The Bear and the
Maiden Fair
We're in that fallow period between seasons now, when winter
looms but we've left Westeros behind until the snow melts in the spring. And
with the threat of a hiatus on the back of everyone's mind, it makes even more
sense to savor what we've seen thus far.
Sometimes, with Game of Thrones, it's the sweeping spectacle
that sets your imagination soaring. Other times, you crash harder than a Stark
kid thrown from a window, your spirit pulped like so many swollen heads in
King's Landing. There are a few scenes, though, that raise the hackles of
casual fan and Martin connoisseur alike. In the season 4 finale, "The
Children," amidst daring escapes and far-less-cliché privy piercings, an
enormous, hulking knight faced off against a hideous, loyal guardian in an
impromptu dance-off to the death that felt as visceral as watching one of those
"how McDonald's makes their beef" shock vids.
Widely derided, the scene sparked a brief tweetplosion that
was quickly forgotten once Tyrion tracked Tywin to the toilet. Still, ask just
about anyone their impression of the scene and as soon as they picture it,
they'll make a face like someone just offered them raw seaweed from the Hudson,
and grumble some monosyllables.
But those people are idiots. Here are five reasons why.
5) The scene is the
culmination of a dozen allusions and symbolic foreshadowings.
Because the scene departs dramatically from the books, it
actually came as a bit of a surprise to some tome-knowledgeable viewers. But
within the show itself, there were several references to what was going to
happen.
You can guess from the title that the repetition of the
ballad "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" throughout the credits and
closings, and as one of apparently the only two songs any bard in Westeros
knows, are all interpreted as hinting towards the showdown of scary swordmasters.
But there's more, circumstantial, allusions as well. The
long Samuel Beckett homage where the Hound and Arya met a dead man in the road
directly mirrors the way Sandor meets his own unlikely end (and yes, I'm aware
"we didn't see him die" and things-and-stuff-books-but-and). Waiting
for Godot is many things, but a typical aside in a high fantasy murderfest it
is not. All the more reason for us to have paid better attention to it.
4) Benioff and Weiss
take great pains to show off scenes of Westerosi brutality, this short
encounter does it better than any of them.
From the pilot to the season four finale, the showrunners
behind our annual excursions in the wilds of George RR Martin's imagination
avail themselves of nearly every opportunity to remind us that in this world,
life is not only brutish and short, but as much of both of those things as
possible. Regicide, fratricide, patricide, good old fashioned homicide, a hint
of suicide, and tales of infanticide cover just about every Latin-inflected
word we have for killing people.
But so many of those scenes hinge on a kind of violent
voyeurism. Shock porn for the sake of social media impressions. From the first
surprise beheading to the last bolt-interrupted bowel movement, the torturous
eviscerations and bloody conflicts and headzit-poppings all elicit gasps and
groans but go too far to linger beyond a graphic, crimson-smeared image.
When Brienne of Tarth and Sandor Clegane, the Hound of House
Lannister face off in the rocky outerlands of the Lords of the Eyrie, over a
not-nearly-helpless Arya Stark, they do so with the words of heroism and
glittering knights, but wearing the ill-fitting armor of soldiers aching their
way through the last years of a war. The lack of music, the heavy clangs and
thuds as the titans clash, the scene finds its song in the roughness of its
intercourse. There is no great triumph to be found here. No medals or gold for
the victor. Just two tortured souls battling each other and themselves while
clambering over the boulder-strewn heather.
3) It freed Arya to
become herself
The Arya Stark who turned over her coin with a quip and a
wink and found herself sailing across the Narrow Sea is not the Arya who served
Lord Tywin at Harrenhal. Nor the Arya who watched her direwolf die at the hands
of a cruel butcher. Nor the Arya who looked on in horror from the crowd when
her father was slain by an even crueler mockery of a king. In all of those
situations, she was under the "protection" of someone.
Only through
Brienne's errant gallantry was Arya freed of her final captor.
Inversely, by failing Arya in her duel with Sandor, Brienne
was chained by the oath she'd given Catelyn Stark. Yes, the scene labored on
long enough to be uncomfortable, and it's true that dying atop a jagged piece
of granite was a death unworthy of the Hound. But it happened in a way that
allowed Arya to recover from the untimely passing of her aunt and the morbid catharsis
she'd giggled away in the canyon during episode eight. It happened in a way
that severed the shackles around Arya's wrists. She has no more ties to the
Seven Kingdoms, only a life she has to figure out how to live.
2) It's aesthetically
beautiful, the perfect microcosmic summary of the entire western storyline.
Yeah, this is the art-house, slightly pretentious entry. But,
you can't ignore the symmetry in the scene. Or you could, but that'd make it
infinitely harder to prove this point. Podrick and Brienne; Sandor and Arya. A
Lannister and a Stark-by-oath, a Lannister and a Stark-by-blood. An ugly lady
knight against an ugly male ex-knight. A young boy who thanks to Tyrion's
pampered-at-least-before-prison lifestyle acts more like a lady-in-waiting. A
young girl whose unfortunate circumstances and karma-stockpiling left her
pretending to be a squire. There's also the parallel, probably inappropriate anywhere-but-Westeros
tension in each pair.
The mortal combat adds another dimension by symbolically reflecting the plot of the show thus far. The older Stark narrowly defeats the Lannister only to lose what she was fighting for. Like every victory we've seen up to this point, this one rings hollow in the end. The giant was defeated, the Mountain toppled, the Lion put down on his throne. As Daenerys freed Slaver's Bay, Arya was freed. She'll sail upon the waves, albeit headed in the opposite direction.
The cinematography frames the fight perfectly. Eschewing the
hectic jump cuts from Mance's assault on the Wall, the ponderous, lumbering
camera clunks along with each crushing blow. There's no commentary, just a
glum, almost voyeuristic look at the kind of ordinary violence that happens
every day in the world of ice and fire. It's pretty much the best
"Previously on" ever.
1) It was two
monstrously strong fighters beating on each other like a platemail-clad
heavyweight main event at Wrestlemania
So what if it was more late-career, less-agile Undertaker
versus never-agile, somehow-late-career-only-like-two-years-in Brock Lesnar,
and not an epic Warrior vs Hogan clash. The fight, for all its tracking, silent
cinematography, bears rewatching for how intricate the choreography is.
If you've never tried to duel with broadswords before, you
probably don't appreciate how much harder it is to fake a realistic showdown
than to perform a swooping, leaping blade-ballet. Dirty, rough; lit with the grime
and grit of the barren Eyrie-environs, the plodding pace of the confrontation
underscores how banal one on one combat can be. There's no weeping orchestral
score or blazing-white Gandalf charging down a hill. Just two herculean
soldiers, smacking each other with swords and spilling black blood on blacker
soil.
Ben Snyder is a writer
at Riot Games who spends most of his time trying to master the dying art of
calligraphic Sanskrit. That's not true at all, and he's even pretty sure that's
not even a thing. Follow him on twitter, @RiotExLibris, or find him on the Riot
community sites with the same tag.
