SPOILER ALERT FOR SEASONS 1 AND 2
Yes! It’s back again and for the last time. The single most significant television series of this decade concludes in May, 2019. The series was perhaps the first of its kind, especially considering the production value of some of the episodes which dwarfed even Hollywood movies.
As I was catching up on the show last month, I was struck by how this fantasy television series has incorporated majestic symbolism and parallels drawn from the real world and its history, its current and past socio-economic challenges and conflicts. The credit for most of it does go to author of the books, George RR Martin, of course.
This is an attempt to dissect into the many parallels between Game of Thrones and real world geopolitics, which the author consciously or unconsciously incorporated into this epic novel series.
Are They Wildlings Or Are They Free Folk?
“The freedom to make my own mistakes is all I ever wanted.”
– Mance Rayder
The show starts off north in Winterfell, the first big castle of the nation of Westeros, south of the wall. The wall keeps the wildlings away. In the first season of the show, the audiences are repeatedly made to believe that wildlings are dangerous and lack morale. For example, a 12-year-old, crippled Bran Stark was attacked by wildlings and they were almost about to kill him. However, protagonist Jon Snow’s expedition north of the wall gives us the other side of this story. The free folk believe that they have an equal stake to the land south of the wall. They do not have the restrictive laws of Westeros and they value freedom above everything else. Besides this, they are running from monsters which the southerners don’t believe exists.
The people who live north of the wall are repeatedly shown to be much better warriors and they’re also shown to have superior magical abilities. However, they are not disciplined or organized like the armies of the south. Their strategies are not as effective as those of the southern armies and they are a highly divided group of people who don’t fight together as one unit.
That being said, these are not the only reasons why the free folk never made it past the wall, despite trying over and over again. They lack the historical context as well, they don’t know why their previous attempts failed while every child in Westeros knows about the wildling attacks of the past and the heroes who fought them. They know the strategies used to defeat them. When Jon Snow tells Ygritte this history, she has no idea how he knew that. The free folk have all but lost their history in the sands of time and even the concept of books seems foreign to Ygritte.
Ygritte however, opens Jon’s mind to many ridiculous practices in Westeros. She makes fun of their war cry and drums as it notifies the enemy that an army is on the march. She rips apart Westerosi women who seem unrealistically feminine and doubts they’d be able to survive anywhere that is as unforgiving as the north of the wall.
Besides, the Westerosi seem to be obsessed with titles and associated ego massages like kneeling. Even one of the more sensible royalties in Westeros, Daenerys Targaryen, initially refuses to help Jon unless he kneels. Stannis Baratheon also demands that everybody bends their knee to him or dies by fire. All of this is completely irrelevant north of the wall. In fact, the free folk are more modern with respect to the way of choosing their leaders, as Mance Rayder was chosen by election and not by birthright or as a result of conflict.
Perspective And Compassion Cures Bias
The modern day parallel of this can be seen in the mass immigration crisis in the Central and Latin Americas. These are people who are running from monsters (cartels and dictators) which most US citizens don’t have first-hand experience of. These monsters are just fantasy for a population which has lived in a safe nation under the protection of the strongest military in the world. Consequently, the resulting empathy is not strong enough to open borders to these people.
It can also be seen that this story has parallels to the plight of Native American Indians, a people who were almost wiped out entirely by colonizers with superior technology. Nevertheless, they continue to fight to get back what they once had, despite having little to no chance at accomplishing this goal.
The story of the free folk is also the story of forgotten history and the power of propaganda. Although, some of the southern lords agree that they didn’t build a 500 mile, 700 foot tall ice wall to keep out wildlings, they are still unaware of the real reason why the wall exists. They are still skeptical of the free folk only because they live north of the wall. In fact, many southern lords consider the free folk less than human. For example, Randall Tarly calls Gilly an “it” instead of “her.”
This is because generations of southerners were taught the same lie over and over again. We know many examples of this in the real world, it is a strategy being used by democratic governments and dictators alike to keep people blind to the truth.
However, the series gives us hope in our overall humanity. It shows the transformation of Jon from a young man who is determined to kill wildlings and ‘keep the realm safe,’ to the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch who would let the free folk come to the south of the wall for the first time in history.
It shows us that, often it takes only one determined and strong leader to save millions of people and engineer lasting change. However, it often comes at the price of his own life. We have seen this in our own world history – many humanitarian leaders have been assassinated precisely because of their compassion for people who are supposed to be hated. Dr Martin Luther King Jr, John F Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi remain compelling examples.