Historian on GOT's ending

>Ok I'm up early so I suppose we should talk about #GoT. And since such a large portion of the episode dealt with the question of succession, I feel like we are justified in taking a final look at the politics of the show.

>So here's my take: the political resolution of the narrative was so unsatisfying because the writers did not have a clear sense of what was politically defective in Westeros to begin with.

>If we accept the late medieval setting of the story and the source material, however remote, of the Wars of the Roses (Lannister/Lancaster vs. Stark/York) then the political problem of Westeros should have been the independence of the aristocracy.

>Sir John Fortescue's Wars of the Roses-era treatise De Laudibus Legum Angliae famously named this problem "over-mighty subjects," meaning a nobility whose wealth and military power rivalled that of the crown.

>In late medieval Europe, the demographic and economic fallout from the Black Death left this stratum grasping and dangerous, squeezing its peasantry and ever pressing for more lands, titles, offices. Crowns that could not satiate these demands often fell prey to them.

>This seems like a good description of Westeros: the ruling dynasty was displaced by a coalition of ambitious noble houses. And the new usurper king, uninterested in governance, presided over a long period of political drift and crown indebtedness.

>From this perspective, the Targaryen restoration was supposed to stand in for the coming of the Tudors: strong, centralizing Renaissance monarchs who systematically reconstruct royal power and break the independence of the nobility.

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>Ok, fine. But the political rise of Daenerys Targaryen in Essos was framed in radically emancipatory terms--"breaker of chains." She's John Brown, not Henry Tudor.

>This always struck me as a weird Americanism. We are asked to root for her because she is an abolitionist -- the idea being that no one would get morally or politically invested in a would-be royal absolutist.

>But this right here flubs the political diagnosis of Westeros: the real problem of the Seven Kingdoms is feudal anarchy and weak governance. Over-mighty subjects. "Breaking the wheel" requires more government, not less. A stronger crown, not "emancipation."

>But the writers, assuming our instinctive liberalism won't allow us to root for absolutism, continue to frame Dany's program as liberation. And when they can no longer conceal that she's doing more or less exactly what she set out to do, they immediately re-code it as tyranny -- a word that was used repeatedly last night. Again, because we can't root for stronger government.

>And once this would-be Caesar is assassinated, we get . . . an elective monarchy, occupied by a man with no spouse or heir. As if the problem this whole time was a strong crown rather than a weak one.

>And as the breakaway of the North suggests, this just reinforces the feudal particularism and decentralization plaguing the kingdom(s) to begin with.

>The political resolution of the narrative is to formally transform Westeros into a weak, elective monarchy (like Poland) where the crown is more or less entirely subordinated to the landed aristocracy.

>Who can all sit around congratulating themselves on their salvation from what in the end was obviously coded as the terrifying "oriental despotism" of Daenerys Targaryen. PS. I did actually like Arya sailing off to discover America, since the vaunted "age of discovery" was really rooted in the same feudal crisis as all the baronial wars and peasant uprisings of the late 14th and 15th centuries.

have sex

STANNIS

No one fucking cares. This fucking faggot probably thinks half of London were African bisexuals in the 16th century.

The TLDR version is "wow that was bad"

based

AH DUN WAN ET. NEVA AV

Good analysis, terrible formatting.

>I did actually like Arya sailing off to discover America
confirmed pleb