The Ethics of Hodor

“In the 2014 scholarly essay “A Song of Ice and Fire’s Ethics of Disability,” Lauryn S. Mayer of Washington and Jefferson College and Pascal J. Massie of Miami University of Ohio examined the disability themes in George R.R. Martin’s book series. They wrote that the saga seemed interested in “dismantling the clichés of disability, examining the costs of ableist ideologies, and uncovering the fear of mortality and vulnerability that compels people to build a wall separating themselves from the disabled.””

“Lauryn S. Mayer: Medieval and fantasy literature has been noted by a lot of scholars for providing a space to imagine something different: another world—utopian, dystopian—or a particular way of thinking, different social structures, those kinds of things. The thing that I found interesting with Martin was that he takes a world in which people are particularly vulnerable and he plays that up.”

“By talking about disability as a very certain set of extreme conditions, we have a tendency of setting up these walls between them and us. But what Martin does is show how very, very fragile the boundaries between wholeness and bodily vulnerability are. Only in a moment you can go from being an “able” person to somebody who is “disabled.””

“And when you get to that scene where he snaps his chains and then snaps his tormenter in half, that’s not him, that’s Bran. Hodor is horrified by what’s happened. Bran’s always using an excuse: “I just want to be strong again,” “I won’t do this for too long”—that’s the logic of the abuser.

Hodor’s supposed to be loyal anyways. You could just have Bran tell Hodor to hold the door and have him die sacrificially. But I think it’s very interesting that the show shows this early violation against a kid who could have grown up to be a perfectly functioning and very colorful adult.”

“Kornhaber: The point you made earlier about the show reminding people of their fragility—it seems like this revelation about Hodor’s past is another example of that. It wasn’t something he was born with.”

“Mayer: Yeah, and that’s the reason, I think, people react so viscerally to the show. Look at the reaction [videos] to any particular horrifying episode of Game of Thrones, like Shireen being burned to death or the Red Wedding. If you watch people’s body language, they are acting as if they themselves are being physically hurt, right? A lot of them will start curling into themselves. They’ll start touching parts of their bodies like you do when you’re injured. And if you look at the comments afterwards, you see the kind of thing where [it’s like] people dropped something on their foot. A lot of them are not even able to articulate complete sentences: “FUCK THIS FUCKING SHOW!” or “I can’t even, I can’t, I can’t.””

“When I was driving back from Pittsburgh before I had this interview, I got cut off by a large truck. A three-second miscalculation, and you’d be having this conversation with someone else. And that [feeling], I think, is what Martin does. In terms of disability, it really reminds us of how profoundly vulnerable that we are—that the boundary between the abled and the disabled is so thin.”

“I’m leery about any sort of generalization turning medieval people into a homogenous mass. Class does have a huge influence. Courtly literature will usually show lower classes as being inherently less intelligent, less good looking, less able to do things. There’s the trope of the kid of the royal blood raised as a peasant but of course you know he’s of royal blood because he’s so much smarter or whatever. In a lot of cases, medieval courtly literature was self-serving because it was trying to take a class situation and make it an inherent set of qualities. So somebody who was born into a class to serve would probably have automatically been treated as if they were somewhat less mentally capable, which would have been encouraged by the fact that very few of them could read and write.”