Will this story end any better a second time? Has Dany grown, or is she destined to fly from revolution to revolution, leaving chaos behind? The show’s head seems to be with Tyrion, but its heart is with Dany - certainly immolating a temple full of rapists feels better than plying slave traders with prostitutes.
In case you didn’t notice history repeating, the episode ends with Dany, fireproof breasts and all, stripped naked by the flames just as she was by the pyre in which her dragons were born in Season 1. Rather than escape quietly, she burns down everything, freeing the dosh khaleen and - again, but on an apparently bigger scale - becoming khaleesi. Her imprisonment in Vaes Dothrak brought her back to where she started, geographically and figuratively.Īfter leading and losing a khalasar, after conquering Meereen and fleeing it, Dany is still all about blowing up the system. The pyrotechnic last scene of “Stranger” contrasted Tyrion’s style of accommodation with Dany’s permanent revolution. His talent is greasing the wheels, whereas Dany, in her own words, wants “to break the wheel.” During his stint as King Joffrey’s Hand in King’s Landing, his goal - and he was good at it - was to keep his monstrous nephew’s worst impulses in check while trying to manage the crown’s finances and keep House Lannister from being ousted.īetter him than Joffrey - or Tywin - but in the end his impulse was to work within the system and thus keep the system going: to create a kinder, gentler Lannisterism. He’s too practical, and practicality tells him, as he airily tells the slave masters, that the rich and poor will always be with us. Would Tyrion ever have done that on his own?ĭoubtful. He’s able to cut a deal - which may or may not work in the end - only because Dany had upended the slave economy in the first place. And doing good, like Dany’s chain-breaking, only matters to the extent that you can do the hard, boring work of maintaining their welfare.īut Tyrion’s worldview is also insufficient by itself.
BEST TYRION LANNISTER QUOTES WITH DANY SERIES
It’s not an amoral story - even if the series loves building up sadistic villains - but its general philosophy is, being good is useless unless you can also do good. The morally rigid, like Ned and Stannis, break where they can’t bend. Martin, has a bias toward its horse-trading Tyrions and Littlefingers. “Game of Thrones,” like the source books by George R. As Missandei points out, however sad a life Tyrion has had, his brief stint in chains doesn’t mean he knows anything about spending a life as property. “Book of the Stranger” plays up this discomfort, focusing on the incredulous reaction of freed slaves Missandei and Grey Worm, even if they have little choice but to back Tyrion in the end. (There’s an Orientalist overtone to the whole Essos story line, in which Dany is often cast as a white savior and Tyrion is a kind of colonial viceroy, mangling the language and trying to tame the exotic East with Western efficiencies.)
But “Game of Thrones” is made to be watched in our world, where the optics of a rich white man bargaining away the freedom of darker slaves is unsettling. The racial dynamics of American slavery may not map directly onto those in “Game of Thrones” - in the source books, slaves come from many countries, sometimes the same as their slavers. Pragmatic? Maybe, but Abe Lincoln, he ain’t. Tyrion offers them time and money: seven years to transition from a slave economy, and compensation for their losses. Dany, with her Unsullied and her dragons, overthrew the slavelords, who have started a bloody insurgency and taken back the cities outside Meereen. Tyrion’s deal is morally complicated by the fact that it involves slavery. Trump has attacked as making “a terrible deal” with an untrustworthy enemy, that in domestic policy Bernie Sanders has dismissed as “asking for half a loaf.” It’s the sort of approach that, in foreign policy, Donald J. More broadly, Tyrion is arguing for realpolitik principles that, our own election has shown, never stop being controversial: choosing deals over ideals. In our own world, President Obama is not the first to use the phrase, some variation of which has been attributed to Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin and others. We’ve heard the “make peace with our enemies” line on this show before: in Season 1, Littlefinger counseled it to Ned Stark, an inflexibly moral man who disregarded the advice and ended up a head on a stick.
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