Thought I had scheduled this weeks ago. Sorry for the delay!
George R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman held a public conversation at NYC’s Symphony Space in late October.
One thing that has characterized various ASoIaF projects is that they feature good guys who sometimes do bad things and bad guys who sometimes who do good things. In other words, they reflect real life.
GRRM and Neil Gaiman addressed this.
“The joy of history and history books is we use the word ‘probably’ a lot,” Gaiman said.
Martin responded, “A lot of people don’t want grey characters — they want heroes, they want villains. And we see that in real history. Especially here in America, we grow up and we hear about the Founding Fathers and various people in the past, and they’re our heroes. They’re wonderful, they’re flawless. And then we find out later that maybe they weren’t flawless. Maybe they had a flaw here and there. Maybe they did some pretty bad things occasionally. But they also did good things.”
He continued, “There seems to be a lot of people who cannot accept that. If they find a flaw, they immediately move shining hero to absolute dirtbag, and now we have to despise this person. Really, most human beings are somewhere in the middle. And we should just accept that.”