The NY Times has an amazingly patronizing review of Game of Thrones:
In a sense the series, which will span 10 episodes, ought to come with a warning like, “If you can’t count cards, please return to reruns of ‘Sex and the City.’ ”
Well, gosh, Ms. Bellafante, I’m sorry all those characters hurt your pretty widdle head. Maybe you should return to reruns of trashy, materialistic sex soaps. Have fun with that.
The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.
You know, I quit going to book clubs because the level of discussion seldom held my interest, but the last time I was in one, we read quite a bit of fantasy — Sharon Shinn’s Archangel was memorable for appealing to the men just as much as the women despite having a pretty traditional romance plot — and not a lot of lit fic. Why? The literary crap we tried bored us to tears.
I’m hard-pressed to recall a sex scene in all of my recent television viewing. And… OK, I just checked my library, and despite the complete works of Georgette Heyer, fantasy still outnumbers romance by about 3 to 1.
Ladies, please join me in a (NSFW) Lily Allen singalong:
Considering I literally had a fantasy novel arrive on my doorstep today, I am right there with ya. :D