Warped Aesops for Game of Thrones.
- Nice guys finish dead.
- The world is run by insanity, vengeance, daddy issues, greed and lust, in that order. ...Wait, are we sure this is a twist?
- People who kill innocent children are not necessarily bad. If they have a good side, you can totally root for them.
- The best way to avenge your lover and his royal family is by killing even more members of it, effectively dooming that family to extinction.
- Also, if said lover was killed in a legally sanctioned duel that he volunteered for, you have every right to take your anger out on the instigator's innocent granddaughter.
- It's never okay to trust the family of your son's best friend, but it's totally cool to trust a Manipulative Bastard who views women as little more than disposable sex objects, just because you've known him since you were both kids.
- As long as you're King and were born and raised to believe that violence solves every problem, feel free to slap your wife around if she says or does something you don't agree with. The haughty queen starts ranting and raving about how incompetent of a ruler you are and demand you help rescue her brothers? Give that bitch a good smack across the lips and threaten to give her another one if she speaks out of line again. That's how a real king treats his lady! And she definitely won't be plotting to have you killed after getting hit one too many times, either.
- It doesn't matter how much they abuse, torture, starve, rape or kill their slaves, slave masters should be viewed in a sympathetic light because they're simply just trying to get by like everyone else.
- Don't worry too much about everyone giving you grief for killing the king to save your country; chances are, just about everyone who objected to it will end up betraying their allies for a far less noble cause, anyways.
- Getting tortured, maimed, and/or horrifically traumatized will help make you a better person.
- You've accused someone of nobility of paying an assassin to kill your son using his personal dagger, even though no client with half a brain cell would give the assassin such a distinguishable weapon? Don't even try to hear him out, just shove him in a Kangaroo Court to be executed, even though it's a blatant declaration of war against his powerful family. One of your allies proudly admits he committed treason by slaughtering several of your guards and two young, innocent hostages in revenge for his son's murder? Actually, just let him off the hook, you can still talk some sense into him. Besides, his family will get really mad if you choose to have him executed.
- It's morally reasonable to ally yourself with a daughter-raping, baby-sacrificing monster of an individual so long as you have a warm place to stay at for a few nights.
- Bitch-slap and verbally humiliate a corrupt politician in full view of his allies whenever he steps out of line, regardless of how much he outranks you. So long as you're his uncle, mother or grandfather, you'll get away with it.
- The perfect method for keeping your unpredictably violent bastard son in line is to repeatedly insult and berate him over his Stupid Evil antics and flippantly gloat over the fact that your soon-to-be-born legitimate son will take over the family business after you, not him. You have every reason to be surprised when (not if) said bastard suddenly decides to stab you in the back (or the heart, we're not being picky here).
- When forced to choose between finding a cure for your daughter's terminal illness and listening to that sorceress you barely know telling you to sacrifice her to stop a blizzard that will blow over the next day, let your child burn.
- Spending years neglecting your daughter and mocking her appearance and regretting it at the last minute makes you a much better parent than your husband, who treated her with nothing but love and care up until he chose to sacrifice her for the greater good.
- Having trouble differentiating between your targets and innocent civilians while plotting a mass assassination? Don't worry - as long as they're female, they're completely innocent by default!
- You shouldn't share important details regarding the enemy to your ally just because he thinks himself to be clever.
- Suspecting your own sister for treason is completely justified because your omniscient brother can sort out who's wrong with no trouble.
- Do not ally with important individuals even when they are willing to fight for a common cause with you, if they don't agree in one issue.
- A 6'6 musclebound behemoth of a man can easily die from a 4-inch knife in the back. A frail 5 ft. preteen girl can survive getting stabbed in the gut 5 times and still run a marathon afterwards. Case in point - physique and body structure are meaningless.
- Strategies are for wimps, if you are going to win the day anyways.
- It's absolutely justified sacrificing all of your heavy-hitter army in a decisive battle for humanity. All it will take is more time, and your heavy-hitter army will be at full strength, as if they were never gone.
- You don't need a magical wall and an army as well as maintaining them for millennia (or even a dragon) to keep out a force of nature. All you need is an assassin with a dagger who knew nothing about the force of nature to deal with him.
- Always choose the murderous, adulterous tyrant over your noble, heroic Fire-Forged Friend.
- Some random bastard you have never met a day in your life before deserves to be King due to being blood-related to a family well-known for their insanity and bloodlust - even though he keeps insisting that he doesn't really want the throne. Nevertheless, you're dead-set on putting him there, and keeping the queen you currently serve off of it. Do try and act surprised when your best friend, who has his nose buried far up the queen's posterior at this point, decides to snitch on you.
- You should try to negotiate with a despotic ruler (who happens to be your sister who tried to kill you numerous times) and be surprised when it doesn't work. Twice.
- You can execute people out of a sense of duty, get your revenge in the nastiest of ways, blow up a major religious symbol which includes an entire house of rivals, religious zealots and a large number of innocents and you will still be seen as sympathetic. But destroying an entire town because an evil despot puts you on your last leg with seeing your alies die in front of your eyes makes you the most despicable monster of them all regardless of how justified you are.
- Don't bother about rising above what's expected of your family heritage. In the end, you will do exactly what's expected of you anyways.
- With enough science and medical knowledge at your disposal, you too can create an undead supersoldier who's even harder to kill than the literal God of the Dead.
- Whether or not you are irredeemably consumed by revenge depends on how many decades you spend waiting to get revenge on your much stronger aggressor, not how high of a body count your quest for vengeance leaves.
- The queen whom you serve and are loyal to just burned over 1 million innocent men, women and children to a smoldering crisp? It's fine, there's obviously some sort of justification for why she did it. Your family members obviously won't pledge their allegiance to her after this? Now THAT'S something you should be concerned about.
- When putting the people who conspired to kill the queen on trial, the choice of who actually decides the outcome should be made by one of the defendents; especially if the majority of people at the trial are friends/related to the other defendent.
- Believing in your ideals, having a purpose and being able to forge alliance? Those are the marks of a poor ruler. A good ruler should be impartial, follow the whims of other and not want it.
- When you are planning to choose a king; experience, wisdom and popularity with the masses is not required. All you really need to choose a king if he has a better story than everyone else.
- When ransacking the enemy stronghold, it's imperative that you kill the surrendering soldiers and take no prisoners, except for the Warden-turned-traitor who murdered your beloved queen-commander.
- A person who sat around doing nothing is the perfect person to be king.
- It's not required for a medieval equivalent of a finance minister to actually know anything about finance.
