A Song of Ice and Fire Series Review Part 1: When You Play the Game of Thrones, You Win or You Die

A Song of Ice and Fire Book 1: A Game of Thrones
by George R.R. Martin 

Content Warning

This review contains mentions of rape, slavery, incest, and child marriage.

Spoiler Warning 

This review not only discusses in-depth spoilers of the novel, but it also contains spoilers for the HBO television adaptation as well.

Introduction 

First and foremost, I want to start off this review by mentioning that this review is specifically for the first book in the Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones. It is not my review for the HBO television adaptation of said series. I will make some comparisons and references to it just for the sake of illustrating my point on certain things, but my overall thoughts, feelings, and final rating is for the novel. 

Summary & Review 

There are so many aspects of A Game of Thrones that I could start off with to dive into my feelings about the book, such as just the sheer amount of world-building and depth to the history that Martin put into this book. Not that anyone could ever reach the level of Tolkien, but out of those who have come close, Martin is definitely one of them. However, that's really not where I want to start. The first thing that I want to talk about is just how well-contained Martin manages to make the first book in such a vast, developed story.

Now, certainly, A Song of Ice and Fire does not remain a well-contained story. As the books progress, the story starts to really spill out of its own edges, so to speak. But the first book is the exception. While it has its entire own world full of different kingdoms and cultures, and it is rich with history, somehow Martin manages to keep an entire 800-something page novel feel as though the whole book is connected to the Stark family and their story. Even the chapters from the perspective of Daenerys Targaryen, which take place all the across the Narrow Sea on an entirely different continent, connect to the Stark storyline--as King Robert's decision to send an assassin after Daenerys is central to Ned Stark's (patriarch of the Stark family) decision to resign as Robert's Hand (second-in-command). 

Martin masterfully manages to keep the story so close at heart to this one family in a number of ways. First of all, the very opening prologue and early chapters take place in the North (the domain of House Stark), and introduce the threat the Others (White Walkers, for you show fans) pose to the North right off the bat. Martin also keeps the story mostly contained from within the perspectives of members of the Stark family. In the first Ice and Fire novel, there are eight viewpoint characters, and six of them are Starks--well, four Starks, a Tully married into House Stark, and the bastard of Ned Stark named Snow, that is. The only two characters whose viewpoints we actually get to read from to set up the story who aren't aligned with House Stark are Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister. And even Tyrion's plot in the first book is integral to the plot of the Starks' storyline because it is Catelyn Stark (nee Tully)'s abduction of him that is one of the multiple conflicts that start the War of the Five Kings (the focal plot of book two in the series, A Clash of Kings). 

Martin's ability to keep A Game of Thrones so well-contained to a core cast of characters is certainly unusual for the genre. Most often, sprawling epic fantasies branch out further and events don't always actually link the characters together in such a meaningful way until the very end. While this is certainly the case with later Ice and Fire books, I think it's actually a good thing that the first book was different. Martin used A Game of Thrones as a means of getting his readers' feet wet, just wading into all of the different conflicts and characters that were to come, and he allowed them to form an intimate connection with all the members of House Stark who would go on to become major players in the story later early on, becoming invested in their personal story arcs, before he expanded and started including so many more. 

With eight POV characters in one novel, it is difficult to say for certain who the actual "protagonist" is. That being said, if I had to choose, I would point to Eddard "Ned" Stark. He is the patriarch of House Stark, he has the most chapters from his perspective out of all eight viewpoint characters, and his plot is the most central to all of the different conflicts going on in the book--almost everything comes back to Ned's investigation of the murder of the previous Hand of the King, Jon Arryn. However, what's most interesting about the structure of A Game of Thrones is that, despite Ned Stark's position as being the more traditional style protagonist for a story, Ned is not the first character that Martin decides to introduce his perspective. Aside from the prologue (which in A Song of Ice and Fire is always told from the perspective of a one-off character who dies in the prologue), the first chapter of A Game of Thrones is told from the perspective of Ned's eight-year-old son Bran. 

Not only is this structurally an odd choice because Bran is so young, and A Song of Ice and Fire is so adult in nature, but quite honestly, Bran doesn't have many major plot beats in the first installment. In fact, the most important thing that Bran does is get pushed out of a tower window after he accidentally discovers Queen Cersei in a compromised sexual act with her twin brother, Jaime. After that, I really feel that Bran's chapters were used either for the purpose of world-building and doing some early foreshadowing to some of the more fantastical elements of the series that were to come later, or they were used to tell Robb Stark's storyline through Bran's eyes. Robb Stark is the oldest of the Stark siblings, and he goes on to have one of the most major roles in the story's plot, so much so that even the showrunners bumped him up to being more of a POV character in the television adaptation, so it always struck me as odd that GRRM never decided to give Robb any viewpoint chapters of his own. His story is contained through the eyes of his younger brother Bran and his mother Catelyn. Choosing to tell his story through Catelyn's eyes makes sense, because she's Robb's mother and it is used as a clever literary tool to showcase the way that Robb (fifteen in the books) is still a boy at heart. 

But why Bran? 

Like I said, Bran doesn't go on to do much of import until later. Robb's the one in this story who is going off to war, fighting in battles, and later declared King in the North. Shouldn't Robb's battles be more important for us to see, rather than just chapters of Bran lying paralyzed back at Winterfell? I mean, Bran is almost too young and innocent for the very nature of this story, and by not including his perspective of the chapter where he catches Cersei being unfaithful to her husband the King could have amped up the mystery of Bran's "fall" from the tower even more. 

Again, why Bran? Why include him as a POV character at all, let alone introduce the entire novel from his perspective. Now, Martin is not a weak writer. The actual prose of A Song of Ice and Fire isn't that beautiful or writerly, no--but lofty prose also wouldn't reinforce the tone of this story at all. Martin is actually quite a clever writer when it comes to a lot of things--world-building, character development, complex plotlines that have to weave together, politicking. And generally speaking, in most books, even those that contain multiple points of view, the character who narrates the first chapter is usually the story's main protagonist, and in A Song of Ice and Fire, for some reason, that's Bran Stark. Again, Martin is not a bad writer, so he must have had his reasonings for starting this book and the entire series with Bran, and I can only speculate that this is an indication of the major role Bran is going to go on to play in the series' conclusion if we ever get it. Though most show fans were disappointed with the controversial ending given to the HBO adaptation and Bran's ascension to being the new King of Westeros, I can't honestly say that I think this won't happen in the books. The context may be different, but I always keep in mind that Martin started this story with Bran for a reason, and I trust his judgment.

While Bran may ultimately end up the protagonist of A Song of Ice and Fire as an entire story from start to finish, I still remain firm that Ned Stark is the most important character in A Game of Thrones as its own individual story. His central story was definitely the most intriguing of all the varying plots of the book--trying to solve the mystery of Jon Arryn's death and the discovery that Cersei's children are all born of incest between herself and her brother Jaime. There's a certain irony in reading Ned's passages because the reader actually knows more than the character, so as you read, you're absolutely aching for Ned to put it together, but of course, he wasn't privy to the tower scene with Bran, Jaime, and Cersei, and so, there isn't any way for him to come to this immediate conclusion, and that makes reading it all the more intoxicatingly frustrating. 

Ned is also just such a fascinating character to place into a novel with this type of genre and setting because, in a lot of ways, he is used to criticize certain conventions of the medieval/high fantasy genre. In most epic fantasies, it seems the plots usually fall into the trope of "good vs. evil." Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is arguably the most epic fantasy ever written, and it definitely falls under this dichotomy, with most of the characters falling pretty inarguably in either the "good" or "bad" side of the column. Something that Martin does a lot in Ice and Fire, though, is take these genre-based tropes and flips them inside out, so that readers are never necessarily getting the conclusion to a storyline that they would've expected and almost certainly gotten from a different writer, and Ned Stark is a prime example of this. 

Ned is an honorable man, one of the most honorable characters in the series, and he consistently dedicates himself to doing what he believes is just and right. This is an obvious high fantasy trope that Martin isn't trying to avoid using, he just chews it up and spits it out by showing the reader the real consequences of having such a strict honor code in a war setting. Ned's honor does not allow him to triumph in the end and depose of all the evildoers working against him in King's Landing. He doesn't save the day and stop the war, he doesn't save King Robert's life from his vindictive Queen, nor does he really even end up protecting his family. For all of Ned's honor in solving the Jon Arryn murder and revealing the truth that Prince Joffrey is not Robert's son and therefore not the next King, Ned only loses his head for it. Joffrey still gets the throne, Queen Cersei gets away with Robert's murder, and Ned's family all end up in a more dangerous position than they would have been in if Ned had never confronted Cersei with the secret that he knew. Martin, here, is not trying to reinforce the idea of a lot of fantasy works, about honor and duty and righteousness being a good thing. Martin is telling us that if Ned would have chosen his family's safety over his precious sense of honor, then maybe he'd be alive, and his family would still be together. He's showing us the dark reality of the consequences of honor-above-all and the flaws of this feudal society. He's turning the trope inside out, and I love it. Not only because it makes the story more interesting, but just because of the nature of its harsh reality when it comes to war--the good guy doesn't always win.

Another aspect of this part of the story that is so compelling is that it is with Ned Stark's fate that George R.R. Martin reveals what an untrustworthy writer he is, and I mean that in the best sort of way. Generally speaking, most authors can use foreshadowing to clue their reader in to the direction that the story is going to take--some readers figure it out, and some don't, and it usually depends on how skillfully a writer uses their foreshadowing. All good writers foreshadow, but only really great writers know how to properly blend foreshadowing and at the same time subvert the expectations of their readers. Martin pulls off this blend with ease in A Game of Thrones. 

There are so many points of the story that seem to foreshadow the idea of Ned Stark eventually ruling in some capacity by the end of the book. He sits on the Iron Throne while King Robert is away during his fatal hunting trip, Robert (on his deathbed) names him the new Protector of the Realm to rule until his "son" Joffrey comes of age, and on top of that, Ned's a pretty good ruler. There's a reason why the vast majority of Northern lords loved and respected him as their liege lord. Any reader who didn't already know what was coming at the novel's conclusion could look at so many of the examples from Ned's chapters and come to the conclusion that GRRM was slowly laying the groundwork for Ned Stark to eventually rule--even if it wasn't in the first book, it seemed sure to happen at some point. There was so much build-up. 

But you know what there was even more foreshadowing to? Ned Stark's death. 

I mean, Ned's death is literally everywhere in this entire book leading up to it. In one of the earliest chapters, Ned and a band of northern men find a dead direwolf (the sigil of Ned Stark's family) who wandered too far south of the Wall (just as Ned went south to become Robert's Hand), leaving behind its six pups (Ned has five trueborn children and one bastard), and it got killed by a stag (the sigil of House Baratheon, whom Joffrey--the one who orders Ned Stark's execution--technically belongs to, even if Robert's not really his father). This scene actually tells the reader the entire outcome of the story, and Ned's own wife even thinks about the direwolf being disemboweled by a stag to be a bad omen for Ned's decision to become Robert Baratheon's Hand. Not to mention the fact that Martin gives us the entire context of how Ned's father, his brother Brandon, and his sister Lyanna all went south at some point and they all died. And there's the scene in which Varys (the King's master of whisperers) warns Ned that he should have sent the royal executioner, Ser Ilyn (who eventually cuts off Ned's head) after the attainted knight Ser Gregor Clegane instead of Beric Dondarrion, pointing out to Ned that Ser Ilyn takes his job as executioner very seriously. Ned's daughter Arya overhears Varys and his friend from across the sea, Illyrio Mopatis, conspiring about how if one Hand could die, so could the next. Oh, and Bran and his youngest sibling Rickon both have prophetic dreams where they see Ned in the crypts of Winterfell before his death. Like I said, Ned's death is all over this book, and while some readers probably picked up on it as they were reading, I bet just as many latched onto the false foreshadowing of Ned Stark eventually ruling and were absolutely stunned when Ned died with more than 100 pages still left in the book. 

It's this aspect of Martin's writing that I really love, because you never can be fully certain that the story is going in the direction you think it is just because the foreshadowing seems to lead you there. Because Martin could very well be tricking you again just so he can pull the rug out from under you later, as he's done so many times in these books. It's also the reason I find it a bit silly that some readers still seem to believe that series will have a happy or even hopeful ending--that Daenerys will retake the Seven Kingdoms, that Jon Snow will be revealed as the true heir and take the Iron Throne. That the two will eventually meet, get married, and rule the Seven Kingdoms together and bring peace to the realm. No. I don't believe for a single second that either of these things will ever come to pass because those are traditional fantasy tropes of a hero's journey, the kind that Martin is aiming to criticize in his work, and because those trajectories are too easy without any room for Martin to subvert the plot in any meaningful way. These endings are too cliche, and the story is way too dark and complicated and gritty for it all to wrap up in a neat little bow that leaves the readers feeling warm and happy. More than likely, these characters' fates as well as those of most other beloved characters are probably going to play out in more twisted ways that have us reeling in the same way that Eddard Stark's death did--you know, if George Martin ever finishes the books.

If Ned Stark's honor was his fatal flaw and his weakness, I do believe that the position he holds with his family is his strength. A Song of Ice and Fire is riddled with characters who are examples of poor husbands and poor fathers (Robert Baratheon, Tywin Lannister, Roose Bolton, Walder Frey, Randyll Tarly, etc.), and I don't necessarily blame Martin for the repetition of this, because the conventions of the society is that marriages are arranged for political reasons, so love doesn't usually play into what bonds most the noble families together. That being said, it does make Ned's relationship with his wife and children a lovely exception. While he definitely isn't perfect, there is no denying that Ned genuinely loves his whole family, even his bastard son--if Jon is even actually his son.

Of course, the evidence that Jon may not even biologically be Ned's son is actually there from as soon as the very first book. The background context of how Robert Baratheon won the Iron Throne is spelled out from the start--with Rhaegar Targaryen, the son of the old Targaryen King, abducting Ned's sister and Robert's betrothed, Lyanna Stark. Ned even has a dream about Lyanna dying in the Tower of Joy where Rhaegar took her, where the whole room smelled like blood. It all seems to point to death from childbirth, and the idea that Jon is her son, and that Ned kept the identity of his beloved sister's son a secret to protect him from Robert--someone who had been okay with killing infants as war collateral in the past--seems highly likely. Again, this entire idea of Jon Snow secretly being the heir to the Iron Throne does fall into that cliche "chosen one" sort of trope, so while I do think it's probably going to be true, I just can't wait to see how George R.R. Martin turns it inside out later to subvert our expectations.

It is a shame, of course, that Catelyn will probably never learn the truth that Ned never cheated on her. Her relationship with Jon Snow is one of the most complex, and therefore highly interesting, character relationships in A Song of Ice and Fire because clearly Catelyn resents the idea that Ned was unfaithful to her, but she also seems to genuinely love Ned and won't take it out on him, and so she takes it out on Jon Snow instead--pushing him away from their family. Generally, I like Catelyn Stark. In fact, I like her more than a lot of Ice and Fire fans do, but her treatment of Jon Snow is definitely my biggest criticism of her as a character. Obviously, Jon cannot control the circumstances of his own birth, and even if he actually were the product of Ned having an affair with another woman, that wouldn't be Jon's fault. It's Ned's. This is also why I find it surprising that this actually isn't the most common reason that fans give for disliking Catelyn.

So many people seem to blame Catelyn for starting the War of the Five Kings.

Yes, she had a hand in it. She abducted Tyrion Lannister and had him taken captive to her sister Lysa Arryn (nee Tully, widow of the late Hand, Jon Arryn) in the Eyrie to stand trial for supposedly murdering Jon Arryn and trying to have her son Bran assassinated while he was in a coma (neither of which Tyrion actually did). Yes, her actions lead to Tywin Lannister's initial raids in the Riverlands. But also, let's not forget that there were a lot of other forces at play that started the full war, and Catelyn was also a pawn. It was Littlefinger, a man Catelyn had grown up with since she was just a young girl, who was a member of her family for many years, who claimed to love her, who lied to her and manipulated her into believing that Tyrion tried to murder Bran, and while Catelyn shouldn't have done what she did, she did it from the frame of mind of a grieving mother who thinks Tyrion was conspiring to kill her eight-year-old. It's a rash and consequential decision, but one that does make sense from the frame of mind she was in. If anything, Littlefinger himself was more responsible because he's the one who chose to lie and frame Tyrion in the first place, when he knew it wasn't true. He also spurred Ned's investigation of the Lannisters on only to turn on him at the last moment to add more fuel to the fire of the war between the Starks and the Lannisters, and if you've read book three A Storm of Swords, you know that Littlefinger actually did a lot more than just all that to manipulate the war into happening. If anyone is to blame for starting the war, it's Littlefinger, who had been pulling almost everyone's strings from behind the scenes for most of the novel. Everyone was essentially just a pawn in his greater game--one that we still don't actually what the intended endgame is. After five novels of considerable length, I still have no idea what Littlefinger ultimately wants for himself in the end.

We also have to consider that even if Catelyn hadn't abducted Tyrion, the war still would have happened. Ned was already investigating Robert's bastards and probably still would have discovered the truth of Joffrey's parentage. Given his strong sense of honor, he probably still would have tried to actively deny the prince the throne, and Joffrey being who he is probably still would have taken his head for it. Queen Cersei was also on her own mission to get rid of Robert and would have done so no matter what the Starks were up to. Robert's brother Stannis Baratheon knew the truth and was already consolidating his forces on Dragonstone--which is actually why he was absent for the events of the entire first novel. Renly Baratheon and House Tyrell were scheming behind the scenes to make Margaery Tyrell the new queen. Ned's eldest daughter Sansa warned Queen Cersei that her father was trying to take her away from King's Landing and her betrothal to Prince Joffrey which is essentially what tipped the Queen off that Ned was going to strike against her and led to the coup in the Throne Room that god Ned arrested. Littlefinger was scheming behind the scenes. Varys was scheming behind the scenes. And, Jaime had still almost killed Ned Stark's son by throwing him out a window, which was an act of aggression itself. So many other forces were at play that all collectively worked together to cause the War of the Five Kings that it's a bit unfair to pin it all on Catelyn or any one character in particular (except maybe Littlefinger). 

That's part of the beauty of how Martin handles the politicking in his story. There's not one single thing that happens that causes an out-and-out war. It's a slow build of many acts of aggression over time that sizzle and brew until it eventually catches fire. There are so many shades of gray, where there aren't just two sides in the war--black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. There are multiple sides all fighting each other, and neither one is perfectly in the right. It's complicated and messy and so much more realistic as to how wars actually build, and Martin knew how to pull it off perfectly in this book, steadily building up the war with each and every conflict from the hands of so many different characters.

So needless to say, while Catelyn definitely has flaws and made mistakes, I don't blame her entirely for starting the war. And I think she's a fascinating character. She's demonstrated on multiple occasions that she actually has a strong political mind--sometimes even more so than her son Robb. I think the women and girls of House Stark don't get as much credit from Ice and Fire fans as they deserve for being as complex as they are, and that they often get more criticism heaped on them than they deserve. This doesn't only include Catelyn, but it also extends to Ned and Catelyn's daughters, Sansa and Arya as well.

Just like with Catelyn and the war, there are so many fans who are dead-set on blaming Sansa entirely for getting Ned killed. And just like I laid out above with explaining all the factors that caused the war, Ned's death works the same way. Sansa's decision was just one factor out of many that caused it, and I honestly blame her even less than Catelyn just based on how young Sansa is. Contrary to the television series, in which Sansa is a teenager, book-Sansa is eleven. She hasn't even started puberty yet. We're talking about a little girl. Yes, she went to Cersei and told her that Ned was planning on taking her back to Winterfell, but this came from someone who was too young to understand the complicated nature of the war slowly brewing around her. Of the fans who like to criticize her for it, I'd like to see any one of them act any more mindfully about it at age eleven. And for Sansa, aside from her mother who was hundreds of miles away, and her father who wasn't telling her what was going on or why they were leaving, Cersei was the next closest adult-figure she had in her life. The two had been forming a rapport with each other since Sansa was betrothed to marry Cersei's son, so Cersei had become a trusted figure in her life, and at that point in time, Sansa didn't know she had any reason not to trust her, because Ned hadn't warned her not to tell Cersei they were leaving. Sansa was upset and confused, her mother wasn't there, and her father wasn't telling him much, so she went to an adult she thought she could trust. It was certainly a fatal mistake, in the end, but also an innocent one that came from a young child with no malice behind it. And it's not as if Sansa didn't learn from her mistake. She recognizes the role that Cersei and Joffrey both played in her father's execution and learns not to trust them later, during her captivity in King's Landing. 

Sansa's eventual captivity in King's Landing--trapped in her betrothal to King Joffrey--is also part of this wonderful narrative setup that Martin does with the Stark sisters. Sansa always wanted to be a lady and political figure, whereas her younger sister Arya always rebelled against these traditional roles and wanted to be more of a fighter. Martin sets up the end of A Game of Thrones to essentially give each sister what they always wanted. And then, in true Martin fashion, he flips the tropes on their head. Arya is the tomboy trope, but instead of becoming a revered female fighter who triumphs, it's a traumatic experience where she has to become a good fighter in order to survive. Sansa is the damsel in distress, but instead of the handsome prince saving her and falling in love with her, Sansa must use every amount of diplomatic and submissive training she has in order to protect herself from the prince. Instead of glorifying these tropes as some heroic journey, Martin is showing his reader the harsh realities of what each of these lives are really like. Arya's life isn't heroic, it's terrifying. Sansa's life isn't one of those beautiful songs she loves so much, it's captivity, and I can't wait to see how there experiences in learning about the reality they really live in helps these characters fully mature and come back stronger in the end. 

In addition to its viewpoint characters, A Game of Thrones is full of so many other characters that aren't viewpoint characters, but who no less feel integral to the plot of this story and who also still feel fully fleshed out--Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish, Varys, Queen Cersei Lannister, Jaime Lannister, King Robert Baratheon, Robb Stark, among so many more. We never get to see through the eyes of any of these characters in the first novel (and for some of them, we never do), but they're all still so fully realized in the chapters that they do appear in. In books written by lesser than stellar writers, I often feel that authors have a hard time fully integrating their supporting characters into the story, and they often feel extraneous. And while Martin does seem to have a slight problem with feeling the need to give every character--even people who only appear in one paragraph--a name, his side characters are all so dynamic. I was never left feeling like I didn't have a good enough idea of who they were as people.

There's also the mystery of how George R.R. Martin chose some of his viewpoint characters, and why others were left out. With the Stark family, it's easier to figure out. He included so many of them as POV characters because he wanted this book to revolve around their family. But Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen are the outsiders in this. 

So why them? Why take a book with a plot that largely revolves around the Starks and insert these two into the mix? What is Martin's end goal with them? My rather unpopular theory is that Tyrion and Daenerys are going to ultimately end up being the antagonists. I don't say villain or bad guys because I don't necessarily think those two terms are appropriate. "Antagonist" is not always synonymous with "villain." It can be, but not always. In literature, the antagonist is simply the character(s) or force that is working against the protagonist. Sometimes the antagonist isn't even a person. In survival stories, nature can be the antagonist, and there are plenty of stories where the protagonist is the more villainous character and the antagonist is more morally just. In A Song of Ice and Fire, of course, there aren't really true villains and heroes anyway, mostly just shades of gray. To say that Tyrion and Daenerys will eventually be the antagonists is only to say that I think, eventually, it will come down to their political game (Daenery's eventual quest for the Iron Throne, that if you've read book five A Dance with Dragons, you know that Tyrion will become embroiled in) being in direct rivalry to the Starks' primary ambition--the continued fight for Northern independence from the Iron Throne and the right to govern themselves. Martin has already set up the Starks as his central characters in this first novel and made their home his first setting. And if the books even remotely follow the trajectory of the course of the later seasons of the television series, then eventually Daenerys will come from the Iron Throne, making her a natural hurdle to Northern independnce, as she wants all Seven Kingdoms including the North. It makes her their natural adversary. 

So, if this is truly the direction that Martin intends to go (and one can never say for certain because he is a master at subversion), then it's really a brilliant move on his part to include Tyrion and Daenerys as viewpoint characters right from the start. Characters that you're invested in as a reader are the best characters, whether that be heroes or villains, protagonists or antagonists. What George has done here is taken characters who will eventually fall on rival sides and made you invest in all of them before that conflict ever comes to pass, so that by the time it does, it's only going to be more intense for you, as the reader, to experience because you'll be invested in both sides, you'll care about all the characters involved, and deep down, you'll know that both sides can't win. The ending is fated to be bittersweet because of this, as no matter who comes out on top in the end, you're still going to mourn those who don't. It's pure genius on Martin's part because writing it in a way that only makes you route for one side takes half the perspective out of the story, and this is a story that revolves around war and politicking, and getting the full scope of all perspectives involved is important to the conflict. And Martin wants his readers to be conflicted reading it. 

So now let's talk about the elephant in the room. Or, well, should I say, the dragon in the room. 

A lot of people who read this are going to bristle against the idea of me referring to Daenerys as the antagonist, even though I already explained that antagonist does not mean villain, and even though I said the same thing of Tyrion, and even though I'm talking about book-Dany while a lot of people's interpretation of her character is based on show-Dany. I, personally, do not feel that the show's version and the book's version of Daenerys Targaryen are completely identical to one another. There's overlap, but they're ultimately very different. Show-Dany was more of a traditional hero figure and who was built up as being more of a humanitarian with a tendency towards compassion towards those who were suffering, not to mention that she was portrayed as a more mature adult woman. 

I am not talking about show-Dany. I am talking about the Daenerys Targaryen of the novel who is a very young teenager leading possibly the largest army in the world, being worshipped as a godlike figure, and who has the medieval equivalence of three nuclear weapons at her disposal.  

Now, I like Daenerys and would never lump myself in with self-proclaimed "Dany haters." I don't think a character has to be morally justifiable to interesting and fun to read about, and I don't think having criticisms of a character or recognizing their flaws is the same as hating them. Daenerys is very complex and well written, and she's integral to the story. I think her story is every bit as interesting to read about as any of the other less-than-morally-just characters in the series, as this is a story about war after all, you can't expect the characters to be righteous people or you take the conflict and intrigue out of it. That being said, I'm going to admit it. I don't think book-Dany is the compassionate humanitarian that her show counterpart was portrayed early on as being. She certainly has a sympathetic backstory, being forced to flee her homeland as an infant, hunted by assassins her entire life, and sold into a marriage to a war-lord when she was only thirteen by her abusive brother. It's very easy to empathize with her, and I do, but there are still a lot of moments that happen in this book (as well as future installments) where I don't necessarily think that Dany was in the right, which means that I don't necessarily think she's fated to be the story's hero either. It's GRRM we're talking about, after all.

So what exactly has Daenerys done to make me feel this way? 

Honestly, it's not much different than the plot of her story from the first season of the show, except that I think the finer details of the story are ironed out better in the novel, where you can actually read the narration and be inside Dany's head, drawing conclusions from details that just get lost in the page-to-screen translation. Mainly, I'm thinking about her interactions with Mirri Maz Duur.

Mirri is a maegi, a practitioner of magic. She belongs to a village of peaceful, peasant-like people known as Lhazar. Daenerys' husband, Drogo, who is the khal of a nomadic and warlike people sack her village and take the survivors (primarily women and children) to be sold into slavery, Mirri among them. She comes into Daenerys' service after Drogo is wounded, and Mirri steps forward to help heal his wound--with a firm warning from Drogo's bloodriders against causing him any harm, lest she suffer the same fate. When Drogo's wound proves to be fatal, a pregnant Daenerys who is trying desperately not to lose her husband or her position as khaleesi asks Mirri to use magic to try and bring Drogo back to life. She does, but it doesn't work the way Dany intended, as Drogo only comes back comatose, Dany's child is born early and stillborn, and so a grieving and enraged Dany blames Mirri for killing her husband and unborn child for vengeance and burns Mirri alive on Drogo's funeral pyre, which leads to her three petrified dragon eggs hatching into three real live baby dragons, bringing their species back into the world.

That's the surface-level version of the story that we get in the show that is, and the show did an excellent job at painting Mirri as an evil child murderer and Dany is the victim in all of this. But the real version of this that we are given in A Song of Ice and Fire, is deeper and much, much more complicated than this. 

Now, I'm not arguing that Dany has never been a victim. Her brother Viserys was a creep who abused her for her entire childhood, and I don't really find her "love story" with Drogo as romantic and compelling as some fans do, given that she was a child-bride who was sold to him, and that he forced himself on her multiple times in the early days of their marriage. Daenerys has definitely been a victim, I just don't agree that she's the victim where Mirri Maz Duur is concerned. People take her as the victim because the story is told from Daenerys' perspective, and she sees Mirri as having wronged her unjustifiably, so people by into the biased emotional perspective that Dany presents, but if you look objectively, Daenerys definitely comes across as the more villainous party in these circumstances.

First of all, Mirri's village Lhazar was only being sacked because Drogo was intended to sell goods and slaves to raise money to buy ships. The purpose of doing so was to fund Daenerys' war for the Iron Throne. They needed money for ships, so they decided to attack a peaceful, innocent village completely unprovoked and sell its entire population into slavery to see it done. Yes, Drogo is the one who ultimately made this decision, not Daenerys herself, but she was the one who had been trying to convince him to go to war for the Iron Throne of Westeros for their child to sit on some day, and she never actively does anything to try and discourage him from selling slaves to do it. She may not be the directly responsible party, but she was complicit in letting it happen. 

Now, Dany isn't completely heartless. When she witnesses some of the surviving Lhazareen women being raped by Drogo's bloodriders, watching the violence does make her uncomfortable and she asks for them to be stopped and even goes so far as to claim the women to be her own handmaidens, so that they can't be raped further. But after this, her actions afterwards are pretty backwards. She convinces Drogo that if his bloodriders feel that they have to mount the women they've taken captive, then the riders should marry them first. Great! So now the captive women will be unwillingly forced into marriages with their rapists who slaughtered their families and subjected to marital rape instead of sexual slavery! Obviously, Daenerys has done so much to save them from their torment, it's truly astounding (*sigh*). 

There's also the fact that Daenerys' discomfort with seeing the aftermath of the destruction of Lhazar doesn't actually change her stance on war or allow her to grow in a positive direction. She doesn't ever really admit the role that she played in causing the deaths and suffering of these people. She recognizes that it's awful, but she never takes accountability for it. She's also still willing to go along with their original plan to take the captive to Slaver's Bay and sell them (a point conveniently left out of the show). It isn't as if Daenerys ever tried to dissuade Drogo from making this decision later because she wasn't comfortable with these people's suffering. The only reason the plan fell apart was because Drogo became wounded and died, which caused his khalasar to fall apart. But their intention was always to sell the Lhazareen captives into slavery, where many of them would have been sex slaves, and Dany never lets her discomfort with witnessing rape as a means of warfare change her stance on this. It's still her means to get across the Narrow Sea and take back her father's kingdom, so she's ultimately still willing to do it. She's not evil or heartless, as watching the suffering did bother her, but she is quite a bit selfish because she's still willing to let these people continue to suffer because she sees them as collateral for her war. And hey, once they're sold at Slaver's Bay, at least she won't have to watch while they suffer this time, right? (*sight*). 

Now, I also want to point out, that I don't think Mirri Maz Duur's intentions were as cut and dry as they seem on the surface either. It's easy to spin this into a simple story of revenge. Drogo slaughtered Mirri's village, so she kills Drogo in vengeance. That's simple, but George Martin does not write simple stories or simple characters. While it's left vague and open to interpretation, since Mirri is not a POV character, and she's dead, so we'll never get her side of the story anyway, I don't believe that Mirri ever set out to intentionally kill Drogo in the first place. Again, this is my understanding of the book (and only the book. The show spins it more as the vengeance interpretation). But in the novel, Mirri is warned that she'll fare the same fate as Khal Drogo, so killing him would be a rather foolish decision. If anything, I think it's more likely that she volunteered to try and help heal Drogo because she wanted to get in a good position of necessity with Drogo and Daenerys so that she wouldn't be sold at Slaver's Bay. It reads more like a story of a woman serving her enemies to try and save herself. This is also reinforced by a minor point in the novel that is cut from the show entirely, which is that Mirri explicitly told Drogo not to remove the poultice that she put over his wound until she told him it safe to do, but that Drogo didn't listen to her and took it off anyway because it was itching and bothering him. It was only after that that the infection set in and started to claim his life.

Again, this could be interpreted that perhaps the itching was because Mirri poisoned it to kill Drogo, but again, I don't think so. It would only end badly for her, and it seems more likely that Drogo was trying to be the mighty khal and disregard Mirri becomes his people look down on maegis. And even if my interpretation is wrong, and Mirri was intentionally trying to kill Drogo, I can't say I blame her. He slaughtered every man in her village, took all the women and children captive to be sold into slavery, and she was raped by his riders during the sack. What Drogo did to Lhazar is absolutely reprehensible, and Mirri is absolutely justified in hating him for it--as much as the Starks are justified in hating Joffrey for killing Ned. Readers just don't always see it that way because we get the entire story from Dany's perspective, and Dany loves Drogo (I use "love" her loosely because I think her love for him was more or a survival technique in its own right, so that she could take back some agency in her own life), so the reader is naturally swayed into falling in line with Dany's emotions, because George R.R. Martin is phenomenal at writing complex characters and tricking you into feeling sympathy for atrocious people just by the sheer skill with which he writes them! The raw emotion with which Martin writes Daenerys' chapters is so strong, that people are instantly hooked by them instead of developing their own feelings on the matter outside of Daenerys'. People conveniently forget that Drogo is a warlord who sells slaves, slaughters innocent people, and bought and raped a child bride--and yes, it was rape. No matter Martin's feelings on the actual wedding night, subsequent chapters describe Drogo coming into Dany's tent and taking her against her will. 

I also strongly adhere to the interpretation that Mirri isn't responsible for intentionally killing Dany's baby--an interpretation that was, again, watered down in the show adaptation.

First things first, Mirri isn't the one who even brought up black magic or resurrection. Daenerys asked her to use some magic she might know to bring Drogo back, and Mirri explicitly warned her that death would be cleaner. Second of all, she openly told Daenerys that it would be dangerous for any person to enter the tent after she began the resurrection. If she had wanted to intentionally kill Dany's baby, she wouldn't have tried to get her to keep out of the tent. I also strongly believe that the trade between Drogo's life and his horse's worked, and that's why he came back with no human level of consciousness--because he was traded for an animal. The interpretation that Daenerys' baby was traded for Drogo's life also just doesn't track with the description that we get of Dany's stillborn baby.

• Mirri's description of Daenery's stillborn son: " "Monstrous" Mirri Maz Duur finished for [Jorah]. . . "Twisted. I drew him forth myself. He was scaled like a lizard, blind, with the stub of a tail and small leather wings like the wings of a bat. When I touched him, the flesh sloughed off the bone, and inside he was full of graveworms and the stink of corruption. He had been dead for years." " (A Game of Thrones, page 756).

Now, I don't really hold it in high probability that Mirri was making this up, as Jorah was present for this conversation as well as Daenerys' birth and doesn't deny any of Mirri's claims here. And it's pretty obvious what kind of creature Mirri is describing when talking about Dany's baby. It sounds like she was talking about a dragon fetus, and one that hadn't been living, based on her claim that he had been dead for years. For what reason would trading Rhaego for Drogo's life cause Rhaego to come out looking like a petrified dragon fetus and for Drogo to come back without human consciousness? The answer: none. It doesn't make sense. Of course, Daenerys comes to the conclusion, that Rhaego, her child, was traded for Drogo, and I don't blame her for making this conclusion. In the heat of the moment, and in the midst of her grief, it's the natural conclusion to come to. But as a reader, it's clear that Drogo's new form of life and the status of Rhaego's body after his stillbirth just don't connect in any logical way, and that tracks when you look back and analyze the events more carefully.

Mirri told Daenerys for no one to enter the tent after she began chanting for Drogo's resurrection. But that didn't happen, because Drogo's bloodrider Qotho was so infuriated that Dany let Mirri perform black magic on Drogo that he shoved her over, and she went into early labor. The midwives refused to see her because of what she had done and they were desperate for someone qualified to deliver the baby, so Jorah carried Daenerys into the tent for Mirri to deliver the baby. Let me repeat that, Jorah carried a pregnant woman into the black magic tent after Dany was explicitly told that it would be dangerous for anyone to enter the tent when the magic began. It was an absolutely idiotic decision on Jorah's part to think carrying her in there was a good idea, and it's likely the only reason that Dany's baby got involved with the blood magic. If Jorah hadn't carried her in, the birth probably would have gone more naturally. Rhaego may not have lived given that the birth was premature and Dany was so young, but he wouldn't have come out looking like a petrified dragon fetus. In fact, I would even venture a guess that the only reason Dany went into early labor was probably a combination of the emotional duress she was under with Drogo's impending death and because of the physical trauma of Qotho roughly pushing her to the ground. I doubt it had anything to do with the magic, because she wasn't yet inside the tent, and if Mirri's warnings had been headed, she never would have been.

It's clear from the descriptions of Rhaego's body that he was traded for the life inside the petrified dragon eggs that Dany had had with her the entire novel and that were also all inside the tent when the magic was going on. "Only death can pay for life," as Mirri explained it. The death of Drogo's horse paid for his life, though no longer a human life, and the death of Dany's baby paid for the life the petrified fetuses in Dany's dragon eggs. And it all checks out, Drogo has an animal level of consciousness because he was traded for an animal's life. Dany's baby looked like a dragon fetus and the dragons see Daenerys as their mother (even literally suckling from her when they hatch) because Dany's real baby was literally traded for the dragons. If you need any further proof, there is the fact that after Rhaego's birth, Dany had a dream where she saw her son Rhaego consumed by fire, and it was only after Rhaego's death that Daenerys felt heat in the dragon eggs after Rhaego died. Prior, they only ever felt like stones. Rhaego's sacrifice is what brought life into the eggs, and it was a fluke because Jorah made the decision to carry Daenerys into the tent, and that is only reinforced by his strong burden of guilt after it all happens, blaming himself for the death of Dany's child. The only reason that the eggs didn't hatch immediately is because dragon eggs need fire to hatch--which they didn't get until Dany put them on Drogo's funeral pyre--but the life was back in them as soon as Rhaego died. 

But the darker more unsettling aspect of this interpretation is that Mirri didn't kill Dany's baby intentionally. Jorah inadvertently did. It was a mistake, and not even Mirri's mistake. She didn't even intend to kill Drogo--she did everything that Daenerys asked her to do for him right up until Daenerys asks her to try blood magic. And Mirri pays the ultimate price for it anyway. When you really think about it, Mirri is a woman who witnessed nearly her entire population get brutally slaughtered, she was raped, she did everything Daenerys asked her to do, and Dany still burned her alive. It's pretty brutal, and yet most readers were cheering Daenerys on as she murdered a woman who was, in more ways than not, a victim in one the most excruciatingly painful ways possible. 

Of course, this isn't the first time Dany has showcased an interest in this method of execution--and she stood by and watched with fascination when Drogo poured molten gold over her brother Visery's head. We mostly cheered her on when she let this happen because, well, Viserys was abusive and awful, and he had his death coming for a long time. But with Mirri's execution, it's different. George R.R. Martin has pulled all the stops with his writing skills to twist your feelings about this, to make you think Daenerys is the hero triumphing over the villain here when most the textual evidence refutes that. He had us all cheering a brutal murder because he's such a good writer that he can pretty much trick his readers into feeling however he wants them to about any character. And it's not a criticism to the work--it's a strength. Only the best writers can manipulate their readers' feelings like that. 

Ultimately, I do quite love every aspect of where the story ends--Daenerys' as well as all the other characters. Ending the story with the birth of the dragons makes a great contrast to opening the novel with the introduction of the Others, reinforcing the ice and the fire from the series' title A Song of Ice and Fire. 

I also like the bittersweet implications. Ned Stark might be dead and Joffrey still ended up getting the Iron Throne with Cersei at his side, pulling the strings, but the Northerners are marching south to war against the Lannisters with Ned's son Robb declared the new King in the North. The fact that the book ended with Daenerys hatching her dragons also carries the implication that she will also be coming to Westeros for war as well. Future installments, of course, prove that this won't happen immediately, but that's the flavor we get from the ending of the first book: Joffrey and the Lannisters have won the Iron Throne, but Robb Stark and Daenerys Targaryen are both on their way to take it from them. It's the perfect ending to A Game of Thrones as its own novel, and not just the first part of the massive story to come, because it's the perfect blend of loss with hopefulness, and it's open-ended. It wraps up a large portion of just that book's plotlines but leaves it open what will happen in the coming war, letting readers who have not yet started the second book to wonder what will happen and to hope that Robb or Dany or perhaps even Robb and Dany together might overthrow the Lannisters who killed Ned. 

I also think that if George R.R. Martin never finishes the series to give us a cohesive conclusion, A Game of Thrones could still be enjoyed thoroughly as a standalone book, because it has the most perfect ending of all five books, in my opinion. Both conclusive and open-ended enough to be a masterfully done final ending to a great book, and readers can walk away with their own conclusions about what happens next, if they don't want to follow through with future installments of an unfinished series. 

Final Thoughts 

I would rate A Game of Thrones 5 out of 5 stars. It had such great world-building, some of the most complex characters I've ever read about, a great setup for the future installments, and amazing intrigue, and somehow it managed to keep itself well-contained despite the vastness of the universe. 

Read Series Review

Book Two: A Clash of Kings >>