Well, this looks dandy, doesn’t it?

I think it’s very smart for the trailer — and perhaps the show — to play up Melisandre’s role, and the role of religion in general, in Westeros. Over the course of the novels, one of the things I’ve come to find most fascinating in them is the duel between the rationality of realpolitik and the rationality of religion. There are a lot of purely rational or strategic actors, both on the state and individual level, in George R.R. Martin’s novels. Littlefinger is probably the most prominent example of that phenomenon: he’s cold, calculating, not particularly attuned towards conventional morality (including killing his wife or making sexual advances on his teenaged ward who happens to be the daughter of the only woman he’s ever loved) if he can find a way to turn events to his advantage. Illyrio Mopatis is motivated less by a desire for power than for profit, to the extent that he’s willing to see an entire continent destabilized to fulfill his aims. Someone like Ayra Stark, who has been essentially abandoned by the Gods, has made vengeance her religion and is extremely tough and strategic in pursuing that goal.

Then, there are the mystics. Part of what makes Stannis Baratheon unpredictable — and thus makes him more powerful — is the fact that he makes decisions that aren’t purely governed by rational strategic calculations. Melisandre’s advice makes him think more than some of his competitors about how the common people of Westeros understand leadership and moral authority, and to take actions like fortifying the wall or going after Ramsay Bolton. The neglect of the wall and the continued empowerment of a psychopath are both stains on Westeros that have major ramifications for both the stability of the realm and the integrity of law in the nation. By trying to address both of those problems, Stannis puts himself and his forces at risk, but he has an enormous amont to gain both strategically and morally from taking on tasks that his rivals ignore. Similarly, the High Septon acts as a wild card, surprising Cersei by reasserting the importance of moral purity and using his power to enforce norms in a way that affects her standing as a rational leader.

In fact, the whole series is really about what happens when you try to assert purely rational governance in a world where fairy tales and Gods reach out into the world and muck up your affairs. It’s one thing to play the Game of Thrones when the rules are stable and the motivations of the actors you’re dealing with are predictable. It’s quite another when dead men walk, dragons return from extinction, and even humans are governed by things other than pure self-interest.

On many of your recommendations after our discussion some time back about the comparative visibility of Christian-influenced fantasy in comparison to fantasy that draws its concepts from other faiths, I just finished The Lions of Al-Rassan. I quite enjoyed it, though I think it has perhaps a reverse George R. R. Martin problem—there are a lot of fascinating concepts there that feel wildly underdeveloped, like a Reconstructionist-sounding strain of Kindath theology, or the actual mechanisms of reconquest, and I wish there’d been more room to explore them. But as an exploration of the weaknesses of theocratic governance, it’s a convincing argument with all sorts of resonance today.

I’d say there’s a stupidity to what Almalik does to Ishak after performing the world’s most successful cesarean section on Zabira, the king’s chief concubine: “he had ordered the physician’s eyes put out and his tongue cut off at the root, that the forbidden sight of an Asharite woman’s nakedness be atoned for, that no man might ever heard a description of Zabira’s milk-white splendor from the Kindath doctor who had exposed her to his cold glance and his scalpel.” But the Kindath don’t have power in Al-Rassan such that they can squander it being appalled. And religion doesn’t only lead to individual bad acts of state: it guarantees a constant cycle of escalation, whether it’s Alvar’s mother getting hyped up to send him off to war by visiting Vasca’s shrine and reaffirming her sense that non-believers need to be annihilated, or providing an enormous list of slights that seem to need avenging:

At certain moments, Jehane thought, in the presence of men like Husari ibn Musa or young Alvar, or Rodrigo Belmonte, it was actually possible to imagine a future for this peninsula that left room for hope. Men and women could change, could cross boundaries, give and take, each from the other…given enough time, enough good will, intelligence. There was a world for the making in Esperana, in Al-Rassan, one world made of the two—or perhaps, if one were to dream, made of the three. Sun, stars and the moon. Then you remembered Orvilla, the Day of the Moat. You looked into the eyes of the Muwardis, or paused on a street corner and heard a wadji demanding death for the foul Kindath sorcerer ben Avren, who drank the blood of Asharite infants torn from their mothers’ arms.

It also makes people unpredictable and irrational. The governor of Fezana gets frustrated because “being deeply cautious by nature, couldn’t quite believe that Ramiro of Valledo would be so foolish enough to come and make war here, laying a siege so far form his own lands. Valledo was being paid parias from Fezana twice a year. Why would any rational man risk life and his kingdom’s stability to conquer a city that was already filling his coffers with gold.” Choices like this, or the destruction of Sorenica aren’t good for the peninsula’s economy and social stability, something its new rulers recognize when they ask the Kindath to resettle and rebuild their shattered city.
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