Warning: This piece contains spoilers for HBO’s Game Of Thronesseries up through the end of the June 2 episode, “The Rains Of Castamere.”
As Game Of Thrones aired
its penultimate season-three episode, “The Rains Of Castamere,”
veterans of George R.R. Martin’s Song Of Ice And Fire novels were
holding their collective breath for what they knew would be the most
explosive, emotional development to hit the TV adaptation of his series
since the execution of seeming protagonist Eddard Stark toward the end of season one.
The betrayal and murder of Eddard’s heir, Robb, along with his pregnant
wife and his mother, Catelyn, ends one of the series’ many plotlines
with abrupt, thudding finality. And their deaths come at a moment that
should be triumphant, during Catelyn’s brother’s wedding, which is
supposedly sealing a much-needed alliance between the Starks and the
Frey family. Instead, the Freys violate their oaths of hospitality and
slaughter the Starks and hundreds of their soldiers and followers
(though the TV adaptation only shows a small handful dying), in what
comes to be known as the Red Wedding.
As Martin himself put it, in an EW interview that
posted immediately after the episode aired, the Red Wedding is
“probably the most powerful scene in the books.” He says he’s fielded
vehement, extreme reactions to it ever since book fans first experienced
the event in his 2000 novel A Storm Of Swords. When the Game Of Thrones show
launched, the Red Wedding immediately became a primary topic of
discussion for fans of the books, who wondered whether HBO would soften,
alter, or even excise it for fear of alienating viewers. HBO didn’t,
and the viewer reaction has been predictably stunned and horrified, as
evidenced by the Red Wedding Tears Twitter feed, or the YouTube compilation of live video reactions. Even the critical reaction has come across as aggrieved and despairing, with pieces like i09’s thoughtful but pained “Why do we sit through the brutality of Game Of Thrones every week?”, or Pajiba’s write-up, subtitled “There Is Nothing Fair In This World; There Is Nothing Safe In This World.”
In that EW interview, James Hibberd asks
Martin why the Red Wedding evokes such powerful reactions, particularly
since neither Robb nor Catelyn have ever been fan-favorite characters.
Martin says, “I don’t know if I have a good answer,” and vaguely
theorizes that it’s because their murder is such a surprise and a
betrayal. He’s quick to add that a lot of minor characters and anonymous
guardsmen die, in addition to the two least-beloved remaining Starks,
which ups the stakes. But off-screen deaths and the massacre touched on
in the books don’t explain the Internet descending into breast-beating,
clothes-rending misery, and even the dramatic reversal of a joyous event
abruptly turning into a horrific one is a minor part of the impact. A
lot of the initial reaction to the televised version of the Red Wedding
was simple shock at the brutality of the sequence. Some of it is because
Robb and Catelyn were main characters: Like Eddard’s death, theirs
suggest that no one in Martin’s world is safe, and that even Arya or
Tyrion or Jon or Daenerys or whomever else the viewers love most could
die at any moment. And in a story where one family can casually break
all its society’s most sacred rules and slaughter unarmed wedding
guests, there’s no trusting any vow or promise, or any seeming
friendship or romance.
But at heart, past that first shock, the Red Wedding floors readers and viewers because it’s the death of hope.
There
are reasons the Robb and Catelyn Stark of the books were never
considered fan favorites: Robb is never a point-of-view character, and
he’s a distant, vanilla figure compared to the troubled characters
Martin uses as portholes to the world. He’s a noble figurehead, and a
simplistically perfect one: In spite of his youth, he’s a skilled,
principled leader and a smart strategist, and his only major misstep is
in falling in love and failing to honor his oath to marry for political
gain. Catelyn Stark has much more of a personality, but she’s a flinty
martinet who makes poor decisions in her attempts to protect her family,
and she’s essentially a Northern version of Cersei: strong-willed to
the point of blindness where her children are concerned. (Those
impressions are more from the book’s fandom than the show’s, however,
judging from the number of HBO fans now posting proprietary, swoony
online laments for “my Robb,” and the fanbase Michelle Fairley
accumulated for finding Catelyn’s sympathetic, human side without losing
her hardness.)
But
Robb and Catelyn had a combination of righteousness, purity, and
resources that no one else on the show could claim. They were the
traditional, ideologically pure “good guys.” They weren’t after power
for selfish, grasping reasons: They had a moral calling to avenge
Eddard’s murder at the hands of the treacherous Lannister family, and
reclaim Catelyn’s daughters from the Lannisters’ abusive household. They
were stepping up to face an unwanted but necessary challenge, to
protect their family and country in a mature, considered, responsible
way. They were playing the part of conventional fantasy heroes, wronged
and seeking justice. And in any conventional hero’s-journey story, Robb
would be expected to save the day and triumph: As the son of a man
murdered by evil, grasping, cheating sadists, he reluctantly took up the
messiah mantle and fought back, and the standard format for this kind
of story suggests he deserves his inevitable victory.
Having
him go down as the victim of a sneaky, cowardly plot is like watching
Harry Potter get fatally gutshot at the Yule Ball, halfway through the
books. He’s the hero; he’s supposed to win, no matter what it takes. The
majority of fantasy stories are about escapism and wish-fulfillment,
and about the catharsis that comes when a deserving champion punishes
and defeats an equally deserving villain. The protagonists may have
setbacks and disappointments, they may make sacrifices, but they don’t
die ignominiously, choking on their own blood, while their enemies
gloat.
And
with Robb and Catelyn gone, there’s no longer any chance at the
expected, traditional happy ending any time in the near future. There
are plenty of protagonists left behind to take up the fight, but none
have Robb and Catelyn’s moral purity of cause, combined with the army to
back it up. They were the last appeal to adult authority, the last
illusion that someone sensible and severe could come in and take charge.
The remaining heroes are currently scattered, disempowered, and
isolated. The ones with Robb’s righteous claim to vengeance—Eddard’s
five other children—have no power. Four are currently fleeing enemies;
one, Sansa Stark, is in captivity. Four of them are children, and the
fifth, Jon Snow, has his own massive problems to contend with.
Meanwhile, the rest of the people who do have the power to challenge the
Lannisters are either half a world away and still consolidating their
forces, or hopelessly morally compromised by dark magic, murder, and
hubris.
For
that matter, there’s no chance at the expected, traditional happy
ending in the far future, either. The Lannisters might eventually be
destroyed, and the kingdom restored to a just and honest ruler, but that
victory would still have to take place in a world where the rightful
hero watched his pregnant wife stabbed to death in front of him, then
bled out in front of his dying mother. That’s why the Red
Wedding has such an emotional impact, George: It ups the ante on the
series’ sheer physical brutality, it leaves readers and viewers
expecting that any character or situation might suddenly devolve into
gory slaughter, and it definitively ends any hope for a glorious, clean
ending where all the black hats are put in their place and all the white
hats ride away triumphantly.
So is it time for despair and suicide, as some of the most histrionic reactions have suggested?
More sensibly, should former fans just give up on the series? Plenty of
newcomers to the Red Wedding have suggested that Martin is just a
sadist himself, that he “has issues” or is some sort of psychotic
bastard, twisting the knife in his viewers for his own sick reasons, and
that they’re better off getting away before he can emotionally hurt
them further. But I’ll let you in on a secret about him, one that
suggests viewers should stick by the series to the end.
I
have a long-brewing theory that Martin is the world’s most cynical
romantic. I’ve never yet read a Martin novel or story that ended in
utter despair for any character who hadn’t thoroughly earned it—and
I’ve read him extensively, from his 1977 debut novel, Dying Of The Light,
to his many short-story collections and the entire Song Of Ice And Fire
series. His work has always embraced bleakness, loneliness, and
hardship, with tough-minded people muddling through traumas that
perpetually threaten to break them. His protagonists rarely get exactly
what they want; often, they can consider themselves lucky if they become
wise enough to realize they wanted the wrong thing. His characters
often make hard, ugly choices to survive, but those choices make them
stronger and fiercer, and more capable of protecting themselves from the
hatefulness of the predatory worlds they live in.
Martin’s
cynical side can be overpowering: Characters who start his stories with
naïve faith in honor, loyalty, or love—especially their own one-sided,
demanding love, as opposed to a mutual bond—are commonly punished for
their beliefs. But his romantic side holds just as steady, with the most
steadfast and worthy characters prevailing. As I put it in that
Gateways, “For a man whose writing is so often ruthless and
uncompromising, he has a hell of a sentimental streak when it comes to
questions of injustice, honor, nobility, personal dignity against long
odds, and wrongs that need to be righted at any cost.”
I’ve
said this over and over when writing about Martin’s work. What he does
better than any author I’ve ever encountered—what defines his writing
for me—is his masterful skill at exploiting the tension between the
desire for justice and the availability of that justice. But that
doesn’t mean there is nojustice, just that it’s always hard-won
and thoroughly earned. Robb and Catelyn’s grotesque ends complicate the
search for justice considerably, and move it far into the future. But
it doesn’t make the quest impossible. It just means it’ll be that much
sweeter and that much more satisfying when it finally arrives.
Source: AvClub.com
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