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On this past Sunday’s Game of Thrones, viewers were treated to a rather fantastic sequence in the map room at Dragonstone. Newly returned exile princess Daenerys Targaryen was plotting out her strategy for re-taking Westeros as its queen, and she was surrounded by her ragtag band of allies and advisors, including Tyrion Lannister, Yara Greyjoy, Ellaria Sand, and Olenna Tyrell. There was also Lord Varys, the longstanding Master of Whispers, who has been a conduit of information and secrets who has been planning for a moment like this since long before Dany or anyone even realized it.
In one of the season’s best scenes to date, Dany openly (and rather disdainfully) questioned why she ought to listen to Varys at all, since he had served her father only to turn right around and serve the families who deposed him and sent her into exile. She kind of had a point. After all, it was Varys who set in motion the plan to install her brother, the snivelling and cruel Viserys, as the new king. He had also, playing both sides of the fence, carried out an order from King Robert Baratheon to hire assassins to kill Dany when news of her marriage to Khal Drogo reached King’s Landing. Why should Dany trust Varys when he’s made it so consistently clear that the only side he’s ever been on has been his own.
Varys, however, had a pretty convincing retort:
Varys has long proclaimed his loyalty to be to “the Realm” rather than any one monarch or family dynasty. (These claims are a good deal muddier in the books, but we’re not talking about the books, are we?) Varys also makes a case for himself:
“I wasn’t born into a great house, I came from nothing. I was sold as a slave and carved up as an offering. When I was a child, I lived in alleys, gutters, abandoned houses. You wish to know where my true loyalties lie? Not with any king or queen, but with the people. The people who suffer under despots and prosper under just rule. The people whose hearts you aim to win.”
Um. So maybe Varys should be the king? Think about it: he’s smart, he knows more about his allies and his enemies than anyone else, he has the people’s best interests at heart, and he knows how the game must be played in order to achieve those best interests. He’s not even some kind of too-good-to-be-true saint, either. Remember when he had that guy locked in a box for years as a kind of slow-burn revenge? Enemies don’t be fucking with Varys!
But of course, Varys can never be king. That’s just not the world he’s living in.
The thing that has always been frustrating about Game of Thrones hasn’t been any plot twist of character choice. It’s been the fact that with the boundless options that a genre like fantasy affords, with the ability for George R.R. Martin to make the world however he wants to, we end up with a barbaric, feudal, patriarchal society that is only differentiated from the barbaric, feudal, patriarchal societies that actually existed in Europe by the existence of things like dragons and snow zombies. This came up frequently in the arguments about whether GOT relied too heavily on rape scenes in order to show the brutality of its world. Because, yes, rape is indeed an ugly reality that the people in the world of Game of Thrones face, but that’s only because the world that was created for them was a brutal pre-industrial patriarchy. The fantasy genre is just that, a place where any fantasy of a different kind of world is possible. And yet we seem to keep choosing the same ones that reflect a less refined version of the patriarchy we’re still experiencing. What good is a fantasy genre if we can’t imagine something better than what we’ve already got?
In the world of Westeros, Varys could of course never be king. He’s a eunuch, for one, and kings need to have heirs. He’s not from a high family (that “Lord” in Lord Varys is decorative at best, mocking at worst). He’s one of many in Westeros who would have been a good leader if not for all the things that disqualify him from such. On the surface, we’re supposed to think that Dany defies this, because she’s a woman and because she’s good. But how revolutionary will a Daenerys reign actually be? She only has a claim to the throne because she was born into one of the handful of families who can lay claim to power. And she only has a chance to grab that power because she has the destructive power of her dragons behind her. So. You can only come to true power if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth and you possess overwhelming military might. SO DIFFERENT FROM THE WORLD WE LIVE IN!
Oh, you say, but what about Jon Snow? He’s a bastard and had to humble himself before the Night’s Watch, after all. Yes, true, Jon has had a tough road. But of course, he’s not a bastard at all, is he? We all found out last season that he’s in fact a true-born Stark (Lyanna’s son), and likely the scion of Rhaegar Targaryen, and thus the exact same dynastic line that Dany is from.
You know who else gave Daenerys her best advice on Sunday’s episode? Olenna Tyrell, who advised Dany to recognize her power and “be a dragon.” Olenna is another one who has been self-evidently more qualified to rule the seven kingdoms for her entire run on the show. No, she doesn’t share Varys’s concern for the people, but she’s incredibly smart about, for example, when to use diplomacy and when to poison tween despots with a pigeon pie. Olenna is a mean old lady, but she has shown a tendency to recognize goodness — in Sansa, in Dany — and return it in kind. But Olenna, too, could never rule, not when she was younger and certainly not now in her dowager years.
Again: what good is fantasy as a genre if we can’t imagine a world where a eunuch or a grandma or a dwarf or fucking Brienne of Tarth couldn’t end up ruling over all? How did we end up AGAIN in a world where the only two people who could possibly end up in charge are the beautiful heiress and the secret prince? Alas, King Varys, what might have been.
