Full of terrors …
This is a level 7 cleric spell that does 10d10 damage per round (no save) to a single target. It also instantly grants the caster a profound insight into the psychology of everyone who witnessed the death of the target. After receiving this insight, the caster must make a save vs. death to avoid losing all respect for those whose mind she now knows.
[Warning: this post contains spoilers for both the TV show Game of Thrones and its associated books. Don’t read on if you haven’t yet got to season 5 episode 9]
So last night Stannis Baratheon did what any sane viewer of this show should expect him to do, both on character grounds (he’s a murderous arsehole) and metaplot grounds (George RR Martin is a murderous arsehole). But reading around the traps this morning it appears that a lot of people are shocked that Stannis – the man who killed his little brother with an abomination born through adultery to a psychopathic witch, and cut off his advisor’s fingers, and burnt Mance Rayder alive for shits and giggles – is willing to sacrifice his own daughter to the lord of light’s [insatiable] blood lust just when his entire life’s goal is going pear-shaped. Others are shocked that a show that threw a kid from a window in episode 1 – and allowed the incestuous arsehole who did it to redeem himself later! – and burnt two farmboys to death because of reasons, should somehow murder a noble child that everyone loves.
The Guardian has an excellent episode-by-episode blog of the show, with generally excellent above-the-line posts and great below-the-line banter, including by some dude who writes only in the voice of Stannis Baratheon. The blog writer, Sarah Hughes, declares that burning a child to death may be a step too far for her, in the same episode that we are shown another character paying to fuck a child and making it pretty clear that the child is going to be severely damaged by the affair (“you’ll have another one for me tomorrow,” he warns the brothel madam). This is not the first child we’ve seen burnt to death, or thrown from a window; it’s not the first barely-adult teenage girl we’ve seen murdered (though usually they’re raped first) and her fate is hardly special against the general backdrop of violence and murder in this show. What about that horrible little tete-a-tete north of the wall, where a bunch of men in black find a community in which a single man rapes all his daughters, murders their male children and raises the girls as sex slaves; and what do the crows do? They rebel against their leader so they can take the guy’s place. But burning some girl you were starting to like is a step too far? Lots of people in comments are complaining that this is outrage for the sake of it, suggesting that it’s just done to lure public attention or something (because the most pirated TV show in history really needs more press!) Have these people been watching the same show as me or is there some kind of politically correct, heavily pixelated version that Guardian readers can download? Because I can’t comprehend how anyone would be surprised that a man as cold, driven and vicious as Stannis Baratheon would burn his own daughter at the stake, or that burning a child at the stake is somehow a step further in any direction for this show. In response I can only think of that great Raul Julia line from Streetfighter: “For you it was the most important day of your life, but for me it was just … Tuesday.” This is not a show where a single extra dead child is going to tilt the scales. Especially when you consider that the week before everyone was singing the praises of a 20 minute long battle scene in which multitudes of children died and were reanimated, and one excellent character was attacked and murdered by undead children.
There’s an obvious class analysis to be had here: how is it that some rich, educated girl in a dress dies and we are all up in arms about it; but no one notices the way that Sansa was completely relieved and happy to learn that two boys burnt alive were not her brothers. They’re just two farmkids, irrelevant in the scheme of things, their deaths a hapless accident that brings her joy because it confirms her brothers (real people!) are still alive. And of course wildling children aren’t even human, right? By now we’ve all become so complicit in the vicious intrigues of the elite that we’re now thoroughly indoctrinated into their code of combat: only rich people matter, and though their lives are expendable they should only be expended for a purpose. To channel Drew’s dialectical ephemeralist for a moment, quoting the Falcon:
Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal.
In my opinion one of the great joys of this show is that it gets us complicit in the brutality and bloody-mindedness of the ruling elite that we should be despising, so that we even feel horror and indifference when they do. Sure, you burnt a few farmboys but I’m much more well-disposed towards you now I know they weren’t important; and sure, you raped and murdered a girl but rich boys will be boys, eh?
Which brings us to the obverse of this, which is the shock that many people on the ASOIAF reddit are apparently feeling that the show would lead Stannis to this bitter and barren path. I can’t read the reddit, because it contains spoilers (I tried and I think I just found out Jon Snow’s fate which is really annoying) but the word on the Guardian blog (and expressed by a few people directly there too) is that the reddit is up in arms about how the show “broke” Stannis’s character and goes against his character in the books. The latter argument is easily dismissed since apparently the show’s makers have revealed they got this little bbq party straight from George RR Martin; but the former is interesting. There are actually people out there who believe that it’s out of character for this murderous, devious, sinful man to kill his own daughter if it suits him – and worse still they don’t like him anymore. They’ve been led so deep into the psychology of the books that, I guess, they actually think his previous horror shows – the mass burnings, the satanic rituals, the fratricide, the prisoner-killing and the ruthlessness of his war tactics – are all signs of a good man. Presumably if he had just ordered all the guards on the picket tortured and hanged (which he did) and then held off burning his daughter everything would be a-okay … The truth, of course, is that there is nothing about Stannis’s conduct that is morally acceptable, and he is a deeply evil man. His daughter even said this, that picking sides was the reason for all the trouble in the first place and if everyone just stayed home none of this shit would hit the fan in the first place. I guess we’ll never find out where this logic would take her, since her dad decided to burn her alive in order to ensure the side he picked won.
It’s interesting that the readers of these books seem to be prone to picking up the psychology of the psychopathic ruling class to the extent that they can accept Stannis despite his many evil deeds; but they haven’t picked up the cosmology of the show that they can accept that the sacrifice of Shireen is obviously essential to the success of his mission (because of magic reasons). Because once you accept his religious fanaticism and the undoubted efficacy of his red witch’s powers, it’s obvious that when you’re in a bind you should burn whoever proves handy to her. It’s only morally beyond the pale for a man of Stannis’s sterling qualities if it’s useless, and it’s clearly not useless. But many people on the Guardian blog were protesting that it was senseless savagery, and many on the ASOIAF reddit appear to have the same view, and they can get behind a man who commits deeds too foul for words if they’re useful but they can’t accept a man who murders his own daughter because they think it’s useless. Is this ability to engage readers in the psychology of the books, but fail to bring them into the cosmology, a failure of George RR Martin’s? Or is it a failure of his readers’? Having not read the book I don’t know but I’m inclined to the latter because the people protesting this “senseless” savagery on the Guardian blog hadn’t all read the books, and so presumably had also managed to accommodate the ruthless logic of the TV show but not its magical cosmology. Is it a problem of the low-fantasy genre that we don’t believe the power of magic? Or is it just a problem when lots of people not steeped in the fantasy genre watch a fantasy show?
I think it takes special skill to get people to accept a deeply flawed and immoral world view so completely that it takes the burning alive of a schoolgirl to get us to snap back to our normal frame of reference. This is great work by the TV show’s creators, and really shows how far they’ve sucked their viewers into the horrible world they’ve created. Let’s hope next week they reward us for our complicity with a river of noble blood.
I’ll finish by quoting someone from the Guardian blog:
Guess i’m rooting for the Night’s King now then….
Compromise and Conceit 
June 11, 2015 at 7:27 pm
Adam Smith somewhere remarks that people identify and feel for the rich and famous much more than for the poor – they weep for King Charles, but not for the orphans he made. Same here – they think they see a moral dilemma instead of a nasty fuck-up. See it in drug and criminal rehab all the time – people fall for and try to “understand” people whose brains have long since left or gone wrong.
June 12, 2015 at 10:13 am
I think whether Stannis has “long since left or gone wrong” really depends on whether you accept both the pscyhological and cosmological tenets of his world. If you accept that magic is real and the white walkers are a genuine threat to humanity, then it’s easy to accept that he really does see himself as a saviour and that burning Shireen to death is a reasonable strategy. If you don’t accept those tenets then yeah, he’s a crazy dude with an army. I guess this moment in the show shocks a lot of people out of their comfortable acceptance of one or both of these positions. There’s an amusing example at Salon, where a guy who one week ago was writing about how great Stannis is now has to write an article about how he’s beyond the pale. But is he, really, within the framework of the show?
This blog was originally set up to chronicle my GMing in the world of Compromise and Conceit, which attempted to conceive of how the morality of our real world historical figures would change if they had evidence that god and hell were real. Ideas that to us now from the standpoint of history seem stupid or evil like, say, witch-burning, take on a very different flavour if you have solid evidence that they are correct. We have empirical evidence of the threat facing the people of Westeros (the camera never lies!) and we have empirical evidence that Stannis is a murderous, callous arsehole on a religious mission (that we also have real evidence is probably theologically valid). Given that, who can be surprised that he burnt his (essentially, within the sociological framework of the times, useless) daughter alive in sacrifice to these facts?
June 12, 2015 at 10:54 am
The question can be constructed two ways:
1. “Would you sacrifice one life to save thousands?” – This is a valid philosophical debate with reasonable beliefs on both sides. It’s OK to disagree with someone on this and you can be a “good person” while supporting either side
2. “Would you kill a young girl for shits and giggles?” – This question has only one answer for good people.
If Westeros has no magic, then the second question applies. If it has magic then the former applies – though you could still be badly misled (i.e. killing a kid in a “magic ritual” that accomplishes nothing).
If we believe in consequentialism – then we need to see whether Stannis saves to world to judge whether his action is right or wrong (i.e. It’ll become clear later whether the ritual helps). If we believe he should be judged by his intent then the first question definitely applies because it’s reasonable for him to believe he’s coming down in the side of “right”.
For all the people getting up in arms, let me remind you of someone else who sacrificed their only child to save humanity…
June 12, 2015 at 11:02 am
That other dude who sacrificed their only child to save humanity, he was omniscient, so we can judge him on intent – he knew what the outcome of his actions would be. And given how poorly the world is shaping up, and how sinful it’s becoming, I think we can only conclude that that person sacrificed his only child for shits and giggles.
Turning back to someone slightly less psychopathic (Stannis) I agree with you. I think that from our external view of his motiviations, he seems committed to a path that he genuinely believes is essential for humanity, and he genuinely believes that the magic works, and seems to have a strangely naive view of the inherent goodness of his witchy advisor (who to me seems obviously dubious as all hell). Whether or not he is in the shits-and-giggles camp or the driven-man camp really depends, to me, on how you interpret his relationship with and understanding of Melisandre. But most critics of his actions (and by extension, the show) seem to be viewing them on the assumption that the magical aspects of the world he inhabits are not relevant… which is a fatal flaw, in my view.
June 12, 2015 at 3:33 pm
I didn’t get into GoT, but I think Stannis likely has his theology wrong. If there really are gods, a lot depends on their role. Sacrificing a daughter to Huitzlipochtli – no problem; to Zeus, you will get your immediate wish but lose big-time when he steps in as the fount of justice (see Iphigenia, Creon and a few others). And “You shall not pass your children through the fire to Baal” and, if you do, the Lord will punish you sevenfold, and your descendants as well. If the gods were accessible, Stannis would know this.
Does GoT make sense with a divine realm that is pretty much only about power, with no moral role?
June 12, 2015 at 3:54 pm
Lots of people online are making comparisons with Agamemnon, but I don’t know much about the theology of GoT to compare. This is the part of my response to Paul about how much our reaction and our judgement of the sacrifice depends on our understanding of Stannis’s witchy advisor’s religion – she claims to be working for the good of humanity but is the Lord of Light more a Baal than a Huitzlipochtli? It’s not clear to me! All of the god’s catechisms are deeply sinister – e.g. “For the night is dark and full of terrors” (so let’s burn children!) Also it’s not clear how deeply Stannis believes it or supports it.
For the record I think this Lord of Light god is deeply sinister, and Melisandre is up to her own mischief. So Stannis is either a fool or has his own sinister goals that are not entirely consistent with his claimed desire to protect the people of Westeros from winter …
June 15, 2015 at 9:18 pm
GoT appears to have a magic system in place [1], which may extend to priestly magic in that there may be gods that back certain ritual behaviours or alternatively those ritual behaviours may just trigger the magic themselves (i.e. believe it hard enough and it comes true).
What’s interesting here is the hoarding of knowledge that runs counter to our own real world experiences, possibly driven by a lack of minor magic effects. In our world scientific knowledge is shared unless the knowledge is quite dangerous (e.g. good luck googling how to build a nuke). That has lead to a general sharing of the scientific method.
By contrast in GoT, magic isn’t shared. This could be because there are no minor magics that you’d share with a friend – only birthing dragons or vast poorly directed effects that could be passed off as luck.
Maybe Westeros would be best off if a bunch of mages worked towards a spell that heated your tea up and then shared it widely…
[1] Unless someone wants to argue that hatching dragons from stone eggs and animating the dead is physics?
June 15, 2015 at 10:46 pm
Either Malisandre invested way too many xp in the Plausible Deniability feat, and not enough in actual spells; or when she burns people alive, the sacrifices are not being directed to the beneficiary Stannis thinks they are.
I guess there’s been a long history of witch burning and oppression of magicians in this world (it doesn’t seem like the kind of society that is 100% comfortable with women having political power, let alone metaphysical!) so it would probably lead to a tendency to hoard knowledge and only share it with very trusted people. I wonder if there are real examples of this kind of thing happening, where e.g. the consequence of suppression of certain kinds of science meant that people only worked on stuff that was really important, and ignored smaller things that might be more practically useful. I can’t think of any, though.