On one hand, you have the Starks, who are unaware of their protagonist status, who fail to understand that the true meaning of their words designate them as such. They have the attributes (the magical castle, the ties to godhood and magical powers) but they don’t understand they are in such a story. They have forgotten everything about the ways of the Starks of old, as they forgot about the true nature of the Old Gods. When we begin the stories, they are a relatively loving family, individualized, human and evolving in the medieval mundane. Metaphors are just metaphors. It takes nothing to listen to Nan’s stories, they know they are the listeners and not the wolves in the tales. Yet, they grow into the stories and become those bloodied, mythical wolves because they have to, because they were meant to. They end up trapped in those stories, wounded by the harsh demands of a genre that requires sacrifices from its heroic figures. The Starks belong to the fantasy genre but what it demands of them is absolutely horrifying.
On the other, you have the Lannisters, who remembered and remained true to their founding history. They are descended from a trickster, a weaver of stories who forced himself into the fantasy paradigm. As such, they seek to claim the center stage, unconsciously aware that they are evolving in a story they don’t really belong to. Tywin, who made a religion out of the family name, weaves symbols and images around his three children, teaching them that their value as people equals to their value as stories, teaching them to perform their identity as Lannisters. There are countless exemples of Tyrion, Cersei and Jaime’s hyperawareness when it comes to performing status so I won’t bother listing them but the Lannister’s legacy is, at heart, a trick.
Consequently, the Lannisters use and overuse their own fantasy sayings to create their own mythology : A Lannister always pays his debts, the Rains of Castamere, the lions of the Rock.. It’s all deeply performative, a wish fulfillment constantly renewed : I call myself a lion, I am a lion. There’s a sense of the religious in the way the Lannisters siblings were made to believe in the fantasy posturing they had to perform.
They have to rely on stories to see themselves, especially stories filled with religious symbols. Cersei and Jaime created their own incestuous myth, convinced they were gods like their father said they were. Their story is a story about how Tywin’s hubris, his disregard for the sacred laws of men, doomed his oldest son and daughter to the oldest genre there is. Unlike the Starks, who are trapped in the fantasy genre, Jaime and Cersei are thrown into a whole other kind of narrative and that’s a prophecy. The story that is forming around them is a tragedy.
We define the tragic hero as the person who either knows that God is absent and and as such, is shunned and released from the world or as the person who realizes God is absent and must die, unable to cope. If God, to the Lannisters, is the the belief that they are the protagonists of the story, I think Jaime and Cersei are both of these tragic archetypes. Jaime has realized what and Cersei were, he knows they don’t belong in the story. Cersei has yet to know and when Jaime kills her, she will understand. The genre they belong to is a twisted sort of tragedy, one that is lost in the outskirts of a fantasy story as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
Keeping all of this in mind, Tyrion’s role in all of this is fascinating. In a family of trickster trying to pass as mythical and grand fantasy figures, he was shunned as grotesque. Aware of the illusion and lies embedded in his family’s mythos, he found his way to the heart of the story by exposing Tywin, by killing a false god and living with that taint. He found his way to the dragons he yearned for but a place in the fantasy paradigm is bitterly earned.
And as Tywin dies, as the Lannister’s mythology is exposed as human, small and pitiful, Bran finds his way to actual godhood. The Starks transcend their enmity with the Lannisters, as they don’t exist on the same frame and prepare to fight their true (fantasy) nemesis : Winter and the Other, a walking, festering metaphor for destruction and death.
