George R.R. Martin is the author behind A Song of Ice and Fire, adapted for HBO as Game of Thrones. That makes him one of the most influential fantasy authors alive, and not one who pulls punches. A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones were famous for brutally killing off characters, bringing a level of unpredictability to the genre a lot of people weren't used to. "If there's anything I don't like, it's predictable books, predictable TV shows, predictable movies. We've all seen them," Martin said during an interview with fellow fantasy author Joe Abercrombie. "I like the suspense of not knowing what's gonna happen next, and where it's gonna be, and who is gonna survive and who's gonna die."
I think Martin would say this is part of his broader commitment to realism, another thing that A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones were known for. People don't have plot armor in real life, so why should characters in books? Martin also includes plenty of sex and violence in his works; they're parts of life, so why should they be excluded?
But Martin has noticed that certain audiences, particularly American audiences, react very differently to these two subjects. "I have found...the American audience, when it comes to this, is not at all disturbed by the amount of violence in the books. I can do a detailed description of a battle scene, I can have a guy tortured to death, I can have people get an arrow in their eye or whatever it is, and American audiences — even young people — nobody is distrubed by violence," he said.
"But sex? Sex is potentially explosive. How much sex are you going to have? How are you going to present it? What is the vocabulary that you present? What words do you use? The older fantasy books just had...they would kiss and then there would be a break and then the next morning they would wake up. Nobody much does that anymore."
Martin is far from the first person to notice that people feel very differently about violence in media vs sex. Why exactly is this? Consult a sociologist. What we do know is that despite puritanical attitudes towards sex, people still love reading about it. Romance novels have long been extremely popular. And more recently, romantasy books have gotten very popular, as Martin himself can tell you. "Right now, I am told that the hottest genre or subgenre in imaginative literature is romantasy, which is epic fantasy with a strong romance element, and in some of it the strong romance element is presented with explicit sex scenes," he said.
Popular romantasy series include A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, and Powerless, two of which are currently being turned into TV series by Amazon, so Hollywood has taken notice of this trend as well. You could call something like Twilight a romantasy series as well, although that had horror/supernatural elements rather than high fantasy elements.
The point is that even if people are skittish about sex in public, they very much enjoy reading about it and watching it; "sex sells" is an aphorism for a reason. Martin points out that, in romantasy books, the sex scenes are "often presented in a kind of poetic way." Maybe that provides people with an out, at least in their own heads: if the sex scenes are written poetically enough, they're not sex scenes, they're erotic poetry, and that's not filthy, it's fancy.
Martin isn't likely to write any romantasy any time soon, but there will be sex and violence enough in The Winds of Winter, the long-in-coming next book in his Song of Ice and Fire series. As for when it's coming out, that mystery persists.
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