Daenerys is a Tyrant, Jon Snow is an Idiot, and Other Inconvenient Truths about ‘Game of Thrones’

Daenerys Targaryan was always really good at conquering and proclaiming her ideals to the world. She and everyone who supported her rarely paused to ask why exactly she was the right choice to rule Westeros. Once she actually got around to governing, she was terrible at it. Meereen, Yunkai, and Astapor quickly collapsed into chaos as she freely butchered the slave-loving elites without understanding where their culture came from. Killing is easy; diplomacy and politics are hard.

The show expresses that problem quite well. But once they were mostly free of George R.R. Martin’s books in seasons six and seven, Benioff, Weiss, and co. found it difficult to reconcile Dany’s megalomania with her righteousness. Case in point, she massacred a bunch of Dothraki khals in a fire she started, emerged unburnt from the flames, and the Dothraki immediately looked upon her as some kind of god. The purity of her cause was undeniable, and the show could hardly disagree. Fire and blood remained her solution to the thorny issue of Slaver’s Bay, as her dragons put the Yunkish ships to the torch and charred each city’s remaining leaders. Tyrion attempted diplomacy and was repaid with treachery, and Dany had to swoop in to clean up the mess.

There is still time for Dany to have a reckoning with her misguided notions of breaking the wheel by a rather extreme form of “join or die” persuasion. Indeed, season seven poked a lot of holes in her approach, thanks to Tyrion and Jon’s admonishments. But the show still seems committed to the idea that Dany–or perhaps, Dany and Jon together–are the saviors of Westeros. The only rack Dany has to hang her hat on is that her father was the king of the Seven Kingdoms, a right that his ancestor claimed by arbitrary conquest. What kind of righteousness can grow out of that, and how can its revolutionary fervor square with the belief that an Iron Throne should exist at all? In the obsidian caves at Dragonstone, Dany tells Jon to forget his pride and bend the knee. What about Dany’s pride?

And what exactly does everyone see in her that’s got them so convinced that she is the chosen one? The freed slaves of Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen have good reason to devote themselves to her. Perhaps even Jorah, Daario, and the Dothraki could feel the same, having witnessed her emerging from the flames unburnt, like some Aryan messiah. But what about Varys? Tyrion? Jon? And let’s bring Jorah and Daario back into it. Setting aside Varys for obvious reasons, could it be that Dany’s closest acolytes believe in her ability to rule simply because they all want to fuck her?

A lot of this could get resolved in the next six episodes. Jon is a very different kind of ruler (though not completely), and some of that might rub off on Dany as they likely move forward as equals. But until now, Benioff and Weiss’s vision of a holy saint ready to make the world a better place still glows brighter than whatever she must gleefully do in order to get there.

I’m not the first person to look slightly askance at some of the decisions Jon has made since he first attained some power. Indeed, I think that Benioff and Weiss see Jon as a slightly foolhardy man who only wants to do good, help others, and maintain his honor. He makes mistakes. Sometimes, he pays for them. (Good thing Melisandre and the Knights of the Vale were around to bail him out.) It is the tension between his heart and the realities of the world around him that makes him interesting to watch. In a lot of ways, he’s the mirror image of Daenerys: both are driven by abstract moralities, with little patience for diplomacy.

That lack of patience doesn’t reflect well on Jon. He raises the red flag about the White Walkers early and often, and in fact reorients the entire narrative toward their defeat. His impassioned plea to the northern lords, to Daenerys, to Cersei–it’s all about ending the army of the dead. But has he listened to any of the people who keep saying that the whole reason the Wall exists is to keep the Walkers out? Several characters, from Sam to Varys, all make this point. Benjen “Coldhands” Stark even comes right out and tells Bran and Meera that the dead cannot pass beyond the Wall. The ambiguity found in Martin’s books of the Wall’s alleged magical properties is absent in the show. It is clear that the Wall is effective at doing its job.

In other words, there is no reason for Jon or anyone else to care about the White Walkers once the wildlings are rescued from Hardhome and pass through the Wall. That doesn’t stop Jon from imploring anyone who will listen that the world is on the verge of ending.

Jon’s actions to prevent this is what actually brings the Walkers south of the wall, thanks to Tyrion’s cockamamie plot to capture one and shove it in Cersei’s face. If Jon, Jorah, Tormund, et al. don’t range north of the wall, they don’t get trapped, and Daenerys doesn’t fly north with Viserion, and Viserion doesn’t turn into a Wall-breaking bulldozer. Jon’s panic about the White Walkers erases the possibility of containment, and brings the Long Night back to Westeros’s doorstep. Head, meet desk.

Sandor “The Hound” Clegane finally became a full-blooded character in the third season. Before that, he was Joffrey Baratheon’s sworn shield and a generally menacing presence who happened to stop his older brother from senselessly murdering his jousting opponent; save Sansa from a pack of would-be rapists; and flee the Battle of Blackwater Bay, because loyalty to something as sadistic and hollow as the realm (particularly in the hands of Joffrey) didn’t seem all that appealing.

When he arrives in season 3 as a captive of the Brotherhood Without Banners–and subsequently as the captor of Arya Stark–he transforms into a witty, fatalistic practitioner of “kill or be killed.” But hey, he’s fun! It isn’t long before Arya manages to draw out the kinder, more loyal elements of his nature.

Tormund is lovable the moment you meet him. Similarly sharp tongued, with an affection for Jon Snow that ignores Jon’s dual loyalties, he is as realistic and violent as the Hound; at the end of the day, he does what he does to save his compatriots. His infatuation with Brienne is adorable beyond words, too.

There is a problem here. Both don’t really have much compunction about killing innocent bystanders. The Hound wounds, kills, and steals his way across central Westeros, and hardly any of his victims have it coming to them. They’re just in the Hound’s way. Tormund lustily massacres a farming village south of the Wall; ditto the residents of Mole’s Town. Those people have no quarrel with the wildlings. It doesn’t seem to matter to Tormund. He never kills an innocent person again, and doesn’t lose a moment’s sleep over the innocent blood he did spill. He gets off scott free in the eyes of the show.

Olenna Tyrell only killed one person, and no one but Joffrey Baratheon’s mother shed a tear when he perished at the Red Wedding. But did you ever stop and think about how she was totally cool letting Tyrion take the fall? It’s not as if Olenna would have done herself any favors by speaking the truth, but even so, she saw Tyrion as appropriate collateral damage to get Margaery wedded to Tommen, and then gain even more power in the Seven Kingdoms for herself. She never batted an eyelash over it. The Queen of Thorns is fun as hell, but her insouciant attitude toward Tyrion’s fate should really give us pause.

Benioff and Weiss would obviously defend both Tormund, the Hound, and Olenna as three more examples of ambivalence and messiness that they and Martin hope to emphasize across the board. The Hound even finds a brief moment of solace and forgiveness for his sins with the small sept in the woods. Then, a pack of blatantly villainous Lannister soldiers butcher the sept, and the Hound, reborn, picks up his axe to go kill them all. Is he descending back into his former hell? Hardly. Those guys were pure evil, and it’s super awesome to watch the Hound split their skulls in two. Violence isn’t his downfall: it’s his salvation. The thrills that viewers experience in such moments come straight from the grindhouse, but unlike most exploitation cinema, Game of Thrones attempts to wed the grindhouse with psychological nuance. They don’t often go together.

The boundaries between observation, condemnation, and endorsement in narrative art are porous and ever shifting. Benioff, Weiss, and their team believe that they occupy the first two, and sometimes all three. All too often, though, that middle concept seems to get left behind.

It’s easy to root for Jaime Lannister. He is witty, fierce, and protective of those whom he loves. He evolved from a cocky rich boy’s son who pushed a kid out of a window to a man of honor who lost a hand to save Brienne from a gang rape, sent her off to find the Stark girls, and then helped Tyrion escape his execution. He loves Cersei more than anything–despite his dawning realization that she may be past all hope. He takes back Riverrun and sacks Highgarden not out duty, but out of devotion.

He still raped her. Right next to their dead son’s body. There’s no getting around that fact. It’s right there, plain as day, for all of us to see. Jaime pulls Cersei to the ground. Cersei pleads, “Jaime, don’t.” Jaime responds, “I don’t care.” Cut. It couldn’t be any clearer.

What makes Benioff and Weiss’s handling of this event so incongruous is the manner in which it vanishes immediately after it occurs. Across all seasons of the show, much time is spent with other characters on the lasting scars of rape. Sansa’s torture at Ramsay Bolton’s hands is the most emblematic example of this. Yet, Cersei never mentions her rape again. She never even seems to think of it again. Cersei does not appear to be changed one iota after she’s raped, which doesn’t square with her description of her sex life with Robert Baratheon (not totally consensual, to put it charitably), nor with her warnings to Sansa that death is a better fate than to be raped by Stannis Baratheon’s soldiers after the Battle of Blackwater Bay.

Here, we have a trauma that is so much more common in real life than gang rape by strangers. And it merits nary a mention from either the perpetrator or the victim. No love is lost between them.

Of course, there’s a good reason for that. After the episode was released, Benioff, Weiss, and director Alex Graves all intended for the scene to be consensual. If you look at it through the lens of a consensual moment, then Cersei and Jaime’s behavior for the rest of the series makes a lot more sense. After all, it was just another slightly perverse incident in their sex life.

That leaves us as viewers with one of two explanations for the scene’s actual effect: either Benioff, Weiss, Graves, and the rest of the writers’ room are drowning in misogyny, or they did an awful job writing, shooting, and editing the scene. Misogyny or incompetence; it’s one or the other. I lean toward the latter, but that only demonstrates the callousness of their work, to step back and look at the scene and believe it communicated a consensual act.

Benioff and Weiss never addressed the issue until months later, during a Q&A. Essentially, they retcon Jaime’s character. They both acknowledge how brutal the scene is, but couch it with language that “Jaime is is not a good guy…he’s a complex guy,” and that the scene “was something he would do.” They never say the word “rape.” What’s more, their answer directly contradicted Graves’s contemporary statements.

Maybe we can accept Benioff and Weiss’s revisionist explanations as true. It’s hard to buy that. They and their team went out of their way to imbue him with virtue, and have hardly wavered from it since. They have primed the audience to ally themselves with Jaime’s perspective, and invest in his goals. Rapists aren’t complex, though; they’re rapists. It’s impossible to look at a tossed-off rape of your soulmate as simply another “messy” data point in Jaime’s layered psychology. If you didn’t mean to show it that way, then it looks callous, unserious, and troubling as hell.

Robert Baratheon only wanted access to carnal pleasure with impunity. Stannis Baratheon was driven by a monomaniacal faith in his own destiny. Joffrey Baratheon only wanted to hurt people with impunity. Cersei Lannister desires complete control over the world, with her family pulling the strings. We aren’t surprised when any of these leaders pay little heed to the people they are actually supposed to be ruling.

Daenerys wants to free the people, but doesn’t seem concerned about the collateral damage they may suffer as she charges toward her own coronation. Why should she? Over and over, “the people” are shown to be a ravenous mob, prone to fickle swings in allegiance. The denizens of King’s Landing are always on the precipice of a riot. Regular soldiers of every army in the Seven Kingdoms rape and murder at any available opportunity. “Which kind [of terrible am I],” Daenerys asks of Tyrion when they hold their first private counsel. “The kind that prevents your people from being even more so,” he replies. The show backs up Tyrion’s assessment at every opportunity.

When Daenerys leaves Tyrion and Varys to rule Meereen after her escape from the Sons of the Harpy, they employ clerics of the Lord of Light to pacify the common folk and feed propaganda about Daenerys. The people, as they are so often collectively described, lack agency, individual identity, and any kind of decency without a strong leader to guide them. Thomas Hobbes would find kindred spirits in Benioff and Weiss for this vision of humanity.

Indeed, the only time the people are kindly gazed upon is when they worship their liberator, their “mhysa.” Daenerys only cares about the people when she is their savior. Even Jon, who spends five seasons surrounded by almost no one of noble birth, strongly adheres to the tenets of feudal monarchy. What’s the point of breaking the wheel or charging north of the wall to bring down the White Walkers unless you truly believe in the agency and power of everyone in the land? Tyrion and Sansa wield slightly lesser forms of power in this impending new world, but neither of them can see much past who is and should be at the top of the ladder. Nobody bothers to look down to see why the hell they’re on top of the ladder in the first place beyond their “right” to be up there at all.

We would be asking too much for the future leaders of Westeros to tear down the old system completely and throw up a 21st century democracy in its place. You still have to stop and wonder if Jon, Daenerys, Sansa, or Tyrion have any interest in ruling for their people, rather than simply ruling over them.

We haven’t yet seen how Game of Thrones will conclude, and like all shows, these final episodes could bring a lot of these questions into clearer focus. One always risks judging too quickly when one doesn’t have the full painting to study. The first seven seasons have often been masterful, sensitive, provocative, and interpretively thorny at times. No right thinking person hopes for a black-and-white moral perspective, where the good guys all win and the bad guys all get punished. Game of Thrones has never been interested in that. But some of those thorns still sting.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter: @EvanDavisSports.