View a Copy of This License, Visit Or Send a Letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. A Note on Terminology As it has become customary within colloquial parlance to refer to the common world of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series created by George R. R. Martin, and Game of Thrones, the HBO television series adapted from the books, by the name of the television show, for sake of ease and consistency I will continue that tradition. However, a distinction must be drawn between the name of the television show and that of the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones. The title of the first book in the series utilizes a clear indefinite article at its beginning, and it is with this article that I will make a distinction between the two. All other titles and terminology should be self-evident. Introduction When considering the genre of fantasy, it is easy to dismiss it as niche or isolated. To be sure, magic and monsters seem about as far removed from the general human experience as one can get. Moreover, fantasy, as other genres, is not immune to truly terrible offerings, which present as all the more outrageous given the seemingly alien worlds within the fantasy genre. However, fantasy, like its settings and characters, may be more than it appears on the surface. As a genre, fantasy is relatively new to the literary corpus and continues to develop and expand over time, often drawing from reality for inspiration.
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