I'm with POJ, one of the reason I was first drawn to the books is that they are set in a time period where you had knights and ladies, when kings took to the field of battle. When your sword and shield were your closest companions. I mean how many of us have pictured ourselves back in that time as a knight.
I think what separates GOT though is that it doesn't leave out all the unpleasantness in the world. It puts it right out there. In most of these stories you have the noble lords and the evil lords and good triumphing over evil in the end, but here you have an element of realness where they noble lords are naive to the ways of power, where the biggest threat isnt the side with the biggest army but the people with the right knowledge. Where the cruelties of the world are not swept under the rug like they dont exist. You have a world where known murderers and rapists are prominent knights, you have prominent families hiding big secrets that would bring them down. You have characters that you would think would be evil turning out to be honorable, and those that you think would be honorable turning out to be evil.
You have characters who you would be considered as good doing things that would be considered bad. You have people just like in real life doing what they have to do to make their way in the world.
A few spoilers for those who havent seen the episode yet
Now onto the new season, yeah the battles are coming this season covers the war and I know that the actual fighting is a big part of the fantasy genre. Last nights episode was good but not much happened it was really more of a catch up/into episode for the old and new characters. Even in that we learned more about some of them. We learned that Robb is coming into his own as a king and leader of men but at the same time he is still prone to making mistakes. We see that Joffery is even more vicious and nasty and increasingly more uncontrollable and even his mother is starting to fear him. The whole exchange between Littlefinger and Cersei where we have the knowledge is power argument countered with no power is power. I liked how HBO pulled no punches in the last couple of minutes of the episode with the purge of Robert's bastards, you had the city watch ripping kids from their home drowning them, well at one point we see one of them carrying a dead baby away by the legs and the drowning of a child. The problem I had was that you only really got a few minutes with the characters but I understood why it was that way. One other thing that got me though a minor thing, but I could not help but think to myself Ros must be one hell of a working girl because she went from the new girl from the north to running one of little fingers brothels rather quickly.
