Thoughts on the end of Season Seven of "Game of Thrones"
In case you haven't followed all this, George R.R. Martin is several years behind schedule in writing the last two books, and the show is now ahead of the books. Macht nichts. The books are the real story. While the showrunners have the general outlines of where the story is going to end up, they're pretty much making it up as they go along. Several characters who are alive in the books are dead in the show (including little Shireen Baratheon, who wasn't burned alive in the books, and Catelyn Stark, who in the books is not really alive, but is at least undead). There have been many YouTube videos on audibles called by the showrunners after they'd clearly prepared the way for things to go in a certain direction and then changed their minds. For example, I won't go into details, but there have been several YouTube videos done on all the rather obvious "Easter eggs" which would have come together to logically explain Arya's otherwise ludicrous acrobatic flight through Braavos unconscionably soon after being rather viciously gut-stabbed in Season Six. Alas, the showrunners apparently changed their minds after laying all that groundwork and went in a different direction, rendering the entire sequents of events ludicrous and leaving several minor plot points behind as bizarre and inexplicable inconsistencies.
They're playing it by ear. As I wait for The Winds of Winter and The Promise of Spring, the last two books in Martin's Song of Ice and Fire of which Game of Thrones was the first, I relish the thought that it's going to be a while before the story ends. There are rumors that the eighth and final season of the HBO series won't come out until 2019. In a way, I hope they're true because it will give the feckless showrunners a little guidance if Martin somehow gets ahead of them again. It will also enable all of us to enjoy the story longer; this show, like the books, really sucks you in- as you may have noticed- and becomes a minor obsession for its fans. It's going to be a tremendous letdown when it's over. But the longer it takes Martin to come out with The Promise of Spring and the real end of the story, the longer the telling of the tale will take, and the longer we can relish it.
The background of the story is very roughly based on the Wars of the Roses. One of the better GoT YouTube channels, "GoT Academy," is done by a couple of Israeli gentlemen, one of whom is a history teacher who reads a lot more into that fact than I think is justified and is going to be surprised when the red-haired Sansa Stark doesn't turn out to be Elizabeth I in the end.
Martin, like me, is fascinated by the actual, historical Richard III, and openly says that my favorite character, Tyrion Lannister, is based on him (I may also like Tyrion because he is allegedly the same Myers-Briggs type as me). Tyrion is a fan favorite who differs from the historical Richard chiefly in being a bit of a rogue and a carouser where Richard was something of a puritan. Though Shakespeare, the Tudors' court dramatist, has done a good job of obscuring this (with the help of other sycophantic historians like Polidore Vergil, who actively sought out and burned contemporary records in order to make the Tudor version of events more plausible), most historians agree that Richard was, in fact, a good king overthrown not because of personal unpopularity but by what amounted to a foreign invasion led by Henry Tudor and supported by various disaffected nobles. It is by no means certain that he murdered the Princes in the Tower (while I am not going to get sidelined onto that path today, there are other explanations for the boys' disappearance which I and many others regard as at least as plausible), even if he did there were countless English kings who did things just as bad and didn't counterbalance them with what seems to be a contemporary reputation as having lived a generally honorable and useful life. No historian even takes more than two or three of crimes with which Shakespeare charges Richard seriously.
Richard had scoliosis. He was not the deformed hunchback of legend and was a capable soldier, but he did have a disfiguring disability. Tyrion- his Westros counterpart- is a dwarf. Unlike Richard, he isn't particularly ambitious, and he belongs to the wrong house; if "Lannister" is taken to be a counterpart of "Lancaster," Tyrion logically ought to be either a Stark of a Targaryen, one of which (or a combination of the two) corresponds to Richard's House of York. Which brings me to one of my pet theories.
Though this is controversial and very much a minority view, the mother of the Lannister children, Joanna, made her final visit to King's Landing, the capital of Westeros, not quite a year before Tyrion was born. There was a persistent rumor that she and Prince Aerys Targaryen had been lovers before her marriage to Tywin Lannister; many dismissed them because they assumed that a man as proud as Tywin would not have married a woman who was not a virgin. But something happened during the tournament which occasioned Joanna's final visit to Kings' Landing which caused a major rift between now-King Aerys and his Hand (Prime Minister), Tywin Lannister. It was rumored to have been a bawdy joke about Joanna. But Tywin seemed to be more upset about whatever had happened than he had been about the supposed indecent liberties Aerys was said to have taken with Joanna the night of her wedding to Tywin. It seems to me that it was probably something more than a joke. Given the timing of the coincidence between the tournament and Tyrion's birth, and also given the relatively friendly and receptive reaction of Daenerys Targaryen's dragons to Tyrion, I think King Aerys was actually his father and like Jon Snow, (soon to be known by his rightful name, Aegon Targaryen), Tyrion is actually a member of the ancient Valaryan royal house of Westeros and no Lannister at all.
Which brings me to my second theory about Tyrion. Whether he killed the Princes or not, Richard III betrayed his dead brother's trust by taking a throne which was probably theirs by right. In her vision in the House of the Undying, Dany heard a prophecy about herself:
The voices were growing louder, she realized, and it seemed her heart was slowing, and even her breath ... three treasons will you know ... once for blood and once for gold and once for love.
Mirri Maz Duur betrayed her promise to save Dany's beloved husband, Khal Drogo, with "blood magic." She left him brain dead- Dany euthanized him with a pillow- and took the life of Dany's unborn child in payment. Jorah Mormont betrayed the Breaker of Chains by working as a spy for Varys and by selling poachers caught on his land to the slavers.
One betrayal remains: for love. Tyrion loves brother Jaimie and, as we heard at the end of the non-canonical TV series' second to last show of the recent season, viewed the annihilation of the Lannister forces by Drogon and the deaths of so many men he presumably knew in their battle with Daenerys's army with something less than unbridled joy. There were a number of hints in the season finale that his emotional ties to the Lannister family are still strong, despite the abuse all but Jaimie have subjected him to all his life.
I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that my favorite character, whom I do not believe is really even a Lannister, in the end, will betray Daenerys for love of his supposed brother Jaimie, and by extension of the family into which he believes that he was born. A noble motive, as motives for treason go, but a turn of events I hope I'm wrong about. With the exception of Jaimie, who seems to be in the process of actually becoming an honorable man, the Lannisters just aren't worth it.
If so, I'll just remember that the books are the real story, and hope that Tyrion has a fate in them more keeping with his character. But I'm forced to recall that according to Martin Richard III, who betrayed his dead brother by taking the throne that belonged to his nephew, was his model for Tyrion. If Tyrion, too, turns traitor, I'll grieve for the ironic fate of the only honorable man to bear the dishonorable Lannister name.
I'll mourn even more if, as I suspect, he would be betraying his real family in doing so.
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