News Reporter: Act Four: As 'Game of Thrones' continues into uncharted territory, what counts as canon?

Wednesday 29 June 2016

Act Four: As 'Game of Thrones' continues into uncharted territory, what counts as canon?

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen and Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister in HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” (Helen Sloan/HBO)

(Almost) every week, I dedicate this installment of the newsletter to a question from the previous Monday’s chat. If you want to read the transcript from our most recent conversation, you can do that here. While the chat will be going on a brief hiatus for July 4 and so I can recuperate from some upcoming (minor) surgery, you can submit questions for the July 18 chat here. And if you just can’t get enough of me talking “Game of Thrones” for the year, you can check out my Facebook Live chat with David Malitz here.

This week, a reader has a lingering question about “Game of Thrones”:

How should we think about the world [George R.R. Martin] has created if he never finishes the books? Do the final three seasons of GOT become part of the canon of this world? Or do we just have endless fights forever about what GRRM would REALLY have done? And does A Song of Ice and Fire become, like, the most successful multi-media project ever?

My tendency, however waffling it may be, has been to say that, if canon is what the authors said happened, and fan fiction is what observers wish had happened, then both “Game of Thrones” and Martin’s novels are canon in their own spheres. “Game of Thrones” isn’t fan fiction; it’s an authorized adaptation that Martin himself has written for. They may be different, but they don’t have to be in competition, especially if their major plot points are essentially the same. I know I am very much looking forward to reading Cersei Lannister’s point of view chapter as the Great Sept of Baelor goes up in a roar of wildfire.

I understand the tendency to want one, definitive edition. But given the tendency of the current media environment to produce all sorts of adaptations and spin-offs of every available story, I think that debates about which one is best, or who did it better, are often the least interesting conversations we can have about works like these. Why does it have to be a choice? Why not talk about how Lena Headey’s performance of Cersei brought new dimensions to Martin’s writing, or talk about the way the expanding number of perspectives in Martin’s novels laid the grounds for some awesome television casting?

People for whom enjoyment of the entire story rests on, say, Lady Stoneheart can enjoy the series their own way, just as folks who love Yara Greyjoy as she is in the show can have theirs. One of the more exhausting trends in cultural coverage right now is the need to reduce everything to definitive answers, to neatly-ranked lists, to determinations about which opinion is right. Art’s great precisely because it’s subjective. Let’s not reduce “Game of Thrones” by limiting our discussions of the show and novels to litigating something so ephemeral as what counts as canon.