Season 4 of Game of Thrones begins in a few hours. Being in a country where I don’t receive HBO, I think I’m one of the few cases where piracy really is justified. If I had the money and the availability, I would pay for the privilege, promise. I cannot wait for 4.30AM local time, when the episode lands upon the shores of a certain Bay in Sweden. I have my alarm set. I’ve read all the books now- I finished A Dance with Dragons a few weeks back(Also pirated, but I swear if I had the money I would buy them. Pinkie promise!). Not only that, I’ve read the preview chapters of The Winds of Winter, so I can’t wait for 2015 either. All this anticipation has got me thinking: for ten weeks starting April 6th, the only thing occupying my mind will be Game of Thrones. Counting actual screen time, only during 10 of those hours will I be face to face with a cinematic imagining of Westeros and the Known World. Ten hours that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
Of my nearly 22 years of life, I’ve
spent a total of about 160 hours (ridiculously generous estimate) reading the A
Song of Ice and Fire series. Adding time spent thus far watching Game of
Thrones (30 hours first-run, 10 hours rewatching season 1 when I “got” the
scale and detail of the world I’d invested in and maybe another 5 watching and
rewatching the Red Wedding scene) makes 205 hours. If I count time spent
reading supplementary material, surfing wikis, reading/watching the theories of
fans crazier than myself all over the internettubes and perusing maps and the
like (which, it might surprise you, accounts for almost half my supplementary
time) it comes up to maybe 250, max. 250 hours, out of approximately 191,544.5 (accurate to withing a couple of minutes as of posting this) of my life thus far. Yet those 250 hours have gone on to become a part
of me, to define who I am. When faced with a situation, one of the first
questions I will ask myself is “What would Jon Snow do?” I look at episodes of
my life, situations I find myself in, and I immediately compare them to
something that happened in Westeros. Gee whiz, that news story plays out rather
like the Florent/Tyrell tensions. So, money rules our world, right? Just like
gold rules Westeros? That treacherous bastard. He must have some Bolton blood
in him. Yet none of those places, none of those people, none of those
situations are real! They’re all just figments of the imagination of some guy
who lives in Arizona whom I’ve never even met!
And all this is just with one fictional
Universe that’s relatively new to me – I first got into it when I watched
season 1 of Game of Thrones around mid-2012. Imagine what it must be like with
universes and franchises I’ve been invested in for far longer and have consumed
much more material from? Star Trek, Doctor Who, the Foundation series, heck,
the granddaddy of them all, Warhammer 40,000! I have spent so much time: physically
through the page, virtually on the computer screen, for 60 brief minutes
multiplied more times than I can count in a feature film and in the scapes of
my imagination, I’ve lived more in the worlds of Warhammer than far too many human beings do in our physical universe. At times I feel like Warhammer is my life, a
metaphor which extends itself into reality by the fact that the handle I use
for most of my Internet presence – Enter_Skitarii – is itself based off
something in 40k. And being the recluse that I am, it’s obvious that I live
most of my life on the Internet.
It always blows my mind, the influence
that fiction has on our lives. Yet it shouldn’t, really. Our propensity for
fiction is just an extension of our love of stories. All through human existence,
our primary mode of gaining first experience of something has been through the
telling of tales. Folk tales, inganekwane
in my native Ndebele, told by the fireside have been the primary mode of
instilling wonder and curiosity at the world for thousands of generations. The
stories brought by the visitor from three villages over have been the primary
method of gaining knowledge of the world at large since time immemorial. The
tales of the old, grizzled and scarred hunter or warrior have been the source
of inspiration, as well as the warning of the dangers of the trade to those who
wished to follow in his footsteps.
Looking earlier still at our
evolutionary history, looking even at our cousins who haven’t quite found it in
themselves to leave the cosy, warm jungles, heck, looking at nearly every
species on earth, we can see why (causatory why, not epistemological why) the
desire for stories was coded into our genes. Other primates have their calls, elephants
have subsonic rumbles transmitted through their feet and the ground, bees have
the little jig they do. One creature passing information to another has been one
of the things that have allowed species to survive, by creatures sharing with
each other information about the whereabouts of food, the presence of predators
and other factors that could affect their survival.
As we learn more and more about the
nature of memory, we learn that we actually really don’t remember things as objectively as we think. Our perceptions and prejudices colour our memories, things
get added on and altered as other memories jostle for position. We add elements
from our own imagination in an effort to make the story more interesting or
impressive and, if we tell the story to others and ourselves enough, we become
unable to tell the interlocution from reality. Hell, I took a few liberties
with this post to make it more interesting, and I can feel one or two of those
starting to insinuate their way into my memories. I notice this most clearly
when I rewatch movies that were iconic in my childhood. They’re often wildly
different from what is contained in my memory. I used to think this was an
effect of things I’d experienced as a child. But when I recently reread HorusRising (WHICH I BOUGHT WITH MY OWN MONEY BECAUSE IT WAS AVAILABLE AND I
COULD!!!) after about a year and a half I found several elements of the story
that were different from what I remembered. Given half a decade, I can see how
it could be quite considerably different.
It’s not just with made-up stories, but
with things that have happened directly to me, to which I was a first-hand
witness as well. Totally sober experiences with my friends will come out
differently when told individually by each of us. Not just emphasis, but
details, what someone was wearing, what they said , what they did, which
direction they ran when the grumpy old man finally caught us, whether he had a
gun or his penis half-visible through the robe he was or maybe was not wearing.
Different as they are, each of those stories is true.
So this makes me think: if personal
experience can be so subjective and prone to deviation from what actually
happened, is it really any different from fiction? The stories we weave, both
from things that have happened to us and from the infinite reaches of our
imagination are, qualitatively, not that different. They are all equally valuable.
Stories are the true currency of human experience, and there is no false coin.
