I don’t have my books on hand (lent ‘em out), but the gist of it is a mercenary that’s being plied by a king, a septon, and a rich man, each ordering him to kill the other, commanding him via duty, religion, and money respectively. It’s an easy riddle (He’s a SELLsword, therefore the rich man buys it), but that’s not really the point of the exercise.
The main question is “Who has the power”, and it’s pretty clear that it’s the mercenary who has the power, the one who’s active, the supplier (But also the consumer, as he’s the one that’s exchanging something for what he can do), but he’s the one they all want, three people, all of them powerful, requesting his help.
Now, this is a fairly pessimistic outlook, that the one with the money will always win, but as the series has gone on we’ve seen that this isn’t true. To make things simpler, I’m going to remove a couple of the more loaded terms and replace the Gold with Self, the Septon with Morality, and the King with Duty. These are three abstract concepts that everybody can relate to.
Now it’s true, most people will choose Self over anything else - the Boltons, the Freys, the Lannisters, and the Tyrells are all pretty secure in wanting what’s best for themselves personally, and the Cleganes and the Bloody Mummers take this to their logical conclusion.
Ned and Brienne are the paragons of Duty - When asked to do something that outrages him morally, Ned resigns rather than fights against it, and once set on a mission, Brienne does everything humanly possible to accomplish it (Including sinking a boat by throwing a boulder at it). Ned, however, dips into this before he dies, doing what he can for his daughters to keep them alive (Which, while moral, is still to preserve an object of himself). Stannis is also as Duty as you can get, I’ve parsed that he’s not really been enjoying anything that he’s been doing through the series (Although he doesn’t really enjoy ANYTHING except probably waiting for better dentistry), but he does it because that’s what he has to do, that’s his duty, and the ends almost entirely justify the means
For Morality, I’d say that Lancel Lannister, the new Septon, and the Sparrows fit that bill - they may not have morality and ethics that we can agree with, but they’re doing what they’re doing for the reasons that what they’re doing is -right- to do. Dany feels this way very strongly when she’s in Meereen, and she can’t submit to Duty because she’s the Queen, there’s nobody for her to serve. You can see Jaime has leanings towards this at times (forsaking duty to save the people of King’s landing, going back to save Brienne, etc), but pushing Bran out the window to cover up his incestruous crime is fully in Self, so I figure he’s kind of half and half.
Davos is right along the lines of Duty and Morality. He serves and trusts and obeys Stannis unflinchingly, but when Stannis asks something of him that Davos cannot accept (And he can accept a lot), not only will he refuse, he’ll also prevent it from happening, something that Ned, who’s used to being up in his frozen northern shithole where dilemmas like this don’t come up and there’s far better things to put your energies towards, is incapable of doing. Davos is completely willing to accept the punishment for what he did, because doing this is more important to him than the aspect of his self.
But there’s some people who are in the middle!
Littlefinger comes to mind immediately - or at least he likes to project himself as being that way. I’ve got no doubt that he’s mostly concerned with Self, but in society his role is as someone who DOES things, and is essentially a medieval power broker on behalf of all sorts of people, which places him mostly in the middle. He’s managed to win both money and respect from the Crown from his actions. Once Sandor gave up Duty for Self, he discovered he had a lot more free agency, and even did a lot of fairly moral things, and Jaime’s been spinning his wheels for a while too, although he’s settling on a weird Self/Morality thing, but he has a point when he mentions all the vows he’s sworn about how impossibly difficult it is to try and stay on top of everything.
I think that what Varys was trying to get across, in the end, is that if you know which of the three a person is most devoted to, then you know how to control them. Tyrion was the Rich Man, and he was only EVER the Rich Man, and that’s ultimately why he couldn’t succeed.
Why did this post not get noticed more? It’s awesome.
