Smouldering Ash

 

 

There’s been a feeling that the fifth season of Game of Thrones has started quite slowly.

Three episodes in and Stannis and his clique are still lounging around at the Wall like a bunch of moochers; Arya’s sweeping up; Tyrion’s been stuck in his carriage; we don’t know whether the Hound is alive and we’ve only had two minutes of Dorne.

Contrast with the first three episodes of season four and we’d witnessed the Hound’s famous chicken scene, the introduction of Oberyn, Theon’s transformation to Reek, the poisoning of Joffrey, Tyrion’s arrest, Baelish’s ‘rescue’ of Sansa, Karl ‘fookin’ Tanner of Gin Alley leading the mutiny at Craster’sKeep and Daenerys putting Meereen under siege.

We were bloody spoilt in season four, in fact, from the period of the Red Wedding in the late third season up to Arya boarding the boat to Braavos every episode was sublime.

We’re now demanding a huge death or a cinematic battle every week, and the start of the fifth series hasn’t really provided that….unless you class the death of the most excellent Janos Slynt as big news, which I most certainly do!

But look at it like this – the longer the show takes to get going, the more we’ve got to watch. If season five had wrapped up most of the main events in the first three episodes, we wouldn’t have much to look forward to. Just as winter is coming, you know in season five excellence is also not too far away.

And besides, I could quite easily watch three hours of the characters in Game of Thrones talking to one another about ‘what their father once told them’ anyway. They’re that engrossing. In fact I’d rather watch a conversation between a pair of Game of Thrones characters than I would real, actual people, but perhaps that’s just me being a weirdo.

I like to think of Game of Thrones as being akin to a volcano. If late season three and the whole of season four was the violent eruption, we’re now in the stage where the landscape has changed, ash has settled but the lava underground is bubbling and rumbling for the next explosion to rock Westeros and Essos.

You can already feel things picking up.

 

Of the slow three episodes, this week’s episode was the least slow. 

Baelish is to force Sansa into marrying the deranged Ramsey Bolton. We say ‘forced’, on paper he gave her the choice ‘look, you don’t want to do this? Fine, we’ll turn everybody around and go all the way back home if you’re not up for it’, but that was Baelish’s reverse psychology at play. The wily fox pulled the famous move where it’s easy to convince somebody to do something by suggesting they don’t have to, instead of outright ordering them to do it.

Think of an example in your own lives, let’s say you’re 17 years old and you ask your Mother for a lift to the train station. 

Which technique works better?

‘Are you ok to drop me off at the train station? I mean you don’t have to. I was going to walk through the snow, I’ve got plenty of time. Up to you.’

Or

‘Give me a damn lift to the train station….now’

The first option is the most effective and Baelish knows this. It is the illusion of offering choice and making the person believe they have the power to decide. 

Of course Baelish further influenced her decision by doing that creepy thing he does where gets all up in her grill, putting his face about 2 inches away from hers, immediately forcing her on the back foot. Let’s hope he’s had a few Tic-Tacs for lovely Sansa’s sake. 

The decision to give Sansa to the Boltons seemed baffling at first, but when Baelish gave his speech about it being high time Sansa went on the offensive and avenged her family, it started to make a lick of sense. Sansa would become some kind of sleeper agent amongst the Boltons with perhaps the ultimate aim of taking them out from within. 

 

Bit of a risk though.  

Sansa is the key to the North, handing her over to a maniac who peels the skin off people, chases attractive women through the woods with a pack of dogs and eats *ahem* sausages, means lovely Sansa could be one wrong move away from being turned into a pair of shoes. 
 

Baelish did say to Ramsey that he hadn’t heard much about him, so perhaps Littlefinger’s intel isn’t as good as it once was. But if Sansa is successful, and she launches some kind of coup and retakes Winterfell…then Baelish would have his niece as Wardeness of the North and with his power accrued in The Vale, our ambitious pimp could feasibly gobble up half the country.

 

Are the dynamics changing between Margaery and Cersei?

Too early to say, but Cersei cut a broken figure when she was being mocked by the rose of the Tyrells ‘We’d have got some wine in if we knew you were coming, but it’s 10 o’clock in the morning and we’re not all pissheads’, ‘oh, what should we call you now that you’re essentially irrelevant?’
 

Cersei looked haunted. Her voice quivered.
 

Until she left the room that is and marched away with her Lannister guard, looking quite menacing, seemingly off to plot something wicked. Perhaps we shouldn’t write the lioness off yet.
 

Slynt was beheaded by Jon ‘the housewives favourite’ Snow. The temptation is to see Slynt as an argumentative, cowardly idiot. But ponder the other argument for a moment…
 

At the end of season one he foiled a King’s Landing coup against the King’s son [Slynt doesn’t know the truth behind Joffrey’s parentage], and how was he repaid for saving the realm? Oh he was shipped off to the Wall.
 

He hid as 100,000 Wildlings attacked the 100 Night’s Watch men. But wouldn’t you feel bitter at the prospect of dying in defence of people down south who punished you for protecting the royal family, who are now sunbathing and drinking wine while you have to contend with certain death in a frozen wasteland? I don’t think I’d be motivated to die in such circumstances.
 

And now the traitor, the terrorist’s son is Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch and is trying to ship Slynt off to exile. Isn’t that a galling situation for Janos? You’d be pretty riled too.
 

Do you deserve your head cut off for back chatting to the bastard son of a terrorist who is trying to exile you? Well…I’m not sure.

Raise a glass tonight to the honourable, loyal, Janos Slynt.

The episode ended in Volantis as the dirty cow Jorah reappeared on the scene, not dancing for loose change in the gutters of Qarth as I once speculated, but here he was leering and leaching over a Daenerys lookalike in a brothel.
 

As soon as Tyrion decided to get out of his box and go into the brothel I thought something bad might happen. I’ve been to too many away games with Birmingham to know when you don’t go into a drinking establishment on hostile soil. It reminded me when we went to Derby once and a tattooed mentalist in the beer garden of a rough local pub kept asking us the time every 10 minutes, obviously trying to determine whether we had Birmingham accents. When he realised that we did, he went running back inside the pub.

Shit. Shit. He’s gone to tell them that we’re Birmingham fans.
 

I noticed a fire exit in the corner of the outdoor space. 
 

We debated whether to just bail out of the fire exit and get out of there while we had the chance. In the end we waited, we took the gamble. Luckily at that moment, more Birmingham City fans entered the beer garden, dressed in flat caps and fitted jackets. They nodded to us, we nodded back, we were now under the protection of the Peaky Blinders.

The Derby goblin re-entered the garden, took one look at the Blues Peakies and walked off.
 

We let out a sigh of relief.

 

How Tyrion wished he’d have bailed out the fire exit before the local nutter started watching him pee, before wrapping a rope around our favourite dwarfs bonce and announcing that he was going to take him to ‘the Queen’.

But which Queen is that? We’ll have to wait and see.

Looks like the steam has well and truly started to rise from the Game of Thrones volcano.

  

 

Born to Rule

 

In 1513 Florence, as the sound of ringing church bells pervaded the warm air and the vast plazas swarmed with innumerable purveyors of exotic wares, a rather morose diplomat named Machiavelli scribbled away under candle light, writing a small book which would be known to the world as ‘The Prince’. The text attempted to offer a step-by-step guide on the basics of maintaining power.

‘It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both’ concluded Machiavelli.

Oh there’s some other stuff in there about killing all the family members of your enemies, burning their cities to the ground, parking your car across their driveway and basically indulging in everything you can do on the PC game Crusader Kings, but the ‘fear being stronger than love’ sentiment is what the text is most famous for.

In Game of Thrones S5E02 the concepts of leadership and the art of ruling seemed to be central to the episode.

Stannis more or less repeated Machiavelli’s findings in his conversation with Jon Snow, dismissing the burning alive of Mance Rayder as something that needed to be done to inspire the ‘fear’ needed for the masses to follow him before rolling his eyes and apathetically detailing what he did in a matter-of-fact manner as if burning an unarmed man to ash particles was as normal as putting the bins out on a Tuesday.

In Jon Snow we saw the opposite side of the debate. We saw a man of empathy, compassion, somebody who pities the Wildlings as merely being born on the wrong side of the wall; a man of mercy, the man who put Mance out of his misery, a ‘good lad’.

You couldn’t say that Jon Snow inspires ‘fear’, but the men in the Night’s Watch idolise the bastard and their loyalty appears stronger than anything found elsewhere in the realm.

And now Snow has won the vote to become the new Lord Commander after being informed by a blind guy that he’d obtained the most votes [surely grounds for a recount?].

How has Snow achieved such a lofty rise? Not by intimidating or producing fear in his peers that’s for sure.

I can’t think of a single time he’s mistreated anybody. Instead he’s won adoration by treating his men as equals, showing warmth, putting his life on the line to protect them and of course, he’s displayed immense competency in both his physical fights and his tactics in war.

Perhaps the fear/love dichotomy is too simplistic.

I’m just a half-wit sitting in my pants eating Pringles, I don’t profess to know more about philosophy than a silk-wearing Florentine diplomat, but perhaps it is ultimately better to be ‘respected’ as a leader.

Treating your subjects harshly, revelling in cruelty and, well, being an overly nasty piss-ant patently doesn’t work in the world of Game of Thrones.

The Mad King cackled as he burnt his enemies alive and acted like a mentally unwell sicko and as a result three quarters of the realm rebelled, culminating in good old Jamie Lannister piercing his sword through the dragon’s back.

How about Joffrey? He pissed off absolutely everyone and got a nice glass of poison for his troubles.

A leader hoping to be loved, feared and respected altogether is our lovely Khaleesi, Daenerys.

She had an absolute mare at the weekend in Meereen though didn’t she?

In her attempt to show everyone in the city that she’s not biased, she punished a former slave guilty of murder by chopping his head off in quite possibly the most inflammatory way imaginable.

She seemed utterly bamboozled when everybody lost their shit and started rioting in response.

We understand that she was hoping to show everyone that the law of Meereen is universal and applies to the Masters just as it applies to the former slaves, but a leader must hold an understanding of the acute tensions in their territories.

The city is a tinderbox waiting for a spark – brutally killing a young guy on his knees who was begging for mercy, in public, is probably not the wisest of decisions in such a tense situation.

I mean she might have banished the bloke from the city, locked him up for a while, or even killed him behind the scenes. Daenerys’ grand statement to the people spectacularly backfired.

Perhaps her arrogant and obstinate fascination with ‘doing what’s right’ [her version of what’s right at least] will ultimately prove her undoing. For the best leaders know when to turn a blind eye when the situation requires. The Mother of Dragons says she isn’t a politician, well the Meereen fiasco certainly backed up that statement.

It reminded me of Baghdad, with the Sunnis on the one side and the Shias on the other, both on the verge of civil war, and then we ‘liberators’ decide to do something mad like hang Sunni leader Saddam Hussein in a shed and then wonder why everybody goes berserk in response. 

It also wasn’t a great week for the other powerful female leader Cersei who was verbally pulverised by the infuriated uncle Kevan who came across as an embittered cantankerous old relative at Christmas dinner, bit sloshed on the sherry, riled because he’s been given the wrong type of sprouts and has ended up causing a scene at the table and flounced out the room. It appears uncle Kev cares not for the game or the prosperity of the Lannister dynasty, something Cersei will now have to deal with.

It’s not easy at the top and this week’s episode certainly showed the main leaders in the show going through problematic and transformative experiences in their individual quests.

Do any of the leaders appear to have cracked the art of ruling?

Is it better to be feared like the Mad King, Stannis and Joffers? I’m not sure.

Is it better to be loved like Jon Snow? You’d have to say at the moment…it looks that way.

But being loved by the people is one thing, maintaining that love is quite another. Snow has the adoration of the Night’s Watch, and yet a few wrong words, a couple of rookie errors and that love might just evaporate. 

We saw how quickly elements of the Night’s Watch turned on Mormont in Craster’s Keep, and Jon’s already got Ser Alliser Thorne and Mr Slynt ready to spread dissent when the opportune moment arises.

Jon will not worry about potentially losing the loyalty of his men, like uncle Kevan he appears to be one of the few characters not interested in playing the intrigues of the game.

Let’s just hope for his sake, and the sake of the North, Snow’s leadership style of love over fear continues to hold the loyalty of the men of the Watch, for many, many, more nights to come...

 

 

 

Death By Fire

Game of Thrones returned last night for most of us [although not for the heathens in House PirateBay, who are now almost half way through the bloody series].

I'm resisting joining the pirates. I love Game of Thrones season too much to wipe out almost 50% of the series in one sitting. Gonna try and stretch the show out as long as possible.

Just quickly on that. HBO probably need to stop giving out advanced episodes to members of the press now. They've shown that they can't be trusted, and while an advanced viewing might help them write their reviews in time for publication [the workshy gits], ultimately the health of the show is of greater importance.

Imagine if the Red Wedding episode had been leaked at the start of Season 3?

Horrendous stuff.

Right, on to the episode itself...

At the end of last week we looked at a preview of Season Five and one of the overriding themes emanating from the piece was that this is very much a new world, the parameters have changed, everything is different...

So different in fact that I didn't recognise a single character until about 15 minutes into the show.

'The Wars to Come' started with a scene showing two young girls entering a witch's house / chalet and asking for their futures to be read.

One girl, blonde, in Lannister red, displayed astonishing self confidence and belief, to the point of rudeness. 

I don't care if the witch is pissed out of her face, lying in her own filth, getting some sort of kick out of sucking blood from the fingers of pre-pubescents...you're under her roof, learn some manners.

Bloody Myrcella. Except it wasn't, this was the young Cersei.

We then saw an Unsullied going to a brothel. Jesus, they've recast Grey Worm. Gone is his kind face, he's now older, a bit more stern looking and a meat-head.

Again, this was me jumping to conclusions, this was Mr White Rat, who was paying prostitutes to rub his head, hum nursery rhymes and tell him everything was going to be ok, in a sort of motherly manner.

Given that the Unsullied are separated from their real mothers at birth, castrated and then stripped of their humanity, seeing White Rat paying a prostitute not for casual sex or any debauched activity but merely to offer something akin to a mother's love was quite a tender moment.

Made all the more shocking by the bloke in the mask slitting White Rat's throat open a few seconds later.

The episode seemed to whiz by. We saw a disheveled Tyrion roll out of a crate in Pentos and engage Varys in some engrossing dialogue, particularly around the notion of joining forces with Daenerys; Dark Sansa and Baelish watched Robyn 'Ed Milliband jnr' Arryn getting whupped with a wooden sword before they carted off somewhere 'West', and Daenerys sent her Unsullied out onto the streets of Meereen to restore order following White Rat's death, while she debated as to whether she should open the fighting pits, grasping at her bed sheets to make sure the camera didn't pick up an atom of her nudity [Girl power!].

But the main part of the episode revolved around the events at The Wall.

In the Season Five preview, I was excited about the prospect of a Stannis, Jon Snow and Mance Rayder alliance after they were quite 'pally' with one another.

Well if there's one way to ruin an alliance it's by setting one of the other guys on fire.

So much for that idea.

The Mance burning was upsetting for many reasons. Firstly, I'm a sucker for working class, downtrodden, humble characters and Mance was pretty much the paragon of these.

Ok, we like the villains on Game of Thrones because it's not real, because it's art and we can appreciate the spectacle. But as much as I try to suppress it when watching the show, it's hard not to pity the characters with good souls when they meet a gruesome demise.

The guy's main reason for moving on the wall was not for money, or glory, or conquest, but to protect his people in the face of the threat from the White Walkers. In a world where most kings and queens are fighting for glory and thrones, Mance fighting for the preservation of his people is surely the noblest fight?

In the few scenes we had with Mance, he came across as a nice bloke didn't he? He could have killed Jon Snow on umpteen occasions but instead he took him under his wing, even after the fight on the wall, when Snow went to negotiate, Mance greeted Snow with a drink, toasting the life of Ygritte.

He was a good man.

Reminded me a bit of one of those old school characters you might see in a working man's club. Knows how to play dominoes, knows how to play all the card games. Never gets wrapped up in hysteria, just looks at the news on the television, nods and tuts knowingly, before taking a sip of Mild. Maybe a former coal miner with a sharp political mind. Now rendered to reading the Racing Post and catching the bus home. 

He had that sort of vibe for me. A man of tradition and sound morals.

Stannis burning him alive because he wouldn't kneel is so unbelievably excessive.

I'd like to think that Stannis could have offered a deal behind the scenes whereby Mance kept his honour and his dignity and they made a pact for their mutual benefit.

Nobody likes being shown up in public, especially in front of a crowd. Mance was never going to kneel in the middle of the courtyard and kiss Stannis' shoes.

Even enemies can treat one another with respect.

In real history, Genghis Khan used to recruit his former enemies if they showed promise, and many of them became his greatest generals.

The first Persian emperor 'Cyrus', changed his mind when watching his enemy Croesus burn on the pyre, he doused the flames and made the Lydian king his most trusted adviser.

Perhaps Mance would have rather died that played 'general' or 'adviser' for Stannis. We'll never know.

Given that his only objective seemed to be to get his people to safety, I think he wouldn't have been so rigid in negotiations, if he'd just been treated with respect.

Perhaps a partnership could have been arranged similar to the one Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon shared in their war with the Mad King, before Robert claimed the throne and Ned was given the title of Warden of the North.

Alas no, the man Stannis, who was deemed the most just ruler, somebody with a sense of proportion, has seemingly been totally compromised by the Red Woman and her blood magic.

Let's hope he's not too far gone, and there's still a decent enough guy somewhere inside for Ser Davos to try and salvage. 

If you enjoyed this blog piece and would be interested in reading future contributions throughout the fifth series of Game of Thrones, be sure to follow The Garden of Whispers blog on its own Twitter Page www.twitter.com/gotwhispers. Or alternatively you can follow my own personal twitter page by clicking on the icon below. Cheers.