Skip to main content

game of thrones - Why did other houses not demand this?


In the Game of Thrones Season 8 finale Sansa



demands the freedom of the North. North will be an independent kingdom.



Why did other houses remain silent. They could also demand the same for their own kingdom.



I could guess they are not very powerful to demand anything but there was no harm putting that in front of



the newly elected king.




Answer



The other answers overlook something very neat and simple: the Starks were the last to speak.


Sansa deliberately waited until all the others had said "Aye". Everyone (including most viewers, I imagine) assumed she would say "Aye" to her own brother becoming king - but she waited until everyone else had committed before making her move.


This was very smart. Bran's position was essentially confirmed, so her little power play wouldn't stop Bran being king, and it meant that if anyone else had wanted to copy her, they would have to publicly contradict themselves and publicly go against their own word.


She waited until they had all committed to accepting Bran as their king before putting the idea of breaking away into their heads and revealing it was something Bran would likely agree to in order to maintain peace. There were clear shots of her watching the others, smiling confidently, looking around making sure everyone else had spoken, waiting for the right moment.


She learned a lot about politics from Littlefinger and Cersei over the years...





Of course, if there had been someone like Tywin Lannister present, he would not have been caught flat-footed like the others were. He'd have smelled someone consolidating power and he'd have known that he had about five seconds between Sansa making this play and Bran accepting it to put Sansa's ambitions down.


He'd probably have quickly made the calculation that Sansa cares more about peace and having a mild king like Bran than she cares about independence. He'd have used his extensive political wits to quickly think up a powerful way of putting Sansa under the pressure of thinking that the whole deal would fall through if she didn't back down. He'd also have found a way of presenting it without making enemies of the others present, risking them allying against him in future, and without appearing to have gone back on his word, risking appearing weak and losing credibility.


Edmure Tully, Gendry, Royce, Yara, Sam, Davos... these are not characters with the same political instincts and wits, or ambitions.


Of those present, only Tyrion could realistically have responded effectively here, but he's not going to bluff bringing down his own suggestion, when it looks like his last chance to save himself from Grey Worm's dagger.


It would be perfectly in character for, say, Yara to sail home kicking herself that if she'd played her cards better, maybe she might have wrangled independence for the Iron Islands. It would not be in character for her to magically transform into a master politician and masterfully improvise her way to it in a matter of seconds, or take big risks in a clumsy, improvised power grab when, unlike Sansa, she had been perfectly happy supporting Queen Dany.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Was the "pure soul" of Harry's what had really hurt Voldemort?

In the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort possesses Harry, and it hurts. Greatly. I think that Dumbledore explained that it was because Voldemort's rotten soul was incapable of assimilating Harry's pure soul, that Voldemort didn't understand the love and friendship etc that Harry has in his heart. But, I think it was a lie. Remember that in Deathly Hallows, while looking for information regarding Horcruxes, it is discovered that it is in fact possible to merge a soul fragment back, but that the process was extremely painful. Now then, if Voldemort tried to possess Harry, and Harry had a fragment of Voldemort's soul, I think that it could have been the true cause of Voldemort's pain: the fact of having his soul so close of another fragment. I think that Dumbledore knew that fact, but had to lie to Harry because it was inappropriate to let him know that he had one of Voldemort's soul fragments at the moment. Is that right? Or was it truly the pure soul of Harry's...

languages - Do we ever see written English in the Star Wars films?

In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...

star trek - Warning regarding forward saucer section in Nemesis?

In Star Trek: Nemesis , just before the Enterprise rams into the Scimitar, Picard sends a text message from his captain's chair arm pad to Troi — who is manning the helm in lieu of the crewman who was just blown out through what was once the view screen — indicating that she should put full impulse on standby. (Literally, if you watch the scene closely, Troi's console prefaces the order with "TXT MSG" !) My question is: Did Picard also somehow warn crew members in the forward saucer section about what was about to happen? The ramming of the Scimitar was a heat of the moment decision. Considering that he also resorted to calling the auto-destruct sequence shortly after (which ended up being offline), he probably was of the mindset that any losses would be acceptable in order to hault Shinzon's march to Earth. Still, I'm curious. Answer The original script indicates that he called for the crew to " brace for impact ". Whether that call (or the comma...