Honor Gets You Nowhere in Kings Landing: Why Ned Starks’s Decisions Were Plain Stupid

 Logan Hill

Dr. Schoppe

Game of Thrones

20 September 2020

 Honor Gets You Nowhere in King’s Landing: Why Ned Stark’s Decisions Were Plain Stupid

Decisions based on honor are seen in a positive light. Those who hone this kind of moral compass are celebrated or idolized for their ability to make hard but ethically sound choices. This is because, more often than not, the choices based on honor are ones that others may not normally make or even consider. What this ideal does is correlate the word honor with intelligent people who are selfless, placing them on a higher pedestal than average humans. There is nothing wrong with this elevation of honorable individuals; Everyone appreciates a good fictional character that they can trust and admire. Honor is important to have. However, there comes a limit, a time to understand that honor is not worth sacrificing everything else. The case in point is Game of Thrones’, Eddard Stark, or Ned for short. Ned began as a very honorable character, and he certainly went to his death as one as well, but his honor cost him more than it was worth. Ned made many choices that were based on his idea of honor, choosing to blindly ignore the multiple situations that arose proving others were not going to play fair and abide by a similar code like he was hoping. What this led to is a complete disarray of events that could have been avoided, thus further proving that all of Ned’s “honorable” decisions were actually naïve, even stupid.

Before he accepts the position of Hand of the King and moves to the capital, viewers and readers are shown a version of Ned Stark that is a proud amount of righteous. Ned Stark hardly has a fault in his body leading up to his time at King’s Landing. Those paying attention to him are shown a loving husband, a model of a father, and a leader to look up to. As Faruk states in his article “Game of Thrones: A Philosophical insight on Eddard Stark,”:

We see that he is a good father – taking care to encourage all his children, giving them room to explore their strengths and weaknesses. In fact, he even treats Theon Greyjoy – a political prisoner – as one of his own children. By his interactions with Catelyn, he also appears to be a good husband. By his interactions with the various people at his keep, he also appears to be a good ruler. Through his interactions with King Robert, we see him uncomfortable in the limelight, humble about his great military achievements, and at the same time, willing to put away his own preferences in favor of loyalty to the throne – uprooting his family to King’s Landing to take a job others would kill for, but he does not want. He is, by all accounts, respectful and respectable, honorable, humble, conscientious, and loyal. 

Taking all of this into consideration, there is no reason to dislike Neds character. The character development is there and so is the sustenance to back it up. Not only that, but despite his near overwhelming desire to refuse, once the King visits and requests Ned to be his new Hand, Ned agrees and follows him back to King’s Landing. As Hand, he is diligent and responsible, offering thoughtful decisions and solutions during council. There simply is no break in this man’s fidelity. That all being said, it leaves the audience with a major question in mind. How the heck did Ned Stark lose so much face so darn quickly, not only in Westeros but also in the Game of Thrones fandom? Simply put, he set his honor kink on maximum drive and took it to the death, literally.

    You may be wondering what the heck that means. Well, in all bitter frankness, Ned Stark chose honor over everything else, literally everything, up until the minute before his death, when he agreed to ask forgiveness and confess to treason after Varys told him that refusing might cost Sansa her head. A new fan may be tempted to ask: How could being honorable be bad? Is this not how Ned Starks’s character is supposed to be? The simple answer is no, and I am about to tell you why.

Let’s start with where Ned’s character decline begins. Ned’s first days at King’s Landing established that he had some level of intelligence, there is no doubt about that. On his own, he was able to not only do the research, but definitively prove that Cersei’s children were her brothers and not the Kings. However, that was when his smartness peaked because every move he made after that was the behavior of an idiot, pure and simple. Idiot-Ned kicks off things with his visit to Cersei. Ned being the honor driven airhead he is, decides his best plan of action was to lay out his WHOLE plan of action against Cersei TO Cersei. This moment is the first real clue that Ned is really quite a naïve character that is blinded by the thought that everyone is always honorable. See, he knew Cersei’s ways and he knew the Lannister’s’ power, and yet, he turned a blind eye. To him, Cersei was a woman who would run at the thought of her secret being out because there would be no other honorable choice. Therefore, Ned decided in best form to give her a “chance” to escape by telling her that he knew everything, laying every single card out for her to see. He knew what she was capable of and he still not only underestimated her power, but also obnoxiously thought she would change her ways as if she had not already been scheming and finding her way out of traps for years. Rose makes a good point about this in her article “Eddard Stark: Stupid, Incompetent Moralizer”: “He knew all the information he needed to make the right decision. He knew the Lannister’s tried to kill his son, so Sansa and Arya are in big danger in Kings Landing. He knew Cersei killed Jon Arryn, so he also is in danger. He knew Cersei was planning to kill the king, so Robert is in danger. When he went to Cersei he did nothing to protect his daughters and his king from the danger.” And boy is that that the rude awakening Ned is about to get.

Ned’s ignorance does not stop there, not even when the King is killed; that just pushed him to put his plan into further action. When he tells LittleFinger of his plan as well, he is met with the astounding realization that LittleFinger already knows, and so does everyone else. Ned cannot fathom that they would have allowed such a betrayal to go on for so long when they knew who really belongs (or does not belong) in the line of succession. Little Finger knows how Cersci’s play, knows how morals work in Kings Landing, and therefore tries to outline a better plan to Ned. However, this plan isn’t moral at all so Ned immediately turns that down and decides to continue on with his own plan to reinstate Robert’s brother, Stannis [an asshole everyone hates]. This is moment is further proof that Ned is living in a state of reality where he thinks everyone will do the right thing, according to his black and white moral code. He refuses to acknowledge that not only is Cersci more powerful that he thinks, but that King’s Landing does not operate under the same politics as the North. Ned’s mind is fixed on setting things right, doing the honorable thing, not on how plausible his plan actually is...or what the effects of said plan will be. (As Littlefinger pointed out, Stannis would be an atrocious king.) He is so ready for the plan to work that he does not even take into account what might happen if it doesn’t work. Not to mention, it does not even cross his mind once what could happen to his family. Meslow mentions this fault in his article “Game Of Thrones: The Sins of Ned Stark”: “It's hard to fault Ned for having too much virtue, but it's even harder to remain sympathetic to him when his numerous mistakes—born out of both mercy and arrogance—have had such vast consequences for the rest of the Stark family.” While it is actually quite easy to fault Ned for having too much virtue (because he used it dumbly), it’s even easier to be angry at him for completely disregarding his family in place of some lackluster honor that only he cares about. Ned’s complete and total ignorance to what life is really like in King’s Landing is what brought about the end of not only himself, but also the separation of his family and the continuation of all of the things he didn't want to happen.

Ned Stark started his role as someone to look up to, someone who knew what to do. He was a good guy, no doubt. However, he let his preconceived notions about honor get to his head, thus ending with him being the kingdom clown. There comes a point when “honor” is no longer the best Magic-8 ball to a situation. Ned Stark never understood that point. In fact, he completely zoomed right past it, not even giving it a second glance. His utter naivety and lack of being able to read the room is what got him to where he was, not “honor.” If it was true honor that he was worried about, he would have realized he was not the biggest fish in the sea and taken his family back to Winterfell. He would have known that there is more than one way to be an honorable person. Ned chose to honor his own beliefs rather than protect his family. He chose to disregard every premonition he had for some silly fantasy hope that everyone would play as fair as he does. What did that get him? It got him his head cut off; It got Joffrey on the throne; it got his family broken into a million different pieces without him there to help. What Ned thought of as “honorable” choices were only stupid and naïve decisions that cost him literally everything.