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This video is my attempt to explain Targaryen madness in a way that would be comprehensible to people who have only watched the TV show while also being easy for book readers to reverse engineer into a book analysis. I’m going to go through the transcript and make notes about how and where these same ideas can be seen in the books too.
Targaryen Madness is a giant sociological puzzle.
And I’m gonna put it together – at least my understanding of it – using clips from the TV show and a tiny bit of common knowledge from the books about the setting, if you’ll allow it.
But first, I have to tell you what this video is before I let you watch it. It’s a show and book analysis adapted for show. I’m gonna talk about the story’s theme, which means I have to spoil the story’s theme, which you might think isn’t a big deal. But in this story, the theme is incredibly subversive. Most people don’t know what it is. Because it’s the key to interpreting the story properly. Before I’m finished with you, you’ll have a better understanding of the books than most people who’ve read them. And that’s partly because the book institutions have intellectually handicapped themselves with political ideology. So if you were planning to read the books, maybe don’t watch this yet. Or anything I make, for that matter. Or ask a book friend to watch it first. The main reason is because you might be haunted by the question ‘Would I have figured this stuff out by myself?’ That’s how I feel about R+L=J sometimes. It was told to me before I had time to really think about the story for myself.
Okay, here we go.
Spoilers for HBO’s Game of Thrones, seasons one through eight.
Before I dive into it, I’ll talk about how stories work. Usually a story contains a lesson. For example, the lesson in the Three Little Pigs story might be ‘build your house out of bricks not sticks.’ Or you could abstract that further and just say ‘be prepared for the worst.’
In order to find a story’s theme, we’re meant to take situations that look the same and compare them to see how they’re different or the same, and how the characters’ decisions are working out for them.
Madness
The characters in this story call each other mad.
Grazdan: You are mad.
In the books
“I have a gift for you as well.” She slammed the chest shut. “Three days. On the morning of the third day, send out your slaves. All of them. Every man, woman, and child shall be given a weapon, and as much food, clothing, coin, and goods as he or she can carry. These they shall be allowed to choose freely from among their masters’ possessions, as payment for their years of servitude. When all the slaves have departed, you will open your gates and allow my Unsullied to enter and search your city, to make certain none remain in bondage. If you do this, Yunkai will not be burned or plundered, and none of your people shall be molested. The Wise Masters will have the peace they desire, and will have proved themselves wise indeed. What say you?”
“I say, you are mad.”
“Am I?” Dany shrugged, and said, “Dracarys.”
The dragons answered. Rhaegal hissed and smoked, Viserion snapped, and Drogon spat swirling red-black flame. It touched the drape of Grazdan’s tokar, and the silk caught in half a heartbeat. Golden marks spilled across the carpets as the envoy stumbled over the chest, shouting curses and beating at his arm until Whitebeard flung a flagon of water over him to douse the flames. “You swore I should have safe conduct!” the Yunkish envoy wailed.
“Do all the Yunkai’i whine so over a singed tokar? I shall buy you a new one … if you deliver up your slaves within three days. Elsewise, Drogon shall give you a warmer kiss.” She wrinkled her nose. “You’ve soiled yourself. Take your gold and go, and see that the Wise Masters hear my message.” (ASOS Daenerys IV)
In the show, the emissary threatens Daenerys, and Drogon breathes fire at him of his own volition, preserving Dany’s plausible deniability in the situation. The TV show made Daenerys less aggressive in this scene. In the books, the emissary doesn’t threaten Daenerys until after Drogon attacks him, and Daenerys gives Drogon the order.
But they’re inconsistent with their meaning. Take Will for example. Will is the Night’s Watch deserter in the first episode.
Will: I saw what I saw.
He tells Ned that he saw the White Walkers, but Ned doesn’t believe him. Ned calls him mad and says that he was talking madness.
Ned: A madman sees what he sees.
Ned: He was talking madness.
But we know for a fact that Will isn’t mad, because we saw the White Walkers too.
In the books
“He was the fourth this year,” Ned said grimly. “The poor man was half-mad. Something had put a fear in him so deep that my words could not reach him.” He sighed. (AGOT Catelyn I)
Jorah: It was a bitch of a siege.
Barristan: You were first through the breach of Pyke.
Jorah: The second. Thoros of Myr went in alone, waving that flaming sword of his.
Barristan: Thoros of Myr, bloody madman.
Ser Barristan called Thoros a madman for his courage at the siege of Pyke. Apparently madness can mean courage.
Tyrion: Just two more travelers mad with lust.
Madness can mean lust. And sometimes madness is meant like a sort of clinical diagnosis. Like when Grand Maester Pycelle describes the Mad King.
Pycelle: Of all the thousand, thousand maladies the gods visit on us, madness is the worst.
So I think the story is demonstrating that the word mad is unreliable.
In the books
Here are two of my favorite book examples of the unreliability of the word mad.
“Catelyn fears for her sister. How does Lysa bear her grief?”
Robert’s mouth gave a bitter twist. “Not well, in truth,” he admitted. “I think losing Jon has driven the woman mad, Ned.” (AGOT Eddard I)
Madness can mean grief.
In The World of Ice and Fire, King Aerys has been kidnapped at Duskendale.
Ser Barristan offered to enter the town in secret, find his way to the Dun Fort, and spirit the king to safety. Selmy had been known as Barristan the Bold since his youth, but this was a boldness that Tywin Lannister felt bordered on madness. Yet such was his respect for the prowess and courage of Ser Barristan that he gave him a day to attempt his plan before storming Duskendale. (TWOIAF Aerys II)
Madness can mean boldness.
Nicknames
In this story, your nickname is your reputation whether you like it or not.
Catelyn: Kingslayer.
Jaime: Kingslayer… What a king he was.
Nicknames are bestowed upon people without their consent, based on what they’ve done and, ultimately, what other people think of them.
In the beginning of the story we’re introduced to Jaime, who seems like an asshole. He murders a kid, he fucks his sister, he’s got some kind of beef with the hero, he’s arrogant and all of that. And it seems like Jaime is a villain. Kingslayer is the nickname given to Jaime, and I can see that he doesn’t like the nickname. It kind of haunts him.
Tywin: When you hear them whispering Kingslayer behind your back doesn’t it bother you?
Jaime: Of course it bothers me.
But as I get a closer look at Jaime, I can see that he isn’t really evil. Or at least, he isn’t your typical villain. He has some redeeming qualities. His circumstances are at least a little sympathetic.
Jaime: We don’t choose whom we love.
And in fact, the big evil deed for which he’s infamous was actually an unprecedented act of heroism.
Qyburn: And how many lives have you saved?
Jaime: Half a million. The population of King’s Landing.
The same thing is going on with Tyrion and his nickname.
Arya: Where’s the Imp?
Sansa: Will you shut up?
The nickname was presumably given to Tyrion by people who disapprove of him, not that he didn’t partly earn it.
Tyrion: I hear he hates that nickname.
Ros: Oh? I hear he’s more than earned it.
The more I watch Tyrion, the more I can see that Tyrion’s villainy hardly exceeds a desire for wine, sex, and a tendency towards cynicism. Tyrion is also a mix of villainy of heroism, capable of both good and evil. With nicknames, there’s often something not true about them, like Brienne the Beauty.
Renly: You’re jealous.
Loras: Jealous? Of Brienne the Beauty?
She’s not really beautiful. She’s very ugly in the books. And the nickname was a cruel joke that was meant to mock her.
Brienne: Brienne the Beauty they called me. Great joke. And I realized I was the ugliest girl alive.
So the takeaway is that nicknames, or at least the characterizations that they suggest, are unreliable too.
In the books
Kingslayer, Imp and Beauty are unreliable nicknames in the books, too. Notice that Kingslayer and Imp are unreliable in a negative way while Beauty is unreliable in a positive way. Whether the unreliable characterization is positive or negative, the common factor is that they are unreliable.
The nickname “the Beauty” creates a reputation for Brienne of Tarth that suggests she is a very beautiful woman. So the nickname is particularly cruel in that it has the effect of amplifying the shock in everybody who meets her, because they were expecting her appearance to be beautiful when it is really quite the opposite. The amplified shock is then noticed by Brienne, thus amplifying her struggle as an unattractive woman. I think that this causes her to believe she is even more repulsive than she actually is.
Another example of an unreliable nickname in the books is Tormund Giantsbane.
Tormund’s nickname suggests that he has slain a giant. But when Tormund tells the story to Jon, we learn that he didn’t actually kill the giant.
“Is it true you killed a giant once?” he asked Tormund as they rode. Ghost loped silently beside them, leaving paw prints in the new-fallen snow.
“Now why would you doubt a mighty man like me? It was winter and I was half a boy, and stupid the way boys are. I went too far and my horse died and then a storm caught me. A true storm, not no little dusting such as this. Har! I knew I’d freeze to death before it broke. So I found me a sleeping giant, cut open her belly, and crawled up right inside her. Kept me warm enough, she did, but the stink near did for me. The worst thing was, she woke up when the spring come and took me for her babe. Suckled me for three whole moons before I could get away. Har! There’s times I miss the taste o’ giant’s milk, though.”
“If she nursed you, you couldn’t have killed her.”
“I never did, but see you don’t go spreading that about. Tormund Giantsbane has a better ring to it than Tormund Giantsbabe, and that’s the honest truth o’ it.” (ASOS Jon II)
There’s more going on with Tormund in the nicknames department that I’ll explore in Tormund’s character section of the blog. But that’s enough to make my point here.
The Mad King
Now we can look at the Mad King, whose nickname is ‘The Mad.’ If the meaning of the word mad is unreliable, and the characterization in nicknames is unreliable, then a nickname of The Mad is doubly unreliable. As crazy as it sounds, the story is demonstrating that there’s something about the characterization that the mad nickname suggests that isn’t true.
Does that mean that King Aerys didn’t really do all of those cruel things that everyone says he did? No. In the same way that the Kingslayer really did slay the king, the Mad King really did burn those people alive.
Jaime: When I watched the Mad King die, I remembered him laughing as your father burned.
Robert: Oh it’s unspeakable to you? What her father did to your family, that was unspeakable.
If stories contain lessons, then what lesson have we learned so far? Consider how the story might have been different if Ned Stark hadn’t judged Jaime Lannister so harshly for breaking his Kingsguard vow in order to save King’s Landing.
Jaime: You think the honorable Ned Stark wanted to hear my side? He judged me guilty the moment he set eyes on me.
Consider how many lives might have been saved if Ned Stark hadn’t been dismissive of Will’s warning about the White Walkers by writing him off as a madman.
I think the lesson is that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge people before we’ve taken a close look at things from their perspective. I think the story is challenging us to apply that lesson to everyone, including the Mad King.
But there’s a problem. The Mad King is long dead. All we have are stories about him from other characters who, of course, have their own misunderstandings.
Sansa: Why were they killed?
Mordane: You should speak to your father about these matters.
Renly: When the Mad King slaughtered women and babies because the voices in his head told him they deserved it.
Renly Baratheon says that Aerys heard voices in his head. But Renly has never met Aerys, and he was five years old when Aerys died.
Robert: Ah, what was I saying?
Renly: Simpler times?
Robert: It was! It was. You’re too young to remember.
Renly is basing his understanding of the Mad King on his own ideas of madness. Madness is hearing voices in your head, he thinks. Or it’s hallucinations. How else could someone come to be so cruel? But the Mad King is never said to have heard voices nor hallucinated.
Likewise, the audience tends to base their understanding of the Mad King on their own ideas of madness. He must be schizophrenic, we think, even though no disorder is given in the story.
In the books
Many readers will swear six ways from Sunday that The Mad King’s disorder is given in the story. Of course, they each have different ways of naming or classifying the Mad King’s supposed disorder. Schizophrenia, pyromania and psychopathy are a few popular interpretations. The particularly virute-signaly ones will choose multiple.
Needless to say, none of those words are used in the story. And the returns on clinically diagnosing a fictional character are limited at best, especially considering that the reader never meets The Mad King, and 100% of the information about him comes to us by second- and third-hand accounts, all of which are purposefully riddled by the author with biases and misunderstandings thanks to the POV style that the author is using and the unreliable narration it affords.
When the story fails to accommodate any of the avenues we have considered for moving forward with any given question we might have, there comes a point when we have to conclude that what the story is really suggesting is that they are all wrong, and that there is another avenue we’re either neglecting or haven’t yet considered. That avenue is the environment, or nurture.
If the story ever were to provide a definitive disorder for the Mad King, the entire thematic house of cards would come crumbling down. That’s why I can confidently rest my reputation on my absolute certainty that the story will never ever provide the reader with a definitive disorder from a credible source. Though I wouldn’t put it past Martin to provide the reader with a definitive disorder from a non-credible source, as long as that character’s non-credibility is demonstrated in the story too.
But there is one character who worked very closely with the Mad King and who has a low probability of bias. His job and status is secure regardless of how the king performs or even which family rules. I’m talking about Grand Maester Pycelle.
In the books
Tywin is probably the most reliable source of information regarding King Aerys’s character, because Tywin and Aerys were childhood friends. But the TV show doesn’t make note of this fact. That said, Pycelle should still have bigger picture insights into King Aerys than Tywin does, because Pycelle has known more kings than Tywin has.
Pycelle: How many years has it been? You were a young man.
Ned: And you served another king.
A Maester is like a part of a castle, sworn to loyally serve whomever currently holds the castle, even if it violently changes hands. Because they need somebody to record history and tend to the ravens.
Theon: You are a Maester of the Citadel, sworn to serve the Lord of Winterfell. Are you not?
Luwin: I am.
Theon: I am the Lord of Winterfell, as Bran just informed you. Send the ravens.
Luwin: My Lord.
And sure enough, Grand Maester Pycelle has known more kings than anybody.
Pycelle: I have been Grand Maester for many years. Kings and Hands have come to me for advice since-
Ned: What did Jon want the night before he died?
Pycelle: In the past sixty-seven years, I’ve known- truly known, more kings than any man alive.
If there’s one person who should know about the Mad King, it’s him. So what does Pycelle say about Mad King Aerys?
Pycelle: He was a good man. Such a charmer. But to watch him melt away before my eyes… Consumed by dreams of fire and blood.
He says Aerys was a good man, and charming. That doesn’t match with his mad reputation. This mismatch shows me that Mad King Aerys wasn’t always the kind of person anybody would consider mad. It sounds like he used to be pretty normal.
In the books
The books are peppered with hints that The Mad King Aerys used to be a really good guy.
The king—the old king, Aerys II Targaryen, who had not been quite so mad in those days—had sent his lordship to seek a bride for Prince Rhaegar, who had no sisters to wed. (Maester Cressen ACOK Prologue)
The Mad King was open-handed with them as pleased him. (Godric Borrell ADWD Davos I)
The World of Ice and Fire goes into more detail about Aerys’s life, giving the reader the closest thing available to a sympathetic perspective of Aerys while still falling short of an acknowledgement of the possibility that Aerys’s “madness” could have been a consequence of his life experiences rather than his name, bloodline, genetics or inbirth. And sure enough, Aerys’s life is fraught with tragedy. Whether it’s a dead son, a dead lover, a treasonous advisor or the unbearable pressures of ruling, the discerning reader is left to recognize that many of Aerys’s tragedies can be found in the story of Daenerys, too.
Martin shows us that the characters in the story have as much trouble as the readers do in challenging their own beliefs about The Mad King’s characterization and the narratives they’ve been fed about the past.
Brienne was still awaiting his answer. Jaime said, “You are not old enough to have known Aerys Targaryen . . .”
She would not hear it. “Aerys was mad and cruel, no one has ever denied that. He was still king, crowned and anointed. And you had sworn to protect him.”
“I know what I swore.” (ASOS Jaime II)
Alright, let’s take a break here to talk about the big picture and tie things together.
The story is constantly punishing me for making premature moral judgements about people, by subverting my expectations about them.
First I think Ned is very good and then I come to realize that he did some things a little bad. First I think Jaime is very bad, and then I learn that he did some things very good. First I think Tyrion is a little bad, but it turns out he’s also a little good.
Tyrion: I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples, bastards and broken things.
In the books
This scene and line are the same in books and show.
Robb Stark seemed puzzled. “Is this some trap, Lannister? What’s Bran to you? Why should you want to help him?”
“Your brother Jon asked it of me. And I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things.” Tyrion Lannister placed a hand over his heart and grinned. (AGOT Bran IV)
We need to see King Aerys’s beginning to find where the madness came from. But we can’t because Aerys’s beginning is in the past. But! We do get to see Aerys’s daughter, Daenerys, who’s haunted by her father’s mad reputation.
Daenerys: I’m not my father.
A daughter isn’t guilty of the crimes of her father, but that doesn’t stop the whispers and sideways looks of concern that maybe she has a touch madness too.
In the books
There are many times when the reader is given glimpses of doubt present in the characters around Daenerys.
She could feel the eyes of the khalasar on her as she entered her tent. The Dothraki were muttering and giving her strange sideways looks from the corners of their dark almond eyes. They thought her mad, Dany realized. Perhaps she was. She would know soon enough. If I look back I am lost. (AGOT Daenerys X)
“Aegon’s dragons were named for the gods of Old Valyria,” she told her bloodriders one morning after a long night’s journey. “Visenya’s dragon was Vhagar, Rhaenys had Meraxes, and Aegon rode Balerion, the Black Dread. It was said that Vhagar’s breath was so hot that it could melt a knight’s armor and cook the man inside, that Meraxes swallowed horses whole, and Balerion . . . his fire was as black as his scales, his wings so vast that whole towns were swallowed up in their shadow when he passed overhead.”
The Dothraki looked at her hatchlings uneasily. The largest of her three was shiny black, his scales slashed with streaks of vivid scarlet to match his wings and horns. “Khaleesi,” Aggo murmured, “there sits Balerion, come again.” (ACOK Daenerys I)
On a first read through of the story, these sort of lines tend to go overlooked by the reader without much consideration, because they’re often disregarded by Daenerys, and of course we occupy Daenerys’s perspective.
Yet even as her dragons prospered, her khalasar withered and died. (ACOK Daenerys I)
Daenerys: Ser Jorah, bind this woman to the pyre. You swore to obey me.
The story is raising the question of whether or not Daenerys’s story will end in madness like her father, while showing clues that her father’s story began in goodness like Daenerys. It suggests that if my reasons for why I think Daenerys would do no evil are that she could do no evil, they aren’t good enough.
In a story that’s repeatedly subverting my expectations about good and evil characters, I’m made to wonder: Is the story going to subvert my expectations about this one?
In the books
The reader sympathizes with Daenerys because her story and character is incredibly sympathetic when told from her perspective.
As with each POV character, every Daenerys chapter takes place entirely in the mind of Daenerys. We tend to become immersed in the events of the story, and that makes it easy to forget or never consciously notice that all of the information we receive is not necessarily an accurate representation of the world or events on the part of Daenerys.
The question of whether or not Daenerys has inherited her father’s madness is subtly raised in the reader’s mind every time the topic of madness or The Mad King comes up.
As she climbed down off the pyre, she noticed Mirri Maz Duur watching her. “You are mad,” the godswife said hoarsely.
“Is it so far from madness to wisdom?” Dany asked. “Ser Jorah, take this maegi and bind her to the pyre.” (AGOT Daenerys X)
Understandably, this isn’t a topic Daenerys likes to think or talk about very much, and her opinion on her own character cannot be unbiased, so we need to look to other characters’ opinions about Daenerys.
The reader is challenged to consider Daenerys’s story from the perspective of non-Daenerys characters, to seriously question if her enemies are wrong and her allies right.
The dung made him think of his lord father. Are you down in some hell, Father? A nice cold hell where you can look up and see me help restore Mad Aerys’s daughter to the Iron Throne? (ADWD Tyrion II)
Not coincidentally, there aren’t any POV characters who’ve met Daenerys until late in the story, who we might look to for an alternate perspective on her.
Of course, it’s safe to assume that everything in a story must have a narrative purpose towards telling the story. The narrative purpose of the repeated mentions of The Mad King’s madness as well as the criticisms of madness made towards Dany create a feeling of forboding in the reader. And that’s a feeling that the reader will increasingly come to identify as a metatextual threat to Daenerys’s happy ending. The story is suggesting an answer to an uncomfortable question that the reader hasn’t consciously asked himself yet. “What is the narrative purpose of The Mad King’s madness?”
Mother of dragons, Daenerys thought. Mother of monsters. What have I unleashed upon the world? A queen I am, but my throne is made of burned bones, and it rests on quicksand. Without dragons, how could she hope to hold Meereen, much less win back Westeros? I am the blood of the dragon, she thought. If they are monsters, so am I. (ADWD Daenerys II)
I think this is one of the things in the characterization that the mad nickname suggests that isn’t true. And that thing is, the Mad King was always mad. Apparently he wasn’t always mad.
Bastards and Broken Things
Jon: What the hell do you know about being a bastard?
Tyrion: All dwarves are bastards in their father’s eyes.
In the books
In the first episode, Tyrion points out a similarity between bastards and dwarves. Society treats them poorly based on the way they were born. They’re broken things, if you will. And the longer I watch, the more I see that this setting is loaded with these kind of beliefs.
Man 1: You’re an abomination!
Man 2: Born of sin!
People who are born of incest in this world are called an abomination and a freak, even if they haven’t done anything wrong.
Of course, people born of incest didn’t choose to be born of incest. Tommen’s parents did the wrongdoing.
In the books
Stannis
I declare upon the honor of my House that my beloved brother Robert, our late king, left no trueborn issue of his body, the boy Joffrey, the boy Tommen, and the girl Myrcella being abominations born of incest between Cersei Lannister and her brother Jaime the Kingslayer. (Stannis’s letter in ACOK Davos I)
Catelyn
Bastards were common enough, but incest was a monstrous sin to both old gods and new, and the children of such wickedness were named abominations in sept and godswood alike. (ACOK Catelyn IV)
Crewman of The Night’s Watch galley Blackbird
“Fucked her own father,” Sam heard one man say, as the wind was rising once again. “Worse than whoring, that. Worse than anything. We’ll all drown unless we get rid of her, and that abomination that she whelped.” (AFFC Samwell II)
If you’re born a bastard, people believe you’re treacherous by nature.
Alliser: Blood will always tell. You’ll hang for this, bastard.
In the books
A couple of them saw Jon looking down from atop the King’s Tower and waved up at him. Others turned away. They still think me a turncloak. That was a bitter draft to drink, but Jon could not blame them. He was a bastard, after all. Everyone knew that bastards were wanton and treacherous by nature, having been born of lust and deceit. (ASOS Jon VII)
“The evil is in his blood,” said Robett Glover. “He [Ramsay] is a bastard born of rape. A Snow, no matter what the boy king says.” (ADWD Davos IV)
If you’re born a dwarf, people believe you’re devious and foolish by nature.
Bronn: He’s talking about you.
Tyrion: What? Demon monkey?!
Bronn: People think you’re pulling the king’s strings. They blame you for the city’s ills.
Tyrion: Blame me? I’m trying to save them!
In the books
Pycelle: A child born of a traitor’s seed is no fit consort for our king. She’s a sweet thing now, Your Grace, but in ten years, who knows what treasons she may hatch!
In the books
“A child born of traitor’s seed will find that betrayal comes naturally to her,” said Grand Maester Pycelle. “She is a sweet thing now, but in ten years, who can say what treasons she may hatch?” (AGOT Sansa IV)
Of course, none of these people chose the way they were born. Condemning people for the way they were born, or who their parents were, or what kind of sex they had, uhh… it’s a shaky proposition.
The story is exploring what these beliefs do to people.
Tywin: You are not on trial for being a dwarf.
Tyrion: Oh… yes I am. I’ve been on trial for that my entire life!
In the books
“This is folly, Tyrion,” declared Lord Tywin. “Speak to the matter at hand. You are not on trial for being a dwarf.”
“That is where you err, my lord. I have been on trial for being a dwarf my entire life.” (ASOS Tyrion X)
Jon: Because all I could think was, what if I got her pregnant? And she had a child? Another bastard named Snow? It’s not a good life for a child.
Jon doesn’t want to father a bastard because he knows that in a world where bastards are believed to be treacherous, the child will be treated like he’s evil, and that treatment will take a cost on the child as it took on him.
In the books
A drunken Jon Snow gets pretty angry when his uncle Benjen suggests that Jon will father a bastard.
Jon felt anger rise inside him. “I’m not your son!”
Benjen Stark stood up. “More’s the pity.” He put a hand on Jon’s shoulder. “Come back to me after you’ve fathered a few bastards of your own, and we’ll see how you feel.”
Jon trembled. “I will never father a bastard,” he said carefully. “Never!” He spat it out like venom. (AGOT Jon I)
Catelyn’s unkind treatment of Jon peaks in the books when Catelyn tells Jon that it should have been him who fell from the tower instead of Bran.
He was at the door when she called out to him. “Jon,” she said. He should have kept going, but she had never called him by his name before. He turned to find her looking at his face, as if she were seeing it for the first time.
“Yes?” he said.
“It should have been you,” she told him. Then she turned back to Bran and began to weep, her whole body shaking with the sobs. Jon had never seen her cry before. (AGOT Jon II)
If I believe that babies who are born of incest, born to traitors, born bastards or dwarves are inherently bad, that belief can change the way I treat the baby. And that treatment can cause the baby to become bad. Which reinforces the belief in me and in everyone who encounters him that these babies are born bad.
Brother fornicates with sister in the bed of kings, and we’re surprised when the fruit of their incest is rotten? Yes! A rotten kid!
Now I can understand why the beliefs persist. They’re actually useful. Because these babies do disproportionately grow up to be treacherous, devious, foolish and what have you. But the belief itself is creating the environment that’s causing it.
Tyrion: I wish I was the monster you think I am! I wish I had enough poison for the whole pack of you!
It’s a vicious, self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the books
“Have you nothing to say in your defense?”
“Nothing but this: I did not do it. Yet now I wish I had.” He turned to face the hall, that sea of pale faces. “I wish I had enough poison for you all. You make me sorry that I am not the monster you would have me be, yet there it is. I am innocent, but I will get no justice here. You leave me no choice but to appeal to the gods. I demand trial by battle.” (ASOS Tyrion X)
I may not have found the source of Targaryen madness just yet. But I found the source of much of Tyrion’s madness, Jon’s, Ramsay’s and Joffrey’s.
What would it have been like to be treated like an outsider by the kind of father who raped your mother under the hanging corpse of her husband?
Roose: So I had him hanged, and I took her beneath the tree where he was swaying. She fought me the whole time. She was lucky I didn’t hang her too.
In the books
“Has my bastard ever told you how I got him?”
That he did know, to his relief. “Yes, my … m’lord. You met his mother whilst out riding and were smitten by her beauty.”
“Smitten?” Bolton laughed. “Did he use that word? Why, the boy has a singer’s
soul … though if you believe that song, you may well be dimmer than the first Reek. Even the riding part is wrong. I was hunting a fox along the Weeping Water when I chanced upon a mill and saw a young woman washing clothes in the stream. The old miller had gotten himself a new young wife, a girl not half his age. She was a tall, willowy creature, very healthy-looking. Long legs and small firm breasts, like two ripe plums. Pretty, in a common sort of way. The moment that I set eyes on her I wanted her. Such was my due. The maesters will tell you that King Jaehaerys abolished the lord’s right to the first night to appease his shrewish queen, but where the old gods rule, old customs linger. The Umbers keep the first night too, deny it as they may. Certain of the mountain clans as well, and on Skagos … well, only heart trees ever see half of what they do on Skagos.
“This miller’s marriage had been performed without my leave or knowledge. The man had cheated me. So I had him hanged, and claimed my rights beneath the tree where he was swaying. If truth be told, the wench was hardly worth the rope. The fox escaped as well, and on our way back to the Dreadfort my favorite courser came up lame, so all in all it was a dismal day. (ADWD Reek III)
How much of Ramsay’s behavior could be a consequence of his environment? The place and the way that he was raised? This small consideration immediately reveals that Ramsay was once a child vying for acceptance into a family that happens to have a tradition of flaying people.
Roose: But then I looked at you, and I saw then what I see now. You are my son.
We can do this sympathetic exercise with all of the villains whose histories we’re allowed to glimpse. The Hound’s burning at the hands of his brother. The death of Cersei’s mother in childbirth.
How much of Joffrey’s Joffreyness could be a consequence of his environment, where his parents hated each other and were cheating on each other? Maybe not all of it but certainly not none of it. And the stakes couldn’t be higher because if anybody finds out that his uncle is his dad, they’ll all be executed for treason.
Cersei: You’ve never been a father to her.
Jaime: If I was a father to any of my children they’d be stoned in the streets.
Cersei: And what has your caution brought?
In the books
She had seen enough of Robert Baratheon at Winterfell to know that the king did not regard Joffrey with any great warmth. If the boy was truly Jaime’s seed, Robert would have put him to death along with his mother, and few would have condemned him. (ACOK Catelyn IV)
Alright. Look at that. We’re sympathizing with Joffrey and Ramsay. That’s how we know we’re on the right track. The story is testing our adherence to the lesson. It wants me to try to see things from other peoples’ perspectives before judging them, especially the people I think are evil, because that’s when it’s the most difficult thing to do.
It’s also showing me that judging someone evil for the way he was born is no different than judging him evil as soon as he was born. And since someone can’t possibly be judged sooner than when they were born, that might be the most egregious failure to adhere to the lesson conceivable.
Tywin: You who killed your mother to come into the world?! You are an ill-made, spiteful little creature full of envy, lust and low cunning.
At this point, we have all the pieces we need to finish this puzzle. But before we even have time to think, the story has already escorted us into a trap.
Gods Toss A Coin
Cersei: What’s the saying? Everytime a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin.
Varys: They say everytime a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin and the world holds its breath.
The people have noticed over the past 300 years of Targaryen rule that the Targaryen family is madder than any other family, and their explanation for that is that the gods flip a coin.
In the books
We learn from Barristan Selmy that The Gods Toss A Coin saying originates from King Jaehaerys II, Dany’s grandfather, for whom Barristan served as Kingsguard.
“every child knows that the Targaryens have always danced too close to madness. Your father was not the first. King Jaehaerys once told me that madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin. Every time a new Targaryen is born, he said, the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” (Barristan ASOS Daenerys VI)
In the show, we’re told that the gods toss a coin in order to determine whether a Targaryen will be mad, which suggests that the opposite side of the coin is non-madness. In the books, we’re told that the coin’s opposite side isn’t non-madness, but greatness.
King Jaehaerys only ruled for three years before he died of illness, but in that short time he restored the realm and came to be remembered as one of the best Kings to ever sit the throne.
Jaehaerys’s wisdom shines through in his coin toss formulation. The difference between madness and greatness is alignment. It shows me that he recognizes that madness and greatness are just different ways of moralizing an extreme outcome, and that extreme outcomes are a permanent fixture of Targaryens, or perhaps the ruling environment.
The coin toss formulation is a rudimentary articulation of the story’s theme about good and evil. Its fundamental observation is that good and evil are two parts of one thing. In this case, that thing is a coin, or symbolically, a Targaryen. In the theme, that thing is each and every person.
Now, the story does seem to have working magic, so maybe there really are gods and they decide when a newborn Targaryen will have the madness. But I haven’t seen a god in the story. And ‘God did it’ would be an uninteresting answer to an interesting question.
Cersei is wondering if Joffrey’s madness comes from incest, because the Targaryens are infamously mad and they practiced incest for centuries.
Tyrion: You’ve beaten the odds. Tommen and Myrcella are good, decent children. Both of them.
And since one out of three isn’t half, Cersei’s children have beaten the odds.
This observation causes us to mirror this line of thinking. With modern medicine, we know that inbreeding can cause a long list of health defects for the baby. But madness certainly isn’t on that list. And none of our mad inbred characters have any of the defects that are.
However, it is a fictional world, and we might think ‘maybe in this world madness is one of the defects of inbreeding.’ But still, the story has shown me that madness can mean anything in the ballpark of unreasonable. And everyone has done something unreasonable before.
Just like with the word mad, the story demonstrates the same problem with the word Targaryen.
Robert: Orys was said to be a half-brother to Aegon Targaryen. If this were true, a little blood of the dragon mingled with that of the stag in those days.
While the Targaryens ruled, they were intermarrying with families like the Baratheons, and they were having sex with pretty much anybody they wanted, because they were the rulers and that’s an attractive thing to be and a scary thing to refuse. So the Targaryens were making plenty of bastards of their own. Those bastards would go on to have families and bastards of their own, and on and on for the 300 year long Targaryen reign. As a result, there are thousands of people walking around with a little bit of Targaryen blood in them. Many of those characters didn’t appear in Game of Thrones, but the Baratheon family did. It isn’t mentioned in the show that the Baratheons descend from Targaryens. But thankfully it is mentioned in the bonus material.
Robert, Stannis, Renly, Gendry and Shireen are all Targaryens.
It’s incredibly important information, to know that there are all these mildly Targaryen people walking around. Because it evokes the question, how Targaryen does someone have to be in order to qualify as a Targaryen for the Targaryen madness? And why don’t half of these Targaryens have the madness?
In the books
People of lesser Targaryen descent are sometimes referred to as dragonseeds. Throughout the story we meet several minor characters who are proud to tell anybody who will listen that they have a bit of Targaryen blood in their heritage. Brown Ben Plumm is a distant relative of Elaena Targaryen. Rennifer Longwaters is the chief undergaoler of the dungeons beneath the Red Keep, and the son of a bastard son of Elaena Targaryen.
“She gave their son the bastard name of ‘Waters’ in honor of his father, and he
grew to be a great knight, as did his own son, who put the ‘Long’ before the ‘Waters’ so men might know that he was not basely born himself. So I have a little dragon in me.”
“Yes, I almost mistook you for Aegon the Conqueror,” Jaime had answered. (AFFC Jaime I)
For those who contend that the Targaryen blood or inbreeding causes madness, there’s a lot of Targaryen sanity that requires some explaining.
The story is discrediting Targaryen madness from every angle. It challenges my assumptions about what a Targaryen is, what madness is, and that inbreeding causes it.
If you’ve ever found yourself in a discussion about Targaryen madness, you may have noticed that some people can be hostile to anyone who dares embark on a sympathetic investigation into the Mad King’s madness. ‘Why are you trying so hard to defend the Mad King?’ someone will ask accusingly. ‘I’m just investigating him,’ I’ll respond, ‘because the story challenged me to do so.’ ‘Well let me save you some time,’ he might say. ‘He was definitely one-hundred percent mad.’
Aerys: Burn them all!
‘Targaryen madness is definitely real. And anybody trying to say otherwise must be mad too.’
If I point out that Robert and Shireen are Targaryens, he might even say that Robert and Shireen are mad, in order to protect his belief that the Mad King was mad. And if he isn’t able to stop my investigation, he might say that I’m mad for daring to sympathize with someone he believes is evil. Because that’s what madness really means to him.
Mad is a moral judgement disguised as a clinical one. And the moralization can be heard behind every utterance of the Mad King’s name.
Renly: When the Mad King slaughtered women and babies because the voices in his head told him they deserved it.
Joffrey: The King can do as he likes!
Tyrion: The Mad King did as he liked.
Robert: Fear and blood!
Ned: Then we’re no better than the Mad King!
Robert: Careful, Ned! Careful now!
Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire are designed to reveal something about its audience. Not everyone will have stepped up to the story’s challenge about looking a person’s perspective before judging him. And almost all of the characters are trying to learn the same lesson.
Janos: Listen to him. He even talks like a wildling now.
Jon: Aye I talk like a wildling! I ate with the wildlings, I climbed the Wall with the wildlings, I-
Everywhere I look, there are characters who’ve divided the world into good and evil.
Robert: What Rhaegar Targaryen did to your sister! The woman I loved! I’ll kill every Targaryen I get my hands on.
Ned: Someone who’s brave and gentle and strong-
Sansa: I don’t want someone brave and gentle and strong, I want him! He’ll be the greatest king there ever was, a golden lion, and I’ll give him sons with beautiful blonde hair!
In the books
Sansa begins the story believing that beautiful people are good people and ugly people are bad people. Considering that storytellers in-story and out tend to make the heroes beautiful and the villains ugly, it isn’t hard to imagine where Sansa learned to moralize this way. She’s an avid reader of Westerosi fables and stories.
Sansa’s beautiful/ugly moralization is demonstrated when she places her trust in Cersei, for example. I think Sansa pays the price for this moralization again when she rejects the Hound’s offer to take her back to Winterfell. The Hound is ugly and that makes him seem more scary than he is.
There’s a scene at the Hand’s Tourney that has perplexed me and many fans for a long time. In it, Sansa’s thoughts indicate a shocking lack of sympathy for the dying knight Ser Hugh. A common interpretation is that the scene is meant to show us that Sansa’s naivety is so extreme that it’s indistinguishable from sociopathy. However, that doesn’t jive with Sansa’s character anywhere in the story. She’s a caring, empathetic and sociable person as dissimilar to a sociopath as can be. Sansa’s lack of sympathy for Ser Hugh didn’t begin to make sense to me until after I had discovered her moralization, and after matching that with a small piece of information about Ser Hugh that first appears much later. In the chapter Eddard VII, Ned learned that Ser Hugh was ugly. Sansa’s sympathy is reserved for beautiful people and lacking for ugly people.
They’re blinded by morality, and that blindness causes the character to forego the difficult but necessary task of challenging his belief that his enemies are evil,
Arya: Ilyn Payne.
which often causes him to leap to the conclusion that the appropriate solution is to kill the evil people until only good ones are left.
Arya: The Hound.
Is this a conflict between the Night’s Watch and the wildlings? Or the freefolk and the crows?
Are the Sons of the Harpy sadistic slavemasters clinging to power? Or heroic sons avenging their murdered fathers?
Is Daenerys a benevolent liberator committed to making the world a better place for everyone? Or a self-righteous terrorist over committed to a half-baked ideal?
Hizdahr: I pray you will never live to see a member of your family treated so cruelly.
Daenerys: Your father crucified innocent children!
Hizdahr: My father spoke out against crucifying those children!
That’s a question for another time. But as with most good dilemmas, I think the answer is exactly… in the middle. And that the middle isn’t easy to find.
In the books
The benevolent liberator interpretation of Daenerys is the first one the reader will find, because Dany’s story is presented from Dany’s perspective and no one else’s. This is no accident on the part of the author. By depriving the readers of a non-Daenerys perspective of Daenerys, the self-righteous terrorist interpretation will not be self-evident. But make no mistake, non-Daenerys perspectives of Daenerys are sprinkled throughout the story here and there, providing attentive readers with clues that there are quite a lot of people in the story whose perspectives we and Dany are not taking seriously enough.
And Books, the clever Volantene swordsman who always seemed to have his nose poked in some crumbly scroll, thought the dragon queen both murderous and mad. “Her khal killed her brother to make her queen. Then she killed her khal to make herself khaleesi. She practices blood sacrifice, lies as easily as she breathes, turns against her own on a whim. She’s broken truces, tortured envoys … her father was mad too. It runs in the blood.” (ADWD The Windblown)
Melisandre: How would you punish the infidels, Ser Davos?
Davos: I do not judge people for the gods they worship. If I did, I’d have thrown you in the sea before you ever set foot on Dragonstone.
Melisandre: I am not your enemy.
Davos: You are my enemy!
In the books
“I have a knife myself. Captain Khorane made me a gift of it.” He pulled out the dirk and laid it on the table between them. “A knife to cut out Melisandre’s heart. If she has one.” (ASOS Davos II)
There are many good and evil classifications throughout the story that blind the characters to the sympathetic point-of-view of their enemies and the unsympathetic point-of-view of their friends.
Robb: They killed my father.
Talisa: That boy did?
Robb: The family he fights for.
Talisa: Do you think he’s friends with King Joffrey?
If what madness really means to people is approximately evil, then Targaryens have something in common with bastards, dwarves, traitors’ children and inbreds. Because if you think about it, Targaryen madness is just like them. It says that if you’re born a Targaryen, that means you’re contaminated with this heightened risk of evilness.
It shows me that, just like with the other Broken Things, when people search for the cause of Targaryens’ madness, they’re dismissive of the environment.
Cersei wonders if the madness comes from the incest because the Targaryens all have a heavily incestuous lineage in common. But maybe a lot of the unreasonable behaviors in Targaryens were brought on by the environment rather than the way they were born or who their parents were.
Daenerys: And I ask you not to judge a daughter by the sins of her father.
So I think the next question we’re supposed to ask is this. What kind of environment do all Targaryens have in common?
Tyrion: If we can’t control him…
Cersei: Do you think I haven’t tried? He doesn’t listen to me.
Tyrion: It’s hard to put a leash on a dog once you’ve put a crown on its head.
Power Corrupts
When I think of power corrupting, I tend to imagine something spectacular. But the story spends most of its time showing me the subtler ways that power corrupts the lives of the powerful.
Joffrey is out of control, and that was only a minor annoyance in the beginning. But once the prince becomes the king, the law says that his word is final and his personhood is sacred. The result is that family dynamics suffer a troublesome twist.
Joffrey: I’m asking if he fucked other women when he grew tired of you. How many bastards does he have runnin- What you just did is punishable by death. You will never do it again. Never.
In the books
Cersei doesn’t slap Joffrey in the books, but there is no shortage of examples of the way power corrupts family dynamics.
“I should go to court with you every day, to listen. Margaery says—”
“—a deal too much,” Cersei snapped. “For half a groat I’d gladly have her tongue torn out.”
“Don’t you say that,” Tommen shouted suddenly, his round little face turning red. “You leave her tongue alone. Don’t you touch her. I’m the king, not you.”
She stared at him, incredulous. “What did you say?”
“I’m the king. I get to say who has their tongues torn out, not you. I won’t let you hurt Margaery. I won’t. I forbid it.”
Cersei took him by the ear and dragged him squealing to the door, where she found Ser Boros Blount standing guard. “Ser Boros, His Grace has forgotten himself. Kindly escort him to his bedchamber and bring up Pate. This time I want Tommen to whip the boy himself. He is to continue until the boy is bleeding from both cheeks. If His Grace refuses, or says one word of protest, summon Qyburn and tell him to remove Pate’s tongue, so His Grace can learn the cost of insolence.”
“As you command,” Ser Boros huffed, glancing at the king uneasily. “Your Grace, please come with me.” (AFFC Cresei VIII)
Since the power of the ruling family is predicated on the lie that the ruling family’s bloodline is better than everybody else’s bloodline, the lie needs to be protected at all costs. The rulers make it a point to put on displays of absurd power and wealth and surround themselves with the trappings of power in order to create and maintain the illusion in the minds of the lords, vassals and smallfolk that the ruling family is extraordinary, or more to the point, that any attempt to depose the ruling family would be feeble.
One thing that can shatter this illusion is to witness the King or the Prince’s vulnerability, such as when he appears nude, when he flinches away from pain, or bleeds when injured. So the rulers have adapted a law that the King should not be hit under any circumstances, and that the punishment for doing so is death.
However, this creates unintended difficulties with raising the youngest members of the ruling family, because good parenting generally necessitates the use of physical punishment like spanking, whipping or slapping to correct extreme cases of bad behavior. And so royal parents adapt a different way of punishing their royal children. The practice is called whippingboys.
The royal child is provided with a non-royal friend and allowed to develop a friendship with him from a young age. When the royal child needs to be punished, the friend is punished instead in view of the royal child, in order to transfer the harm through the royal child’s sympathy for his friend. The practice of using whippingboys is one of the most injust, traumatic and sick things that children in this environment of power have to endure. And it’s ultimately a consequence of the fact that people in this world believe that power resides in blood.
When a person has the power to execute people with impunity, even his most genuine friends will find it difficult to tell him the truth.
Davos: I don’t serve the others. I serve Stannis.
Cressen: As do I. But loyal service means telling hard truths.
Daario: You’re the Queen. Everyone’s too afraid of you to speak truth.
Most people are eager to tell the ruler the things she wants to hear.
Jorah: Do you think these slaves will have better lives serving Khraznys and men like him, or serving you?
Davos and Daario are most valuable to Stannis and Daenerys when they say what they really think, especially when it isn’t welcome. Sometimes this is the only way a powerful person can tell her genuine friends apart from the sycophants.
With power, it can be hard to tell what it is about you exactly that people really love.
Daenerys: I can’t control them anymore.
Daario: A dragon queen with no dragons? That’s not a queen.
So many of the rulers and powerful people are dealing with these problems.
Robert: You were right! Varys, Littlefinger, my brother, worthless!
But you know who doesn’t have these problems? Olly. Because Olly is nowhere near power.
Dad: No one boils a potato better than your mom.
Right.
The story asks me ‘What drove the rulers mad in the past?’ And the rulers in the present are showing me the answers.
Viserys: I’m the last hope of a dynasty, Mormont. The greatest dynasty this world has ever seen on my shoulders since I was five years old. And no one has ever given me what they gave to her in that tent. Never. Not a piece of it.
From the time they were children, members of the ruling family were told that they were made to rule.
Just like the powerful children of the present, it’s easy to imagine that Targaryen children were given authority over many of the adults around them.
Joffrey: Away with you, dog.
Joffrey: Come, dog.
Sansa: Handmaidens wait on Ladies, not the other way around. And I don’t have time to answer a thousand questions and teach you how to do your job.
And this is considered normal.
These royal kids would more frequently grow up to be royally messed up parents like Cersei, who teach future kings and queens terrible lessons.
Cersei: Someday, you’ll sit on the throne and the truth will be what you make it. And if you’d rather fuck painted whores you’ll fuck painted whores.
So much of this environment signals to the people in it that they’re better than everyone else. Maybe the real mystery of Targaryen madness is how supposedly half of the Targaryens managed to come out of this environment with their sanity intact.
Cersei: She was good. From her first breath she was so sweet. I don’t know where she came from. She was nothing like me.
Now the sociological phenomena of Targaryen madness and the Targaryen coin toss are coming into focus.
Varys: They say everytime a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin and the world holds its breath.
The reason that people believe the madness is in the Targaryen blood or incest is because, until recently, there haven’t been any non-Targaryen rulers to compare them to.
The Targaryens ruled for three-hundred years until just seventeen years ago. And nobody has practiced incest for nearly as long as the Targaryens. But as the story is showing me over and over again, everyone’s life is corrupted when they exist in this environment of power, or even in proximity to it. Commoners like Shae, Ros and Hot Pie inevitably feel power’s touch when they come near it. Or when it comes near them.
Goldcloak: We’re looking for a bastard named Gendry! Give him up, or I’ll start taking eyeballs!
The nearer they come to power and the people who have it, the more it’s felt.
Even the incest itself is a consequence of power corrupting. Because the reason the Targaryens practice incest in the first place is to consolidate power. Because the claim to power is inherited with the Targaryen blood. And also, it would seem, so is their affinity with dragons. Another source of power they need to keep out of the hands of competing families.
And just like with Jon Snow, the Targaryens who didn’t have any power, or who didn’t want it, may have often come to find it ruining their lives anyway.
Jon: I don’t want it. I never have.
Now I can see why, in the coin toss saying, the world has to hold its breath and wait to see how the coin will land. The madness or unreasonableness doesn’t appear immediately. It only appears after the person has had the life experiences that form him. They can’t know how the king has formed until life has formed him. And the consequences of the king’s formation are not felt by the population until that prince comes into his power, his throne, his dragon. And begins passing judgements, making policies, and trying to bear the burdens of ruling. And that’s why the population cares how the coin will land.
Daenerys: The common people are waiting for him. Illyrio said they are sewing dragon banners and praying for his return.
Jorah: The common people pray for rain, health and a summer that will never end. They don’t care what games the high lords play.
In the books
You know old Ben Blackthumb? He came here as a boy. Smithed for Lady Whent and her father before her and his father before him, and even for Lord Lothston who held Harrenhal before the Whents. Now he smiths for Lord Tywin, and you know what he says? A sword’s a sword, a helm’s a helm, and if you reach in the fire you get burned, no matter who you’re serving. (—Gendry to Arya, ACOK Arya IX)
Because the consequences of the king’s formation are felt most intensely by the common people, who either thrive or starve depending on the King’s judgement and character.
I can see that commoners hear all kinds of crazy stories about what’s going on with the ruling family behind the gates of the Red Keep.
Faith Cryer: Prancing down his blood-stained whores to the tune of a twisted demon monkey!
Some are true, some embellished, and some are completely made up. So how does a commoner know what to believe?
Man 1: All hail the king!
Man 2: He’s a bastard!
Man 3: Please, Your Grace, we’re hungry!
His most reliable information about how the king is doing is the price of fish and bread, so to speak. It’s the answer to the question ‘Is my life better or worse under the new king than it was under the old king?’ I think that’s another reason it’s a coin toss. There are only two answers to that question. Better or worse. ‘What reasonable person would choose to make things worse?’
Cersei: The queen is telling you the leftovers will feed the dogs. Or you will.
‘He must be mad.’
Daenerys Targaryen
Now that I’ve taken the Targaryens’ environment into consideration, I’ve learned something new about the self-fulfilling prophecy. When I change bad to good, the loop remains true. Treating someone like he can only do evil can cause him to believe that he can do no good, so why bother trying? And treating him like he can only do good can cause him to believe that he can do no evil. So why would he bother challenging his own judgements?
Tyrion: Burning the Tarlys for instance.
Daenerys: That was not impulsive! That was necessary.
Tyrion: Perhaps.
Daenerys: Perhaps?
This video isn’t about Daenerys, it’s about the Mad King. But the Mad King is about Daenerys. Because who really cares about the Mad King anyway? He’s a historical figure that I never met. Daenerys is the character I care about, because I’ve watched her every step of the way and she’s just like me, but better looking.
If my reasons for why she would do no evil are that she could do no evil, not only is the story showing me that that reason is not good enough, but myself and characters like me are part of the environment that causes her to fail to challenge her own judgements, to fail to look at the world from other peoples’ perspectives, and thus fail to develop an understanding of people more sophisticated than good and evil.
Jorah: If you want to sit on the throne your ancestors built, you must win it. That will mean blood on your hands before the thing is done.
Daenerys: The blood of my enemies! Not the blood of innocents.
The Targaryen madness puzzle shows me that I’m not supposed to be searching Daenerys for signs of a clinical disorder. I’m supposed to be searching her story for life experiences that could one day cause her to exhibit the degree of unreasonableness that The Mad King Aerys exhibited in his final years.
I tried to sympathize with the Mad King, and I gave it all I got. And though the Mad King’s side of the story may be forever buried in the past, there was a lot to be learned about the present in the trying.
So the next time someone tries to tell you that the Targaryen madness is genetic…
Tyrion: The Targaryens are famously insane!
…you can tell them the Targaryen madness is sociological. And to stop moralizing and maybe try to see things from other characters’ perspectives.
In the Bastards and Broken Things section, I laid much of the suffering of Broken Things at the feet of society and their deterministic beliefs.
Catelyn: When my husband brought that baby home from the war, I couldn’t bare to look at him. So I prayed to the gods. ‘Take him away. Make him die.’
And while it would be cool if Catelyn didn’t treat Jon the bastard differently than her own children, when I look at things from Catelyn’s point of view, I can see that the ugly truth is that there are sympathetic reasons that she does. A bastard has more cause than most to resent his half-brother for his inheritance, and more opportunity than most to steal it.
The conditional nature of the word “traitor” shows me that the daughter of a so-called traitor has more cause than most to shove a king into a moat.
So the belief that bastards are treacherous would be useful to a mother who doesn’t want her sons to be killed by their half-brother. And the belief that traitors’ children are treasonous would be useful to a king who doesn’t want to die in a moat.
So while it would be easy to stop here and conclude that the characters just need to stop demonizing and sanctifying one another, that isn’t the whole picture. I have to stop moralizing the moralizers. These beliefs are serving important functions for the people who have to live in this world.
If peace is forged through political marriage, then conflict is forged through incest.
Cersei: No, I won’t do it.
Tywin: Yes you will. You’re still fertile. You need to marry again and breed.
Cersei: I am Queen Regent, not some brood mare!
Tywin: You’re my daughter!
When life is defended by combat ability, life is lost by dwarfism.
Bronn: You’re a shit warrior.
When I trace these beliefs as far back as I can, beyond the characters, their decisions and into the environments that produced them both, I find that many of the beliefs have one of the others in common. One belief at the heart of so many of the problems in this god-forsaken world.
Varys: Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall.
Blood Right
In this story, people believe that power resides in blood. And so blood is where power resides.
From the Tyrells of the Reach to the Starks of the North, each castle and family is its own epicenter of blood right, power, and its corrupting influence, most of them subordinate only to their liege lord and the king of Westeros. In the North, power resides in the blood of the Starks.
Lyanna Mormont: I don’t care if he’s a bastard. Ned Stark’s blood runs through his veins. He’s my king!
And in the Reach, power resides in the blood of the Tyrells. But the king’s blood and family rules over them all. I can see that even these other families are plagued by many of the same problems that plague the king’s family. There are terrible mothers and fathers, coddled lordlings, betrayals of love, angry bastards, conflict over inheritance and an all-around scarcity of hard-truth-tellers.
Ned: He was talking madness. Said the walkers slaughtered his friends.
Benjen: Well the two he was with are still missing.
Ned: A wildling ambush.
Benjen: Maybe.
Cersei: When you play the game of thrones you win or you die. There is no middle ground.
This is the truth is Cersei’s words here. The moment I claim blood right, I’ve committed myself and my entire family, from now until forever, to protecting a lie. And that lie is: ‘My blood is better than everyone else’s blood, and that’s why my family should rule.’
If I ever fail to protect the lie, I’ll be conquered. And myself, my family, extended family, friends and everyone with a drop of my family’s blood will be hunted and exterminated by the family who conquered mine. Because now they’ve claimed blood right, and it’s their turn to protect the lie. And how can they do that if there are still members of the old blood walking around? I have to be killed.
Robert: Seven hells! Don’t start with her again! The girl will die and I’ll hear no more of it.
But imagine, if you will, a parallel world where people don’t believe that power resides in blood.
Stannis: Their fate depends on their king.
Mance: All the same, we do not kneel.
Well, in that world, there would be no reason for a bastard to steal his brother’s inheritence. Because even if a treacherous bastard were to kill his brothers who stand between himself and the throne, the people wouldn’t necessarily accept a treacherous bastard as their ruler just because he has the blood of a whoever. And then there would be no reason for a parent to treat the bastard child differently, because there would be nothing to fear from him. And so people would have never have developed the belief that bastards are treacherous because it wouldn’t appear to be true and it wouldn’t be useful to anybody.
The same thing happens with traitors. If the ruler didn’t have to protect the lie that power resides in his blood, then it wouldn’t be treason to say otherwise. Ned would be alive. And since Ned is alive, Sansa wouldn’t have a reason to kill Joffrey. And so the Lannisters wouldn’t have a reason to fear Sansa, and the belief that treason is in blood wouldn’t exist. Because it wouldn’t be a useful belief for anyone to have.
These terrible belief loops start to disappear once people stop believing that power resides in blood.
The devious Dwarf stigma is alleviated this way too. Since people in this hypothetical world don’t believe that power resides in blood, there would be less conflict everywhere regarding succession. Fewer treacherous bastards. Fewer vengeful traitors’ relatives. And so the world would be a less violent place. And since the world is a less violent place, combat becomes a less important skill. And since fighting isn’t so important anymore, there’s are fewer reasons for a father like Tywin to treat his dwarf son unfairly. And since dwarf sons like Tyrion weren’t treated unfairly, they didn’t become resentful. And since he wasn’t resentful he didn’t become devious. And so the belief that dwarves are naturally devious does not develop in this world.
Isn’t that cool? Now let’s do incest.
If people didn’t believe that power resides in the ruler’s blood, then the ruling family wouldn’t have to practice incest to keep the claim out of the veins of competing families. But! They would still have to practice incest to keep the dragon affinity out of the veins of competing families. So dragons are the turd in the punch bowl.
It would seem that as long as there is this enormous genetic inequality, this world is stuck with blood right and all of the other problems that come out of it.
But I don’t think they are stuck with blood right. Because if power resides where men believe it resides, then the place where power truly resides is in the people. They just have to believe it.
Well, that’s some of what I think the story is about. How people are formed by their environments, families, institutions and incentives. And if myself or the characters want to make the world a better place, we have to demoralize the problems, and each other, and empiricise them.
In the books
The Kingsguard is another one of the institutions in the story, and Jaime Lannister is infamous for having soiled the institution with his betrayal of King Aerys II. But Jaime expresses to Brienne that, from his point of view, the situation is much the reverse.
“It is a rare and precious gift to be a knight,” she said, “and even more so a knight of the Kingsguard. It is a gift given to few, a gift you scorned and soiled.”
A gift you want desperately, wench, and can never have. “I earned my knighthood. Nothing was given to me. I won a tourney mêlée at thirteen, when I was yet a squire. At fifteen, I rode with Ser Arthur Dayne against the Kingswood Brotherhood, and he knighted me on the battlefield. It was that white cloak that soiled me, not the other way around.” (ASOS Jaime II)
Stannis: What are you reading?
Shireen: The Dance of Dragons. When people started declaring for one side or the other, their fight divided the kingdoms in two. Brothers fought brothers. Dragons fought dragons! By the time it was over, thousands were dead.
Stannis: If you had to choose… between Rhaenyra and Aegon, who would you have chosen?
Shireen: I wouldn’t have chosen either. It was all the choosing sides that made everything so horrible.
I promised a theme at the beginning of all of this. Power Corrupts is a big theme, but it isn’t The big theme. In order to find that, I have to go one step further and ask: ‘Does power always corrupt?’
Jorah: Have you ever heard baby dragons singing?
Tyrion: No.
Jorah: It’s hard to be a cynic after that.
Tyrion: It doesn’t mean she’s going to be a great queen.
Jorah: No, it doesn’t.
If a person allows himself to be corrupted by power, then that must be a bad person. Because a good person would be able to resist the corrupting influence of power, to resist all the temptations of sex and revenge and complacency.
Daenerys: Send the next one in.
But that isn’t really what happens.
Tywin: What kind of king do you think you’ll be?
Tommen: A good king?
Tywin: So. We have a man who starves himself to death, a man who lets his own brother murder him, and a man who thinks that winning and ruling are the same thing. What do they all lack?
Sometimes good people make terrible kings.
Tommen: Wisdom.
Tywin: Yes!
In the books
“His Grace is not an easy man. Few are, who wear a crown. Many good men have been bad kings, Maester Aemon used to say, and some bad men have been good kings.” (ADWD Jon III)
“Robb will make a good king,” he said loyally.
“Will he now?” The smith [Donal Noye] eyed him frankly. “I hope that’s so, boy, but once I might have said the same of Robert.” (ACOK Jon I)
Because the theme of the story, in my own words, is that there is no such thing as good or evil people. That’s a fairy tale understanding of people.
Melisandre: Are you a good man, Ser Davos Seaworth?
Davos: I’d say my parts are mixed m’lady. Good and bad.
Melisandre: If half an onion is black with rot, it’s a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil.
Davos: And which are you?
Melisandre: Oh, good! I’m a knight myself of sorts. A champion of light and life.
Davos: Well that must be very nice for you.
They were being taken to serve Lord Tywin Lannister at Harrenhal, the Mountain told them. “You’re traitors and rebels, so thank your gods that Lord Tywin’s giving you this chance. It’s more than you’d get from the outlaws. Obey, serve, and live.”
“It’s not just, it’s not,” she heard one wizened old woman complain to another when they had bedded down for the night. “We never did no treason, the others come in and took what they wanted, same as this bunch.”
“Lord Beric did us no hurt, though,” her friend whispered. “And that red priest with him, he paid for all they took.”
“Paid? He took two of my chickens and gave me a bit of paper with a mark on it. Can I eat a bit of raggy old paper, I ask you? Will it give me eggs?” She looked about to see that no guards were near, and spat three times. “There’s for the Tullys and there’s for the Lannisters and there’s for the Starks.”
“It’s a sin and a shame,” an old man hissed. “When the old king was still alive, he’d not have stood for this.”
“King Robert?” Arya asked, forgetting herself.
“King Aerys, gods grace him,” the old man said, too loudly. A guard came sauntering over to shut them up. The old man lost both his teeth, and there was no more talk that night. (ACOK Arya VI)
Created 2021
Updated Mar 2, 2022 – Added Ben Blackthumb
Updated Sep 26, 2022 – Added Toothless Old Man
Updated Oct 13, 2022 – Embedded video
Apples and Dragons 