Game of Thrones – Suspension of Disbelief
For fantasy to really work for an adult audience, one of the things its needs is the suspension of this disbelief. This does not mean that the audience believes what it is seeing is true, but that the audience has been persuaded to stop actively disbelieving it is not true.
For me as an adult fan of fantasy films, LOTR attained this very well. However the Narnia films died on their feet, because I just could not believe in the film for the duration of the story. I could not look past certain aspects and put my disbelief to one side for a moment.
For myself, the suspension of disbelief requires two things:
Firstly, it needs to be a world is consistent and in which the fantasy setting has an ethos and a mythology and does not stray too far from that central mythology. When Santa turned up in Narnia, what little suspension of disbelief I had was instantly shattered. However in comparison, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the rings knew its mythology, stuck it to its mythology, and I was therefore able to immerse myself within the story.
Secondly, the world has to be believable and consistent with its own laws of logic. Jackson’s take on middle earth was by no means realistic, but everything worked (more or less) with its own mythology. Characters had roles and limits and worked consistently within them. When I accepted the premises which the world worked in, I was asked to believe nothing which was unreasonable.
Narnia on the other hand was a complete mess. It had no tangible internal logic and was impossible to believe. A major factor in this was the capabilities shown by characters who were small children. It took a fantasy and made it into a fairy tale for me.
It is much easier to maintain a suspension of disbelief in the written form where images are much more controlled by our imagination and detached from the world we know than it is on the screen where imagery is created for us and reminds of our daily reality by its very visual nature.
This is my concern for Game of Thrones. The setting is dark and violent and does not take prisoners, but as the books continue, some of the major characters are nothing more than young children , who in any earthly situation would be out of their depth. It is easier for us to maintain that suspension of disbelief in the written form, but will it survive the translation onto the big screen where we see in essence teenagers taking to the fore?
The answer comes not from me but from the man who coined the phrase, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He said what is needed to maintain that suspension of disbelief is “ … a human interest and a semblance of truth…”. If the human side of the story can be kept alive and well, and the essential nature of the characters believable (especially the children), we should be able to see this potential problem fade into background”.
“but as the books continue some of the major characters are nothing more than young children , who in any earthly situation would be out of there depth. It is easier for us to maintain that suspension of disbelief in the written form, will it survive the translation onto the big screen where we see in essence teenagers taking to the fore?”
I want to quote you and reply to this.
Probably the mistake you’re making is to think of these kids like “todays” kids. When they’re not. The Middle Ages times where different, but i can easely translate this matter to my father. He was just 6 during the World War II, living almost alone in a farm with one brother and 5 sisters, (my granpa on the enemy lines and my grandma at work far away from home) he’s gone through some major pain with Fascists and Nazis in this area, what the stark kids gone through the series is nothing compared to what my dad and my aunties gone through that time.
Kids will always find a way to survive, even when you, an adult think they’re not going to make it. Probably today kids won’t survive two days in a forest, scared like they are of GERMS. *LOL*
P.S. Sorry for my bad english, i was just trying to explain myself
Btw the site looks great! Love it
I appreciate the point that you are making, having come back from work with Township kids in South Africa this past year, I know how resilient children can be. I also know that resilience often bears a high price.
However I probably didn’t articulate myself correctly in the article, the suspension of disbelief does not depend on whether teenagers can deal with the issues at hand or not, it is whether the viewer, believes that it is plausible that teenagers can deal with the issues at hand.
You obviously have no issue with believing it plausible that teenagers could survive even thrive in those situations, however I have some reservations on whether a mainstream TV audience would agree with you.
I have picked up that some of the character ages have been increased which I think will help the issue significantly, and make another couple of issues which I may post about later easier to deal with.
To be fair the original book also had Father Christmas in it. In a way they were too faithful to the original. LotR took one of it’s silliest moments in Tom Bombadil out. The Narnia books were written for a much younger audience than LotR or AGoT. I believe the film makers have made a mistake by filming them in the order they were published, rather than the chronological order.
I don’t know if you’ve finished all four books yet, but what those kids go through is brutal. The high price of their resilience, as you put it, is paid in spades and explicitly clear. Please don’t read further if you don’t want to know anything (I won’t give away details but will make generalizations).
Where Arya is mentally and emotionally by the end of book 4 is functionally sociopathic and perhaps even functionally psychopathic. She’s the child version of the character Dexter from the Showtime series. One of the things that makes these books so compelling is the very real picture they paint of the effects of violence, war, deprivation, and abrupt societal change on children. Based on where the books are going, I think that Jon is being set up as the mythic hero, whereas Sansa is being set up as the mythic heroic politician (my belief is that Sansa is the primary student of “The Game of Thrones,” and her character arc is going to end with her assuming the Winterfell crown as its wisest and most benevolent–yet savvy and politically brilliant–ruler. Jon will have the morality to rule, but Sansa will have the actual ability to rule.) Arya, meanwhile, paints the opposite story–what happens when an intelligent, resourceful, and opinionated child is given no hope, no security, no affection, and no safety net to test out her morality. She becomes controlled chaos, and quite frightening. I think this is an excellent cautionary tale, and makes me say “no wonder” when I hear the horror stories of child mercenaries and the things they do in Western Africa, for example. They didn’t seem to have much of a choice. Arya was give one choice: die or become what she did. She chose to live, but the cost was, frankly, her soul. What do you think?
David,
A long post and you have got well past where I have read to in the books, so I wont comment directly upon that aspect of you post, well not until I have read the books further.
However my experiences of children in challenging situations (for me it was kids growing up in townships in South Africa), is that they don’t become wholey broken they actually become randomly broken and kinda incomplete.
Contradictions who move between adult decision making and childishness at a blink, who are capable of extreme generosity and inhuman cruelty in the same instance, and have no concept of the juxtapose between the two.
However they retain an ability to come through the horrendous apparently relatively unscathed, and heal emotionally at a rate that adults would find mind boggling. There was a girl who we fostered for 3 months who was wild and uncontrollable when she first came to us, who after 3 months of just living with a normal but very much imperfect family, had returned to normal child like patterns of behaviour.
i’m not sure if that answered your point at all, but its what you post provoked in me.