CAUTION- PROBABLE BOOK SPOILERS: A Game of Thrones post-mortem, and partial apology
More about that one point shortly. Season Eight was bad. The writing was bad. The story was rushed. Motivations were obscure because the groundwork was not adequately laid for the characters' actions. The cinematography and the acting, as usual, were superb. That scene with Daenerys briefly appearing to have dragon's wings when Drogon rose behind her in the final episode and the one with the flaming swords of the Dothraki being extinguished in the dark as their charge was repulsed by the White Walkers were among the most visually effective of the whole series.
And while the ending was flawed, I'm one of what are probably the very few who are basically OK with it. I belong to a couple of GOT forums on Facebook, and it's amazing to me how many of the participants are complaining that Bran somehow didn't "earn" the throne and shouldn't have been the ultimate winner of the "Game." In fact, he probably was the central character in Season Eight, whether we realized it or not, and his entire story was- as he himself implied when Tyrion asked him whether he'd be willing to serve- nothing more or less than a preparation for the throne.
It's remarkable to me how few people saw that his foreknowledge was not only the decisive factor in the victory of the living at the Third Battle of Winterfell (Stanis's defeat was the first, and the Battle of the Bastards was the second) but that Bran was its real hero. He deliberately made himself bait for the Night King. Admittedly, that takes less courage when you know how things are going to turn out, but it was Bran who really did the Night King in. Arya may have struck the blow, but it was Bran who essentially arranged for the Night King to be there when Arya acted as he knew that she would.
There is something to be said for having a general who knows what the enemy is going to do in advance, whether he actually holds the rank or not. And there is even more to be said for having a king who knows in advance what is going to happen.
Which brings us, indirectly, to what I take to be Martin's central thesis.
It's more than Lord Acton's famous adage that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." If by "modern" we understand the last five hundred years or so, it's one of the great lessons of modern times. It's the lesson of both the French Revolution and the Russian. It was taught by the Peasant's Revolt and the various misadventures of the violent wing of the Radical Reformation and Mao's Great Leap Forward. It's what the Inquisition was all about, and all the religious wars and persecutions of history. It lies behind most of the greatest crimes of the ages. It's the ultimate lesson of most of the tyrannies and genocides in the sorry history of our species.
There is nothing more dangerous than a noble cause that loses its way. There is nothing more evil than good when it becomes self-righteous. And the greatest and most seductive of all lies is the idea that the end justifies the means.
"What does it profit a man," Jesus rhetorically asked, "if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" What, indeed? The seductiveness of a beautiful vision, a glorious ideal, can be overpowering. It's easy to become so dazzled by it that one betrays one's own most basic values in its pursuit. No matter how great a cause, no matter how glorious a good, it ceases to be good when it adopts the tactics of evil.
I misinterpreted one aspect of the leak I reported in my last post, which accurately predicted almost every detail of what would happen in the last episode of Game of Thrones. I still believe that nothing in the behavior of Daenerys Targaryen pointed to psychopathy or even narcissism. Granted, her childhood- the traumatic death of her father, and her early life as the younger sister of an abusive narcissist so bent on regaining the throne of Westeros that he was willing to sell her into what amounted to sexual slavery in order to make it happen- would have been fertile ground for narcissism, as well as a host of other psychiatric problems. But from the first season of the show on, Daenerys Stormborn seemed to be all about others. Power came to her almost naturally as she sought the welfare of those around her. True, there was always a sense of entitlement around Daenerys, a sense that power and the adoration of others was her due.
Perhaps that was inevitable in any child of her family, given its history and its sense of inherent superiority. But when Dany gained what amounted to weapons of mass destruction- her dragons- she used them, yes, to gain power- but power to use on behalf of others.
She was the Mother of Dragons, yes- but for the sake of being the Breaker of Chains. She freed the slaves. Yes, she was ruthless- she had the slave owners killed and crucified the slave traders, and later had defeated enemies who refused to bend the knee burned alive. But what choice did she have? Give them their parole of honor, as was often done with prisoners during the American Civil War, releasing them on their oath not to take up arms against her again? Build and staff a prisoner of war camp? Leave a body of experienced and hostile troops in her rear?
No, one of the biggest problems with Season Eight was that before she became, in essence, a war criminal after her victory at King's Landing, Daenerys had often been ruthless, but she was never wantonly cruel. She did what had to be done, and did not flinch. But the Daenerys who put her defeated enemies to death in Essos and burned the Tarleys alive did so because she had no real choice.
Foreshadowing, as several critics of Season Eight have pointed out, is not character development. Nothing before the penultimate episode of the series prepared us adequately for a Daenerys willing to slaughter the greater part of the population of the capital and largest city in Westeros when she didn't have to.
Yes, she had talked about her willingness to win back the throne for House Targaryen by "blood and fire," and even to burn cities. But that was Daenerys, the Breaker of Chains. That was Daenerys the Good. I assumed, given the insanity which ran in the Targaryen family, that Daenerys had burned King's Landing and all those innocent people because she had snapped; that her talk of "liberating" the rest of Westeros the way she had "liberated" King's Landing meant that somehow all that dragon fire had become confused in a psychotic state with the act of liberation itself; that perhaps the fact that she herself was immune to fire had somehow through some psychotic "logic" caused her to believe that it wouldn't hurt the people of King's Landing either and that the very act of causing wanton destruction was in itself an act of liberation. I assumed that Jon's killing of Daenerys would be done because he realized that he could not reason with a mind that had lost the power of reason.
But no. It was simpler than that- and while I, and probably most of the show's fans, completely missed the point and became derisive and even enraged at what we perceived to be an abrupt, unexplained, arbitrary and inexplicable change in the behavior of a beloved character, it made perfect sense.
In fact, it was the central point of the entire show, the entire story.
Daenerys was not psychotic. She obviously was not a psychopath, either; a psychopath would have been interested in the welfare of the poor and downtrodden only to the extent that it could be used to advance her agenda, and Dany's concern for them was genuine. Nor was she a true narcissist; Dany's vision of her cause might have been associated too closely for comfort in her mind too with her person, but the welfare of others was nevertheless her purpose, not simply her own greater glory.
Dany was Thomas Muntzer or Melchior Hoffman. Dany was Thomas Torquemada. Dany was Mary Tudor. Dany was Maximillian Robespierre. Dany was Vladimir Illich Lenin. Dany was Pol Pot. Dany was the True Believer, the leader so convinced of the righteousness of her own cause and so dedicated to it that she became a monster, so focused on the goodness a great goal that she lost her sense of the very definition of "good."
Daenerys Stormborn became what human beings always become when we lose sight of our own principles in pursuit of a noble objective.
As an aside, I think she's a cautionary tale for all those conservatives who have converted to the cause of Donald Trump. But she's a cautionary tale, too, for the intolerant and authoritarian faculties and student bodies of our colleges who, in the pursuit of justice, have like Daenerys become the very thing that they oppose without realizing it and turned institutions whose very purpose is the free and open pursuit of knowledge and the truth into mechanisms of thought control and intellectual regimentation.
She is a warning to the Pharisee in all of us who is so sure of our own righteousness that we lose sight of what righteousness is. She is a warning to the traditional Christian who does not merely hold convictions about the ethics of sexuality but looks down upon, judges and personally condemns those who do not comport themselves accordingly. She is the LGBTQ activist who assumes that traditional Christians are motivated by hatred and bigotry. She is the "progressive" who sneers at the passionate Trump supporter without seeking to understand what motivates him and the Trump supporter who is full of contempt for the snowflake cuck Commie socialist who takes issue with the man who is trying to Make America Great Again.
She is the feminist who assaults the pro-life protestor, and the pro-lifer who is unable to distinguish between the act and the person who might feel driven to it or even fails to see the contradiction involved in defending life with a sniper's rifle or a bomb.
She is the fanatic who lives in all of us. And it does live in all of us. And I think that what George R.R. Martin is trying to do in A Song of Ice and Fire is warn us about the fanatic within. I missed that point. Maybe what we all took to be a lack of character development in Daenerys leading up to what seemed such a shocking transformation was really our failure to see the fanatic in Daenerys Stormborn. Maybe Daenerys never changed. Maybe she merely lost sight of what differentiated her from what she was fighting.
Maybe, at this moment in history, we all are in danger of doing that. And perhaps that's the message of A Song of Ice and Fire.
Now, back to King Bran the Broken.
There is a danger as well as an advantage to having a king who foresees the future and can plan accordingly. That danger is the real flaw in the story's ending. Some of the most chilling science fiction ever written has been about tyrants who are invincible precisely because they know in advance what they who oppose them are going to do. King Bran may be a kind of constitutional monarch on paper, and hopefully whatever the collective consciousness that is the Three-Eyed Raven puts him beyond the danger that poses. Imagine Daenerys with Bran's abilities. Or Ramsey Bolton.
That flaw mitigates the fundamental change in the constitution of Westeros which happened in the Dragon Pit when the king was given a council of nobles to rule with him and the monarchy of what is now the Six Kingdoms became elective rather than hereditary. But of course, King Bran may be protected from the danger of going rogue by his ravenhood even though he possesses a power which in other hands would be a grave danger. And his successors will not have that power at all.
Instead, the Dragon's Pit has become the Runnymede of Westeros, and Tyrion's solution its Magna Carta. It does not, of course, leave Westeros a democracy of any kind; a society in its stage of development would be incapable of functioning as a democracy. I sometimes wonder whether modern America is capable of it! But then, the Magna Carta (contrary to what our British cousins often suggest) did not turn England into a democracy either. But it did establish the principle of limited and shared power and stepped back from the dangers of unlimited royal power. It established accountability for kings of England. Having a constitutional government of any kind isn't chopped liver, and it marks a major step forward for the fictional realm of Westeros.
No, on reflection, my problem with Season Eight isn't with the way the story ended. It isn't perfect, but in many ways, it was the best possible ending. However strongly the hearts of Daenerys partisans (many of whom still haven't even been able to recognize the fundamental betrayal of her own principles involved in the massacre at King's Landing) or those of Jon Snow or any other alternate winner of the Game of Thrones may hate the story's ending, and however flawed that ending might in fact be, it makes sense- and with reflection, I think many (though not all, and perhaps not even most) of those who are so upset about the ending itself will eventually realize that. It was as close to a happy ending as Game of Thrones was likely to get.
Jon is back at the Wall, where- if the truth be told- he is most in his element, just as Bran suggested. He is not the king, and that is good because he was not made to be a king. Arya is off to explore and to have the adventures her heart craves; she was not made to be Mrs. Gendry Baratheon. Tyrion- whose late-series bumbling, probably due to divided loyalties, was the creation of Benioff and Weiss rather than GRRM- is in his element as the King's Hand. Sansa, prepared for the role by her hardships, is Queen in the North. And Bran is king- as he has known that he would be ever since he became the Three-Eyed Raven.
The surviving Starks still survive- and, with the exception of Lyanna Mormont, the Hound, and Jaimie Lannister, all my favorite characters who were alive at the beginning of the season are still alive, and in what may not be the circumstances in which we ourselves would put them, but probably will turn out to be the circumstances in which they, themselves, would be most comfortable.
The writing is still bad. There were too many plot holes during the post-book era, especially late in the series. But the worst fault of the series is that the ending was rushed, and the character-driven nature of the story sacrificed in order to wrap things up. Season Eight was the worst season of GOT by far, and no amount of reflection or excuse-making will change that.
But that does not change the fact that it was a great ride, a magical story, and a landmark in television history. I myself do not get HBO and while a fan of the show followed it largely after-the-fact, via YouTube and the Internet. I am a huge fan of the books, all of which I have read. And while I strongly suspect that the books will end the same way the show did (more or less), I am confident that George R.R. Martin will repair the worst flaws- assuming he ever finishes A Song of Ice and Fire- and that the best is still to come.
The show, again, was mere fan fiction. The books are the real story, so in a sense Season Eight doesn't even matter.
Comments