Fantasy Fatigue Setting In With A Game of Thrones

At the enthusiastic urging of my son, I recently began reading George R.R. Martin's enormously popular fantasy series A Game of Thrones.  I'm about three quarters of the way through the first book, but am once again struggling with a phenomenon that I have come to call "fantasy fatigue".  What's that, you might ask...

In just about every fantasy novel I've started, the setting is exotic and interesting.  Usually the book features a map of the make-believe land, something that strongly appeals to me from early in my childhood when my sister and I would play a fantasy game called "Mapland" and we would imagine different parts of our front and back yards to be separate countries with various geographical features like jungle, mountains, oceans...and various animals to contend with as well.  I like this element of fantasy literature.  As a matter of fact, J.R.R. Tolkiens's very detailed mapping of Middle Earth was a very important factor in my affection for his Lord of the Rings series.  As far as the characters and the way that fantasy fiction societies are inevitably presented are concerned, though, the fatigue sets in pretty quickly...

I am sick and tired of being expected to root for hard-ass, sword-swinging, and autocratic protagonists who only want to protect the established aristocratic, anti-democratic order against the evil enemy, who as often as not attempts to rally the "common" people to its cause.  After finishing Tad Williams' wonderful, eerily prophetic, and unrecognized four-volume science fiction series Otherland, I decided to try out one of this primarily fantasy-genre writer's other works.  I got through the first few chapters of the first book in one of his series and had to put it down.  It wasn't the writing per se that was bad; no, the society that I as a reader was being expected to support was abhorrent to me.  The same thing happened when I started Terry Goodkind's Wizard's Rule series.  It occurred again with Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series.  And now the fatigue is rising again with Martin and his "throne game".  In each of these experiences I began to have the unsettling experience of rooting for the "bad guys" because I could not bring myself to accept the status quo that the "good guys" were trying to preserve.  With Martin, this problem is compounded by his alternation of chapters, each presented to expressed the personal experiences and view point of a protagonist character.  The antagonists, though, get less "fair and balanced" treatment than even the liberals on Fox News Channel.  So what does Eddard Stark, the supposed main character of A Game of Thrones, want more than anything? To preserved a brutal kingdom that puts down women and the poor. In "his" proper world, men can father children out of wedlock with impunity, but a woman caught so doing can best hope for exile. And don't get me started with how prostitution is universal here for poor women with no other means of support...

There are different royal houses vying for power in A Game of Thrones.  The "good" Houses of Stark, Baratheon, Arryn, and Tully are ruled by fools who let emotions govern their actions instead of reason.  The "bad" Lannisters, for their part, although brutal themselves, display a feistiness and cunning that I admire.  At my stage in the reading, I know as a reader I'm supposed to be rooting against the Lannisters, but guess what? I hope they wipe everyone else out!  Fat chance of that happening, I suppose...

I am going to continue trying to get through this series in spite of my objections, though.  It leaves a bad feeling within me to start books only to abandon them.  George R.R. Martin's writing is very good, but I fear for those "bad" Lannisters as I read on...