Westeros

The last season of Game of Thrones was such a crash landing that no one is to be blamed for jumping off that train!  However, since many years have passed, revisiting HBO’s Game of Thrones after spending time with three seasons of its recent prequel, House of the Dragon, I found gives a lot of depth to this universe, especially away from the din of the cultural zeitgeist seven years ago. George R.R. Martin has created an unbelievable rich and detailed parallel world from which we can draw inferences for our own. The more time spent with Westeros, the more it begins to feel less like fantasy and more like our own actual history. Individual decisions can set forces in motion that continue for generations.

Within this history, two broad metaphors seem to emerge. They are not exact allegories, and Martin’s world is rich enough to support more than one interpretation. The dragons can be viewed as the equivalent of a nuclear arms race, where extraordinary destructive power creates both security and hubris. The White Walkers represent a different kind of threat, closer to a creeping climate catastrophe that develops slowly while political leaders remain focused on more immediate conflicts.  One threat comes from the human desire to control power. The other comes from failing to recognize a danger that does not respect political boundaries. 

Taking a Hegelian view of the world, much of the history of Westeros is driven these two forces, regardless of individuals making decisions.  In my second and separate essay, I take a Satre-ean view of the world through the eyes of Sansa Stark.

Here we trace the march of Westeros history, taking a top down, macro perspective.

Valyria

The first part of this fantasy saga begins outside Westeros with the Valyrian Freehold and its eventual doom.  Valyria is the cultural and military superpower of the known world in Martin’s universe. Its power rests largely on dragons, blood magic, and the labor of thousands of slaves working around the volcanic chain known as the Fourteen Flames. The dragon lords dominate much of the surrounding world and create a civilization unlike anything that follows them.

The parallel with a nuclear superpower is evident. Dragons give Valyria a military advantage that nobody else can match. They can also be read more broadly as symbols of imperial power and inherited privilege. What matters is that they create confidence in the ability of the Valyrians to control forces much larger than themselves. King Viserys makes this point generations later when he observes that the belief that humans control dragons is itself an illusion.

The “doom” brings that confidence to an end. The Fourteen Flames erupt and Valyria is destroyed in a catastrophe so large that the peninsula fractures into islands and becomes the Smoking Sea.  The Targaryens survive only because Daenys the Dreamer foresees the disaster twelve years earlier. Her family moves to Dragonstone with their dragons before the destruction occurs.

This leaves them in an unusual position. They are refugees from a lost civilization, but they also possess the most powerful weapons that civilization created. Valyria disappears. Its military technology survives.

Dawn

Another part of the story begins thousands of years earlier in Westeros itself.  The Children of the Forest are the indigenous inhabitants of the land and live closely with nature. The First Men arrive from outside Westeros and begin cutting down the sacred Weirwood trees. There is an obvious echo here of indigenous peoples confronting an expanding settler population, be it the Americas or Australia.  Faced with destruction, the Children create a weapon to fight back. The White Walkers emerge from this effort and eventually move beyond the control of their creators.

The first order logic is clear in their decision making. The Children face an existential threat and create something powerful enough to stop it. The second order effect is very different. The new weapon becomes an existential threat to everyone.  The Long Night forces the Children and the First Men to cooperate against the common danger. They eventually reach the Pact, and the Wall separates the realm from the darkness in the Far North.

Later another migration changes Westeros for good. The iron wielding Andals arrive carrying the Faith of the Seven and conquer much of the south. The Children disappear and the culture of the First Men largely retreats.  The Starks manage to stop the Andal advance at Moat Cailin. Geography helps them. The Neck and the difficult northern climate create a natural defense, allowing the North to preserve much of the older culture.

In the west, House Lannister rises through another route. Lann the Clever takes Casterly Rock through cunning rather than overwhelming force. Different forms of power are already visible very early in the story.

Conquest

The surviving power of Valyria eventually comes to Westeros through Aegon the Conqueror.  Aegon possesses something no Westerosi ruler can match. His dragons fundamentally change the military calculation.  King Loren Lannister initially resists and joins the battle against Aegon. The result is the Field of Fire, where dragon fire devastates the opposing armies. Loren survives and kneels the following day.  The Arryns face a similar reality. Their mountain fortress at the Eyrie appears almost impossible to conquer through ordinary warfare. Visenya simply flies Vhagar over the defenses. Geography that had protected the Vale for generations suddenly becomes less relevant.

The Starks take a different path. Torrhen Stark brings his army south but recognizes the imbalance before battle begins. He kneels and becomes remembered as the King Who Knelt.  There is something interesting in this choice. Pride would have produced a dramatic battle. Pragmatism preserves the North.

The logic of deterrence begins to appear here. Once one side possesses overwhelming destructive power, the decisions of everyone else begin to change even before that power is used.

War

This history leads into House of the Dragon and the Dance of the Dragons.  The third season of the House of the Dragon, starts with the Battle of the Gullet which brings war early, and the story gradually moves toward the larger destruction created by the civil war.  The dragon confrontation in Episode 7, “The Dragon in Winter,” is especially effective. Four enormous beasts tearing into each other feels less like elegant fantasy and more like uncontrolled animal violence. The scene also makes clear how little control the humans actually possess once these weapons are released. The “Dance” shows what happens when the Targaryen weapons system turns inward.  The dragons created the dynasty. During the Dance, those same weapons are turned against each other.

The first order effect of dragons was Targaryen supremacy. The second order effect was that a civil war within the family could destroy the very source of that supremacy.

Descent

The finale, “The Treasons at Tumbleton,” moves Rhaenyra further toward tyranny.  She holds the Iron Throne, but her position becomes increasingly unstable. Betrayal, paranoia, and the actions of the dragonseeds begin to weaken her rule from within.  The execution of the High Septon becomes an important moment. I do not necessarily blame Rhaenyra for the specific decision. Allowing the Septon to publicly declare Aegon the legitimate king could trigger rebellion inside King’s Landing at the moment when her position is already fragile.

The scene has an interesting echo in Cersei Lannister’s later destruction of the Great Sept of Baelor. Yet the motivations are different.  Cersei acts largely through self preservation and spite. Rhaenyra believes something larger. She has come to believe that her own rule is connected to the survival of humanity because of the prophecy concerning the threat from the North.  This creates a dangerous shift. Personal ambition and historical destiny begin to merge.

Her speech to the common people outside the Sept reflects this change. She speaks about ancient history and moves into High Valyrian, even though the people standing before her cannot understand the language. The moment feels strange because she is no longer really communicating with them. She appears to be speaking to herself and to the role she believes history has assigned to her.

The transformation works because it has developed slowly. Politics, grief, fear, and prophecy gradually change Rhaenyra over several seasons. This is very different from the much faster breakdown of Daenerys Targaryen near the end of Game of Thrones.  Dragons create confidence through force. Prophecy creates confidence through destiny. Both can lead rulers to believe that ordinary limits no longer apply.

Lineage

The first king after the Dance is Aegon III, known as the Dragonbane.  He is a traumatized child ruling after a civil war that has devastated his family and destroyed much of the Targaryen dragon power. During his reign, the last living dragon eventually dies.  The Targaryens remain on the throne, but something fundamental has changed. They still possess the name, the history, and the institutions of the dynasty. They no longer possess the weapon that created it.

The family continues through rulers such as the corrupt Aegon IV and the more beloved Aegon V, known as Egg. Eventually the line reaches Aerys II, the Mad King, whose reign ends with Robert’s Rebellion. Nearly one hundred seventy years separate the Dance from the events of Game of Thrones.

Over that period the dragons disappear, but the political structures created by conquest remain. The families continue to fight over a system built by weapons that no longer exist.

Catastrophe

Revisiting Game of Thrones after House of the Dragon changed my perspective. The characters are living among the remains of a magical civilization they no longer fully understand. They inherit castles, bloodlines, institutions, stories, and political rivalries from the Targaryen world. Much of the knowledge behind that world has disappeared.

The dragons are gone at the beginning of the story. At almost exactly the same time, another ancient force begins moving south.  The White Walkers are different from every political enemy in Westeros. They have no interest in legitimacy, wealth, religion, territory, or the Iron Throne. They operate almost like an indifferent force of nature.  Yet most of the political system is unable to respond to them.

The great houses remain focused on who controls King’s Landing. Robb Stark fights the Lannisters. Stannis fights for his claim. Cersei fights her enemies. Daenerys eventually crosses the sea to reclaim the throne of her ancestors.  Meanwhile, the threat beyond the Wall continues to build.

This is where the two metaphors perhaps converge.  The dragons represent the risks that come with the pursuit and possession of overwhelming power. The White Walkers represent the danger of a slow moving common threat that remains outside the immediate field of political attention.

Across the history of Westeros, its rulers are often quite capable of dealing with the threat directly in front of them. The larger danger sits beyond their field of vision. The Children see the First Men. The Andals see the old religion. Aegon sees kingdoms to conquer. Rhaenyra and Aegon see rival claims. The Starks and Lannisters see each other. Cersei sees her political enemies.

The dead continue to move south.

The television version of Game of Thrones spends seven seasons building this threat and then resolves it in a single night at Winterfell when Arya Stark kills the Night King. This feels unsatisfying partly because the Night King himself does not exist in the books in this form. The television series creates a single villain and therefore creates a simple mechanism for defeating the larger threat.

Martin’s broader structure appears more interesting.

The Long Night is not simply another war. It is the culmination of thousands of years of decisions, conflicts, migrations, weapons, beliefs, and political rivalries. Each generation responds to the problems it can see. Other forces continue to develop underneath the surface.  The history of Westeros is therefore not simply about who should sit on the Iron Throne.  It is really about what happens when societies become very good at fighting immediate battles and much less capable of seeing what those battles are setting in motion.

That may be the most interesting part of Martin’s world building. The fantasy feels like history because consequences echo across generations, often far beyond the imagination or control of those characters who set them in motion.