Alyssa Rosenberg on Ned Stark:
All season, the show’s drawn out how miserable Robert Baratheon is atop the Iron Throne. Tonight, he’s smacking his wife for insisting that he’s wrong in his role, losing his temper when Cersei tells him “I should wear the armor and you the gown,” then confessing to Ned Stark, “See what she does to me, my loving wife. I should not have hit her. That was not…that was not kingly.” It’s an indication of Robert’s unsuitability that he escapes his kingship by foisting the power of his office on a man who, though he is a good and decent person, we know by now is entirely unsuited for it. Ned might be a good Hand, even a good king, in a fairy-tale world, but he governs by ideal, rather than by any sense of the pragmatic. He’s more concerned with the quality of process than with outcomes.
I’ll cosign this. Ned is a terrible Hand, and he’d be a terrible King for all the same reasons. He has no talent for politics or subterfuge whatsoever, and as much as we’d like for leaders to be eminently moral people sometimes the successful exercise of politics, even in the public good, requires a bit of shadiness. This is part of what is so clever about George R.R. Martin‘s writing from the perspective of someone who writes about politics–whereas in a traditional fantasy novel, Ned’s strong sense of honor and morality would make him incredibly popular and therefore powerful, in practice it alienates him from the relevant stakeholders whose support he requires to keep the peace.
There is a character on the show whose social talents are eminently suited to the role, but it’s certainly not Ned Stark.
