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Title 37 C. F. R., Chapter II, Part 201.14
Fantasy After Representation
D&D, Game of Thrones, and Postmodern World-Building
Fantasy After Representation
Ryan Vu

My essay is premised on the observation that while canonical theories of fantastic

genre fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror) proposed by critics such as Tzetvan
Todorov and Darko Suvin center on epistemic aporia, most recent examples in
popular culture reject fundamental difference, alterity, and the unknown in favor
of postmodern play within a limited set of generic conventions. I argue that today,
tabletop roleplaying game systems (RPGs) provide a superior hermeneutic for
understanding how the fantasy genre operates in mass culture than does traditional
genre theory. After 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 participants to produce fictions across and between genres. Through a
reading of Poul Anderson’s use of the “multiverse” trope in his novel Three Hearts
and Three Lions, the notion that reality consists of an infinite number of intercon-
nected worlds, I argue RPGs completed a reorientation toward the fantastic
begun by mass-market fantasy literature. Epistemological concerns, distinctions
between fantastic genres, and individual authorship are de-emphasized in favor of
established formal conventions, a shift which encourages a participatory model of
consumption and ease of transmission across diverse media. I then use the HBO
adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones novels as an example of
how this paradigmatic shift in the fantastic has moved beyond the niche markets
of fantasy fiction 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 fiction,
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

Extrapolation, vol. 58, nos 2–3 (2017) https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2017.14

274 Ryan Vu

make. Again, history counters formalism: Michael Saler points out that
science fiction, fantasy, horror, and detective fiction began as twentieth-
century marketing categories, subdividing what he calls the fin-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 field 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 influence across literature, film, and electronic media since their
inception in the early 1970s. RPGs are the culmination of twentieth-century
fantasy’s self-reflexivity, and can help us to reconceptualize popular fiction
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 contem-
porary 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 After Representation 275

I. The Fantastic, Realism, and Genre Theory

It is generally accepted that the rise of modern literature, defined 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, epistemo-
logical focus of literary modernism. Where the detective novel was the “low”
counterpart of modernism, he writes, science fiction 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 fictional worlds
is defined 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 definitions 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 fiction. 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 fiction, 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 reflects 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 fiction 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
efficacy 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 fiction, Fredric Jameson finds hope in what only a
few decades ago was broadly dismissed as mere genre. For all its compromises,
science fiction 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 fictional world in modern scientific 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 commod-
itized tropes (Archaeologies xiii–xiv). Albeit in a mediated way, then, Marxist
SF critics seek to repurpose a postmodern phenomenon (paraliterary science
fiction) 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 After Representation 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 definition 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 fictional
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 first of these, exemplified 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 field. Tracing the rise of fantasy’s generic tropes, their
origins in early twentieth-century pulp fiction, 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 definition, preferring to present the genre as
an accumulation of figures 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 fulfillment (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 fiction of all individual claims to exceptionality or political-
philosophical significance, we find the same structures inherited from
chivalric romance and adventure fiction. The most significant criticism of
fantastic genre is in part a horrified 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 fiction 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 fiction,
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 fiction than any of the approaches dominant in academic genre
criticism.
 Fantasy After Representation 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 reflected 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 significant
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 official
culture for similar reasons. Attebery’s first and clearest example of fantasy
as formula is roleplaying games (10). From an aesthetic standpoint, the
problem with both “formula fiction” and roleplaying games is their hyper-
rationalism. In Coleridgian terms, their structures are mechanical, with
“no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites” (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 intensified 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 office, which

pro tempore fixes, reflects and transmits the moving fantasms of one man’s
delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains afflicted
with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite
purpose (48)

His critique of print here prefigures critiques of the audiovisual mass media of
the twentieth and twenty-first 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
defined by one or more fictional 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 influenced) by being
noncompetitive; in place of the satisfaction of victory, they offer immersion
in genre worlds, the acting out of fantasies inspired by fiction consumed in
other media. Dungeons & Dragons, the first such game, is well known for
its adoption of the fantasy genre in the sense of sword and sorcery adventure
fiction 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 film, 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 first 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 After Representation 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
find DUNGEONS & DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations
know no bounds will find 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 fictions 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 fiction 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 specific 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
fill 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 fine-grained detail, they provide
a modular system for producing fictions 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 accumu-
lating 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 fiction 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 (quantified) 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 fiction in print or on
film—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 fictional 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 fidelity 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 first
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 After Representation 283
of appeal: whenever there is a conflict 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 battlefield 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
first 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 fiction. 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 finer 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 fiction 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 officially validated reality was
under threat of being displaced by a perverse doppelgänger. Paratextuality
has been central to modern fantastic fiction 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
fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction.15 Paratexts like these informed the
correspondence pages of twentieth-century genre fiction journals, encouraging
detailed discussion of fictional worlds, narrative structure, and the thematic
ideas the stories raised. Well before the “gamification” of genre fiction, 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 fiction” (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 fiction journals had the
effect of deepening their readers’ sense of inhabiting fictional worlds while
reinforcing their awareness of those worlds’ artificiality: “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
affirms their sense of culture as ongoing, horizontal interactions with other
fans. Likewise, RPG designers see themselves as enablers of decentralized
 Fantasy After Representation 285

play in the same fashion as any other game designer, not as expressive
authors. D&D is fantasy fiction in which the centrality of the text—a series
of novels, films, comics, etc., even a particular setting—has been displaced
by paratextual discourse.
As mentioned in the first part of this essay, theorists of genre since Bakhtin
have argued that genres define phenomenological “worlds,” or in a term John
Frow borrows from social scientist and philosopher Alfred Schütz, “finite
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 defining their limits and the range of variation
within them, which requires a system that can be modified 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
fictional preface to Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953),
among the novels cited by Gygax as an influence on D&D (“Appendix N”
224), the unnamed narrator describes a gentleman scientist—“one of those
magnificent 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 infinity 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 battlefields 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 filled with tongue-in-
cheek scientific “explanations” for its fantastic elements. The tale’s allegorical
and psychological dimensions are flattened 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 fighting when he fought the Nazis but a
resurgence of archaic horrors that civilized men had once believed were safely
dead?” (67). Another major influence 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 first 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
fictions 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 fiction’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 fine-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 defines 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 field
of fiction, 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 After Representation 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 fiction 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 intellec-
tual’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 profitability.
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 significant 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 fiction.” The rise of audiovisuality in film, 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 Prestige Fantasy

In the younger media of film 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 fiction.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
fictional 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 sufficient 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 film
genres, with popular narrative set to evade genre analysis altogether. However,
 Fantasy After Representation 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 films 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 fiction and “what
if?” forums freely combine characters from different worlds and genres.
Fantasy films are usually “presold” adaptations of novels or comic books,
and the power of fan expectation makes it difficult to take the liberties with
genre material that filmmakers were used to in the 1980s and 1990s. The
Marvel Cinematic Universe has demonstrated the profitability 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 defined
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 infinitely 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 conflict is not between good and evil but chivalry and
nihilistic egotism. Major battles are often skipped, especially in the lower-
budget 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 influences—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 fixation for
a twenty-first-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 fiction, it is still disdained within the middlebrow aesthetic
milieu HBO programming depends on. Perhaps as a result, praise for the
show is often justified by superficial 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 finance 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 instrumen-
talize 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 After Representation 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 affirmation 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 identifies a less ambiguous aspect of GOT’s
fascination: the instability of both its narrative structure and its structures
of identification. 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 first 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 identification, 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 figures. Even as the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros
292 Ryan Vu

move inexorably toward a final conflagration—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 difficult 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 first
season. Though the swinging, swaggering Martells couldn’t be more different
from the brooding Starks, they fulfill 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 After Representation 293

court intrigue of King’s Landing has little in common with games as defined
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 fiction 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
difficult to finally 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 identification, 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 first 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 conven-
tional 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 find 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 future-
oriented, 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) finally reaches its conclusion, it will leave behind an unwieldy
behemoth 23 over which any ultimate “lesson” about the nihilism of politics
or the intrinsic cruelty of man will undoubtedly prove superfluous.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 final achievement of a classical
narrative shape, but the cultivation of an information-based engagement with
Martin’s fictional world, in which audience speculation on future narrative
developments sparks debate over genre and comparison with other discursive
worlds, both fictional and nonfictional.25 Critiques of the show (and of
contemporary genre fiction 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, stifling central aspects of
personality” (222). Where Tolkien resolved the crises of modernity in the
form of a fictional myth-history with a eucatastrophic structure, 26 Martin,
Benioff, and Weiss’s postmodern response is a negative one, in which final
salvation never comes. In its place is the hyper-detailed fictive 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 fictional 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 After Representation 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 fiction, 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 sophis-
ticated.28 Yet its effects can be seen everywhere one looks. The structure of
realism and identification 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 fiction (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 fictionality 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 signifier
and signified 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-representa-
tional 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
fiction, 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 fictional genre to
spatio-temporal models of reality. “The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic
generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that
defines 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 field of literary genre theory in the twenty-first 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 fiction 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 fiction’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 influence 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 fixated 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, first 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 After Representation 297
Dragons) in 1983 and joined the rising tide of Christian activists and writers
dedicated to proving D&D’s supposed demoniacal influences.
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 fiction. From the company website: “With
GURPS, you can be anyone you want—an elf hero fighting 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 fiction, 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 films began
to overtake SF, and between 2000 and 2013, the top twenty-five grossing films
included twice as many fantasy films as SF films. 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 conflict 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 satisfies 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 identification (“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 final defeat and in so far is evangelium,
giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as
grief” (Tolkien 153).
27 The numerous flashback 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
fiction 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
fiction, while also tied to romance, evolved along quite different lines and would
require its own study. Suffice 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 influence. While the specific 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 financial 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).
 Fantasy After Representation 299

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vi Contributors

Ryan Vu received his PhD from the Program in Literature at Duke University.
His dissertation is on the historical rise of fantastic literature during the
Enlightenment in Britain and France.