Power-grabbing tips from “House of the Dragon” and “Shogun”
One swords-and-scheming TV show seems more relevant today than the other
Both are big-budget sagas about the ruthless pursuit of power. Both combine exquisite production values with immense popularity. “House of the Dragon”—which started airing its second season on hbo in June—is the third-most “in-demand” television series in the world, according to Parrot Analytics, a data firm. (“Game of Thrones”, its antecedent, still tops the charts despite finishing in 2019.) “Shogun”, released in February and streaming on Hulu and Disney+, is in the top 0.2%. The tens of millions of people who have watched these shows undoubtedly include plenty of politicians, from Washington to Warsaw. This raises an intriguing question: might they learn something? And if so, which of the swords-and-scheming blockbusters offers a better guide to seeking power in real life?
At first glance, the answer is obvious. The world of “Game of Thrones” is a fantasy. Humans in Westeros ride dragons through the clouds at several hundred miles an hour, a feat that would be impossible even if dragons existed, which they don’t. Enemies are dispatched not in debates or at the ballot box, but via magic shadows, magic disguises and magic minerals. Sometimes they are raised from the dead. Sometimes dragons are raised from the dead, to become zombie dragons. None of these options is available to a politician in the real world.
“Shogun”, by contrast, is loosely based on actual events. An English ship’s navigator, William Adams, really did wash up in Japan in 1600, and he really was ennobled for helping the Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, build a stronger navy. The television series, like the novel by James Clavell on which it is based, changes the names: Adams becomes John Blackthorne (played by Cosmo Jarvis) and Tokugawa becomes Lord Toranaga (Sanada Hiroyuki). It also exaggerates the Englishman’s role in the warlord’s rise to power. But as historical dramas go, it is fairly true to life. An Englishman in 17th-century Japan would certainly have been astonished by the locals’ elaborate courtesy, superior personal hygiene and impromptu beheadings.
Yet, of the two programmes, the fire-breathing fantasy seems closer to the way power is sought and exercised today. In the first season of “House of the Dragon”, a well-meaning king is visibly fading and clearly incapable of ruling for much longer. Everyone around him is furiously plotting over his succession, while pretending not to. No one wants to appear disloyal to the ailing monarch. Sound familiar?
The second season also has echoes of modern America. King Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney) is a narcissist with improbable hair who knows nothing about governance and says whatever he thinks will please the audience in front of him. When grown-up officials offer sage advice, he grimaces with boredom. When devious courtiers want to sway him, they flatter his preposterous ego.
In every season of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon”, the players are breathtakingly cynical. They scrabble for more power when they already have plenty. They take every opportunity to enlarge their territory, simply because they think they can. They pay no heed to the suffering of the “small-folk”.
It is a world Vladimir Putin would understand. Its morals are those of the warlords currently turning Sudan and Yemen to ash and rubble. And the way Westerosi victors humiliate the vanquished brings to mind the way China’s Communist Party humbles anyone who even hints at challenging Xi Jinping.
The characters in “Shogun” are often cruel, too, but they follow a code. They respect the law—indeed, much of their plotting depends on the assumption that their opponents will not openly flout it. Good luck trying that with Mr Putin.
They also make extraordinary sacrifices to preserve their honour. One young samurai, having blurted out a truth that offended a lord, makes amends by disembowelling himself. It is hard to imagine anything more distant from modern mores. Rather than eagerly seeking opportunities to take offence at other people’s ill-chosen words—and describing them as acts of literal violence—the samurai atones for his own rudeness with a short stabbing sword.
Several politicians in Westeros have a modern flair for populist gestures. Ordinary people hate crime, so its leaders make a show of brutalising criminals. In the first season of “House of the Dragon” Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) led the guardsmen of the City Watch, dressed in flamboyant gold cloaks, for a night of noisily murdering alleged murderers and violating rumoured rapists.
Daemon’s tactics differ only in degree from those of Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who has rounded up tens of thousands of suspected gangsters, locked them up indefinitely and shared a video on social media of them stacked like semi-naked Lego bricks in overcrowded jails. Both leaders want to look tough on crime; neither fusses about due process.
Despite their different genres, the “Game of Thrones” franchise and “Shogun” have elements in common. Alliances shift. Leaders constantly seek weapons of mass destruction, whether European cannons or eggs that might hatch into dragons. Religion is unpredictable: rulers use it to buttress their authority, only to find that religious leaders (Jesuits in Japan, and the High Sparrow in King’s Landing) have ambitions of their own.
Like their modern counterparts, Westerosi and Japanese warlords treat foot soldiers as expendable. But the martial muddle in Westeros is more realistic. Overconfident generals walk into traps. In “Game of Thrones” one prince gets tipsy before a fight to the death, with predictable results. In the new season of “House of the Dragon” the assassins Daemon hires prove as gruesomely incompetent as the ones Mr Putin sent to admire Salisbury Cathedral.
To viewers in a world where heads of government have posed topless, brandished chainsaws and whined about being deprived of premium television networks in their youth, the world of “Shogun” seems impossibly dignified. Toranaga stays calm even when nearly buried alive by an earthquake. The real Tokugawa was surely less impressive, but he did unite Japan and usher in two and a half centuries of peace and cultural flourishing. Today such leadership sounds like fiction.
Power is power
If there is one positive lesson that can be drawn from the “Game of Thrones” canon, it is that loyalty should not be blind. If your leader is no longer up to the job, find a new one sooner rather than later. So many characters in Westeros stab, poison or desert their kings that the viewer loses count. Obviously, you would not want America’s Democratic Party literally to stab its leader in the back. But a figurative thrust of Valyrian steel might save the world from something worse.
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© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
Both are big-budget sagas about the ruthless pursuit of power. Both combine exquisite production values with immense popularity. “House of the Dragon”—which started airing its second season on hbo in June—is the third-most “in-demand” television series in the world, according to Parrot Analytics, a data firm. (“Game of Thrones”, its antecedent, still tops the charts despite finishing in 2019.) “Shogun”, released in February and streaming on Hulu and Disney+, is in the top 0.2%. The tens of millions of people who have watched these shows undoubtedly include plenty of politicians, from Washington to Warsaw. This raises an intriguing question: might they learn something? And if so, which of the swords-and-scheming blockbusters offers a better guide to seeking power in real life?
At first glance, the answer is obvious. The world of “Game of Thrones” is a fantasy. Humans in Westeros ride dragons through the clouds at several hundred miles an hour, a feat that would be impossible even if dragons existed, which they don’t. Enemies are dispatched not in debates or at the ballot box, but via magic shadows, magic disguises and magic minerals. Sometimes they are raised from the dead. Sometimes dragons are raised from the dead, to become zombie dragons. None of these options is available to a politician in the real world.
“Shogun”, by contrast, is loosely based on actual events. An English ship’s navigator, William Adams, really did wash up in Japan in 1600, and he really was ennobled for helping the Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, build a stronger navy. The television series, like the novel by James Clavell on which it is based, changes the names: Adams becomes John Blackthorne (played by Cosmo Jarvis) and Tokugawa becomes Lord Toranaga (Sanada Hiroyuki). It also exaggerates the Englishman’s role in the warlord’s rise to power. But as historical dramas go, it is fairly true to life. An Englishman in 17th-century Japan would certainly have been astonished by the locals’ elaborate courtesy, superior personal hygiene and impromptu beheadings.
Yet, of the two programmes, the fire-breathing fantasy seems closer to the way power is sought and exercised today. In the first season of “House of the Dragon”, a well-meaning king is visibly fading and clearly incapable of ruling for much longer. Everyone around him is furiously plotting over his succession, while pretending not to. No one wants to appear disloyal to the ailing monarch. Sound familiar?
The second season also has echoes of modern America. King Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney) is a narcissist with improbable hair who knows nothing about governance and says whatever he thinks will please the audience in front of him. When grown-up officials offer sage advice, he grimaces with boredom. When devious courtiers want to sway him, they flatter his preposterous ego.
In every season of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon”, the players are breathtakingly cynical. They scrabble for more power when they already have plenty. They take every opportunity to enlarge their territory, simply because they think they can. They pay no heed to the suffering of the “small-folk”.
It is a world Vladimir Putin would understand. Its morals are those of the warlords currently turning Sudan and Yemen to ash and rubble. And the way Westerosi victors humiliate the vanquished brings to mind the way China’s Communist Party humbles anyone who even hints at challenging Xi Jinping.
The characters in “Shogun” are often cruel, too, but they follow a code. They respect the law—indeed, much of their plotting depends on the assumption that their opponents will not openly flout it. Good luck trying that with Mr Putin.
They also make extraordinary sacrifices to preserve their honour. One young samurai, having blurted out a truth that offended a lord, makes amends by disembowelling himself. It is hard to imagine anything more distant from modern mores. Rather than eagerly seeking opportunities to take offence at other people’s ill-chosen words—and describing them as acts of literal violence—the samurai atones for his own rudeness with a short stabbing sword.
Several politicians in Westeros have a modern flair for populist gestures. Ordinary people hate crime, so its leaders make a show of brutalising criminals. In the first season of “House of the Dragon” Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) led the guardsmen of the City Watch, dressed in flamboyant gold cloaks, for a night of noisily murdering alleged murderers and violating rumoured rapists.
Daemon’s tactics differ only in degree from those of Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who has rounded up tens of thousands of suspected gangsters, locked them up indefinitely and shared a video on social media of them stacked like semi-naked Lego bricks in overcrowded jails. Both leaders want to look tough on crime; neither fusses about due process.
Despite their different genres, the “Game of Thrones” franchise and “Shogun” have elements in common. Alliances shift. Leaders constantly seek weapons of mass destruction, whether European cannons or eggs that might hatch into dragons. Religion is unpredictable: rulers use it to buttress their authority, only to find that religious leaders (Jesuits in Japan, and the High Sparrow in King’s Landing) have ambitions of their own.
Like their modern counterparts, Westerosi and Japanese warlords treat foot soldiers as expendable. But the martial muddle in Westeros is more realistic. Overconfident generals walk into traps. In “Game of Thrones” one prince gets tipsy before a fight to the death, with predictable results. In the new season of “House of the Dragon” the assassins Daemon hires prove as gruesomely incompetent as the ones Mr Putin sent to admire Salisbury Cathedral.
To viewers in a world where heads of government have posed topless, brandished chainsaws and whined about being deprived of premium television networks in their youth, the world of “Shogun” seems impossibly dignified. Toranaga stays calm even when nearly buried alive by an earthquake. The real Tokugawa was surely less impressive, but he did unite Japan and usher in two and a half centuries of peace and cultural flourishing. Today such leadership sounds like fiction.
Power is power
If there is one positive lesson that can be drawn from the “Game of Thrones” canon, it is that loyalty should not be blind. If your leader is no longer up to the job, find a new one sooner rather than later. So many characters in Westeros stab, poison or desert their kings that the viewer loses count. Obviously, you would not want America’s Democratic Party literally to stab its leader in the back. But a figurative thrust of Valyrian steel might save the world from something worse.
For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com