Episode 120: A CLASH OF KINGS, TYRION IX: "We the People, Part 2" SHOW NOTES! (Patreon)

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn.          

Welcome to the one hundred and twentieth episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “We the People, Part 2: An Analysis of ACOK, Tyrion IX,” in which Tyrion takes out his rage on Joffrey as the city rises up against him and his family. At least Sansa makes it out OK!

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• Lord Peter
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• Grave-Robb Stark, the Cadaver King and Horror of Harrenhal
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• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen’s Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• Lord Gene the Splendid, Master of Coin, Warden of Tampa Bay who believes that the sudden vacation plans made by certain witnesses clears him of all charges  
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Spoiler warning: All published books, 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show. Anything and everything!

Question

Lt. Glenn, Lord of H-Town, one of our small council patrons, asks:

Hi guys,

I had a question for the podcast.

In this age of terrors and wonders do you think the alchemist guild will come back to prominence? Also what houses if any do you think have taken them back into service already. I can imagine the Hightowers and the Iron Bank would be immediate customers of their services and for some reason, I feel like the newly formed house Thenn/Carstark would also quickly adopt their services.

Love the Cast and kind regards

So, thank you Lt. Glenn for the question. If you’d like to ask us questions we’ll answer here on the NotACast pod-cast, you are welcome to become a Sworn Sword or higher patreon over at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF where you can get show notes, access to our NotASlack at the two highest tiers and bonus episodes like part 3 of “The Second Coming” which, if you’re listening on release day, is coming for all Poor Fellow and above patrons!

Very excited to get more in-depth on the dense, impactful and completely terrifying second half of Damphair’s TWOW chapter! But enough about patreon. When we last checked in with Tyrion, he had encountered a minor civil disturbance after wishing farewell to Myrcella. Let’s find out how the Lannisters react to this extremely small, very insignificant civil disturbance in this synopsis of ACOK, Tyrion IX, part 2!

Synopsis

Tyrion doesn’t remember getting off his horse, but he sees Mandon helping Joffrey down. Cersei, Tommen and Lancel come through with Meryn and Boros behind them. Balon Swann rolls in without his helmet. Horas Redwyne brings in a Lady Tanda, shrieking over Lollys. And Lord Gyles stammers about the High Septon being pulled from his litter by the shrieking crowd. Preston Greenfield was allegedly on his way to save the High Septon according to Jahlabhar Xho 

Tyrion was dimly aware of a maester asking if he was injured. He pushed his way across the yard to where his nephew stood, his dung-encrusted crown askew. "Traitors," Joffrey was babbling excitedly, "I'll have all their heads, I'll-"

The dwarf slapped his flushed face so hard the crown flew from Joffrey's head. Then he shoved him with both hands and knocked him sprawling. "You blind bloody fool."

"They were traitors," Joffrey squealed from the ground. "They called me names and attacked me!"

"You set your dog on them! What did you imagine they would do, bend the knee meekly while the Hound lopped off some limbs? You spoiled witless little boy, you've killed Clegane and gods know how many more, and yet you come through unscratched. Damn you!" And he kicked him. It felt so good he might have done more, but Ser Mandon Moore pulled him off as Joffrey howled, and then Bronn was there to take him in hand. Cersei knelt over her son, while Ser Balon Swann restrained Ser Lancel. Tyrion wrenched free of Bronn's grip. "How many are still out there?" he shouted to no one and everyone.

Lady Tanda says that Lollys is out there, and someone needs to go save her. Preston Greenfield and Aron Santagar are missing too. And Tyrek. Tyrek is gone too. And also … Sansa Stark. Tyrion demands to know where she is. Joffrey reports that she was next to him, but he has no idea where she is now. 

Tyrion pressed blunt fingers into his throbbing temples. If Sansa Stark had come to harm, Jaime was as good as dead. 

Tyrion demands to know why Mandon Moore hadn’t bothered to protect Sansa. Ah, well, he only thought of Joffrey. Cersei says this is well and good, but maybe you boys can go out and find Sansa? Lady Tanda demands that they find Lollys too. Boros Blount says, uh, maybe they don’t go in their white cloaks?

Tyrion had stomached all he cared to. "The Others take your fucking cloaks! Take them off if you're afraid to wear them, you bloody oaf . . . but find me Sansa Stark or I swear, I'll have Shagga split that ugly head of yours in two to see if there's anything inside but black pudding."

Ser Boros rages that Tyrion would dare call him ugly, and he starts to raise his sword. Bronn pushes Tyrion behind him, but Cersei tells them to quit it. Boros is going out in the crowd. But then thankfully, Sansa and Sandor Clegane rolle into the courtyard.

Tyrion called to her. "Are you hurt, Lady Sansa?"

Blood was trickling down Sansa's brow from a deep gash on her scalp. "They . . . they were throwing things . . . rocks and filth, eggs . . . I tried to tell them, I had no bread to give them. A man tried to pull me from the saddle. The Hound killed him, I think . . . his arm . . . " Her eyes widened and she put a hand over her mouth. "He cut off his arm."

Clegane lifted her to the ground. His white cloak was torn and stained, and blood seeped through a jagged tear in his left sleeve. "The little bird's bleeding. Someone take her back to her cage and see to that cut." Maester Frenken scurried forward to obey. "They did for Santagar, " the Hound continued. "Four men held him down and took turns bashing at his head with a cobblestone. I gutted one, not that it did Ser Aron much good."

Lady Tanda asks about her daughter, but Sandor never saw her. He wants to know where his horse is though. Motherfuckers are going to pay if his horse got hurt. Tyrion says the horse was running with them for a bit, but they lost the horse somewhere along the way.

"Fire!" a voice screamed down from atop the barbican. "My lords, there's smoke in the city. Flea Bottom's afire."

Tyrion was inutterably weary, but there was no time for despair. "Bronn, take as many men as you need and see that the water wagons are not molested," Gods be good, the wildfire, if any blaze should reach that . . . "We can lose all of Flea Bottom if we must, but on no account must the fire reach the Guildhall of the Alchemists, is that understood? Clegane, you'll go with him."

For half a heartbeat, Tyrion thought he glimpsed fear in the Hound's dark eyes. Fire, he realized. The Others take me, of course he hates flre, he's tasted it too well. The look was gone in an instant, replaced by Clegane's familiar scowl. "I'll go," he said, "though not by your command. I need to find that horse."

Tyrion orders the other three kingsguard knights to ride escort to a herald to tell people to stay indoors. If people are out after evenfall, kill them. Meryn says they should really stay by the king to keep him safe. Yeah. That’s it. But Cersei says that they need to obey Tyrion or be tried for treason. But about those cloaks. Should they wear them? They really want to know this.

"Go naked for all I care. It might remind the mob that you're men. They're like to have forgotten after seeing the way you behaved out there in the street."

Tyrion let his sister rage. His head was throbbing. He thought he could smell smoke, though perhaps it was just the scent of his nerves fraying.

Tyrion heads up to the Tower of the Hand, and he finds Stone Crows on a door guard. He orders them to find Timett, but they refuse, saying they’re Stone Crows, and they don’t deal with Burned Men. Okay, fine. Get Shagga then. Nope. Sorry, Tyrion. Shagga is sleeping off a hangover. Well, then fucking wake him, you assholes.

Shagga turns up a little while later, and Tyrion chastises him for sleeping while the city was burning. Yeah, well, maybe the city should have better water. He can’t drink that shit. He has to drink ale and wine. Tyrion’s eyes rolling into the back of his head, tells Shagga to head over to the manse that he has Shae in. He’s to go there and protect her at all costs.

The huge man smiled, his teeth a yellow crevasse in the hairy wilderness of his beard. "Shagga will fetch her here."

"Just see that no harm comes to her. Tell her I will come to her as soon as I may. This very night, perhaps, or on the morrow for a certainty."

Evening brings no relief as the city is still in chaos. The fires were mostly gone and most of the mobs dispersed, but Tyrion realizes he won’t be seeing Shae tonight. Later that night, Ser Jacelyn Bywater shows up with news while a furious Tyrion “enjoys” a cold supper. And the news is not good.

The High Septon was dead, killed by a mob who didn’t much appreciate a fat High Septon while they starved. Ser Preston Greenfield is also dead -- his white cloak gone red and brown from all the blood he shed. Ser Aron Santagar had his head turned into a red pulp. Lady Tanda’s daughter had been raped by half a hundred men. Tyrek was missing. The High Septon’s crystal crown was missing. Nine gold cloaks were dead. Forty more wounded. No idea how many smallfolk had died or been wounded in the melee.

Tyrion orders Tyrek to be found alive or dead as his father (his uncle Tygett) was kind to Tyrion. Jacelyn says they’ll find him, and they’ll look for the septon’s crown too. No, fuck that. Don’t worry about that crown.

"When you named me to command the Watch, you told me you wanted plain truth, always."

"Somehow I have a feeling I am not going to like whatever you're about to say," Tyrion said gloomily.

"We held the city today, my lord, but I make no promises for the morrow. The kettle is close to boiling. So many thieves and murderers are abroad that no man's house is safe, the bloody flux is spreading in the stews along Pisswater Bend, there's no food to be had for copper nor silver. Where before you heard only mutterings from the gutter, now there's open talk of treason in guildhalls and markets."

Tyrion wonders if Jacelyn needs more men, but no. That’s not the ticket. He doesn’t trust the bros he has as gold cloaks now. There’s some loyalists among the new recruits, but there are more shit-cloaks than good cloaks in the lot. And they’re not going to hold if the city is attacked. Tyrion knows this.

But Jacelyn goes on to talk about how the gold cloaks are most smallfolk themselves. They live in King’s Landing, drink in the bars their, eat the food. And they fucking hate the Lannisters just as much as the smallfolk who just rioted all over your ass do. And they have good reason to hate the Lannisters! Remember that little incident when Tywin massacred a bunch of them and murdered Rhaegar’s kids? Or remember that time that Ned was executed by Joffrey’s “justice.” People want Robert back. Maybe they’d even be better with Stannis. Shit’s getting bad among the ranks of “loyal” gold cloaks.

Tyrion gets all huffy, saying yeah, they hate the Lannisters. So what? Jacelyn giving major side eye says that not only do they hate the Lannisters, they will turn on Tyrion’s family. But what about Tyrion do they hate him? Jacelyn says to ask Varys. But Tyrion is asking Jacelyn.

Bywater's deep-set eyes met the dwarf's mismatched ones, and did not blink. "You most of all, my lord."

"Most of all?" The injustice was like to choke him. "It was Joffrey who told them to eat their dead, Joffrey who set his dog on them. How could they blame me?"

If only the czar knew! According to Jacelyn, it’s because Joffrey has evil councillors that he acts so evilly. Cersei wasn’t loved by the smallfolk. No one likes Varys. But the smallfolk blame Tyrion most of all. It’s the timing, you see. Tyrion arrived right when the bad times started. And he had exiled Janos Slynt because he was too honest. And Tyrion threw Pycelle into the dungeons when he opposed Tyrion. Plus, Tyrion probably wants to seize the Iron Throne for himself. That’s what they say.

"Yes, and I am a monster besides, hideous and misshapen, never forget that." His hand coiled into a fist. "I've heard enough. We both have work to attend to. Leave me."

Perhaps my lord father was right to despise me all these years, if this is the best I can achieve, Tyrion thought when he was alone. He stared down at the remains of his supper, his belly roiling at the sight of the cold greasy capon. Disgusted, he pushed it away, shouted for Pod, and sent the boy running to summon Varys and Bronn. My most trusted advisers are a eunuch and a sellsword, and my lady's a whore. What does that say of me?

Bronn comes in complaining about the gloom of the chamber and wants a fire. It blazes by the time Varys arrives. Tyrion demands to know where Varys has been this whole time. Say, it is rather interesting that Varys was nowhere around when the riot happened. What was he about?

"About the king's business, my sweet lord."

Oh. The King. Which one? Hmmmmmm, Varys? HMMMMMMM?

Tyrion misses Varys’ insinuation here and starts shit-talking Joffrey, stating quite controversially that Joffrey is bad person and a worse king. Bronn puts in that an apprentice could rule better than Joffrey. Bronn says this, of course, while eating some of Tyrion’s dinner which just royally crawls into Tyrion’s asshole. Undeterred, Bronn asks if Tyrion has any wine, and Tyrion gets angry thinking about pouring wine for some peasant like Bronn. He warns the sellsword that he’s going too far:

"And you never go far enough." Bronn tossed the wingbone to the rushes. "Ever think how easy life would be if the other one had been born first?" He thrust his fingers inside the capon and tore off a handful of breast. "The weepy one, Tommen. Seems like he'd do whatever he was told, as a good king should."

A chill crept down Tyrion's spine as he realized what the sellsword was hinting at. If Tommen was king . . .

Tommen could only become king if Joffrey died, and Tyrion was not about to kill the son of his beloved brother Jaime -- even if he was also Cersei’s kid. Tyrion threatens to behead Bronn for treason, but Bronn laughs him off. 

"Friends," said Varys, "quarreling will not serve us. I beg you both, take heart."

"Whose?" asked Tyrion sourly. He could think of several tempting choices.

And that is ACOK, Tyrion IX! Wowoowowowowowow! I love this chapter. Action, suspense, conspiracy, drama, no romance. It’s the perfect BFish chapter. What’d you think, Emmett?

Depth

As you pointed out so well last week, Jeff, the riot itself only takes up a few paragraphs. George spends more of Tyrion IX digging into the meaning of the riot--which lives count for the powerful and which don’t, what problems they prioritize and which they leave to fester, and what all of this says about the big-picture politics at play and Tyrion’s individual character arc. I know I’ve just been repeating the phrase “shadow on a wall” throughout ACOK, but in this part of the chapter, we see how even the most blunt and material political action--like, say, a citywide riot--always dissolves back into what people make of it, what people project into it.

And you, ser, have been pointing out really well how all of this violence that rises up in this city isn’t random or an angry outburst of the smallfolk that’s coming from a place of envy. The Lannisters have soaked the rags of food hoarding, tossed them into a well of historical kerosene from Tywin’s sack to Joffrey’s murder of smallfolk and lit a match of lawless rule and tossed the match of Joffrey being out in public onto the kindling. Nothing is occurring in a vacuum. And now the Lannisters have received their just desserts. But as we’re going to unpack in this chapter, it’s not just the guilty who suffer. In fact, Joffrey and Cersei come through this event relatively unscathed in this moment. But this is only a snapshot. We have to expand our lens to view this act within the whole of the series.

• The aftermath
  • The panic on the streets crashed headlong into the sudden reassurance of the walls, producing disassociation in the mind’s eye of our POV Tyrion Lannister, who must rebuild his concrete controlled world, as he will after the Blackwater
  • He does not even remember getting down from his horse. Someone else comes rushing in with every blink, everyone with a fragment of the story to tell
  • Gradually, a picture emerges, although it won’t become complete until later in the chapter; Tyrion IX descends into chaos and gradually returns to clarity
  • First, we see Joffrey, who is merely “shaken.” Then, we see that Meryn has lost his cloak and Boros has blood on his blade. Then, we learn of the first missing member of the party: Lollys Stokeworth, the least powerful among them
  • Despite the righteousness of the rioters’ cause (we want bread, bastard!) the consequences are not born equally by those around the neglectful king
  • Joffrey is well guarded, and so is only temporarily spooked by what happened; Meryn and Boros have merely lost the signifiers of wealth and violence
  • Lollys is noble-born, of course, and eats well every day while thousands starve. But she is not in any real way a decision-maker supporting this status quo
  • Ironically, that’s exactly why she was so exposed to the mob’s violence! The other members of the king’s party don’t care about her and left her behind
  • It’s heartbreaking to watch Tanda cry for help throughout this scene, begging for one of these sworn anointed knights to protect an endangered innocent. None do
  • No one even pays attention to Tanda! No one acknowledges her! The people in power have abandoned their duties to Lollys as they have to the smallfolk
  • As Tyrion puts it in his next chapter, Cersei considers Lollys to be a “bovine lackwit,” less than human, and everyone else seems to feel the same way
  • The protectors, the guardians, the shield that guards the realms of men--it was all just an image. In execution, power corrupts, and only looks after itself
  • If these powerful people aren’t protecting Lollys, nor the starving smallfolk, why should they remain in power? Why shouldn’t they be toppled and killed? A violent fate, to be sure, but does the status quo not embody violence? Per Mark Twain:
    • There were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?
      
      What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror--that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
  • I’m reminded of one of the most heartbreaking moments in The Hedge Knight when reading about how no one gives a shit about Lollys Stokeworth:
    • Heartsick, Dunk wheeled Thunder and raced back and forth before the tiers of pale cold men. Despair made him shout. "ARE THERE NO TRUE KNIGHTS AMONG YOU?"
      
      Only silence answered.
  • The silence that the supposed best knights of Westeros give Lady Tanda, that the royal family gives her is gut-wrenching.
  • Lollys is the most vulnerable member of the royal party. She was only there, because Lady Tanda was attempting to curry favor with the Queen Mother by showing face at a ceremony.
  • And now she’s missing, and no one but her mother cares.
  • The primary damnation that the narrative lays on the Lannisters is how they’ve stolen the throne, despoiled the realm, killed thousands of innocents and damned tens if not hundreds of thousands of more due to starvation.
  • But let’s not forget that the Lannisters also fail at the most basic feudal norm: protecting their vassals. Or even caring about their vassals.
  • And even if you can’t be bothered to care emotionally, just in terms of pure mercenary politics, the Stokeworths are vitally important to the survival of Joffrey’s reign as Tyrion thinks about back in ACOK, Tyrion IV:
    • Half of the food they ate these days came from his lands or Lady Tanda's. Rosby and Stokeworth lay near the city to the north, and were yet untouched by war.
  • To Joffrey, Cersei, the Kingsguard, even Tyrion, the Stokeworths are expendable as Lady Tanda will find out in AFFC. Lollys, most of all. It’s damning.
  • Lord Gyles reports that the High Septon was shrieking prayers as the mob swept over him, but as with Aeron in “The Forsaken,” the gods aren’t listening
  • Like the people in power, the gods are not tending to their flock, instead abandoning them to decay and death. There are no good masters here
  • Jalabhar Xho saw Preston Greenfield riding back to help. The knight trying to do his duty, protecting the High Septon, but it only got him killed in this context
  • This report gets bloodier as it goes, stripping away the face of power, shredding the pretense of doing justice as Tyrion promised. He is left only with rage
  • And he immediately directs that rage at Joffrey. He is “dimly aware” of a maester asking if he’s injured, but all he can focus on is his hateful nephew
  • Joffrey’s crown is encrusted with the shit thrown at him. Not a subtle metaphor, but as with this chapter as a whole, sometimes you need to be blunt
  • Joffrey’s rule is nothing but shit, from the lies that put him on the throne to the atrocities he has committed as king. George will make the same point with Tywin’s horse shitting before Joffrey and the Throne after the Blackwater
  • Joffrey has learned nothing from this challenge to his rule. As George writes it, Joff is excited by all this. His blood is up. He’s ready to kill them all, for fun
  • And so Tyrion slaps his king across the face, shoves him to the ground, and kicks him, calling him a blind bloody fool and a spoiled witless little boy
  • This is unquestionably a cathartic moment for the reader as well as Tyrion, fitting into the cathartic role of this chapter as a whole within the framework of ACOK
  • As with Chiswyck’s death, it’s like we’ve broken through the firmament and proved that these overpowered abusers can be hit back, can be brought low
  • As Tyrion says in the show: I just struck a king, and yet my hand did not fall from my wrist! You are not ordained, you are not divine, you are an upjumped landlord
  • We desperately want to reach through the page and shake Joffrey because he’s being so hateful and so obstinate and just the worst in all humanity
  • We can’t do that, but Tyrion can, so we project ourselves into him, the sudden shock of recognition heightening the emotional intensity necessary for catharsis
  • Tyrion speaks for George and us in calling Joffrey a blind bloody fool who endangered countless people yet comes through himself unscratched
  • The frustration of power: you shield yourself from consequences for your actions. Everyone else must suffer for them. Joffrey believes that’s how it should be
  • Moreover, in real-world terms, I can’t help but see a resonance here:
  • Similarly, what did powerful Americans think was going to happen when they set their dogs on people--as in, did they expect marginalized oppressed people to just meekly bend the knee? Well, they didn’t, and they won’t!
  • One of the more interesting touches George has for ASOIAF is that those moments of catharsis for readers and POV characters ends up souring for them in the long-term.
  • Dany’s dracarys moment in Astapor is a fist-pumping moment of exhilaration as the good masters get what’s coming to them and get it good and hot.
  • But then at the end of ASOS, Dany learns that her ramshackle ruling council she leaves behind in Astapor has all been murdered by Cleon the Butcher.
  • And then in ADWD, Yunkai marches on Astapor, and the sellswords butcher and enslave the population.
  • Here in ACOK, Joffrey has universally proven himself an unfit king, and Tyrion slaps him and kicks him out of rage.
  • We pump our fists - same as we did the last time Tyrion did this to Joffrey all the way back in Tyrion’s first chapter in AGOT when Tyrion slapped Joffrey twice for being a brat about Bran - because to quote Jaime Lannister from S01 “it felt like justice.”
  • But when we take that wider look at Tyrion in the story, we see the consequences of the act: it damns Tyrion, providing foundation for how guilty Tyrion looks in poisoning Joffrey.
  • Moreover, to narrow the lens, does slapping Joffrey around really change his behavior, make him recognize the error of his ways?
  • No! It doesn’t. Joffrey is going to continue his reign of terror, only restrained by the arrival of Tywin at book’s end.
  • Even then, when a Stannis loyalist declares Joffrey a black worm, and that a cleansing fire will come, Joffrey reacts in a Joffrey way:
    • Joffrey lurched to his feet. "I'm king! Kill him! Kill him now! I command it." (ACOK, Sansa VIII)
  • I feel Tyrion here. I feel the righteousness of his hand. It feels good. But is it good? I don’t think so!
  • You nailed it, ser! Per Machiavelli:
    • “One has to mention that men should either be well treated or crushed because although they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries of more serious ones they cannot. Therefore the harm that is done to a man should be so serious that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”
  • George is challenging the reader to critically examine our own emotional reactions, to draw a distinction between what feels good in the moment and what will actually secure a better world in the long term
  • These individual acts of violence provide the rush of catharsis, a feeling that the world has been made right, but catharsis (like apotheosis) is always temporary
  • Striking back in force against Joffrey is the only tool available to the masses, but Tyrion has tremendous power in his hands. Yet he only ever uses that power to manage Joffrey, keeping him in power, guaranteeing his atrocities continue
  • So while we might instinctively cheer Tyrion on, sharing his rage and need to force Joffrey to suffer a taste of the suffering he’s inflicted, what good does it do?
  • All it does is make Joffrey hate Tyrion more. And not only Joffrey, but Cersei and the Kingsguard knights. As you say, this comes back to bite Tyrion at the trial for Joffrey’s murder, when this is used as evidence he killed Joffrey
  • Tyrion didn’t kill Joffrey, of course. But he wants to; as he thinks in this scene, he might’ve done more to Joff than slap and kick if he hadn’t been stopped
  • Blood begets blood; violence begets violence; the lions savage each other while the people suffer, and justice falls by the wayside
  • Throwing down Aerys didn’t save the world, and slapping Joffrey won’t either. George is insisting that we move past catharsis in favor of true lasting justice
  • Tyrion, meanwhile, moves past Joffrey to Sansa, who is nowhere to be found. Mandon Moore, her knightly shield, sworn to defend the young, the innocent, and women, abandoned her to the mob in favor of defending Joffrey
  • Once more, we see how the incentives of power corrupt the values of knighthood expressed in the stories and songs. Mandon Moore foresook his oaths and his orders because he loves his power and his power ultimately derives from Joffrey
  • And so Sansa, like Lollys, gets abandoned to the mob even though they aren’t responsible for the suffering of the people, while Joffrey and Tyrion and Cersei, who are responsible due to their power, are saved by that very same power
  • Same dynamic can be found at Storm’s End--the turncloak lords suffer less than Davos, even though Stannis considers their crimes to be worse than Davos’
  • Moreover, these Kingsguard knights are cowards. They love their armor and their swords as tools to protect themselves from consequences, not to protect others
  • Cersei, “untroubled” as George puts it, says the knights were right to abandon Sansa for Joffrey, because Joffrey is all she cares about. Her responsibilities to the rest of the realm are meaningless to her
  • Yet she does want them to go back and find Sansa now, because as Tyrion says, if Sansa comes to harm, Jaime is as good as dead. That’s what the Lannisters really care about: not Sansa in herself, but her utility as a political pawn, the possibility that she can be used to get back the person they do care about
  • Moreover, they are still ignoring Tanda as she begs in the background for someone to rescue Lollys as well as Sansa. No one cares about that, because Lollys is not politically useful like Sansa. She’s worth nothing in the game
  • This worldview, reducing people to cogs in the system, is precisely the system the people are rioting against, because that worldview has starved them 
  • Tyrion is not challenging that worldview, but he knows deep down how shameful it is, which is why he keeps losing his temper at Joffrey and his Kingsguard 
  • This allows Tyrion to vent his simmering pent-up rage at the lack of justice in Westeros, but that lack of justice is also what’s keeping him in power
  • He roars at the Kingsguard to take off their cloaks if they’re so afraid of what the mob will do to them. The signifiers of power, the white cloaks that are supposed to speak to unquestionable moral authority, have become targets, emblems of irresponsible power that has lost the consent of the governed
  • But if they take off those cloaks, they lose their shadow on a wall. They become mere enforcers, swords for hire, and these men think higher of themselves
  • The white cloak is a uniform, right? In a fantasy pre-modern culture where soldiers rarely had the same armor and armament, the red, gold and especially the white cloaks stand in for a uniform.
  • I recall a ceremony where an older Lieutenant Colonel was retiring and broke down in the middle of his speech sobbing, because he always felt like a superhero when he put on his uniform, and he wasn’t going to be able to do that anymore.
  • The white cloak confers a lot on these guys, giving them honor and an identity grounded in hundreds of years of history — glorious and otherwise.
  • I’m just imagining Barristan choking on his own rage at Boros and Meryn asking if they can take off their cloaks to go out into the city.
  • These jabronis are what you say they are: they’re swords for hire. They’re in it for the honor the uniform confers on them, but they’re nothing more than the hollow drums that Tyrion thought the Kettleblacks were. 
  • Tyrion calls them cowardly, brainless, and ugly, and Boros Blount responds “who’re you calling ugly?!” It’s a classic joke construction, a la Han Solo
  • Boros doesn’t really care about Tyrion calling him stupid or cowardly, but ugly? He won’t take that! In part, this is because Boros is a superficial shallow man, concerned only with appearances, as we see regarding the cloak itself
  • But it’s mostly because Tyrion himself is ugly, at least as far as the eyes of the beholders are concerned, and the people around him use his ugliness to make them feel better about themselves; they use his stature the same way
  • I may be a cowardly fool, a gutless crony who abandoned his knighthood vows in favor of being a bootlicker to a sadistic child...but I’m still prettier than the Imp!
  • All these pyramids of power, these different but interlocking structures. Everyone using what power they have over each other; once more, no justice to be found
  • Boros moves to threaten Tyrion as Tyrion threatened Joffrey; Bronn protects Tyrion as the Kingsguard protected Tyrion. The hierarchies of authority spring to life to inflict violence, no one doing anything about the suffering outside the walls
  • What prevents further bloodshed? Do cooler heads prevail? Do all these varyingly powerful people remember their duty to the powerless outside?
  • Nope! They are interrupted by Sandor riding briskly in on Sansa’s horse, with the girl herself behind him on the saddle, arms clasped around her savior
  • This is George doing what he arguably does best in ASOIAF: present the glorious image of chivalry, then twitch the curtain to show you what’s behind it
  • Sandor and Sansa are riding right out of the stories and songs! The valiant knight and the fair maiden, the innocent and the guardian, an imperiled soul plucked from hell and brought to deliverance by a self-sacrificing hero. The horse, the armor, her arms around his broad chest...it’s all here, the perfect storybook image
  • And then you think about it for a second, and it all comes crashing down: the values that the storybook image is supposed to exemplify, the better world that chivalry is supposed to protect. This world is still a fallen one, a forsaken one
  • Sandor belongs to the Kingsguard, but he is no knight. He tells us this over and over. Why is he not a knight? Because sometimes the knights are the monsters
  • He was put through unimaginable pain by his brother, who became a sworn and anointed knight despite his atrocities, who remained a sworn and anointed knight despite committing more atrocities. Sandor saw that there is no justice to be had
  • As Melisandre put it in the show: the only hell is the one we live in now. The stories and songs beloved by young Sandor lied to him and abandoned him to fire and blood. Knights do not protect the powerless; they are part of power
  • Sandor has, in this moment, backed up the songs and stories. The word made flesh, the image made reality. This is how the world is supposed to work…
  • ...but Sandor only had to save Sansa in the first place because the world does not, in fact, work like it’s supposed to. She was only in danger because the system has failed, because the people are starving, because the songs lied
  • The danger that threatened the fair innocent princess was not a dragon. It was not some unknowable dehumanized foreign foe. It was the very people that are supposed to be protected by the system of chivalry embedded in the stories
  • She told them that she had no bread to give. Sansa is an embodiment of power, but she does not practice it herself (not yet). She cannot correct the system
  • But why should that matter to the people? They can’t get at the Lannisters, but the Lannister cronies abandoned Sansa. Why not take out their rage at her?
  • Sandor saves her as a true knight should, but in the process, cut off a man’s arm. This image haunts Sansa, arguably traumatizing her, because even life-saving violence is violence, and speaks to a world that cannot seem to be at peace
  • So even as the chivalric image is fulfilled, the power of it fades immediately in a world that structurally does not back up the values of that image. It was an exception, and the rule takes over; as Sandor says, Sansa returns to her cage
  • She has not been saved at that deeper level; she is still a prisoner of power, and so too are the people outside, no matter what individual heroes may do
  • Sandor has shown up the other Kingsguard, being a more true knight than any of them despite not being a knight. While they were cleaving to power and abandoning their vows, he put himself in danger to save an innocent
  • That’s really good, and I think Sandor Clegane shares a similar role to Brienne of Tarth in moments like these.
  • The not-knights defend the weak and innocent. They embody no chance and no choice here at the riot in King’s Landing and with the orphans in AFFC.
  • Edmure Tully is another such who is quartering the smallfolk within Riverrun to save his people from the onslaught of war criminals marching towards them.
  • The problem, as you’re pointing out, is that their acts of charity, compassion and goodness don’t solve the problems of a violent, fallen world (I can hear the Augustine you’ve been so eloquently talking about in our Forsaken episodes coming out! It’s lovely!)
  • Too often we think of the violent, fallen world as an external thing — something we need to resist from evil men around us.
  • The truth is that the fallen world exists within us as much as it exists in others.
  • Sandor Clegane saved Sansa Stark in this instance, and then in our next Sansa chapter, he’ll hold a sword to Sansa’s throat and tell her that killing is the sweetest thing after she tries to thank him for saving her.
  • And then Sandor will brag about all the types of people he’s killed, before declaring that he doesn’t need to fear, because he bears the sword.
  • As you’re pointing out, Sandor Clegane is a victim of the violent world - his face is a testament to that - but he’s taken the lesson of the violence visited on him and embraced it (for the moment).
  • There’s a parallel between Sandor the mob in King’s Landing. They’ve been the victims of a violent, aristocratic hierarchy that oppresses them on the reg. 
  • And the lesson they’ve taken from their oppression is to wield violence right back — even to Lollys and Sansa when they didn’t have it coming.
  • But an individual act of justice does not change the system. The wheel is unbroken and keeps on turning. Tyrion hears that fire is spreading in the city and says that they can lose all of Flea Bottom as long as the wildfire is untouched
  • You can see his point--they lose the entire city if the wildfire goes up in flames! Tyrion is defending the people from the fate Aerys laid out for them
  • But as with Sansa out on the streets, the people are only in danger from the wildfire because of the decisions and worldview of the powerful
  • Tyrion and Cersei ramped up wildfire production, and Tyrion will burn his own men alive with it at the Battle of Blackwater in order to hold onto power
  • As with Edmure at the Battle of the Fords, Tyrion is protecting people from a problem he caused, and unlike Edmure, he doesn’t even have the pretense of a chivalric worldview. He openly says “we can lose all of Flea Bottom if we must”
  • Who’s we, Tyrion? The people in power? Sure, they can lose all of Flea Bottom. But the people who live there can’t! Once again, we see that these questions are abstract for the powerful, detached, squinting down at the lives of the powerless
  • The fire is only there, the danger only exists, because of how the powerful have been conducting themselves. This undercuts the core of the chivalric worldview expressed in both oaths and stories. We keep the people safe. But what if you are the terrors in the night? What if you’re the ones endangering people?
  • Sandor was the only one to act like a worthy authority figure...and as a reward, Tyrion immediately sends him back into the fire, back into the hell that taught him about the evil corrupted nature of power in the first place. So much for heroism!
  • Tyrion then turns back to the actual knights, trying to get them to help clean up the mess. Go out and tell the people to stay off the streets. They refuse
  • Their place is beside the king. They have allowed fidelity to power to overpower what is supposed to be the core of knighthood--service to the powerless
  • Echoes of Jaime to Catelyn at book’s end: Vows and vows. They make you swear and swear.
  • Obviously, these Kingsguards’ vows are less in significantly less conflict than what Jaime faced at the end of Robert’s Rebellion
  • But this is a spot where GRRM plays with these themes with far lesser stakes than the ones Jaime dealt with.
  • In a way, this works as foreshadowing and foundation for Jaime’s statement at the end of ACOK.
  • In fact, I’d argue that this is part of the entire narrative structure and point of knights.
  • From these bozos to Arys Oakheart to Jaime to Barristan, the vows that these knights are in constant conflict with one another, ensuring a consistent narrative tension.
  • I love the detail that Cersei “rears up like a viper” in response. The Lannisters are often compared to a viper’s nest, ever snapping at each other and everyone else
  • As with Tyrion slapping Joffrey, there is catharsis to be found here, yet George undercuts it in the big picture. It’s fun to watch Cersei tell these assholes off!
  • But she’s not doing it in the name of justice, she’s doing it in the name of power. Do what my brother says, because he is the Hand and speaks for the king
  • Tyrion just lets her rage, because he senses at some level how useless it is. His frayed and fevered thoughts have moved on, now dwelling on Shae
  • Tyrion goes in search of Shagga, only to be confounded first by the guards’ refusal to fetch him and then by Shagga having passed out drunk
  • I think this is George reminding us that there is no objective universally applicable political framework. For Tyrion, the ground is falling away from under his feet. For the clansmen, this is just another day on the job
  • Just like the Kingsguard care more about their own status than anything else, these clansmen are still focused on their own internal politicking
  • Shagga, meanwhile, slept right through the riot! It’s meaningless to him; as an outsider, none of the politics and culture of King’s Landing make sense to him
  • He only passed out in the first place because the water is so dirty and disgusting here compared to the clean-flowing streams of his mountain home, and so he drinks booze. In other words, he slept through the collapse of Lannister power precisely because of how shitty conditions are in King’s Landing!
  • You can’t even drink the water here. That’s how bad things have gotten. No wonder the people are rising up! Moreover, as Bywater tells Tyrion later in the chapter, one of the reasons the people hate him is because of Shagga
  • In the midst of the city suffering and collapsing into chaos, all Tyrion cares about is his own personal paramour, his own interests. He set her up in a nice manse while the people on the streets starved, and now he sends Shagga out into the streets to keep her safe. No one else! The Hand of the King couldn’t care less
  • Yet as the night wears on, Tyrion realizes that his public responsibilities will have to outweigh his personal pleasure. The situation is simply too bad for him to ignore it via sex with Shae, and he must stay and reckon with the bloodshed
  • As I said, what makes ACOK Tyrion IX so special, one of Tyrion’s best chapters and one of the best chapters in ACOK, is that it’s not just about the riot itself
  • Instead, George is exploring the framework of power, the social/political/cultural understanding, that fed into the riot and leads out of it
  • He is showing us not only that things are bad, not only how things got bad, but why things aren’t going to get better. That’s great political storytelling
  • As we’ll discover in Tyrion X next week, Tyrion holds all the power, all the cards. 
  • The power dynamic he wields against Shae is similar to the one that we see with Cersei and Lady Tanda and Tyrion and King’s Landing as a whole.
  • Tyrion gets to decide who he protects (Shae), what parts of the city are worth saving (not Flea Bottom)
  • This discrepancy in the power furthers the divide between the haves and have nots in the city.
  • The smallfolk may want to be left alone, but they’re not being allowed to. 
  • So, they make their peace (is that the right word here?) and negotiate with power in the ways that they can.
  • Lady Tanda and Shae become suck-ups to power, and when they step out of line, they get slapped, murdered or abandoned.
  • Others choose to resist the Lannisters, but at what cost to the city?
• The butcher’s bill
  • By the time Jacelyn Bywater turns up with the butcher’s bill, the darkness has closed around Tyrion, literally and figuratively. It’s gloomy in his chambers, his dinner has gone cold, and his mood is full of anger and despair
  • He roars at his servants and sends them scurrying when they try and start a fire--a small detail, but emphasizing the abuses of power at play in this chapter
  • These servants have nothing to do with the problems plaguing Tyrion. They are not at fault. Tyrion, however, sees them not as equal human beings deserving of dignity and respect, but nameless barbarians upon whom he can safely vent
  • They’re like a stress ball to him. I’m angry, and I’m going to make that your problem, even though you’re trying to do your job and help me out
  • Now, of course, Tyrion losing his temper is not the equivalent of Joffrey ordering Sandor to cut through dozens of people. But they spring from the same hierarchy, the same way of looking at the world. Tyrion is not as bad as Joffrey, but we are seeing the reasons Tyrion cannot solve the problem of Joffrey
  • Is it any surprise that Joffrey has grown up with these attitudes? He never saw any other way to be! He wasn’t raised by anyone with a more humanitarian take
  • The adult Lannisters either ignore Joffrey’s crimes or look upon them with confusion and dismay, ignoring how he is just ripping the polite face off their own worldview, as Big and Little Walder do vis-a-vis the adult Freys
  • Joffrey has not transformed the Lannister way, he has merely made it less convenient and workable than it used to be; the adults are unwilling to face that
  • We talked about this back in Sansa I, but this is endemic of all the people that hold positions of authority in King’s Landing.
  • There, Arys Oakheart was putting a gloss of respectability on Joffrey’s rule by his presence — even though he was ashamed at the blows he was ordered to inflict upon Sansa.
  • Here, Tyrion is performing in a similar way but on a macro political scale, and here’s where I think George’s writing is so good and subversive. 
  • We’re inside Tyrion’s mind, and unlike Theon who is doing cruel, awful shit on-page, Tyrion has declared from the outset of ACOK that he wants to do justice. And like you were saying, he’s not Joffrey in ACOK.
  • But he is propping Joffrey up, giving his reign the veneer of respectability.
  • Oh sure, Joffrey’s bad, but how much worse would he have been without me, Tyrion, there to restrain him?
  • There’s a real subversiveness in that, because yeah, it’s kinda true, isn’t it?
  • If Tyrion wasn’t there, then Joffrey would have been able to commit all sorts of worse atrocities than he’s able to commit.
  • But by being a present, stabilizing presence in King’s Landing, Tyrion enables Joffrey to commit atrocities.
  • So, whaddya do? Life is never simple.
  • I’ll just leave you with one question: is Tyrion the medieval fantasy equivalent of Jim Mattis?
  • Ser Jacelyn Bywater has come to try and force Tyrion to face down reality, starting with the bare blunt facts of who has died during the ongoing riots
  • The list is topped, as Tyrion says, by the High Septon. The list itself is a microcosm of a society on the brink of collapse, a reflection of its values; it’s arranged by George to poke holes in it, as with the list of people arriving (or not) through the gates of the Red Keep. He is displaying and dismantling structures
  • The High Septon comes first because the gods sit atop the fiery ladder...but now the High Septon has been brought low. Have the gods fallen with him?
  • Tyrion notes that starving men take a hard view of priests too fat to walk, perfectly summarizing the corruption at work in the halls of power
  • The High Septon is supposed to be the bridge between the physical world and the spirit world, the embodiment of god’s grace on this fallen earth
  • But earlier in the chapter, he was just wasting everyone’s time with his self-indulgent droning over Myrcella. Tyrion couldn’t even hear his words, and so neither could the reader. So much for the voice of god! God has no voice here
  • We are forsaken, and so the High Septon cared more about stuffing his face than helping the starving members of his flock. The latter saw his deceit, his greed, his corruption, and so they literally ripped him to pieces. Can’t say I mourn him
  • And Tyrion knows it...yet that doesn’t change his mindset, nor his policies. As with Stannis and Theon, being smarter and more empathetic than his peers doesn’t mean anything to anyone but the reader if it’s not reflected in his actions
  • The starving men Tyrion describes are as much an enemy to him as Stannis. The starvation is a given, in Tyrion’s mind, rather than a condition he can change
  • Moving on down the list, down the social hierarchy encapsulated and endangered by this butcher’s bill, we have a dead Kingsguard knight
  • The Kingsguard wear white, holy and pure, the light of the Seven as One which is then separated into the individual rainbow rays of each deity in turn
  • But as Jaime notes later in this book, the image is only an image, papering over both the atrocities and general human frailties of those wearing the cloak
  • Sometimes the knights are the monsters, as Meera says...and even when they’re not, they’re just confused flawed humans, not angels cloaked in dazzling sunlight
  • Preston Greenfield tried to be a hero out of the songs, and not only did he die for it, but his snow-white cloak was defiled, covered in his blood, turned red-brown
  • The gold cloaks couldn’t even find him at first; they were looking for the white, the untainted purity of a system that works, blessed by the Seven who are One
  • But god is dead, power corrupts, and the system does not work. The High Septon was ripped to pieces as he prayed for deliverance, and Preston Greenfield’s white cloak has been swapped out for a crusty bloody one
  • That’s what the lived reality of Westeros looks like. The shadow on a wall has faltered and failed; the image fades, and catharsis provides instead bleak truth
  • Next step down the pyramid we find another knight, though not a Kingsguard. Aron Santagar, as Sandor noted, was taken down by mere rocks--all the shining swords paid for by the taxation of the masses didn’t serve him against their rage
  • His head is red pulp inside a crushed helm. Military might was of no avail, and behind that surface of power, we are mortal men. Per Euron: men are meat
  • It’s a neat narrative turn that the farther down we go down the list of casualties, the less guilty the people become.
  • Aron Santagar is the Red Keep master-at-arms, the one that Rodrik Cassel went to when he and Catelyn arrived in the city back in AGOT, Catelyn IV.
  • To Rodrik, Aron Santagar was a “vain but honest man”, worth trusting.
  • We don’t hear about Aron participating in the Lannister coup or taking part in Joffrey’s atrocities.
  • But he still benefited from being within the wall of the Red Keep, getting the best food “earmarked for castle and garrison.”
  • One more step down we find Lollys Stokeworth, not killed but gangraped, left to wander naked. She suffers immensely because there is no justice to be had
  • The people in power don’t actually protect the young, the innocent, the women who have not been given the tools to protect themselves. They abandon them
  • The starving peasants have been hit all their lives, and shockingly, the lesson they have learned is to hit back! Is Tyrion not the same, in his own way?
  • This is, of course, not to excuse the gangrape of Lollys, but to point out that total lack of power over one’s life corrupts as surely as the overabundance of power
  • And so we near the bottom of the power pyramid, and the specifics of Bywater’s list appropriately give way to tatters and uncertainty, because power stops caring
  • Tyrek is not dead, but missing...as is the Septon’s crown. That these are repeatedly linked together emphasizes the inhumanity of power
  • This is the mindset pervasive among the elite--a crystal crown matters as much as a living person. Why? Because the crown embodies wealth and power
  • That mindset is what produced the inequalities that led to the riot in the first place, yet even in the arrangement of the report, we see that nothing will change
  • Part of the condemnation directed against the High Septon by the smallfolk is not that the High Septon is a hypocrite, though he is that.
  • It’s that he’s, as Jaime puts it, a “fat fraud.”
  • The High Septon doesn’t actually believe anything about what he was droning on about on the docks.
  • The religious office he holds is merely a tool to enrich himself and expand his belly.
  • That fat part of the fraud equation is a major part of why the starving masses tear the High Septon apart in this moment.
  • But the fraud aspect highlights something that’s much more long-lasting though.
  • Tyrion dismisses the search for the High Septon’s crown as meaningless when real people are dying or missing, and he’s right in the immediate sense that people’s lives > a symbol of wealth.
  • In the longer term, Tywin will re-establish the shadow on the wall, creating a crystal crown twice as tall as the one lost and organizing a search for the crystal crown that was lost during the riot — only finding shards of it later.
  • What both men miss is that the crown serves as a stand-in to remind the faithful of god’s power on Planetos.
  • There has to be real substance to the Faith, and if that substance is empty, if the highest leaders of the Faith are fat frauds, the people will throw them off for something real.
  • Now, I’m not arguing that the Faith are real. By all accounts, the seven are fraud themselves!
  • But the people believe that divine power rests in the gods as seen through septs and through the clergy.
  • If the clergy are shown to be wanting, they’ll get new clergy — ones that will be even less to the liking of the Lannisters.
  • From there, we step down from the nobility to their servants, the gold cloaks. Their deaths are numbered, but not named. Far more of them suffered than the nobles, despite not having say in it. They are the lapdogs of power, shields around these abusive corrupt thieves, and die in their place like whipping boys
  • One more step down to the bottom: the smallfolk themselves. No one had troubled to count how many of them were dead. And that’s the whole point
  • They’re not people, in the eyes of power. They are ants. You don’t trouble to count their dead. You don’t trouble to support those who are still alive
  • Their lives don’t matter in the system in which they are embedded. The people rose in response to that realization; the powerful have learned nothing from it
  • Even when Tyrion tries to respond with some humanity, it’s only for his own family, only for Tyrek, and only because Tyrek’s father was kind to him
  • He’s still in the bubble, and Jacelyn Bywater gets his most prominent moment in the story as he tries one more time to burst his patron’s bubble
  • You told me you wanted the truth, always. There’s a clear parallel to the Stannis-Davos dynamic at Storm’s End: the knight delivers hard truths, and the king (or Hand, in this case) both absorbs and rejects those truths
  • The hard truth, in this case, is that Lannister power is on the brink of total collapse. Their legitimacy has failed; they can only hold onto the city through application of brute force, and even that (as we’ve seen) provokes backlash
  • These are the wages of ruling through fear. Not only is terrifying a populace into acquiescence a bad thing in itself, it lays the ground for chaos the moment said populace decides they hate you more than they fear you, or that they fear the death by starvation to which you have sentenced them more than your swords
  • “The kettle is close to boiling.” Disease is rampant in the city, as is petty crime, and the food supply is just about to run out completely. In such circumstances, the risks of revolution start to seem lesser, or rather, they start to seem moot
  • Again, it does not take a great deal of insight to draw connections to the current American environment. Disease and poverty exacerbate the collapse of power under specific epically bad leaders; they demonstrate the collapse of power
  • The argument for direct action is that the system isn’t going to correct itself, powerful people will never voluntarily give up power--it’s the only way to change
  • Power respects only force; that’s where power came from in the first place. Direct action with a credible threat of force is the only way to earn the attention of power
  • This doesn’t necessarily have to take the form of a guillotine; direct action can include mass strikes, nonviolent occupations of government offices, etc.
  • American police forces were created to break exactly such strikes and protests, with an soupcon of slave-catching ladled over it in the South
  • We can see in ACOK Tyrion IX a reflection on the essential question: who, exactly, are the police here to “serve and protect?” Not the populace at large
  • They’re here to serve and protect power. Anyone who’s actually dealt with the police one-on-one knows they respond far more to the property rights of the powerful than helping random victims of murder, rape, and petty theft
  • As with Flea Bottom in King’s Landing, American policing treats isolated chunks of the population as enemies under their occupation. This is not because every individual policeman is an incorrigible racist (although many, many of them are)
  • This is because of the incentives of the institution as a whole, built around protecting their resources and power from democratic oversight
  • They can harvest blood and treasure from poor people, especially poor black people, because those people do not have the power to strike back
  • Democracy has failed these people. One party openly preys on them; the other offers lip service and little more, continually shifting resources away from marginalized communities while painting BLACK LIVES MATTER on streets
  • Their elected officials take money from police unions, and so do nothing. Their elected officials build highways through these communities, giving contracts to their own companies and their friends’ companies, cutting their deals on the golf courses they build instead of affordable housing. Power corrupts them all
  • Gerrymandering, stripping convicts of the right to vote, the failure to make Election Day a national holiday, the failure to secure enough locations to vote...all of this is what makes “vote blue no matter who” as a solution ultimately hollow
  • For me, the question of whether rioting is a good response to this state of affairs is a shallow question, designed to distract from the truth of American history
  • It is an inevitable response, because every other way of calling attention to (let alone solve) the problem of American bodies under occupation of American money and American force has been rendered unworkable by American power
  • On one hand, ACOK Tyrion IX is germane to these discussions, because of that “kettle boiling” sensation of a population that has taken this shit for too long
  • As Jacelyn Bywater tells Tyrion, this is not just about Joffrey, nor even just about the lack of bread. It’s also about Tywin sacking the city during the last war
  • Similarly, IRL, it is folly to pretend that the issues plaguing the USA just came about recently. BLM as a movement may be only a few years old, but the horrors to which it is responding are our country. They are not ancillary, an unfortunate side effect of American power to be corrected. They make up American power. We have never been a free country. We only pretend to be. A shadow on a wall.
  • Historical memory belies the notion that we are dealing with the excesses of bad individuals. This is how it has always worked, and so goes it in King’s Landing
  • On the other hand, Westeros is ultimately a fictional world ruled by its god and creator George RR Martin. It can reflect the real world, but never one-to-one
  • There is no racial component to the inequalities of power in King’s Landing. Unlike in American history, there was no specific group used to scapegoat and suffer for society’s ills, dividing the powerless against each other on racial lines
  • The struggle in King’s Landing is more purely a struggle between classes, and the gold cloaks are starting to develop class consciousness, as Bywater says
  • In American cities, police officers (well-paid and benefited relative to other laborers) increasingly live outside the cities they police, further cementing the relationship between the police and policed as occupier and occupied
  • That’s not the case in King’s Landing. As Bywater notes, his men are largely drawn from the smallfolk. They walk the same streets and eat the same food
  • What Bywater calls “mutterings from the gutter” defines the current American state of unrest. Here in our world in 2020, it has not quite progressed to “open talk of treason” in the barracks as well as the guildhalls and marketplaces
  • The gold cloaks don’t get to drive home to a nice cul-de-sac in Rosby after a day cracking heads open in Flea Bottom. They’re stuck there with everyone else
  • As such, many of them are starting to agree with the rioters that Lannister power is unacceptable. Team Joffrey is getting us all killed, and they have to go
  • Also unlike modern police forces, the gold cloaks are not exactly functioning as a tight coherent unit, disciplined to stay loyal above all to the force and each other
  • In a medieval context, there wasn’t something like a police force around.
  • In fact, GRRM’s idea of gold cloaks or a capital police force doesn’t have a historical connotation as a recent AskHistorians post about policing in 12th century London had it:
    • In Anglo-Saxon England vigilantism, not a town guard or much less police force, was more or less the "default" method of conflict resolution between equal members of society. There was no real distinction between vigilante justice and "official" justice, nor did independent courts, lawyers, etc... exist at this point in England's history.
  • The gold cloaks are anachronistic to the medieval-ish historical time period that ASOIAF is based off of.
  • But I wonder at this idea that Cersei and Janos brought about in having more police to save the city.
  • I’ve been in and out of government bureaucracies my entire life, and boy does this idea that more of something means that it’s a better of something.
  • You attach a number (like increased the number of gold cloaks to 6000. Promote ahead of peers. Send immediately to ILE!), and you have a quantifiable bullet for your OER/performance appraisal!
  • The issue is that it’s not truly about the quantity of gold cloaks as Jacelyn Bywater states. It’s the quality.
  • So many of the gold cloaks are new, signed up by Cersei and Janos Slynt, and they only signed up to put food in their bellies--another example of how these police forces depend on social inequalities, rather than helping to solve them
  • Same goes for the military, which actively recruits among poor people because so many of them have no other way of going to college and climbing the ladder
  • Because of that, however, the US military tends to be more diverse than US police forces, and the gold cloaks feel more like our military in that regard
  • They are, after all, preparing for a battle against external foes, not just trying to hold onto King’s Landing itself for their Lannister patrons
  • And in Bywater’s eyes, as well as Tyrion’s, the riot was a dry run for war, a rehearsal for the Battle of Blackwater...and it’s not looking good for them!
  • How can we hold the city against external foes if we can’t hold it together before those external foes even show up? We can’t govern, let alone win the war
  • Worse yet, our failure to govern is making our external foes more attractive to those rising up from under us. As Bywater says, part of the discourse dominating King’s Landing has to do with how much better things were under Robert...and so, how much better things might be under Stannis as King instead of Joffrey
  • Stannis, being Stannis, fails to take advantage of this opportunity; as Davos notes mournfully at the Blackwater, Stannis persists on flying the “[S]tranger’s banner” of R’hllor, rather than the welcoming sign of Robert’s crowned stag
  • But right now, that’s of little comfort to Tyrion, because the gods that are worshipped by the people of King’s Landing--namely, the Seven--are said to be punishing the city for the crimes of his family. The sparrows are on the rise…
  • Tyrion sums it all up as “they hate my family,” which is both true and overly personalized--Tyrion can’t quite step outside the perspective of his faction
  • Moreover, he can’t step outside himself. He asks what the people think of him, personally, just as Stannis asked Davos what the people thought of Renly’s death and the twincest. And as with Stannis, Tyrion rejects any and all insights
  • Bywater tries to avoid the question, saying Tyrion should ask Varys instead. But Tyrion, like Stannis, persists. And Bywater, like Davos, gives in and confesses
  • They hate you most of all. You are public enemy number one. While you’ve been politicking and scheming and screwing Shae, they’ve been cursing your name
  • The injustice of it chokes Tyrion, and you can understand why. As he says, Joffrey is the King, and it is Joffrey who has been committing brazen, sadistic, cartoonish atrocities against the populace, including during the riot
  • No one is more hateable than Joffrey, as the fandom can attest! George wrote him that way--a sneering little punk that we, like Tyrion, just want to slap
  • But the people don’t quite see it that way, just like they don’t see Aerys in quite the same way that George has led we the readers to feel about him
  • Despite the evil inequalities of power in this society and the ways in which they have been abused, the people of King’s Landing are as much a product of their environment as anyone else, and have not abandoned monarchy as a whole
  • The culture of monarchy, in which the king is sacred, the literal embodiment of the realm chosen by the gods, is too strong. A powerful shadow on a wall
  • Instead, as in the real world, the source of suffering must be the king’s evil councillors poisoning his mind. Same thing happens on Dragonstone: king’s men like Cressen and Davos insist Melisandre has literally taken charge of Stannis
  • Even those rising up against the system have been shaped within it, and cling to its values even while bruising and bloodying their fists against its structures
  • Moreover, Joffrey is a child, which has a huge impact on how the people in the streets see him. It should have an impact on us as well. Not to excuse Joffrey for what he’s done--after all, he’d only be worse if allowed to live to adulthood
  • But even the best and brightest thirteen-year-old would still be a thirteen-year-old, and ultimate responsibility lies with the adults in the room
  • Bywater might be pulling a Davos again here, in that he gently folds his own critique of his patron into the detached report of what the people in general think
  • His Grace is but a boy. How much can Tyrion really blame Joffrey for what’s going on? Was he not the one who pledged to do justice? Has he not failed?
  • Is this really the injustice that has choked Tyrion? What about all the other injustices he has witnessed and in some cases taken part in? Only when you suffer an injustice does it suddenly feel real to you? This is how power works!
  • As Bywater points out, it’s not like the rest of the people in power are popular by comparison. No one likes Cersei, and no one likes Varys. The people have been under cruel occupation by them for years; none are “friends to the commons”
  • But, then again, Cersei and Varys were around during those happier times under King Robert...and Tyrion was not, so he is associated with the unhappy times
  • Here we see the same gap between the political narratives of the powerful vs. those of the powerless that we saw at work with Aerys’ rep in the Riverlands
  • The fallout of Aerys’ paranoia and pyromania was largely confined to the nobility, or so it appears, because almost nobody knows about the wildfire
  • And while Cersei and Varys have certainly abused their powers over the people, the people used to be able to rely on peace and prosperity in the meantime
  • Now they can’t. The bread is gone, the circuses are silent, and when the people look around to see what changed, they see Tyrion Lannister, Hand of the King
  • On one level, this seems as absurd to us as it does to Tyrion. Tyrion came in response to the collapse of power in King’s Landing amidst civil war; blaming him for the chaos and suffering would seem to confuse cause and effect
  • Moreover, many of the specific criticisms that Bywater brings to Tyrion’s attention are bunk. Pycelle is not “wise and gentle,” no more than Janos Slynt is “bluff and honest.” These are stereotypes, images simplified from afar, not reality
  • Nor is it true that Tyrion means to claim the Iron Throne for himself. This is all part of the public image of the Imp, the assumption that because Tyrion is ugly on the outside, he is ugly on the inside, a curse sent to Tywin by the gods
  • Yet it is true that he filled the city with clansmen and sellswords that do not answer to anyone but him, and Tyrion does not respond to this charge
  • Moreover, he has allowed these mistaken arguments about his treatment of Janos and Pycelle to spread. He has not created his own counter-reputation
  • Why not publicize Janos’ crimes and Pycelle’s corruption? Why not mitigate the damage to his public image done by his secret police by giving away bread?
  • Because in Tyrion’s mind, his negative rep is a given, a guarantee by a fallen world that hates him for his stature. They will only ever see me as a monster
  • I am hideous and misshapen, and there is nothing I can do about that, so why try? As such, Tyrion abandons that which is under his control RE his image
  • Tyrion came riding into the city at the head of a column of unwashed mountain clansmen and sellswords.
  • He already has several things going against him from his dwarfism to being a Lannister to being well-fed.
  • So, the people are already against him before he even starts. 
  • Hey, wait. Wasn’t this part of the advice Tyrion gave to Jon: using the ways you’re already behind the game as armor and forming an identity around it? (I know. I repeat myself.)
  • Y’know I wonder at this. Is this the same sort of greeting Daenerys will receive when she arrives in King’s Landing?
  • She’s done nothing to earn the enmity of the people, but the optics surrounding her will set off all the same alarm bells that Tyrion does — several times over.
  • He/she’s a dwarf/woman arriving at King’s Landing with an army of sellswords and mountain clansmen/Dothraki. His/her father isn’t much loved in King’s Landing due to things they did in the past.
  • Like Tyrion before her, I think Dany will fail to form a counter-identity to combat the insults, names and rejections that the smallfolk of King’s Landing will employ.
  • And so, just like Stannis at Storm’s End, he dodges the implications of the very insight he asked for, because he believes he simply cannot be loved
  • All of that comes back not only to the people at large, but specifically Tyrion’s family and how he has been rejected by them. In this moment of literal and figurative darkness, Tyrion wonders whether his father was right to hate him
  • A heartbreaking thought! Not only because no one deserves to be hated by their parents, but also because Tywin’s hatred of Tyrion was never about his actions
  • Sure, Tywin genuinely disapproves of Tyrion marrying Tysha etc. but it goes deeper than that. Tyrion doesn’t live up to Tywin’s image of House Lannister, and Joanna died giving birth to him. As such, Tywin would resent Tyrion, denying him love, no matter what Tyrion ended up doing with his life. So why should he try?
  • Yet Tyrion still always thirsted to earn his family’s love even as it became less and less possible; now, facing his family’s downfall, he blames himself
  • What a tangle of personal and political grievances this is! Tyrion blames himself for that which he is not guilty and excuses himself for that which he is guilty
  • That’s why this is my favorite Tyrion chapter. Not only for the peerless catharsis, not only for the blunt exploration of power, but for how perfectly it summarizes how Tyrion finds and loses himself in the middle of all this
  • His alienation brings him deep sorrow, but he cannot find his way out of it, because both his power and his lack of power have corrupted him
  • Being politically powerful has detached him from the suffering of those without such power. Being personally powerless has broken his heart apart
  • Tyrion is left unable to even conceive of what justice would look like, for himself or for the people of Westeros as a whole. All he can do is castigate the masses for hating him, even as he hates himself, echoing his father in both cases
  • He externalizes that hatred onto Varys, Bronn, and Shae. A eunuch, a sellsword, and a whore; what does that say of me, that these are my confidants?
  • This is hardly a value-neutral assessment! Are Tywin’s well-heeled well-spoken advisors any more useful to him? Arguably much less so. Same for Stannis; that’s why he says he would prefer fewer lords and more smugglers at his back
  • Tyrion is not rationally taking stock of his mistakes, he is simply taking the self-loathing he internalized from his father and projecting it outwards
  • I am just Bad, and the people around me are Bad; that’s what the masses are picking up on, and they’re right, but I hate them, as Dad is right, but I hate him
  • This mindset makes it impossible for Tyrion to treat himself or his subjects better, so even though he’s more insightful and compassionate than his father or his sister or his nephew, it doesn’t end up mattering in practical terms
  • That image of him persists, and by the time we get to ASOS, Tyrion has decided to embrace it rather than fight it. I will be the monster you think I am. Why not?
  • This is inevitable, as the riots are inevitable. Hit people all their lives, and they will learn to hit back. Tyrion, too, will rise up in force after being pushed too far
  • These power dynamics happen between the powerful, as they do between the powerful and the powerless. Power worms its corruptions into every crack it can
  • Even in this isolated chamber, literally far removed from the starvation and violence on the city streets, those power dynamics persist
  • Tyrion’s self-loathing is a learned behavior, and I wonder whether one subtext is that Tyrion didn’t really have to do anything to earn the position as Acting Hand of the King.
  • Recall that conversation from AGOT, Tyrion IX:
    • “Why me?" he asked, cocking his head to one side. "Why not my uncle? Why not Ser Addam or Ser Flement or Lord Serrett? Why not a … bigger man?"
      
      Lord Tywin rose abruptly. "You are my son."
      
      That was when he knew. You have given him up for lost, he thought. You bloody bastard, you think Jaime's good as dead, so I'm all you have left
  • Tyrion was the Jaime substitute and all that Tywin had left. So, he’s here in King’s Landing, defying his father with Shae and declaring that he’ll do justice (subtext: the opposite of what Tywin did?)
  • But there’s been no real leadership arc that’s crafted Tyrion into a skillful political actor. He hasn’t had years in the shit like Jon Snow, learning to lead before his election of LC of the NW.
  • Instead, that famous surname and that fabled gold that greases every wheel were all the apprenticeship Tywin deemed sufficient for Tyrion to become acting Hand of the King.
  • It has to grate on Tyrion.
  • Now, Tyrion is doing a better job than anyone expected. He’s not dull. He’s smart. He reads a lot. He’s into history.
  • He honestly thinks he’s doing the best job possible despite all of the people around him - Joffrey most of all - making his job impossible.
  • Tyrion’s been trying to say “fuck you, dad” the entirety of the book, but then Jacelyn tells him that the smallfolk hate him anyways. 
  • Jesus. How crushing is that? Like, you’re saying: Tyrion thinks that smallfolk are adapting Tywin’s mindset, but are they really? No! But that’s a human reaction to getting news like that. 
  • Bronn walks in with no patience for the literal gloom Tyrion has allowed to settle around himself. Bronn makes a fire, because he’s lived a poor life with no fire
  • He’s faced the same material deprivation as those on the streets, which Tyrion never has, allowing for the alienation and detachment I was talking about
  • But unlike Davos, Bronn’s poverty has not engendered empathy and mercy in him; instead, Bronn is in it for himself and only himself, having learned to hit back
  • Tyrion refuses to eat because of how disgusted he is with himself, his family, and the whole of humanity. Bronn, who never believed in any of those things, has an appetite. All he’s ever believed in was getting enough food at the end of the day
  • So he grabs Tyrion’s dinner, refusing to respect the dictates of power, just like those down on the streets. And Tyrion responds with irritation. I didn’t give you leave to eat my food! Why can’t you starve with the rest of the peasants?
  • This is the riot and its aftermath in microcosm. Even in face of this potent challenge to power, neither the powerful nor the powerless can imagine any other way to structure things. The powerless grab for all the resources they can individually hold; the powerful can only tut and threaten them. Nothing changes.
  • Here, at the end of the chapter, with everything reduced and deconstructed and rendered ash as the fires burn outside, we finally get a concrete proposal
  • And that proposal...is to kill Joffrey. That’s what Bronn, the peasant in the room, puts forward as the solution, not because Tommen will do a better job by the peasants, but because he’ll do as he told, the way kings should
  • In Bronn’s view, the font of authority is just another piece in the game, being moved by players half-hidden in the shadows. In our real world, our elected public leaders often feel like pawns being moved by unelected power brokers
  • Bronn doesn’t want to change that. He just wants it to work more effectively. You can see the real-world connections; often, criticisms of Trump come with the longing to restore a better era of American power that really never existed
  • What existed was presidents who did what they were told, who served the dictates of power in a more subtle and elegant fashion than the buffoonish Trump
  • Bronn has climbed the ladder and now walks the halls of power, so his interest is not in taking power down, but in capturing it for himself and his patron
  • Joffrey is an obstacle, not to the justice Tyrion promised and then abandoned, but to the smooth serene execution of power by Tyrion and, therefore, by Bronn
  • George is building on the revelation with which he ended Tyrion II. In that chapter, Tyrion rid King’s Landing of Janos Slynt and his baby-killing cronies, only to realize that he had his own baby-killer on the payroll with Bronn
  • In this chapter, Tyrion is forced to face down the backlash created by his peers, his family, and himself, and when he casts about for solutions, all he finds is Bronn saying that they just need to seal their own power with Joffrey’s blood
  • This chills Tyrion. Kinslaying is a step too far for him. It won’t be forever. Eventually, after being held responsible for Joffrey’s death despite his mercy, Tyrion will turn vengefully on his family, hating them as much as the people
  • He threatens to take Bronn’s head, wielding the power of punishment that has produced this uprising, but all Bronn does is laugh. The power no longer intimidates. It no longer holds sway. Bronn just reaches out and casually takes his food away, and even though Tyrion is no Joffrey, he still reacts to this challenge like a spoiled brat. The shadow on a wall fades, and yet persists
  • Varys begs them all to take heart, and George fades out on a punchline: Tyrion wants to take a literal heart. He could think of several options. George doesn’t make clear, but Tyrion could be thinking of anyone: Varys, Bronn, Cersei, Joffrey, the hearts of everyone who rioted, everyone who ever hated him for his stature
  • And ultimately, his own. Tyrion’s heart has been scalded by rejection once more, and as his story goes on, he decides that the pain is too much. Why love anything, including himself, if he’s never going to be loved back?
  • Power has cut everyone off from each other and themselves. Tyrion’s own face in the mirror is hateful to him, but so is everyone else’s. He rode into King’s Landing promising justice, but in this chapter, that promise breaks all over the city
  • Is Tyrion a nice guy? No, no not a genuinely kind person. The, letting TVTropes take over for a moment, guy who wants a prize for basic decency.
  • Tyrion is shocked that people hate him, despite everything that he’s done. 
  • And what is it that he’s done that’s good? He saves Sansa from a bloodier beating by Joffrey’s kingsguard goons. That took some courage given that no one was doing anything about it, and the king was ordering it.
  • He also fired Janos Slynt and exiled him to the Wall, ordered Allard Deem to be murdered on the way to the Wall.
  • What else? I’m struggling here to name something that’s objectively good in some moral, rather than political advantageous for the Lannisters sense or isn’t morally neutral.
  • Most people tend to be more neutral. Tyrion, though, isn’t so neutral. He ventures into some bad/villainous territory in ACOK occasionally, but he embraces that mentality come ASOS and ADWD.
  • Much like the riot, Tyrion’s dark turn doesn’t erupt from nothing. It’s foundation’d throughout ASOIAF, but you can really feel its pulsating core of heartsick hatred at chapter’s end.

Foreshadowing/Groundwork

We get another mention of Sandor Clegane’s fear of fire after Flea Bottom goes up in flames. He goes out this time to retrieve his horse, but come the Blackwater, Sandor isn’t going out for one last sortie with all the death and wildfire about. Fuck the king.

The fire will indeed reach the wildfire when Dany comes to town…

Jacelyn Bywater says that he doesn’t trust his own men that he’s recruited into the gold cloaks which turns out to be sadly correct as the gold cloaks will drag him from his horse and murder him during the Battle of the Blackwater.

Theory/Discussion

Where in the world is Tyrek Lannister?

• The search for Tyrek Lannister after the riot:
  • "I led a search myself, at Lord Tywin's command," offered Addam Marbrand as he boned his fish, "but I found no more than Bywater had before me. The boy was last seen ahorse, when the press of the mob broke the line of gold cloaks. Afterward . . . well, his palfrey was found, but not the rider. Most like they pulled him down and slew him. But if that's so, where is his body? The mob let the other corpses lie, why not his?" (AFFC, Jaime III)
  • Good question, Addam Marbrand, one that we’ll theorize on here!
  • In ACOK/ASOS, Tyrion and Tywin send gold cloaks and red cloaks throughout King’s Landing to find Tyrek Lannister, but they have no success.
  • Most in-universe characters believe that Tyrek is dead, but as Addam Marbrand indicated, there were irregularities with Tyrek’s disappearance.
  • Moreover, GRRM himself, has indicated ambiguity about Tyrek’s fate
    • Was "file Tyrek" closed in ASOS with the hint that he ended in a bowl of stew?
      
      GRRM: Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. - GRRM, SSM, 5/12/2001
  • But then he stated in a 1999 online chat that we found find out what happened to Tyrek in a future volume of ASOIAF:
    • Simple question, really — will we ever find out what happened to the "Wetnurse", Tyrek?
      
      GRRM: Yes, you will. I try not to leave too many loose ends. But sometimes you need to wait. - Event Horizon Chat with GRRM, 3/1999
• Varys Did It
  • As of the recording of this podcast, Tyrek’s fate has not been revealed, but there are strong indications that Tyrek is alive and in the custody? Care? Of someone. Namely, Varys.
  • Jaime gives the strongest case for Varys snatching up Tyrek in AFFC, thinking:
    • Jaime found himself wondering. Tyrek had served King Robert as a squire, side by side with Lancel. Knowledge could be more valuable than gold, more deadly than a dagger. It was Varys he thought of then, smiling and smelling of lavender. The eunuch had agents and informers all over the city. It would have been a simple matter for him to arrange to have Tyrek snatched during the confusion . . . provided he knew beforehand that the mob was like to riot. And Varys knew all, or so he would have us believe. Yet he gave Cersei no warning of that riot. Nor did he ride down to the ships to see Myrcella off. (AFFC, Jaime III)
  • So, Varys has means, motive and opportunity. But I think there’s a potential for an additional motive for Varys to abduct Tyrek Lannister during the riot.
  • When Tyrion confronts Varys about his whereabouts during the riot, Varys replies that he’s been about “the king’s business.”
  • Tyrion, being Tyrion, immediately loses focus and starts growling about how Joffrey sucks, which yeah. He does suck. A LOT.
  • But this podcaster wonders if Tyrion misses Varys being sly here. He doesn’t say which king. Could he be talking about, oh, I don’t know, say … Aegon the Young Grift??
  • Of course, having Tyrek in his pocket would help in fingering Cersei as being behind Robert’s death.
  • But the additional layer is that by having a Lannister in his pocket, Varys might have plans for this kid to be part of his “realm in a box” concept for Young Grift.
  • “Realm in a box” is shorthand for the potential that Varys is planning for Aegon to take the Iron Throne and immediately gain legitimacy by having ready vassals among the southron high lords to rule as lords paramount.
  • As example: beyond Tyrek, there’s the potential that Varys might snatch up Edric Storm (hanging out in Varys’ hometown of Lys by the end of ADWD), bringing him back to Westeros, potentially using him to take Storm’s End (per JoeMagician’s theory we talked about in Episode 117), removing the taint of bastardy by royal decree and naming him Lord Paramount of the Stormlands.
  • Back to the Lannisters: with Jaime as a kingsguard, Tyrion attainted, Kevan now dead at the end of ADWD, Tommen and Myrcella as doomed angels, Lancel likely to meet his demise in some way come TWOW, Willem Lannister murdered by Rickard Karstark’s goons, that puts Tyrek as third in the line of Lannister succession after his cousins Martyn Lannister (a 13-15 y/o boy probably at Casterly Rock) and Janei Lannister (a three or four year old by the close of ADWD).
  • So, there are some hurdles for Varys to clear for Tyrek assuming the lordship of Casterly Rock and the paramountcy of the Westerlands, but if the king says “This Lannister is the chosen one”, I can’t imagine the lords of the Westerlands would put up much of a fight.
  • Hell, as we talked about in Tyrion’s final AGOT chapter, when these jabronis are told to shut up and color by an authority figure (Tywin), they ask which crayon colors they can be allowed to doodle with.
  • All of this to say it seems likely to me that Varys took Tyrek during the Riot in King’s Landing to help create to stabilize Young Grift’s rise to power come TWOW.
  • But, of course, as always, we’ll have to see what George has up his sleeve come TWOW!

Conclusion

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