Arthurian Legends And Morally Grey Issues

Arthurian Legends and Morally Grey Issues

The stories of the legendary King Arthur are one of the most important influences on the modern fantasy genre of literature, film, and other artistic mediums. The stories helped establish many of the characteristics and traits of the genre today. Many of the tropes of any story set in a Medieval setting can trace their roots back to classic Arthurian legends. Even the stories of King Arthur reflect the world they are written in. The character of King Arthur has greatly changed over hundreds of years, each time reflecting the virtues, and ideals of the world they are written in. Ranging from the martial warriors of King Arthur Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory to the very Victorian England version of

Martin created the world of A Song of Fire and Ice with the contents of Westeros and Essos, a fantasy world that strips away all of the whimsical beauty often seen in fantasy stories. Every action has a consequence, every choice is coated in uncertainty. And the uncertainty of every action is only made more ambiguous by the morally gray world of Westeros. They may make choice that seems right in a moral sense, but it can result negatively. Martin sees that his novels can have the honest necessity to reflect the real world and he takes full advantage of this as his world is one where people die sometimes ugly deaths, no matter how beloved the person is. Main characters are killed off so that the reader will not expect the supposed hero to survive, and instead will feel the same tension and fear that the characters might. When the character makes a choice on a very morally grey issue, the reader has the same amount of knowledge about what will happen as the character they are reading about. The novels reflect the substantial death rates in war. The deaths of supernumerary extras or monsters common in fantasy have no major effect on readers, whereas the death of a friend has much more emotional impact. And many chapters in the books set in the wars instead focus on the effects the wars have on the common people. Many characters face the problem of increasing numbers of refugees and the food shortages associated with the destruction. Martin based the events of the stories and it’s tone off of real historic events like the English civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses (1455 to 1487 AD). The characters that the audience begins to assume will do the right thing will often not be rewarded as such. Even the romances of the main characters inhabiting Westeros have dire consequences unlike those of a standard romance. These romances have consequences more severe than those of Romeo and Juliet where the lovers die and go even beyond the destruction caused by