ensemble of non-realist genres to be an integrated whole, which he dubs “fantastika,” a common term in Czech and other Slavic languages (“Fantastika”). The eighteenth-century distinction made between the “realistic” novel and the “allegorical” nature of romance is an Anglocentric one; both forms are simply referred to as roman in French, German, Czech, and many other European languages. Whether or not one accepts this primary split, clear distinctions between the genres descended from the extra-realist genres can be hard to Extrapolaion, vol. 58, nos 2–3 (2017) htps://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2017.14

274 Ryan Vu make. Again, history counters formalism: Michael Saler points out that science iction, fantasy, horror, and detective iction began as twentiethcentury marketing categories, subdividing what he calls the in-de-siècle “New Romance” of Rider-Haggard, Wells, Stoker, and Stevenson (14–15, 84) into semi-autonomous readerships. While these audiences developed relatively independently for a time, they were cut from the same cloth, and overlapped more often than theories of genre can easily account for.1 Furthermore, the normative force of realism has been in decline at least since the postwar period—an entire system of genre has lost its anchoring concept. I contend, then, that any theory of fantastic genre appropriate to postmodernity must begin with fantasy, the fantastic genre least rooted in the epistemological concerns that inform traditional theories. What is sometimes called our “post-genre” narrative environment was always latent in fantasy: a ield of generic play at once wholly conventional and undetermined by any rhetoric of transcendence or “root logic.” Because fantasy roleplaying games (RPGs) involve the generation of internally consistent “worlds” or narrative platforms open to audience participation, I turn for a theory of contemporary fantasy beyond the problematics of representation to their powerful inluence across literature, ilm, and electronic media since their inception in the early 1970s. RPGs are the culmination of twentieth-century fantasy’s self-relexivity, and can help us to reconceptualize popular iction as a quasi-positivist system of genres. Rather than offering a closed set of normative epistemological frameworks, a genre theory premised on multiple systems of information more or less open to one another would help critics of the fantastic understand how genre “works” in a multi-media environment long since liberated from the authority of nineteenth-century literary realism. I conclude by reading HBO’s Game of Thrones as an example of how contemporary fantasy has begun to realize itself as a legitimated cultural norm. I read the series as engaged in a “game” of sorts with its audience, alternately subverting and reinforcing the norms of high fantasy in accordance with a post-representational logic. The show’s counterintuitive sense of “realism” has nothing to do with verisimilitude or allegory, but rather with mastery of its adopted generic codes. So often dismissed as marginal, fantasy today is hegemonic. This essay begins to assess how popular narrative has been shaped by fantasy’s example.

Fantasy Ater Representaion 275 I. The Fantasic, Realism, and Genre Theory It is generally accepted that the rise of modern literature, deined by the development of print and a turn toward realism in prose,2 sets fantastic genres off from their precursors in epic poetry, myth, and folklore. Roberto Capoferro gives a precise formulation of this assumption when he argues that the modern fantastic is distinguished from its premodern antecedents by its adoption of empirical rhetoric to represent the supernatural. He calls the tension between supernatural objects and realistic description “ontological hesitation” (33–36), revising Tzvetan Todorov’s classic analysis of the nineteenth-century fantastic tale in which the hesitation was epistemological, rooted in psychology and the unconscious. Brian McHale associates the postmodern era with the exploration of ontological difference, in contrast to the subjective, epistemological focus of literary modernism. Where the detective novel was the “low” counterpart of modernism, he writes, science iction is postmodernism’s pulp sibling, “the ontological genre par excellence” (16; see also 59–60), depicting contact between wholly different worlds.3 Marxist critics have often tried to valorize these “low” genres vis-à-vis more respectable forms, emphasizing the critical value of difference, the alternative perspective on our world opened by an encounter with others. But the precise nature of this difference remains at issue. The sharp distinction between fantasy and SF drawn by Darko Suvin in the late 1970s, in which the difference that organizes science ictional worlds is deined by a commitment to “cognition” rather than mere desire or fancy, has been repeatedly questioned over the intervening decades, the critical capacities of at least certain forms of fantasy literature acknowledged even by Suvin himself.4 Today these literary turf wars can seem quaint. Contemporary cultural production decenters genre deinitions based in literary theory and philosophy in favor of an ecumenical approach in which traditional genres are less like autonomous structures and more like complementary palettes. A number of popular and academic critics have begun to speculate that we are in a “post-genre” narrative environment,5 in which it is no longer the least bit surprising when novelists like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Colson Whitehead rebrand SF and horror concepts as literary iction. If genre was at one time a label of distinction capable of separating culture from commerce or true fans from casual consumers, then today Derrida’s claim that “Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging” (212) is a matter of common sense.

276 Ryan Vu Fantasy, science iction, and horror remain useful as marketing categories, but in the long aftermath of the pulp era they are most effective in combination. The accelerating centralization of media capital provides an economic impetus for the shift toward cross-genre texts. Book publicist Crystal Patriarche sees the embrace of genre by literary authors as a “high concept” trend that isn’t going anywhere: “We’re going to see more blending as everyone attempts to grab a larger audience and the literary snobs are going to have to stop looking down on genre” (qtd. in Wright). Whether there are any literary snobs left remains an open question, but the need is clear for a rethinking of lingering structuralist assumptions in theories of the fantastic. Echoing Derrida, Gary K. Wolfe relects on the legacy of this indistinction: Because of the uncertainty of these genre markers, the fantastic genres contain within themselves the seeds of their own dissolution, a nascent set of postmodern rhetorical modes that, over a period of several decades, would begin to supplant not only the notion of genre itself, but the very foundations of the modernist barricades that had long been thought to insulate literary culture from the vernacular iction of the pulps and other forms of noncanonical expression. (“Evaporating Genres”) If we take this argument seriously, then the main function of genre is to separate high from low culture (and its dissolution is therefore something to be welcomed). However, I hold that the apparent decline of genre’s symbolic eficacy only bothers a few academic holdouts and has increasingly little to do with the institutions of cultural production and consumption. In his writing on science iction, Fredric Jameson inds hope in what only a few decades ago was broadly dismissed as mere genre. For all its compromises, science iction is able to encompass what Jameson, following other Lukácsian or post-Frankfurt School Marxists, calls social “totality,” the former terrain of the great realist novel. Jameson takes a wider view of Suvin’s novum—the speculative point of difference from the familiar meant to ground a radically alternative ictional world in modern scientiic or “cognitive” logic—as simply the negative sign of historical possibility. SF gives the future back to us in all its indeterminacy, which we are just able to perceive through the veil of commoditized tropes (Archaeologies xiii–xiv). Albeit in a mediated way, then, Marxist SF critics seek to repurpose a postmodern phenomenon (paraliterary science iction) for the modernist end of world-historical transformation. Fantasy remains a source of discomfort because it lacks an equivalent project. It rejects the clear link to modernity science gives to SF and is typically understood as anti-modern as a result. What Jameson calls the “seemingly irrecuperable

Fantasy Ater Representaion 277 ascendancy” (68) of modern fantasy is therefore a serious problem for genre criticism, yet another example of postmodernity’s challenge to critique. In light of fantasy’s seeming ungroundedness, critics have been forced to focus on internal distinctions. Brian Attebery arrives at his deinition of the fantasy genre by trying to reconcile fantasy as mode and as formula. As a mode it serves as mimesis’s opposite number,6 a fundamental element of ictional discourse. As formula it obeys a historically contingent set of rules with “impossibility” as their shared point of departure. “The history of the fantasy genre may be viewed as the story of the imposition of one particular set of restrictions on the mode of the fantastic,” Attebery writes (10). These attempts can be grouped into a few general approaches: psychoanalytic, historicist, and rhetorical. The irst of these, exempliied by the work of Rosemary Jackson, has fallen out of favor. While compatible with the self-consciously literary tales originally theorized by Todorov, it is not equipped to deal with the rest of a highly diverse ield. Tracing the rise of fantasy’s generic tropes, their origins in early twentieth-century pulp iction, and the pioneering work of Tolkien and others (and their links to fairy tales, medieval romance, etc.) continues to be an important task for fantasy scholarship. Just as important is the delineation of fantastic rhetorics—the pragmatic discussion of how the fantasy genre “works” as a system of reader expectation.7 However, both sidestep the question of formal deinition, preferring to present the genre as an accumulation of igures whose organization is contingent on ideological pressures and shifting tastes. Attempts to recuperate the genre for critique along the lines of Suvinian “cognitive estrangement” result in broad concepts like “wonder” (Attebery 16, 128) or “alterity” (Miéville 244), which no matter their ideological investments make fantasy out to be little more than a less dialectical SF. This attempt to separate the essential worth of an aesthetic text from its conventions descends from Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy. Fancy is mechanical, rationalistic, the combinatorial play of wit lacking any higher purpose. Imagination elevates the dross of formal convention with the prophetic vision of poetic genius (Coleridge 295–305). Jameson notes that Freud inverted Coleridge’s hierarchy of imagination over fancy with his theory of dreams and creativity: the narrative structure we assign to dreams constitutes egocentric wish fulillment (Archaeologies 47) while the dream content itself contains the real keys to our unconscious. Likewise, even mass-market SF can be valorized by critics for its capacity to give the collective unconscious coded expression in the form of utopian social imaginaries. Fantasy, lacking an equivalent modernist telos, typically

278 Ryan Vu manifests conservative ideology: the dream of an idealized past. Indeed, if we strip genre iction of all individual claims to exceptionality or politicalphilosophical signiicance, we ind the same structures inherited from chivalric romance and adventure iction. The most signiicant criticism of fantastic genre is in part a horriied response to an obsolete form’s persistence into modernity. As Clute puts it in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, “Many GENRE FANTASIES (a term which encompasses almost all DYNASTIC FANTASY and HEROIC FANTASY) boast storylines which could—with almost no alteration—be transferred from FANTASYLAND to a mundane venue” (“Fantasy” 314; capitalized terms mark other entries in the volume). Interesting attempts have been made to pinpoint where fantasy is capable of a critique of the present sensitive to materialist history.8 However, what critical theories of both SF and fantasy have in common is the attempt to elevate, from the mass of popular entertainments that fall in and between both genres, a relatively narrow canon in terms of a political-aesthetic project. To give a satisfying formal account of non-realist genre iction at large, however, I argue we need to suspend epistemological and political judgment, reorienting our critical framework to understand genre not as a discourse about the world but as a discourse between participants. To commit to this perspective, we have to acknowledge that today “fantasy” names the structure of popular genre itself, indifferent to older criteria of realism or plausibility. I am not suggesting a return to reader-response theory or an abdication of formal criticism for the empirical study of fan culture (nor a dismissal of either approach). This is rather a response to an historical shift. The following section is an experiment in theorizing fantasy in its benighted, formulaic sense—as mere genre—by concentrating on the notion of play, taking the genre back to its roots in the organized escape from the authority of fact. To understand in formal terms what it means to think of fantasy as a kind of game may be the key to understanding popular genre itself. I focus my analysis on roleplaying games, a form with clear links to fantastic iction, to argue that their rule systems imply an alternative theory of genre to those based in epistemological and political critique on the one hand or audience analysis on the other. However pragmatic and ad hoc, the concept of genre developed within gaming has proved more relevant to the production of fantastic iction than any of the approaches dominant in academic genre criticism.

Fantasy Ater Representaion 279 II. Fantasy Gaming as Genre Theory It should come as no surprise that one of the earliest academic studies of the fantasy genre begins by relating it to games. In The Game of the Impossible (1976), W. R. Irwin draws on the classic accounts of play by Huizinga and Caillois to emphasize the ludic aspect of fantastic narrative. According to Irwin, “narrative sophistry, conducted not to make the worse appear the better reason but to make nonfact appear as fact, is essential to fantasy. In this effort, writer and reader knowingly enter upon a conspiracy of intellectual subversiveness, that is, upon a game” (9). In his historical study of theories of the fantastic and the imagination, David Sandner points out that for pre-Romantic writers indebted to Lockean associationism such as Joseph Addison, fantastic writing was the product of the imaginative reworking of folk tradition. It relected the writer’s skill at manipulating outmoded forms, and certainly didn’t suggest any further commitment. “The term ‘fantastic’ emphasizes the genre’s own production of itself as self-consciously imaginary,” Sandner writes; “the genre ultimately presents itself not as supernatural but as skeptical literature grounded in the imagination as a modern faculty of the mind—that is, as ‘pretend,’ a ‘game’ or ‘thought experiment,’ with the act of thinking itself, the interiority of modern identity, foregrounded” (15). The leap fantasy asks of its reader is immediate—perhaps more signiicant than its break with verisimilitude is its subordination of purpose to the game itself. Irwin cites Huizinga’s critique of physiologists and psychologists whose theories of play were too focused on purposiveness, denying the freedom he believed was play’s primary condition (9). Popular fantasy has tended to lose respect within the institutions of oficial culture for similar reasons. Attebery’s irst and clearest example of fantasy as formula is roleplaying games (10). From an aesthetic standpoint, the problem with both “formula iction” and roleplaying games is their hyperrationalism. In Coleridgian terms, their structures are mechanical, with “no other counters to play with, but ixities and deinites” (Coleridge 305), produced by fanciful wit without the “mysterious power” of imaginative genius. Reduced to rhetorical convention, they are mere data arbitrarily assembled without “esemplastic” synthesis, without organic, natural order. In this sense they express the disunity between subject and object endemic to modernity. The precursors to the modern fantastic in the eighteenth century were often dismissed by critics for an excess of “Gothic machinery.” The term was a catch-all category for ghosts, fairies, goblins, moldering castles, and the rest—a supernatural derived, like the pulp genre of heroic fantasy on which

280 Ryan Vu Dungeons & Dragons is based, from medieval folklore and romance. The term also referred to the narrative conventions through which supernatural shocks resembling the technical illusions of theatrical spectacle were delivered to a passive, unthinking readership. The premodern imagery intensiied by modern technology was thought to foster public irrationalism and a cycle of addiction to stimulation.9 As Coleridge puts it, popular Gothic novels operated via a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing ofice, which pro tempore ixes, relects and transmits the moving fantasms of one man’s delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains aflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all deinite purpose (48) His critique of print here preigures critiques of the audiovisual mass media of the twentieth and twenty-irst centuries. Roleplaying games (RPGs) take the anti-humanist rationalism of genre to its furthest extreme: they are convention boiled down to its essence, ordered by a probabilistic system of rules and statistics. Normally played in small groups, each player takes on the role of a character in an imagined setting deined by one or more ictional genres. The game session is both narrated and adjudicated by a referee. “Tabletop” RPGS are distinguished from most other games (including the countless video games they have inluenced) by being noncompetitive; in place of the satisfaction of victory, they offer immersion in genre worlds, the acting out of fantasies inspired by iction consumed in other media. Dungeons & Dragons, the irst such game, is well known for its adoption of the fantasy genre in the sense of sword and sorcery adventure iction and Tolkien’s neo-medieval epics. There are games to suit practically every popular taste, from spy thrillers to vampire romances to space opera, often adapted directly from already-successful franchises in ilm, television, novels, and comics. They thus lend themselves almost exclusively to fan culture. To everyone else, even those who enjoy other types of roleplay or other, similarly complex games (i.e., the wargames that served as the basis for D&D’s combat system), they seem bizarre or incomprehensible. As D&D co-creator Gary Gygax writes in the foreword to the irst rulebook published in 1974: These rules are strictly fantasy. Those war gamers who lack imagination, those who don’t care for Burroughs’ Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard’s Conan

Fantasy Ater Representaion 281 saga, who do not enjoy the Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to ind DUNGEONS & DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will ind that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a “world” where the fantastic is fact and magic really works! (“Foreword” 3) I want to suggest that RPGs not only provide a forum for fans to inhabit their favorite ictions while strengthening community identity, but that they also provide an unprecedented set of tools for analyzing their genres, by teaching their players how to reproduce genre iction with themselves at the center. In his magisterial history of the form, Jon Peterson writes: The precedent of the fantasy genre established the parameters of heroes, monsters, wondrous items and spells, and this taxonomy itself became a tool for the inventors of new additions to the fantasy canon. Where genre authors, who inherited these building blocks of fantasy from myths, could handle these fantastic elements without resolving the vagueness of the legends, Dungeons & Dragons forced monsters, spells and magic items to conform to its system, and thus made them speciic enough that they could be simulated in a game. The genius of the creative apparatus of Dungeons & Dragons is how it lowers the bar for contribution to the fantasy genre: it creates, in effect, a do-it-yourself kit, a checklist that prospective monster-makers or spell-weavers need merely ill in with their own fancies. (201) While RPGs do not provide a hermeneutic that would be legible to an academic critic, they do something else remarkably well. By formalizing the rhetoric of genre in a positivistic manner, in ine-grained detail, they provide a modular system for producing ictions that can be adapted to a variety of desires. Not all of them have ever been primarily narrative—early D&D and many of the video games based on RPG systems were focused on the “dungeon crawl,” or a type of play in which players do little more than move through a closed virtual environment slaying monsters and accumulating treasure. The rules systems of RPGs embrace statistical calculation to determine uncertain outcomes and counterbalance the otherwise dictatorial power of the referee. Nicholas J. Mizer argues that the quasi-bureaucratic management of D&D’s often arcane rules systems repeats the Weberian dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment, its always-incomplete systematization both a condition of existence (no game can be completely regulated) and an incentive to continually produce new and more elaborate rules (1307). Mizer cites an interview with a business partner of one of

282 Ryan Vu Gygax’s collaborators: “To understand D&D, you have to understand that Gary thought like an insurance actuary. D&D is fantasy iction through actuarial science” (qtd. in Mizer 1309). Indeed, the systems for all but the most rules-light RPGs are primarily oriented around two poles: (1) development, or the gradual increase in a player character’s abilities through the accumulation of (quantiied) experience, and (2) risk, or the evaluation of danger to the player character and the tools he or she has to manage it.10 As Gygax himself puts it, “The fear of ‘death’, its risks each time, is one of the most stimulating parts of the game” (Volume III 6). For the very features intended to make them more egalitarian and open than (for example) the linear storytelling of fantasy iction in print or on ilm—their rationalization, their sidelining of the author-function, the secondary status of narrative—RPGs must be seen as a degraded form from the standpoint of a critical theory that seeks to defend and justify the fantasy genre’s purposiveness. Not even broad notions of alterity or wonder are supportable as the teloi of the RPG fantastic. The fantasy worlds governed by D&D are, after all, “where the fantastic is fact and magic really works.” Fair play allows little room for ambiguity, even if the game is meant to simulate the irrational. Copious supplements detailing various ictional settings render them as familiar as any known world. And nothing kills the sense of alterity and disruption of the familiar more than mastering the distinctive symbolic language of RPGs, a grammar of generic tropes, as a means to accomplish nothing more ambitious than passing time with friends. Balancing the reams of pseudo-facts and tables are the constant disclaimers against absolute idelity to the rules. “As we’ve said time and again,” writes early D&D editor Tim Kask, “the ‘rules’ were never meant to be more than guidelines; not even true ‘rules’” (i). In a game released just after the irst edition of D&D and heavily indebted to that system, an editor’s note reads: “Necessarily, then, fantasy games are complicated without being precise” (St. Andre 2). When Gygax refers to “death” in scare quotes, that’s because character death is rarely more than a temporary setback; mortality is always up for renegotiation. The substance of RPG gameplay—the roleplaying itself—involves interaction that isn’t reducible to rules. In an introductory guide to RPGs included in an early Runequest boxed set, the designers write: The actual game rules are important only when there is some question of success or failure, for the rules are the agreed-upon “reality” which makes the game world understandable. The rules represent the common experience of the player-characters as well, and provide ways of determining the likelihood of success or failure before a situation is actually met. The rules are also the court

Fantasy Ater Representaion 283 of appeal: whenever there is a conlict between what the player-characters wish to do and what their game-world seems to let them do, then the rules are used to settled the dispute. (Stafford & Willis 2) Rules, then, mediate between the players, the referee, and the “game world,” an apparatus with the scope of physics but the contentious, interpersonal character of law.11 In the course of in-character conversation, which makes up at least half of most gaming sessions, the rules play almost no role. Nor can the rules give any formal means of resolving disagreement over their proper application.12 Peterson draws a fascinating comparison between D&D and Diplomacy, a play-by-mail realpolitik strategy game originally released in 1959 in which players take on the roles of European world leaders at the turn of the twentieth century. Diplomacy in turn resembles the simulations run by groups like the RAND corporation. While Diplomacy is competitive and avoids the dice and statistical calculation of the battleield wargames that fed into D&D’s combat systems, both it and D&D include dialogue-based, free-form interaction. In Diplomacy, the game mechanics’ aim is to establish the possibility of alliances and engineer betrayals. “These operations, like any exercise in coalition-building, must conform to the same obscure laws of interpersonal dynamics that governed the political games at RAND, and within them must lie some of the enjoyment in Dungeons & Dragons, as it also is ‘no fun as a two-player game.’ The way that players behave as they organize into parties and advocate for the interests of their characters forms a irst connection between Dungeons & Dragons and the circa 1959 conception of role-playing as it was understood by the inventors of the Inter-Nation Simulation and the social scientists of that time” (386). Peterson also explores roleplaying’s other analogues in group psychotherapy and the play of children, but social simulations with a distinctly political content hold some of the more fascinating suggestions for the nature of RPGs and the way they reinterpret genre iction. The importance of free-form roleplaying also marks RPGs’ main point of distinction from aesthetic theories of representation and where (most) other games diverge from traditional RPGs. The immersiveness of an RPG experience depends less on the representational verisimilitude promised by any given system of rules and more on how those rules give context and stability to the co-creation of a unique game world out of generic materials, a co-creation that mediates and strengthens social ties. Roleplaying is theater without an audience, limited to the interaction between participants.13 The aim of all the rules, maps, charts, and other assorted paratexts that make up the printed content of RPGs is neither representation nor primarily to simulate

284 Ryan Vu an alternative experience, as in a video game. Rather, it is to foster discourse about and through genre. I argue it is this paratextual discourse, including in-character dialogue, argument over rules, and discussion of the iner points of the setting, that most effectively establish the game world’s sense of “reality.” Perhaps the fact that RPG game worlds have no existence apart from player imagination fed the moral panic in the 1970s and 1980s over D&D’s supposed alchemical power to transform the less savory elements of genre iction into delirious hallucinations, not to mention convert hapless teens to Satanism.14 As we have seen, these attacks echoed those leveled at popular media as long ago as the eighteenth century, expressing the fear that oficially validated reality was under threat of being displaced by a perverse doppelgänger. Paratextuality has been central to modern fantastic iction from its earliest days. Texts as diverse as Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) were framed by their authors as found documents via prefatory materials, suggesting their place within larger worlds. The “New Romances” of Rider-Haggard and Kipling included maps, fake advertisements, and other markers of objectivity that have since become standard elements of science iction, fantasy, and detective iction.15 Paratexts like these informed the correspondence pages of twentieth-century genre iction journals, encouraging detailed discussion of ictional worlds, narrative structure, and the thematic ideas the stories raised. Well before the “gamiication” of genre iction, critics of weak characterization and formulaic plotting ignored the compensatory powers of fan discourse. As Saler puts it, “the world of fandom inspired by the genre provided its enthusiasts with much of the human interest that mainstream readers found in more conventional iction” (97). What appears as a lack from one perspective is an invitation to engage from another. Saler argues that the letters pages of early genre iction journals had the effect of deepening their readers’ sense of inhabiting ictional worlds while reinforcing their awareness of those worlds’ artiiciality: “Readers became active participants in the elaboration of imaginary worlds and detached critics of them as well” (97). RPG systems are genre exhaustively rationalized, and can be understood as the theory immanent to fan culture’s practice. By inviting fans to at least temporarily adopt their theory of genre as a set of rules governing their discourse, RPGs radicalize fans’ sense of themselves as active contributors to genre production instead of distant observers. It afirms their sense of culture as ongoing, horizontal interactions with other fans. Likewise, RPG designers see themselves as enablers of decentralized

Fantasy Ater Representaion 285 play in the same fashion as any other game designer, not as expressive authors. D&D is fantasy iction in which the centrality of the text—a series of novels, ilms, comics, etc., even a particular setting—has been displaced by paratextual discourse. As mentioned in the irst part of this essay, theorists of genre since Bakhtin have argued that genres deine phenomenological “worlds,” or in a term John Frow borrows from social scientist and philosopher Alfred Schütz, “inite provinces of meaning” (qtd. in Genre 94). The nature of this meaning is tied more closely to experience than representation. RPGs too see genres as worlds, and focus their energies on deining their limits and the range of variation within them, which requires a system that can be modiied to suit any genre setting.16 That is, RPG rules inherently suggest (if not state outright) the existence of a total, positivist system of genre, focusing squarely on structure over experience. But SF and fantasy authors had been conscious of the links between genres since their early days, born as they both were out of the marketing efforts of competing pulp magazines.17 The co-presence of multiple worlds even became an explicit trope within both genres. For example, in the ictional preface to Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953), among the novels cited by Gygax as an inluence on D&D (“Appendix N” 224), the unnamed narrator describes a gentleman scientist—“one of those magniicent types which only Britain seems to produce” (Anderson 2)— presenting a theory of multiple universes that loosely references quantum theory: “Wave mechanics already admits the possibility of one entire cosmos coexisting with ours. The lecturer said it was not hard to write the equations for an ininity of such parallel worlds. By logical necessity the laws of nature would vary from one to another. Therefore, somewhere in the boundlessness of reality, anything you can imagine must actually exist!” (3). The narrative proper begins when Holger Carlsen, an athletic Danish engineer “in no way remarkable mentally” (2), is mysteriously whisked away from almost certain death on the battleields of World War II to the world of medieval French chivalric romance, where he is destined to be a great hero. Carlsen constantly questions his improbable environment, and the tale is illed with tongue-incheek scientiic “explanations” for its fantastic elements. The tale’s allegorical and psychological dimensions are lattened into the diegesis as so many possible interpretations, none more “true” than any other. Explicitly comparing the struggle between Law and Chaos in the fantasy world to the war on earth, Carlsen muses: “What had he been ighting when he fought the Nazis but a resurgence of archaic horrors that civilized men had once believed were safely dead?” (67). Another major inluence on D&D, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal

286 Ryan Vu Champion cycle features characters that are all incarnations of the same heroic archetype, each occupying a different world within a “Multiverse”18 of genre worlds. D&D’s irst published adventure, “Temple of the Frog,” mixes necromantic gene-splicers and aliens, pitting the player characters against an evil cult devoted to “combining the natural animals available with each other—through the use of biological mutations and methods discovered in old manuscripts” (Arneson 28). The strain of pulp fantasy literature most important to the formation of early RPGs, as naive as it often seems, has always been aware of other genres and the permeable nature of their borders. Similarly, it has always tried to soften the boundaries between its impossible ictions and the world of everyday experience. Insofar as fantasy assumes multiple worlds, then, it implicitly contains a theory of genre both comparative and rhetorical, and one in which iction’s primary relation to the real is interactive. More precisely, we can think of modern fantasy as the metadiscursive form of romance, with the RPG system as its structuralist moment. In his foundational essay, Barthes describes the activity of structuralism as a “simulacrum of the object” that attempts to reconstruct it “in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning (the ‘functions’) of this object” (214), a form of mimesis “based not on the analogy of substances (as in so-called realist art), but on the analogy of functions” (215). While structuralism served as the original basis for academic criticism of the fantastic, its simulacral functionalism was never so ine-grained or comprehensive—Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale has nothing on Gygax and company’s anatomy of heroic fantasy. The validity of Todorov’s theory of the fantastic is dependent on a historically bounded rhetorical distinction between realism and its exceptions, one ignored by later fantasy. Recall that for Barthes and the original structuralist critics, it is immaterial “whether [the] initial object is drawn from a social reality or an imaginary reality. It is not the nature of the copied object which deines an art (though this is a tenacious prejudice in all realism), it is the fact that man adds to it in reconstructing it: technique is the very being of all creation” (216). Abstracted from any particular content, countermanding realism’s authority over the ield of iction, fantasy has become more than a loose collection of semi-related, non-realist subgenres (sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, urban fantasy, etc.). It is the bedrock on which contemporary genre hybridity multiplies. Fantasy’s logic is immanent, combinatory; its “rules” mere guidelines, enchanting and disenchanting in equal measure. As novelist and critic Lance Olsen puts it, “contemporary fantasy may be thought of as the literary equivalent of deconstructionism” (qtd. in Sandner 276) in its provisional, relativistic attitude

Fantasy Ater Representaion 287 toward both language and experience, as modest about its own coherence as it is expansionist in its scope. While RPGs are perhaps the clearest expression of the positivism at the heart of modern fantasy, the once-marginal forms of consumption and engagement associated with fantastic genre iction determine today’s popular narrative. Hiroki Azuma derives a general theory of postmodern culture from his study of otaku, or Japanese fandom. He argues for a “double-layer structure” in which individual commodities, both narrative and non-narrative, are understood by consumers to be merely local access points for a larger information structure, or database. Not only are individual works “judged by the quality of the database in the background,” but “consumers, once they are able to possess the settings, can produce any number of derivative works that differ from the originals” (33). This database model can be contrasted with the “tree-model” of modernity, which read cultural phenomena as outward manifestations of a hidden master narrative that it was the intellectual’s task to unveil. It is not the suggestion of deeper mysteries that attracts contemporary audiences, nor mere empty thrills, but the possibilities of the code—pop culture today is grasped in directly informational terms. The cultivation of immersive secondary worlds across multiple media platforms is something Hollywood studios have come to depend on for proitability. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the multiverses of Marvel and DC Comics, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: all are transmedia fantastic worlds (or megatexts) that capitalize on fan communities as promoters who view themselves as co-creators, critics, and scholars all at once. As Jeffrey Sconce put it on Twitter, “Comic Con has morphed from a quaint gathering of weirdos to the new politburo of the culture industry” (@JeffreySconce). RPG systems are an important key to understanding fantastic genre’s embrace of “world-building” over the course of the twentieth century, but the centrality of audiovisual media to contemporary fantasy requires special attention if we are to extend our analysis across an increasingly diverse media landscape. This essay thus concludes by using HBO’s Game of Thrones as an example text, both for its cross-platform reach (a series of novels, a television show, video games, etc.) and for its expansion of fantasy’s cultural hegemony even over “elite” audience demographics. The logic of genre I have been outlining here has allowed fantasy and related genres to move from the peripheral realm of paraliterature to play a dominant role in “mass” culture via the Hollywood blockbuster system. Now Game of Thrones reaches viewers of “prestige TV” who might formerly have rejected fantasy a priori as puerile escapism. This is a signiicant development in the history of the modern

288 Ryan Vu fantastic. As we have seen, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries widened a primary audience distinction between readers of realism (and, later, various forms of modernist avant-gardism) and romance, or in twentieth-century terms, “genre iction.” The rise of audiovisuality in ilm, television, and digital media is, I argue, one of the chief factors in the gradual breakdown of cultural distinction around genre. III. Game of Thrones and Presige Fantasy In the younger media of ilm and television, genre hybridity is even less restricted than in literature, and the ascendance of fantasy is still more pronounced. In a recent essay, Vivian Sobchack charts the quantitative rise of audiovisual fantasy over the past decade and a half against the relative decline of science iction.19 Arguing that the transformation of our spatiotemporal senses by digital media coupled with the increasing complexity of social problems have pushed us beyond the aesthetics of postmodernism, Sobchack asserts that “irony and satire seem now merely a sign of impotence parading as critical distance” (286). Despite their differences, SF and realism both depend on rational causation and theoretical plausibility. In contrast, fantasy— which she construes as everything that is neither realism nor SF—relies on the kind of associative logic commonly criticized as “magical thinking,” in which connections are drawn via analogy, emotion, and desire, collapsing temporal sequence into a vague yet immediate present. Wishes granted by a genie, haunted houses, and the naturalized immediacy of comic book superpowers can all be contained within these broad co-ordinates, worlds in which spectacular effects require no rational explanation of their underlying causes. Magical or mythical reasoning, Sobchack speculates, indistinct from feeling or sensing, is paradoxically encouraged by the spread of digital technology. Interconnectivity is a baseline assumption and any distinction between real and virtual is elided. Likewise, the relations between non-realist ictional worlds are governed by no external order. “Extremely disparate in their themes and motifs,” Sobchack writes, “fantasy texts tended to be regarded individually—only occasionally coalescing […] in suficient quantity to be thought of, or written about, generically” (287). The spectacular new capacities of digital cinema only accelerate fantasy’s indeterminacy. Sobchack’s argument suggests that with the dual reign of audiovisual media and fantasy, we face the spread of fantasy’s formal incoherence to all ilm genres, with popular narrative set to evade genre analysis altogether. However,

Fantasy Ater Representaion 289 if we understand modern fantasy to have developed into a hyper-rationalized trans-generic system (as suggested in the previous section), the consequences of its dominance are rather different. We need only skim the vast archive of paratextual discourse integrating fantasy ilms within their wider transmedia worlds to see this style of engagement with genre continue unabated alongside the affective powers of cinema. The Sorcerer’s Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter, a sourcebook of information about J. K. Rowling’s world and its borrowings from “actual” folklore, is a national bestseller and far from the only one of its kind. Comic book forums endlessly debate the probable outcome of hypothetical superhero battles, drawing on everything from decades of comics history to ballistics. Fan iction and “what if?” forums freely combine characters from different worlds and genres. Fantasy ilms are usually “presold” adaptations of novels or comic books, and the power of fan expectation makes it dificult to take the liberties with genre material that ilmmakers were used to in the 1980s and 1990s. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has demonstrated the proitability of ensuring consistency within transmedia worlds. To virtually inhabit these worlds is to think about and discuss their parameters and to make comparisons with other worlds, including the “real” one, even if the differences between them are assumed to be provisional. These forms of engagement have been deined by Henry Jenkins as “convergence culture,” which “represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (3). While the larger link Sobchack makes between digital immersion and magical thinking is worth considering, and while the functionalism of contemporary fantastic genre can be thought of in technological terms (especially so in video games), the fan culture theorized by Jenkins and others is highly aware of and reliant on genre as a technique of rationalization. If audiovisuality and the ubiquity of special effects ininitely suspend the epistemological questions grounding literary SF and the nineteenth-century fantastic, that seems only to accelerate the proliferation of genre discourse as I have been discussing it. Game of Thrones, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss’s HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, serves as an example of fantasy today. It may seem like an odd choice—after all, major selling points include its claims to “realism” and HBO’s status as the purveyor of prestige television. An epic fantasy series about noble houses locked in a vicious struggle for power in a pseudo-Renaissance England (“Westeros”), the show caters to a highly educated, high-income, relatively youthful viewership. Billing itself as gritty genre revisionism, GOT has relatively little magic—the

290 Ryan Vu general epistemological orientation of the world’s inhabitants is skeptical— and the central moral conlict is not between good and evil but chivalry and nihilistic egotism. Major battles are often skipped, especially in the lowerbudget early seasons, in favor of backstabbing, poisoning, execution, rape, and talking in rooms. With its constant reminders of the corrupt nature of monarchical power and of honor culture’s self-destructive naiveté, the show would appear to be a polemic against premodern values. Indeed, its chief historical inluences—the English Wars of the Roses, the run-up to the Hundred Years’ War in France—were dynastic struggles that signaled a crisis in the feudal system. Taken at face value, this might seem an odd ixation for a twenty-irst-century soap opera. Here GOT’s “realism” is essential to its appeal. Even though, as I argue above, fantasy supplies a metadiscursive form for popular genre iction, it is still disdained within the middlebrow aesthetic milieu HBO programming depends on. Perhaps as a result, praise for the show is often justiied by supericial allegorical interpretations, in which, for example, the plot’s ticking time bomb, an imminent ice age and zombie invasion, has been read as a metaphor for everything from climate change to the 2008 recession. Indeed, critics tend to treat GOT’s allegorical and realistic elements as seamlessly linked. After the requisite disclaimer about how he isn’t really into fantasy, David Stubbs calls the show “grounded in the brutal reality of the human condition, its history, and, at the tectonic level of geopolitics, its current state” (“No Myth”). If our world is crumbling, few take issue with mapping the magical onto the climatological and the excesses of hereditary nobility onto the crises of inance capitalism. Another possibility is that GOT’s purported “realism” is more relevant for how it naturalizes an underlying liberal ideology than as a representational aesthetic. Princess Daenerys, the last heir of the deposed House Targaryen, sets herself the decidedly non-medieval goal of freeing all the slaves in the Near-Eastern-themed realms she conquers. Tyrion Lannister, dwarf by accident of birth and hedonist by temperament, prefers not to get involved in politics and mocks the ideological commitments of his peers. Beyond the quasi-modern values espoused by some of the more sympathetic characters, those who survive the longest—the mortality rate on the show is famously high—tend to embrace opportunism in their interactions with others. Some identify GOT’s liberalism with the way its savviest characters instrumentalize ideologies without believing in anything beyond themselves.20 The Starks, perhaps the only clan with any collective sense of honor, are endlessly made to suffer for it. However, no character consistently manifests liberal ideals. Even Daenerys’s abolitionism and her discomfort with the spectacle

Fantasy Ater Representaion 291 of gladiatorial combat are inseparable from her belief that she is the rightful queen of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Tyrion, who comes to serve as her advisor, is arguably more consistent with liberalism when he convinces her to compromise with her enemies and phase slavery out rather than eliminate it entirely (“Book of the Stranger”). Others have argued that the show depicts a world torn apart by Machiavellian realpolitik, not stabilized by it (Carpenter). The cynical, ironic detachment from any ideological position displayed by so many of the show’s characters cannot convincingly be said to represent any particular class in history—except the contemporary audience of Game of Thrones. For this group, all reference to premodern ethics can only be obsolete, and the overt afirmation of liberal values in the context of a medieval fantasy world, while a boon to the show’s cultural capital, is just a sanctimonious anachronism. Novelist John Lanchester identiies a less ambiguous aspect of GOT’s fascination: the instability of both its narrative structure and its structures of identiication. Both show and novels are known for the way they build up characters as protagonists only to kill them off in horrifying ways. “This is a world in which nobody is safe, ever” (“When Did You Get Hooked?”). The best-known example is Eddard (“Ned”) Stark, patriarch of the grim, duty-bound northerners of House Stark and central character of the irst season, who is executed in the penultimate episode for attempting to reveal that the heir apparent to the throne was the child of an incestuous relationship between the queen, Cersei Lannister, and her twin brother Jaime (“Baelor”). Though his death is foreshadowed by a series of fateful decisions, such as warning Cersei before making a formal accusation in order to save her and her children from punishment, it still comes as a shock. Martin, Benioff, and Weiss rely on the audience’s familiarity with genre to achieve this effect even as Ned’s doom becomes inevitable. The audience is led to access their knowledge of fantasy conventions (the certainty of moral resolution, the immortality of characters whose point of view we share, etc.) only to be forced to doubt them at every step. The show punishes its audience for identiication, a process fundamental not only to heroic fantasy but to all popular narrative. Furthermore, as Lanchester goes on to say, this instability extends to our judgments regarding the characters and the function they serve in the plot. Through a gradual revelation of his backstory and especially by suffering torture at the hands of enemies even worse than he is, Jaime Lannister develops from a smug villain (one instrumental in causing Ned’s death) into a kind of anti-hero. Audience sympathies are constantly manipulated in favor of characters who initially seemed to be villains or minor igures. Even as the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros

292 Ryan Vu move inexorably toward a inal conlagration—the coming of Daenarys from the east, the creep of winter and an army of undead from the north, and the wars of succession already tearing the land apart—the question of how it will affect major characters, and thereby determine the overall “meaning” of the series, is kept in suspense. The series depends on maintaining the belief in a master narrative even while undermining the more obvious contenders for this title in a constant game of bait-and-switch. The sheer quantity of characters and subplots increases the sense of contingency as it can be dificult to tell who is essential to the overall narrative and who is not. As the series progresses and its characters grow further apart geographically (a standard feature of epic fantasy novels, less common in television), subplots multiply to the point where individual episodes are forced to cut rapidly between plots that have little to do with one another, conveying information in the manner of Azuka’s database model rather than leading an audience through a stable or coherent narrative. It also leads to recurring plot structures and narrative doubling. A good example is the introduction of Oberyn Martell in the fourth season. His dramatic entrance into King’s Landing, the center of Westerosi power, from the southern periphery in the Andalusia-esque Dorne, mirrors Ned Stark’s journey from the north in the irst season. Though the swinging, swaggering Martells couldn’t be more different from the brooding Starks, they fulill analogous narrative functions. Like the Starks, the Martells hold a grudge against the cynical Lannisters and are motivated by honor rather than the naked struggle for power that drives royal politics. Like Ned, Oberyn is built up as a hero and audience favorite, then killed (spectacularly) by season’s end. Like Ned, Oberyn willfully ignores the rules governing the game he is playing. An oft-quoted line from Cersei in season one sums them up: “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die” (“You Win Or You Die”). The “prestige TV” format permits the winnowing away of characters to be carried out with maximum visceral impact; gory spectacle within a fantasy setting, far removed from liberal norms of civility and decency, is precisely what gives this heightened “realism” full license. In sum, while GOT does little to spark the audience’s sense of wonder or confront them with radical alterity, the show and the novels reinforce genre expectations through calibrated deviations. Its “realism” consists in adopting the structures of heroic fantasy—a world where magic has waned, whose fate rests on the actions of a few chosen individuals and the possibility of return to a vanished age—then withholding or denying their normative resolution. This becomes clearer when we consider the titular metaphor of a game, which tends to be invoked when the action of the show least resembles one. Certainly the

Fantasy Ater Representaion 293 court intrigue of King’s Landing has little in common with games as deined by Caillois: its “play” is neither optional nor governed by explicit rules.21 Most of the show’s central characters are interpolated into the “game” by their inherited social position—Ned Stark is ordered to King’s Landing by the king, a close personal friend. It is those who try to subordinate the struggle for power to a higher moral code who die the most horribly. The audience, on the other hand, is in a very different position. For us, the conventions of popular iction and the logic of their exceptions follow familiar patterns; at key narrative turning points the question becomes, “Which structure will ‘win’?” In a sense GOT simply adopts serial narrative writing convention, that setting up then denying audience expectations builds suspense, to an extreme. Nonetheless, the form of the inevitable resolution is so unclear that it is dificult to inally determine whose narrative is central. Is GOT a story about the restoration of the Targaryens to their rightful place? Is it about the folly of the dynastic struggle in the face of the coming long winter? At one point (before half of them got killed) it seemed to be about the revenge of House Stark—and there’s still an off-chance it might be. The game GOT offers its audience is speculative rather than based on simple identiication, disciplining the viewer to disinterestedly evaluate each character’s chance of “winning.” This shifts the focus from the characters themselves to further speculation about the “rules” that determine the course of the narrative. One can pretty much guess the ending of Lord of the Rings from the irst few paragraphs, or at least deduce its moral sympathies. But in GOT, the suspension of narrative judgment is so thorough that it simultaneously builds the desire for conventional moral resolution (“at last, the good guys win!”) and fosters cynicism about that morality (“don’t be naive, morality is a pack of lies”). With genre fantasy in place of the realism of the everyday as the show’s normative backdrop, we ind a partial inversion of Todorov’s fantastic. Todorov located the genre’s ambiguity in the way it suspended the reader’s epistemological judgment. GOT’s ambiguity on the other hand is in an entirely positivist register, having nothing to do with any underlying real behind representation. What you see is what you get. The secondary world itself and the “rules” of genre that determine the narrative, are at once moral, physical, even (pseudo-)historical.22 Uncertainty arises from the question of where and how those rules will be broken, determining what we see, how the narrative will resolve, and how it should resolve—its meaning. Only in the latter, quasi-allegorical sense does GOT have anything to do with external “reality” or representation. As an ongoing series it is futureoriented, encouraging speculation about the overall shape of the narrative,

294 Ryan Vu and pedagogical, “educating” the viewer through the way the narrative does or does not line up with generic norms. When the show (having now outpaced the novels) inally reaches its conclusion, it will leave behind an unwieldy behemoth23 over which any ultimate “lesson” about the nihilism of politics or the intrinsic cruelty of man will undoubtedly prove superluous.24 The ultimate lesson is sentimental—the incitement of emotional cathexis to genre conventions through their spectacular violation. In this way the series brings to the fore the two central and related aspects of modern fantasy discussed in the previous sections: (1) the prominence of the secondary world itself over/ under any of its individual storylines or characters, and (2) the way genre fantasy serves as a discursive medium for its viewers. For the point of the series is not the inal achievement of a classical narrative shape, but the cultivation of an information-based engagement with Martin’s ictional world, in which audience speculation on future narrative developments sparks debate over genre and comparison with other discursive worlds, both ictional and nonictional.25 Critiques of the show (and of contemporary genre iction in general) that limit themselves to allegorical readings interwoven with real-world events, while not necessarily wrong, fail to recognize the actual scope of its milieu and capacities. GOT’s ideological effects are limited to and constructed by its participants, or those who interact with it. This is who/what the show is “about,” which necessarily constrains any allegorical pretensions. GOT viewers can imagine they’re contemplating the world when in fact they’re contemplating their own relations. We can return to Suvin’s most recent characterization of modern fantasy with a revised understanding, that “what Fantasy reacts against, and as a result inscribes itself into, has primarily to do with experiences of everyday life, arising out of ongoing socio-economic history, stiling central aspects of personality” (222). Where Tolkien resolved the crises of modernity in the form of a ictional myth-history with a eucatastrophic structure,26 Martin, Benioff, and Weiss’s postmodern response is a negative one, in which inal salvation never comes. In its place is the hyper-detailed ictive space itself, dense with narrative threads that can be drawn out endlessly into the future and the past.27 Serial narrative is just one “hook” to lure audiences into a system that converts them into participants, its formulaic, repetitive structure the form through which its audience is encouraged to interpret an “everyday experience” that is always already mediated. In a ictional landscape rich with “megatexts” like Martin’s, theories of gaming can help us understand what happens when the components of narrative take precedence over any given story or medium. “Games are not representations of this world,” McKenzie

Fantasy Ater Representaion 295 Wark writes in an experimental text positing electronic games as the structure of late capitalist experience. “They are more like allegories of a world made over as gamespace. They encode the abstract principles upon which decisions about the realness of this or that world are now decided” (20). Fantasy, the clearest descendant of romance and adventure iction, is the genre in which this broader transformation of the function of narrative is most apparent, and in which (I’ve argued) its self-understanding is most sophisticated.28 Yet its effects can be seen everywhere one looks. The structure of realism and identiication I outline above with regard to GOT amounts to a sort of HBO house algorithm, applied to other genres like the Western (Deadwood), gangster melodrama (The Sopranos), police procedural (The Wire), science iction (Westworld), and crime noir (True Detective). Each of these forms, each part of a shared history of popular narrative, is elevated to a higher, “intellectual” status by calculated interruptions of their normative resolution. The genre sophistication that has been my focus is part of a repertoire of techniques HBO dramas borrow from art cinema, such as auteurism, ambiguity of perspective, and the suspension of narrative closure.29 In the more populist milieux of Hollywood blockbusters, bestselling novels, and video game franchises, the centrality of secondary worlds is more accepted, and there is less need for such elaborate means of winning over the audience. GOT marks a key point where mass and elite audience tastes intersect, and where it is most apparent that the HBO treatment doesn’t “critique” its host genre, but rejuvenates and legitimizes it.30 The success of the series ushers in the apotheosis of genre rather than its end, in which ictionality has subsumed realism and its principle referent has become its own structure. For the networked subjects of a global media empire, the internal micrologics of genre appear to have replaced the traditional opposition between realism and its others as the dominant form for making sense out of experience. This can be understood as yet another symptom of the ever-widening gap between signiier and signiied endemic to postmodernity, or in terms of the “social factory,”31 in which audience interaction with media objects is increasingly made productive of economic value with individual works reduced to mere momentary nodes.32 The transgressive charge of Baudrillard’s notion of the hyper-real33 has drained away; today the entire discourse of realism operates in a post-representational register. The proper object of aesthetics is system itself. When criticism can no longer be grounded in the authority of the Real and becomes barely distinguishable from fan discourse, the comprehension of this process and its consequences requires a theoretical approach sensitive to the ways popular iction, neither innocent nor naive, theorizes its own transformation of reality.

296 Ryan Vu notes 1 See Hartwell 20. 2 The standard scholarly account of the turn in English remains Watt. 3 Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope most clearly relates ictional genre to spatio-temporal models of reality. “The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic signiicance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that deines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time” (84–85). As Todorov observes of Bakhtin, “Genre, then, forms a modeling system that proposes a simulacrum of the world” (83). 4 See Suvin. See also Williams’s recent attempt to recoup Suvin’s argument (“Recognizing Cogntion”). 5 See Frow’s recent work on genre theory for critical overviews of the increasingly hybridized ield of literary genre theory in the twenty-irst century. For an account of slipstream, which prompted a post-genre discussion within SF theory, see the special issue on slipstream in Science Fiction Studies (Latham). China Miéville is the best known and most polemical advocate/practitioner of the “post-genre fantastic” novel and short story today. 6 Attebery relies on Hume for this argument. 7 For the most successful of these efforts, see Mendlesohn. She builds on Attebery and Clute as well as Irwin. 8 See Miéville and Jameson (“Radical Fantasy”). 9 Fred Botting writes of how critics of popular iction understood it to produce irrational sensation addicts: “The passivity of romance readers—wound up, excited, disappointed, only ever reacting to narrative effects—makes them little more than mechanical puppets jerked by the strings of iction’s repetitive and formulaic apparatus, subjected to terrors, shocks and thrills: automated stimulation evacuates rather than assures rational subjectivity” (“Reading Machines”). 10 A number of literary critics have been exploring the inluence of legal theory and actuarial science on the form of the early novel. See, for example, McPherson and Youssef. 11 Hence the pejorative term “rules lawyer” to describe the behavior of a player overly ixated on the rules as a means of establishing dominance over the game. 12 Except by giving the referee the last word, which as any gamer knows is easier said than done. 13 Elements of the game can of course extend beyond their initial context. Game sessions have been adapted into novels, perhaps most notably the Dragonlance series. 14 The campaign against D&D was sparked by the “Steam Tunnel Incident,” in which Michigan State University student James Dallas Egbert III disappeared into the university’s tunnel system during a Quaalude-fueled depressive episode. William Dear, the private investigator hired by his parents, irst made the connection to Egbert’s D&D habit. Convinced by Dear’s theory, Egbert’s mother Patricia Pulling formed the organization BADD (Bothered About Dungeons &

Fantasy Ater Representaion 297 Dragons) in 1983 and joined the rising tide of Christian activists and writers dedicated to proving D&D’s supposed demoniacal inluences. 15 What Saler describes as “spectacular texts” (57–94). 16 The most expansive form of RPG system-building is probably Steve Jackson’s Generic Universal Roleplaying System (GURPS), explicitly designed to be compatible with the full range of genre iction. From the company website: “With GURPS, you can be anyone you want—an elf hero ighting for the forces of good, a shadowy femme fatale on a deep-cover mission, a futuristic swashbuckler carving up foes with a force sword in his hand and a beautiful woman by his side […] or literally anything else!” (GURPS). TSR followed suit, rebranding D&D’s rules as the “D20 System” and licensing it to third party developers (“4th Edition”). 17 For a brief but relatively thorough account of this process see Peterson 90–100. For a more detailed account focusing on the birth of science iction, see Westfahl. 18 The Elric (sword and sorcery) and Jerry Cornelius (psychedelic spy thriller) series are among the better known. 19 She notes that beginning in 2005, Hollywood production of fantasy ilms began to overtake SF, and between 2000 and 2013, the top twenty-ive grossing ilms included twice as many fantasy ilms as SF ilms. Though there were more new SF series on TV between 2000 and 2013 than fantasy, many of them failed, whereas fantasy series proved much more successful. However, both fantasy and SF titles increased in the new millennium relative to earlier numbers (289–291). 20 Adam Kotsko, author of Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, writes: “I don’t know if the show counts as ideology critique, but it’s an interesting variation on the sociopath fantasy—we have dozens of characters who hold themselves at a distance from social forces in order to instrumentalize them, but instead of this being in conlict with good liberal values, good liberal values are precisely what enables the sociopathic pattern” (“Pure Ideology”). 21 See Caillois 9–10. 22 See, for example, the controversy over the show’s depictions of rape, which Martin somewhat paradoxically defends as an important part of history: “If you’re going to write about war, and you just include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that, and you don’t portray [sexual violence], then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that” (qtd. in Barnett). 23 This will be true even if, unlike Lost, another cross-genre fantasy series that concealed its narrative structure until the very end, its ending satisies fans. 24 Perhaps this is why book readers have tended to co-operate with the show’s producers in concealing “spoilers,” and why contemporary genre fans in general are so protective of their favorite franchises’ house secrets. This is the age of the obligatory spoiler alert. Why these franchises are so protective is less mysterious than the question of why fans are so willing to acquiesce and even self-police in ways that would have seemed extreme twenty or thirty years ago. Do they tacitly accept that there is little more of interest to these properties on the narrative level than the periodic dole of plot details as a social event? 25 These speculations themselves fall into recognizable genres: the allegorical reading, the game of identiication (“What Game of Thrones character are you?”), the “open letter” to the showrunners, etc.

298 Ryan Vu 26 “The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairytale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’, nor ‘fugitive’. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal inal defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a leeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (Tolkien 153). 27 The numerous lashback scenes in the novels have begun to be adapted by the HBO series in recent seasons, and multiple prequel series are already being considered. As with other popular genre franchises, there is also an extensive archive of fan iction that further develops Martin’s world. 28 The reader will note that by focusing on mainstream fantasy I have limited myself to traditionally masculinist genres. Certainly the history of popular women’s iction, while also tied to romance, evolved along quite different lines and would require its own study. Sufice it for now to say that HBO has its takes on the romantic comedy (Sex and the City and Girls) and the nighttime soap opera (True Blood), but they hew closer to their generic forebears and lack the same pretensions to seriousness. 29 See Bordwell 56. 30 Like “Quality TV” in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the criteria of legitimacy shift to serve fan taste. M.A.S.H., Cagney & Lacey, The Cosby Show, and NYPD Blue were all variously hailed as part of a television renaissance. Just as Sue Brower writes of the now-defunct advocacy group Viewers for Quality Television, the relationship of networks with prestige TV audiences is based on “television’s persistent social image as mass culture and the fact that ‘quality’ programming historically has appealed to a group that is often smaller, but especially attractive to advertisers” (174). Subscription cable only heightens the value of this elite audience, while social media extends its cultural inluence. While the speciic aesthetic criteria may have changed, both quality and prestige TV require a normative notion of mass culture as a backdrop, even as they appropriate (and thus “rehabilitate”) its bad objects. 31 The autonomist Marxist concept of the social factory broadly refers to the ways in which capitalist production processes have internalized areas of social life well beyond traditional waged labor. For a convincing synthesis of postmodern and autonomist Marxist theory centered on the disruption of language by the rise of visual media, see the work of Jonathan Beller, most recently “Wagers Within the Image: Rise of Visuality, Transformation of Labour, Aesthetic Regimes.” 32 For a reading of GOT and HBO drama that analyzes the “prestige” label’s function as an inter-corporate inancial instrument, see Szalay. 33 The ontological state of total abstraction in which, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it” (Baudrillard 1).

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