A Song Of Ice And Fire

Of the hands we see work in canon from the series starting, Tyrion does the most. I'm not a Tyrion fan at all but he did more than Ned, Tywin, and Mace and whoever Cersei appoints.

Tyrion's behavior during his marriage to his child bride war hostage still doesn't make me a nice guy to me. He was in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, but he still chose to marry her.

Basically, it amounts to Tyrion not sleeping with Sansa because he wants her to like him enough to sleep with him versus Tyrion not doing it because it's the right thing.

It's clear that he didn't consider that Sansa would never sleep with him when he said that because when she responds with "what if I never want to?", he reacts like he just got slapped in the face. He was fishing for something there, threw the die and lost.

Nice guy to me is the type of person that acts nice so they can fuck you rather than because they're actually nice. To me, that fits Tyrion's relationship with Sansa.

Then I agree with you Mad

"Robert could make a good leader but he seems to more of a guy who wants action and adventure than ruling."

Robert is a guy who will love to live in dugegon and dragons universe, being a perfect murderhobo who will get rich and kill stuff for the rest of his live.

We have to remenber that nice guy is more a tactic(being nice to people in order to get sex) than a mentality which means there is a lot of diferent nice guys: for jocks who said something nice expecting sex to one like Tyrion who have a very low self steam and for him every rejection is confirmation of his worst fears.

Ned would have been an very good king's hand in policy terms if he had been allowed to do his job; he simply wasn't good at the politicking. Whereas as Lannisters are good at politicking but crap at policy (except Cersei, who is bad at both).

In short, Ned was good at doing what was right for the realm, and the Lannisters murdered him for it; that's on them, not on him. The Lannisters were good at staying in power (again, pre-Cersei) but were an absolute disaster for the realm.

edited 13th Nov '17 7:14:53 PM by Galadriel

@Gal I disagree with you about Ned. Ned wasn't a good Hand. He didn't do anything of note/using his authority until he attainted Gregor.

Cersei filled a council and made a treaty with the faith with got rid of a lot of the crowns debt. Yes, they both blew up in her face but she used her royal powers to do something. Ned didn't do anything and shi hit the fan. Cersei at least was an active user of royal powers.

Yeah, filling the council with the same sort of lickspittles that Robert hated.

Ned didnt really try to be a hand, just to be a good friend, meaning he kind did the same mistake of Robert:not getting what they are now.

Robert and Ned both knew of their duties and both actively and passively ignored them. Cersei didn't want to be contested so she appointed people who were followers.

We know from our current series and with pre-series information that there can be councils and courts to investigate or try various royal and noble members. Ned could have used his power as Hand to officially investigate the death of Jon Arryn. Robert loved them both enough to likely not stop it and that could have gotten Stannis back to King's Landing. And if it didn't, a royal summons would have.

Well Ned didn't try and be a Yes-Man.

Robert: We need to kill Daenerys Targaryen.

Everyone else: Okay

Ned: Fuck no, she's a child and is no threat.

I think Ned considered dangerous since he have very few allies there, he want to make things secret.

Sure, but he did it out of moral obligation, not because it was a stupid thing to do.

One of the last times I remember discussing ASOIAF it was over the peculiar fact that the people with power in ASOIAF...don't really have any power. Joffrey and Cersei are the rulers for most of the series yet who thinks of them as being "in charge?" The real power is in the hands of Varys and Littlefinger. These two are, when you get right down to the details, nothing. Dear Cersei and Joff could order both of them killed and there's no "legal recourse" if that happened. They're dead, end of story.

So, Ned Stark as Hand "technically" has power the way Cersei was "technically" the ruler of Westeros for a time. He was considerably more competent and humane than her but he remained a powerless individual because everyone with power appears to have no power at all. What made Tyrion an effective hand was not the title but his personal maneuvers and scheming. Otherwise he'd have been a puppet to have his strings pulled just like all the rest.

Varys' riddle is still the best quote in the entire series and sums up so many things perfectly.

edited 16th Nov '17 12:47:15 AM by Nikkolas

Eh. I mean that's half right but it's an incomplete and unfair assessment imo.

Jaime is lord commander of the kingsguard and he has power to order the kingsguard and no one save the king/regent should have the ability to give the kingsguard orders.

Cersei was regent and she acted as such exercising royal power in appointments and construction/demolition.

Yes, Littlefinger and Varys have a wide network of informers and spies and hired guns but any rich person can pay someone to do a job.

And when Joff was alive he gave orders and people followed them. So to those people he was in charge. Yes, we recognize he's not the brains behind the operation but he was obeyed.

I saw this mentioned on another site and thought it was kinda funny, there was a (really bad) Game of Thrones video game other than the Telltale one with the plot being based around finding one of Robert's bastards, but not just any bastard. One he had with a bastard daughter of Aerys who Targaryen "loyalists" wanted to use as a puppet ruler to gain power that ends up in Varys hands in two of the four endings. Damn it Robert!

I highly doubt that Tyrion would have raped Sansa; he probably would have just licked his wounds and gone back to Shae. Tyrion does some fairly immoral things but overall he's still firmly in the realm of Greyand Grey Morality at this point.

As for Hand competency Tywin was pretty good (considering the king he had to work with). So is Jon Arryn for similar reasons with the exception that he made a major flub with trusting Littlefinger. As a stratigist and tactician Tywin's nothing to write home about but in the realm of logistics he's pretty good.

Not really. Tyrion raped a sex slave in Volantis and feeds a singer to the poor.

You also have to remember that Tyrion wouldn't have had to force Sansa with a knife to rape her. He could just coerce her into doing it by just having so much powers over her.

he said a that point, he raping the slave was when he sunk tino villany.

And for tyrion dialogue, he seen hoping that sansa was able to love him or something, Tyrion thinks Sansa hate him for being ugly and the imp but in true is because...well he is a damn lannister.

By the time he got to Volantis yeah, he's gone totally off the rails. It's his empathy towards the powerless that was his most endearing feature before his falland it's that aspect of his character vanishing after he kills Tywin that sets the stage for his villainy.

I remember he has that singer assassinated, I think he was trying to blackmail him but I can't remember precisely.

edited 4th Dec '17 12:53:37 PM by Sigilbreaker26

The singer was trying to blackmail him by threatening to tattletail on Tyrion and Shae's relationship. Onto the pie he goes.

I mean, Tyrion never actually gave a shit about the powerless. He burned down the homes of Flea Bottom for strategic purposes and then I'm pretty sure he told Bronn to have the Gold cloaks arrest people if they started building their houses again. Tyrion Lannister is an Incel.

Don't know what the hell an incel is but Tyrion is doing all that so that those people will survive a siege (and considering what happened last time King's Landing fell in a siege in addition to how starved for resources he is...)

Plus he had a saddle made for Bran, didn't he? He also tries to befriend Bronn and sort-of Shae (though their relationships are poisoned by the fact that they're inherently transactional) as well as reaching out to Jon Snow. Tyrion is a lonely guy who has empathy for people he sees as in the same situation as him (rejects, or as he aptly puts it "cripples, bastards and broken things") and it's this empathy that seperates him from Cersei, who is in a similar situation (in a loveless marriage to Robert filled with marital rape) but instead of having empathy towards others develops a sort of internalised misogyny.

It's when Tyrion abandons this empathy that he goes down the same road as Cersei. Thinking that Tyrion was always evil is, in my opinion, as much a simplification of his character as the saintly show version.

edited 4th Dec '17 2:16:54 PM by Sigilbreaker26

Incels are a vile community online that got banned from Reddit for being too out there even by the standards of Reddit. "Incel" is short for "involuntary celibacy", and basically they're people - mostly guys, many of whom would reject even the notion that a woman can be involuntarily celibate - who have developed very warped views of human interaction, especially with regard to the opposite sex.

Typically, they'll complain that they're virgins because they're not good looking enough to attract someone who would have sex with them (whether they want a long-term relationship or not varies from person to person, obviously). They reject the idea that their behaviour might have anything to do with it, even if they're rarely (if ever) approached anyone they found attractive, or if they've only made such approaches in an aggressive way. They'll also refuse to think that they should ever lower their standards, especially regarding appearance.

Having been rejected or "neglected" for so long by members of (usually) the opposite sex, they resent members of that sex. They have all sorts of theories - although that's too lofty a word for their delusions - about the factors that control the behaviour of their opposite sex, usually very negative ones.

I'm pretty familiar with this phenomenon these days because I've been reading various subreddits for a while now, including ones focused on feminism and related issues, so I also ended up reading the Incels subreddit for a while, out of morbid curiosity. (That subreddit no longer exists, but they've spread to other places; I believe "redpill" is one of them, but they were probably always a pretty major faction among the "redpill" followers.) It's quite easy to feel sorry for these people at first, but then they end up saying something absolutely horrible that makes it very hard to have any sort of basic respect for them, including defending - or outright advocating - sexual violence as a punishment for women who have "too high" standards.

When people from other points of view try to have a conversation with incels, it's very difficult because incels are typically very depressed, and very open about it, and when you challenge them in any way, they'll typically respond with threats of self harm. That just kills the conversation, obviously, which is probably the effect they're going for by using that tactic.

EDIT:

edited 4th Dec '17 3:53:46 PM by BestOf

Wow that's quite bad.

That description totally doesn't fit Tyrion though, given he spent a good deal of time trying to make friends. Like, maybe post Tywin-assassination you could make a case for it, and he's certainly wrestling with self-loathing for basically all the time before and after that, but he's just too complex to dismiss with an internet group.

edited 4th Dec '17 3:55:53 PM by Sigilbreaker26

I meant to comment beyond that note on incels, about Tyrion: he's definitely not an incel, for a variety of reasons.

First, he does respect at least some - actually, most - women. He does lose his moral compass in Volantis, but from the narration you can tell that he's almost immediately disgusted with himself, and when he recovers his sanity, he will probably feel guilty about that for a very long time.

He doesn't rape Sansa, either, nor would he do it; he would rather sleep with prostitutes, as he has always done. Now, you can argue that using the services of prostitutes, especially when they're not necessarily willing to be in that profession, is disrespectful towards women, but it is a mostly accepted phenomenon in their society, so even though that is a blemish on his record, at least he's not necessarily dipping below the standards of the average Westerosi nobleman in that regard. Now, obviously, not raping people is a ridiculously low standard by which to judge anyone; the only reason I bring it up at all is that Tyrion is actually being ordered to do it, yet he doesn't. If he did force himself on his wife, it would be something that his society would not only condone, but applaud; yet he doesn't force himself on Sansa because he values her more than his father's orders. He also saved Sansa from a beating that was ordered by the King, so there's that.

Don't get me wrong: Tyrion is no saint, and while he does show compassion (I would argue, often), he does also largely ignore the plight of people from the lower tiers of society. He's a mixed bag. I'm just saying he's not a daemon, nor is he comparable to the "incel" community.

While it's true that he doesn't rape Sansa, he does fucking act like he deserves a medal for not doing so.