{"id":39453,"date":"2017-06-30T06:00:47","date_gmt":"2017-06-30T10:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=39453"},"modified":"2017-09-08T13:17:41","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T17:17:41","slug":"game-of-thrones-griping-12-more-like-lady-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=39453","title":{"rendered":"Game of Thrones Griping 12: More Like Lady PAIN"},"content":{"rendered":"
This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both.<\/div>\n

(This was supposed to go up this morning. Somehow I never got around to actually clicking the “publish” button, so it’s late… oops)<\/p>\n

I want to take a closer look at one character in particular: Lady Crane. This character, and the way the show treats her, gives us (I think) a lens into how the writers think, and what sort of world they’re depicting.<\/p>\n

Game of Thrones<\/em> is not a black-and-white show, but there are certain characters we get the impression that we’re supposed to either like or dislike. And while it’s not always a clear binary value, I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to like Lady Crane. We’re supposed to root for her and consider her one of the good guys\/women. So, by looking at her, we can look at what sort of character the show wants and expects us to like, and why. So let’s look at Lady Crane.<\/p>\n

A Play Within A Show<\/h3>\n

I admit it: I’m a sucker for play-within-a-play stuff. And this unnamedI think?<\/span> Braavosi theatre company is my favorite part of the Arya storyline. I always like to see story elements illuminate the setting, and here we get some sense of what version of Westorosi political current events has made into the court of public opinion. Here, Ned Stark is a scheming, power-hungry type, Joffrey a noble innocent, and Tyrion a vile demon.<\/p>\n

We know this is all hogwash, but the Braavosi audience doesn’t, and you can’t really blame them. It’s also nice to take a trip down memory lane, and revisit plot points from seasons past. It all ends with Lady Crane’s star turn: her anguished monologue as she holds Joffrey’s body in her arms. Despite the determined use of sing-songy rhyming couplets, this is actually halfway affecting stuff. Maybe they should just do the whole show this way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sharp-eyed viewers will notice that these two aren't the actual Cersei and Joffrey.<\/div>
Sharp-eyed viewers will notice that these two aren't the actual Cersei and Joffrey.<\/div><\/p>\n

Later, Arya is lurking backstage, scoping out her best poisoning opportunity, when Lady Crane notices her. They show a bit of rapport and talk shop about the play. “My final speech is shit,” she says, then, later, “the writing’s no good.” Arya gives her opinion: add some revenge. “She wouldn’t just cry,” she says of Lady Crane’s character. “She would be angry. She would want to kill the person who did this to her.”<\/p>\n

Lady Crane tries to run this idea by the playwright, who the script says is named Izembaro, but he’s not having any of it. We’re definitely not supposed to like this pompous blowhard, who basically tells her to take her notes and shove them because he’s in charge.<\/p>\n

So, a crack performer, trying to make the best of what she considers to be subpar material, and the original auteur, who’s not interested in changes? Is this a meta-commentary on the show itself? To me, yes, it absolutely is. The only question is whether it’s deliberate or accidental. Either way, the takeaway is clear: revenge make things better.<\/p>\n

In the logic of the show, grief is not enough. A mother distraught over the murder of her son? Bo-ring<\/em>. But add anger, hate, and the tantalizing promise of future violence… now<\/em> you’re cooking with gas. Maybe you think this is thin. On it’s own, maybe it is, but it’s part of a pattern, which we’ll see more of shortly.<\/p>\n

“Putting Holes in Them”<\/h3>\n

Arya, her torso newly ventilated by the Waif, makes her way to Lady Crane’s room, and the Lady is good enough to treat her wounds. This is explained through a bit of dialogue that I think I should reproduce here in its entirety.<\/p>\n

ARYA: You’re good at that. Where did you learn?<\/em><\/p>\n

LADY CRANE: I’m a jealous woman. I’ve always liked bad men and they’ve always liked me. They’d come home, wherever home was that night, stinking of some whore’s perfume. So we’d fight, and I’d put a hole in them. And then I’d feel terrible, so I’d patch them up. I got good at patching them up.<\/em><\/p>\n

ARYA: And good at putting holes in them.<\/em><\/p>\n

LADY CRANE: And that.<\/em><\/p>\n

I can’t be the only one who noticed what a conspicuously odd bit of backstory this was. Like I said above, I think we’re supposed to consider Lady Crane a sympathetic character, right? How many of your romantic partners can you stab and still be considered a sympathetic character? I might even say that one is too many, but maybe I’m just old-fashioned.<\/p>\n

In any case, Lady Crane has stabbed more than one. If her dialogue is to be believed, this is a regular occurrence. We’re not given an exact number, but she’s stabbed at least enough boyfriends that she’s learned how to treat stab wounds just through trial and error. I’m going to risk sounding judgmental here and say that at that point, you’re stabbing too many of your boyfriends. You should really just collect your stuff and delete their number from your phone next time, before you reach for the nearest knife.<\/p>\n

This brings me back to the time I stabbed Stefan. Or was it Christian? The guy with the man bun? Sometimes I get the names of the people I've stabbed mixed up.<\/div>
This brings me back to the time I stabbed Stefan. Or was it Christian? The guy with the man bun? Sometimes I get the names of the people I've stabbed mixed up.<\/div><\/p>\n

I suppose the writers needed some way to explain her medical skills. But there are many ways to do that. “Before I joined the theatre, I was apprenticed to a healer.” Or maybe, “Sometimes there are accidents with the prop weapons. Every traveling company has at least one member who knows how to sew up a wound.” Or you could just not explain it at all. The ability to bandage wounds is not so unusual that it requires a bespoke backstory to explain it.<\/p>\n

So there was no particular need to write “serial boyfriend-stabber” onto Lady Crane’s character sheet, but they did it anyway. Not only that, she disfigures the faces of her enemies. The dialogue immediately after the part quoted above:<\/p>\n

ARYA: What happened to the actress? The one who wanted you dead.<\/em><\/p>\n

LADY CRANE: Bianca. She’ll have a hard time finding work as an actress after what I did to her face.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yeesh. Okay, in her defense, Bianca did<\/em> hire someone to kill her. But once again I have to wonder why this bit of detail is included. Lady Crane was a talented performer, able to move audiences to tears. She was also a kind person, who helped Arya without asking or expecting anything in return. Is that not enough to make her a character they trust the audience to like?<\/p>\n

Apparently the answer is no. By the standards of this show being a good person who’s good at her work is not enough. The writers seem almost constitutionally incapable of respecting a character who is not adept at violence, either directly (doing it themselves) or indirectly (getting other people to do it for them).<\/p>\n

Those who eschew violence are treated as naive and weak. Think of the Hound’s one-episode storyline with Septon Swearengen in “The Broken Man.” He and his band of god-hippies are attempting to create a life free from war, until, as punishment for their naivete, they’re slaughtered to a man, for almost no reason – unless it’s maybe to give the Hound a motive to kill some more dudes an episode later.<\/p>\n

Think of Prince Doran Martell, who sought to avoid war with the Iron Throne. For that crime he was murdered by his own familyIn a hilariously nonsensical sequence which I may get the chance to cover in more detail someday.<\/span>, including Ellaria SandBy the by, the show version of Ellaria Sand is pretty much the precise opposite of the book version.<\/span>, who hisses “weak men will never rule Dorne again.”<\/p>\n

The pattern of the show is clear: wanting to avoid war, wanting to break the endless cycle of tit-for-tat violence, wanting to do anything more than hype the audience up for violence to come – these are all signs of “weakness.” I point this out because the showrunners have gotten the message of the book series so exactly backwards that it almost seems like it was done deliberately, out of spite.<\/p>\n

I’m going to revisit this idea either this coming week or the week after. In the meantime, there’s one more thing I want to mention.<\/p>\n

Frey Pie<\/h3>\n

Let’s shift back to Arya’s storyline for a moment. If her conversation with Lady Crane is to be believed, Arya’s plan is someday become the Westerosi Magellan, and sail the uncharted seas on the far side of the western continent. Maybe it’s a gauge of my cynicism that I personally don’t expect that the writers will ever even mention this again.<\/p>\n

But whatever. Arya returns home, and gets right to work, killing the stuffing out of local d-bag Lord Walder Frey, co-orchestrator of the infamous Red Wedding.<\/p>\n

For a second it looked like she was just going to give him a shave, but nope, she kills him.<\/div>
For a second it looked like she was just going to give him a shave, but nope, she kills him.<\/div><\/p>\n

Before he dies, she points out – in a painfully hamfisted way – that not only is she killing him, she also killed his two sons, Lothar and Black Walder, and cooked their corpses into the pie he was just eating. There’s even a close-up shot of one of their fingers.<\/p>\n

Earlier I described Lady Crane’s stabbing habits as “conspicuously odd.” Doesn’t this seem the same way? What is this, a Titus Andronicus <\/em>reference, seemingly out of nowhere? If you’re a book reader, you probably already know about “Frey Pie.” But in case you’re not, I’ll explain: something vaguely resembling this happened in the books.<\/p>\n

And when I say vaguely, I mean vaguely. In the books, some Freys were indeed strongly suggested to have been cooked into a pie and served to unsuspecting guests. But this was done by someone else, to someone else, in completely different circumstances. The act had a certain logic to it, twisted but nonetheless real, centered on the Westerosi folklore concerning hospitality and “guest right,” which was the cultural norm most egregiously violated at the Red Wedding.<\/p>\n

Or course, in the show, all that context is shorn off, and we’re left with Arya tricking a father into an act of disgusting filicidal cannibalism. I can’t always tell how this show expects me to react to something. Is this supposed to be a fist-pumping “yeah!” moment? Am I supposed to cheer for Walder Frey getting his comeuppance, and not notice that Arya has just done something that makes her seem completely unhinged?<\/p>\n

If I trusted this show I would maybe think there was some depth to what just happened, that it was an exploration of the damage lust for revenge and constant trauma can do to one’s sense of right and wrong. But I don’t trust this show anymore, frankly. I suspect that next season I’ll be expected to cheer for Arya again, despite the fact that she fed a father his own sons in a pie, which is not the sort of thing that people with a strong moral center do.<\/p>\n

The Home Stretch<\/h3>\n

It snuck up on me too, but there are only two more Fridays until the seventh season of Game of Thrones<\/em> starts. I’m going to get as many of my ducks in a row as I can before then, because I do have vaguely defined plans to do episode-by-episode reviews. Until then, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both. (This was supposed to go up this morning. Somehow I never got around to actually clicking the “publish” button, so it’s late… oops) I want to take a closer look at one character in particular: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-of-thrones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}