Game of Thrones, “The Bells”
This week on Dear Television:
Aaron Bady, Sarah Mesle, and Phil Maciak consider “The Bells,” the new album from Swedish death metal band “Game of Thrones.” Does it shred? In any case, below you’ll find spoilers for the episode, “The Bells” (unrelated), from the TV show, Game of Thrones (also unrelated). If you don’t want to know any information about “The Bells,” don’t read these essays, and also don’t watch “The Bells.” Don’t ask any questions. Don’t open your browser. Cancel your HBOGo subscription. Delete your Twitter app. Go back to sleep. Dream dreams. Awaken to a new day. Forget everything you ever knew about Westeros. Go back to the beginning. Adopt a rescue dog. Eat healthier. Start over.
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Previous episode: Season 8, Episode 4, “The Last of the Starks”
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Daenerys Was Right!
Dear Television,
Daenerys is not the “mad queen.” She is certainly not in a great place at the moment, but not only does she have a history of murdering her enemies with a gruesome calmness—as she did last night—I want to propose that her current problem is not a lack of rationality. Her problem, if it is a problem, is that she thinks killing her enemies is fine, and she allows herself to decide who her enemies are, and she’s decided that people we like (and, also, generalized innocent people) are her enemies.
Benioff and Weiss have an explanation, and it’s that she suddenly breaks on the battlefield. “I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did,” one of them says; “she makes the decision to make this personal” when she’s sitting on the dragon, on the wall, and “sees the Red Keep.” She goes mad, in other words, and murders millions of innocents on a sudden explosion of fury; like her father, the Mad King—whose leftover wildfire she ignites—she burns King’s Landing.
I’m going to proceed as if all the things that Benioff and Weiss say in the post-episode featurette are stupid and wrong, however. For one thing, she doesn’t make it personal. After all, if the sight of the Red Keep suddenly causes her to fly into a rage—”in that moment on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her”—then why does she immediately start torching the city insteadof the Red Keep? Why does she elect to decide to burn multitudes who never did much of anything to her, who she’s never known? Why, instead of only killing the bad queen and the bad queen’s officers—and hoping everyone else decides to love her—does she instead demonstrate that she is completely, totally, and unstoppably terrifying, someone so vengeful and destructive (and maybe even crazy) that you really don’t want to even think about coming close to considering getting anywhere near her bad side?
Oops, I answered my own question! I think Daenerys is not only rational, but absolutely right. We know how rational she is because she’s clearly spent those long days in seclusion analyzing her enemies’ new technology and developing a three-dimensional tactic to counter it: attack the ships in their sun-blind spot, from above, then fly straight up to thwart the crossbows on the harbor wall, and then attack the giant crossbows on the gate wall from behind. That’s a smart plan!
But every scene leading up to the battle shows us a Daenerys who is a step ahead of everyone else; in her seething vengeful fury, there is complete clarity: she knows what she’s going to do, she blames others for making it her only option, and she’s angry at everyone for what she’s about to do. But she’s about to do it because she knows what Cersei told us in the first season, that there are only two outcomes to this thing they are all doing: you either win or you die. If Daenerys wants the Iron Throne—and she does want it, it’s the only thing she wants and has always wanted, her entire character is built on wanting that one thing to the exclusion of all else—then she can’t let herself be a Ned Stark, having it both ways and dying in the middle ground. To win, she must follow Olenna Tyrell’s advice: ignore the clever men (“the lords of Westeros are sheep”) and be a dragon. So that’s what she does. And because she all but tells Jon Snow that this is what she’s going to do, the only interesting question is why we aren’t listening when she says it. Are we as dumb as him?
Benioff and Weiss also explain away her decisions by citing her lack of advisors and guidance. But what she has really lost are allies. Her allies have betrayed her, all of them but Grey Worm. They don’t quite admit that they have; they use sophistry to pretend they haven’t, or their high opinions of themselves, or they betray her offscreen when we don’t have to see them struggle with their decisions. But they’ve all betrayed her. She is completely right about that, and she sees it more clearly than anyone else in the show. Sansa is actively working to turn Jon against her, Arya tells Jon that it was right to make a deal with Daenerys and also to break it as soon as convenient, Tyrion has been talking treason with Varys and gives him the crucial intel he has (apparently) been sending by raven to all the other kingdoms, and Jon started it all by disobeying her. Along with the open revolt of the Starks, Tyrion’s loyalty to his brother remains a problem, as does his constant stream of terrible advice, and what’s perhaps worst is that—like Jon—he seems to think he can betray her without it really being a betrayal. Even the Onion Knight betrays Daenerys when Tyrion asks him to help smuggle Jaime into the city and why on earth would he do that?
What on earth are they all thinking?
Daenerys is the only person thinking clearly, and that goes for us as well. If the audience’s sympathies are with Jon, Sansa, Arya, and Tyrion, we will tend to empathize and make ourselves understand why they did what they do. And their betrayals of Daenerys do reflect who they are as people: Jon spent a lifetime suffering from what his father’s silence about his parentage did to him, and so he decides not to be silent about his parentage; Sansa has suffered greatly from the machinations of King’s Landing, and she does not wish to be vulnerable to it again; Arya likes to collect enemies, not allies; and Tyrion’s cynical cleverness—and wrath—has been inverted into a sentimental credulity and a disastrous need to have it both ways. These decisions make a kind of sense; they make the mistakes that fit their characters.
If our sympathies help us understand their motivations, however, that sympathy (and our pride at connecting the dots) can make it easy to overlook how dumb and inflexible they are all being. We see them make the same mistakes over and over again and refuse to learn from them; because we like them—and because we like piecing together their character arcs—we accept Jon being Jon, or Sansa being Sansa. But while Jon’s actions are in character for him—this isn’t the first time he’s tried to say no to being King, or ordered his people to accept an alliance they don’t want—why on earth would he think he could be successful this time? Has he learned nothing from his experiences? Sansa refuses to trust anyone else—as she has many times—but her situation has changed quite a bit. And wasn’t the last lesson she learned from Littlefinger that sometimes you do have to trust your family, not betray them? (Now that she’s installed in Winterfell, you’d think that the safe choice for her family would be not to break your word to your brother, immediately, just so you can piss off the dragon queen). Arya goes on a commando murder quest because that’s what she does, but she already had a moment—with Hot Pie, in episode 7.2—where she decided to give up her murder quest and go home to Winterfell; why is she back on her old bullshit? And Tyrion, my God, Tyrion is supposed to be incredibly clever and literally everything he does fails; is he not clever enough to re-examine his decision-making process?
We like these characters, so we accept them staying the same and refusing to learn from their many fuck-ups. And there are so many because none of these characters have any flexibility. When their situations change, they keep doing the same things, making the same mistakes, and having the same results. Tyrion is the worst, and most self-deluding: every time he faces a difficult problem—divided loyalties or a choice of what to lose—he tries to use A Clever Plan to have it both ways. Over and over again, it fails. Over. And. Over. Again. Why isn’t he learning? It’s been a long time since we saw Tyrion with a book.
Rationality is the ability to learn: to extrapolate from past experiences, to analyze the present situation, and to anticipate possible future outcomes. None of these idiots are rational; they keep doing the same thing but expecting a different result (just as we do by watching) and we accept it because we recognize their characters doing the things their characters do, and because we like their characters, we’re happy to watch it on our screens. But the only rational person, here, is Daenerys. She has experienced rebellions, both for her and against her, and has learned from them; she correctly apprehends that time is not on her side (King’s Landing is not going to rebel against Cersei and her allies are all betraying her, which will only continue) and she correctly realizes that the only way to win—and not die—is to be a dragon. Without allies who will serve her out of love, she must do what dragons do: eat the sheep.
When Jon and Tyrion do really dumb things that blow up in their face—or when Sansa and Arya act in stunningly short-sighted ways—the show gets away with it because they are Our Heroes. We not only forgive them, we fail to see through them; we let them have it both ways. This particularly works for the men, who the show expects us to see as loyal to their queen, even as they are flagrantly disloyal to her. Because Jon Snow is the hero of the show—who will probably kill Daenerys next week—we don’t see him betraying her when he repeats his father’s mistake (of revealing the inconvenient genealogies of ruling monarchs). And when Tyrion literally engineers the escape of his brother so that he can engineer the escape of Cersei, the Queen’s main enemy, we somehow don’t see this as a betrayal. In both cases, this is just an honest and a clever man doing what’s necessary because their Queen won’t.
It just might possibly be that the gendering of the situation makes it a little bit easier to see them undermining her, in everyone’s best interest—even hers—without being marked by disloyalty, because patriarchy lets you “serve” a woman while also ruling her. Maybe the gendering of the situation makes it easier to see her as abruptly “turning” in a moment of rage and madness and grief and burning King’s Landing. Maybe because she’s young and pretty, and has always been surrounded by male advisors, we overlook how well she’s learned the lessons that Olenna and Cersei have taught, and how completely in line with those lessons her actions are.
But a deeper problem is that we don’t want to admit that Daenerys is right, because we don’t want to admit what monarchy is. There are no good kings and queens, something Varys should have known (Jon Snow would be a good king, maybe, and his reign would be extremely short). Kings and queens are selfish people who will kill you when they need you to die; while Tyrion should have been reading Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt, Daenerys was out learning, in the field, what exactly the throne is. She is open about it. She is honest. She had wanted everyone to love her, and tried to make it happen. But as the people who loved her kept dying—and as her “allies” turned against her and her enemies grew stronger—she correctly identified the failure of this strategy, and changed tactics. Just like she attacked the ships from the sun—ambushing them instead of letting them ambush her—she has abandoned a failing tactic, based on her knowledge of the field of play, and adopted a winning one.
And she wins. She has an effectively unkillable dragon and her army is victorious; while Jon and Tyrion and Sansa and Arya were out there doing literally nothing, she ran the board. No one loves her, but is anyone going to fuck with her? Is anyone really going to fuck with her? After that?
I guess we’ll find out next week. But if there’s any realism left in this show, they won’t. She might be wrong to imagine that her reign will be any different than those before her; she shows every sign of being the latest iteration of every king or queen ever. That kind of narcissism is the most normal thing in the world, so of course she thinks she’ll be an exceptional monarch (and, lest we forget, “she’s a girl who walked into a fire with three stones and walked out with three dragons. How could she not believe in destiny?”)
The problem is that we, the audience, expect her to be different. We expect the will of the governed to matter, and we expect a throne to be replaced with something different and better, something like, I don’t know, just spit-balling here, a two-party representative republican democracy with a free press and a bill of rights and a separation of church and state. We are moderns, and we like these characters, so—with the same anachronistic illusions as bedevil so many period dramas (where white people never seem to be racist, for example, and women often manage to enjoy full social personhood)—we expect them to be moderns too. Tyrion and Varys and Jon want a different world—our world, we narcissistically assume—and so we imagine they are the good guys, and that they will win; we imagine that they are seeing clearly and working to bring about Hope and Change.
But none of these people live in a world of hope and change. They live in a world where dragons kill sheep, where you either win or you die, and where “politics” is the maneuvering amongst allies, rivals, and enemies, a game of thrones in which “the people” only suffer. What Daenerys (like Olenna and Cersei) believes, and commits to, makes this the only interesting episode of the season: that power is power.
Who are Daenerys’ enemies? The answer is incredibly easy, despite Tyrion’s soft-hearted words about hostages and enemies: anyone who opposes her is an enemy, anyone who does not bend the knee. She kills enemies, allies, and bystanders when they refuse to bend the knee; this has been true of her for a long time and has continued to be true. When Varys betrays her, he becomes her enemy and she kills him; when the people of King’s Landing fail to reject Cersei and bend the knee to Daenerys, they become her enemies and she kills them; when Sansa, Arya, Jon, and Tyrion betrayed her, they became her enemies and she will kill them, or try.
The problem, ultimately, is not that Daenerys is a mad queen; there is no such thing. It’s a redundant phrase. Power corrupts and absolute power—dragon power, destiny power, fantasy power—most of all. To be a king or queen is to win the game, and to win the game, everyone else has to lose, and die. That’s the game. And if the fantasy of “High Fantasy” is always that absolute rulers might rule well and kindly and with good intentions for their people, then Game of Thrones has abruptly woken up and remembered what a queen is.
I drink to eat the skull keeper,
Aaron
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