Many viewers, yesterday, as they watched GOT finale, thought about Arya’s trip to the west as a hint to the discovery of America, the mythical trip to the new land that in Europe that helped to define the limit between the Middle Age and the Modern Age. Yes, I know that in the book cannon she is not the first to go for this quest (in Fire and Blood we have the arguably successful Elissa Farman’s trip) but let’s keep this TV Show only. Besides the Arya plot, both the destruction of the throne and Samwell Tarly’s suggestion of an incipient idea of democracy plants the seeds of change in the westerosi “Ancien regime”, suggesting the proximity of a new age, less concerned about old values and tradition and more open minded towards the new. But we can also see the struggle of modernity to get born right there in the heart of the main story, in the clashing tales of Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. That’s what i’m trying to write about today.
More than with democracy itself, or the “New World” trip, we associate the beginning of modernity with that sassy and curious word: revolution – the brutal and sudden shake of an arrangement of power. In this sense of the word, both Jon and Daenerys make revolutionary choices in their paths: Jon lets the wildlings cross the wall, and Dany frees the slaves in Slave’s bay. They also have a similarity in their beginnings, since they both extract the core of their revolutionary ideals of a “moral” point, a generic “goodness” and “bravery”: Jon is merciful with wildlings from day one, when he refuses to kill Ygritte because he feels empathetic to her, and Dany is merciful with slaves because of her “kind heart”. They are also both brave, because in both cases by being good they defy the status quo, assuming great risk.
But there is a fundamental difference between them along the way: Jon gets to know the wildlings, their culture and their history, just as well as he knew the people of Winterfell and the Night Watch. He eats, travels and even fucks among them. By doing that, he ultimately gets to listen from Mance Rayder himself that the wildlings are only trying to reach south because of the White Walkers… the same menace that threatens the Watch. As he understands the existence of a common cause, he recognizes the complexity of a apparently simple situation, becoming capable of resignify the Wall as the limit between the living and the dead, and not between humans from this or that nation. His revolution, if shakes the order of that part of the world, is also a recognition of the core of that order, since it answers the question of why there was a wall in the first place. It points to the future (a new order with wildlings and watchers together) as much as it points to the past (a correct comprehension of the reasons beneath the ancient wall). Jon, the revolutionary, dies because of that, becoming a martyr of his cause. When he gets back, as a legend resurrected by fire, he is able to apply his logic to almost all of the realm: they need to get together in a new way, but only because by doing that they are capable of defeating a threat of the past. Change is necessary to respect the true foundations of that community.
Dany, in the other hand, while a brave and good hearted person for most of the story, never really cared about learning the history or the habits of the ones she ruled and freed, nor of the ones she always planned to conquer (the westerosi). She abandoned Astapor and Yunkai after conquering them, and in Mereen she chose to stay in her imperial pyramid and not to get to know the ancient habits of that society, despising their whole culture as a slaves and masters affair (please, i do not defend the Masters, they are the worst, i’m just saying that if she wanted to rule, she should have bothered with knowing her ruled ones). This simplistic view ultimately leeds to the crisis of the fighting pits and then to war. In the end, she solves this problem as she solves almost all of her problems: with fire and blood, the simple solution that never recognizes a single nuance and always reduces the complexities of any problem to ashes, taking down whatever is standing up to open space for the new. A more straightforward revolutionary way of acting, if you think about it: fuck the messy past, let’s have the bright future.
But there is a fundamental difference between them along the way: Jon gets to know the wildlings, their culture and their history, just as well as he knew the people of Winterfell and the Night Watch. He eats, travels and even fucks among them. By doing that, he ultimately gets to listen from Mance Rayder himself that the wildlings are only trying to reach south because of the White Walkers… the same menace that threatens the Watch. As he understands the existence of a common cause, he recognizes the complexity of a apparently simple situation, becoming capable of resignify the Wall as the limit between the living and the dead, and not between humans from this or that nation. His revolution, if shakes the order of that part of the world, is also a recognition of the core of that order, since it answers the question of why there was a wall in the first place. It points to the future (a new order with wildlings and watchers together) as much as it points to the past (a correct comprehension of the reasons beneath the ancient wall). Jon, the revolutionary, dies because of that, becoming a martyr of his cause. When he gets back, as a legend resurrected by fire, he is able to apply his logic to almost all of the realm: they need to get together in a new way, but only because by doing that they are capable of defeating a threat of the past. Change is necessary to respect the true foundations of that community.
Dany, in the other hand, while a brave and good hearted person for most of the story, never really cared about learning the history or the habits of the ones she ruled and freed, nor of the ones she always planned to conquer (the westerosi). She abandoned Astapor and Yunkai after conquering them, and in Mereen she chose to stay in her imperial pyramid and not to get to know the ancient habits of that society, despising their whole culture as a slaves and masters affair (please, i do not defend the Masters, they are the worst, i’m just saying that if she wanted to rule, she should have bothered with knowing her ruled ones). This simplistic view ultimately leeds to the crisis of the fighting pits and then to war. In the end, she solves this problem as she solves almost all of her problems: with fire and blood, the simple solution that never recognizes a single nuance and always reduces the complexities of any problem to ashes, taking down whatever is standing up to open space for the new. A more straightforward revolutionary way of acting, if you think about it: fuck the messy past, let’s have the bright future.
Since Jon was raised as a bastard in the most traditional and honorable house of the continent, he is the perfect mix between deep roots and the freedom of the outcasts to move between them and criticize them. It seems legit, in the other hand, that Dany is the one to embody the more extreme view of revolution: she never had a true home, her only living brother was a monster and creator of fake news (“in westeros they make toasts to us!”), she never had any root to attach to. Since she has no foundation, she is all about a foundation still to come, the foundation of a utopia forever postponed, that she calls “breaking the wheel”.
Hannah Arendt, the famous author of “Origins of Totalitarianism”, among lots of other great books, writes about the dangers of Dany’s kind of revolution in an article called “what is authority”. For Arendt, authority is always sustained by foundations: the authority of the senate in Rome, for example, is rooted in the fact that the senators, by blood and by age, are more close of the foundation of Rome than everybody else. For Arendt, the passage from middle age to modern age has the death of authority as one of its consequences: the idea of power rooted in bloodlines or age begins to sound too absurd. To fill the lack of order left by the crisis of the Ancién Regime, political thinkers such as Machiavelli develop the idea of revolution: the establishment of the foundational act from which all the authority spreads not in the ancient past, but in a future yet to be reached. Since we still have to achieve the moment of foundation of this “New Rome” – a clean place, free from our current sins and chaos – all violence in the purchase of this utopia becomes justifiable. It’s the “you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs” way of thinking. It sees some things established in the past as dispensable, for the greater good. But these “some things” tend to become “all things”: since the utopia is by definition never truly achievable, the revolution will always demand more and more violence, until all the “old” is substituted by all the “new”. That’s why so many revolutions in modern age started beautiful and degraded into mass violence: France in 1798, Russia in 1921, China in the sixties.
Daenerys is the perfect revolutionary, in this sense, since she identifies a crisis (“the wheel”) imagines an utopia (a world of free people) and gradually accepts higher degrees of violence in the purchase of such utopia. The real city of King’s Landing in front of her, with it’s real problems, doesn’t concern her because it will never be as good as her utopia, therefore it’s flamable.
If only she had read those books about Westeros that Jorah gave to her in the first episode of the series… If only she had listened more carefuly to Barristan’s amazing stories while he was around… If only she had cared to truly know Tyrion, Varys, Olenna, Yara, Davos, Bran, Sansa, Arya and their stories when she had the chance…
If only she had read those books about Westeros that Jorah gave to her in the first episode of the series… If only she had listened more carefuly to Barristan’s amazing stories while he was around… If only she had cared to truly know Tyrion, Varys, Olenna, Yara, Davos, Bran, Sansa, Arya and their stories when she had the chance…
Well, if any of that had happened, she could have created some kind of bond with the reality of the land she desired so bad, fading the ideal image in her head, and maybe she wouldn’t have thought about the people of Westeros as “eggs” before an omelette. As the mother of a Balerion sized dragon, she would still have been able to make a revolution – but in Jon’s style, accepting the complexity of the affairs with diplomacy and humanization provided by a link to the past of that land. I guess the speech of Tyrion in the finale, about choosing Bran as king, was a hint to that: the “importance of stories”, or the importance of history, is related to the capacity of fully change towards the new while fueling this change with the traditions that has always kept that community together. And I think that was a beautiful, optimistic choice of D&D (and GRRM, probably, in a time in witch extreme right politicians such as Bolsonaro (in brazil) and Trump (in USA) rely on fake news and lies to merge all our democratic achievements of the more or less recent past under the label of “the system”, burning them without mercy to establish their dystopian revolutionary utopias.
