From Mark Hemingway, via Verily Magazine:
…If the LOTR movies were the cinematic event of the last decade, Game of Thrones has become a global phenomenon in the defining cultural medium of this decade—premium cable television. However, not all fantasy is created equal; the success of GoT is pretty disconcerting if you care about how women are portrayed onscreen. More specifically, you might wonder why actresses on GoT have to get naked every twenty minutes…
and
The fantastical film and literary genres we all take for granted—sci-fi, fantasy, and horror—all have rich storytelling traditions we could trace back to Gilgamesh if we had a lot of time on our hands and a supercool comparative lit professor to walk us through it. But the CliffsNotes version is this: For commercial purposes, our current definitions of these genres were largely created by the pulp writers in the first part of the twentieth century, like H.P. Lovecraft, the master of horror and alien creatures, and Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian—a character that was hugely influential in creating modern fantasy.
While much of the English speaking world was still bound by Victorian mores, Lovecraft was redefining horror and fantasy by imagining entirely new interconnected dimensions where there is no moral order, only existential dread. What overt intellectual influences the pulp writers had is hotly debated, but it’s safe to say that since Howard was born just a few years after Nietzsche’s death, there was at least a “God is Dead” vibe in the air.
I have some issues with the article as a whole, but makes some valid points. Read the rest of it HERE.
