8 George R.R. Martin Tropes And What They Really Mean

2. Kids Are Cruel

What It Is: Another fairly self-explanatory one. The Kids Are Cruel trope paints many of the children in A Song Of Ice And Fire in a particularly sinister light. I'm not talking 'kicking the family dog' cruel, either. What It Really Means: So when do we see it? Well, who can forget Joffrey's cruelty €“ even from early on, we see him demand the execution of Sansa's dire wolf. And of course, it's pretty obvious just how severely his cruelty develops. There's Robert Arryn, too, who has a penchant for sentencing people to be thrown off cliffs, and even Arya Stark, who despite having noble intentions, quickly becomes an aggressive, steely-eyed killer. The point is, A Song Of Ice And Fire contains a lot of youngsters who don't act very much like your typical children. Martin uses these characters not just as a means of progressing the story, but as a way of characterizing the world in which the novels are set. It's a world in which children aren't children as we know them, but are forced by grim circumstance to become so much more. On top of that, Martin subverts the trope that children are weak and annoying, elevating many of them to power positions greater than their adult counterparts, turning the modern world as we know it upside down in order to realistically portray the frequently ludicrous power imbalances of the medieval monarchy.