shipperx | GoT as Realpolitik

Interesting GOT review (not of this week's episode but of the series thus far). It discusses things in depth that I haven't seen elsewhere (well... outside of fandom, at any rate).

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137360/charli-carpenter/game-of-thrones-as-theory?page=show

EXCERPTS:

...Social relations in Westeros are sustained as much through bread-breaking rituals, arranged marriages, and promise-keeping as through backstabbing and treachery, and the power of such rules is only highlighted by their occasional breach. Lords and kings no less than oath-breakers are punished for violating custom and agreement -- either explicitly or through the inability to convert their hard power into material successes. Contrary to Cersei's assertion, kings cannot always "do as they like": Ned and the chivalry he represented may appear to have been the loser at the end of book and season one, but Joffrey's disregard for basic standards of justice will return to haunt him as it did his predecessors. The true moral of the story is that when good rules are disregarded, disorder and ruin follow...

And

...Perhaps the most marginalized viewpoint in war literature, and political narrative more generally, is that of the enemy itself. Yet in Game of Thrones, even the despots, king-slayers, executioners, and slave-traders are humanized and contextualized. As Adam Serwer notes, "Tolkien's monsters are literally monsters ... [but] most of Martin's monsters are people. Just when you've decided to hate them, [Martin] writes a chapter from their perspective, forcing you to consider their point of view." Martin shows how gender, race, class, age, and disability combine to produce multiple gradients and forms of power in Westerosi society, just as much as differences in material capabilities. By mixing things up, moreover, he reminds the audience that these categories are often constructed rather than fixed: the strong find themselves crippled; princes become slaves; noblewomen turn into stable hands; bastards grow to be commanders...

and

Perhaps nothing underscores this more than the portrayal of gender relations on the show. Westeros and surrounding lands are of course deeply misogynistic societies, but this hardly makes the show and novels sexist, as some have claimed. Rather, they force the audience to confront the violent reality of feudal gender relations. Martin's in-your-face depictions of debauchery, sexual assault, trafficking, forced marriage, and illegitimacy refute the gendered myth that knights and armies exist to protect women and children, just as they refute the political myth that states exist to protect nations from serious external threats. In standard fantasy, female characters who fail to play along with these myths tend to be punished (compare Eowyn to Arwen in Lord of the Rings). Not so in Martin's realm: Sansa, the only character who appears to buy into notions of chivalry, is painted as pitiably naive. The stronger female characters of Martin's world are indeed constrained by gender norms, but rather than embody them they chafe at and try to maneuver around their circumstances, each representing different feminist ripostes to the gender-blind realist narrative of statecraft and world politics...

The article as a whole is interesting.