Game of Thrones Season 7

[all fictions]

Really? Cause it seems like it's done nothing but deconstruct shit from start to finish in the books.

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Yes really.

"Men's lives have meaning, not their deaths" is the closest we've gotten to an overarching thesis statement for ASOIAF, along with Septon Meribald's Broken Men speech and Ellaria Sand's speech about the futility of vengeance. It reaches all the way back to the first book, to Ned (who turns out to not be the protagonist after all) and his shocking demise. So many readers have interpreted that moment, as well as the Red Wedding two books later, as being indicative of nihilism on GRRM's part. Everything is chaos, honor gets you killed and is therefore worthless, "power is power." But this is not so.

Ned's legacy is not his death, it is his life. The children determined to find each other again because Dad taught them to stick together and be brave, the vassals who have set out to rescue and restore those children in his name ("the Ned's little girl"), the memory both in-universe and IRL of a decent man who treated his servants like human beings worth listening to and who was determined to protect the young and innocent…all of this is the meaning of Ned Stark, not that he ended up as a head on a spike.

Heck, let's go even further, to Waymar Royce's brave last stand against the Others in the series' opening pages. We didn't think that highly of Waymar Royce at first: he's a jumped-up noble brat that is wearing the wrong clothes for ranging and don't listen to his companions' advices. But when it mattered most, the guy went down with real courage, standing his grounds against monsters from a thought-to-be mythical past, demonstrating there's more to him than bluster and arrogance.

This is why I think ASOIAF is more reconstructive than deconstructive, not tearing the genre apart so much as reminding readers of why it was worth falling in love with in the first place. It's not that being the hero is stupid, it's that being the hero is hard, and you might fail at it. But that doesn't mean the attempt is worthless.

The true mark of a hero is facing a situation in which you will not be rewarded for doing the right thing–it might even get you killed–but you do it anyway, to emphasize that heroism means something more than being the main character and ending up on top at the end.

Many books in the fantasy genre promised social rewards for doing the right thing. In book after book, if you were good—and in these books, it was easy as (hot) pie to be good—you would be king, and the land would prosper because of the king's goodness. ASOIAF argues that it is not easy to be good, and that the rewards for being so are not automatic, but that this only makes it all the more powerful if you choose to do the right thing anyway. ("No chance, and no choice.") It's also about divorcing doing the right thing from social rewards and status–the former does not automatically lead to the latter, and achieving the latter doesn't mean you've accomplished the former. Like Jaime learning to separate external honor from internal honor, and thus deciding he is going to be honorable according to himself, not how others view him. It's also like Stannis telling Jon that he intends to let the wildlings through the Wall despite the certainty that this will hurt his prospects with the Northern nobility because "when the cold winds rise, we shall live or die together." There's an immense catharsis to be found in these moments, in which characters discover what their values really are when the pretense of being rewarded for them is stripped away.

It's a very existential brand of romanticism. The truest of all knights is Brienne of Tarth, and she's not even a knight. The truest of all lords is Davos Seaworth, born a nobody in Flea Bottom.

"No chance, and no choice" from Brienne VII in AFFC is probably the best example in ASOIAF. Brienne is heavily outnumbered by Rorge's band of psychos 7-to-1 and knows she is almost certainly screwed if she steps out from the shadows and challenges them. She could very easily hide, let them inflict horrors on the kids at the inn at the crossroads, and move on safe and sound when they're gone. But despite having "no chance," she takes them on anyway, because in order to be the true knight she wants to be despite everyone telling her she can't, she has "no choice" but to defend those kids to the last breath. After all, the knightly oaths say: "I charge you to be brave, I charge you to be just, I charge you to defend the young and innocent." Like her ancestor Dunk, she's "a knight who remembered his vows" while technically having never taken those vows–this is the author separating the values of knighthood from the social systems in which they're embedded. Being a knight isn't automatically a good thing, but striving for the ideals of knighthood is. Gregor may have been anointed by the crown prince himself, but "he was no true knight" where it counts.

We fall in love with these things for a reason, after all, and both Sansa's and Sandor's stories make clear that GRRM is after more than detached, bloodless deconstruction. After all, Sansa could be seen as a stand-in for the fantasy reader, specifically an uncritical reader. Her fall-into-knowledge over the course of AGOT is so dramatic and devastating because she starts out in a bubble, and that bubble is explicitly fueled by songs and stories. In other words, fantasy has left her unprepared for the likes of Cersei and Joffrey. As such, after her beloved handsome prince forces her to watch her father executed after promising her that he would show mercy, Sansa is "reading" the world around her differently, wondering how she ever could have loved Joffrey. But what makes this more than a miserable grimdark grind, however, is the conclusion Sansa draws from this experience. She does not become Cersei, determined to imitate the unjust systems that have brought her low; she does not become Littlefinger, thinking only of what she is owed and creating more victims in the process. Instead, she gradually realizes that she must live up to the values expressed in the stories and songs, even–especially–if the world around her (particularly the institutions and individuals in power) does not. "If I am ever queen, I'll make them love me," for example, or even more powerfully, "he was no true knight." The latter is what sparks Sandor's own gradual reformation, because what Sansa is saying there is that the corrupt institution of knighthood, that which anointed Gregor and thus convinced Sandor that the values of knighthood he'd worshiped were a lie, has no monopoly on what it really means to be a true knight.

The reconstruction is thus also about people seeing that the world they believed in isn't real, and believing in it anyway, in hopes that in doing so, they can make it real. (They don't always succeed, but the point is that they try.) From "a knight who remembered his vows" to "a king who still cared," from "my people…they were afraid" to "no chance, and no choice."

Finally, the simple fact is, bad guys are not winning. Come FeastDance, all the ruthless characters have managed to get themselves in a comfortable position, but it is precarious as a result of their ruthlessness: everyone hate the Freys and they are killed left and right by outlaws and piemakers; Tywin got killed by his youngest son, while Cersei is alone after driving away allies due to her paranoia; Roose Bolton is stuck in a snowbound castle while people die mysteriously and many Northmen plan to betray him due to his idiot bastard son abusing "Arya Stark". This puts a pretty hole in the belief that, in ASOIAF, you have to be ruthless and have no honor to reach your goals.

In short, GRRM is a romantic at heart, and a careful reading shows it clearly. The showrunners failed to notice it and got only stuck on the "dragons, blood and tits" part.

EDIT:

Winter is coming... All men must die... But I don't necessarily think that makes it a pessimistic world, or perhaps not any more pessimistic than the real world that we live in. And we're here for a short time, and we should be conscious of our own mortality. But the important thing is love and compassion and empathy with other human beings is still possible. Laughter is still possible, even laughter in the face of death. The struggle to make the world a better place. We have things like war and murder and rape, horrible things that still exist in the world, but we don't have to accept them. We can fight the good fight, I think, the fight to eliminate those things. So there is darkness in the world, but I don't think we necessarily have to give way to despair. One of the great things Tolkien says in Lord of the Rings is despair is the ultimate crime, that's the ultimate failing of Denethor, the steward of Gondor, is that he despairs of ever being able to defeat Sauron. We should not despair, we should not go gentle into that good night. So winter is coming, but light the torches and drink the wine and gather around the fire, we can still defy it.

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[Polokun]

Ehh, to be honest I cant help but disagree. Most of the good guy's later success seems more attributed to them either being just as brutal as the people that mistreated them, or sheer luck.

 

[stormbringer951]

Really? Cause it seems like it's done nothing but deconstruct shit from start to finish in the books.

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The most obvious is GRMM's meditations on chivalry and knighthood. Examining the legacy of the war and despite indicting the knights (both those that carried out Tywin's chevauchees, and the knights that failed in their duty to protect the people from them:

At Maidenpool, Lord Mooton's red salmon still flew above the castle on its hill, but the town walls were deserted, the gates smashed, half the homes and shops burned or plundered. They saw nothing living but a few feral dogs that went slinking away at the sound of their approach. The pool from which the town took its name, where legend said that Florian the Fool had first glimpsed Jonquil bathing with her sisters, was so choked with rotting corpses that the water had turned into a murky grey-green soup.

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I did what I could for her, though that was little enough. As she lay dying, her worst curses were not for the men who had raped her, nor the monster who devoured her living flesh, but for Ser Quincy Cox, who barred his gates when the outlaws entered the town and sat safe behind stone walls as his people screamed and died."

"Ser Quincy is an old man," said Septon Meribald gently. "His sons and good-sons are far away or dead, his grandsons are still boys, and he has two daughters. What could he have done, one man against so many?"

He could have tried, Brienne thought. He could have died. Old or young, a true knight is sworn to protect those who are weaker than himself, or die in the attempt.

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That's Maidenpool, home to one of the great legends of chivalry, where the lord, in an excessive lack of chivalry, refused to fulfil his end of the feudal contract by protecting the people and the raiders filled the famous chivalric pool with corpses. Martin also indicts those who carried out similar raids (the Mountain, Amory Lorch) as unfit chivalric role models. Sandor Clegane is so embittered by his brother becoming made a knight by a prince in a great event that he decides that knighthood is a violent lie, but despite the routiers and raiders and cowards, GRRM does not write off chivalry and knighthood and knights errants from the stories. He shows us one of them, stepping into a hopeless fight to save the lives of children she doesn't know:

The door to the inn banged open. Willow stepped out into the rain, a crossbow in her hands. The girl was shouting at the riders, but a clap of thunder rolled across the yard, drowning out her words. As it faded, Brienne heard the man in the Hound's helm say, "Loose a quarrel at me and I'll shove that crossbow up your cunt and fuck you with it. Then I'll pop your fucking eyes out and make you eat them." The fury in the man's voice drove Willow back a step, trembling.

Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice.

She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand. "Leave her be. If you want to rape someone, try me."

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There's also the common fandom assertion (repeated by the show) that Ned's honour and honesty was a useless handicap compared to being sneaky and properly ruthless in the game of thrones, but a mere couple of years after his downfall and execution, we can compare his legacy with Tywin Lannister, schemer supreme and architect of the Red Wedding. Tywin's lack of care for his son and daughter and more for his dreams for them, and his own preferred brutal methods, have sabotaged his legacy. The brutality of his methods comes home to roost in a gigantic problem for Cersei (the Sparrows), she learned from him all the worst aspects of his style, and her attempts to ape him leads the Lannisters' strategic allies to an acrimonious split, his son harbours delusions of vaunting Targaryen brother-sister marriages against all reason and logic, and he also left a literally stinking corpse. Meanwhile, Ned's bannermen are at worst fractious and reluctant to bend to their new overlords, and at best openly plotting the downfall of the Boltons (the North remembers) or marching to a die or die battle through a punishing blizzard to save Ned Stark's daughter.

Other examples include the deconstruction of the Hero's Journey: Aegon, a shallow manfactured hidden prince who has not actually learned anything from the experience of rubbing elbows with regular people (like Jon) and who hasn't even synthesised Dany's philosophising about the principles of rule and the painful experience of attemping to implement it like Dany. If you want a prediction, GRRM won't end the series with Jon unveiled as Rhaegar's son to cheering crowds, Jon is as he is already GRRM's vision of what a hidden prince looks like, not Lambert Simnel come again.

I mean, heck, in the first chapter the snooty know-nothing knight who is in charge solely by dint of being a noble, who is obliviously in danger of being fragged by his men, who can't take advice from them and can't bear to be wrong, this asshole faces down nightmare fairies from the myths and legends and defies them. All the witnesses are dead and nobody will ever know how brave he was, but the reader witnesses his courage in the face of ultimate adversity. That counts, at least, as both a minor deconstruction and subversion of fantasy tropes about nobility.

EDIT: comprehensively ninja'd by allfictions, hah.

 

[Fernandel]

Good post, @all fictions.
It's just a goddamn shame that GRRM's attempt at a romantic narrative is severely hobbled by his desire to depict the horrors of war in very gratuitous ways, a strong focus on very unpleasant characters and their motivations, taking away the agency of the moral characters you mentioned, and absolutely terrible pacing.

I'm sure that GRRM tried to write the kind of story that extolled the chivalroc virtues. Hell, it was pretty obvious that he was trying to do it as early as book... four, IIRC? But it was only on a re-read of some of the significant chapters of the series that I got it.

I quite clearly think that he failed to get that point across early and often, and I cannot blame Martin's audience for missing the point and missing it hard. He certainly wasn't making understanding it easy, what with all the extraneous chaff distracting the reader.

At some point, I think it's fair to blame the author for failing to make a point properly, and not to blame the audience for failing to understand it.

 

[all fictions]

Ehh, to be honest I cant help but disagree. Most of the good guy's later success seems more attributed to them either being just as brutal as the people that mistreated them, or sheer luck.

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That's in the show

Otherwise, I'm not sure what you are talking about. If you mean things like Manderly's Frey Pies or Lady Stoneheart's Brotherhood or Winterfell's And Then There Were None, they are presented as logical consequences deriving from the antagonists breaking too many rules, but those aren't the bedrock of the protagonists' success. Heck, in fact, the radicalization of the BwB is presented as a bad thing ("War makes monsters of us all"), and they are on their way to kill complete innocents (Genna Lannister, Brienne and her companions, Jaime arguably).

The success of the liberation of the North and the fall of House Bolton doesn't rest on all Bolton allies being murdered, it rests on a mute boy learning to read, a smuggler finding a boy among cannibals, a broken man recovering his identity, and a king making compromises.

Like, I can only think of Jaime using his reputation to end the siege of Riverrun and Jon threatening Gilly to save a baby, but that's it.

It's just a goddamn shame that GRRM's attempt at a romantic narrative is severely hobbled by his desire to depict the horrors of war in very gratuitous ways, a strong focus on very unpleasant characters and their motivations, taking away the agency of the moral characters you mentioned, and absolutely terrible pacing.

I'm sure that GRRM tried to write the kind of story that extolled the chivalroc virtues. Hell, it was pretty obvious that he was trying to do it as early as book... four, IIRC? But it was only on a re-read of some of the significant chapters of the series that I got it.

I quite clearly think that he failed to get that point across early and often, and I cannot blame Martin's audience for missing the point and missing it hard. He certainly wasn't making understanding it easy, what with all the extraneous chaff distracting the reader.

At some point, I think it's fair to blame the author for failing to make a point properly, and not to blame the audience for failing to understand it.

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I wasn't blaming the audience, I was blaming the show

Honestly, I can divide ASOIAF readers into two categories:

1. "Gawd, FeastDance is so weird/boring! Who are these characters? Where are the battles? It seemed like nothing happens. Get to the dragons vs ice zombies already!"
2. Versus "Wow, FeastDance is wild. The level of plot complexity just ramps up without getting impossible to follow. The moral ambiguities of the previous books have gotten even greyer. Characters I once hated, I now love or at least pity. I'm enthralled by descriptions of the Hobbesian nightmare that the Riverlands have become and I could read a hundred pages of monologues from Septon Meribald. Are the pieces coming together? Maybe! But I'm still loving the ride."

Maybe I'm just an optimistic fool, but I don't think there are that much readers, especially those who read all five books, who missed the point. It makes more sense to have those misconceptions if one read only Books 1-3 and missed things while reading.

To be honest, I think marketing also has a role to play, for both the books and the show: marketing for the books were setting them up against LOTR, despite GRRM's professed admiration of Tolkien, while the marketing for the show was trying really hard to put it up as "not your typical fantasy". And then there is the word-of-mouth distorting everything for non-readers or show watchers only, and so you get even more misconceptions.

 

[Polokun]

Problem is, with all the so-called romanticist viewing of knights claimed in the latter 2 books, it's ultimately only held up by less then a handful. The reality is that in real life, knights were just like as they were shown in the first 3 books: Upjumped assholes who bully people lesser then them. And to claim otherwise is naivety at best and straight up delusional like Book 1 Sansa at worst.

 

[all fictions]

Problem is, with all the so-called romanticist viewing of knights claimed in the latter 2 books, it's ultimately only held up by less then a handful. The reality is that in real life, knights were just like as they were shown in the first 3 books: Upjumped assholes who bully people lesser then them. And to claim otherwise is naivety at best and straight up delusional like Book 1 Sansa at worst.

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Did...did you read anything I wrote? I said that the knightly ideals are good things, even if knighthood itself isn't a good representative, and I also provided examples from the first three books of GRRM's point, not just the last two.

I feel like I am talking to a wall.

 

[Polokun]

Did...did you read anything I wrote? I said that the knightly ideals are good things, even if knighthood itself isn't a good representative, and I also provided examples from the first three books of GRRM's point, not just the last two.

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But what exactly did knightly ideals actually GET people?

It got Brienne forced to do the BwB demands or die.

It gets Selmy to bounce around from lord to lord, supporting assholes/incompetents/tyrants.

And it gets NewJaime to still support the Lannisters, regardless of his claims of being better.

 

[all fictions]

But what exactly did knightly ideals actually GET people?

It got Brienne forced to do the BwB demands or die.

It gets Selmy to bounce around from lord to lord, supporting assholes/incompetents/tyrants.

And it gets NewJaime to still support the Lannisters, regardless of his claims of being better.

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So the "doing the right thing without expecting rewards and even the possiblity of failing" just went right over your head?

We're meant to see how hard it is to live up to the ideals of knighthood in a world that allows for conflicting vows, how good knights in service to a bad cause handle it, how many of them dare to question the system itself, and how that reflects on their view of themselves and of the institution as a whole. Living up to the chivalric code is freaking hard which is precisely why it is the mark of a true knight.

Also, Dunk is as close as you can get to true knight, and most of his conflicts are resolved because of how he is, not in spite of it.

 

[Polokun]

So the "doing the right thing without expecting rewards and even the possiblity of failing" just went right over your head?

We're meant to see how hard it is to live up to the ideals of knighthood in a world that allows for conflicting vows, how good knights in service to a bad cause handle it, how many of them dare to question the system itself, and how that reflects on their view of themselves and of the institution as a whole. Living up to the chivalric code is freaking hard which is precisely why it is the mark of a true knight.

Also, Dunk is as close as you can get to true knight, and most of his conflicts are resolved because of how he is, not in spite of it.

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As is written, it comes off more not that it's hard, but that it's pointless.

 

[all fictions]

As is written, it comes off more not that it's hard, but that it's pointless.

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If it were pointless, doing the opposite would bring better results, yet it clearly doesn't.

And I'm sorry, but I wouldn't call it "pointless" when Brienne's example is what got Jaime to change himself. Or how Sansa is starting to get Sweetrobin to grow out of his mother's terrible upbringing by telling him stories of knights so he can feel brave.

 

[Polokun]

If it were pointless, doing the opposite would bring better results, yet it clearly doesn't.

And I'm sorry, but I wouldn't call it "pointless" when Brienne's example is what got Jaime to change himself. Or how Sansa is starting to get Sweetrobin to grow out of his mother's terrible upbringing by telling him stories of knights so he can feel brave.

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Yeah, Jaime changed so much he bravely and with noble intention threatened to murder a baby to the father's face. Or how Sansa is obviously just manipulating Sweetrobin just to stick to Petyr's plan.

You'll have to forgive me if the story so far comes off not so much "Man of La Mancha" and more "Don Quixote".

 

[all fictions]

Yeah, Jaime changed so much he bravely and with noble intention threatened to murder a baby to the father's face.

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Surprise, character development are ongoing things that aren't over just because the character had an epiphany. Like, this is even before Jaime permanently turns away from his relationship with Cersei. I myself repeatedly says that Jaime's arc isn't over until he has expressed remorse for throwing Bran.

Regardless, this was to end the siege of Riverrun without bloodshed and, more importantly, hold to his promise to Catelyn to never again to take up arms against the Starks or Tullys.

Will you look at that, a return to a theme!

Or how Sansa is obviously just manipulating Sweetrobin just to stick to Petyr's plan.

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Lolno.

Sometime during the night she woke, as little Robert climbed up into her bed. I forgot to tell Lothor to lock him in again, she realized. There was nothing to be done for it, so she put her arm around him. "Sweetrobin? You can stay, but try not to squirm around. Just close your eyes and sleep, little one."

"I will." He cuddled close and laid his head between her breasts. "Alayne? Are you my mother now?"

"I suppose I am," she said. If a lie was kindly meant, there was no harm in it.

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Alayne stroked his fingers. "There, my Sweetrobin, be still now." When the shaking passed, she said, "You must have a proper wife, a trueborn maid of noble birth."

"No. I want to marry you, Alayne."

Once your lady mother intended that very thing, but I was trueborn then, and noble. "My lord is kind to say so." Alayne smoothed his hair. Lady Lysa had never let the servants touch it, and after she had died Robert had suffered terrible shaking fits whenever anyone came near him with a blade, so it had been allowed to grow until it tumbled over his round shoulders and halfway down his flabby white chest. He does have pretty hair. If the gods are good and he lives long enough to wed, his wife will admire his hair, surely. That much she will love about him. "Any child of ours would be baseborn. Only a trueborn child of House Arryn can displace Ser Harrold as your heir. My father will find a proper wife for you, some highborn girl much prettier than me. You'll hunt and hawk together, and she'll give you her favor to wear in tournaments. Before long, you will have forgotten me entirely."

"I won't!"

"You will. You must." Her voice was firm, but gentle.

"The Lord of the Eyrie can do as he likes. Can't I still love you, even if I have to marry her? Ser Harrold has a common woman. Benjicot says she's carrying his bastard."

Benjicot should learn to keep his fool's mouth shut. "Is that what you would have from me? A bastard?" She pulled her fingers from his grasp. "Would you dishonor me that way?"

The boy looked stricken. "No. I never meant — "

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She lies to him not because of Littlefinger's plans, but because she cares about him. Likewise, if she wanted to manipulate him, why didn't she lead him on and let him have a crush on her instead of disabusing him of the notion of marrying her?

The entire tourney for "the Brotherhood of Winged Knights" of TWOW wouldn't have been based on the stories of Artys Arryn, Sweetrobin's ancestor and hero, if Sansa truly meant to manipulate him. It certainly wouldn't have been "to keep him safe and make him brave". Instead, Sansa is basically bringing songs to life, even if Littlefinger uses it for his own ends.

 

[Polokun]

She lies to him not because of Littlefinger's plans, but because she cares about him. Likewise, if she wanted to manipulate him, why didn't she lead him on and let him have a crush on her instead of disabusing him of the notion of marrying her?

The entire tourney for "the Brotherhood of Winged Knights" of TWOW wouldn't have been based on the stories of Artys Arryn, Sweetrobin's ancestor and hero, if Sansa truly meant to manipulate him. It certainly wouldn't have been "to keep him safe and make him brave". Instead, Sansa is basically bringing songs to life, even if Littlefinger uses it for his own ends.

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Well clearly we're reading the same thing, but have different interpretations. Because it just comes off like she's manipulating him. Besides, it's not like she's actually good at it.

And even if that were the case, that's just using the image of knighthood to again, manipulate a kid to do what she wants.

 

[c.j.]

Yes really.

"Men's lives have meaning, not their deaths" is the closest we've gotten to an overarching thesis statement for ASOIAF, along with Septon Meribald's Broken Men speech and Ellaria Sand's speech about the futility of vengeance. It reaches all the way back to the first book, to Ned (who turns out to not be the protagonist after all) and his shocking demise. So many readers have interpreted that moment, as well as the Red Wedding two books later, as being indicative of nihilism on GRRM's part. Everything is chaos, honor gets you killed and is therefore worthless, "power is power." But this is not so.

Ned's legacy is not his death, it is his life. The children determined to find each other again because Dad taught them to stick together and be brave, the vassals who have set out to rescue and restore those children in his name ("the Ned's little girl"), the memory both in-universe and IRL of a decent man who treated his servants like human beings worth listening to and who was determined to protect the young and innocent…all of this is the meaning of Ned Stark, not that he ended up as a head on a spike.

Heck, let's go even further, to Waymar Royce's brave last stand against the Others in the series' opening pages. We didn't think that highly of Waymar Royce at first: he's a jumped-up noble brat that is wearing the wrong clothes for ranging and don't listen to his companions' advices. But when it mattered most, the guy went down with real courage, standing his grounds against monsters from a thought-to-be mythical past, demonstrating there's more to him than bluster and arrogance.

This is why I think ASOIAF is more reconstructive than deconstructive, not tearing the genre apart so much as reminding readers of why it was worth falling in love with in the first place. It's not that being the hero is stupid, it's that being the hero is hard, and you might fail at it. But that doesn't mean the attempt is worthless.

The true mark of a hero is facing a situation in which you will not be rewarded for doing the right thing–it might even get you killed–but you do it anyway, to emphasize that heroism means something more than being the main character and ending up on top at the end.

Many books in the fantasy genre promised social rewards for doing the right thing. In book after book, if you were good—and in these books, it was easy as (hot) pie to be good—you would be king, and the land would prosper because of the king's goodness. ASOIAF argues that it is not easy to be good, and that the rewards for being so are not automatic, but that this only makes it all the more powerful if you choose to do the right thing anyway. ("No chance, and no choice.") It's also about divorcing doing the right thing from social rewards and status–the former does not automatically lead to the latter, and achieving the latter doesn't mean you've accomplished the former. Like Jaime learning to separate external honor from internal honor, and thus deciding he is going to be honorable according to himself, not how others view him. It's also like Stannis telling Jon that he intends to let the wildlings through the Wall despite the certainty that this will hurt his prospects with the Northern nobility because "when the cold winds rise, we shall live or die together." There's an immense catharsis to be found in these moments, in which characters discover what their values really are when the pretense of being rewarded for them is stripped away.

It's a very existential brand of romanticism. The truest of all knights is Brienne of Tarth, and she's not even a knight. The truest of all lords is Davos Seaworth, born a nobody in Flea Bottom.

"No chance, and no choice" from Brienne VII in AFFC is probably the best example in ASOIAF. Brienne is heavily outnumbered by Rorge's band of psychos 7-to-1 and knows she is almost certainly screwed if she steps out from the shadows and challenges them. She could very easily hide, let them inflict horrors on the kids at the inn at the crossroads, and move on safe and sound when they're gone. But despite having "no chance," she takes them on anyway, because in order to be the true knight she wants to be despite everyone telling her she can't, she has "no choice" but to defend those kids to the last breath. After all, the knightly oaths say: "I charge you to be brave, I charge you to be just, I charge you to defend the young and innocent." Like her ancestor Dunk, she's "a knight who remembered his vows" while technically having never taken those vows–this is the author separating the values of knighthood from the social systems in which they're embedded. Being a knight isn't automatically a good thing, but striving for the ideals of knighthood is. Gregor may have been anointed by the crown prince himself, but "he was no true knight" where it counts.

We fall in love with these things for a reason, after all, and both Sansa's and Sandor's stories make clear that GRRM is after more than detached, bloodless deconstruction. After all, Sansa could be seen as a stand-in for the fantasy reader, specifically an uncritical reader. Her fall-into-knowledge over the course of AGOT is so dramatic and devastating because she starts out in a bubble, and that bubble is explicitly fueled by songs and stories. In other words, fantasy has left her unprepared for the likes of Cersei and Joffrey. As such, after her beloved handsome prince forces her to watch her father executed after promising her that he would show mercy, Sansa is "reading" the world around her differently, wondering how she ever could have loved Joffrey. But what makes this more than a miserable grimdark grind, however, is the conclusion Sansa draws from this experience. She does not become Cersei, determined to imitate the unjust systems that have brought her low; she does not become Littlefinger, thinking only of what she is owed and creating more victims in the process. Instead, she gradually realizes that she must live up to the values expressed in the stories and songs, even–especially–if the world around her (particularly the institutions and individuals in power) does not. "If I am ever queen, I'll make them love me," for example, or even more powerfully, "he was no true knight." The latter is what sparks Sandor's own gradual reformation, because what Sansa is saying there is that the corrupt institution of knighthood, that which anointed Gregor and thus convinced Sandor that the values of knighthood he'd worshiped were a lie, has no monopoly on what it really means to be a true knight.

The reconstruction is thus also about people seeing that the world they believed in isn't real, and believing in it anyway, in hopes that in doing so, they can make it real. (They don't always succeed, but the point is that they try.) From "a knight who remembered his vows" to "a king who still cared," from "my people…they were afraid" to "no chance, and no choice."

Finally, the simple fact is, bad guys are not winning. Come FeastDance, all the ruthless characters have managed to get themselves in a comfortable position, but it is precarious as a result of their ruthlessness: everyone hate the Freys and they are killed left and right by outlaws and piemakers; Tywin got killed by his youngest son, while Cersei is alone after driving away allies due to her paranoia; Roose Bolton is stuck in a snowbound castle while people die mysteriously and many Northmen plan to betray him due to his idiot bastard son abusing "Arya Stark". This puts a pretty hole in the belief that, in ASOIAF, you have to be ruthless and have no honor to reach your goals.

In short, GRRM is a romantic at heart, and a careful reading shows it clearly. The showrunners failed to notice it and got only stuck on the "dragons, blood and tits" part.

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I was busy for a waill and you end up giving a much better reply then I ever could, thanks for that.

Well clearly we're reading the same thing, but have different interpretations. Because it just comes off like she's manipulating him. Besides, it's not like she's actually good at it.

And even if that were the case, that's just using the image of knighthood to again, manipulate a kid to do what she wants.

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Unfortunately I don't think this argument is going to go anywhere we see things clearly one way and you see it another but if you haven't changed your mind based on the previous responses then nothing I type would be able to convince you.

That's in the show

Otherwise, I'm not sure what you are talking about. If you mean things like Manderly's Frey Pies or Lady Stoneheart's Brotherhood or Winterfell's And Then There Were None, they are presented as logical consequences deriving from the antagonists breaking too many rules, but those aren't the bedrock of the protagonists' success. Heck, in fact, the radicalization of the BwB is presented as a bad thing ("War makes monsters of us all"), and they are on their way to kill complete innocents (Genna Lannister, Brienne and her companions, Jaime arguably).

The success of the liberation of the North and the fall of House Bolton doesn't rest on all Bolton allies being murdered, it rests on a mute boy learning to read, a smuggler finding a boy among cannibals, a broken man recovering his identity, and a king making compromises.

Like, I can only think of Jaime using his reputation to end the siege of Riverrun and Jon threatening Gilly to save a baby, but that's it.

I wasn't blaming the audience, I was blaming the show

Honestly, I can divide ASOIAF readers into two categories:

1. "Gawd, FeastDance is so weird/boring! Who are these characters? Where are the battles? It seemed like nothing happens. Get to the dragons vs ice zombies already!"
2. Versus "Wow, FeastDance is wild. The level of plot complexity just ramps up without getting impossible to follow. The moral ambiguities of the previous books have gotten even greyer. Characters I once hated, I now love or at least pity. I'm enthralled by descriptions of the Hobbesian nightmare that the Riverlands have become and I could read a hundred pages of monologues from Septon Meribald. Are the pieces coming together? Maybe! But I'm still loving the ride."

Maybe I'm just an optimistic fool, but I don't think there are that much readers, especially those who read all five books, who missed the point. It makes more sense to have those misconceptions if one read only Books 1-3 and missed things while reading.

To be honest, I think marketing also has a role to play, for both the books and the show: marketing for the books were setting them up against LOTR, despite GRRM's professed admiration of Tolkien, while the marketing for the show was trying really hard to put it up as "not your typical fantasy". And then there is the word-of-mouth distorting everything for non-readers or show watchers only, and so you get even more misconceptions.

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The sad thing is a usraly dislike brod carictrisations of fans like this (priquill fans anyone?) I have to say this is exactly how I have found people's poinuons on the latest 2 books.