But there’s a difference between histories and stories, and it is all the difference. When Grand Maester Pycelle was lecturing Ros meaninglessly on “the things about kings” — historical records rarely allow for any true understanding of the fact that rulers are just people, and that huge political and social upheavals arise from their deeply personal failings and completely petty concerns. As we see from the fact that Archmaester Ebrose’s official record omits Tyrion completely, history tends to focus on the what, while painting a very reductive picture on the who, and completely missing the why.
The irony of the Nazi imagery in this scene lands like a lead ballon, since this is basically a white supremacist’s worst nightmare: this woman, screaming in two different foreign languages, explaining how she and her mindless, savage, dark-skinned minions will force the white men to submit to her social-justice-warrior agenda.
Love is the death of duty. What is honor compared to a woman’s love?
From the beginning, this series has been about characters learning to engage their sympathetic imaginations and realize that everyone else in the world — no matter their gender or clan or class — was also a person, and not an object. It has been about recognizing the individual humanity of others: their agency, their subjectivity, their inherent right to exist and the intrinsic value of their existence. If Game of Thrones was, as I’ve suggested, a school of empathy, Jon Snow has been its most successful student, and Daenerys was the the institution’s most disastrous failure. What Dany did was the ultimate rejection of empathy: reducing hundreds of thousands of people to meaningless and disposable objects in her pursuit of power.
So, all told, this confrontation between Jon and Dany should be the most powerful and important and tragically resonant moment in all of GoT — but it just isn’t. It isn’t, because we don’t believe in their love.
To reiterate: Even maintaining the broad strokes, this whole thing could have worked. It is, after all, a good story: The exiled princess who becomes the corrupted queen; the hidden prince who becomes the tragic hero; the doomed love affair; et cetera. But the charm of GoT was always that these archetypal fantasy tropes were played out through characters who seemed like authentic people, whose stories revealed more complicated and complex aspects than the storybooks ever told us. Yet here, at what should have been their climatic moment, D&D reduce it all back down to fantasy tropes operating at a storybook level.
For as much as we object to how D&D send Dany offstage as a cartoon villain, can’t we also recognize that this is the way history will remember her? When the histories are written, Dany will be the Mad Queen, the Dragon Queen, the monster whose brief, blood-soaked rise to power almost put her on the throne. The books will remember Dany as a terrible footnote to history, reigning for a few mere hours between Queen Cersei and King Brandon. She will be important, but only as a thing that happened to the Seven Kingdoms. She will not be remembered as a person, as an actual human being.
So, if we were feeling charitable, we could say that is the real lesson of “The Iron Throne”: It is an ending that recognizes that, in the end, none of us get to be complex, fully realized human beings. Perhaps this final episode is painfully reductive because memory itself is reductive. It doesn’t matter if you are a king or queen being written up in the history books, or just an ordinary person with a one paragraph obituary in the local paper: The final words written on you will probably reduce you to your broadest strokes, and utterly fail to capture the full essence of the life you lived, and the things you did, and the feelings you felt, and everything else that made it all worthwhile.
We’d all like to be remembered as the complex subject of our life stories. But all of us become objects in the end.
How large a problem it was that all the characters didn’t know everything that we, as viewers, knew about everything that happened, and what everyone has been through, and how everyone has changed. In theory, Bran — “The Three-Eyed Raven” — is the exception to that.
But that’s exactly the problem with Bran’s being chosen as king: He was always a character from some other fantasy show, not from GoT. Since the beginning, GoT has explored the ways in which all politics are personal, and how even the noblest or vilest people contained fascinating complications and contradictions. The show has reveled in the messy, complex minutiae of human emotion, and demonstrated that this is what truly drives and shapes history. And, as part of this argument, the show has constantly reinforced the importance of empathy and understanding: Over and over again we have learned that it is in recognizing the complex humanity of others that any hope for salvation lies.
Jon Snow may have been the story’s most successful advocate for bringing all of the warring clans of the world together, but Tyrion Lannister was the person who proved that you could get along with anyone, so long as you could share a good bottle of wine and trade a few bad jokes. Unlike Jon, Tyrion has made terrible mistakes, and done immoral things, surrendering to his baser instincts. Unlike Arya and Sansa, he has lived a rich, full life, finding love and sex and humor and friendship in the cracks of all this political drama. He is, in the final analysis, the perfect person to balance out the coldly ethereal presence of Bran the Broken: Bran is blandly otherworldly, but Tyrion is fantastically, complex human. (Spare me Bran’s know-it-all aloofness: I’ll take a ruler who nervously arranges the chairs around the Small Council table any day.)
The Night King is dead, but the Night King simply represented Death, and death can never be defeated. As we saw throughout the series, humanity was always a bigger threat to itself than any supernatural forces could be, and humanity has not changed at all.
Dany didn’t break the wheel. The wheel cannot be broken, it just goes round and round: That’s the whole point. Yes, one generation of leaders joined together to save the world, and learned some important lessons, and perhaps will go forward more empathetic and inclusive than the generation that came before. But do we doubt for a moment that intrigue and rivalries and resentments will all stop? That hatred and injustice and oppression and war will stop? That people will no longer be killed, raped, burned, enslaved, and thrown from windows? Just from studying GoT — let alone from experiencing the real world — we know too much about people to ever believe there could be such a thing as an idyllic or utopian society. If we think this has a happy ending, we haven’t been paying attention, because nothing ever ends. The wheel just keeps rolling along.
She has been so many places. She has met, and traveled with, and learned so much, from so many different people. She has been so many different people: She has been everyone, and she has been No One.
But she has never been happy. She has never felt safe. She has never found a home. She has fled to avoid being killed herself, and she has gone forth with plans to kill others, but she has never really had anything to live for. She didn’t care if she died: Why would she? Her life has been nothing but misery and revenge for as long as she can remember now. It took the Hound — one of her most important traveling companions and teachers — to point out the obvious: Dying sucks, and living as an angry, vengeful bastard like the Hound sucks almost as much. After learning from so many teachers throughout GoT, Arya finally decided to go back to one of her first lessons, and say Not today to the God of Death.
From her first meeting with Cersei (who represented what she was supposed to become), and her first date with Joffrey (who was the man she was supposed to define herself through), the fairy tale kept giving way to a reality that was harsher and darker than anything she’d ever imagined. Through the first six seasons of GoT, Sansa kept living out versions of the fairy tale in dreadfully diminishing returns, bartered off to one “prince” after another who would turn out to be a mosnter.
But even as Sansa was forced to survive the objectified life of a woman in Westeros, she never stopped, somehow, being the feminine ideal. Where women like Arya, Yara, the Sand Snakes, and Brienne rebelled against gender expectations and embraced the ways and weapons of men, Sansa never did. It was startling to have Arya hand her a dagger, and have Sansa remind us that she has never used a weapon. How is it possible for anyone to have survived 8 seasons of GoT without ever using a weapon? Sansa never rejected the life of a woman. Instead, she learned: first to survive it, then to excel in it, and finally to expand it.
“There are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us.” Jon Snow, alas, is one of those men, and his entire story has been his undertaking one unpleasant job after another that he did not want to do.
It is in the nature of endings to disappoint. They’re either too happy, or too depressing. They either gave us too much closure (wrapping everything up in a big phony bow), or not enough (leaving too many loose ends and unanswered questions). They either go exactly where we predicted (in which case we find them boring), or they go somewhere we never expected (in which case we think they got it wrong). If we love the story, we don’t want it to end too soon (It’s still great!), but neither do we want it to overstay its welcome even a moment too long (It used to be so great!).
Writing about it has helped me remember the long, complicated, contradictory journeys of these characters, and of this world, and all those experiences are not lost or rendered meaningless by the journey’s end.
Think about the loved ones you have lost. Did they get meaningful ending? Probably not: Very few of us are that lucky. But none of us want to think that those endings will encapsulate our lives, or determine their worth, or provide any kind of final verdict on their meaning. They are just moments, nothing more, that happen to come at the end. To put them in perspective, we have to remember the entire experience.
The idea of the end of a thing as inscribing the final meaning of any experience is one of the lies agreed upon that we use to organize our lives. Everyone tries to allegorize experience so that we think that we are tending towards some ultimate destination. But that really is a lie. I mean, that’s a lie agreed upon. The truth is, all we get is a day and a time. And more than that, as an artist in this medium, you have to assume that every episode, in some way or another, is the end of things, and that the audience gets a sense of an ending. And then the miracle is that life goes on. Well, and then one day the miracles stop. The biggest lie is the idea that we are entitled to a meaningful and coherent summarizing, a conclusion, of something which never concludes. And in that regard — this is the lie I’m telling myself so I don’t set fire to anything — I don’t regret anything.
GoT has somewhat been a victim of its own success. As the show became an unstoppable pop-culture juggernaut, the budgets got bigger, and the limits to what D&D could do on-screen disappeared. The show became more cinematic, focusing more on large-scale spectacle than the small human drama it was when it began.
It was a nice reminder that these two are the real powers in Westeros: they are behind almost everything that has happened on both sides of the Narrow Sea. They also echoed the speech by Maester Pycelle: kings come and go, but they remain. (In a different way, Jeor Mormont makes this same point, asking Jon, “Do you think it matters who sits on the Iron Throne?”)
Martin aims to go beyond what he sees as “medieval philosophy” of “if th eking was a good man, the land would prosper” to delve into the complexities, ambiguities, and vagaries of real-life power: “We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.”
When he talks to Ned about Lyanna, he has this idealized image of her but that was truly not Lyanna’s personality. Even Ned says that Robert does not see the wolf blood that she has. In the end, Robert truly does not know who Lyanna really was. He loved her beauty and this image he had of her but didn’t love the real person.
Robert puts Lyanna up on a pedestal because she was the only thing Robert could not have. He won the seven kingdoms, he gets drop dead gorgeous Cersei, but he still fantasizes about a woman he never really knew.
Robert understood one important thing: loyalties are fluid. An enemy is only an enemy right now. Change the political situation — which Robert was doing — and he won’t be your enemy anymore. The Kingsguard’s job was to guard the king; Barristan wasn’t about to slice Robert’s throat as soon as he got better, because Robert wasn’t his enemy, just his opponent. Same thing with all the other lords. Robert couldn’t possibly blame them for siding with their king over an usurper. Robert’s beef was not with the Reach or the Tyrells but with Rhaegar Targaryen. If the Tyrells were defeated and could be talked into changing their support, that’s much better than finishing them for really no reason.
I read somewhere that GRRM intended the story to be effectively the aftermath of the typical fantasy story. If you look at Robert’s Rebellion, it has all the hallmarks of a typical story of some heroes on a righteous mission fighting an obviously bad guy. There are some down turns, but in the end pretty much everything works out and they have an ending that could easily be summed up with “and they lived happily ever after.” They avenged their fallen loved ones and dethroned the tyrant with the main hero ending up as king in his place with a beautiful bride and the adoration of the kingdom. There is even a sequel of them getting the band back together to fight pirates.
Edward believed that the way to rule was to be magnanimous, and it wasn’t until Warwick turned on him that he had a wake-up call regarding the limitations of magnanimity. Similarly, Tytos’ lifetime was dominated by the horrific series of Blackfire rebellions that cost him 3 of his brothers as well as many of his best friends. This seems to have led him to the belief that laughter was preferable to bloodshed, and that his personal pride could be sacrificed for the good of his subjects. Tytos the Laughing Lion really believed that he could forgive loans and forgo repayment because he could afford it. He literally lived on a mountain of gold. When you have that much wealth it is easy to lose sight of its true value. In our world, Tytos would be remembered as a humanitarian and a philanthropist, but in the world of Westeros his kindness was only seen as weakness. Tywin learned an object lesson about how it was safer if he was feared than loved.
Tywin is uncommonly good at making friends and (with the exception of his own family) is an extremely good judge of character. Moreover, he knows the friends he needs to make and the ones he is better off without. No single event underscores this as clearly as the War of the Ninepenny Kings, where Tywin built a network of friendships that would not only benefit him but lead to a peaceful and prosperous realm in the early days of King Aerys rule. The most important friendship was, of course, that with the crown prince. Believe it or not, he was probably on terrific terms with the wardens of every Kingdom.
Tywin viewed lordship not as a right but as a career to pursue, and any career he was going to pursue he intended to do well in. While it is unknown to us if Tywin is as skilled with a sword as his son Jamie, it is apparent that he can hold his own by virtue of his front line service, on the stepstones during the War of the Ninepenny Kings. It is clear that Tywin knows that in learning to lead you must first learn to follow. His actions in personal combat, however limited to his youth, were sufficient to secure his warrior reputation and build camaraderie with the scions of other great houses. However, once he had learned the fundamentals of knighthood he quickly moved up to study maneuver, tactics, strategy, and ultimately lordship.
Two fundamental alliances that he makes during the War of Five Kings — that with the Boltons and the Freys — would have been impossible if he didn’t live these principles. He turned enemies into friends because he knew what they wanted, was able to convince them his way was the best way to get it, trust them to fulfill their end of the bargain, and keep his word when they did. “A Lannister always pays their debts” may be as much of a threat as a promise, but a reputation for integrity must be earned, not just boasted about. He negotiated with Lord Bolton directly after they had just fought a bloody battle. To Tywin, battle is just one stage of a protracted negotiation.
What all of this shows is that when Tywin uses his power, he always prefers the pen to the sword. Soft power over hard power. The answer to having enemies is to make friends. He also does not shy away from bloodshed but shows a drastic preference for peaceful coexistence.
While Tywin was born to wealth and position he never took either of these things for granted. He viewed Lordship not as a birthright so much as a privilege that he had to cultivate responsibly. To fulfill his responsibilities, he had to apply equal portions of honesty, empathy, subterfuge, and ruthlessness that most human beings are not capable of balancing. It also must be said that in order to accomplish everything that he did he had to sacrifice his own happiness at many different junctures and put the interests of his house above that of the family that actually comprised it. All of this combined to ensure that he was probably the one man most able to rule the unruly collection of Seven Kingdoms with an eye toward peace and prosperity.