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So what was this long story all about?


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I still think that in the end very little has changed. Life in Westoros is still pretty much as it was before Joeffry/Cersei. Life continues, poor are poor, lords are lords. Samuel's attempt at genuine democracy was literally laughed at.

So the king will be elected from now on (like some sort of mafia commission) but that King will still have to come from a Noble family which means you can still only become King via birthright.

People are still not free, they still serve, they still live under the oppression of self-entitled nepotistic rulers. The life standards of the vast majority of people in Westeros is still pretty miserable.

The wheel has not been broken - The more things change the more they stay the same.

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Just now, Winter prince said:

IIRC they are all ancient trees

I think they still reproduce farther north. There is a fight scene in the books with Brienne in a ruined building with what is described as young weirwood growing through it.

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7 hours ago, Old Rusty Coin said:

What is good and what is not good; need we anyone to tell us these things?

 

The same arguments used by English conservatives against the French Revolution. Slow evolutionary change is better than a despot who promises rapid change through violent revolution. Daenerys is being compared to Napoleon and Robespierre.

Alternatively, bitches be crazy if you give them any power?

 

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GRRM said what inspired it - a vision of the Stark kids finding dogs and that Robert Frost poem about fire and ice. You can see those things shine through at the end.

Re all the bitches be cray stuff - if you are going to equate a character with hot desire, better a male or female character? If you are going to equate a character with cold hearted hate, better a male or female character? I don't think its about bitches be cray, I think it is GRRM just correctly assuming which sex generally carries more heat and desire and which can hold more frozen hate.

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6 hours ago, Winter prince said:

It was about the end of tyranny for the sake of selfish interests. It was the dawn of a new world that didnt have choice of rulers but now does.

Except most elected monarchies failed and none (as far as I am aware) ever lead to any greater involvement by the common people in running their country.

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7 hours ago, tallTale said:

Power, and the lust for power, corrupts.

Wanting the iron throne is the great sin in game of thrones.

I agree this is more or less what it is about if it has to be about 1 thing.

It also has a very strong element of love vs honor or love vs duty - and it symbolizes those two things (I think correctly) with the feminine and masculine. I think it is no mistake Dany was a passionate and changeable threat, whilst the NK was an impassive, relentless threat.

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3 hours ago, Vanadis said:

Noble orphans facing obstacles, fighting evil and saving the realms.

Not a bad summary, after all.

On the pragmatic side, it is about the Stark children saving the world, more or less. 

On a deeper side it is about the bad effects of lust for power, of circumstances forming children and of beating a threat together.

And of course, it was a epic phantasy story jsut worth reading for all the adventures it depicts.

GRRM once said, he writes about "human hearts at conflict" and that what a lot of this is about. Emotions, decisions, consequences. And I like that everything is grey-nuanced and not black-and-white, not even things like honor or love. 

Honor and Love are so overrated and stupidly romanticised, GRRM really made it work out that we see both sides.

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4 hours ago, pudgiebudgie said:

That's actually the exact opposite of the story's message.

How is an elective monarchy better than a lineage monarchy? I think nothing changed in the long run, and the outcome is quite nihilistic. Everyone can decide if you like this story or not... 

 

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4 hours ago, Pauld123 said:

I take it to mean that actually you can never break the wheel. 

In the end I very much agreed with Dany. Perhaps the next few wars would be bloody but eventually she would have become a juggernaut and there would be no more need for war, surrender would have been automatic. She could have built that paradise. You could see she was sad about innocent death but genuinely felt the end of a glorious paradise justified the means. She wasn't evil or insane. I think she was hasty and ruthless. 

Instead - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I thought that Dany's actions were rational as well, but ultimately it would be utopianism, someone who probably genuinely believes they are doing right who creates horror (a Lenin or a Mao). Human society cannot be perfected by some tyrant imposing this from above.

That said I am not sure that Dany's world would have been any worse than the world as Westeros was at the moment. There would have been a lot of war and conflict while she created her empire and then no doubt a few decades of peace (replacing other wars that would have taken place anyway). I don't think really the show did a good job of presenting why Dany's vision was so unacceptable, because, as we have seen in the past, when she does rule she wants to do things like free slaves not kill everyone for fun. The ones who would have lost out most would have been the nobles (and those who died in the wars of course)

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1 hour ago, Pauld123 said:

I still think that in the end very little has changed. Life in Westoros is still pretty much as it was before Joeffry/Cersei. Life continues, poor are poor, lords are lords. Samuel's attempt at genuine democracy was literally laughed at.

So the king will be elected from now on (like some sort of mafia commission) but that King will still have to come from a Noble family which means you can still only become King via birthright.

People are still not free, they still serve, they still live under the oppression of self-entitled nepotistic rulers. The life standards of the vast majority of people in Westeros is still pretty miserable.

The wheel has not been broken - The more things change the more they stay the same.

Yep historically elected monarchies usually just allowed the nobles to run rampant, a corrupt oligarchy. None as far as I am aware ever led to a constitutional monarchy or representative democracy.

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