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When Game of Thrones first started last year, I was pretty intrigued. I hadn’t read the Song of Ice and Fire series, but I was excited at the idea of an ongoing fantasy television serial in the Lord of the Rings mold. You see, when The X-Files made geeky, heavily detailed mythologies safe for mainstream television in the ‘90s, it was the beginning of a new era for the nerd genres. No longer were fans stuck with Star Trek as their only television alternate universe to obsess over. We had horror (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), science fiction (Battlestar Galactica), spies (Alias) and islands (Lost), but we had yet to see a Middle Earth-esque fantasy world on a weekly basis.

Well, one mistake I made when first delving into Game of Thrones and the Westeros-verse, is to assume it would be an easy transition. I’ve been enjoying picking mythologies apart for decades now, including the aforementioned Hobbit habitat, so I figured this would be awesome! I’d be able to add another universe to my list, another detail-rich, fake society I could get to know better than the real one I actually live in. Then, I saw the first episodes and was overwhelmed… but not in the good way.

There were so many characters with funny fantasy names, so many locations with funny fantasy names, so much twisting and turning complexity between the relationships and storylines, so much back-story, I didn’t know what was going on. Here I am, I guy who knows that Sméagol is a Stoor, a family of hobbit that migrates away from the Shire, and eventually becomes Gollum, but I couldn’t quite grasp what a maester is and why knights are called “ser” instead of “sir”.

What I forgot was that HBO as a network doesn’t produce dramas that hold viewers’ hands through their world building. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact I respect that they don’t condescend to me. The thing is, gangsters (The Sopranos), cowboys (Deadwood), cops (The Wire), and so on, are real world mythologies with which the viewer is already familiar. Throwing them into these worlds without a life vest is okay because we go in with a solid foundation. Even with True Blood, we may not be familiar with this particular brand of vampire, but we pretty much know all of the major vampire rules.

Game of Thrones does gather inspiration from Rings and other such tales; however, unlike vampire stories which all have a pretty similar mythological basis, all fantasy universes have to be their own thing, with their own structure, details and nomenclature. So, going in, I was a little too arrogant. I figured I was an expert at these sorts of worlds, I’ll be able to pick things up.

I was wrong. I was hopelessly lost and I was mad about it. The one thing the show lacks is an audience surrogate character like Buffy or Jack on Lost. This is the character through which we discover the new world and all of its rules. Such a character isn’t a necessity per se, though even Lord of the Rings has Frodo. He’s an inhabitant of Middle Earth, but it’s through his eyes that we discover the world. Thrones lacks such a character, throwing us into Westeros, all of its myriad unfamiliar locales, and introducing character upon character on an uninitiated audience. In an English accent.

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