A Game of Thrones Themes

No question about it: A Game of Thrones is all about power. Where does power come from? And what do people do with it? The biggest struggle in the book is the conflict over political/royal power in...

A Game of Thrones is chock-full of betrayals, treachery, and abandonment. (Also conspiracies, subterfuge, manipulations… should we go on?). Even the people who are incredibly principled do their...

Family is the basic unit for a lot of political decisions in A Game of Thrones. If two men are fighting, it's rarely just an issue between two individuals: it's a clash between two major houses and...

Society is no picnic in A Game of Thrones. Our heroes and villains (and just regular people) have to navigate a social jungle filled with dangers. One of the main difficulties is that there are so...

In A Game of Thrones, principles are often questions of duty and honor. Oh, and they're never fun. No one ever says, "my principles tell me that I should eat this pie." Pretty much everyone in this...

A Game of Thrones is not a kid's book, that's for sure. But many of the most important characters in this book are pretty young, and we watch them grow and mature when faced with a crisis. Or, more...

In a book where the good guys are usually the first to die, justice doesn't seem to prevail. But this is what makes A Game of Thrones so engaging: the good guys might lose out and the bad guys migh...

There's a famous quote from William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." That's a pretty good summary of how the past works in A Game of Thrones. It's like throwing a rock into a...

Strength and skill come in super handy in the struggle for power. It's all about deciding who is better: stronger, smarter, more skilled, meaner, or just better dressed (in armor). Whoever has more...

Gender is a lot more constraining in A Game of Thrones than it is in our world (we hope). The roles for men and women are pretty narrow: women are pretty and nice; and men are strong and capable of...