All Men Must Lie

Today’s thought is being brought to you by:  States That Are Commonwealths, War, Sporks, and Readers Like You.

“You think darkness is your ally?  You merely adopted the dark.  I was born in it, molded by it.  I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding.”

This thought has nothing to do with The Dark Knight Rises, but I like that quote.  Instead, today’s thought is about why I am an unapologetic elitist, in one field in particular.  That field?  Nerdiness.  So I’m just going to come out and say it:  HBO producers are dicks for making Game of Thrones.  (Which is the wrong name for the series to begin with, by the way.)  They are dicks because they made something that made me decidedly uncool when I was younger into the thing that all the cool kids are doing.  I can’t go on facebook these days without hearing something about someone who died in the last episode.  I get it, important characters die.  Stop being surprised.  Ygritte dies next.  Now you know something.

The point I want to make today is not about George RR Martin’s love of killing fan favorites.  The point is that you can’t retroactively make yourself a fantasy nerd.  It doesn’t work that way.  You either grew up on fantasy or you didn’t.  Watching a tv show and doing a little background research just doesn’t cut it.

When I was a wee lad, I was picked on, rather relentlessly I might add, for my love of fantasy.  I have always enjoyed escaping into made up worlds and meeting strange characters.  I probably always will.  Magic in all of its forms has always captured my imagination.  I love it when I can read about a system of magic that makes sense, and is not a crutch for an author.  As much as I hate to admit it, Harry Potter has a fairly well defined magical formula.  A Song of Ice and Fire does not.  If you’re actually interested, the best magic system in a fantasy series is the Warrens in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen.  Now that it has become cool to like fantasy, I’m annoyed.  All of the years I spent being bullied and insulted have now become wasted, because I can say “I told you so,” to my heart’s content, but no one cares, and more importantly, it doesn’t change my past.

Think about it like this:  I loved something that made me an outcast.  Now, when I speak out about how much I dislike the bandwagon fans, I am still made an outcast.  I can take some solace in knowing that I’m ahead of the curve, but ultimately that’s pretty small comfort.  I suppose I’ll just continue doing what I love and waiting for it to become cool.

-Harry