How 'Game of Thrones' Influenced My Writing Career

#VocalGOT

While I’ve heard a lot about Game of Thrones, especially from popular magazines, and the internet, I never really got into the program until April 2019, when the show was coming to a close. Nevertheless, the show has had a huge impact on my life.

It especially plays a role in my writing career. As a person with autism, it has always been difficult for me to connect with others in the real world. However, storytelling has always come naturally with me. A lot of people on the autism spectrum have fantastic imaginations, as they’re trapped in their own minds, and so find ways to keep themselves entertained with their time. A lot of creative minds, such as Stanley Kubrick, are suspected to having been on the autism spectrum. When I was little, I would play my fantasies in my head with my friends “Jorge” & “Angela.” Jorge was an adorably handsome rich boy who was also my boyfriend—he was also one of my very first crushes—while Angela was my spunky cool best friend. We were the “Three Musketeers,” and did pretty much everything together. In my imagination, I wasn’t a lost girl disconnected from the rest of the world. In my imagination, I was just like everyone else with my friends.

In Game of Thrones I can see parallels with the Stark family—Sansa, Arya, and Bran, are “Three Amigos” just like me, Angela and Jorge were back in the early 2000’s. I’m Sansa, because I’m a girly girl who often sees myself as a princess, but cannot handle the hardships of reality. However, as time went on, I became stronger, and better equipped to handle the problems of my life. Arya is Angela, as they are both adorably spunky tomboys who don’t take anyone’s garbage—which is why Arya made such a great hitwoman for someone who’s still technically a preteen. Angela even threatened her uncle with a knuckle sandwich once when he called her “Angie”—really. Now, because I was only eight, I never thought of Angela having a “hit list,” but she’s pretty close to being a more “family-friendly” Arya, so to speak. Even the close friendship between Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams in real life paralleled the relationship between Angela and me!

And last, but not least, Jorge is Bran. Like Bran, Jorge was a boy from a wealthy family who, for certain reasons, got special powers. (He more often than not got special powers in my stories, even if no one else in the story did, so I could fulfill a fantasy about being saved by him as a superhero.) He either enjoyed said powers, or felt uncomfortable with them—mainly because they were bizarre, and/or he was uncomfortable with his strict father finding out—but eventually came to accept them. The difficulties involving having a prissy rich boy having said powers, such as sweating and getting dirty, were solved easily—he’d never so much as get disheveled in a fight, no matter how nasty. He was, after all, supposed to be my handsome boyfriend as well as my “Superman”—technically he was more like Batman due to his wealth, but still.

Moreover, Bran is a “Warg,” which in Game of Thrones universe is a shapeshifter. In one of my stories, Jorge gains the ability to shapeshift into a panther, due to his anger at his perfectionist father as well as the stress from being in a traumatic situation. The “thrill” he gets from his power is similar to the thrill Bran gets from his power as a “Warg,” to the point he destroys his father’s car. Other stories also had him getting similar bizarre powers, such as becoming an Inspector Gadget-style cyborg after a traumatic accident. He even resembled Bran’s actor, Isaac Hempstead-Wright, what with his brown comb-over and “nerdy” glasses.

The show as a whole, thanks to the resemblance between my adventures with the characters, inspired me to write a script with my characters in my head. In my script, the main character, based on my younger self, is a little girl who moves to a new school to get the right accommodations for her difficulties, so her parents choose a school where everyone is “different,” i.e. they are all minorities. Throughout the story, Angela teaches the other kids at school to accept her as one of their own despite her bizarre personality and difficulties on the field. There are even more parallels of her to Arya, as Angela’s “hit list” involves protecting my character from bullies. For example, the day after my character gets roasted for messing up a game, she stands in front of the entire lunchroom, and announces, “I know Jenny can be weird, but she’s still a student here, and Rule #1 here is: we never let anyone feel left out.”

Technically, Angela had let her feel left out earlier in the film when she ate in the bathroom, but only because she didn’t know better. In fact, the reason she got distracted from her was due to a fight with her brother, whom himself was at the top of her “hit list” as he thinks he’s better, because he’s older and a boy. Cue a huge fight in the lunchroom, for everyone else to see. Had Arya gone to an early 2000s elementary school as opposed to a dark fantasy world, she probably would’ve had similar incidents with kids picking on her.

Meanwhile, the main character tries to get into a relationship with Jorge, despite Angela’s discouragement due to his snobbish personality. One of the reasons she likes him, is because she wants to see herself as a princess, and sees him as a “Prince Charming” despite his cold personality. Like Sansa, she wants to live a fantasy life, despite other characters warning her of the difficulties of doing so, and tries to find her “Prince Charming.” In fact, the very first day she meets him, she decides to sit with him, despite Angela’s warnings—she lets her eat with him, but says that trying to flirt with him is a bad idea. However, eventually she asks him “Want to go on a date?”... right after poor Angela discourages her from flirting with him! Technically, she does have a crush on another boy, but doesn’t know how to reconcile her feelings, and certainly doesn’t randomly walk up to him and say “Wanna go on a date?” Moreover, when Angela tells her about her big brothers, she gets excited, because she herself has always wanted a big brother, and Angela has four of them! Poor Arya also got annoyed by her sister’s femininity and naivety on the show—when she's told that “most girls” like pretty flowers, she says “Most girls are idiots.” Until she was forced to kill others as a boy, however, she stuck around with her older sister.

Unlike Bran, or Jorge in my early fantasies, Jorge has no special powers in the story. It’s supposed to be “realistic fiction,” but he wants to be a superhero just like his idol, Batman, despite the constraints of reality. Despite technically having no powers, Batman trained himself to be as powerful as Superman and Wonder Woman. Humorously enough, he even tries to skirt the issue of sweating, by saying he can “train himself not to sweat.” He sees himself as great because he has money, which would appear to make him analogous to King Joffrey. However, he’s still, at heart, an innocent nine-year-old boy, with nine-year-old boy fantasies. He wants to use his “powers” for good, not evil. Like Bran, Jorge has difficulty connecting with others due to his personality, and at first, gets annoyed that she wants to eat lunch with him. Throughout the show, Bran could be snippy at times, but he had a good heart when the chips were down, making Jorge more like him than King Joffrey.

My character is even more charmed and fascinated by the fact that Jorge wants to be a superhero, as she fantasizes about saving the world with him as a “Battle Couple,” despite not really training like he does. At one point, as my character talks with her parents about “weightlifting,” and how mediocre it is, she points out that Batman got his “powers” from training a lot, and discusses how her new “boyfriend” Jorge wants to do something similar. This excites and fascinates her mother, as this is the first time in her life that she’s had close friends. Eventually, when she gets mocked on the field for losing a game, he comes to comfort her in his superhero attire as “The Purple Widow.”

As for myself as a character, she learns that the world isn’t always fair, but that she can adjust herself to it, with help from a great support group, i.e. my new “friends.” After getting mocked on the field in front of everyone, she’s deeply hurt. However, when Angela invites her over to her house, she decides to help her play soccer, so that she doesn’t humiliate herself, and even invites her to her birthday party so she feels as though she fits in. She also gives her “pointers” on being cool—giving her advice on Halloween costumes so that she doesn’t look immature, telling her not to flap her hands strangely, etc. It wasn’t out of malice, however, she just wants her to fit in with everyone else. Sansa got similar training in Game of Thrones, because the dark atmosphere of Game of Thrones doesn’t accommodate damsels in distress, becoming stronger as a result.

All in all, the characters and plot from Game of Thrones parallel my fantasies. This goes to show that our favorite shows can connect with our imaginations, and vice versa!