How Game of Thrones' Failed its Leading Women
CONTENT WARNINGS: spoilers for “Game of Thrones,” mentions of sexual assault and violence
Sometimes you forget most things are created by white men. After all, HBO hit series Game of Thrones, in its first seven seasons, had created beautifully complex female characters with fleshed-out arcs: characters like Cersei, the fierce and incestuous Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Sansa, who survived two abusive marriages to become a major political player, and Arya, a trained assassin who recently saved the kingdoms from an undead enemy. And of course (the also incestuous) Daenerys Stormborn, of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Rightful Heir to the Iron Throne, Protector of the Realm, Breaker of Chains and Mother of Dragons.
Even in a show known for the turmoil its characters go through, Daenerys has suffered and overcome a great deal. When we first meet her in season one, she is a mild-mannered, shy teenager, barely protesting when her older brother Viserys sells her to her future husband in exchange for troops. By season seven, she has built up an army of the Unsullied, the Dothraki, a team of advisors, and three dragons, whom she calls her children. When Daenerys meets Jon Snow, her male counterpart in many ways, she recounts her journey: “I spent my life in foreign lands. So many men have tried to kill me, I don’t remember all of their names. I have been sold like a broodmare. I have been chained and betrayed, raped and defiled. Do you know what kept me standing through all those years in exile? Faith. Not in any gods, not in myths and legends. In myself. In Daenerys Targaryen.” Throughout the seasons, the audience watches Daenerys grow into Khaleesi, the fearsome yet loyalty-inspiring queen who once famously declared: “I will answer injustice with justice.”
So it was shocking to fans when in the penultimate episode of the show, Daenerys follows in her father’s steps, fulfilling his promise to “burn them all” and murdering thousands of innocent civilians in her sack of the capital city. The twist had been built up in the two episodes previous, as Daenerys began to lose her advantage in the war: her advisors question her state of mind and even betray her, her oldest friend dies in her arms, she loses another one of her dragons as well as most of her army, and watches her enemy kill her best friend, Missandei.
It is still an unsatisfying and frankly, misogynistic end to Daenerys’s storyline. For a character who has spent her whole life trying not to be like her abusive brother, father, and other male family members, who has striven to “break the wheel” of injustice and tyranny, to simply “go crazy” in the span of a couple of episodes is unrealistic. Although the “Mad Queen” arc had been planned for years by the creator of the books, George R. R. Martin, showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss decided to accelerate the character’s descent into madness in just a few episodes (many believe in order to move on to their next project, developing the next Star Wars series). It would have made sense and been fascinating to see Daenerys’s descent into madness over a longer period of time, as her bloodthirsty tendencies have been foreshadowed in previous seasons. Instead, in the last episode, Daenerys is murdered by her lover (and nephew) Jon, propping him up as the sacrificing, noble hero to her mad, power-hungry despot.
This is not to say female antagonists cannot be compelling, just that the writers lost the patience and nuance with which they wrote the women on their show. Daenerys is not the only female character to be miswritten this season. Missandei, the only black woman on the show, is freed from her chains (by Daenerys) and finds a new family only to be captured again and beheaded in chains. She is reduced to a plot device, to a shock value death, to a catalyst for another female character to go crazy. The first female knight, Ser Brienne of Tarth, is written off as the “scorned girlfriend,” sobbing in a nightgown in the snow after losing her virginity to and being left by Jaime (the brother-lover of Cersei, if any folks are curious). Even Cersei, the show’s chief villain, is reduced to a one-dimensional character with flat dialogue, a far cry from the cunning character who once said “when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.”
In episode four of this season, Sansa declares “without [my abusers], I would’ve stayed a little bird all my life,” implying that her character development into one of the most clever politicians in Westeros is predicated on her trauma—that her being a victim and a survivor is somehow “necessary” for her to become a strong woman, which she always has been. This quote is especially problematic given the show’s exploitation of sex and violence towards women, which it has been criticized frequently for.
Additionally, the lack of non-white characters on the show has always been a point of contention. The series was inspired by the 15th century English conflict, the Wars of the Roses, which has been used as an excuse for the majority white cast. The few people of color on the show are freed slaves, like Missendai and her lover Grey Worm, or live in “savage” civilizations, like the conveniently ethnically-ambiguous Dothraki. Of the noble families in the kingdom, only one, House Martell, is not white, although its members are still played by light-skinned actors.
There could have been an easy fix to these misdirections: hiring more women and people of color during writing and production. In the show’s eight season run, Thrones has only employed one female director and two female writers. According to television critic Maureen Ryan, this amounts to 5.0% of the 73 episodes directed by women and 5.5% episodes with women having a full or partial writing credit. The homogeneity in the show’s production likely translates to the blunders it suffered in its final season.
But we can still remember Daenerys Targaryen as the woman who spent her life pursuing justice, for herself and for others. We see her as a feminist icon in a genre plagued by misogyny and misrepresentation of women.
And instead of the last speaking line of the show, which is a “joke” about brothels, I leave you with this:
After freeing the slaves of Meereen, Daenerys walks with a newly liberated Missandei. “Valar morghulis,” Missendai says, which means “all men must die” in the ancient Valyrian language. It’s a common greeting phrase usually answered with “valar dohaeris,” meaning “all men must serve,” which emphasizes the inevitability of death and how each person should serve their purpose in life before dying.
“Yes, all men must die,” Daenerys replies. “But we are not men.”
It's not hard to see the hubris and fallibility this statement—that Daenerys, who has recently freed the people of a city by violently killing their masters, believes herself to be above the very cycle of life and death, primed for a higher purpose of doling out justice. Perhaps it even foreshadows her downfall. But the sentiment is clear: in a world where men subjugate women, where the majority of the female characters have been raped or threatened with rape, Daenerys has overcome those who would oppress her to become a powerful contender for the throne, and a powerful woman besides.
by KELLY HUI