Go back to the first season and it’s easy to see how much Game of Thrones was being pushed as the next installment of the HBO drama franchise, with “The Sopranos in Middle-Earth” used by showrunner David Benioff as a simple pitch. And it really seemed like it was for a few episodes: the middle-aged, traditionalist father Ned Stark spending his episodes trying to keep the peace in an unruly kingdom while keeping his ideals intact, at the same time as teaching his unruly daughters to get along — just as Tony Soprano did with his gang and his children.

Of course, we all know how that turned out for Ned in Game of Thrones’ first massive twist at the end of the first season. This was a massive upheaval of storytelling expectations — the main character isn’t supposed to just die — but this is an essential part of George R.R. Martin’s story. A Game of Thrones and its sequels were written in order to combat many of the genre tropes of fantasy in the 1990s.

The fantasy literature genre grew from two main sources. First, the pulp science fantasy of authors like L. Sprague de Camp during the golden age of science fiction pushed the genre through next few decades as collections of individual novels and stories in loosely shared universes. They were often technically science fiction, but filled with what we’d now call fantasy tropes — Dragonriders of Pern being a prime example. It was also heavily woman-oriented, with authors like Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula Le Guin, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. (George R.R. Martin’s early works also fit this context.)

The other dominant force in fantasy was the explosion of interest in Lord of the Rings coming out of hippie culture in the 1960s. This was an incredibly popular, but much more rigid form of fantasy based on a hero’s quest to save the world, across a single serialized trilogy, leaning heavily on legendary and mythical sources, particularly Arthurian legend.

In 1977, two releases set this form of heroic fantasy as the default model for the next two decades: Terry Brook’s The Sword of Shannara, essentially an incredibly popular retelling of Lord of the Rings with all the weird academic Tolkien bits sandpapered off. The other was Star Wars, which, while apparently science fiction, dove directly into Campbell’s monomyth, and set in stone the tropes which defined the fantasy genre: farm boy becomes chosen hero, wise wizard mentors, charming rogues, ultimate evil, and so on. The key element added and refined in fantasy literature: deliberate monarchism and celebration of chivalry in faux-European nations. Luke Skywalker wasn’t crowned king of the galaxy, but Garion (The Belgariad), Tomas (Riftwar), and Simon (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn) all rise to a Western European-style throne at the ends of their journeys.

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, trilogies (or four, or five-book series) of heroic fantasy exploded. You couldn’t go to a bookstore without seeing “The Exciting Conclusion of the Gib’berish Cycle!” on every other shelf. It also served as a reassertion of masculinity in the genre: many of the authors were male, as were their protagonists. (Though this was not exclusive, as Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar trilogies demonstrated.)

And then it got worse. 1990 saw the release of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, the first novel of The Wheel of Time. While initially the series looked like relatively conventional fantasy, if one that was longer and had more characters, by the fourth novel it had become something entirely different: a highly-serialized, world-spanning story with hundreds of characters and scattered point-of-view chapters to show every part of the story. Most importantly, it was, to all appearances, never-ending. There was a conceptual endgame, with the heroic Dragon Reborn facing the evil Dark One someday, but the books were in no hurry to get there. (In fact, it took 14 books, 23 years, and the tragic death of the author and his replacement with Brandon Sanderson to reach that ending.)

The Wheel of Time also never met a fantasy cliche it didn’t like. It didn’t have one Chosen One, no, it had three farm boys with grand destinies. They’re called ta’veren in the novels — the series loves its apostrophized, italicized fantasy nonsense (seriously, try to parse a random plot synopsis). As with much fantasy, there’s a trend of the need to defend Western European-style culture from alien hordes, either human or bestial. The gender politics were also especially bizarre, especially the early books, where women were treated as bizarre, unobtainable aliens of disdain, constantly crossing their arms under their breasts and sniffing at the boys’ antics.

It was also tremendously popular, dominating the genre. The heroic fantasy genre was already a known winner, while the consistent stream of books also allowed readers to lose themselves in a world, just like the loosely connected series of previous fantasy. The hyper-serialization only added to speculation and immersion, adding comics/sports/wrestling style never-ending storytelling to another genre.

This was the milieu into which George R.R. Martin wrote A Game of Thrones. In his original pitch, he’s aiming for a relatively conventional three-book trilogy. But a couple hundred pages into AGoT, the entire story shifts. Conventional fantasy becomes a deconstruction, at almost every level. Most overtly, Sansa’s story — particularly her relationship with The Hound (some of which got transferred to Littlefinger on the show) is clearly about demolishing the idea of chivalry and courtly love as something worthwhile.

“Just as if I was one of those true knights you love so well, yes. What do you think a knight is for, girl? You think it’s all taking favors from ladies and looking fine in gold plate? Knights are for killing.”

This goes wider, becoming an attack on fantasy’s uncritical embrace of medieval European trappings. Tournaments are treated as ridiculous, treasury-destroying farces and inheritance law leads to brutal civil wars. The most othering line of the early going — ”A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is considered a dull affair” — is reversed in the series’ most famous scene, a brutal massacre of several heroes and the norms which are supposed to make Westeros better. And chosen heroes? Martin just kills them off.

Martin is also clearly uncomfortable with the gender politics of conventional fantasy, which often tended to posit men and women as technically equal, while at the same time focusing entirely on the men’s stories. He reverses this: women are clearly unequal in Westeros in a legal and social sense, which often manifests as cruelty, but they increasingly dominate the story of A Song of Ice and Fire as it progresses.

Thus in order to succeed to at being a deconstruction, Thrones has to adopt the setting of the things it want to satirize. The series is primarily white and European because it’s trying to say something about the way fantasy treats white, European culture — including its treatment of women.

Now, this is not to say the books succeed entirely, nor that the show adapts them with this in mind. But it’s essential to recognize what George R.R. Martin was rebelling against, and how that defines his story, before criticizing it. It also answers questions of “Why is Game of Thrones the way that it is?” — or rather, it reveals those as the wrong questions. The biggest question is: Why was A Song of Ice and Fire so popular, and why did HBO decide to adapt it and not another fantasy work?

It’s not that Martin’s books were the only novels pushing back against fantasy conventions. Guy Gavriel Kay’s beautiful tragedies of politics toyed with expectations and had explicitly woman-centered stories…but they were all self-contained. Glen Cook’s Black Company novels were as militaristic and brutal…but they didn’t start with the tropes that Thrones upended. Nor was Thrones’ sexual violence and in-world misogyny special: both Melanie Rawn’s Sunrunners series and Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant hinged on rapes commited by the point-of-view characters (Martin’s novels do have rape in the world, but no POV characters commit one until arguably the fifth book, and even that’s Victarion. Who’s Victarion? Exactly.)

No, what made A Song of Ice and Fire so popular was that it appealed on every possible spectrum. Yes, it’s a deconstruction of heroic fantasy, but it’s potentially a straight-up heroic fantasy — just look at how Chosen One both Jon and Dany are. Yes, it’s a counter to the overtly fantasy bullshit of neverending series like The Wheel of Time…but it’s also a neverending series on its own, with a dense, compelling world filled with the sort of history that lets readers get lost in the world. Thrones wants to have it both ways, and it initially succeeded because it could…but this is not sustainable.