Good point. I think the secret to his success is making sure the people who would catch on don’t make it back. Hence, making sure that Halman Tallhart and Robett Glover don’t make it back to report to Robb and find out that they were told Roose had orders from the King in the North and Roose told Robb they went AWOL.
“To Carthage then I came/Burning burning burning burning”
–The Waste Land
And we leave our hero staggering punch-and-literally-drunk through the shallows of the Void…just like he was at the beginning. I did warn you: he doesn’t grow. He doesn’t change. He doesn’t get better.
What changes now, I believe, are his capabilities, and quite radically.
I think Tyrion Lannister, along with and alongside Daenerys Targaryen, is going to ride the line between heroism and villainy for the rest of the series, before deciding at the very end to fight with post-human paladin Jon Snow on the side of the angels. But I also think for that to stick, for it to stand out amidst the metaphysical fireworks of endgame, Tyrion’s struggle has to be–and is going to be–blown up to an appropriately mythical scale in TWOW. I’m certainly not saying that how he relates to Penny or thinks about his siblings is unimportant, but for Tyrion to achieve the important destiny glimpsed by Moqorro (and lbr demanded by his prominence in the narrative), he needs…well, given where he is and what’s going on there, what else would it be?
“What are you reading about?” he asked.
“Dragons,” Tyrion told him.
“What good is that? There are no more dragons,” the boy said with the easy certainty of youth.
“So they say,” Tyrion replied. “Sad, isn’t it? When I was your age, I used to dream of having a dragon of my own.”
He had expected to find them impressive, perhaps even frightening. He had not thought to find them beautiful. Yet they were. As black as onyx, polished smooth, so the bone seemed to shimmer in the light of his torch. They liked the fire, he sensed. He’d thrust the torch into the mouth of one of the larger skulls and made the shadows leap and dance on the wall behind him. The teeth were long, curving knives of black diamond. The flame of the torch was nothing to them; they had bathed in the heat of far greater fires. When he had moved away, Tyrion could have sworn that the beast’s empty eye sockets had watched him go.
The clouds in the sky were aglow: pink and purple, maroon and gold, pearl and saffron. One looked like a dragon. Once a man has seen a dragon in flight, let him stay at home and tend his garden in content, someone had written once, for this wide world has no greater wonder. Tyrion scratched at his scar and tried to recall the author’s name. Dragons had been much in his thoughts of late.
“If you want to conquer the world, you best have dragons.”
Tyrion could not help but laugh.
The white cyvasse dragon ended up at Tyrion’s feet. He scooped it off the carpet and wiped it on his sleeve, but some of the Yunkish blood had collected in the fine grooves of the carving, so the pale wood seemed veined with red.
After a book of being trapped inside his own head, crammed into one uncomfortable corner after another, and confronted at every turn with his own powerlessness, I think Tyrion will return triumphantly to the main stage on the back of Viserion, ready for his goddamn motherfucking closeup. And the power and ecstasy and sheer sweet existential validation of becoming a dragonrider will pull his character in two directions at once. On the one hand, it will allow him to fight the good fight from Yunkai to Volantis, and I think he’ll spend the middle third or so of TWOW doing just that (the slaves on the Volantene fleet creeping toward Slaver’s Bay are about to have their chains broken en masse, if they don’t rebel on Benerro’s and/or the Widow of the Waterfront’s orders first). On the other hand…the Tyrion of TWOW is still going to be the Tyrion of ADWD, because he has yet to begin getting better. So forget for a moment the lasting-for-days glow you got the first time reading Tyrion’s “one, two, three” setup in ACOK, and consider: would you give this guy a napalm-armed helicopter with teeth and turn him loose on the Middle Ages?
But then again, it’s ultimately too simplistic to set up rigid barriers between the books like that. One of the most powerful aspects of rereading the earlier books after ADWD’s release is realizing how much of Tyrion’s mindset in the latest novel is seeded in the first three:
“I used to start fires in the bowels of Casterly Rock and stare at the flames for hours, pretending they were dragonfire. Sometimes I’d imagine my father burning. At other times, my sister.”
And as I said above, he’s not going to be flying solo for long. I think the natural meeting point for his path and Dany’s is in/around Volantis, before/after/during the delta’s liberation. Indeed, we see in Tyrion’s sixth chapter foreshadowing of how Dany, with the Dothraki united behind her and with Tyrion’s advice, could take down the Old Blood:
“On the way down from the Sorrows to Selhorys, we thrice glimpsed riders moving south along the river’s eastern shore. Dothraki. Once they were so close we could hear the bells tinkling in their braids, and sometimes at night their fires could be seen beyond the eastern hills. We passed warships as well, Volantene river galleys crammed with slave soldiers. The triarchs fear an attack upon Selhorys, plainly.”
Tyrion understood that quick enough. Alone amongst the major river towns, Selhorys stood upon the eastern bank of the Rhoyne, making it much more vulnerable to the horselords than its sister towns across the river. Even so, it is a small prize. If I were khal, I would feint at Selhorys, let the Volantenes rush to defend it, then swing south and ride hard for Volantis itself.
After the dust has cleared, while the Widow and the red priests reorder their chunk of Essos, our heroes will have quite a bit to discuss: dragons, Tywin, Jaime, Jorah…and of course Aegon.
This is really where we get into the villain side of that aforementioned line, as I think Tyrion will foster mistrust, suspicion, and ultimately war between Dany and Aegon. I’m convinced that one of GRRM’s guiding goals while assembling the Meereenese Knot was ensuring that Tyrion in particular was in position to break the news about Aegon to Dany. And IMO the signs are clear that Tyrion doesn’t believe Aegon to be Rhaegar and Elia’s son:
“A true friend, our Lord Connington. He must be, to remain so fiercely loyal to the grandson of the king who took his lands and titles and sent him into exile. A pity about that. Elsewise Prince Rhaegar’s friend might have been on hand when my father sacked King’s Landing, to save Prince Rhaegar’s precious little son from getting his royal brains dashed out against a wall.”
The lad flushed. “That was not me. I told you. That was some tanner’s son from Pisswater Bend whose mother died birthing him. His father sold him to Lord Varys for a jug of Arbor gold. He had other sons but had never tasted Arbor gold. Varys gave the Pisswater boy to my lady mother and carried me away.”
“Aye.” Tyrion moved his elephants. “And when the pisswater prince was safely dead, the eunuch smuggled you across the narrow sea to his fat friend the cheesemonger, who hid you on a poleboat and found an exile lord willing to call himself your father. It does make for a splendid story, and the singers will make much of your escape once you take the Iron Throne…”
Dany, of course, will immediately make the connection to the “mummer’s dragon” from the House of the Undying. And as I’ve argued before, when Dany inevitably learns from Tyrion that Illyrio is behind this, she will fly to Pentos in a rage to confront her ostensible patron. Once Illyrio admits Aegon’s his son, I think Dany will have Drogon burn him alive; that gift of dragon eggs comes home to roost, and Tyrion’s ADWD storyline comes full circle, from Pentos to Volantis to Meereen and back again with the One Ring a dragon.
And after that…well, that’s ADOS territory, and I’m losing focus on Tyrion. Here’s where his ADWD storyline leaves me. On the one hand, I still believe that Tyrion Lannister not only wants to be loved, he wants to love; he wants to do good in this changing world. On the other, he spends the entirety of A Dance with Dragons trying to kill the part of him that cares. This is a story about existential failure: the Void. It’s not that Tyrion will actually become a straight-up villain. It’s that he wants to.
Congratulations on one of the best, if not the best meta series, ever.
Hiya! I’m of the school that says when Patches went down with the Windproud, he encountered the Drowned God beneath the waves, and became Its prophet. Of course, we know from WOIAF that said God is a Lovecraftian abomination, and so the sight of It drove Patches mad even as It kept him miraculously alive before returning him to the surface world: “no one ever explained those two days the fool had been lost in the sea.” (I expect It will drive Damphair mad as well when he summons It in TWOW by praying for Its help against Euron before the Seastone Chair built by Its children the Deep Ones, although I do hope Aeron retains enough sanity to ride It into battle against his by-then-dragonriding abuser. C’mon, tell me with a straight face you don’t want to see C’thulhu fight a dragon while Sam runs around underneath trying to save his books. “My atlas!” he cries as Sarella literally drags him away.)
As for the individual prophecies, you’re right on about the Red Wedding. The one about smoke under the water and flames burning green is pretty clearly referring to the Blackwater, and “in the dark the dead are dancing” is a chilling vision of the Others’ reign. But while I’m sure the rest have specific “answers,” I see them all collectively as evidence of how thoroughly direct contact with the divine screws with your brain. Being a prophet means, to paraphrase Jaeherys II, walking a line between greatness and madness, and I think what poor Patches went through “under the sea” pushed him far over that line. When he says “I know, I know, I know,” it’s not a brag. The revelation, the knowledge, of the Drowned God is a crippling curse, not an empowering blessing.
Finally, I think Patches’ prophecies are meant in part to undercut Melisandre’s messianic certitude. As @racefortheironthrone put it regarding the aforementioned vision of the Blackwater, “even as Melisandre pushes forward her religious mission, metaphysical events are happening below her nose that she cannot see coming.”
I would also add that Patchface contrasts strongly with Aeron Damphair. Aeron believes himself to be a true prophet of the Drowned God, but ultimately he’s the same weak man he’s always been who’s listening to the voices in his own head and confusing them with the divine, and lacks the true conviction of his faith.
Reminds me a lot of Deacon Vorbis from Small Gods – on the outside, a fanatic, on the inside a solipsist.
Historian @racefortheironthrone is joining me to explain all the references to you! You guys are lucky you got two NYers here to explain the NYC references. And my extensive knowledge of 80s New Wave and UK glam rock are really going to come in to play here.
I actually spotted an error in the dialog! I’ll be telling you about that and much more!
And I’ll be talking about Batman and super-science!
Back by Popular Demand Elana and Steven dive in to the second episode of The Venture Bros. called “Maybe No Go“. The Venture Bros. cartoon on Adult Swim references everything from Hannah-Barbara to Marvel, David Bowie to the Big Bopper, cult cinema, Oscar Wilde to Henry Kissinger. The show’s central theme is failure– the reality of life after the promises and optimism of the 60s space age have…
Welcome back to A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, where I explore how real-world politics (and weird bits of pop culture) was presented in some of my favorite bits of classic Marvel comics. In this issue, I’ll be discussing how Captain America made the transition from his Timely Comics incarnation to the Marvel era.
Timely Comics’s
version of Captain America was (to be kind) rather crude, still in that stage
where superheroes as a genre are still emerging from pulp, so there’s a lot of
repetitious scenes where Cap and/or Bucky get tied to chairs because that’s the
only way the author can think of to get to the plot exposition, most of the
villains are pretty generic mobster types, and so on. However, Kirby and Lee
were able to go back and sift through the old material to find the stuff that
worked – Steve Rogers as Captain America, the uniform and the mighty shield,
the Red Skull, Agent 13 – while ditching the stuff that didn’t work (the secret
identity, Bucky to an extent, etc.).
At the same time,
there were a number of strategies that Marvel used to make the transition work.
First, in the very act of updating Captain America from the 1940s to the 1960s,
Kirby and Lee made Steve Rogers a man out of time, giving a previously rather
thinly-sketched individual a rich source of Marvel-style pathos and
interiority. The Steve Rogers who emerged in the pages of the Avengers, Tales
of Suspense, and Captain America is a veteran haunted by the memory of his
losses during WWII, a rare example in which PTSD is given its place in that
conflict. (Indeed, a lot of stories from this era involve Cap having vivid
flashbacks or hallucinations that make him question his sanity.)
However, with Kirby
there as the keeper of the sacred flame to ensure that the original spirit of Captain
America wasn’t lost, Steve Rogers’ status as a man out of time was never an
excuse to position him as a conservative or reactionary
figure. Rather,
Captain America’s position was that he would embrace these changes and fight
for the same progressive change that he had back in the New Deal:
And that’s what I
think people often get wrong about Captain America: while he was born into the
“Greatest Generation,” he’s not an old man. Rather, because of his variable
number of decades frozen in the ice, he’s a young man who’s traveled through
time, bringing the passion and idealism of youth into a new era.
Second, Kirby and
Lee kept much of the political edge of the original comics by making a
foundational element of the new Cap comics that Nazism was not dead, but had
continued into the present day as a hostile force that threatened liberal
values, often hidden beneath reactionary causes and movements (hence the
usefulness of HYDRA as a dark mirror through which to question and explore the
national security state in Captain
America: Winter Soldier). For example, early on in Tales of Suspense, they
posited that Nazi agents were at work in modern Germany:
To argue that
Nazis were hidden in German society, as if Himmler’s Operation
Werwolf had
really come to pass, was a pretty bold political statement in a Cold War world
only five years past the construction of the Berlin Wall and in which the
Western German government had yet to publicly grapple with the legacy of the
Holocaust. But Kirby’s political acumen shines in these issues, grounding these
stories in contemporary politics, as with this reference to West German laws
banning the display of Nazi iconography:
Third, another
thing that Marvel could bring to the table is a fully matured Jack Kirby. As I
mentioned above, the Timely Captain America comics were too close to the pulp
era to really be distinctively superheroic. But by the 1960s, Kirby was Kirby.
And so what the Red Skull’s sleeper agents were out to awaken was not merely a
coup against the Federal Republic of Germany, but a giant Nazi robot:
The Timely Comics
version of the Red Skull had been a petty saboteur and sometimes assassin, very
much within the wheelhouse of pulp antagonists. The new Red Skull (who’ll be
explored in future installments) was reimagined as a full-on supervillain with
a flair for giant robots, doomsday devices, world conquest, and grandiloquent
speeches complete with cigarette holder. And so Kirby gave the world not just a
giant robot menacing the free world, but a Nazi Voltron:
This was the
secret alchemy that brought Captain America into the contemporary world of
Mighty Marvel Comics: on the one hand, Jack Kirby’s larger-than-life visuals and
Marvel’s attention to interiority gave Captain America new life, but on the
other, the original political spirit of the Timely Comics was carefully
preserved, so that what made Captain America unique is a superhero is that his
power is essentially weaponized progressive ideology:
Face front, true believers! Welcome back to People’s History of the Marvel Universe, where I explore how real-world politics (and weird bits of pop culture) was presented in some of my favorite bits of classic Marvel comics. In this issue, I’ll be discussing how Captain America made the transition from his Timely Comics incarnation to the Marvel era. Timely Comics’s version of Captain America was…
Credit to Bob Al-Greene Hey folks! Still working on Arya X – I’m up to 5,000 words, chugging through the last of the Political Analysis section – so in the meantime, I thought I’d throw up some other stuff I’ve been working on: A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, Week 1: Captain America Hates Income Tax Evaders A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, Week 2: John Byrne’s Hatred for…
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