Who else does he have? He was smuggled out of King’s Landing because they were going to kill him for Joffrey’s murder, and dropped at the feet of Dany. Where else can he go? No one really likes him in Westeros.
I think that may be a decent guess. Though in the show it appears Qyburn is now in charge of the little birds. But that doesn’t mean they are loyal to him. Killing Pycele and Kevan could be one way that Tommen has to go back to Cersei… maybe without her blowing up the entire city.
“I have nowhere else to go and nothing to do, so why not help this woman and her barbarian allies to pillage my home, rape and burn my people and help her kill my one nice nephew and his father, my beloved brother?”
I don’t want to assume that Tyrion has turned into a man who is evil out of apathy.
Or who is so vengeful that he is willing to bring mysery to countless people because he was wronged by a few. Or who is so desperate to matter in the world, that he doesn’t care if his self-affirmation brings destruction and death on a large scale.
I’ve not seen anything that makes me believe he bought into the Muad’Dib myth, like Martin’s Fremen, the Unsullied/Dohtraki - though he acts as if he had an epiphany similar to Jorah’s when Dany emerged from the fires with her freshly hatched dragons.
But if he believes in her as a saviour - when did that happen and why? I don’t get this new Tyrion at all. He is lazy and stupid and careless. And he can’t even remember that he gave Theon a hard time when they met, not the other way around.
Of all the characters who act more stupid now and less comprehensible, he is the worst example.
Well, I disagree pretty much completely. Remember Tyrion’s speech at his trial - it wasn’t just his family (except Jaime) who betrayed him; it was the whole court; the whole city; and the woman he loved. This after he had served so well as Hand and risked his life to save the city during the Battle of Blackwater, with the scars to prove it. But he was still treated like a monster. He was in complete despair when Varys brought him to Esteros. And he didn’t snap out of that despair until he met Dany - who treated him with respect and dignity, and recognized his wisdom, and gave him the ability to do what he does best. Not only that, she promised to take down the people who had destroyed him and in their place and rule with compassion for the lowly and underclass - like the slaves she had freed in city after city. Why would he not long for that kind of justice?
He doesn’t want misery for everyone - that’s why he confronts her about her plan to level cities and hurt the innocent with the guilty. He wants to guide her to be a wise ruler. She has given him purpose again.
Not out of character at all; in fact it fits right in with his arc through the whole series. He finally has a chance to prove Cercei and Tywin and everyone else wrong, and prove his worth with someone like Dany who recognizes his ability and wisdom.
He thinks she’ll be better for Westeros than its current rulers. I think it’s likely that he’s right. You might disagree, but considering how shitty things are right now in Westeros, it’s not a totally unreasonable opinion to have.
The whole city? The butchers and the bakers and the stable boys and … they all conspired to bring him down?
The whole court? We don’t know that. We know that some players at the court conspired against him for a variety of reasons: Pycelle might have been guided by revenge (Tyrion humiliated him, after all), Cersei might have actually believed that Tyrion killed her son, the Queen of Thorns had found a scapegoat for her murder (though Tyrion isn’t even aware that the Tyrells and Littlefinger were the minds behind the curtain), Oberyn saw a chance to confront the Mountain and the House of Lannister for his sister’s death, Varys wanted him to join Daenerys, and Tywin needed a sacrificial lamb and saw an opportunity to re-institute his firstborn as the heir of Casterly Rock.
Shae was opportunistic.
The player Tyrion hated the most, Tywin, he killed. The woman who he thought betrayed him, he killed. Cersei is still alive but - as far as he knows - killing her means killing his brother.
The brother who didn’t conspire against him, but helped him as much as possible, who was even willing to give up his calling and subjugate himself to his father’s will to save his brother.
And yet, Tyrion is now doing everything in his power to bring his brother down and get him killed.
Tommen also didn’t conspire against him. Plenty of members of the court were likely not involved at all.
But all are guilty? And guilty of what, exactly? That people didn’t stand up to say: “We don’t know what happened, but all the evidence must be wrong, Tyrion is innocent, for sure!”
And lets not forget that a) Tywin gave him an out, and he refused in a stupid fit of rage; b) he doesn’t seem to mind at all that Varys had his own agenda when he played his part in bringing him down.
When Daenerys nailed those slavers to the crosses, it was not justice she showed but vengeance. When she let the dragon burn the representative of Mereen - who was not shown to be a member of the Harpies - she didn’t show justice; whenever she is cornered or pissed, justice is the last thing on her mind.
Yes, he speaks out against the first impulse of this oh so just queen - but he is still supporting a war that has no justification at all, apart from one woman’s entitlement.
Even if we assume that Daenerys’ intentions are righteous, her methods are not - and the bulk of her troops is known for its viciousness and her dragons are, well, dragons.
There cannot be any doubt that many, many innocent will suffer for her entitlement and his urge to prove his worth.
As with pretty much everything that’s been going on with every character: who the hell knows, really. But he did say something like “if I don’t come back, you’ll know I failed.” It seems like a trip to Westeros, some shit stirring, and then a triumphant return is something that would take a pretty long time.
I think he’s going to Dorne. He said he was going to get allies and ships. That could have been the Ironborn, but they turned up by themselves and Tyrion hasn’t said “Whoops, best try to get Varys back”. Dorne make plausible allies (Tyrion knows Oberyn thirsted for vengeance even if he’s not up to speed on the Sand Snake revolution) and having stayed out of the wars are just as plausibly in possession of a working navy (they are a coastal region, even if we haven’t seen their navy).
From a narrative perspective, it accomplishes the goal that this season has been working towards - bringing the strands of the story together. Dany and the Dornish are united, the North, the Watch and the Wildlings are united, and the Song of Ice of Fire is in crescendo.
Makes sense. It covers the Quentyn Martell gap nicely.
Who’s left to be the allies, though? In the Quentyn plotline, Doran was not an idiot, and everything depended on that. Show Doran was apparently just a lazy piece of shit and didn’t have anything cooking.
I think you are forgetting that Tyrion and his brother didn’t leave amicably, because Tyrion discovered that the story about his first wife Tysha being a whore who was paid to marry him was untrue and that Tyrion’s first and only true love was then gang raped in front of him and Tyrion was forced to participate. Jaime was the one who set it all up, on Tywin’s orders.
How much hatred would you have for someone who did that to you, and to her?
There hasn’t been a war in history that didn’t kill some innocent people. And many of the people on the court could have spoken up for Tyrion - and didn’t. Many of them knew he was the one who saved the city at Blackwater, but stood silent when the story was told another way. Tyrion has no reason to love or even like any of those people.
But that doesn’t mean he’d just kill them all for no other reason. However, he truly believes the Iron Throne has become tyrannical and decadent, that the constant squabbling for it has put Westeros in a state of regular wars for decades at the expense of the common people, and that a change needed to be made.
The ‘out’ would still have stripped him of his honor and station, and Tyrion later found out that Varys’ agenda was a moral one to restore peace and stability to the seven kingdoms.
And that’s what is great about Game of Thrones. There are no Marvel heroes and villains here. Good people can do bad things, bad people can do good things, and even the ‘heroes’ have flaws. Hell, the entire story opened up with Ned Stark taking the head of a man who was telling the truth and whose warnings would have been very useful had they been heeded at the time. But hey, rules are rules.
Daeneris is a Targaryan with a temper. She has a good heart, but is prone to rash behavior. Those traits may get her killed, they may get innocent people killed, or she may learn to keep them in check and use them when needed and they’ll become a source of her strength.
Not true at all. If Tyrion is a patriot like Varys, he knows that the current situation in Westeros is unstable, and that the people ruling it are likely to do much harm to the common people. He has seen first-hand evidence of Daeneris’s power, and her mercy and judgement. If he has concluded that she is the best hope for peace and stability in Westeros, why wouldn’t he help her?
And Tyrion LOVES dragons. And he’s a student of history and knows that until the Mad King came along, the Targaryans were good rulers.
And until the very end of that episode Tyrion has no clue about the Dothraki being part of Daeneris’s army, and the Unsullied are former slaves who, in the person of Grey Worm, appear to be totally cool with being soldiers for a just and kind ruler. They aren’t rapers and pillagers - they were a slave army doing what they were told. Now they aren’t slaves.
Or, many, many innocents will suffer if the Game of Thrones is allowed to continue in Westeros between a bunch of snakes while the wall is ignored, winter is coming, and really bad stuff is going to happen.
When the U.S. took Okinawa in WWII, they knew that a whole lot of innocent people were going to die as a result. But the judgment was that if Japan wasn’t defeated, the world would be a worse place and even more people would be hurt. Sometimes all your choices kind of suck.
What, you’re not waiting with 'bated breath to see what awesome power Dany can wield with the Sand Snakes at her side?
I honestly think that’s the most botched plotline. Not the Sandsnakes, which are painful to watch but ultimately don’t murder the story, but the fact that there was nothing secretly brewing in Dorne. Oberyn/Doran had such a cool over/covert hostility dynamic thing going, and the big reveal that Doran has had this cooking all along is so dramatically cool. So Doran amounting to nothing is actually the worst part of that whole plot.
Funny enough, Sam Stone mentions two posts later what I thought was the second worst mis-translation from books to show: not revealing Tysha wasn’t a big act. It does so much to explain Tyrion’s rage and subsequent breaking. I’m worried that they underestimated their audience and thought no one would remember who Tysha was when he mentioned it, so they just threw it away.
I think it must be important to the overall plot flow that Dorne be allied with Daenerys, but you’re right, the way the show has played it out, it’s hard to imagine how that’s going to work narratively. Dorne has very little to offer. Maybe just having a secure beachhead and supply line is enough?
The Mad King was by no means the first bad Targaryen ruler. He was just the most recent, and by some measures the worst.
Interesting thoughts, Sam Stone, I disagree, of course - but it’s more fun that way, isn’t it?
I wasn’t sure at first if you misremembered or I did, so I watched Tyrion’s escape in season 4 episode 10 again to be sure: Jamie doesn’t say anything about Tysha - it’s not on Tyrion’s mind when he murders his father and escapes with Varys.
Unless I miss something (and, please, correct me if I’m wrong), the “Tysha was a whore”-story still stands in the series.
So, Tyrion has no reason at all to be cross with his brother. But even if Jamie had confessed the story as laid out in the books, it’s no reason to wish a brother dead. Jamie was no mover in the actions against Tysha, he cowardly obeyed his tyrannical father (something Tyrion also did time and again).
In the series, he has no reason whatsoever to wish his brother harm. If anyone should feel responsible for Tysha’s fate, it’s Tyrion. What did he expect from “Rain of Castamere”-Tywin? Give his blessings? He should have run with Tysha, far, far, far away.
Btw, Jamie doesn’t seem to hate Tyrion, even though he cold-bloodedly murdered their father. Is Jamie so much better a brother than Tyrion is? Well, maybe he is.
Yes. But there are necessary wars and justified ones, and many more who are started for base motives. “I’m entitled to be Queen of Westeros because my forefathers proved to be the most murderous bastards around when they used WMDs aka dragons freely in their conquering expedition of a foreign continent.”, belongs to the latter group.
But Tyrion himself is single-handedly responsible for rekindling chaos after the war had already been over, when he decided to kill the one man who held it together and was known to be able to keep control.
Of course, we know that Littlefinger might have assassinated Tywin too - but he didn’t and might not have succeeded. The situation was calming down, the Tyrells were feeding the masses, a nice kid had ascended the throne, the Tyrell-Lannister alliance was powerful enough to regain control, things were getting better, especially for the people.
If Tyrion is telling himself that he wants Westeros to be stable, he shouldn’t have killed his father, and if he argues that he is planning a war for the common people, he is a hypocrite. War has never been good for the common people. And letting Dothraki loose on them and dragons? Yeah, Daenerys has such a good heart.
Also, Dany has made it perfectly clear that she wants to rule, she alone. She might consider herself to become a benevolent matriarch who smiles upon the obedient powerless - but she is not a champion of “more power to the people”.
And decadence? I think, he has read tons about it while studying the Targaryen rule.
Varys’ agenda is anything but moral. He could have easily made sure that the 7 Kingdoms remained stable under Robert’s rule. He only had to reveal the incest.
Even if a war had started then, it would have been very one-sided and soon over. But, of course, that was the opposite of Varys’ plan - sow chaos, divide the Houses, start civil war and then bring Daenarys in as a saviour.
Peace? Stability? No. The 7 Kingdoms had those. Conquest was his goal, for whatever reason (I still think he is a Targaryen and his shaved head hides the white-golden hair).
Why should he think so? As far as he knows, Daenerys is the last Targaryen, and she is barren. She can’t found a dynasty, and no one but a Targaryen should be able to control dragons, the WMD that secured the Targaryen’s position before sated Houses, social inertia and tradition did it for them.
Since Tyrion is an avid reader of history, he should know perfectly well what happens when a ruler, who came to her place by force, has no heir.
Oh yeah, the student of history should also know what it means to establish a theocracy. Bad enough in our world, in one created by Martin, the books he loves to read can only have told him that it’s the worst possible idea.
But why should Tyrion care about the tyranny of the true believers?
Tyrion doesn’t know about the White Walkers, he laughed about those fairy tales when he was in the north. He is not doing it to save the living! And, yes even without the walker threat, a winter is on its way, which means that the people need anything right now but another devastating war.
Tyrion could have walked away. Or he could have gone to the Wall; he would have been very useful there. But he really wants to be the one who matters – and that’s what drives him, not ideals.
At one point Bronn tells Jaime that if he ever sees Tyrion again, give him his regards. Jaime says that he murdered his father - if he ever sees him again, he’ll kill him.
Much like Jaime’s speech to Edmure, though… I don’t believe him. I think Jaime feels the need to bluster and keep up the pretense that he’s still a cold hearted bastard, but that’s no longer the case.
Right. And though it looked to me more like calm determination than hate, he doesn’t seem to be the forgiving type either.
Added:
JSexton could also be right. Actually, yeah, I didn’t believe that he was sincere when I saw the scene. But it’s still possible that he was.
I rewatched the Jamie-Bronn scene, and I’m not sure. If Jamie is earnest, it’s a resigned and sad acceptance of a deed that must be done. There is no hate. But he might also lie to Bronn and himself here.
Nicely done.
Sam, I apologize for my grammar - I should not have written my answer so quickly.
Absolutely. The Sand Snakes evidently have no plan other than the occasional assassination, preferably of invalids or teenagers. Dorne has been reduced to an irrelevancy whereas before/in the books it was/is a major power player - all the more major for being able to act in secret. Coiled and ready to strike, as it were.
However if Dany does ally with them, it brings Dorne back into the big picture and gives them a role in the story.