Valar ēdruta qringaomagon

For a literary theory class, we had to give a presentation about the topic we were planning to write our research paper on, so the professor could green-light it. I was really excited that a girl was going to write about feminist agendas in A Song of Ice and Fire, because I’m a huge fan of the franchise. However, it started out bad with the professor, who was also the chair of the department, stating that he thought “fantasy [was] crap,” and it only got worse from there.

Besides writing several names wrong (such as “Rob” instead of “Robb”) and mentioning several characters that only exist in the TV show, the student portrayed the fairly empowering books as the most sexist piece of fiction ever written. It soon became very obvious that she had only seen (at best) a few episodes of the TV show.

At the end of the presentation, several other students and I tried to correct the mistakes, but the professor rejected them all regardless, as the presentation reinforced his beliefs that fantasy is garbage.

Through a mutual friend, I later heard that the girl got an A for her research paper. I took note, avoided that particular professor, and when I wrote my master’s thesis on a similar topic, my supervisor told me that this professor had been trying to get the university to boycott research into fantasy literature for years.