Head Tale

The penultimate episode of “Game of Thrones” has aired and, as usual, there have been all sorts of reactions – positive, negative, questioning, sentimental, memetic.

Of everything I’ve read since watching the episode, this post on Reddit which speaks to how so much of how we respond to art (books, movies, television, etc.) is based on whose viewpoint we are sharing and, when seen from a different perspective, characters and their motivations can totally change.  Beyond that, there’s also the fact that protagonists are exactly that – the main characters and everyone else exists to serve the story – as backdrops, as masses of humanity, as collateral damage.  This post also gets into the question of what is a “good” guy and what is a “bad” guy and how this particular episode of GoT subverted that so successfully.

Anyhow, I’m not doing a great job of summarizing so just read it (uhm, here be spoilers!)

TL;DR: The despicable behavior and general horror we saw in Episode 5 is what warfare and conflict actually looks like, and the warfare and behavior we’ve seen in prior seasons only seems tamer because we’ve only seen it from the perspective of the main characters, who are all nobility or otherwise sheltered. This episode did a great job of challenging the ubiquitous misconceptions of warfare in media that mask the evils that arise when you ask people to kill other people on a large scale.

This show has always needed to decide what details to keep from the books and what parts to throw away. It needs to do this for time and budget limitations. As a result, we don’t get to see many of the story’s main events from the perspective of anyone that’s not a main character. It’s easy to forget this, but the main characters are all nobility or are servants of nobility, and they DO NOT represent the general population. As a result, a huge theme of the books that show viewers don’t get to see is how fucking horrible and cruel the world is, and in particular warfare is, for anyone that’s not wealthy, powerful or otherwise protected.

Let me clarify; there is a disingenuous notion in most portrayals of warfare in which the biggest tragedy that can come out of a war is thought to be the ‘good guys’ dying, the ‘bad guys’ living to be bad again, and the ‘objectively and morally wrong side’ prevailing in carrying out their evil plan. I think this idea is a result of the narrative built around WWII, which popularized the idea of ‘fighting a war to destroy an evil worse than the war itself’. This good-vs-evil view of war was an exception, not a norm; in most wars throughout history, the adversary was not as cartoonishly evil as the Nazis, and the cause was not as obviously noble as ‘fighting for freedom and the lives of others’. In the medieval to early-modern period of Europe which the show is based off of, the average conflict usually amounted to something like, “This lord does not recognize me, the nephew of the king, as the rightful heir; I will pay my soldiers above-peasant wages to kill his soldiers for me so I can secure the throne.” Not quite as noble, yes, but this kind of petty dispute was the cause of the majority of conflicts in Europe and elsewhere for centuries: some powerful person wanted more power, so they went after it.

I think that the show up to this point has taken advantage of the fact that we, the audience, are very used to the WWII-style ‘good-vs-evil’ portrayal of warfare that popular media has sold to us. GoT consistently set up the Starks and their associates as ‘good’ and the Lannisters and their associates as ‘evil’, with some exceptions. In reality, the net good done by the Starks and the net evil done by the Lannisters are not all that different. If it seems that the Lannisters are worse than the Starks, then it’s probably because you are only paying attention to what is said and done by/to the main characters, who are all nobility or serve nobility. In reality, the nobility that start these wars, based on succession and family feuds, are doing so for selfish reasons that hurt the majority of Westerosi people. To solidify this point, consider the Stark’s role in the War of the Five Kings.

In the War of the Five Kings, we are very much led to believe that Robb Stark is righteous in his cause of rebelling against the Lannisters because of the injustices done to the Starks and the cruel nature of the Lannisters as main characters (Jaime, Cersei and Tywin). But how sure are you of this characterization? Is it a fact that Robb was the ‘good guy’? Did he do anything that actually made the world a better place? Or…maybe you only find yourself rooting for him because you liked what came out of his mouth more than Joffrey and you felt bad for what happened to Ned? Consider for a moment the effects of his rebellion which almost certainly happened, but that we weren’t shown because the show wanted us to see noble speeches and bannermen celebrating victories instead.

We didn’t get to see his soldiers stealing food and grain from poor families preparing for the winter. We didn’t get to see his soldiers killing and maiming civilians caught in the crossfire. We didn’t get to see all the women his soldiers came across that were raped. We didn’t get to see the children that were killed for sport or fun. We didn’t get to see the citizens of the North who were executed because they didn’t want to fight and die for Robb’s cause. These are the nasty features common to every war ever fought by humanity, and they universally occur in any situation where you get a lot of people under stress who are told that killing is good and the right thing to do. If you hadn’t thought about this because it wasn’t portrayed, I don’t blame you; these realities are constantly glossed over in historical adaptations and movies because we like to root for the good guy more than accept the fact that far more people end up losing in a war than winning.

Maybe the Starks weren’t good, you say, but the Lannisters were definitely worse, right? Let me ask another question; what did the Lannisters do that made the realities of warfare that the Starks brought to Westeros (rape, murder, suffering etc.) worth it? Did they…commit genocide? Did they starve their population? Did they indiscriminately kill their citizens? No, they didn’t. They didn’t actually do any of that, and any acts of cruelty they committed against innocents prior to Robb’s rebellion had been done by plenty of other houses. In all honesty, the Lannisters were as good as any other house; the kept their people safe and fed. The truth about the Stark rebellion is that we only cared about Robb winning because we were constantly shown what a victory meant for him, his family, and his loved ones. We liked Robb the character, so we automatically liked his rebellion without considering what it was actually doing to the world. So when he was killed alongside his mother and banner men, it was a huge deal to us. It was the worst thing imaginable at the time. And the Lannisters became evil in our eyes.

This nobility-first portrayal of war, the ‘good guy vs bad guy’ nature of the conflicts in the show, even the notion that a person who appears to be good can’t commit acts of evil–they are all lies. It’s just not how war works, and it’s not how people work. The nobility may have the luxury of talking about why their conflict is right, why their enemy is evil, and why they are the one who truly cares about the people….but this ignores the fact that warfare is unceremoniously cruel and unfair for the average person, no matter what the intentions behind it are. For every injustice done to the Stark nobility, multiply that by a thousand for the people who’s lives were destroyed by the war that the Stark nobility launched, and realize that they get no justice and no satisfaction knowing which lord was ‘good’ or ‘bad’. They are caught in the middle of a horrible machine and there’s nothing they can do about it.

Now, onto the episode. I absolutely loved this new episode because it totally flew in the face of this convention, and it appears that a lot of the audience is having a hard time grasping that what we just saw actually happened. There were many, many moments that shredded up all the things in the show that we had grown comfortable with when we were only watching nobility fight between each other or armies fight against the dead. Among these moments were:

-The absolute horrors done to civilians caught in the battle that up until this point we haven’t really seen, but almost certainly occurred;

-The supposedly ‘kind and decent’ Northerners killing and raping right alongside the Dothraki, which again has probably been occurring a lot but we just haven’t been shown;

-Gray Worm having zero qualms about killing surrendering Lannisters because guess what, it’s extremely common for soldiers who lose friends and loved ones to the enemy to take out their rage by massacring enemy prisoners;

-Denearys taking this to the extreme and completely destroying the stronghold of her enemies, despite the civilian casualties, and being completely unfazed by anyone’s death besides ‘her side’ (those she brought over from Essos);

-Jaime totally abandoning any notions of righteousness after trying to convince himself he was good and feeling no real change in his own character after doing the ‘right thing’ for once in his life;

-Jon being totally flummoxed by the fact that the war he was fighting did not live up to any of the high ideals and platitudes he constantly spouted when he was in a position to do so;

-The fact that this was one of the first battles in the series that was not a ‘pitched’ battle (i.e., one army meets another in the field), which were EXCEEDINGLY rare in medieval European warfare;

-The fact that Arya is not an unstoppable badass as she has been shown when all she had to do was assassinate cartoonishly evil people, and in fact she’s just as scared of a pointless death as anyone, but this is literally the first time she’s ever had to deal with the fact that she might not die fighting for something greater than herself- which is exactly how all the people having to deal with these battles have felt the entire series.

-The fact that Denearys totally fucking snaps and lets the power go to her head once she realizes that her entire life’s work might have been compromised by people she trusted working against her. This lack of mercy when trying to secure one’s position is the status quo for anyone with a great amount of power in the real world, but we all pretended that Dany was going to be different.

Overall, these events were awesome, and I’m so glad that the show finally gave us a taste of what all the nobility’s talk of honor, justice, and so on amounts to when it comes to the reality of warfare.