The Mockingbird and the Lion: Catalysts for Chaos in Game of Thrones

Abstract

The television series Game of Thrones (2011‒2019) was a cultural phenomenon that aroused great interest among audiences worldwide. HBO’s adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novel series can be deemed as a milestone for the fantasy genre, which has traditionally never been regarded as mainstream. Nevertheless, this level of success was only possible thanks to the brilliance in terms of storytelling with which palace intrigues were handled, most of them being orchestrated by the polarising characters of Petyr Baelish and Tywin Lannister: all of their spine-chilling schemes plunge Westeros into utter chaos, thus enabling plot development indirectly. Therefore, the aim of this article is to carry out a thorough comparative analysis of the aforementioned characters considering the notion of hegemonic masculinity, the understanding of subalternity by Gramsci, and the medieval social implications of hostageship in order to examine how the mayhem they cause inevitably triggers plot progression, thus subverting Propp’s original conception of the helper while overlapping with the character type of the villain.