The Dance of Dragons



If I said to you, I can wave a magic wand and make you the Prime Minister of the UK for two terms or, instead, I could hand you a cheque for £250m…

Which would you go for?

For most people, myself included, it’s a no brainer – you’d take the money.

The appeal of a life of unrestricted luxury, numerous holidays, no work, a massive house or two - it’d be too much to turn down for most people.

Would you shun such comfort and wealth to become Prime Minister and have to face the endless media scrutiny; the lack of sleep; the intrusion; the debilitating stress involved in making life or death decisions and the ingratitude of the electorate?

The pursuit of power has always confused me. Far better, I say, to pursue happiness, in whichever form it resembles for the individual in question.

Let’s change the premise…

If I said to you, you could be Prime Minister for two terms….but you’d have to burn alive your only child. Would you do it? Could you do it?

Well, Stannis did.

Of course the absolute power wielded by a King is greater than the limited power involved in the position of Prime Minister.

And of course some of you will argue that this isn’t solely about becoming King, Stannis wants to use the Lord of Light to save the realm from the White Walkers and therefore the sacrifice of his daughter is an altruistic move ‘for the good of the realm’.

What I’d say to those people [and I say this as a Stannis fan] is that firstly the only evidence he has that he’s needed in the war with the White Walkers [and that there’s going to be a war at all] is based on the ramblings of a mad woman, a witch, who essentially harbours a hidden agenda to use Stannis to install a radical new religion and is someone who already admitted to Stannis’ wife from the bathtub that most of her magic is ‘smoke and mirrors’ – so right away we’re on dodgy ground believing anything she says.

And secondly, Stannis wasn’t so fixated with what’s good for the realm when he used the smoke baby to kill his little brother Renly – another dead family member in Stannis’ seemingly unscrupulous rise to power.

Let’s be blunt, Stannis had the lottery winner option available to him. He could have allied with Renly, realised that his younger brother had the support of the liege lords, was popular with the people and once they brought down the Lannisters, Stannis might have taken his young family to a picturesque part of the country and spent the rest of his days watching Shireen grow up in the serene grounds of his wealthy estate.

But Stannis the Mannis told the banker ‘no deal’ and he picked the Shireen-burning option.

Better in his mind to be powerful, to be the top dog, than to live out his days in comfort.

Although…perhaps we’re being too harsh in judging the power-chasers in the Game of Thrones by our modern 21^st century standards. There’s an argument that in the undemocratic nation of Westeros, where military strength seems to be the dominating factor…holding some sort of power could be the difference between a comfortable life and a painful death.

If you’re a former dinner lady from Basingstoke and you win £50m on the lottery, you probably don’t need to worry about a bunch of Stone Crows rampaging through your gardens, stealing your livestock and burning your mansion to the ground. You wouldn’t really need political power.

If Stannis allies himself with Renly; goes off to a wealthy estate to retire with his family…and then in 10 years Renly is deposed by Daenerys and a dragon lands on the roof of Stannis’ holding, he might be regretting not picking the Shireen-burning option as he watches the demise of his estate.

Even if the decision to burn his daughter turns out to be wise, it’s something we, as human beings, have a hard time respecting. Surely it’s better to die protecting your family, upholding your honour and dignity than to progress up the ladder of power by sacrificing your loved ones and engaging in barbarism? Perhaps that’s a Ned Stark way of looking at things, but if we are not our families, our children, then who are we? What do we stand for? When does the pursuit of power become ‘not worth it actually’?

Looking at Twitter, Stannis appears to have lost a lot of his support after the daughter burning incident, although, bizarrely and almost worryingly, the internet reaction is nowhere near as strong as the furore surrounding the Sansa rape scene.

It seems that a father, marching his nervous daughter up to the stake against her will, having her tied up and then watching the poor girl burn alive in a slow and excruciating manner as bloodcurdling screams pierce the air and a mother desperately attempts to save her baby isn’t as bad as a newly married wife participating in some sinister wedding sex.

Charlotte Runcie of the Telegraph hilariously encapsulated the unfathomable position of these people in her review of the episode:

“The moment that her mother dropped to the ground and emitted a low moan of despair, far too late to save her, was almost as bleak as Sansa’s rape earlier in the season.”

Yes…almost

 

 

The penultimate episode of season five ended with our lovely Khaleesi observing a gladiatorial contest involving fighters chopping and slicing each other to the death for the pleasure of their Queen. All went fairly well until a bunch of the Sons of the Harpies snuck in and caused a ruckus, killing many of the spectators before marching towards Khaleesi.

The few Unsullied [STILL using spears in close combat. FFS lads, didn’t Rome: Total War teach you anything, you never send the hoplites into a city, get some bloody daggers] limply tried to restore order, but the Harpies, the pastoral pansies, seemed to give them another shoeing.

The old dog Jorah jumped in front of his former Queen and put on the heroics. A turquoise thug dropped dead here, a lime delinquent fell there. Jorah grabbed Daenerys’ hand [has he given her the stone aids!?] and took Khaleesi into the fighting pit, but alas, more Harpies came sauntering in. All appeared lost…until Drogon flew into the arena and started slaughtering the attackers.

I was a bit disappointed when the dragon arrived. I’ve never been a big fan of using animals to just appear at opportune moments to save the day. Every time the hobbits are about to bite the dust in JRR Tolkien’s world the pissing eagles swoop in. Seems like a bit of a get out card to me.

Daenerys went into ‘laterz guys’ mode, jumped on the back of Drogon, left everybody else to their fate and f**ked off out of the stadium.

Again, I’ve seen a mixture of responses to this bit of CGI.

It did look very ‘Never Ending Story’-ish. I was half expecting the dragon-riding Khaleesi to end the episode by chasing some 14 year olds, decked out in 80’s clobber, down a New York street into the trash cans.

It did look slightly cheesey in places.

My own view is that if TV struggles to match the movies for CGI quality, I would try to keep it minimal. I think watching Daenerys climb onto Drogon from afar, from Tyrion’s point of view, before seeing a blurred silhouette fly off into the sunset would have been more effective, but hey ho, some people liked it.

The curtain closed with Tyrion and co still trapped in the centre of the stadium surrounded by the Meereenese Norwich City supporters club. How will they escape? We’ll see next week, when we’re told there’s an event so shocking it will make the Red Wedding look like a silent fart.
 

You would wager the show has to deal with Sparrow State’s taking over of King’s Landing and Cersei’s imprisonment, and of course, Stannis’ assault on Winterfell where we’ll get some idea as to whether throwing sweet Shireen on the barbie has been in any way ‘effective’.

Or it may just transpire that a daughter, and her father, have indeed fallen victim to the latest ‘smoke and mirrors’ stunt from the Lord of Light and his sexy red-headed saleswoman.
 

 

 

 

 

Frozen Hearts

 

 

 

As Jon Snow wistfully looked back to the rocky shore and witnessed the top dog of the White Walkers perform his Undertaker schtick, raise his arms in the air and awake the dead Wildlings…I started to think about themes that arose during the episode.
 

You could make the argument that ‘Hardhome’ was the latest contribution to the now annual Game of Thrones episode where you’re supposed to mentally switch off and enjoy the zombie-chopping, giant-stomping, Valyrian sword-swinging action and forget about the repercussions, the political intrigue for a week.
 

Those fans of the show who ‘heard that Game of Thrones was quite good, got tits in it’, jumped on the wagon late in the journey and have been half-watching this season, spending each episode dipping in between the show and their mobile phones before moaning ‘nuffin’s happening this season, it’s too slow’ – well, this was the episode for them. They left the Farmville to fend for itself for 50 minutes and enjoyed the battle. The episode received universal acclaim.
 

But I couldn’t help but think about Jon Snow’s proposal to the Wildlings. This offer to allow them to settle south of the wall, take over some land, farm it, and spend the rest of their days there…and it threw up loads of controversial ideas about immigration.
 

Just how sensible is Snow’s relocation proposal? Is it naïve? Is it progressive? You’ll each have your own view depending on your world view…and, of course, depending on whether you’re a hideous book pig who already knows how it pans out.
 

Looking back, I have to admit that I left school in a pretty dangerous mental state. I saw the best in all people, I assumed that everybody, more or less, had a similar ethical and moral code to myself [not that I’m a saint, by the way] and as long as you were fair to people, they’d generally, as a rule of thumb, be fair back to you.
 

And that might well remain the case for a sizeable proportion of the general public….but crucially, it isn’t the case for the other sizeable chunk.
 

I remember the first time I saw Jasper Carrot’s ‘Golden Balls’ television programme, where contestants would build up a pot of money and in the final round, the last two remaining contestants would vote on whether to ‘take’ or ‘share’ the money. Just before they placed their votes they’d have a 2 minute spiel about why they should share the pot, how much debt they were in, why they needed the money, why it’s in their mutual interest to split the cash.
 

If both players voted to take, nobody wins anything. If both players vote to share, then the prize is split 50/50. But if one player votes to share, and the other votes to take…the person who voted to take, steals the whole pot.
 

Well, you don’t need to watch too many episodes of Golden Balls before your faith in humanity and your whole world view shatters to a terrible end. Time and time again good, honest people who needed the cash to pay off debt, or medical bills, or for their kids’ education would vote to share and be utterly shafted by the other player.
 

Drive the roads through any UK inner city. Note how many people pull out on you, drive down side roads and try to cut in at the front of the queue. It’s a free for all.
 

On leaving university I was unemployed for six months and struggled to find work due to a lack of experience. I signed on at the Job Centre, in the naïve hope they’d help me get a step on the ladder, and of course for some help with my finances and debt. I was often suggested to apply for jobs that were totally out of my skillset, 30 miles away and were nigh on impractical options. Once I overheard staff members talking about how they needed to shift 10 of us into any job, ‘don’t matter which’ this week, otherwise their Christmas bonus wouldn’t be as large. This was a turkey factory. And these turkeys were being shoved in all kinds of boxes.

You only have to look at the reason why we’re in an economic mess at the moment. Mortgage providers were incentivised to flog off as many mortgages as they could, to people who couldn’t afford to pay them, in order to get bigger and bigger bonuses.
 

There are one million different examples you can use to show just how ‘wankerish’ [for want of a better word] a large number of humanity is - from people who ring up advertising watchdogs to get commercials pulled to what ISIS are doing to the innocents in Iraq and Syria. You’ve got your own examples. Plenty of them. I could spend a whole blog entry talking about it. 

That naïve kid who left school seeing the best in people, was soon given a rude awakening as the real world hit, as more and more Baelishes emerged.



 

So when Jon Snow offers to take the Wildlings south of the wall, when he offers the golden ball of Westeros to the Wildings and Jon Snow votes to ‘share’….some Wildings will also vote to share, but is he forgetting those who will vote to take?
 

What if the Wildlings, on settling south of the wall, decide they want a bit more land and invade the North? What if they bring a hitherto unseen disease into the realm that Southerners’ immune systems can’t handle?  What if they slaughter whole villages, engage in genocide?
 

They might just stay in their tiny corner and live peacefully…but what happens if they don’t?
 

Will Jon Snow be reviled as the idiot who opened Pandora’s Box, opened the gate for the barbarians?
 

Sure, the Wildlings might help the rest of Westeros in its fight with the White Walkers, but what’s the long term picture once/if the winter subsides?
 

Is the enemy of your enemy always your friend?
 

Here in Britain we like to call ourselves the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. If you’re white, and you’re filling out a form asking your ethnicity, you’ll sometimes see ‘Anglo-Saxon’ listed [although it’s becoming increasingly rarer in Cameron’s Britain], but the Anglo-Saxons weren’t the original inhabitants of these lands.
 

The Ancient Britons were here for eons.
 

The Romans pulled out, left the Britons to fend for themselves, and the land was immediately beset with opportunist invaders. The Picts in Scotland caused the Britons all kinds of problems.
 

So the British lord of the realm, a chap named Vortigern, invited in the Anglo-Saxons to help them fight the Picts, and in recompense the Anglo-Saxons would be given land, in the South East of Britain to farm and build their homes upon.
 

You know what happened next. There’s a reason that the modern day English are said to be ‘Anglo-Saxon’. For the Germans didn’t stay in their small corner of Britain for too long.
 

Soon the Ancient Britons were on the run, the language of the Anglo-Saxons had taken over and they were the ‘rulers’ of this proto-England…this Angle-land…..land of the Angles [and Saxons, who must have been off sick when the meeting about naming the nation took place].
 

History tells us that seeing the best in all people can be a pretty destructive mentality to have. The Anglo-Saxon invitation turning into an occupation is just one such example in history’s rich tapestry of lessons we oft ignore.
 

In the south of Europe we’re seeing a comparable situation with African and Syrian refugees clinging to rafts and trying to sail to a better life.
 

If you’re from a small Greek island that has existed for thousands of years. A community that saw off countless greater powers, countless invasions, kept the Persians at the door, and you live in a small fishing town of 15,000 people when you see Ahmed, a former market stall owner from Damascus drowning in the sea...as a human being you’d offer your hand, pull Ahmed from the sea, wrap a blanket around him, and offer him a warm meal. You’d probably champion his right to stay and live in your idyllic Greek Mediterranean community and avoid going back to the Syrian warzone.

 

But what if the personal story of Ahmed the market seller turns from the personal into a hard, emotionless statistic?
 

What happens if Ahmed becomes 650,000 Ahmeds, annually, and they’re sailing on rafts towards Europe?
 

When does it cease being a touching story of humanity, and mutate into an existential crisis?
 

If your idyllic Greek fishing village of 15,000 has 45,000 Syrian migrants descend upon you. When do you start asking questions about how feasible this is? The existence of your people and your community is in severe threat.
 

Soon the language starts to change, the racial makeup of the people starts to change, the architecture starts to change, the religion starts to change…and that Greek Ionian fishing village that has lasted thousands of years is all but wiped out from history.
 

Do you then start to take a colder look towards immigration and population displacement?
 

I don’t know.
 

The narrative in Game of Thrones is that ‘winter is coming’ and Jon Snow and his ilk seemingly don’t particularly care about life after the White Walker battle. They’d argue that they need to guarantee there is a country to live in before they start worrying about the long term picture. Jon Snow is living in the moment, a leader worrying about the short term only.


Can we criticise him for it? Hardly. These uncomfortable questions about immigration are difficult to answer in the world of Game of Thrones, but are just as difficult to ponder in our own world.
 

Sometimes opening the gates for the barbarians results in an exchange of ideas, the introduction of trade and a cultural enrichment, perhaps an idealist stance but it can produce positive results.
 

But sometimes, just sometimes….you can be, unwittingly, opening up the gates of hell and putting into motion wheels of change you just can't halt.