Hero siege death sigil3/2/2024 Maybe Littlefinger–who sees the chance to wield power by installing Joffrey as a puppet/hostage king–is right. Renly may not have seen battle, but he knows that there is a short window in which to choose a king before Cersei and sadistic Joffrey consolidate power. And as Jorah Mormont reminds the surviving Targaryen heir, Dany, there is no such thing as a right to a throne–only the ability to hold or to take it. There was no agonizing about the rules of succession when he and Robert overthrew the Targaryens. Deciding to support Robert’s still-unseen brother Stannis, Ned says that there is no choice.Īnd more than once, he’s reminded that that is a lie. (Or we must assume it was right: maybe the Dothraki might have invaded anyway, but it’s hard to imagine a worse outcome than the botched murder, which made Drogo into a blood enemy.) But Ned can use his principle the way some people use religion of self-help books: as an excuse to simplify hard decisions for himself. His principle, as Robert admits on his deathbed, allowed him to defy the King and make the right decision about Dany. “You Win or You Die” is Game of Thrones’ strongest investigation so far of its moral question: how much good is there in blind righteousness? Ned is a principled man, definitely. In her own strange way, she’s making a moral point: what good can you do through honorable failure? When Cersei gives him that definitive line–“You win or you die”–she’s not just being cynical. Or if you’re Ned, you ally yourself to honor, the truth and the letter of the law and let that take you where it will. If you are not so powerful, you need alliances-like Littlefinger, who relies on his wiles and deals of convenience to grab opportunity like Renly, who comes to Ned with an offer to put a short, sharp end to the question of succession like Daenerys, who sees that her best means of getting her throne back is by truly assimilating as a Dothraki queen–and finds that Robert, before he died, has done her the favor of persuading Drogo by trying to kill her. And when your family, like theirs, commands a powerful army, you can seek power by keeping fiercely loyal to blood and trusting no one outside the family. If you are rich and well-armed like the Lannisters, your route to power is fairly direct: you buy your way close to it and then seize it when the chance presents itself. At which point “You Win or You Die” becomes all about the major subject of Game of Thrones: power, and the different ways it is acquired and held. So the bitter, Falstaffian king goes to his piggy, piggy death just before Ned can break the news of his children’s parentage to him, leaving a vacuum–and opportunity. When he insinuates something, it stays insinuated.) (At least, this is how it is insinuated by Varys, and no one insinuates like Varys can. And, just perhaps, some assistance from the skin of wine eagerly poured out by his omnipresent, terrified page Lancel-Lancel Lannister. For in the end it is not a sword that kills King Robert of Westeros, but a stab in the portly belly from the tusk of one of the pigs he hunts. The sigil of House Lannister is the lion, not the boar, but there’s no point in overhammering the point. Specifically the sigil of House Baratheon. Tywin Lannister (a steely Charles Dance) is not a subtle man, which–if not sufficiently indicated by his mocking of Jaime’s “cleverness” and his blunt talk about the language of force–is underscored by the fact that he is eviscerating and skinning an animal. But before Cersei presents this more poetic expression of the will to power to Ned Stark, we begin the episode by meeting a man much spoken about but yet unseen. We knew this would be a significant episode if for no other reason than that it contains the scene–alluded to in the episode’s title–that gives the series its name. And “You Win or You Die” was the series’ most thrilling and thematically rich hour to date. But now that it’s in motion, its momentum gets more undeniable week by week. Like a battering ram in a siege, Game of Thrones took a while to roll into place. Follow ALERT: Before you read this post, ask your butcher for a nice venison roast for dinner and watch last night’s Game of Thrones.
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