This post is going to use HBO’s excellent show Game of Thrones as a thinly-veiled framework for me to provide anecdotes about my misspent youth, playing fantasy role-playing games with my friends. (To clarify, these would be pen-and-paper narrative-heavy role playing games, and not Fifty Shades of Grey style role playing games. More D & D than S & M. Capiche?)
The show’s been on for four years, and if you’re reading an article about Dungeons and Dragons and Game of Thrones, I assume you’re up to date on the show, so this is your unnecessary spoiler-warning. (I won’t be spoiling anything from the books.)
If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary. – Ginia Bellafante, New York Times 04/15/2011
The above quote was taken from Ginia Bellafante’s rather ill-conceived review of Game of Thrones, published a week or two into the show’s initial run. Her review, although not super-negative, was pretty dismissive saying that HBO’s adaptation of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire was “boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.”
The “boy fiction” crack has clearly turned out to be crazy talk, as the show’s demographics are very broad and inclusive.
Ginia, really.
