Fair warning - I'm going to be liberal in my use of spoilers in discussing all things Game of Thrones. I haven't watched the latest season or read the latest book, but please feel free to go nuts in the comments below (preferably with spoiler tags for the rest of the readers, but whatever, they've been warned). OK, on with it, then.

I love a great deal of fantasy literature. It's not all I read - there's not a genre I don't like to dip my toes into now and again - but it definitely consumes the bulk of the novels I pick and choose from my enormous pile of shame. When people admit the horrors of their Steam pile of unplayed games, I'm usually quietly thinking about the sheer number of unread books on my Kindle. Unlike my gaming pile of shame, however, I don't feel any real particular guilt about the number of books I own. It's nice to be able to have my own personal library to pick and choose from at will.

Usually when I consider a new book to read, I'm wondering if there isn't a new Joe Abercrombie or Scott Lynch novel lurking out there I haven't picked through. We're in the middle of a great big golden era of fantasy literature. Patrick Rothfuss. Tad Williams. Brandon Sanderson (although he's kind of hit and miss for me - loved his work on the RJ novels, didn't much care for Mistborn, kind of on the fence about Stormlight Archive). The aforementioned Abercrombie and Lynch. Any subgenre of fantasy you like, you can undoubtedly find a new book by a great established author or some up and comer releasing something amazing. It's an utterly fantastic time to be a lover of books of all sorts, but particularly the fantasy genre.

I don't particularly have a favorite sub-genre or particular style of fantasy I like or dislike. I don't read a lot of urban fantasy, but there are a few from authors like Diana Francis (full disclosure - I'm a former student of hers, but even so, she's a fantastic fantasy/urban fantasy writer) and Charlie Huston I greatly enjoy. I tend towards shifts - one year, I'll favor some sweeping, majestic fantasy work like Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, and the next I'll want to read darker fantasy like Richard Morgan's Steel Remains.

My history with some of fantasy's biggest names hasn't always been really so cut and dried. I loved Narnia as a child, but I didn't come around to Tolkien until I was a freshman in college, just a year or two shy of the films coming out. I read an absolute metric ton of the usual sword-and-sorcery nerdery by Eddings and Brooks, but I grew tired really quickly of the fluffy nature of their novels and the way they endlessly seemed to repeat themselves thematically and in regards to character development.

Perhaps one of my more complicated histories with fantasy novelists comes from none other than George Arrr Arrrrr Martin. First, though, some music. DJ, queue up something with a bit of fantasy flare, will you? Hit it!

The Books

I'll be honest, I have no damn clue when I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire. I know it was sometime late in the 90s. All I can remember is being on a Robert Jordan kick and reading anything in fantasy literature that used up roughly half the Amazon forest to print.

I was never quite blown away by Game of Thrones. I respected the first novel for its bleak tone - a rarity in those days, at least in that genre - and the sometimes rich writing, but it dragged its feet on a great many plot points. Even then, I wasn't a fan of child protagonists, and everything involving Bran just irritated me (it still does).

It did a great many interesting things. I read a great deal of Tom Clancy and Forsythe back then, so I wasn't exactly new to political intrigue working its way into books I liked, but the amount of depth in Martin's works outmatched anything else being written back then, including the equally verbose Jordan. The execution of Ned Stark was wildly fascinating and led me to wonder just what the future of the series might hold, giving me just enough of a dangling thread to keep reading for a couple more installments.

Unfortunately, "dangling threads" seems to be Martin's middle names.

My early suspicious about Martin's works were that he was a shock-and-awe writer, someone who relied on a bit of murder in lieu of actual plot development and closure. You see it a lot with mystery writers, who often confuse adding a body for a little intrigue and don't actually end up progressing the plot. At times, it's fine - sometimes a little murder and mayhem is just what a book needs to kick things into a higher gear and forge new and interesting paths for existing characters to take.

Unfortunately in Martin's case, death quickly loses its meaning. I'm paraphrasing here, but if you've read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there's an early scene where Arthur Dent tries to understand the scope of what's happened to Earth and just can't. It's too big. So Ford Prefect advises him to think of it on a smaller and smaller scale until he can finally process it. It's a funny bit, but it's also reflective of human nature. We can sympathize with tragedies on a large scale, but a huge body count doesn't connect with us in the same way a personal, singular death can.

Those important deaths were something Martin was great at in the beginning, particularly with Ned Stark, a character to whom he'd devoted much of that first book's narrative. Unfortunately for later characters like Oberyn, Catelyn, and Robb Stark, their deaths seem less meaningful and more in line with a general "keep the reader interested" philosophy. While the fall of Robb Stark is without a doubt one of modern literature's most fascinating scenes, it's largely useless in terms of plot movement and furthering any sort of characterization of the other protagonists aside from reducing the number of players at the theoretical endgame of the novels.

And that's really the sticking point - there's no endgame in sight for anyone or anything in the novels. We all have our suspicions as to who will make it and who won't - it seems obvious we're leading up to a dragon vs. undead showdown of some sort, but who knows? Given the amount of time it takes in between novels, not to mention the slog of unnecessary bullshit that the reader must wade through in order to reach that fabled ending, it just doesn't seem worth it to me. Martin will either finish his novels or he won't, and either way, I just really don't much care. Martin's writing in its early days deserves a lot of respect for the writers it inspired, but by and large, everything past Game of Thrones is largely inconsequential.

The Telltale Video Game

I'm jumping ahead of the TV show a bit here because I want to hammer home that same last point. Inconsequential is the very name of the Telltale episodic game, which serves only to shine a fascinating light on the faults of both the Telltale model and cheap cash-ins of existing franchises.

Having just finished Tales from the Borderlands a few weeks ago, I can safely say that given the right writers at the helm, Telltale is wonderfully capable of making a side story to a larger universe feel compelling, even if it doesn't wind up that way (time will tell with regards to Tales). Those characters in that particular series don't actually matter much to the whole of the Borderlands universe, yet they play out a story that hooked me almost like no other this year.

Unfortunately, Game of Thrones never once hits the high notes of Tales from the Borderlands. Far from it. It's plagued through and through by a refusal to matter, both in terms of its own plot and in regards to the larger universe. Main characters are slaughtered in droves. While it's shocking at first - the death of the teenage child by the wonderfully played Bolton is well done after a period of heightening suspense - it also largely loses its meaning quickly, much like the novels. If everyone dies, there's no one left for the character to attach themselves to.

That's not to say everyone does die in the Telltale game, but they come pretty damn close. House Forrester is whittled down (get it?) to a fraction of its starting numbers, all is yawningly lost, and no darling, the kids are most definitely not all right. All that might be forgiven if the series wraps up things in any sort of fashion, but it doesn't. It feels like there should be maybe one or two more episodes, but frankly, I'm glad there aren't. Game of Thrones tends to drag through its middle parts, throwing in deaths aplenty but little meat in terms of forward progression.

The series' highlight comes from a brutal choice at the end of its penultimate chapter, when the player must choose to sacrifice one vanilla brother or the other at the hands of an ambush everyone and anyone involved should have seen coming. It leaves me mildly curious as to what Telltale does with a theoretical second season, but only in terms of a technical nature. The split between the players' choices between the two brothers seemed relatively equal enough that they'd have to plan some contingency for both, but all this is assuming Telltale won't just cut and run.

My guess? The second season will focus on other characters, tangentially involved with the fate of the Forresters, with those survivors that the player base chose making a pittance of an appearance at the beginning. After a while, having so many possible choices for survivors will take its toll on the programmers, made all the more problematic by the distinct aging of the Telltale engine.

Speaking of, the series is almost nothing but QTEs, annoyingly so. Whereas Tales from the Borderlands manages to keep its QTEs relatively limited in favor of exposition (a smart choice), Game of Thrones devolves mostly into a series of QTEs followed by a couple of boring choices and a few bits of subpar storytelling in a universe that's seen too much exploitation already.

I get that the Telltale model of choice choice choice, QTE QTE QTE works for them, but it needs an evolution and fast. With regards to Tales from the Borderlands, I suggested elsewhere that they keep the QTEs but make them unfailable and reward the player for better, faster responses, either via storytelling elements or in-game cash rewards. In regards to Game of Thrones, I have no clue how to fix their problems. The story isn't good enough to rely upon it instead of QTEs, and the QTEs suck in general, so either route, we're kind of screwed as players. I'd suggest an old fashioned point and click adventure that actually let me explore the Seven Kingdoms and beyond, but who are we kidding here? Telltale is going to ride the guided train tour all the way down.

The TV Show

Surprisingly, I'm not all that down on the TV show. The format requires that a large amount of the fat from the novels be trimmed, leaving a rich world with a faster paced narrative. I'm down with that. That's not to say I'm opposed to big, bloaty stories - I love The Stand, for example - but they need to be consistently movign forward in interesting ways. The TV version of Game of Thrones does precisely that.

It wouldn't work without the marvelously steady and groudned approach of most of HBO's programming. Sure, Syfy had Battlestar Galactica, but even that had its share of standalone bullshit episodes that left me rolling my eyes. Game of Thrones needed a channel that demanded lean storytelling and HBO is just such a place.

I'm fond of the casting, too. I'll watch Sean Bean in damn near anything. If you can find them, watch the Sharpe's Rifles TV movies, or even better, read the books. It's easy to knock Dinklage for his lackluster performance in Destiny, but he's murdering it as Tyrion Lannister in absolutely every scene he's in. They even got Brienne and the Onion Knight just right, who are my favorite characters from the novels.

The effects are what they are. They're gorgeous, of course, but I can't help feeling like the world feels somewhat uninspired at times. Or rather, it feels a bit too inspired by our own. I don't want Dune levels of outlandishness, but certainly it could stand to have a dose of originality thrown into the drab Middle Eastern-meets-every-medieval-age-look-ever.

I think the changes that the show makes are smart, though played a little safe for television viewers. Some elements like Lady Stoneheart's absence makes sense, although I found her to be one of the very few promising new threads to come out of the later novels. An undead Stark, by all appearances a variation of the White Walkers, seeking vengeance for her fallen? Now that's a storyline I can get behind, even if it adds more bloat to the novels.

I want to get caught up on the show soon, but there's a lot of other good TV out there I'm trying to watch too. It's high on my list, though, so I hope it'll be sooner rather than later.

I think that about wraps things up. Have a happy Thanksgiving if you're from teh States, and even if you aren't, have a happy Thanksgiving anyways. Hey, it's an awesome holiday. You think about all the things you're grateful for and then promptly forget them as you expand your waistline several thousand inches. It's amazing! Thanks for reading.