Dream Log: 'Game of Thrones' Alternate World

Last night I dreamed I was a minor character in "Game of Thrones." 

 

I was a mercenary, a sell sword, but I didn't want to fight, which meant that I and a couple of like-minded former comrades-in-arms were basically now drifters.

After drifting for a while we came to a large ominous-looking door in a wall. What was most ominous about the wall and the door was how 21st century they looked. This being "Game of Thrones" and all, things were supposed to look about 15th century, at the newest. After a moment of foreboding, we opened the door and walked into what looked like a 21st century university classroom, with an up-to-date professor at the head of group of today's students. 

It was all so completely unfamiliar!

Except... it wasn't. Not completely...

The professor saw us starting to figure things out and said, "Okay, okay," and directed some of the students to sit us down in the midst of them. 

It was the year 2023. Which meant the "Game of Thrones" world we had been living in... 

"Is a computer simulation," the professor said. 

Then we started to ask questions which were clearly more embarrassing, such as, What exactly were we doing roaming around a non-existent quasi-Medieval world, carrying swords, trying not to get into fights, thinking it was real and forgetting the present?

They seemed distinctly disinclined to answer any questions of those kind, instead trying to turn everything around on us, demanding to know just exactly what right we thought had to barge in here and interrupt them, and insisting that we return tomorrow at precisely one in the afternoon for processing.

I was having none of that, telling them we weren't guinea pigs and what kind of cold-blooded monsters were they, and pretty soon everybody was shouting, and one of them said she was calling security, and security was better-armed than just swords. I unbuckled my scabbard and threw my sword away, saying I did not want to be violent and hadn't threatened anyone. In the end we just walked out through a different door than the one we had come in, and we were in the middle of a present day university campus.

"Game of Thrones" is Coming

The title of this post is a joke which you might not get if you don't watch the show.

Smug snobs are circulating memes about how they've never watched "Game of Thrones." I used to be those snobs. Yeah, I used to be proud of not watching "Game of Thrones." Then a few years ago, pretty quickly, I got hooked. For a while, being the fan of history that I am, I was very annoyed by the fact that what appeared to be an early-to-High-Medieval Western European world had some literacy, but not in Latin, because in reality, it generally took centuries before it even occurred to Western Europeans to even try to write in the native languages, so that Latin was not only the universal written language, it was the only written language, and Latin persisted along the written native languages for centuries after that. Then I told myself, Yeah, Steve, and in real life there weren't any dragons or magic or giants either, and I got over it. Somewhat. Not completely.

It would still be awesome if you learned Latin. Just the same way it would be awesome if you watched "Game of Thrones." Either way, you would thank me, and you're welcome!

It's a tremendously good show. I, like many millions of other people, am passionately in love with Daenerys Targaryen. I think Jaime is not all that bad. I hope that Arya and the Hound will end up being friends, although I'm not sure how realistic it is to hope for that. And so on and so forth. You know what I'm talking about. It's a tremendously good show. If you're too smart to watch it -- pfffft. Yes, I said pfffft, Sir! Your loss!

Dream Log: Caught Up In "Game Of Thrones"

I dreamed that I was in "Games of Thrones" -- not an actor in the TV series, but a denizen of Westeros. Most of the dream took place in and around King's Landing. I got into a fight with someone and killed him, and then suddenly Queen Cersei confronted me with several of her guards, whom she told to take me captive, but I eluded them. While I was still within earshot I heard Cersei swearing revenge. Awful, awful, long, drawn-out revenge, beginning when I would be captured when I least suspected it. I had not set out to kill anyone, but I thought there was probably no point in sticking around and attempting to plead my case with the Queen.

I never figured out what the connection was between Cirsei and the man I killed, but apparently he had been important enough to Cersei for her to want to make an example of me. She didn't send a whole army in pursuit of me. I just saw Jaime coming after me. It wasn't clear to me whether Jaime cared at all about the man I had killed or whether he was just loyally following his Queen's and sister's orders, but either way, he pursued me tenaciously all over King's Landing and the surrounding area. Jaime and I clashed swords a couple of times, but only when he cornered me, not at my instigation. I didn't feel it was wise to confront him and try to fight my way out. I didn't see anyone else chasing me but I assumed Jaime had some help.

For some time, several days, Jaime chased me around a Medieval urban landscape of balconies and hallways and stairs and rooftops. I didn't sleep much or deeply, and I felt I was gradually losing my attempt to escape the horrible, horrible death Cirsei had promised me. On the other hand, the scenery was really swanky. Consistently upper-class. And in real life my bedroom windows were open, and the area outside my bedroom is woodsy, so the dream smelled very nice.

But finally it occurred to me that Queen Daenerys' invasion fleet was now close to King's Landing, so that this might be an excellent time to try to reach her and declare my loyalty to her. (How did I know she was coming? Cirsei and Jaime didn't know. It was going to be a surprise invasion. Oh well, it was a dream.)

I stole a horse, rode along the coast toward Daenerys' fleet, swam out to her ship and declared my loyalty. Daenerys had heard of me, and had heard that I hadn't thought that Cirsei and Jaime were all bad. I told her that this had been true in the past, but that Cirsei's vow to torture me to death and Jaime's tenacious efforts to capture me for that purpose had induced me to re-evaluate what sort of people they were. I also said that, like so many others, I had long thought that she, Daenerys, was way, way, extra-cool and groovy, and that in a clash between her and Cirsei I was always going to take her side, whether Cirsei wanted to torture me to death or not.

Daenerys spoke quietly with her advisor Tyrion for a moment, and then said that she was disposed to believe that my declaration of loyalty was sincere, and it was around this happy moment that I woke up.

Deep Thoughts About "Game Of Thrones"

So I've been watching "Game of Thrones" for a couple of years now. I'm well aware that many people who've seen the entire series and were reading the novels it's based on before the series started have been intensively discussing it for a long time. HBO even hosts one of these discussions online. I don't think I'm going to make a big splash with the hardcore fans with this little post. (Although it would be nice, of course, if it turned out to be this post which finally made me rich and famous. It'd be nice if any of the posts on the blog turned out to be the one that did that.)

Before becoming a fan of "Game of Thrones," I hadn't been a big fan of anything in the fantasy genre. It took me a little while to get into the spirit of the show. I resisted it at first for being ahistorical. I felt like telling the whole world that "Game of Thrones" was WRONG because it was obviously set mostly in Western or Central or Eastern Europe apart from Greece and Rome and its culture was non-Christian and literate, and none of those parts of Europe became literate until they became Christian and, and... and then I told myself: none of those areas actually had dragons either, for example, or armies of skeleton zombies. It's not supposed to be historically accurate, it's an alternate world. It's fantasy. Took me a while to get that.

In the last couple of episodes, a couple of remarks about Cersei and Jaime Lannister, America's sweethearts, caught me off-guard: Olenna says to Cersei that she wonders whether Cersei is the most vile person she's ever met; and Brienne tells Jaime that she knows that there is some honor in him, as if it were plain that most of what there was to see of him were evil; and Edmure asks Jaime how he manages to tell himself that he's a decent person, saying that we all need to tell ourselves that we're decent.

Those remarks took me off guard because I hadn't been thinking of Cersei and Jaime as loathesome people. Not at all. Then I thought back a while and remembered that I had loathed Cersei back when she blamed Tyrion for Joffrey's death, and that since then Tyrian had left King's Landing, leaving Cersei less opportunity to behave loathesomely to him, and that Cersei had been through a lot of suffering at the hands of the Sparrows, who just by contrast made her look much more sympathetic (to me at least).

But in the case of Jaime it was harder to explain away my surprise at and resistance to the charge that he was a loathesome person. Jaime had helped Tyrion escape Cersei's plot to have him legally murdered; when Brienne brings up unpleasant things he's done, he responds by saying that he'd rather not talk politics with her, and it's clear that there is some common ground and respect between them, and that he'd prefer to emphasize the positive side of things; when Edmure reminds him of some awful things he's done, Jaime replies: We're at war. I'm sorry if it's inconvenienced you. He recalls that Edmure had had him imprisoned, and Edmure's sister had hit him in the head with a rock, but that he didn't hate her at all. On the contrary, he admired her very much. Her fierce loyalty to her children reminded him of that of his sister. Which means: loyalty to his children, because he and his sister Cersei are secretly a couple. How much of a secret it is, is not clear at this moment with Edmure, just as it is unclear at other times with other people.

Anyway: Jaime does not seem devastated when someone implies that he's a dreadful person, even someone like Brienne, whom he likes very much. Instead, he seems to believe that life is simply too complex and full of plots within plots and causes entangled with other causes, for him to neatly divide people up between the good and the evil, the noble and the loathesome. A woman hit him in the head with a rock while he was in prison, and he greatly admires her. He didn't stop looking at her and considering her side of things when he got hit with that rock. On the other hand, a moment after he expresses that admiration, he cold-bloodedly threatens to do truly terrible things. On the third hand, those cold-blooded threats end up preventing a lot of bloodshed.

Jaime is a moral relativist. If he thinks about good and evil at all, he sees that they are a matter of perspective.

And, perhaps, so do the people who make the show. And maybe that has to do with why I like it so much: a character can do something horrible, and it's not sugarcoated, not justified away in an unrealistic manner; but still, that character can have a good side. The characters are complex, like real people. And not just one or two of the characters, but dozens if not hundreds. You can like a character generally but still be appalled by some of the things he or she does, and you can dislike a character generally and still be moved when bad things happen to him or her.

Except of course for the thoroughly evil and monstrous Ramsay Bolton, who must be destroyed in order to save the world, literally. And the zombies may be in a separate category.