#she has her flaws but to pigeonhole her into one category or the other is a great disservice to how beautiful of a character she is | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thelawyerthatwaspromised · 6 years

Text

GoT’s POV Trap: The Anatomy of Betrayal (and why S7 and S8 won’t be nearly as predictable as you think) (*super long*)

One of the defining features of ASOIAF is the POV storytelling method. It’s one of the most brilliant aspects of the entire series and GRRM executes it to near perfection.

By using the POV trap, GRRM does a few things: he can keep the story “small” as it pertains to a particular character dealing with events in their own time and space, he can give the characters infinitely more relatable than if the story was delivered from an omniscient narrator, and he can make the characters very, very fallible. GRRM’s characters lie to themselves as often as they lie to other people, much like people in real life usually lie to themselves more often than they lie to other people.

A wonderful side effect of the POV method is that it obscures key plot developments and allows for a much greater sense of surprise an emotional impact when events don’t unfold as the characters hope they might.

What does this have to do with the television show, Game of Thrones? Just about everything. Television allows for the watchers to see events in the eyes of whichever character the director chooses. In that way, it’s much more difficult to execute a POV trap in literature than it is on television or in a movie.

A very general theory of mine is this (and it’s not that controversial): if a character on the show articulates a risky but sneaky plan to defeat their enemies, they will almost always be upstaged by a quiet third party - one that does not allow the audience to hear their plan onscreen.

(tw for everyone that hates Littlefinger)

(additional tw for everyone that hates the idea of political!Jon)

Betrayals. A well-executed betrayal on GoT is almost always the most talked about aspect of a given episode or a season because it usually signals a significant change in the flow of the story and, also usually, a death or several.

Is there a pattern we can establish that tells us when a betrayal or, at least, one character is about to outdo another? A couple things. The POV of the soon-to-be-betrayed (who almost always articulates their intended schemes) and the absence of nearly any substantive exposition by the betrayer. This tracks well for every season of GoT.

Season 1

The two main events of Season 1 that were in the betrayal/surprise category were the betrayal of Ned Stark by Littlefinger and the capture of Jaime Lannister at Whispering Wood.

Main POV’s and their plans

Ned: Good ole Ned was out of his depth and didn’t have enough friends in KL to overcome the extent to which the deck was stacked against him. Yet he wasn’t stupid, which has already been expertly debunked by at least one tumblr user, he simple wasn’t playing the game with the same amount of tools as the other and he was too noble to escape his fate.

But Ned most definitely was the most prominent POV character in the 1st season. He did his sleuthing regarding the death of Jon Arryn. He uncovered the secret regarding Cersei’s incestuous relationship with Jaime and the corresponding truth about the status of her children. What watchers of the show saw appeared to be twists that Ned was uncovering about the Lannisters. What Ned didn’t see were the counter measures of his main antagonistic competitors; Cersei and Littlefinger.

Tyrion/Tywin: Likewise, and interestingly, our two main POV’s in Robb’s military campaign to free his father were Tyrion, Tywin, and to a lesser degree, Cat.

The recently-freed-from-the-Vale imp was a huge centerpiece of the first two seasons of the show as a bridge to show us a more complicated conflict than a simple black and white “good vs. evil” war between the Starks and the Lannisters had the show only stayed in Robb’s camp. But the focus on Tyrion and his complicated and layered relationship with his father Tywin worked well to lower the curtain on Robb’s grandest strategic victory for the viewers in a way that caused his victory at Whispering Wood to come as a surprise.

Tyrion learned that the Starks were fierce, loyal, and had a common purpose. What he and Tywin both failed to realize was that Robb was not foolhardy. But the show also allowed viewers to have this impression about Robb initially as well.

The Opposition

LF and Cersei: An important feature of the POV trap in GoT is that you get some interaction with the opposition...because they are meant to lead their target down a specific path.

This is abundantly clear with LF and Cersei. We know Ned dislikes LF and doesn’t trust him but he’s forced to rely on him. Likewise with Cersei, we know Ned dislikes her, but he makes his biggest mistake (his madness of mercy) when he tells Cersei he knows about her children and what he intends to do about it. The LF quote comes to mind: “when you know what a man wants, you know how to move him.”

Cersei and LF now have all the information they need to know what to do next. Cersei must act against Ned and LF pigeonholes Ned into needing the Gold Cloaks for protection.

But, importantly, we never see this happening onscreen.

So Ned plans to tell Robert and he plans to hand the Throne to Stannis as the rightful heir and he plans to use the GC to help him.

It’s not a bad plan. Ned has worked quite a bit to bring it to fruition. But the fatal flaw is that his enemies know more than he does. Cersei plans to act aggressively, and she and LF use LF’s control over the purse strings to turn the GC’s against Ned. It’s shitty and it’s sad but it’s also a very good translation from books to screen and it works because we were always in Ned’s shoes along the way.

Likewise on the war front, we sit at the war council of Tywin. We hear his plans. We know he plans to Tyrion in the vanguard. We hear him say that Robb is young that he thinks he’ll back down in the face of a real battle.

The audience believes Robb is sending a message to Tywin when he tells the spy to report to Tywin that Winter, along with 20,000 Northerners are coming for him. It was a really cool scene and it really did seem like Robb was simply being a badass.

What we didn’t see was Robb’s POV on why he seemingly leaked important information to a Lannister spy. He did it to make Tywin believe that Robb’s sights were set on Tywin’s forces. When Robb sent the auxiliary force to bait Tywin into believing it was THE battle, it only confirmed the intelligence that Robb passed along to Tywin earlier.

From Tyrion’s POV, there was a battle, everyone was revved up. We thought we were getting our first epic scene on GoT. Alas, the show probably didn’t have the budget yet for a proper pitch battle so the technique was to knock Tyrion unconscious and show the aftermath where Tyrion was the LAST to know of Robb’s maneuver which resulted in lifting the siege on Riverrun and capturing Jaime.

So Ned as the POV of his plans and Tywin/Tyrion as the POV for their plans were both thwarted by their opposition. The pattern will hold.

Season 2

There are tons of examples I can use but for Season 2 I’ll focus on the two biggest “surprise” moments: Stannis’ assassination of Renly and Tywin’s arrival with the Tyrells to win the day at Blackwater.

The Main POV’s

First, we’ll go with the build-up to Stannis assassinating Renly. Renly defied the normal laws of succession by declaring himself King even though, by birthright, Stannis was the rightful heir. Stannis and his faction is given a very shadowy image through most of Season 2 except for the “conscience of the audience” character in Davos.

Interestingly, the POV for Renly’s camp is really through the eyes of Catelyn Stark, who’s sent to Renly by Robb to broker an alliance against their common enemy the Lannisters. We hear Catelyn lamenting that the two brothers are behaving as they are. She fears a battle will only hurt both Baratheon brothers and that any enmity should be set aside to defeat the Lannisters.

Renly is certainly more receptive than Stannis to the idea of a peace agreement with Robb. He has the numbers. He is far more liked than Stannis. His plans are simple. Defeat Stannis’ much smaller force. Take KL and the combined might of the Tyrells-Baratheons-Northern alliance would squeeze the Lannisters in the middle.

He articulates his plans. That’s key. Everyone knows that this would be his move. Including his enemies.

Interestingly, the POV for Blackwater shifts to Tyrion and Stannis/Davos.

Tyrion believes his father is pinned down by the Stark forces and Stannis has given no indication that he fears the Tyrells will ally with the Lannisters.

Tyrion has staked his entire plan on the wildfire trap he sets for Stannis, which works pretty spectacularly.

(keep this in mind for S8...)

Tyrion articulates his plan. Stannis articulates his. It’s interesting as these are seemingly the only to main actors for the battle planning. But, as in the fashion in GoT, the audience doesn’t see is that the twist lies offscreen.

The Opposition

Not much that needs explaining.

Stannis guided Renly into agreeing on a battle the next morning. Renly rather foolishly let his guard down, not really anticipating (not that I have much of an idea how he could have stopped it) any treachery from his older and prideful brother...much to his chagrin.

On the other side of things, Stannis overcame the wildfire trap and seemed poised to crush the Lannisters only to be surprised by what happened offscreen between Tywin and the Tyrells.

So again, Renly articulates his plans. They are foiled. Stannis articulates his plan. They are foiled.

Quiet background characters have discussions but we don’t see the decisions they make.

The Red Wedding

Blah. Perhaps the clearest and most famous example of counter-scheming in GoT and maybe television history.

The POV’s

Robb and Cat, unlike the lead-up to Whispering Wood and unlike the lead ups to Robb’s victories, are shown deliberating and deciding their course of action.

Robb’s betrayed his promise to marry a Frey - but they need Walder Frey and his men in order to attack Casterly Rock. It’s a bold plan. It’s risky. But Robb is out of options once the Karstarks splinter off after the execution of Rickard Karstark.

(just to make you sad)

The Opposition

Roose Bolton. Walder Frey. Tywin Lannister. They all played a part in Robb’s demise and they all did so in the background.

Roose is shown being hospitable to Jaime - but it’s actually presented very sensibly. Jaime is already more likable to the audience so we don’t necessarily want to see anyone being hostile towards him. Roose doesn’t want to be known as the man who killed Jaime Lannister for some of the same reasons that Robb kept Jaime alive but we’re also not privy to his plans on participating in the Red Wedding. That’s not to say that the audience could not possibly have predicted his betrayal of the Starks, but he’s a background character with unexplained motives.

Which leads to...

Sorry again.

But the pattern remains. Robb articulates his scheme. It’s risky but it’s not really a bad one if things break properly. Yet he’s foiled by offscreen interactions by Roose, Tywin, and Walder.

I could go on an on. The Purple Wedding had the same elements...only this time Tyrion’s POV is interrupted by LF (partly at being pissed about being played by Tyrion in S2) and Olenna scheming to have Joffrey killed and essentially framing Tyrion and Sansa.

Where am I going with this?

My contention is that the pattern held in Season 7 which means there are essentially only two offscreen schemers in Season 7: Sansa Stark and Jon Snow. Sansa was revealed in the finale of Season 7 to be a schemer and we already have seen the results of her scheme in the execution of Littlefinger.

Jon Snow’s scheme is a trickier one as it’s not meant to harm anyone but his actions in S7 are intended to lure the audience down the same path that the show has lured them in seasons past. The evidence is there.

The S7 POV’s

Arya and Tyrion serve as the two biggest POV’s for Sansa and Jon’s actions in Season 7. Here’s where the identifiable patterns that have always been used by the show inform the audience that not everything is as it appears.

First I’ll start with Arya. She comes to WF and is immediately suspicious of Sansa and her motives. The show wanted us to be suspicious of Sansa’s motives. They gave us moments like the following:

Sansa and LF shared looks when Jon was crowned in S6/E10 which led many to believe that the conflict would center around Sansa and Jon rather than Sansa and LF. The pre-S7 build-up echoed these suspicions. Sansa betraying Jon became one of the most commonly predicted theories for S7.

What’s more? For the first time we got to observe LF executing his own plot. He never explicitly stated what he was planning to do, but we were privy to his actions in a way that had never happened.

Remember our rule. If character explicitly states or we are unquestionably shown what they are planning, it’s not going to work.

Additionally, we saw Arya aggressively confronting Sansa about her loyalties to Jon. We saw Arya breaking into LF’s chambers and stealing the scrolls that supposedly implicated Sansa as a traitor. We also saw that Arya was duped by LF and that he intentionally planted the evidence and wanted Arya to find it. So Arya’s “plan” (which wasn’t very deep or well-thought out but still follows the pattern) was foiled by LF and we saw it happening. But we saaawwww LF foiling Arya’s plans...which followed the pattern of LF being foiled by Sansa -> who despite having tons of dialogue in S7 was NOT truly a POV as we never heard her articulating any of the open-ended questions she was asked through the season.

She was asked what would make her happy. We didn’t get an answer. That will carry over into S8.

She was asked how she feels about Jon being king. We didn’t get an answer. That will carry over into S8.

She was “led” through THE LYING GAME by BOTH Arya and LF. We didn’t hear her really answer either in their scenes.

That doesn’t mean she was scheming as a lone wolf, it means her schemes were kept offscreen (since they involved Arya in the end) and the audience was left not knowing what was in her mind during S7.

Sansa was a schemer. And she defeated her competition.

Again. The pattern holds. We see Arya scheming. She is thwarted by LF. We see LF scheming. He is thwarted by Sansa all along and Arya after awhile. The twist/betrayal/surprise is Sansa. This again doesn’t mean we can’t anticipate a certain twist or betrayal, it simply means that the characters that don’t offer us a glimpse into their decision making processes have something to hide.

Which leads me to the other character without a true POV in S7 and who, I believe, will be revealed as a schemer in S8: Jon Snow.

To start. I don’t think Kit Harington is a terrible actor. I think he did spectacular work in S7. I don’t have statistics in front of me, but I believe he received the most screen time in S7 of any character. I also believe that after episode 3, the audience was essentially cut off from his POV for the rest of the season save for a few precious moments.

Jon is a schemer.

It’s part of his progression during the season as I don’t believe he started as a schemer.

He’s extremely emotionally raw in the first episode. He’s clearly trying very hard to be a good king.

He needs support. His vulnerability is clear in the quieter moments.

His reaction to being questioned about leaving WF makes it clear that he does not want to leave and he takes it very seriously and to heart when his subjects make their feelings on the matter known.

His first few encounters with Dany are also pretty raw and we know his POV.

He’s not there to strut around about his titles. He’s there to speak frankly and secure an important ally but his first approach fails. This particular part is more tinfoily but I find it interesting that we don’t see Jon tell Tyrion that he wants dragonglass when Tyrion asks how he can help Jon. It’s not an unreasonable explanation to say that we didn’t see it because we don’t need to see Jon asking for dragonglass...but it’s also a lie by omission. Dragonglass is important, sure, but the goal in his trip to Dragonstone is to secure Dany as an ally and get her dragons up North.

That’s the whole point...we aren’t actually shown Jon asking for dragonglass because I believe that was the first time Jon partially became a schemer. Remember, important characters in a scene that don’t tell the audience out loud what they want are generally hiding something. We already know Jon has hidden his main goal by telling Tyrion he only wants dragonglass.

The cave scene continued Jon’s progression. He set up the meeting offscreen and we didn’t get any indication from Jon that he planned the meeting before it happened. It had a purpose. He suddenly behaves very different than the Jon we’re used to.

He sets up a 1 on 1 without explanation. He behaves more aggressively by taking her hand. Long gazes. etc. Skeptics of political Jon would surely say that Jon is super attracted to Dany and that’s why he’s behaving this way, yet nothing on screen or spoken by Jon indicates that physical attraction is present, nor is it in Jon’s character pattern to proceed like this based strictly on physical attraction. We are most definitely shown that Jon wants something specific from Dany and that their worldviews are completely incompatible.

So I’m leaning heavily in the “not romantically motivated” column for this scene.

And we close with Jon blankly staring at Dany and not directly answering the difficult question of how he could even manage to get the northern lords to follow a southern ruler. The scene simply ends with an unanswered conflict for Jon.

But we do know what Dany wants and we do know her POV on the matter.

Then we start getting dodgy Jon. He’s in a transition period. He’s not actively answering many questions. He changes the subject a lot. And the camera gives him momentary looks that show an inner conflict that he’s trying to suppress.

We see real!Jon for a bit but he quickly censors his own POV and calls the dragons gorgeous beasts after momentarily displaying disagreement with Dany’s assessment that the dragons are beautiful.

Then Jon doesn’t answer the question about what he thinks of Dany torching the Lannister army.

My guess?

I need the dragons, I know. But I hate the idea of you using them on people. Dammit, this is a tough situation. You’re pretty but I think you might also be insane.

~ Jon, internally

Then he also doesn’t answer regarding his own resurrection.

We are incrementally being closed off from Jon’s POV now.

Davos is articulating for the audience that Jon is checking out Dany. Jon doesn’t say it. Jon dodges again. He reveals no personal feelings regarding Dany. My patterning would hold that Davos is the character guiding the audience and Jon is the schemer. It so happens that this matches up with what I think is happening over the course of the season.

Again, Jon is cagey. He doesn’t have to actually answer anything here. We know what Missandei thinks. We don’t actually get to see any indication of what Jon thinks.

I’m going to take a momentary side bar here to say that if you think this is all just to set up Jon realizing his deep passionate love for Daenerys as a “twist” that no writer or director would frame it this way without some private personal indication from Jon that he has feelings for Dany before it was actually presented to the viewer that way. In short, you can believe that if you want, but that belief would be stupid.

So we’ve again had other characters articulating what they think about Dany in front of Jon but Jon’s personal POV regarding Dany remains unrevealed.

The last two scenes I looked at happened in reverse order. Sue me.

Then we get the wight hunt and the goodbye scenes.

Each STILL withholding Jon’s POV.

Jon calls himself a stranger. How fitting for someone who has repeatedly concealed his inner thoughts.

Dany’s sweet attempt at a goodbye.

Jon again revealing absolutely nothing.

Yet we DO get to see Tyrion telling Jorah that Dany needs him more than ever aaaaaaaaaas Jon approaches implicating that there’s some reason to doubt Jon.

Also, Tyrion is a shit in the books. There’s nothing else to this thought. I just wanted you to know.

Yeah, you better look away. You fucker.

Jon remains cagey with other people on the wight hunt regarding Dany. Again, his POV in relation to how he feels about her remains a mystery.

What? Jon doesn’t just say that Dany is better than Cersei? POV locked.

POV locked down.

Tormund with SECOND inquiry about Dany that gives Jon the chance to say something about her. POV locked down.

Which leads to...

Wait.

Jon’s POV has been totally masked. We’ve had other characters completely dictate our expectations. Then out of fucking NOWHERE, Jon hands the North over to Dany.

Ok.

If you’re thinking “well Dany was brave and she’s so beautiful and sad that Jon decides that he’s in love and she deserves to be queen” then you are saying that being pretty, sad, and riding a dragon would be enough for Jon Snow to hand over ruling authority of the Stark ancestral home which would give very little reason to like Jon and even less reason to respect Jon.

No.

Jon is angling. His POV he’s expressing towards Dany has not ONCE been echoed or articulated by Jon to anyone else. Not to mention it’s completely spur-of-the-moment and it throws Dany emotionally when Jon tells her that he’s pledged to her. Jon is scheming.

Boy, if this isn’t an indication that we are dealing with a conflicted Jon Snow but also that we aren’t allowed to be privy to his POV then I’m not sure what else the show can do to indicate that. He’s already pledged his kingdom. What a grand gesture! If he’s genuinely in love with her enough to do that, why show this angst about him looking tortured? He’s already resolved to make the decision. He’s behaving romantically when in Dany’s presence. What inhibition would he be feeling at this point?

We are still not being shown the inner workings of Jon’s thought processes.

Then we get an even better POV obfuscation at the Dragonpit.

First, we get this rather ominous and otherwise pointless dialogue...

Jon, again, being cagey after publicly pledging for Dany.

Hell, once he slept with Ygritte he had no trouble saying how much he wanted to rip her dress off, how he enjoyed having sex with her, etc. Jon isn’t that shy about such things. He’s a little bit of a prude I guess, or at least not a bleedin’ poet. But he’s not like a 5th grader trying to hide his crush as there’s absolutely no reason for him to behave this way.

(”He’s just so overwhelmed about loving Dany!” Again, Jon’s not five. And if you think this is why he’s acting reluctant about everything, you need to experience grown-up life.)

‘We Sail Together’ - ‘You Don’t Have to Choose’ - ‘*Knock knock* *Who’s There?* *Nephew* *Nephew Who?* *Nephew Imma Manipulate You*’

The holy triumvirate of political!Jon scene progression, imo.

Jon’s just got done publicly pledging Dany and befuddling EVERYBODY. It confuses and angers both Davos and Tyrion because it wasn’t communicated. It seemingly angers Sansa that it was done without her consultation. It even seems to peek LF’s interest, which leads neatly into his supposing that Jon must want to marry Daenerys. Hmm. The audience is again being guided in a certain direction without Jon having to say it himself. How convenient.

Then Jon starts flexing his muscles in influencing Dany but ALSO he’s allowed to keep his POV still very shadowy.

And leads neatly into the Theon scene.

Which holy crap, if this doesn’t make you suspicious about Jon doing the “right” thing, I think you’re probably going to be very unpleasantly surprised in S8.

So, whose POV’s did we get to see in Dany’s camp in S7?

We saw Tyrion agonizing over losing his influence. We saw Varys questioning Dany’s capacity. We saw Theon, Davos, and Tormund quizzing Jon personally without much reveal.

We even had Tyrion and Dany giving all the necessary exposition on Dany’s POV to know exactly what’s going on in her mind.

The only character’s feelings left unresolved in the south remains Jon Snow.

Wanna know something else really interesting?

WE ALSO ALREADY GO TO SEE CERSEI ARTICULATING HER BETRAYAL OF THE NORTH/DANY ALLIANCE.

It serves as a very close parallel to LF’s schemes being shown to the audience.

It should stick out because that’s not how it works on GoT when we’re fearing that the bad guys will betray the good guys.

LF was out maneuvered and executed.

Cersei’s ploy with the G.C. is not a twist. There’s no political intrigue behind it...because we already know it’s happening.

By every other pattern established by the show’s writing, the Golden Company are not being introduced because they will have a surprise impact. The Golden Company is being introduced to draw attention away from other plotting characters.

The Golden Company masking Tyrion or Varys’ betrayal of Dany in favor of Cersei makes absolutely no storytelling sense as we already know the component of the betrayal that has the most tangible impact: the Golden Company. What could Tyrion or Varys do that would have more impact than delivering the strongest mercenary army to Cersei with the Northern alliance unawares?

We also already are privy to Tyrion’s and Varys’ thoughts. There’s nothing about the way D&D have always set up their twists that would lend any credence to the idea that another twist would involve them.

The character with the masked POV, with a ridiculous amount of influence over Dany, and the one who benefits the most from behavior that remains unknown to the audience is Jon Snow.

The pattern played out repeatedly in Season 7.

Tyrion and Dany articulated their plans to conquer Westeros in episode 2.

Those plans were emphatically foiled by Cersei, Jaime, and Euron.

We didn’t hear Cersei, Jaime, and Euron discussing their counter measures.

Then Jaime and Bronn were shown executing the transportation of the gold and crops taken from Highgarden. We were also shown Jon, Tyrion, Theon, and Dany in one scene or another deliberating on what Dany’s next course of action was going to be - but - we were never shown the moment in which Dany decided she would attack the Lannisters in the Spoils of War.

Again, it doesn’t actually matter if the “twist” was predictable or not. What matters is how the twist was executed by the writing. Again - it is a “surprise” (whether you were surprised or not) that Dany descended on the Lannister force atop Drogon at the Blackwater rush.

This is how the show repeatedly, over and over and over again execute their most significant plot developments.

Characters articulate plans. Other characters counter those plans offscreen.

The victors have an obscured POV where we don’t get to see their decisions being made. The victors surprise and defeat the characters when we were privy to their plans.

It’s like clockwork. It’s repeatable. It’s quantifiable.

So what is this twist and/or betrayal?

That he doesn’t have feelings for Dany. That he was behaving in a way specifically designed to get her North with her dragons and that his identification of her growing affections for him are what gave him the means to accomplish that task.

And how would this even be revealed? By some event that causes the curtain to be lifted when it comes to Jon and his inner most thoughts.

He has the motive: he needs to save the world from extinction.

He has the need for this: Dany repeatedly refused to agree to come North.

He has the opportunity: Dany has an overt fascination with him and she’s now articulated that heroic men move her emotionally.

His POV remains hidden: Find me a quote from Jon saying how much Dany means to him that isn’t a 1 on 1 encounter.

His competition POV is not a mystery: Tyrion, Jorah, Dany, Cersei -> everyone else significant in the south has clearly articulated plans (Cersei, Dany) or have been given a clear POV and confusion regarding Jon (Tyrion, Jorah).

Jon Snow remains a mystery.

The audience is guided in a certain direction regarding his feelings. He’s never had to articulate those feelings. Other characters have had plans that they’ve articulated which have been foiled.

There’s no other mystery for Jon that doesn’t implicate Dany. He can’t be scheming something against Cersei that would involve Dany as he’s never discussed it with Dany while Dany has discussed Cersei. It’s not about the Night King as the Night King has zero POV and there’s no sensible reason why Jon’s POV would be obscured to hide some inner thoughts regarding the Night King.

To date, he’s re-routed Dany’s entire campaign. He’s convinced her to commit her entire army to his cause. He’s bent the knee without ONCE expressing any public affinity for Dany. He’s cut off communications and had no private exposition with his closest advisers.

Jon IS the wildcard schemer now. There’s no one left.

The villains have transitioned from the schemers to the failed schemers, explaining for the audience in detail what they plan to do only for those plans to inevitably be foiled. I believe Cersei’s articulated plans will have a very serious consequence to them (which is the real twist of her already-revealed plot).

The other “surprise” schemer of Season 7 (Sansa Stark) had her POV similarly cut off from the audience to build suspense with regard to her final decisions. The same Sansa Stark who said this:

Season 7 showed us that Sansa took this conversation seriously.

I believe Season 8 will show that Jon Snow did that same.

#tltwp meta #jonsa #jon x sansa #Political Jon theory #political jon meta #jonsa politics #D&D are predictable #schemers scheme offscreen #say that 5 times fast #jon is a schemer #the starks are schemers #stark restoration #King and Queen in the North

892 notes · View notes

newstfionline · 6 years

Text

‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effort

By Nick Miroff, Amy Goldstein and Maria Sacchetti, Washington Post, July 28, 2018

When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunify migrant families separated at the border, the government’s cleanup crews faced an immediate problem.

They weren’t sure who the families were, let alone what to call them.

Customs and Border Protection databases had categories for “family units,” and “unaccompanied alien children” who arrive without parents. They did not have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been taken from their families and placed in government shelters.

So agents came up with a new term: “deleted family units.”

But when they sent that information to the refugee office at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was told to facilitate the reunifications, the office’s database did not have a column for families with that designation.

The crucial tool for fixing the problem was crippled. Caseworkers and government health officials had to sift by hand through the files of all the nearly 12,000 migrant children in HHS custody to figure out which ones had arrived with parents, where the adults were jailed and how to put the families back together.

Compounding failures to record, classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown were at the core of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.

After his 30-day deadline to reunite the “deleted” families passed Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw lambasted the government for its lack of preparation and coordination.

“There were three agencies, and each was like its own stovepipe. Each had its own boss, and they did not communicate,” Sabraw said Friday at a court hearing in San Diego. “What was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know either.”

Trump officials have insisted that they were not doing anything extraordinary and were simply upholding the law. The administration saw the separations as a powerful tool to deter illegal border crossings and did not anticipate the raw emotional backlash from separating thousands of families to prosecute the parents for crossing the border illegally.

Most of those parents were charged with misdemeanors and taken to federal courthouses for mass trials, where they were sentenced to time served. By then, their children were already in government shelters. The government did not view the families as a discrete group or devise a special plan to reunite them, until Sabraw ordered that it be done.

One result was that more than 400 parents were deported without their children. Many other parents say they went weeks without being able to speak to their children and, in dozens of cases, signed forms waiving their right to reclaim their children without understanding what those forms said.

Scrambling to meet the judge’s reunification deadline, government chaperons transported children from shelters scattered across the country to immigration jails near the border where they had been severed from their parents weeks or months before.

One attorney said Friday that 10 days had passed since her client was told she would be reunited with her 6-year-old daughter. She remained in detention in Texas, and neither she nor a social worker for her daughter, waiting in a New York shelter, could get an explanation. “She watched all the other mothers go out of her dorm. There is only her and one other left,” said the attorney, Eileen Blessinger.

In court filings Thursday, the government said it had reunited more than 1,800 children with their parents or other guardians. But 711 children would remain separated for now, because their parents had been deported, had criminal records or otherwise had not been cleared to regain custody.

In the end, Trump’s decision to stop separating families, followed by Sabraw’s reunification order, has largely brought a return to the status quo at the border, with hundreds of adult migrants released from custody to await immigration hearings while living with their children in the United States.

“If you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people. And if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart,” Trump griped before his June 20 executive order, calling the situation “a tough dilemma.”

Senior administration officials said they made efforts to note which families had been broken up and that they thought the HHS system already in place would have allowed parents to recover their children and leave the country together by agreeing to voluntary deportation.

“There was always an intent for reunification to occur. It wasn’t meant to be a permanent condition,” one official said.

Sabraw, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, said even a short-term split was unacceptable.

“It is the act of separation from a parent, particularly with young children, that matters,” he told the government in court proceedings.

The government previously had separated parents on a more limited basis, such as when human trafficking was suspected or the adult’s relationship to the child was in doubt.

Last year, with no public announcement, the administration piloted a mass-separation system in the El Paso area. When illegal crossings jumped this spring, Trump signed off on a blanket policy for the whole border.

“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” Sessions said in a May 7 speech in Arizona. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”

One senior Border Patrol official said agents were quietly directed not to refer parents of children under 5 for criminal prosecution. But 27 toddlers and preschoolers were separated between the start of “zero tolerance” on May 5 and Trump’s executive order ending separations on June 20. Dozens more had been taken from their parents in previous weeks.

As the system ramped up, thousands of children were funneled into shelters overseen by HHS, so many that the agency had to set up a tent camp outside El Paso and plan for additional ones on military bases.

On June 28, two days after Sabraw’s reunification order, DHS officials held a conference call for members of the DHS’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, a group of security experts and former officials who provide recommendations and counsel to the secretary. One member, David A. Martin, said officials had few answers when dismayed members asked how they planned to bring families back together: “They were saying, ‘Well, we’re working on it.’ “ Two weeks later, he and three other members quit the panel in disgust.

In his resignation letter, Martin said the family separations were “executed with astounding casualness about precise tracking of family relationships--as though eventual reunification was deemed unlikely or at least unimportant.”

Another member who resigned, Elizabeth Holtzman, said the failure to create records to track parents and children demonstrated “utter depravity.”

“This is child kidnapping, plain and simple,” she wrote in her resignation letter, urging Nielsen to quit.

Top officials thought that any controversy generated by the family separations could be parlayed into leverage for negotiations with Democrats over the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and border wall funding, according to current and former DHS officials involved in planning the policy.

Instead, the firestorm has “poisoned the well,” leaving the chances of congressional action even more remote, said Verdery, who now runs a lobbying firm. “If you’re a Democrat or a moderate and a proposal is pigeonholed as DHS ‘breaking up families,’ it’s going to be a nonstarter.”

Well before Trump took office, people inside and outside HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement recognized that the custom-built database used since 2014 to track the migrant children in its custody was clunky and flawed.

The Unaccompanied Children Portal crashed often, according to several people with access to it. And because it sometimes failed to save information, caseworkers were trained to copy whatever information they were trying to enter about a child into a separate Word document.

Most serious, the portal was not built in a way that allowed ORR to add data categories or quickly sort the information it contains, according to three people familiar with it. If HHS staff wanted to compile specific information, such as a roster of all the pregnant teenagers at shelters, “It would be months and months,” said a former HHS official.

Because the system was not designed with an expectation that ORR would need to find the detained parents of its children, the portal did not include a column to type in information about parents’ identities, locations or file numbers.

A 2015 Government Accountability Office report concluded that “the interagency process to refer and transfer [unaccompanied children] from DHS to HHS is inefficient and vulnerable to errors because it relies on e-mails and manual data entry, and documented standard procedures, including defined roles and responsibilities, do not exist.”

By 2016, the former HHS official said, then-HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell “was frustrated, because a lot of times, we just had to say, ‘We can’t get this data,’ or ‘We can get it, but it will take a couple of weeks.’ “

The department hired a contractor who made recommendations for upgrading the system and adding more staff. A few improvements were made, but it was near the end of the Obama administration, and the old guard ran out of time. “We left a blueprint for the new administration to pick up,” the former official said. “To my knowledge, nothing happened.”

The department’s refugee office was overwhelmed with the number of children in its custody once the mass separations began. And the files arriving from the Border Patrol were a mess.

In some cases, Border Patrol agents had handwritten parents’ names and alien numbers in children’s files that were sent on to ORR. But it was hit-or-miss, according to several children’s advocates familiar with the records. One HHS official said that files he reviewed typically contained parents’ names but did not say where the parents were.

The underlying problem, though, was that the problem-ridden database “was not set up to reunite children [with] parents from whom they’d been separated,” said Robert Carey, who was director of ORR for the final two years of the Obama administration.

As one senior DHS official put it: “We had a system that was designed to flow one way.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit that led to Sabraw’s order, said it could take months to track down hundreds of deported parents and make arrangements to return their children. Some parents may be hard to reach or hiding from the very threats that prompted them to flee their countries in the first place.

In the meantime, the government will try to place their children with vetted guardians. Otherwise, they will remain in shelters.

“It’s going to be really hard detective work,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project. “Hopefully we will find them.”

#family separation #separating children from parents #deleted families

0 notes