Basically, blame geography for the absence of technological and subsequent social revolution in Westeros and it starts making sense.

Moorcock ranges from pretty standard (although subversive in tone) pulp fantasy to New Wave experimental writings. At some point on that spectrum his writings are pretty clearly no longer fantasy as such. The settings in his pulp fantasy stuff are pretty standard pseudo-medieval (or pseudo-antique) set-ups, despite the very different ideological slant to Heinlein (Elric was envisaged as an anti-Conan) and Tolkein that he takes.

In most fantasy dragons, wizards etc. are pretty much paraphernalia sprinkled on top of a pseudo-medieval social world. It’s pretty rare that magic geegaws actually affect the social structure of fantasy settings (as they obviously actually would), they just provide macguffins and special effects. I grant that people often categorise narratives by certain signifiers, rayguns=scifi and magic swords=fantasy. But that’s not all there is to it. Star Wars is clearly fantasy despite scifi trappings (complete with a knightly religious order and a pseudo-Roman political set-up). I think my working definition of fantasy as supposedly realistic historically-inspired setting plus magic sprinkled on top holds up fairly well. Once the social setting is primarily the work of the imagination I think we’re heading off to other genres (speculative/science fiction if it is rationalised, slipstream if not).

Le Guin’s Earthsea series (haven’t read her other fantasy) is a cut above most fantasy because magic in those books possesses a unique sort of verisimilitude. Le Guin obviously has a keen sense of how actual human societies have understood magic.

The reason most fantasy is pretty lame is because it rarely makes much internal sense and the medieval social world it presents is usually sanitised and romanticised. Fantasy is ideological in that it buys into nonsense elite narratives from the actual medieval era (knights errant etc. ). But fantasy settings provide good canvasses for big special effects, exciting adventures and power fantasies without moral complications – so the genre stays popular in film, book, comic, rpg, computer games etc.

When fantasy is acting as a vehicle for escapism verisimilitude doesn’t really matter, and I agree it’s pure entitled whining to start complaining about gay monarchs or [a href="http://fuckyeahscifiwomenofcolour.tumblr.com/post/37413846476/author-scott-lynch-responds-to-a-critic-of-the"]black female pirates[/a] in a genre full of chainmail bikinis. But I think GoT is aiming at something a bit different, something that of necessity ties it (a little bit) more closely to historical reality. I may be attaching a bit too much importance to genre boundaries in all of this though.

I don’t think GoT is really a critique of actual feudalism, but it portrays the medieval era with a fair degree of honesty – which counts for quite a lot I think (but maybe all of this is special pleading). I guess it could be considered a critique of standard genre fantasy, Sansa’s plot line involves the systematic destruction of her romantic ideas of chivalry. But yes it still does play on the romance of fluttering house standards and brave knights even as it displays a level of mercilessness about showing us what underpins such a system.

True, if GoT were set in the 1990s it would have to be set in Mogadishu or Myanmar or somewhere, which I agree wouldn’t have the same appeal. Knights and castles increase the distance from the backstabbings, battles and brutalisations. But then again everyone loves The Wire…

Moreover, I don’t quite accept the ‘verisimilitude of feudalism’ thesis. Most fantasy, of course, has a feudal-ish feel, but it seems that it usually means ale and knights and blacksmiths, rather than any kind of plot connection to the relevant social relations. The distinction between dragons as paraphernalia, but institutionalised homophobia as essential to the realism of the thing, doesn’t work for me for that reason. A show that had wizards and peasants and corsets but with communities ruled be meritocratic collectives of gay lovers would still be ‘fantasy’ and wouldn’t, I don’t think, be mistaken for ‘sci-fi’ by the median viewer. It may disturb them, and unsettle their expectations, but the genre motifs woudn’t be in doubt.

In any case, it gives the lie to the ‘critique’ function of such narratives, since there aren’t any actual defenders of feudalism left to disprove (not even craven monarchists). No, it still seems to me that some kind of libidinal identification is what’s going on, some enjoyment of the regressive that wouldn’t be possible if the same characters and plot were set in the mid-1990s.

I didn’t spell it out very well here – in part because it’s something I’ve just started thinking about – but I’d want to argue that a right to truth is a right to exert democratic control over the knowledge-power relationships of individuals and government institutions. One point of contention is that I do think the US government is criminalising truth – not in the sense of criminalising a particular true statement but criminalising the processes by which particular truths are produced. The example of truth obtained in criminal investigations inappropriately is a case in point – who do such limitations serve? It seems at the moment in the US it is moving towards protecting the right of the government to possess and use information/truth as it sees fit and limiting the access of citizens and rolling back existing protections.

So I’d argue that it’s not really (or just) the right to truth that is at stake, rather all the implications that are embedded in the knowledge-power relationship of individuals and government: who is allowed to know the truth about whom? The US government after all is not really criminalising the truth, but rather the act of inversing the knowledge-power structure between individual and government that it favorises. (An interesting reversal of this by the way is the disallowing of evidence that police obtained in an illegal manner – but too much of an excursion here). The PRISM programme shows just how far the US government is willing to use the state to its advantage in a quest to veil its own actions in secrecy while obtaining as much ‘truth’ about the lives of citizens. Very awful developments all around.

But I disagree with the thrust of what you are saying when you write: ‘there can be no gay marriage in alternative universes: only shape-shifters and dragons and green fire and black magic and wargs and vengeful wraiths’. No, there can’t: standard fantasy offers a putatively realistic setting based on a period in history, onto which totally fantastic paraphernalia are layered. Standard fantasy is the opposite of speculative fiction, which feature social arrangements very different from those which have actually existed, the existence of which is explained in part through technological artifacts/events that are realistic or at least rationalised (Brave New World, Handmaid’s Tale etc). Now a lot of standard fantasy is bad, presenting a romanticised caricature of medieval Europe full of noble knights, jolly lords and grateful peasants (Charlie Stross has criticised steampunk along similar lines). But part of why GoT has been a success is itslevel of verisimilitude and honesty about the realities of a feudal/dynastic society.

Maintaining that verisimilitude rules out gay marriage, but it demands that gay people are shown to exist within the Seven Kingdoms. The danger is buying a society’s ideology in the process of depicting it, and here GoT is pretty good if not perfect. There are obviously big limitations intrinsic to the conventional fantasy genre, but they come with the territory. Speculative and science-fiction are better vehicles for exploring alternative social arrangements.