Janos Slynt - Hero of The Wall

 

The Watchers on The Wall has  just finished and given us an hour of real enjoyment, a rip-roaring ride of sheer action. 

How about that for a contrast to last week's emotions at the conclusion of The Mountain and The Viper, eh?

Instead of feeling anger and upset, this week I've been left feeling thoroughly content, almost warm with satisfaction.

How atmospheric did the battle feel with the snow billowing down through the purple-black sky? And that fire, wow, lighting up the North for hundreds of miles in sublime beauty.

Then there's the giants, the bloody wooly mammoths and those mega scythes. What an hour of fun we've just had - though I do wish HBO would set aside the final two episodes of each season to be two hours long: I don't think tonight's episode would have lost anything by going into a second hour.

To dismiss tonight's episode as being solely action, however, would be doing it a disservice. Yes there were plenty of deaths, explosions and steel crashing on steel but we saw a range of characters develop in significant ways.

Samwell became a man, declaring himself 'not nothing anymore' and shooting one of those bald prats in the bonce with a crossbow.

Jon Snow became the leader he was destined to be, displaying a knowledge of tactics on The Wall, whilst going on to rally the NightsWatchmen fighting in the grounds of the castle onwards to victory.

Ygritte showed us that she's not the cold-hearted biatch that we thought at the end of last season as her eyes caught Jon's and she couldn't bring herself to kill Snow; letting out a joyous breath and a loving smile.....that is before the nodding Jimmy Grimble fired an arrow through her chest.

Even the angry bloke, Ser Allister, became likeable as he kicked some arse and gave Gingerbeard a decent fight, narrowly avoiding death as the Crows pushed him down a cat-flap.

Yet one character is getting pelters on Twitter and on various internet forums discussing our great show - Janos Slynt.

Scouse Slynt is being derided as a coward, a traitor, a slimeball. Well I say....justice for the Slynty one!

It's easy to see Slynt's behaviour as being disgraceful. We're so used to Hollywood giving us brave, noble characters willing to die for their cause in heroic fashion. Characters giving their lives to protect the greater good. Think the guy in Independence Day sacrificing himself by flying his plane into the core of the alien mothership, ultimately saving humanity.

If Janos Slynt was flying that plane he'd have feigned a course set for the mothership's core; bypassed the ship altogether and flown to Hawaii to enjoy his last few days slurping Pina Coladas on a beach and doing the hoola with some hotties while the rest of the world bowed down for their new overlords.

Isn't there something more....human about Slynt's behaviour there?

No?

Well consider this.

The only reason Slynt is at the wall in the first place is because he showed loyalty to the royal family by arresting a plotter against the Crown in Ned Stark.

We, as the audience, knew that Joffrey had no right to the crown. And we knew that Ned would have made a fair and just protector of the realm, but the residents of King's Landing, and the figures at court were not partial to that information. In the Goldcloaks eyes, Joffrey was the son of King Robert and rightful heir. Whether bribery came into it, or whether Slynt had been promised rewards for his loyalty to the Lannisters, the fact remains that in essence he was defending the King against malevolent influences. 

Should loyalty to the Crown be rewarded by a trip to The Wall until death?

Even the ardent Slynt hater must concede this is harsh.

 I used to work for a well-known clothing company during my time at college. The store was high up at a local shopping centre, with no windows, and during the summers the hot air would rise. This created a stifling heat on the shop floor.

A shame then that the air-conditioning unit had been broken for two years.

This meant that customers fainted from heat exhaustion in the changing rooms. Staff members on a couple of occasions went home feeling sick. I'd spend hours in that heat, feeling like hell in a pair of skinny jeans. The only thing worse than the muggy temperatures were the clone-like 'its hot in here isn't it?' comments from the customers. Responding to that remark 30 times a day wore me into the laminated floor.

How then did I feel when I opened the newspaper and saw the owner of our company grinning with beautiful models on each arm under headlines detailing another year of record profits in the region of £500m?

The air-conditioning unit would have cost £50 to fix.

But nobody came. Nobody cared about the watchers on the shop floor. We were the little people, expendable.

Not unlike those hearty hundred on The Wall.

How disillusioned must they feel to have to give their lives, fighting 100,000 with a lack of resources, cheap weapons, poor armour in seeming isolation?

None of the other regions apparently give a shit.

In King's Landing they play in tourneys. 

In Highgarden they sit around eating grapes amongst their greenery.

Characters like Cersei don't just ignore the pleas of the NightsWatch but actively mock them on the rare occasions they're brought up in conversation.

What motivation then has Slynt to die in pain, so plump little lords may enjoy their summer afternoons in peace and comfort?

Here is a man who has had his freedom and livelihood taken away for being loyal to the Crown and is now part of a tiny force given the task of fighting 100,000 men and monsters, under-resourced, as the rest of the realm sunbathes.

Given this context, can we still blame Janos Slynt for deciding against dying? 

Or should we champion our much-maligned former favourite of the Lannisters for sticking two fingers up at his boss and refusing to be yet another expendable 'little person'?

Companies and Kingdoms can ill-afford to forget about those on the ground, in the dirt, because often they're the only line of defence against much worse horrors.

Mistreat them and don't be surprised when you get a wooly mammoth at your doorstep; or a dehydrated mother of two from Dudley with a compensation form - admittedly two indistinguishable beasts cut from the same cloth I concede. 

 
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Prince Oberyn - Icarus

It's been an hour since the episode 'The Mountain and The Viper' concluded. The recording has long since come to an end and a Sky warning message is etched across the screen....'Your Sky box is about to go into stand-by mode'.

Fine....f**k off.

I'm not ready to get up yet. Can't you give a grief-stricken young man, crying in his pants at 1 o'clock in the morning, a few moments Murdoch!?

Eh? You heartless drongo.

Leave me to pull out clumps of my hair in shock at what has just unfolded before my eyes.

Probably not the most auspicious of times to fire up the blog, perhaps better to get some sleep, and react another time. Like those Premiership football managers who find a camera pointed in their mushes moments after an outrage has occurred and they end up making angry, irrational comments due to the heat of the moment getting the better of them.  

But perhaps a passionate, emotional entry is the perfect tribute to The Red Viper.

For any of you mad, sad or bad enough to have read every entry in The Garden of Whispers thus far, you'll have noticed that rather than react to an individual episode, I like to take a wider approach and talk about issues pertaining to the world of Game of Thrones. But after that, after that, tonight, I couldn't speak about anything else. No.....sorry!....I ain't 'avin it. 

You'll have to wait for your article on Bravosi eating habits or whether Benjen Stark has transformed into a tree for another time.

Oh Oberyn, if only you'd have worn a bloody helmet. Tyrion implored you to take heed of the warning. Like a dad, standing at the door, when you're off to do a bit of cycling.

'Pah, what does he know? Screw the helmet, it'll mess up my V05 surfer's-clay moulded bouffant.' Well, maybe we'll start paying attention after seeing tonight's horror show. 

If there is any comfort to take from Oberyn's brutal death, it's that he died the way he lived - full of passion and intent on getting justice.

He may have died at a ripe old age of 85, rocking in a chair in a stinking room of piss and asbestos. He may have died in a needless war, giving his life to profit a distanced lord or king, but he died attempting to win justice for his sister - a just and poetic death for the charismatic warrior poet.

That's not to say we're not going to miss him. 

We all have our favourite characters in Game of Thrones, and we all come to different interpretations. Who's 'good'? Who's 'bad'? Who's likeable? Who's grating?

For me, Oberyn [and to a lesser extent his entourage] breathed life into season four. If you're going to kill off the Stark threat, and kill off Joffrey, the audience needed something new and fresh to divert their attentions to and Oberyn stepped into the role perfectly. The striking yellow tunic became iconic; we got to see a much-needed ally in the capital for Tyrion and at last, there was somebody seemingly powerful enough to upset the Lannister lion-cart. Oh yeah...AND somebody to take screen time away from the duller characters such as Samwell Tarly and Bran.

Oberyn had the rare qualities of being self-confident, self-assured yet humble, with a sense of justice and compassion. Indeed, the conversation between Oberyn and Tyrion where the Viper relayed the story of the Dornish entourage arriving to see the baby imp remains one of the most beautifully touching moments in the series to date. 

This mixture of the fierce with the sympathetic brought about a genuinely 'cool' character in the form of the Prince.

If you ponder for a moment our world and the groups of people from your school / college / workplace, you'll note that most people tend to fall into one category or the other. There tends to be a whole wealth of confident types who strut around but lack any sort of humility or tenderness. And there seems to be a load of humble and reasoned types, who lack confidence in themselves. When you find somebody that displays both sides of the coin, it is a rare person indeed.

That is the main reason to like Oberyn. Someone immensely adept in wielding a blade and handling himself with the best, but also content to sit in a garden and write poetry. 

How can anybody dislike that?

Those who analyse Oberyn during the fight say that he should have coldly put his spear through The Mountain's fat Bluto head as soon as the beast had fallen.

Perhaps, but whereas an Unsullied, or even somebody like Baelish would have killed their opponent swiftly, almost mechanically, such behaviour would not have been part of the Viper's character. 

Some accuse him of hubris, of being like Icarus, who ignored the dangers and flew too close to the Sun, never anticipating the worst could happen.

I disagree. I don't think Oberyn was consumed with arrogance or hubris, he merely wanted answers, wanted acknowledgement and he let his emotions take over. He lost all sense and perspective because of love he bore for his family and this proved his undoing.

At this point in time I don't know if I'm pissed off with George RR Martin [peace be upon him] or whether I'll just stomach the death and move on with the show as it evolves. 

Has his fixation with shocking the audience prematurely robbed us of a fantastic personality?

At the moment I'm inclined to say 'yes', because I'm incredibly bitter. 

I'm inclined to go to Arizona, confiscate his bloody books off him and throw all of his pens in the bin lest he kill off another great character - all the while subjecting us to Arya, Jon Snow, Samwell, Bran and Reek. 

Alas, however, I've said it throughout The Garden of Whispers: Game of Thrones is supposed to mirror the real world and it is true, in our world there are plenty of injustices. 

The boring oft do outlive the charismatic. Being engaging and a poet isn't reason enough to ensure a prolonged life. Poorer shows would have had Oberyn winning in a predictable fashion. In a perverse way, Oberyn's unexpected death is exactly the reason we love Martin's creation.

Nevertheless Oberyn's death has affected me more so than any other hitherto, and I can't quite fully explain why. Was it because the Viper's motives were so pure, and he merely wanted to avenge his sister's death and get justice?

It can't be, Ned died for similar reasons and whilst that shocked and upset me, the intensity of emotion was nothing like this.

Perhaps it is the way Oberyn died? It is difficult to conceive of a more violent and nasty way to perish. In the early 20th century Sigmund Freud wrote a treatise named 'The Uncanny' which looked at the way in which we become 'terrified' by analysing 'The Sandman' a German fairytale where a creepy nutter goes around pulling the eyes out of children.

The uncanny was described as that emotion where our blood runs cold and our hairs stand on edge. It's a different sort of terror than the more obvious forms [being chased with an axe; watching Birmingham when it's 0-0 and there's 5 minutes of injury time]. Freud said the uncanny is something that appears 'familiar' but is also 'freaky ass shit' at the same time. Freud's perfect example was the doll, if it came alive with the lack of emotion on its face. 

Imagine that countenance. A slow turning head with a fixed, painted mouth, its marble eyes turning slowly and looking your way. Horrifying.

In theory, a doll shouldn't be frightening, but if it came alive the sense of dread you would be filled with would be 'the uncanny'. If you want to see what the uncanny looks like, simply search Google for images of 1900 Halloween photos, and view the scores of small children donning crudely crafted masks which appear more frightening than anything Hollywood could conjure up. 

In The Uncanny Freud wrote that we have a universal fear of incurring injuries to our eyes. We all know people who have gone through major surgery, I have known family members and friends who have had open heart surgery; amputations; brain surgery - but nothing sickened me as when I found out our plumber was in hospital having his eyes removed; his optic nerve messed about with, before his eyeballs were rinsed under the tap and popped back in.

"We know from psycho-analytic experience, however, that the fear of damaging or losing one's eyes is a terrible one in children. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too, that we will treasure a thing as the apple of our eye." - Freud: 'The Uncanny".

In reality Oberyn's death hit me hard due to a combination of all three reasons. A charismatic, much-loved character dying; fighting for justice which he ostensibly hasn't won [I think The Mountain is still alive] and the death was so sickening to behold that I actually felt nauseous. This culminated in an event which will stay with me for the rest of the show until its final concluding episode.

So why not raise a glass tonight to Prince Oberyn? A man of style, passion, heart and justice, removed from the show before his time.

An electric yellow sun flare that burst into King's Landing and lit it up for a season.

Cersei may have smirked on seeing the Viper's head explode, but she forgets where her daughter is currently sheltered. Maybe soon we shall bare witness to the saying that the Lannisters aren't the only ones who pay their debts...

 
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 "You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children. You raped her. You murdered her. You killed her children."

Sansa and Arya - The Rose and The Weed

When we first met Sansa and Arya Stark as two squabbling teenagers in the ramshackle, wind-swept, stony towers of Winterfell we noted two distinctly different personalities at play. For Sansa was a spoilt brat. She was short with her aides; she barked at her father and she lied, to protect Joffrey, condemning an innocent animal to a bloody fate. Sansa had all the markings of a girl that hadn't experienced the gritty reality of Game of Thrones, she was comfortable.

In Arya the audience sympathised. Here was a charming girl of smiles with an acerbic tongue and seemingly endless energy.

We enjoyed her touching relationship with Jon Snow [one of the few Starks to constantly show him loving attention]; we shared her hatred of Joffrey and we could almost feel the great warmth emanating from the scenes with Syrio Forel. 

Arya was our favourite Stark daughter.......right until poor dead Ned lost his head.

'What!' I hear the book readers cry. 'We still love Arya!'

Yes, she seems a firm favourite amongst those wretched people who have read the books. 

But might you naysayers cease spoiler-posting for one moment and reconsider your character loyalties?

For in the world of Game of Thrones, as in our world, life is such a precious thing. Arya seemingly has no qualms with extinguishing precious life. She even seems to get some sort of 'kick' out of doing so. Like a garden weed suffocating the surrounding plants.

Note her vile expression of glee when she pierces the neck of a defenceless soldier who had long since surrendered.

Or the cold, expressionless countenance of a psychopath as she eyes up another kill in the most recent episode. 

Arya has no contemplation of whether she has the moral right to take life, neither does she consider the grieving families she is leaving behind in her reign of terror. She is almost robotic. Like a terminator with a blocked nose and a bowl haircut.

If poor Ned looked down upon her now, would he be proud? I'm not so sure.

Arya supporters will point to the fact that everybody she's killed hitherto had it 'coming to them'.

Debatable.

When she stabbed a young boy on escaping King's Landing, was that a proportionate response to evade capture? The dutiful boy was merely trying to stop the escape of a reported traitor.

Even the murder of the Lannister soldier and Rorge is questionable. Shouldn't these men have faced trial for their crimes? Who made Arya judge, jury and executioner?

She even has the audacity to plot the murder of The Hound, the man keeping her alive, because this dog was ordered to kill a butcher's boy [who supposedly tried to kill Joffrey].

Was The Hound's crime any worse than those committed by Arya?

Increasingly we see a figure not only demented with her indifference towards death but laden with double standards too. 

Yet, I like Baelish. How can I dislike Arya for showing no regard towards murder but praise Littlefinger?

I believe it is explained by age.

We all hate the precocious do we not?

I remember walking through those glass doors into Starbucks to get my usual vanilla latté one morning. I was stuck behind a middle class couple and their child [who looked like Robyn of The Vale] perusing the cake counter.

No matter. No rush.

The bespectacled mother was analysing the poppy seed biscuits and clucking in thought. 

...No problem.

At the till she then turns to little Robyn, a boy no more than seven years old, and asks him if he would like a cappuccino.

Little Robyn nodded.

I almost fell back into the newspaper stand in disbelief.

I bit my lip with irritation. Kids that age should be drinking chemically-enhanced, borderline-poisonous Panda Pops from the Wacky Warehouse, not cappuccinos.

It tapped into a mindset i'm sure many of us share: there is something sickening about the young abandoning their youth and acting decades older.

The absolute worst show on television is the Junior Apprentice. Twelve year olds in ill-fitting suits, whipping out Blackberries and talking about cash-flow and profit forecasts.

Go and find some conkers for the love of God.

And this is the problem with Arya. 

Her response to Ned's execution hasn't been consistent with the reaction of a young teenager. The way she values life lacks the innocence and fragility of a youthful mind. She is a cappuccino. There's something deeply unlikeable about that.

The only Stark to have witnessed the horror of Ned's execution was Sansa [for Yoren made Arya look away].

As Arya's likeability plummeted after that fateful scene, Sansa's rose.

Unfortunate Sansa has had to suffer far greater than Arya. Not only did she witness her father being slaughtered, but throughout the series she has been forced to look upon Ned's head on a spike; endure public beatings from Meryn Trant and Joffrey; face attempts on her life; she's been threatened with rape; she had to marry Tyrion against her will and more recently, she narrowly avoided being flung out of the Moon Door.

In response to this, Sansa routinely cries, breaks down and shows the humility, heart and vulnerability one would associate with a young lady in such a situation.

She displays a certain humanity.

And in spite of all these horrors and all the emotional breakdowns, Sansa still finds the inner strength to carry herself with such a grace and dignity befitting a true lady of her title.

Sansa isn't going around stabbing little boys to death, or making lists of who to torture. She is the smile of defiance, a Lady Diana of Game of Thrones. Westeros' Rose.

And who didn't shed a tear when Sansa entered the Eyrie winter gardens? When she witnessed the snow of the North, her home, for the first time since her mother, father and brother were butchered?

I cried my eyes out of course.

You'd have needed a cold heart of stone to resist weeping.....or the personality of Arya.

Nobody could begrudge unfortunate Sansa a happy ending, not even the heartless book readers.

To weather the storm of hateful thunder, lightening and heavy rain and remain the rose is true testament to Sansa when so many lesser characters would have become weeds.

Whatever happens from this point onwards, Ned and Catelyn's oldest daughter can hold her head up high - I've no doubt they would be proud. 

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The Beauty of Daario Naharis

"I fight for beauty. The Gods gave us two gifts to entertain ourselves before we die - the thrill of fucking a woman who wants to be fucked, and the thrill of killing a man who wants to kill you."

When Daario Naharis proudly delivers this speech in one of his early scenes it tells us everything we need to know about the character of the man and perhaps, his future intentions. This opening dialogue wasn't idle chit chat, but a crystal clear window into the long haired dandy's soul. These were the words of a true Aesthete [the fops of the 19th century who studied 'beauty' and were obsessed with attempting to define it - not people with dodgy toe hygiene, although I can't imagine the Second Sons have access to decent footwear].

Aesthetes were identified by their love of unregulated pleasure, their pursuit of the beautiful and the desire to indulge the senses. They loved flowers [one of Daario's chief interests], perfumes, absinthe, music, heroin. 

If you were catching a flight with them at Birmingham Airport they'd likely miss their plane and be found pissed in the duty free shop, prostrate on the floor with Calvin Klein testers lodged up their nasal passages.

"We had philosophical differences....over your beauty, it meant more to me than it did to them....i'm the simplest man you'll ever meet - I only do what I want to do. - Daario Naharis"

In Walter Pater's treatise 'The Renaissance' Pater stresses that the true Aesthete sees life as fleeting and momentary, as sand in the hourglass, and that they should follow their passions before it's too late. Cram in as much pleasure as possible. Do what you want to do. Avoid forming habits, for the formulaic kills life, dulls the senses, instead seek to test new opinions, try new things and most importantly desire the beautiful as that is the highest of endeavours. 

Patter was vilified for these views. It was deemed that they promoted amorality and reckless hedonism. Should we be teaching the kappa-clad, 18 year old single mother of two to be out on the tiles downing shots of cheeky vimto off a barman's bare arse? On a school night!? Or would such a figure have a responsibility to act less selfishly? To look after her children.

Should we admire Daaro Naharis when he states that he only does what he wants to do, or is this a damaging and callous mindset to have?

Like all great Aesthetes, Daario Naharis has deferred to beauty above all other considerations. Were he a man of loyalty he might have fought for his employers, Yunkai. Were he a man of morality he wouldn't have become a sellsword in the first place, instead he may have opted for a 'just' occupation such as farmer or priest.

Yet Daario fights for beauty, and has declared himself loyal to the 'fittest', 'sexiest', in short 'most beautiful' leader in the race for the Iron Throne - Daenerys. He cares not for her anti-slavery politics, nor her birthright claim of Westeros, he's just drawn to the beautiful allure of the nymph-like Khaleesi. 

Is this such an irrational way to live? 

If South Korea declared war on Italy and you enlisted to fight for the Italians because you prefer their women, would that make you mad?

In our world, perhaps.

In Game of Thrones Daario merely embodies one branch of philosophy in a maelstrom of competing ideologies.

There is however, a huge problem with this mindset. A problem that Aesthetes have struggled with since Longinus of Ancient Greece.....beauty is totally subjective.

There are some people out there who stare at their televisions and touch themselves over Yara Greyjoy and aren't interested in Daenerys. There are some out there who lick their laptop monitors with lust whenever Walder Frey's daughters line up for parade. There are those who long for Loras Tyrell. Others for Tyrion - dwarf fetish enthusiasts. Dirty cows.

Two men can listen to the same song. Where one hears beauty, the other hears f***ing Nickleback.

Immanuel Kant wrote that taste is totally subjective, yet we believe that beauty is objective.  Just because I think that Daenerys is beautiful, doesn't mean I should assume that everybody thinks the same.

Yet people do, and people get angry when you disagree with their judgements and they end up dismissing you as 'tasteless' or having an inferior intellect.

We all know somebody like this. Those ignorant enough to suggest that their taste in music or comedy is 'superior' to the taste of others. 

Those fans of The Smiths who would sneer at EDM as being 'inferior'.

Yet Immanuel Kant stated that EDM is infinitely more beautiful than anything The Smiths or any guitar band has ever created.


Kant identified three areas of taste: the agreeable, the just and the beautiful.

The agreeable is that which can be measured by a concept, eg 'this chair is soft', 'this steak is tender'. 

The just is that which forms society's ethical code and acts as the basis for its morality.

The beautiful is that which cannot be measured by a concept, Kant uses an example of a flower.

Whereas some shitty Smiths song, or Arctic Monkeys track is 'agreeable' in that acts to 'educate the audience about life in a council house', the song has a purpose, like a chair. The EDM track has no purpose, it merely floats around on a higher plain, listless and beautiful, unblemished by meaning, like a flower.

If Daario Naharis was in HMV he would almost certainly pick up Swedish House Mafia's greatest hits, before spitting on a Radiohead album.

And under Kant's philosophy we can see why he chose to fight for Daenerys.

The Lannisters are agreeable, they'll pay you in gold and give you castles. Stannis is just, he offers religious spiritual purity and salvation.

But Daenerys is beautiful, floating around Essos being attractive, seemingly purposeless.  It's easy to see why the Aesthete would be drawn towards this true beauty.

Ultimately, however, all beauty fades, and the Aesthete must not be trusted. Should Daenerys stock her army with those who only follow her for such superficial reasons she will undoubtedly find trouble as the wrinkles crinkle across her cheeks, her blonde locks turn grey and her posture starts to fatten.

Then the fickle Aesthetes move on, in their never ending pursuit of beauty - perhaps to Sansa or whoever next they deem to be beauty's ambassador.

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Misunderstood Masters

 

 As Game of Thrones continues to rise in popularity the audience is inevitably becoming more varied, more vocal and absolutely batshit irrational.

That's not me being a fantasy hipster. A fantasy Zane Lowe figure sitting on a pile of Discworld novels in a linen Gandalf gown, rolling my eyes and tutting as I listen to the delivery men over the road talking about how they'd like to bang 'the one with the dragons'.

I'm not that kind of Game of Thrones snob.

I haven't even read all of the books yet and I consider anybody who has to be...well.....sub-human scum actually. As you quite well know.

But Game of Thrones is now hugely popular, which means one thing.....loads of mentals are going to criticise it.

The most mental of all the mentals are the self-appointed protectors of morality; the bastions of good taste; the champions of the housewives; Mary Whitehouse's clone army - the Guardianistas.

Foppish graduates working in social media, living in dripping damp East London bedsits where they sit eating their tea on a squeaky, creaky mattresses and tuck into slabs of hard cheese using stained, rusty cutlery.

Oddities in cagoules, Stevenage fans with yellow teeth.

Debauched striking teachers flitting between independent coffee houses, subsisting on a diet of brie and the smell of their own farts.

These hordes have discovered Game of Thrones and they don't like what they're seeing.

One of the leading Guardianistas hissed recently that they'd stopped watching altogether due to the rampant misogyny in the show:

"After yet another rape scene, I no longer trust the creators to bridge the gap of thoughtful conversation between action and intent – so I've given up on Game of Thrones for good...I’m exhausted by the triumph of men at the expense of women as a narrative device. " 

We can quickly disregard this lady's screeching indignation as nonsense in two ways:

Firstly, the suffering in Game of Thrones is genderless. If you moan about a dubious rape scene but totally ignore previous scenes where a tortured Theon has his turnip crunched off; Joffrey [a mere child] chokes to death after a gruesome poisoning and Westeros' true king, Viserys, has a bowl of boiling gold poured over his mush, if you ignore that the violence is nondiscriminatory you come across as being selective in your outrage...and a bit of a smelly Guardianista hypocrite.

But secondly, and most importantly, this is a medieval fantasy series loosely based around the events of the War of the Roses with snippets from Ancient Rome. There was unchecked rape, murder, incest, adultery galore during these time periods. Although Game of Thrones is a totally fictional world, it would be utterly disingenuous and....well...absolutely shit...to exclude these aspects from the narrative. It would cheat the audience.

As Ramsey Snow says - if you want to watch a program rife with political correctness and sweet sugary niceness then download a John Lewis staff relations video.

Let's be truthful here, it's never been art's role to teach society how to behave.

Art should be unrestricted. 

You're saying Game of Thrones isn't allowed to reflect a time period of cruelty because it might upset some giggling simpleton sitting in a glass office stuffing her face with Angel Delight?

I say to her - switch the channel over. 

Put something bland on if you can't contemplate viewing that which challenges your rigid line of thought.

I hear Downton Abbey is good this time of year.

It's always problematic to apply morality to history, and to art, and especially to something that is a blend of the two.

We've recently seen the Masters of Slaver's Bay rounded up and crucified for participating in the slave trade. And whilst many contemporary Game of Thrones viewers saw this as justice, I couldn't help but feel sorry for them.

Can you take your ethical code from 21st century Western Europe and bash the colourfully clothed Masters over the head with it? I'm not so sure.

Slavery is abhorrent to us, but if you were there in Slaver's Bay, if you were born into a Masters' family and all you ever knew was their social order...the chances are you'd go along with it. You'd find it the norm.

Would you deserve to die nailed to a cross?

Would you be 'evil', or merely a product of your time?

In many ways the Masters, with their grey hair and their sad faces reminded me of our 70s entertainers.

That sad bunch currently being hunted down, rounded up and retrospectively punished by a cold new world mechanically immune to tactile characters, applying 2014 post-feminism justice to 1970s bum-slapping.

You might have seen a Ken Barlow, a Freddie Star or a Jim Davidson in those turquoise tunics, shuffling along the streets of Meereen in their leather brown sandals.

All three found innocent in our world, but in the world of Daenerys, condemned to the nails and the cross without trial.

How many of us would face our doom at the cross if a Daenerys arrived on our doorstep tomorrow and frowned on the practice of eating meat for example, or she dictated that kissing women on the cheek is sexual assault? Would there be many of us left?

Ask not if the bell tolls for the Masters, it tolls for thee.

Of course our Guardian correspondent would hail Daenerys as the bringer of justice and divine retribution for the 'evil' practices of the Masters. The mass slaughter of hundreds of them would be perfectly justified, because here in 21st century Britain we know that slavery is terrible.

Yet there is no nuance in this line of thought and besides, we've established that this journalist is a bleedin' idiot anyway.

The Masters weren't all evil. Aye, some must have been dodgy, but others would have been fairly reasonable people; and yet they all succumbed to the same brutal death.

This is the problem of making rash outbursts like that of Daenerys or the Guardian columnist, [two raging symbols of the terror of unregulated feminism] you simply end up chucking the baby out with the dishwater. Or the dishes out with the bathwater, or whatever the expression is.

A decent leader would have gradually faded out the practice of slavery by introducing wages, better  working conditions, holidays and dress-down Fridays. 

A nice bit of human rights legislation.

But then again, give it one hundred years and the grandchildren of these oppressed slaves would be sitting in their Homebase jacuzzis, sipping Grey Goose Vodka and bemoaning all this 'bureaucracy' around these days and how the old times were best.

Sometimes you can't please them.

They'd slap each other on the backs and pledge to vote for a party of former Masters posing as common people....EssosKip. 

So maybe a decent leader, on taking the city,  would have just maintained the traditions of Meereen and turned a blind eye to the slave trade. A move that would have at least avoided the future ball ache of the newly freed ranting and raving about referendums, failing to realise how good they've actually got it. 

There is always a lot to consider in these tricky ethical issues. It's never the apt course of action to just crucify everyone or call for a ban on Game of Thrones. 

This is the brand of irrationality that will see you working for the Guardian in perpetual outrage, hurling DVDs out of the window because they contain something that might possibly offend somebody, somewhere.

And by the lord of light, you don't want that, believe me.

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