ABSTRACT
Game of Thrones inherited the generic bias of the English history plays from Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, and the debates about identity politics in the series are, in part, a function of that inheritance. The generic bias toward English royalty in history plays led Shakespeare to exclude women and include both ethnocentric depictions of other nations and classist representations of working people. These gender, ethnic, and class biases in Shakespeare informed the genre of historical fiction that influenced Martin, while Game of Thrones added the generic biases of fantasy literature, specifically the orientalizing depictions of race. Generic bias then offers up a ready-made defense—That’s just how things are done in this genre—when problematic representations of identity are identified and critiqued. In each case, generic bias excludes certain identities from representation, uses offensive stereotypes for those included, and perpetuates these conventions over time—often quite apart from any deliberate authorial intent, sometimes in tension with egalitarian authorial efforts.
