‘Game of Thrones’ Is a Fantasy Story

Game of Thrones has long been treated like a political thriller set in a fantasy world, but as the story hurtles toward its endgame, it has had to grapple with the fantastical elements of the universe. But it hasn’t always done that well, something that Binge Mode hosts Jason Concepcion and Mallory Rubin believe could be due to a discomfort the showrunners seem to feel when dealing with those elements. But as Concepcion and Rubin explain on their podcast about the Season 7 finale, fantasy isn’t just for children.

Listen to the full podcast here. This transcript has been edited and condensed.

Concepcion: Fantasy is, as a genre, often derided as stories for children. Simplistic, unserious tales about wizards and dragons and fairies. Magical swords, chosen princes who defeat evil. Certainly, that is the main criticism hurled at two stories that Mal and I love: Harry Potter and, less pointedly in the beginning but certainly more so now, the Song of Ice and Fire series and Game of Thrones.

I think one of the things that Mal and I are concerned about is the kind of ham-handed way the series has dealt with the fantasy elements, certainly as the show has moved beyond the books—a way that almost seems like they're embarrassed of those elements. And, sure, fantasy stories are about those things, about princes and magical swords and all that stuff, and those things are certainly childish in a certain way. But that's where their power comes from. From places that are really so fragile that they have to be hidden away from life's hard edges. And that's what growing up is, really, a relentless shedding of childhood things that are too impractical to carry forward into adulthood. Too fragile to expose to the light. Too achingly embarrassing to really say out loud. Fantasy's role is to create a world where the howling absences and random tragedies of life have hidden meanings. It's to fulfill that childish desire, hopefully still alive in all of us, all of you. To be special.

A crippled boy becomes a powerful sorcerer. A bastard becomes a king. Broken things heal with newfound strength in ways we never expect. We all inhabit these interior worlds of unspoken dreams and fears. A great fantasy story lets us share those worlds in a way that feels thrilling, but safe. Sad, but also hopeful. In real life, words fail us, all the time. Every day. There's things you want to say to people that you just never say. For your whole life. In fantasy, life-long bonds are forged wordlessly with dragons and owls and wolves. And these tales are a way to meet profound grief wrapped in the armor of imagination.

Think of Harry Potter's story without magic: A child—a baby, really—loses his parents to a car accident. Scarred, physically and psychologically, he goes to live with distant relatives. Resentful of the burden his care puts on them, they bully and ignore him. He sleeps in a storage space filled with spiders under the stairs. Every day, he watches the mail carrier bring in the mail, and he imagines that one of those letters would be for him, calling him away to someplace better, and none of them ever do. Gradually, a darkness, which has always been there inside of him, which he can't express and doesn't understand, grows. And one day, he just decides to walk into the woods, intent on ending his own life. Pulls his jacket tight about him and thinks about his parents. Wonders what they would say if they were there with him now.

Or think about Game of Thrones without the magic. A boy grows up, never knowing his mother. His father's wife hates him. Desperate for a place to call home and to make his father proud he joins the military. When he's gone, his father and half brother are murdered. An orphan, a refugee from war, on the streets in a foreign land, is sold to a stranger like a piece of furniture by her own brother.

But of course, in these stories, Harry's parents didn't die in some accident that means absolutely nothing to his life. They died to save him from ultimate evil. The scar he carries marks him as special—magical. There's an entire community of magical people watching over him, all the time, waiting for just the right moment to pluck him out of his everyday world into his own. He finds friendship and love there, allowing him to meet danger and loss with kindness that he didn't know he possessed. And in his darkest moment, when he believes that the only way to save the world is to kill himself, essentially, he's able to call his parents to him. To talk to them. Their love and pride in him sustains him on a long, dark walk.

Jon Snow isn't a bastard. He's the only one who can stop the White Walkers. His father was a prince, his mother a noble lady. Dany is the rightful queen whose grief at losing her husband and unborn child is what births magic back into the world. These are the kind of stories we tell ourselves in secret when night goes on forever. When everyone around you is turned into a machine, seemingly.

And so we would like to urge the showrunners—Mal and I—to try to stop treating the magic parts of this show as the Dursleys treated Harry, something to stuff under the stairs and not think about, or really flesh out, and [instead] engage with those things. Explain them. How do Bran's powers work? How does Arya's Faceless Men training work? Are Viserion's flames fire, ice, or simply pure magic? What are the Night King's motivations? What's the nature of the relationship between Jon and Ghost, and Dany and her dragons? Those are the things that make fantasy stories important, and they're so important to this story.

Rubin: I think that one of the things that people always say about fantasy is, "It's an escape." But what is escapism, really? Like, is it just about separating yourself from the unpleasant realities of your life to find something that's totally foreign and unrecognizable? No. It never works that way. It's about identifying that DNA that defines who you are in another world that has just a few colors and people and places and ideas repositioned in a way that could change everything. About how other people see you, and how you see yourself, and what you think is possible. And that's an incredibly powerful thing, and it's why stories like this mean so much to us. And that's a really awesome thing. We're very grateful for it.

Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.