The Trauma of Westeros

[SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU ARE NOT CAUGHT UP ON "GAME OF THRONES," PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK]


Game of Thrones is traumatic. In the books and in the show, trauma plays a huge role in how characters function (or don't), and how the worlds are shaped. As a work of fiction, the audience vicariously experiences many of these traumas (a number of them happen off-stage, or in the past). What reader didn't put the book down after the Red Wedding, curse George R.R. Martin, and stew in their sense of injustice before returning? (Seriously, I want to know)

But the constancy of danger and uncertainty in the series has meant that no characters have had the chance to reflect on their experiences. Which is one of the reasons the show in particular, although to a lesser extent, the books as well, has been heavily criticized for its depictions of rape--the structure of the storytelling never allowed for audiences to witness the effects of that trauma, only the sick satisfaction that the act itself, as with other acts of violence depicted in fiction, provides us with. It's dangerous to do that. It promotes a voyeuristic association with violence. And that has real-world effects, not in the individual sense, but en masse. For as plodding as we might think the pace can be at times, it's safe to say that very few characters ever get to feel secure enough to deal with their trauma.

Until recently.

It's why the scene last season, between Sansa and Baelish, was so essential to Sansa's character development. She forces him to confront his actions. To acknowledge what was done to her, and his knowledge that it would happen. In one of the best lines ever written on the show, and masterfully acted, she says, "I can still feel it. I don't mean in my tender heart what he did still pains me so. I can still feel what he did, in my body." It is so frank, so honest, so undiluted in its ownership of her experience, and in her knowledge of what that meant, that I was able to forgive the showrunners their responsibility for what was done to her. Well, forgive but not forget--I've got my eyes on you, showrunners.

Likewise, Danaerys has a speech to Jon Snow in the third episode this season, enumerating the wrongs done to her, a nice mirror to the exhaustive list of her titles and deeds. At the end of it, she asserts her faith in herself as being the one thing that kept her going through it all. It's been a while since we saw Dany vulnerable, and it's easy to believe, with her unprecedented power amassed, that she has forgotten what it felt like to be sold, raped, beaten, enslaved, and targeted by assassins. But she hasn't. No person could. And as Missandei and Grey Worm pointed out to Tyrion in Mereen, there's a vast difference between understanding and knowing.

Sunday night's episode, "The Spoils of War," gave us more of this reckoning. For the first time since her father was beheaded, Arya felt safe, not because she knew she could survive whatever attack might befall her, as with the previous three episodes, but because she knew she would not be attacked. She's had her list of wrongs down pat for a long time now, but she's never been in a place where she could reflect on how those wrongs have changed her. In three excellent scenes, we see her go from laughing with her sister about her list of names as though it's still a childish wish, having that illusion broken by Bran's knowledge of her actions in front of Sansa, and trying her skills in combat practice with Brienne. We've seen Arya spar before, but we've never seen her win. And even though she enjoyed her training with Syrio, she still came out of it bruised and scolded. But this time, she walked into the scene with confidence, she chose Brienne because she saw her as an equal, refusing the offer to spar with the Master of Arms because he was beneath her skill level. And it was glorious. Not just from a cinematic perspective, not just the choreography and the pacing, which were all thrilling, but in the fact that, for the first time since Syrio Forell died, we see her joyful. She's not defiant, she's not angry at her opponent, she's not running on vengeance. She is where she always wanted to be as a child, doing her form of needlework in the grounds of Winterfell. Arya had her sense of self stripped from her in so many ways over the course of her journey, from being shorn and disguised as a boy, to playing a cupbearer for Tywin Lannister, and of course, to being "no one." At the end of the last season, we see her reclaim her name, but until she arrives home, she has had no reason to live save vengeance. And as useful a tool as that has been for her survival, it is yet another force that serves to strip her of herself. When she smiles at the end of the bout, it is perhaps the first time since Jon gave her Needle, or Ned agreed to grant her tutelage, that she's felt appreciated for who she really is.

You can't talk about trauma in the series without talking about Theon. Years of physical mutilation and psychological torture have transformed him, literally and figuratively. And as the showrunners rightfully pointed out when discussing the end of the second episode, where he abandons his sister to Euron, that's not something you just get over. And while it may be tempting to shake our heads and demand that he remember himself (a wholly unsympathetic response that reflects our cultural attitudes toward victims of abuse), Theon has a problem that Sansa, Dany, and Arya don't, namely that he wasn't exactly strong or admirable to begin with. Reclaiming himself isn't so easy when that person isn't someone he wants to be anymore. His situation is perhaps one of the best examples of the failures of retribution. If what you wanted from Theon was for him to learn, and grow, and be a better man, what was done to him has made that more difficult, not less. 

But Sunday night's episode did something new. And yes, it involved a dragon. This show has never made war look particularly fun; especially as it's progressed, the battles have become far more brutal. Battle of the Bastards especially so, with the sheer mass of bodies piling into a barrier, the penning in Jon and his men, the near-trampling of Jon under all of their limbs. But this. This was different. Because of Jaime Lannister. 

Never has the show straddled the audience's allegiances like this before. Jaime's one true despicable act in the entire series was shoving Bran out the window at Winterfell (the rape in Baelor's Sept being a grey area, not because it wasn't a rape, but because it wasn't supposed to be--showrunners, I'm still watching you), and we have come so far with him that it seems highly doubtful that, given the same scenario now, he would do it again. Yes, sleeping with his twin sister is gross, but at this point, it's a quaint vice compared to everything else. And we know he truly loves Cersei, all the more pity for him. 

And Jaime is one of two characters in the show who know how horrific fire can be (the Hound is pretty familiar with it as well). He watched Brandon Stark burned alive in the throne room by the Mad King. He killed the Mad King to protect the citizens of Kings' Landing from the same fate, and that act has been an albatross around his neck ever since. And here he is, the focus of the first real dragon battle we've seen.

Well, it's not exactly a battle, is it?

It's no accident that the moments leading up to the slaughter are spent between Jaime, Bronn, and Dickon, talking about the difference between what Dickon thought war was, and what it actually is. It smells different, for one. But the Lannister attack on Highgarden was not really a battle, either. Jaime took no pride in it, and Dickon, full of dreams of nobly facing a menacing host, instead found himself cutting down ill-equipped men he had known by name.

And then you hear the Dothraki. 

And then the dragon. 

And then Jaime watches as twenty Brandon Starks are cooked in their armor. 

What must this battle smell like, we are left to wonder as we watch the smoke curl and blacken the air. 

And as much as we have been frustrated alongside Danaerys as Tyrion's plans have quickly fallen apart, the directors don't let us feel her triumph untainted. We have been reminded again and again that the people would not forget if she set her dragons on Kings' Landing and all it's citizens, and faced with the results of a single dragon attack on enlisted soldiers at arms, we know why. We may desire Dany's victory, but we experience the slaughter with Jaime. We see him, surrounded by his worst nightmare, the air thick with the ashes of his dead soldiers, his determination to kill Dany building as he remembers Aerys. 

But Jaime fails, saved from Drogon's fire by Bronn, and he fades into the water, weighted down by all his Lannister gold. He'll be back, of course, and only then will we see how he deals with the memories of the men he saw reduced to char and ash in an instant. 

The wars of Westeros are seated in a history we have mythologized much like Sansa at the start of the series: legends of valor and honorable battles. But this felt more like modern warfare. The horrors of napalm, and airborne raids, the atomic bombs that cast shadows of the dead on the ground. It's the end battle of "The Last Samurai" (the only part of that movie worth a damn, even though Tom Cruise is still in it), except this time our broader sympathies lie with the ones doing the mowing-down. It begs questions of us that we should be asking of ourselves every time we see our bombs exploding on the nightly news. Where are the victims? And after what they've seen, is it really reasonable to expect a peaceful laying-down of arms? Or are we just fostering the rage of a generation of victims, determined to make the slaughter end by taking up arms against us, regardless of the odds?

Considering the many criticisms against the show, shooting this scene from Jaime's perspective may just be the most morally responsible decision the showrunners have ever made.