The Surprising Weight of Goodness in a Dark World

I finally read Game of Thrones this year, and what surprised me wasn’t the story itself but how strange it felt to cross a line I’d been taught not to cross. For years the series lived in that mental category of “things Christians shouldn’t touch,” but when I finally picked it up, the reality was so different from the warnings that I’ve been trying to understand what exactly I was afraid of.

The world of Westeros is undeniably violent, and some cultures in it—like the Dothraki—are built on practices I find deeply wrong. I don’t want to soften that. But even in the middle of all that brutality, I kept finding something I didn’t expect: a sense of humanity. Not the polished kind where everyone behaves well, but the kind that wrestles with loyalty, honor, fear, and the desire to do what is right in a broken world. I disagreed with plenty of choices the characters made, and I skipped a few paragraphs here and there, yet the story wasn’t the moral void I had been warned about. If anything, the weight of the darkness made the moments of goodness stand out more clearly.

It made me wonder what actually makes a story “good” in the deeper sense. I’ve started to think that a good story needs some echo of the longing we all carry for something higher—truth, justice, mercy, restoration. Christians believe that longing ultimately points toward Jesus, even if a story never names Him. And sometimes, even in a harsh fictional world, you can see characters reaching for something better than what surrounds them. That reaching matters. It’s part of what keeps a story from collapsing into emptiness.

What surprised me most wasn’t the book but the fear that kept me from reading it. That fear wasn't malicious; it was meant to protect. But fear can flatten things, turning a complex work of art into a simple warning label. And when everything ends up in the “dangerous” box, it becomes harder to know which warnings actually matter. I don’t want to swing to the opposite extreme and read things out of defiance. What I want is discernment—an honest sense of what is good for me and what isn’t—without fear or rebellion steering the decision.

I’m not writing this to convince anyone to read Game of Thrones. If someone feels uneasy about it, that’s reason enough to stay away. And the show, from what I’ve heard, is a different animal altogether. My point isn’t that this particular story is harmless or universally appropriate. It’s simply that my own experience didn’t match the dire warnings I’d absorbed, and that mismatch has left me thinking about how we talk about art, danger, and conscience.

Maybe the real question isn’t “Should Christians read this?” but “What happens when fear becomes our primary filter for engaging with stories?” I don’t have a neat answer, but I’m grateful for the chance to ask it—and grateful, too, for the reminder that my faith isn’t as fragile as I once assumed.

Thanks for reading. I’d genuinely love to hear where you land on this, and what your own experiences have been with the “thou‑shalt‑nots” we sometimes inherit in church life.