Whose Fantasy Is This?

Earlier this year, I was discussing genre with the comics writer Kieron Gillen. His work is at times straight science fiction, at times straight fantasy, and often located at the vaguely defined boundary between them, which he has an idea of how to describe. 

“Science fiction, in its purest sense, is about looking forward,” he said. “Fantasy is: This world never was like this.” 

In a world seemingly intent on fulfilling the dystopian visions of generations of science fiction writers, it’s easy to understand the appeal of worlds that never were, and consequently why if there’s such a thing as must-see-TV anymore, House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power are it. They have a lot in common. Each is revisionist, in dialogue with fantasy conventions that the franchises of which they’re part did more than anything to set. Each is an extension of the intellectual property rights of one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. Each is also a fantasy series, the kind with kings and dragons, and yet one that proposes a sly corrective to Gillen’s accurate schema: This, they claim, in various ways, is what the world was, and is, really like.

The worlds of House of the Dragon and even the much less dark The Rings of Power don’t feel that far from ours. We live in a time where the balance of wealth and power is extremely unequal. People like Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who has gone all in on The Rings of Power, have more wealth than they could possibly use in a single lifetime, and in many respects more power than any king could ever have dreamed of; the rest of us face rising rents, inflation, and a gig economy that affords few protections when we get sick or injured. Through a clouded mirror, these shows explore brutal systems of power that degrade the people who remain faithful to them. 

Even the reasonable rulers strain to do the right thing. Paddy Considine’s Viserys is basically the first king who’s neither insane nor evil to have appeared in the Game of Thrones franchise, and with each half-measure and compromise he makes for the good of the realm, he gets sicker and unhappier. The Rings of Power plays things much more straight, but in its world, too, the politics of trying to be good are murky. In the first episode, Galadriel warns the elven council that the evil that drove them from their home is definitely still out there. Instead of doing anything about it, they essentially exile her.

Whatever attracts people to these shows isn’t simply escapism. Different parts of society feel differently about these reflections of our world. If you’re struggling, they likely look dystopian, or at least in need of a great deal of change; to a reactionary, these might look like utopias, their distributions of power ones to aspire to. 

Each of these shows is a discourse in a teapot, each containing its own criticisms of fantasy, Tolkien, power, and the limits of our imaginations. But the more recursive these criticisms become, the more they actually direct outward, at our own world. The fantasy of the working class may be clear in these stories—we see ourselves reflected in the common people trying to survive as the ruling classes squabble in the case of The Rings of Power, or in the women who are used as pawns in a political struggle and as baby factories in House of the Dragon. The escapism for the ruling classes is more elusive because it can cloak itself in a veneer of historicism. Unlike dragons and elves, kings and queens did exist in history, and do exist now. As a society, wealth and power gets consolidated in the hands of a few wealthy families all the time, even without a monarchy. But unlike Viserys, the oligarchs lording over the real world aren’t noble men doing their best. They’re assholes.

In Gillen’s DIE, which finished its 20-issue run last year, the characters are trapped in a grim and gritty tabletop game—think of it as a goth Jumanji—and literally traverse a world made up of the things that Tolkien drew on for Lord of the Rings. Gillen’s characters watch hobbits die in the trenches of World War I, besieged by both poison gas and dragons, bringing to the surface the themes of the horrors of war that are all over the series, underneath the elves and rings of power.

“In a very real way, Gandalf is Merlin. And Beorn from The Hobbit is explicitly a pun on Beowulf—Beowulf is the ‘bee wolf,’ as in the bear.” Gillen said. “Tolkien took all the bits and bobs of the archetypal stuff he liked and made it suit his own experience, of being a war survivor and as somebody who has a deep Catholicism and all that. People can take those same parts and assemble them in different ways.”

A very good and very popular example of this remixing is Game of Thrones. The A Song of Ice and Fire books on which it’s based are very consciously and overtly critiques of Tolkien, in more or less exactly the same way the gritty comic books of the 1980s upon which modern Hollywood franchises are based were conscious critiques of the sunnier and more optimistic comics of the Silver Age. As a series, Thrones brought a far wider audience to a genre that was once thoroughly nerd shit, and succeeded partially because it was a subversion. There aren’t any fantasy races in Thrones, and magic and prophecy aren’t always what they seem. There used to be dragons, but no one has seen one for a hundred years. Instead of elves, you get the silver-haired and purple-eyed Targeryans, who used to rule over Westeros but were undone by their inbreeding-induced madness. Rather than an Aragorn-like King of Gondor destined to be the heroic king of man, we don’t even know if the prophecy of the Prince That Was Promised in Game of Thrones is true, let alone who the hell he is. By the end of the story, the closest thing there is to a savior has been exiled to a penal colony to live out his days in disgrace.

Perhaps because it worked as an immediate counter to the wildly popular and influential film adaptations of Lord of the Rings, which exploded in popularity and critical acclaim when they hit theaters in the early 2000s. By the time director Peter Jackson made his follow-ups to these movies based on The Hobbit 10 years later, audiences and critics were less enthusiastic about his specific vision. Game of Thrones, which premiered a year before the first Hobbit movie, was much more successful.

Thrones-style revisionism essentially displaced the traditional fantasy represented by Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. From the wildly popular video game Skyrim, which in drawing on A Song of Ice and Fire and much of what had inspired it basically played like Game of Thrones: The Video Game, to this year’s The Northman, a dark and gritty re-telling of the Scandinavian legend that inspired Hamlet, the image of fantasy as being epic stories of elves and dwarves was supplanted by naked men having a knife fight next to a pit of molten lava. Even Elden Ring, the smash hit FromSoftware video game, tempered its Lord of the Rings-inspired imagery of the golden, glowing Erd Tree with a more Thrones-styled approach to its politics of power. George R. R. Martin worked on it, to boot. And yet by the time House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power debuted, this long moment, it seemed clear, was over.

Maybe things would have been culturally different if the show had stuck the landing, but after the incredibly unpopular final season of Game of Thrones, fantasy stories of that type and that scale were not as in vogue. There have been epic fantasy television series that have tried to capture the same level of fascination, like MTV’s Shannara or Amazon’s other fantasy epic, The Wheel of Time, but nothing reached the height of Thrones; what came closest was probably Netflix’s The Witcher, a highly tongue-in-cheek adaptation of a series of video games based on a series of books that themselves critiqued Tolkien by largely ignoring the grand movements of armies and kings and focusing on a drifter out to put down low-level monsters. Game of Thrones was the kind of show you could strike up a conversation with a stranger about, no matter who or where you were. The Wheel of Time is most decidedly not.

Although neither House of the Dragon or The Rings of Power are there yet, HBO and Amazon are incredibly invested in their respective series. House of the Dragon earned 10 million viewers on its first episode, according to HBO, and that number has continued to grow. Amazon claims that The Rings of Power earned 25 million viewers on its first day. It isn’t clear what these numbers mean or measure, and we have to take the corporations’ word for them anyway. But these shows are each certainly making a dent in the culture, and one strain of commentary has been more prevalent than others.

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To the people who dislike the idea of a black elf or a black dragon rider, the very existence of someone cast as the “wrong” race in a fantasy show invalidates its entire premise. Even House of the Dragon, which calls into question exactly how healthy a monarchy is, attracts a secondary audience that is there less for the subversion and more for the brutal depiction of a monarchist state. (House of the Dragon’s depictions of gendered violence are far more centered on the experiences of the women suffering them than Thrones’ were, but they remain depictions of gendered violence.) In the more straightforward The Rings of Power, the existence of a black elf similarly undoes the perceived purity of the long-lived, wise, ruling caste. 

If you long for a time of great heroes and kings, and if your fantasy is one in which the world is “simpler” because that you don’t have to consider a racialized experience, then being confronted with the existence of race means that you can no longer suspend your disbelief. There’s a word for the kind of person who longs for a return to monarchism, especially in America, where we have never had a monarch. They are neo-reactionaries, a subculture of which people like the famed investor and anti-democracy activist Peter Thiel are a part. Thiel even named his surveillance company Palantir, after the seven indestructible seeing stones in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. More worryingly, he funds cultural projects that support his neo-reactionary views like the “anti-woke” New People’s Cinema film festival.

Of course, not everyone who likes these shows is a reactionary—many, many more people like them because they offer space within the medieval fantasy genre for new faces and new politics. Ismael Cruz Cordova, who plays Arondir in The Rings of Power, was inspired to be an actor because of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He kept auditioning for the show because he wanted to be a part of it so badly. Game of Thrones became a hit almost immediately because it attracted more than just what people perceive as fantasy fans—which is often shorthand for “women and people of color.” On Twitter, watching Game of Thrones with other black people through our posts on the #DemThrones hashtag was a weekly, communal experience. House of the Dragon explicitly puts a black character in the center of the action where Game of Thrones did not. This is, among other things, a critique of Tolkien, who depicted a lily-white world in which race intruded largely in the form of heavily racialized depictions of bestial subhumans; this newfound diversity is also, though, a critique of Thrones itself, in which people of color were largely portrayed as reliable best friend types, as well as servants, sex workers, and disposable cannon fodder.

“I like fantasy stories. (I wrote a whole television series about Democrats who get stuff done.),” he said over email. (His publicist made sure to add that his comment about the Democratic Party should be interpreted as a joke.) 

“I get more emotionally involved and inspired by Don Quixote, who tries and fails and is laughed at than I do with a superhero who wins,” he said. “The legend of King Arthur has been told a hundred different ways but always in a supernatural world. We’re just trying something else.”

To Sorkin, though, fantasy is a fictional space distinctly apart from other genres of fiction.

“When a story has supernatural elements—whether it’s the Ring trilogy or A Midsummer Night’s Dream—it’s not supposed to feel like the world we live in, which of course is a big part of its appeal,” he said.

For Gillen it’s not quite that simple. Fantasy settings can strip down our world, and illuminate our current situation from new angles.

“It simplifies things,” he said. “The world at the moment is very complicated. In a fantasy world, you can keep the complications, but also remove elements.”

Just this past week, a queen who has reigned for 70 years died. Her former subjects are now facing a winter season where their heating bills are expected to skyrocket, to the point that almost a quarter of adults in the UK expect to keep their heat off this winter. The new king fired up to a hundred people from his staff during the church service for the previous monarch. In the States, the disparity between the rich and the poor has actually led to widespread labor activism. Earlier this year, workers for Amazon unionized one of their warehouses, a first for the company. In defiance of the law and to discourage unionization at their stores, Starbucks has been giving benefits to non-union workers that it won’t give to unionized workers. The distinction between the ruling classes and the workers could not be more clear.

But the world that people like Jeff Bezos have built involves depredations more extreme than just the kinds of labor abuses that inspire people to battle long odds to form a union—it involves ones that would prevent them from doing so. Unlike the warehouse workers, Amazon drivers aren’t exactly employees. They’re contractors, and Amazon can end their contracts for any reason, effectively ending these small businesses and driving the contractors into debt. At the moment, a lot of people’s lives depend on contract work like this, colloquially known as the “gig economy.” Your Uber driver, food deliverer, grocery shopper, and Taskrabbit handyman aren’t employed by the apps you use to hire them, but instead contractors who work for below the minimum wage and have little recourse if something goes wrong on the job. It’s not all that different from the feudal system that forms the backdrop of popular fantasy shows; you don’t own anything, and most of what you earn goes to an already rich person making themselves richer off of your labor, who enjoys a similarly extractive relationship with a number of people far richer than they are, with all the money flowing up to a handful of lords who operate above the law. That Bezos took great offense to a Carnegie Mellon professor characterizing the late Queen Elizabeth as a “monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire” should not be a surprise. 

Bezos saw the offending tweet—which Twitter removed for violating its rules—as offensive particularly because it came from someone “supposedly working to make the world better.” The irony here is so obvious that it barely needs to be pointed out: Everything that Bezos has done with Amazon has made the world unquestionably worse, and the abuses that his workers face are sometimes unbelievable. Workers in Amazon warehouses are tracked every minute of their shift, sometimes peeing in bottles in order to complete their jobs without taking a bathroom break. These working conditions are also existent for the company’s delivery drivers, who can face being fired for peeing in bottles, but also for not making it to all the routes on their stops quickly enough. Sometimes these routes can include up to 50 stops a day.

Only within a very narrow interpretation of medieval fantasy is a person like Jeff Bezos a hero, a god-king come to save the human race from themselves. 

The basic substance of the critique that Game of Thrones and thus House of the Dragon makes is that the fight to sit on the Iron Throne, which in the fiction of this world is literally made up of the melted swords of the civilizations that these emperors have conquered, is one with no winner. In these stories, even if you manage to secure your right to power in a succession crisis, not only will hundreds of thousands of people die, you’ll also alienate everyone close to you. As a viewer who is not a billionaire, I get a sick comfort from stories like these, and the idea that the ruling classes are all walking gremlins. If you’re a billionaire I imagine you don’t care—even the depiction of a bad monarch is another piece of the powerful myth that monarchy or its equivalent is a valid way to organize society. In House of the Dragon, even if the decisions of the Targaryans are questioned, the idea that they are prophets with a special bloodline is not.

Jeff Bezos has over $150 billion, and The Rings of Power is yet another display of his vast wealth. It cost an estimated $1 billion to produce the show, and you can see it in each frame. The Rings of Power’s depictions of places like Khazad-Dun and Numenor are lush and full of detail, packed full of props and extras and immaculately designed costumes. In particular, the set design for the Harfoots—they’re hobbits but they live in a caravan—have this meticulously designed randomness to them, with each family tying different kinds of plants into their hair. Like Blue Origin and Bezos’s flight into space, as much as anything, The Rings of Power is a monument to the empire of money that Bezos has accrued. 

What’s fascinating about the position of someone like Bezos in this structure of power is that the fiction he likes so much—and he was invested enough in the show to give notes to the production team—depicts its ancient leadership as being ill-equipped for the world that’s coming. If this matters at all to Bezos is unclear, and seems unlikely, though if you’re a fan of Tolkien you’re probably aware that the ruling family in charge of the island city of Numenor will not last long. Neither will Numenor, which is long gone by the time of Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power depicts Isildur as a young man trying to get out of the shadow of his father—if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, you may better remember him as the king of Gondor who refused to give up the One Ring, leading to his doom.

The Rings of Power becomes a critique of Tolkien not just in that it has people of color in it, but also in that it allows the audience to imagine the kingdom before it fell. We can see that it’s not perfect. The kings of men, elves, and dwarves, by the virtue of where the story will go, will not be able to see the evil of Sauron rising in their midst, and some will aid and abet him. The idea of a righteous ruler is as much a fantasy here as the fantasy races. The world never was like this—we have far too many examples of leaders who have consolidated power and then used it to serve themselves rather than to be magnanimous. The fantasy for people like Bezos is that you can crown yourself king of the world and not be a monster.