Attackerman

When Bad Things Happen To Fictional People

You guys, Sady Doyle breaks the news that horrible and politically retrograde things happen to people in A Song of Ice and Fire, including -- and often especially -- women. Maybe you thought that was kind of the point, that Westeros and Essos are bleak places where misery reigns and nobility has gone the way of the dragons. I was unaware that enjoying ASOIAF entailed granting my assent to all this rampant and seemingly immutable injustice, but Doyle puts me on notice that to consider her argument unpersuasive is to whine about all my broken toys:

[H]ere’s how it goes, when you criticize beloved nerd entertainments: You can try to be nuanced. You can try to be thoughtful. You can lay out your arguments in careful, extravagant, obsessive detail. And at the end of the day, here is what the people in the “fandom” are going to take away: You don’t like my toys? I hate you!

Um, OK. Personally, I kind of hate fantasy, and that's one of the reasons I love ASOIAF -- George R.R. Martin really likes to break people's toys. (It's also one of the reasons that A Dance With Dragons is maddening: as Adam Serwer masterfully observes, it's the most conventional "fantasy" of all the books.) I'm hardly invested in the sanctities of the genre, or even in the sanctities of ASOIAF, but don't go writing shit about how a failure to assent to your argument is a character flaw of mine.

 E.D. Kain writes a more text-based critique. I don't see the point. If someone doesn't think that it's desirable for art to depict ugliness, the argument's at a standstill.

But Asha Greyjoy is still my role model. 

 

Must There Be A Jon Snow?

More spoilers for 'A Dance With Dragons.' Lots of them. Do not read this post if you didn't read the book and want to.

It gives me no pleasure to contradict my friend Alyssa Rosenberg, but she's way off the mark in her assessment of Jon Snow. But she's off in a way that reflects well on her character, reflects badly on mine, and highlights why structuralists love 'A Song of Ice and Fire.'

Alyssa considers Jon a "nation builder," who "does more to reconceptualize what Westeros should be than any of the five kings he’s stayed neutral from." She means, of course, Jon allowing the Wildlings into the Realm and even into the Night's Watch. That's, to her, an "astonishing act of political and moral vision." And this, I submit, is why the liberalism of sentiment is doomed to fail.

First, Alyssa ignores the expediency of what Jon did. The central strategic fact of the Night's Watch is its decline. Bereft of men, it can barely hold three posts along the wall. Sworn Brothers just fragged the Old Bear. And it would probably have fallen to Mance Rayder had Stannis not ridden to the rescue. There's a reading in which Jon's acts display "political and moral vision." But there's a far more compelling reading -- bolstered, textually, by his point-of-view explanations to himself -- in which Jon's acts display expediency. With the White Walkers and the Wights afoot, the Night's Watch needs soldiers. Jon gives it soldiers -- even young boys and girls. What Jon does, he does for the Watch, not the Realm. 

Nor does Jon display any interest in building a nation. The Wildlings don't get integrated into the North. They get a ghetto in the Gift, in which they're dependent on the Night's Watch. Jon strolls his Brothers into the Gift to hand out what provisions he can spare -- and while he does so, he makes a pitch for the Wildlings to join their old enemies in the Watch. This is not "act[ing] towards a comprehensive vision of a new world." Look at it from the Wildlings' perspective: serve, or you don't eat. I suppose this is a kind of nation building: the kind that, in practice, fails. Alyssa needs to add a sense of hubris to her sense of tragedy. 

Two Theories of The Spider

Seriously, don't read this post if you haven't read A Dance With Dragons and intend to read it at some point. I have nothing for you but spoilers and minutiae. Seriously.

The epilogue scene in the fifth book of A Song of Ice and Fire confirms that the new central political question surrounding George R.R. Martin's epic is why Pentos cares about the governance of Westeros. Assuming -- for the first time -- that Varys is a reliable narrator during his mustache-twirling soliloquy with Ser Kevan, his intentions are now clear: he has played a long game for Targaryen restoration, with Illyrio Mopatis as his Pentoshi agent. (Or maybe Varys is Illyrio's Westerosi agent. Who knows.) The basic question is why. We have insufficient textual basis to answer as yet. But the game just got more fierce. 

With that reveal, Varys' actions in A Game of Thrones now look rather inconsistent with that goal. After all, he set into motion Robert's plan to assassinate Daenerys and her unborn Rhaegal. There's no real textual reason to believe that he sabotaged the plan: Ser Jorah's guilty conscience unraveled it. But Varys collaborated with Illyrio to broker Dany's wedding to Khal Drogo, a route to Targaryen restoration that ran through Viserys (assuming that Varys & Illyrio didn't believe that Viserys' essential Viserysness would botch the whole thing) and not young Aegon, whom Varys tells Ser Kevan is the linchpin of his long-hidden plan for the Iron Throne. 

So what's going on with Varys? Two theories, after the jump.