Why Victarion is so awesome?
Heh, I know, right? On paper, Victarion Greyjoy seems like the dullest character imaginable: unchanging, undramatic, unreflective, and deeply unpleasant. Yet I love his POV chapters and have never run short of things to say about him. I think Victarion’s characterization is a triumph of tone and context.
Tonally, GRRM’s masterstroke was framing Vic’s blood-soaked circlin’ of the abyss as an extremely grim joke, granting us some measure of catharsis while being trapped in this particular head by encouraging us to laugh at him. The contrast between Vic’s puffed-up self-conception and his transparent inability to understand when he’s being manipulated makes me chuckle as I wince. This black-comedy gambit works in large part because it’s rooted in the Iron Captain’s dynamics with much smarter people. Both Euron in AFFC and Moqorro in ADWD realize they’ve got a useful tool on their hands, and the primary difficulty they face in wrapping Vic around their respective li'l fingers is refraining from bursting into laughter. The monkeys have no such compunctions, and their cackles are meant to cue our own. This stooge thinks he’s a supervillain! “Blind to the tentacles,” indeed.
As for the context, the Crow’s Eye and the Black Flame are able to so effortlessly hack into Vic’s psyche in part because they’ve got genuine metaphysical heft in their corner, their third eyes wide open, whereas he’s clinging to a racist revanchist mythos about how stealing shit makes you awesome. In this way, Vic becomes a vessel for ideological diagnosis; he is an avatar of the Old Way, and the Old Way cannot protect him from wizards. It can’t protect him from anything: the injury that nearly kills him is self-inflicted, as the colossal fool grabbed his enemy’s sword in his fist for no reason beyond wanting to be the most pirate-y of all the pirates. He thinks it’s badass, but it’s pathetic. To zoom out from the micro to the macro, this ideology has left the Iron Islands an impoverished backwater that regularly gets its collective ass kicked by the mainland whenever the latter gets sick of being raided. Both of Balon’s wars were complete wastes, a stupid and selfish ruination inflicted in the name of a cultural self-conception that is not only fanatically hateful and violent, but utterly unmoored from material reality and the lived lives of the Ironborn.
That’s one of the main reasons Euron won the kingsmoot, and it’s the reason Victarion lost it: underneath the south-shall-rise-again bluster, most of the captains and kings know by now that “all you’ll get from me is more of what you got from Balon” simply is not enough. The “mighty pillars” are falling. The myth is dissolving. All of Westeros is dying…
And to zoom back into the micro, that collective decay and ennui is given individual form in Vic’s inner monologue. What makes him work as a character, and especially as a POV character, is that he is deeply unhappy. He does not know why. He keeps trying to fill the hole inside with rape and murder and telling himself he’s finally pulled one over on Euron (as if), never wondering if it’s his lifestyle and ideology that are making him unhappy. Victarion is bored because being a villain is boring. Spending your days hitting people from behind with folding chairs and then taking their stuff is not only violent and cruel, it’s shallow and unsatisfying. It doesn’t even work for him. Euron represents another flavor of evil altogether: he just wants to ride to Valhalla on a sea of screaming souls, and this makes him perfectly content. But Victarion believes in something, and that something has failed him, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. I think he’s going to die before he learns.
