A Defense of Tyrion’s ADWD Storyline, Part 1: Introduction

poorquentyn:

“I’m done. Done, you hear me? Fuck your story, fuck your readers, fuck your fucking human heart in conflict with itself. I don’t care about any of it. I don’t care about myself, let alone the world around me. I’m not a hero, and I’m not your protagonist anymore.” –Tyrion Lannister, basically

Amidst all the grand, complex themes of A Dance with Dragons, there is one man who will tell you it’s all bullshit, and who would know better, given that he’s had the most chapters of anyone in this stupid story he hates? There is an unmistakable whiff of the meta to Tyrion’s storyline in Dance. Here we have the most beloved character in the series essentially going on strike in the wake of soul-shattering trauma and alienation, denying us everything we loved about him and emphasizing everything we preferred not to notice in the first three books. Our easy delight curdles, mirroring Tyrion’s own descent into nihilism. But GRRM himself isn’t nihilistic. Rather, he takes Tyrion’s pain (and the pain he’s inflicted on others) seriously, and refuses to artificially speed up his recovery, instead leaving us alone with the abyss, the Eternal Void. As Louis CK (one of our finest modern philosophers) put it: “Underneath everything in your life, there’s that thing, that Empty, the Forever-Empty…the knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone.” 

And yet…the world our former hero is passing through, that of western Essos, is a really fascinating one at the moment. Tyrion’s journey is a spatio-temporal history of the continent, starting in the womb of detached, annihilating wealth in Pentos before being spat out into Andalos (the staging ground for the patriarchy that ruined Tyrion’s life), the living cultures and the dead ones of the Mother Rhoyne, the Sixth Blackfyre Rebellion disguised as a Targaryen restoration, Old Volantis of cherished memory and uncertain future, the messianic plans of the red priests and the stand-athwart-history-yelling-stop plans of the slavers, the ancient/revived fighting pits of Meereen, and finally the eternal role played by sellswords, so often tangential but now increasingly central. All of Essos is in turmoil (not for nothing does GRRM rename dysentery the bloody flux), past and present blurring together, values and cultures and fears and hopes all clashing. Indeed, the very fact that a Valyrian-blooded dragonrider is fighting to end slavery indicates that the continent is going through a period of intense existential redefinition. All this, to my mind, constitutes the most compelling and sophisticated social/political material of the series. But crucially, our principal POV onto this epoch is a man who can barely lift his head from a pool of wine-soaked vomit to pay attention to any of it. He does not grow. He does not change. He does not get better. He decides in his first chapter not to kill himself, and that’s basically the only revelation we are given.

So that will be the two-sided subject of my analysis of Tyrion’s storyline (it cannot be called an “arc”) in A Dance with Dragons: the excitement without and the emptiness within, and how the two interact, both contrasting with and occasionally mirroring each other. This will be a nine-part series: 

1. Intro 

2. Layover with Illyrio

3. Travels with Team Aegon, part 1 (meet n’ greet, riding the Rhoyne)

4. Travels with Team Aegon, part 2 (the Sorrows, the reveal, a game of cyvasse)

5. The Volantene delta (another game of cyvasse, the kidnapping, the city walking tour)

6. The Stinky Steward Selaesori Qhoran

7. Slavery

8. The Second Sons

9. Conclusion and predictions for TWOW

As you can guess from the parentheticals, these parts will not always break down along chapter lines, but I will be discussing how I feel about individual chapters in and of themselves along the way, as each has a unique feel to it. 

Let me close by saying that I’m quite excited and nervous about this, as it’s my first multi-part essay like the big-boy fandom blogs. I hope it goes well, and thanks for reading ❤

Goddamn, poorquentyn can write. Really looking forward to this series.