Game of Thrones is a Shakespearean drama besieged by a zombie movie. It revolves around the question “What is power?,” and in its more profound moments it offers a leisurely meditation on the fluidity of authority. At other times, it just bombards viewers with the latest special effects.

The clash of genres is reflected in the history of Westeros itself, which can be seen as an epic battle between reality and fantasy. The plot largely focuses on one flawed but realistic family—the Lannisters—that conducted a desperate and seemingly hopeless struggle against a growing host of demonic, magical, and supernatural powers.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and best-selling author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

To the east, the Lannisters faced Daenerys Targaryen, who could walk unscathed through fire, and relied on ferocious dragons to burn and awe her enemies. To the north, the Stark clan was lousy at politics and finance, but the family boasted one daughter who was a shapeshifting assassin, one son who turned into the “three-eyed raven” and enjoyed the gift of divine visions, and another Christ-like stepson who died to save humanity and then miraculously came back to life. Even further to the north lurked the most terrifying (and boring) enemy of all: the Army of Dead, which relentlessly marched south to conquer Westeros and destroy all life. (Luckily the dead took their time, so there was ample scope for more interesting events to enfold.)

For a while, the most immediate threat to the Lannisters came neither from the shapeshifting Starks nor from the fire-breathing dragons, but rather from Stannis Baratheon—another competitor for the Iron Throne—who besieged the capital city of King’s Landing. Though on the face of it Stannis was a cold-blooded general, in fact he was a lackey of the powerful red witch. She destroyed her enemies with black magic, could give birth to demons, and was even capable of raising people from the dead. Later on, the Lannisters almost lost control of King’s Landing to a fanatical religious sect headed by an uncouth and power-hungry monk.

In the face of this otherworldly encirclement, the Lannisters never lost their heart, or their realism. While their rivals relied on sorcery, wizardry, and superstition, the Lannisters relied almost exclusively on science, finance, and realpolitik to maintain their grip on the Iron Throne and the Seven Kingdoms.

The Lannisters initially made their fortunes from their gold mines, and their family motto said that they always pay their debts. How down to earth—especially when compared to the Stark’s apocalyptic “Winter is coming” and the Greyjoys’s mystical “What is dead may never die.” In the first season the Lannisters outmaneuvered the Starks and captured the Iron Throne by the simple ruse of bribing the city’s guards—something the Starks would not even consider. In subsequent seasons the Lannisters deployed all their political and financial skills against the supernatural Starks, and with the help of subterfuge, assassination, and adroit marriage alliances, they managed to defeat Robb Stark and even take the Stark home base at Winterfell.

When Stannis Baratheon attacked King’s Landing, the Lannisters repelled him with chemistry: They manufactured gunpowder to burn down Baratheon’s fleet. When the religious fanatics almost captured the capital, gunpowder came in handy again, and Cersei Lannister annihilated the zealots by blowing them up inside the city’s main temple.

When Cersei was then confronted by the seemingly invincible dragons of Daenerys Targaryen, her immediate reaction was to turn from chemistry to physics. She commissioned an engineer to build huge crossbows that could intercept the monsters in mid-air and pierce the dragons’ thick skin and bones. Later on, the Stark-who-rose-from-the-dead captured a zombie soldier from the Army of the Dead, and flew it on the back of a dragon all the way to King’s Landing, in order to fill the Lannisters with dread. Yet when Cersei saw the ghastly ghoul she could hardly care less, and continued to put her trust in finance. She feigned alarm in order to deceive the Starks and the Dragon Queen, while in reality she was busy raising a huge loan from the Iron Bank to pay for a new mercenary army and transport it to Westeros.