Chivalry (aSoIaF thoughts)

I never cared much about traditional chivalry. But I can see, in trying to subvert it, I’ve circled back on the idea with sincerity. I root for proles, underdogs, unlucky bastards, the vulnerable. And for anyone who’ll stand between them and the boot. Which is, technically, the pitch deck for knighthood. The propaganda version, anyway.

Game of Thrones also walks the circle. aSoIaF built its whole skeleton out of it. I’ll get to watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (the new series) eventually, but I already know the thesis.

Jaime Lannister: I love him. If I met him IRL I’d despise him instantly. He’s a perfect specimen of a brutally rich twat. His charm is skin deep, the kind of man who treats people respectfully only when violence won’t get him what he wants. He’s absurdly skilled and rewarded at every turn for being an arrogant nepo baby. He’s a fictional case study of what chivalry actually produces: a man who thinks the code exists to serve him.

He’s also so logical. That’s the dangerous part. His ethics are wrecked, but his reasoning is airtight.

In Jaime’s backstory: He’s on the King’s Guard, sworn to protect aSoIaF’s Caligula (Aerys II Targaryen). Then he killed him. Backstabber. Oathbreaker. Kingslayer. Nobody let him forget it. Aerys was a sadist who’d spent years perfecting cruelty as a hobby, who’d rigged all of King’s Landing with wildfire, ready to incinerate an entire city full of people rather than be removed. Everyone wanted him gone. Nobody wanted to be the one holding the knife.

Jaime’s like: I’m that guy. I got the knife.

He didn’t do it for humanity. He did it because it was good for his family, good for his position, and good for his one and only, his own sister. But the outcome is still sitting there regardless of motive: millions of people alive because one gilded asshole decided the rules were stupid.

And he’s right. The rules are stupid. Jaimie has done more good for the world incidentally than most actually good people can ever do on purpose. And he knows this.

That’s the hook. Jaime wins the trolley problem. He kills one tyrant and saves a city. And from that moment on, he quietly grants himself permission. Every cruelty after that is, in his own accounting, amortized against one massive good deed done for all the wrong reasons. He has narrative immunity, self-issued. He knows he’s saved everyone in that room sneering at him. He’s saved people who will never know his name. So he gives himself a license to be a monster, and the math, horrifyingly, sort of checks out.

His foil is Brienne of Tarth, who actually believes in the code — sincerely, stubbornly, past the point of dignity — and who cannot even be officially knighted because misogyny. She’s better than any anointed golden boy, with none of the institutional backing. Then there’s the Hound, who hates the whole institution from the inside out, barely tolerates people, and still occasionally stumbles into doing something decent — though his motivation is revenge, not idealism, and definitely not sister-fucking. But for the most part, the motives of knights and whoever they serve are rancid. Outcomes are mixed.

Which brings us to actual history. It’s grim.

Medieval knights were not shining paladins. They were armed contractors for landowners. Think riot police with better branding and worse accountability. When peasants are starving and outnumber you ten to one and have nothing left to lose, you hire trained men outfitted with equipment no skilled peasant could acquire. The resulting knights were brutal, bored, and barely controllable. Even nobles who bankrolled them occasionally found them excessive. Their dogs kept slipping the heel. (The Hound: get it?)

So chivalry appears. Not because knights were good. Because they weren’t. Codes of conduct, courtly love, tales of noble sacrifice — behavioral HR training for mounted tanks. Over time, the morality tales outlived the reality. The horror stories faded and the legends calcified.

Now you’ve got men everywhere thinking that holding a door and saying milady is an access code. As if politeness is a cheat code for basic decency. Meanwhile the actual knights were constructed specifically to manage violence against the people those same men would have you believe they’re protecting. The reality behind the tales are a threat dressed up as a courtesy.

The scary part is: Jaime is a better case scenario. At least Jaime has the body count on his side. The city that didn’t burn. The millions who never knew they were saved by a man who only saved them by accident, on his way to saving himself.

The depressing part is watching certain professions — you know the ones — cast themselves as tragic Kingslayers. Misunderstood men carrying secret burdens, doing what had to be done, unappreciated by a world too naive to understand. In reality, most institutions don’t produce men with one genuinely massive good deed quietly balancing out the ledger. They produce Walder Freys with badges. Ramsays with HR departments. Men who’ve never faced a moral decision that cost them anything, whose job is less dangerous than the pizza delivery guy, armed to the teeth and paranoid, ready to shoot anyone who looks at them wrong.

Yeah, even Jaimie the sisterfucker is better than a cop. That’s romance.

Jamie Lannister: Monogamist of all Time

Jaime as “the Monogamist of All Time” is funny on the surface. He sleeps with exactly one person. Lifetime body count: one, no emotional affairs, no wandering eye. Just full tunnel vision on Cersei Lannister. By the standards of certain corners of modern relationship discourse, he’s a dream, minus the incest and attempted child murder. Loyal. Constant. Never tempted.

But your point is clean: his monogamy isn’t about restraint. It’s about narcissism. Fidelity, under those conditions, isn’t a discipline.

A twin is metaphor for the ultimate closed loop. Same face, same blood, same house, same myth. Loving Cersei is loving himself, but in a different, politically useful gendered role. It’s monogamy as self-devotion. No risk of difference. No true encounter with an “other.”

When he mocks Catelyn Stark about her husband’s supposed infidelity, he’s flexing purity. He thinks he’s superior because he has never strayed. And in a narrow, technical sense, he’s right. Ned Stark appears unfaithful to the world. Jaime appears unwavering.

But Jaime’s devotion is easy. He never had to choose between two people. He never had to reconcile desire with duty. He never had to integrate competing values. He just clung to the one thing that reflected him back at himself.

Monogamists who call it “simpler” are telling on themselves a little. It’s simpler if you reduce love to possession and loyalty to fixation. It’s simpler if you define virtue as not wanting anyone else. That’s not depth. That’s narrowing the field until temptation can’t enter.

Jaime’s version is the logical extreme. Eliminate all variables. Love the person who is genetically closest to you. Collapse erotic love into self-regard. Now fidelity becomes effortless. You are not negotiating difference. You are reinforcing identity.

The irony is that his most morally interesting moments happen when that closed circuit cracks. His dynamic with Brienne of Tarth forces him to confront someone radically unlike him. Not a mirror or co-conspirator. A woman who believes in ideals he’s spent years mocking. That’s the first time he has to wrestle with love as transformation instead of validation.

So if you push your thesis forward, Jaime isn’t proof that monogamy is superior. He’s proof that monogamy can be the most stable form of narcissism imaginable. Absolute devotion to the self disguised as romantic constancy.

Which is why it’s darkly funny when he moralizes about other people’s marriages. He thinks he’s the gold standard of loyalty. In reality, he’s just never risked loving someone who wasn’t most like him, but still technically a separate person.

And that’s the part that stings a little. The “simplest” love might not be the most virtuous. It might just be the least brave.