“I’m just a bastard.”
Gendry isn’t necessarily somebody
the casual viewer might have paid much attention to
for a lot of Game of Thrones
“Here I am, arming Lannisters,
and I never get a second look.”
but by now, it’s pretty clear that you should be paying attention.
The bastard son of Robert Baratheon is the LAST Baratheon standing.
“A poor lad from Flea Bottom who happens to be your nephew.”
Sure, the series left his story hanging for about 3 and a half seasons –
the joke that he was still rowing became so popular that
even the show gave it a shout-out.
“I thought you might still be rowing.”
But before this long absence,
the earlier seasons gave us a lot of hints
that Gendry could end up being very important.
“There is power in a King's blood.”
And going into the final season, Gendry is the WILDCARD.
He’s motivated and strong
“I’m a fighter.”
with deep untapped potential,
and possibly still more to learn about himself.
So let’s look closer at who Gendry is,
and why he could be
one of the most crucial final players
in the show’s endgame.
“I’m ready.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go.”
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Game of Thrones has not been kind to the Baratheon line.
All the recognized name-carrying family members have died,
and in Season 2 we get this sequence
of the Lannisters’ men killing off Robert’s bastards.
These scenes emphasize to us that a former king’s blood is dangerous,
both for the child carrying it, and for the new King.
This is a timeless narrative trope --
the idea that a wronged innocent boy grows up to be a strong, angry man.
“What do you think I've been thinking about with every swing of the hammer?
In The Godfather Part II, the Sicilian Don Ciccio
appears heartless for not being willing to spare young Vito’s life.
[In Sicilian]
But he’s right --
Vito later comes back and takes deadly revenge.
[Groan]
That's why the Lannisters are cruel
but CORRECT to view even this poor baby as a threat.
"Please!
AHHHHHHH..."
Game of Thrones likes to remind us
that the outsider who’s been underestimated
or excluded by the establishment
can develop unforeseen strength.
Following this logic,
it’s hard to think of a more dangerous force in this story
than a forgotten bastard,
fueled by anger and the will to revenge.
After this purging of the bastards,
Gendry is Robert’s sole remaining offspring.
But even before he becomes the only child,
the show implies this particular child
has a special connection to Robert himself.
In the first season, Ned Stark goes to find him
after a tip from Littlefinger that shortly before his death,
the previous Hand of the King, Lord Arryn, visited the boy.
“Look at me.”
Staring into Gendry’s eyes, Ned is visibly affected --
it’s like going back in time
to look at his former best friend in his youth.
“Find anything?”
“King Robert’s bastard son.”
Stannis also immediately sees his brother in his nephew.
“Half Robert, half lowborn.”
So because Gendry is the spitting image of his father,
we get the feeling that he’s
a reincarnation of the Baratheon strength.
“Haven’t you ever wondered where your strength came from?
Your talent for fighting?”
When we meet Robert Baratheon in the show,
he’s an over-the-hill, fat, party-loving philanderer
but he got to be that self-indulgent king
because he was an exceptional warrior.
“King Robert was strong.
He won the rebellion
and crushed the Targaryen dynasty.”
This was a powerful guy in his prime.
To be the next Baratheon who really channels that power
is a fearsome thing.
And the show signals that Gendry
is that Baratheon who’s inherited something essential of Robert,
though that force is not yet fully realized.
“There's a power inside you you can't even begin to understand.”
When Melisandre collects Gendry’s blood with leeches,
“I told you there's power in blood of Kings,
and you have so much blood.”
Stannis puts each one into the fire
while saying the name of a man he wants to die.
“Usurper Robb Stark.”
“Usurper Balon Greyjoy.”
“Usurper Joffrey Baratheon.”
After this, all three are killed.
Of course, as Davos points out,
there’s no way to know if this is a coincidence.
“I don’t know if Robb Stark died
because of the Red Woman's sorcery
or because, at war, men all the time.”
and the deaths don’t end up helping Stannis.
But even if she drew the wrong larger conclusions from her insights,
Melisandre could have been right
about the power of the King’s blood in Gendry.
His blood empowers him and imperils him equally.
At the start,
he doesn’t even really want to know about his heritage,
because he sees that even questions can be deadly.
“Asking me questions is bad luck.
You’ll probably be dead soon.”
But by Season 7, we see a noticeable shift --
he’s no longer fleeing his identity.
He’s adopted his father’s chosen weapon,
the warhammer bearing the Baratheon stag.
And he loudly proclaims who he is.
“It’s Gendry, your Grace.
I’m Robert Baratheon’s son.”
“He was meant to keep that to himself.”
It's no small miracle
that Gendry has managed to survive with his King's blood,
despite how many people want to kill him for it.
And now that blood will make him truly influential in this war.
To quote Lord Arryn’s dying words about Robert’s genes,
“The seed is strong.”
This newly confident Gendry may be embracing his Baratheon side,
but he’s still just as proud of the OTHER half of himself --
the lowborn.
“I’m lowborn.
As low as can be.
My mother was a tavern wench.”
Gendry is one of the few characters
we spend time with in the Game of Thrones world
who represents the perspective and experience of the commoner.
“In Flea Bottom we called them
'bowls of brown'.
We'd pretend that the meat in them was chicken.
We knew it wasn't chicken.”
Jon Snow may have thought he was a bastard,
but he still believed he had a noble father
and was raised as a Stark.
Gendry grew up thinking he was a nobody.
“I’ve never seen anything like this.
Not in my life.”
“It’s shocking, isn’t it?
The first time you encounter real wealth.”
As a result, he has a refreshing humility
and no-nonsense air about him.
“You don't have to be a knight to have armor.
Any idiot can buy armor.”
“How do you know?”
“’Cause I sold armor.”
Even when two Hands of the King seek him out,
he barely reacts --
he just wants to get back to work.
Gendry is a regular guy
“I'm a mistake.
I'm only here because my father grabbed my mother
instead of the girl next to her in the tavern.”
and he doesn’t see this as inferiority.
In fact, he has disdain for aristocrats.
“Highborns…”
because, in his experience,
they tend to be terrible people who use him as a pawn.
“Every time a Highborn asks my name, it’s trouble.
We’re not really people to you,
just a million different ways to get what you want.”
Most of the contenders for the Iron Throne
don’t care much about the common people.
“Do you remember what father used to say about people?”
“The lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.”
but the show underlines that a kingdom IS its people,
so a ruler who ignores those people is unfit to rule.
Overlooking the people could also prove a major tactical error –
we’ve seen Daenerys effectively mobilize oppressed populations before.
Gendry, and other former commoners like Varys and Davos,
understand something fundamental that the Highborns don’t get --
that people have inherent worth.
“What is the life of one bastard boy
against a kingdom?”
“Everything.”
When Ned admires Gendry’s work,
Gendry says, “It’s not for sale.”
“Boy, this is the King’s Hand.
If his lordship wants the helmet-”
“I made it for me.”
Gendry knows that even though people like him
can be bought and sold
their value is not just the price some noble is willing to pay.
“I’m done serving.”
His egalitarian spirit
is why he’s drawn to the romance of the Brotherhood without Banners
with its democratic ideals and mission of fighting for the people.
“You just said you were serving Lord Beric.”
“He may be their leader but they chose him.”
Yet when the Brotherhood still sells him to Melisandre,
Gendry is again reminded
of the bottom line of this world he lives in.
“You can’t defend the people without weapons and horses and food.
And we can’t get weapons and horses and food
without gold.”
You might say that Game of Thrones
has a bit of a Star Wars issue with blood-elitism --
we’re told a number of characters are special
in large part because of their genes.
Gendry is featured, too, because of his royal blood.
“Your blood is noble.”
Yet as a character,
he’s compelling because of the other part of him --
what he’s learned from not being treated as special all his life.
And it’s symbolic that he’s a blacksmith,
because like his metals,
he has been forged in the crucible of a difficult life,
and that’s made him stronger.
“I don’t know much about swinging swords.
But this...
this I know.”
We see that Gendry shares a strong connection with Arya.
“As m’lady commands.
That was unladylike.”
But when he learns she’s a lady,
her status creates a distance between them.
“I can be your family.”
“You wouldn’t be my family.
You’d be m’lady.”
Their dynamic is also complicated when Gendry is sold to Melisandre,
who eventually seduces him for her purposes.
“I don’t like that woman.”
“That’s because you’re a girl.”
Arya is still a girl,
and she’s been dressing as a boy,
stripping herself totally of all feminine sexuality.
As he’s awestruck by Melisandre,
Gendry is very much painted as the “typical young guy”
in his vulnerability to the charms of a sexy woman.
“You’re me...
you've never been with a woman…
what would you have done?”
Since then, Gendry seems to have learned to be less naïve
“I wanted to be one of you.
I wanted to join the Brotherhood
but you sold me off
like a slave.”
and Arya has grown up a lot.
Both have changed in their time apart, though in a similar direction.
They’ve grown harder,
stronger,
feeding their anger and killer instincts,
and becoming better warriors.
Another intriguing aspect to this connection is that,
just as Gendry is said to look just like a young Robert,
Arya apparently reminds people of her aunt, Lyanna Stark,
Robert’s betrothed who ran off to marry Rhaegar Targaryen
and died giving birth to Jon.
This leaves us to wonder whether Gendry and Arya
will get the happy ending Robert and Lyanna didn’t,
“Someone took her away from me,
and seven kingdoms couldn't fill the hole she left behind.”
or whether this history of heartbreak could repeat.
So as we enter Season 8,
Gendry the wildcard has a lot of potential
to factor into the climax ahead.
As another plucky supposed bastard with unknown potential,
Gendry has parallels to Jon Snow.
“Our fathers trusted each other, why shouldn’t we?”
(The irony of THIS line
is that their actual fathers, Rhaegar Targaryen and Robert Baratheon,
were mortal enemies, who fought over Lyanna Stark.)
One interesting fan theory is that, like Jon,
Gendry could turn out to be legitimate.
Cersei tells Catelyn Stark that she bore Robert
a black-haired baby son who died.
“You look just like him.”
It’s possible Cersei didn’t want Robert’s son
to be heir to the throne,
or that someone else took the child away.
“They took him away and I never saw him again.
Never visited the crypt.
Never.”
We do get the sense
of a mysterious party watching out for Gendry.
His blacksmith master, Tobho Mott, lets him go,
“But my master got sick of me, so here I am.”
even though in the middle of a war
there would be plenty of need for weapons,
conveniently getting Gendry out of King’s Landing
just before the purge of Robert’s bastards.
And we know Cersei knows about the purge
“How many bastards does he have running–“
(in the book it’s Cersei who initiates all this).
Even for Gendry to get the apprenticeship in the first place –
a reasonably good placement –
“You live in the fancy part of town.”
someone wealthy from the Lannisters’ inner circle
may have had to pay Mott.
Cersei having another kid contradicts Maggy the Frog’s prophecy,
“The king will have twenty children, and you will have three.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Gold would be their crowns.
Gold their shrouds.”
but we might argue the show had already diverged from this
by inventing Cersei’s and Robert’s infant son
(who wasn’t in the books).
The prophecy could be incomplete or proven wrong.
Or you could even interpret
the “three gold crowns” of the prophecy
as referring to Cersei having not three blond children,
but three children who would literally be crowned rulers,
which Myrcella wasn’t.
Dramatic potential abounds in this theory:
Gendry hates the Lannisters,
“You know how happy I am
making weapons for the family that killed my father?
The family that tried to kill me?”
but if this theory is true,
it’s his own family that killed his father.
"I killed my husband,
because it felt good to be rid of him."
So we could see Gendry channeling Orestes from Greek mythology –
the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra,
who comes back to kill his mother and her lover
after they've murder his father in the bathtub.
If Gendry is legitimate,
he’d have perhaps the strongest claim to the throne,
as King Robert’s heir.
But overall, the Cersei-as-Gendry’s mom explanation could be too neat,
on the tails of the similar Jon Snow reveal.
Other fans speculate that
because the Baratheons have some dragon blood through Targaryen ancestors,
“A little blood of the dragon
mingled with the blood of the stag in those days.”
Gendry could be the third dragon rider
predicted in the “Dragon has Three Heads” prophecy,
joining Daenerys and Jon
in riding dragons to retake the Iron Throne –
though at this point the third dragon, Viserion,
has been taken over by the Night King.
George R.R. Martin’s “Fire and Blood” also mentions the ancient prophecy:
“When the hammer shall fall upon the dragon,
a new king shall arise,
and none shall stand before him.”
Some might interpret this as being about Robert, the hammer,
defeating the dragon, Rhaeger,
but it could also mean That Gendry could literally
use his hammer to strike a dragon -- likely Viserion --
to bring about the new king.
So if Gendry’s so potentially important,
why did the show forget about him for so long?
It’s possible he wasn’t always meant to be central –
his storyline is different in the books,
where he’s one of three bastards remaining;
in the show he’s also absorbed the story of another bastard,
Edric Storm.
The style of Game of Thrones is to develop many threads,
to leave them off and pick them back up,
or unexpectedly cut them short.
It's one of the reasons viewers fell in love with the show --
its commitment to surprising us with which threads weave into
the final tapestry.
By now it feels like Gendry’s thread
has some pivotal role to play in this final chapter.
"You will make kings rise and fall.”
He channels the virility and warrior spirit of Robert Baratheon,
“You’re the fastest.
Go, now!”
proving that the Baratheon power isn’t yet fully extinguished.
And he reminds us that,
beyond this “game” of musical chairs for the throne,
there is a kingdom full of human beings who matter --
a fact which any worthy leader must never forget.
“I've been getting ready.
I never knew what for,
but I've always known I'd know it when it comes.”
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