Game of Thrones: Bran, Hodor, and the Problem of Power

By Zack Boehm on May 23, 2016

WARNING: SPOILERS 

Game of Thrones has always been a show about power. What people will do to acquire it, how people react when they inherit/seize/grudgingly accept it, and what happens to the people who have very little of it.

Half way through season six, we’ve seen the multi-hyphenate Queen Daenerys Targaryen use her power (and flawlessly fire retardant skin) to claim the legion of Dothraki Khalasars in one fell, combustible swoop. We’ve seen the unquenchably sadistic Ramsey assassinate his father and feed his step-mother and half-brother to the hounds in an attempt to consolidate power, and The North, for himself. We’ve seen Tyrion and Varys, who’ve been acting stewards of Mereen with queen Dany away on her Vaes Dothrak vacation, use their provisional power to make unsavory but vital diplomatic agreements in hopes of stabilizing the city. We’ve also seen characters like Arya and Margery, both of whom have been historically defined by their intelligence and mettle, systematically stripped of their power by dominant institutions.

While huge, mesmerizing set pieces like Hardhome or Daeny’s deus ex Drogon escape show the scope of the show’s story and the breadth of its the budget, Thrones is always at its best when it’s exploring how power influences, impels, and corrupts its characters.

A still from Hardhome via winteriscoming.net

“The Door”, the excellent fifth episode of season six which aired on Sunday, continued this discussion with perhaps the bleakest statement on humanity’s fraught relationship with power that Thrones has yet provided.

The episode culminates in what must be among the most affecting sequences in the show’s history, which is saying something for a series that’s made its name on slow-burning children at the stake and killing beloved characters with brutal abandon. I would try to explain what exactly happened in the scene, but I feel like I would need at least a semester at The Citadel before I could begin to understand how Bran, with the White Walker zombie hoard fast approaching, warged his consciousness through time into Hodor. Suffice it to say that the scene provides a rending origin story for Hodor’s peculiar condition while also suggesting that there is more to Bran’s magical capabilities than we might have thought.

But buried beneath the scene’s magical opacity and White Walker dread there is, like in all interesting Thrones moments, an interrogation of a power balance. What makes the particular power balance that this scene deconstructs so discomfiting and, ahem, stark, is that it sees Bran exercising a kind of absolute and irresistible power over the hapless Hodor.

via mwctoys.com

Since the first episode of the season, where a ten-year-old Bran is defenestrated by a mid-coital Jaime Lannister, it’s difficult to find another male character (women are routinely treated appallingly in Westeros) who has had less power than the young Stark boy. Bran’s long fall from the tower window rendered him paraplegic. He is physically dis-empowered in a way that few other male characters are. His disability leaves him immobile, largely at the mercy of his caretakers, and it prohibits him from filling the hyper-masculinized, martial role that his violent medieval society demands of most men. He relies on others, who, importantly, tend to be strong women, to defend him from physical threats.

Bran is not strong in the way that Jon Snow or Brienne of Tarth are strong, but his physical frailty belies his metaphysical power. Since discovering his aptitude for willfully throwing his consciousness and, more recently, dialing up into the World Wide Weirwood Web, Bran has claimed a kind of power-via-magic that is unrivaled in the world of the show. Bran, we’re told, is the most powerful warg in Westeros, the only of his kind able to command the body of a human being. Thanks to the (abruptly curtailed) tutelage of the Three-Eyed-Raven, Bran also has the ability to use his numinous connection to Westeros’s Weirwood network as a portal to the past. Bran can navigate time (and physical space?), giving him a power over temporality that no other character appears to have.

So at the end of “The Door”, when things seem inescapably dire for his small (and ever dwindling) coterie of friends and protectors, Bran exercises his power at the expense of Hodor, who is impotent against its magical force. In this situation, the power structure is inverted. Hodor, strong and hardy, is subordinate in power to Bran, feeble and incapacitated. When this inversion manifests and it is clear that he is dominant, Bran uses his power in an act of pure self-preservation. He sacrifices Hodor to save himself, because he had power where Hodor had none.

via ign.com

Nobody would accuse Game of Thrones of having a rosy outlook on the human condition, but this scene represents an especially grim indictment of our collective struggle with power and powerlessness. When his own life is in the balance, Bran uses his power not only to sacrifice Hodor in order to save himself, but also to retroactively condemn Hodor to a life of cognitive deficiency. Bran is an almost archetypal example of gentle meekness, but desperation drove him to use what power he had to save himself and kill his friend. There is no doubt that we are ultimately meant to sympathize with Bran, but the show would also have us recognize that he is not exempt from the perils of power. Bran’s power, if only for a moment, turns him into a tyrant, because in the moral universe of the show, that’s just what power does to people.

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