TV Drama – Page 4 – Bitch Flicks

Elektra in ‘Daredevil’: Violence, White Masculinity, and Asian Stereotypes

Elektra is in some ways, the most problematic character. … Yet there is something strangely compelling about Elektra, not as an extension of the show’s tired prejudices against Asian people, but as a woman who despite her questionable origins transcends the limiting Strong Female Character trope. …Her presence in and of itself disrupts the masculine hegemony of violence in the show.

This guest post written by Kelly Kanayama appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

When it comes to sensitive depictions of people of color, Marvel’s Netflix show Daredevil has a fairly terrible record. There’s Claire Temple, portrayed by Afro-Latina Rosario Dawson, who helps the white male hero but can never be with him; that privilege is reserved for Karen Page, the embodiment of pure, white womanhood. There’s Madame Gao, who checks all the boxes of the Inscrutable Asian stereotype: the exact nature of her Asianness can never be revealed, she appears to spend her time sipping tea and painting whatever this is, and her communication mostly consists of vague pronouncements. Then there are the hordes of nameless and – as a result of their face coverings – literally faceless ninjas, whose sole purpose is to be dispatched by Daredevil, as his skill in their own martial arts is just that impressive.

And then there’s Elektra Natchios, half-Asian, half-white, sexual, violent, dangerous, and in some ways, the most problematic character on the show.

Elektra functions partially as a contrast to Karen: the femme fatale of color tempting a moral white man away from his virtuous path and, because the two are linked, away from a good-hearted, white woman. To underscore this dichotomy, Karen typically wears whites, neutrals, and blues, like the Virgin Mary would, whereas Elektra’s wardrobe consists of red and black (the vamp’s colors) with accents of gold or the metal of a blade.

Although the series presents Elektra as Daredevil’s equal in terms of fighting prowess, the show disempowers her by attributing this to her status as a living weapon of the Hand. As a woman of color, she is inherently an empty vessel to be filled, with ultimately no agency regarding her actions. Even more worrying, the responsibility for her lack of self-determination lies with her fellow Asians; the Hand may have the occasional non-Asian member, perhaps highlighted to sidestep accusations of racism, but its operation and aesthetics are pure East Asian stereotype. This dynamic ties into other media depictions of people of color suffering the most oppression at the hands of their own – such as any Western news story about South Asian, Middle Eastern, and/or Muslim women – which often serves as justification for the exercise of white privilege over non-white individuals or communities. We might not be perfect, but we’re not as bad as them. It’s fine to bomb their countries, because otherwise they’ll just keep on oppressing.

It must also be noted that the only named Asian characters besides Elektra are Madame Gao and Nobu, whose name no one bothers to mention for most of Season 1 (I resorted to calling him Hot Suit Guy until then). For the most part, Asians in Daredevil are a monolithic mass, the menace of the Other against which a powerful white man must rise.

To meet this challenge, white men repeatedly prove their worthiness to rule by mastering Asianness. Daredevil and Stick are more proficient in Asian martial arts than the warriors of the Hand, while the Kingpin demonstrates his intelligence by speaking to Madame Gao and Nobu in their own languages. These men are thus “better” than their Asian counterparts, as seen in the Kingpin’s ability to convince Gao and Nobu to cooperate with him, or in the fact that both Elektra and Daredevil are both trained by Stick but the latter manages to not become a killer, due to a morality that the Asian Elektra can never have.

Daredevil is a white man’s world. Asians are just getting beaten up and dying in it.

Yet there is something strangely compelling about Elektra, not as an extension of the show’s tired prejudices against Asian people, but as a woman who despite her questionable origins transcends the limiting Strong Female Character trope. In addition to being half of a white woman/woman of color romantic polarity for Daredevil, her presence in and of itself disrupts the masculine hegemony of violence in the show.

Here’s a drinking game I wouldn’t recommend playing with Daredevil: take a sip every time the title character growls “my city.” You’ll pass out in the first fifteen minutes. It’s a key phrase in deciphering his motives behind defending Hell’s Kitchen, which aren’t simply rooted in the desire to stand up for victims of crime. If that was all he wanted, he would have stuck to his day job as a lawyer for the poor and the otherwise marginalized, without the need to sneak out after dark to break some bones. “My city” connotes ownership and, in turn, the right to treat the city’s occupants however he sees fit, since they as part of the city belong to him. The Punisher also comes to this situation from a (former) position of institutional authority. As a former Marine who was deployed in the Middle East, he represents the exercise of U.S. and largely white male-dominated power with the goal of establishing order, and still refers to himself as a “soldier.” This is the language of possession and imposition, spoken by the show’s white male leads.

Elektra displays little concern for such ideologies. Her accent marks her as an outsider in Hell’s Kitchen and in the U.S., and the phrase “my city” is absent from her conversation, as is its more neutral variant “this city.” She is a foreigner, a woman, and a person of color who is at least somewhat removed from her male counterparts’ battles of ownership and authority – and is their equal at what they do best in their efforts to impose the order of white patriarchal institutions upon their surroundings. To drive this point home, Elektra’s most sexualized moment is inextricable from her first display of physical power, as these are combined in that boxing ring scene – first through a fight where she and Matt are evenly matched, then through a passionate coupling where she spends most of her time on top.

In a show where violence equals authority, being the living weapon of the Hand grants her a status similar to those of Daredevil‘s male leads, investing her with the ability to fight alongside or against them as an equal. While Elektra’s is a different type of violence from that carried out by the Punisher or Daredevil with a different source, it is nonetheless effective.

Granted, this part of the plot is still highly objectifying. Perhaps I’m trying to justify my love for a character whose own backstory undercuts her power by finding alternate readings of the indefensible; even in 2016, as an Asian-American woman, I often have to settle for the problematic and compromised or nothing at all. It is a rare occurrence to see a powerful woman on-screen who looks like me and who isn’t entirely composed of racially fetishized tropes: the clingy schoolgirl, the murderous geisha, the dominatrix ninja, or some unholy combination thereof. Elektra may bear aspects of these tropes, but she is by no means reduced to them – in a show where authority is reinforced by successful acts of violence and such acts are the purview of white men, she undermines this supremacy through her own violence and her existence as a female Other of color among the male, the white, and the powerful.

Kelly Kanayama was born and raised in Honolulu but now lives in Scotland, where she is pursuing a PhD in comics research. She has written about comics and superheroes at Bitch Media, SciFiNow, NPR: Code Switch, Women Write About Comics, and Mindless Ones. Her poetry on comics and pop culture has appeared in Room Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, and the British Science Fiction Association magazine Focus. You can follow her on Twitter @kellykanayama.

‘Supergirl’ and Room for the Non-Brooding Superhero

This guest post written by Allyson Johnson appears as part of our theme week on Superheroines.

It would seem that as of late the superhero genre has taken a turn for the dour and morally dubious. Dark Knights battle Men of Steel, a genius, grieving billionaire clashes in ideologies with a soldier out of time which leads to violence; mutants bring the end of days as Hot Topic gets free advertising in what could be the big surprise in Suicide Squad. Hell’s Kitchen offers up a bloody and bruised vigilante and a psychologically scarred heroine and even The Flash, the previous home to the peppiest characters, has had its hero battling demons and facing past traumas. The joy of Barry’s world has dimmed as of late as Zoom has vowed to take everything and everyone that he loves.

Then, across multiple worlds, there is Supergirl, and she is delightful.

It’s hardly a reach to call Melissa Benoist’s Kara Danvers a genuine ray of sunshine. While many may have enjoyed Henry Cavill’s scowling, apathetic Superman, I’d much rather watch Benoist light up the screen with her optimism. Embodying all that is good, honest and hopeful in superheroes; she bursts onto the screen beaming with satisfaction in getting the chance to save the day.

There is an indisputable charm to Kara’s strong will that can go toe to toe with the might of her fist. Here is a young woman that believes so strongly in her fellow being that she tries talking to many of the baddies of the week rather than immediately resorting to fighting. Her kindhearted and giving spirit is ultimately what sets her apart from the other heroes that have populated television and movies for the last few years (with exceptions, obviously.) Kara has more in common with Steve Rogers than Clark Kent in terms of media representation. While she and Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen certainly share attributes (rendering adorable results) the latter is more prone to wallowing than Kara who deals with her problems head on. This is highlighted in the follow-up from the events in “Falling” where Kara has been affected by red kryptonite. Out of control for an episode while her very worst thoughts come snarling out of her, she is branded as a threat to the city. When she awakens from the trance, she sobs out of despair (add Melissa Benoist to actresses who make me cry by crying) and it’s all due to the grief she experiences at how mean-spirited she had become. She doesn’t waste time by ruminating or talking about how it’s all her fault (ahem Arrow). Instead, despite being admittedly shaken, she goes about her day with the mindset of doing anything and everything in her power to regain the trust she worked so hard to earn.

Kara isn’t without her trauma, having left a planet minutes away from destruction and having to willingly leave everyone she’d ever known and loved. Rather than wear her tragedies as a burden (and this is something she shares with Gustin’s The Flash) she utilizes her sadness as a way to help others from enduring the same pain. She thrives on her city’s ability to find hope in the darkest moments, both becoming a beacon for it while also turning to them for courage. Young, unabashedly gleeful about what her powers embolden her to do while striving to better herself, Kara Danvers is the embodiment of what we all expected to see in Superman when we stepped foot into the theater for Man of Steel.

So often in our superhero origin stories, the hero faces a tragedy that influences who they become. It just so happens that rather than allow hers to burden her with a sense of guilt, Kara instead utilizes it as a catalyst for purpose. Where Oliver Queen in Arrow was led down a path of self-righteousness and murder all in the name of “protecting his city,” Kara helps out the girl facing down a schoolyard bully. Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent seem to believe that the humans they save are a mere nuisance in Batman v. Superman, while Kara believes every problem from worldwide mind control to saving a girl’s pet snake out of a tree is worthwhile.

Even the supporting characters, who typically would have been reduced to one note, antagonistic foils for our protagonist, are given a sense of directive purpose. Lucy (Jenna Dewan Tatum) could have been stuck in love triangle hell but instead the two women share a mutual respect. Then, there’s Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart), a journalism mogul who ends up not only mentoring Kara and Supergirl but also proves to possess the warmest heart of any of the characters on the show.

It’s a shame that such richly drawn characters could be buried in such tiresome plots and story development. One of the reasons I’m excited about Supergirl jumping stations from CBS to The CW is the creativity that will now be allowed for its writers. Greg Barlanti, Ali Adler, and Andrew Kreisberg have gone to great lengths to depict characters with love and respect. Now they have time to flourish on a channel with a less restrictive model. Regardless, it would have remained a staple in my weekly roundup, largely due to its leading lady.

There is a larger than life quality to the characters of Zack Snyder’s DC Universe and even in Marvel’s current run where heroes such as Scarlet Witch and Vision join the rankings. Supergirl, despite her otherworldly origins, feels human. Despite her weekly battles with aliens from other worlds or meta-humans from earth, she’s grounded by her optimism and her caring relationships with others. Perhaps there is more drama to be derived from angst and anger, but when we look to Supergirl, we see the face of a hero we would want to see rescuing us, and also, a hero we can all strive to be. I don’t know when it became “uncool” to have heroes who find it burdensome to help others (and in fear of exacting a hyperbole, this isn’t the case all across the board) but while it’s certainly fashionable to have the antihero in the lead or carry a chip on their shoulder, it’s equally as satisfying to watch a hero come speeding into sight, grin in place, and ready to save the day.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Supergirl’s Feminism and Why the TV Series Works

Allyson Johnson is a 20-something living in the Boston area. She’s the Film Editor for TheYoungFolks.com and her writing can also be found at The Mary Sue and Cambridge Day. Follow her on twitter for daily ramblings, feminist rants and TV chat @AllysonAJ.

We Need to Talk About Tara: ‘The Walking Dead’ and Queer Body Positivity

…To have a relationship like Tara and Denise’s was such a glorious prize. Moreover, in a time where femininity is so ensnared in the constant rhetoric surrounding the sizing of women’s bodies, and fixating on labels and valorizing or castigating a language of weight and body image that completely reduces feminine identity, to have two strong and two queer women feature prominently in a way that refuses to submit to those standards and dialogues is such a boon in so many regards.

This is a guest post written by Eva Phillips.

Rarely do the shows that I rapturously and actively nerd-gasm correspond with shows that I eagerly seek out for positive or intriguing queer narratives. With the exceptions of Orphan Black, the ever-confounding subplots on American Horror Story and my nostalgic revisiting of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, my queer reading of nerd-tastic texts is often relegated to the imagined on my part, and infrequently prominently feature explicitly queer characters and storylines for more than an episode or two. Thus, this piece originated as a way of professing my adoration for one of the few queer characters (and her consequent queer relationship) that happened to emerge in one of my most cherished nerd-series of all time (for better or for worse). And then, upon beginning to pen my praises, a really enraging media-kerfuffle transpired involving Amy Schumer, and the irritatingly age-old issue of discussing and analyzing women’s body image and size based on language that strips them of their autonomy resurfaced yet again. My vitriolic response to the uproar then galvanized me to reconceptualize my piece, reexamining my thoughts on the character/relationship I so adored in the context of its statement on body/selfhood positivity and assertion in conjunction with its queer elevation.

So given that buildup, it might seem a bit peculiar that the show that I chose to write on is the oft-beleaguered AMC giant, The Walking Dead. But perhaps halt scorn for a moment. For a show that started off with some of the most flamboyantly misogynistic storylines, machismo engorged characters, T Dogg and “the problem of race”, and manipulatively or even scurrilously portrayed women (the laughably awful attempt to cast Lori as some sort of Lady Macbeth in Season 2? Always a personal “favorite”), The Walking Dead has surprisingly evolved into one of the more complex, multi-persona infused shows. Though it may not be the pinnacle of diversity in the ever-expanding canopy of televisual representation, and it is plagued by some of the worrisome trends of disregarding certain actors (like the irksome detail of Sonequa Martin Green’s late addition to the main credits three season into her stint, compared to Michael Cudlitz’s and Lennie James’ nearly immediate additions).

Tara first appears in the Season Four episode “Live Bait”— which, much to my dismay, was not a standalone episode about a dive-y post-apocalyptic leather bar, but, rather, was a clunky mid-season re-introduction of everyone’s favorite sociopath, The Governor. Fairly pointless things happen throughout the episode’s vignette — he calls himself “Brian,” he gently carries a sickly man, he seems to have a disassociative break from his murderous self, and he develops paternal feelings for a little girl (essentially tacitly promising her a grisly death to continue his pretty dismal parenting record). But aside from “Brian” grumbling around and somehow seducing everyone (how, though? Really? Even Merle had more charisma…) there’s this spunky woman who greets us, pistol at the ready, who hastens to inform “Brian” that she is a star member of the Atlanta police force and has sufficient ammunition to kill “Brian” every day for the next ten years (which, may have not been a terrible idea for a TWD spinoff). This gal with all the chutzpah, of course, is Tara Chambers, significant for being all at once beautifully awkward, savagely protective — she is the watchdog of her niece (the aforementioned little girl, Megan), her father (the aforementioned sickly man), and her utterly milquetoast sister, Lilly — endearingly aggressive yet naïve (she poignantly calls the walkers “monsters,” and shoots them repeatedly, unaware of the “get the brain” rule), and, most importantly, she is profoundly, blissfully queer. Even if, in the final ten minutes of the episode, we weren’t graced with the subtle, all-too-familiar tale exchanged between Tara and Lilly about a camping trip, ‘shrooms, and a confession from a female love interest had a boyfriend, Tara would be the most marvelously encoded queer character to feature in The Walking Dead. Tara swears (at least, by AMC standards) effusively, she is some peculiar admixture of savage, quirky and mournful. She has a belligerent insistence that literally every significant event (including, in her premiere episode, “Brian’s” swift action to put-down her deceased father) must be concluded or heralded with a fist-bump. Actor Alana Masterson efficaciously embodies a character who not only proudly and openly personifies timidly-badass queer femininity, but makes each scene Tara is in meaningful, rather than getting lost in the shuffle of often interchangeable TWD secondary characters (or the, “Are You There God, It’s Me Beth/Bob/Rosita” syndrome that tends to be virulent in the series).

Certainly, there are many praises and vexations to profess when dissecting Tara’s trajectory and character arch, the praise portion of which I would certainly make as rich and embellished as possible because aside from the gorgeous enigma that is Carol, Tara is arguably one of my most beloved characters, living or (un)dead. There’s the really lovely (and it is enraging that character development of queer folk is met with gratefulness) stretch throughout the haphazard, at times brilliant, chaos of seasons four and five, in which Tara develops when she could have been marginalized or left behind. She has some of the most harrowing and compelling storylines. Her entire remaining family suffers the direst walkers’ fate; she realizes the monstrous sociopathy of “Brian’s” vengeance (yelling at her soon-to-perish, then-girlfriend “he chopped a guy’s head off…WITH A SWORD”); upon managing to be one of the two survivors in the husk of the prison, she accompanies, aids and bonds with Glenn; she manages to forge a place in the group and with Rick despite her origins, and develops a quirky little family unit with Rosita, Eugene and Rosita (and later, poor, poor Noah). Not only does her character’s spark never diminish, she is consistently given stellar dialogue, both punchy and sympathetic (her rapport with Eugene is often a highlight), and she rocks some of the most fantastically gay flannel cut-offs that inspire me to greatness.

What is most crucial about Tara, and Alana Masterson’s consistently wonderful portrayal, that really consecrates her deserved spot in the television tradition of marvelously queer Taras, is the space her queerness inhabits and the implicit, resounding body positivity that is manifest in her season six relationship with the affably tragic Denise Cloyd. One of the vexations of Tara’s narrative, and of the show in general, is the virtual nonexistence of queer intimacy and sexuality, particularly given the bevvy of coital exchanges between Maggie and Glenn, and the scantily clad entanglements of Rick and Lori, Rick and Michonne, and even Abraham and Rosita. Tara’s intimacy with her partners is diluted and nearly G-rated, though it is given more attention than her queer peer Aaron and his beau Eric (who, much to my surprise, is still alive — I rewatched the series and thought, “This is surely the episode where Eric dies of a broken ankle or succumbs to scurvy,” but, nope. Still kicking). To address the egregiously dissatisfying matter of disproportionately shown queer sexuality, or the consequent deeming of even queer kisses as “controversial,” would be a really vitriolic and speculative piece all its own.

Rather, what is worth discussing, what I felt so impressed upon to discuss is the way in which Tara’s body exists – she is never exoticized or eroticized, Tara is both beautiful and uniquely, ceaselessly quirky. Her queerness is neither othered nor, arguably more infuriating, forcibly normalized (there is no asinine moment of, “Well, I mean, it’s totally cool that you’re a lesbian.”). Importantly, Tara’s body is allowed to exist in its own right — it is not commodified, positioned, or stylized in a way to be the sexy sapphic chick or the archetypal granola-y/exaggeratedly butch/desexualized lesbian. She is an organic woman with no caricatures clinging to her presentation of self.

This is no more evident and worth celebrating than in the unexpected relationship between Tara and Denise that begins in the season six episode “Now” and flourishes throughout the entirety of the season. Their fire is kindled, so to speak, in the devastating wake of the Wolves attack in “JSS,” and is established on a foundation of moral support (Tara inspires Denise to trust in her medical prowess as she is thrust into the role of Alexandria’s sole doctor), protection and genuine care for one another (Denise asking Daryl to fetch soda for Tara because she talks about it in her sleep is particularly lovely) and just general, unique adorableness. The two even share a winking, encoded, dialogue exchange after Denise initiates the relationship by kissing Tara on the steps, and Denise, presumably referring to, you know, the zombies and all states, “It’s the end of the world,” to which Tara coolly retorts, “No… it’s not.” Amidst all that effulgent splendor and healthiness of a relationship ensconced in decay and turmoil, the most pleasantly surprising element of Tara and Denise (who really need a portmanteau name… Tanise? Rase? Dera? I’ll think of something) is the profound body positivity they embody together and as a couple. Both Tara and Denise — played by the outrageously talented Merritt Wever, who if you are not aware of, you need to familiarize yourself with immediately — are women who may be categorized in certain body types, but to do so would be a blunder. They are beautiful, complex women whose beauty is iridescent in their auras and their fluidity with, attraction to and reliance upon one another. Moreover, they are not hyper-sexualized nor isolated in a realm of frumpy, sexless lesbian portrayal. It is a queer relationship, and a depiction of two women, that thrives on the essence of just being – that is to say that their love and their selves resonate and matter for their own beauty and their own actions; not some essentialized, picked apart, or commodified representation.

That is really at the heart of the matter in why Denise’s savage death in the final episodes of season 6 is so brutal. It’s not simply that it painfully falls into the abhorrent Bury Your Gays trope — Denise gets killed in an attempt to find both soda (for Tara) and inner-strength to be able to tell Tara she loves her (which she resolves to do) — it is that her death signifies the violent and agonizing (not hyperbolic, I’m very attached to these characters) end to a queer relationship that wasn’t steeped in unrealistic or unnecessary stereotyping. Tara and Denise were relatable, despite their outlandishly gloomy environment, and as a couple they embodied a wholly body positive, wholly natural union, albeit forged in the midst of guts and splatter.

The ever-enchanting Merritt Wever, in an interview following the shockwaves of Denise’s vicious arrow-through-the-eye demise (a demise, importantly, intended for Übermensch white dude Abraham in the comics), echoed the heteronormative, unintended privilege of not comprehending the loss of such a character to a queer audience. Beyond her remarks, that there was a sincere failure, in all likelihood, to acknowledge that Denise’s death would be seen as a blight on queer televisual representation, there is a certain melancholy in mourning a relationship that was characterized by body positivity and queer elevation. As a woman who came of age and came to terms with queerness in cooperation with my obsession with television and film, the plethora of queer bodies and queer relationships I watched that fixated on distortedly immaculate physicalities — or, conversely, mocked or marginalized bodies — and reveled in some sensationalized type of sexuality so warped my perception, that to have a relationship like Tara and Denise’s was such a glorious prize. Moreover, in a time where femininity is so ensnared in the constant rhetoric surrounding the sizing of women’s bodies, and fixating on labels and valorizing or castigating a language of weight and body image that completely reduces feminine identity, to have two strong and two queer women feature prominently in a way that refuses to submit to those standards and dialogues is such a boon in so many regards.

Lamenting Denise’s death is certainly deserved, though it should not completely occlude the impact Tara as a character had and will continue to have (once her never-ending supplies run ends after Alana Masterson’s IRL pregnancy). Tara, in her own right, is a formidable character, and as a testament to her character’s appeal and magnificence, she has existed and championed in a series whose literary counterpart she did not even exist in (or so I’m told, because I’m the worst kind of TWD nerd who abstains from the comics). Her flawless presence and uncompromising, uncommodified self and queerness is only the decadent icing on an already pretty phenomenal, fist-bumping cake. Moreover, Tara is one of the few characters that has actually catalyzed me to pine to be fictitious — after all, she’ll probably need a shoulder to cry on after returning to the Negan-sowed chaos in the upcoming season.

Eva Phillips is constantly surprised at how remarkably Southern she in fact is as she adjusts to social and climate life in The Steel City. Additionally, Eva thoroughly enjoys completing her Master’s Degree in English, though really wishes that more of her grades could be based on how well she researches Making a Murderer conspiracy theories whilst pile-driving salt-and-vinegar chips. You can follow her on Instagram at @menzingers2.

‘Game of Thrones’ Week: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our ‘Game of Thrones’ Theme Week here.

Bowed, Bent, and Broken: Examining the Women of Color on Game of Thrones by Clara Mae

With the women of color being so scarce in the show, it’s just as important to look at the quality of these portrayals. While Game of Thrones does give us some strong women of color, many of them are portrayed problematically in their own ways: either put into subservient roles, exoticized, demonized, or otherwise discarded by the narrative in ways that the white characters aren’t.

Let’s Talk About the Children: War and the Loss of Innocence on Game of Thrones by Amy Woolsey

Children have always figured prominently in Game of Thrones, but their presence seems especially meaningful this [fourth] season, as we get a clearer glimpse of the war’s effect on bystanders, people not entrenched in political intrigue and behind-the-scenes strategizing.

Game of Thrones: Does It Feel Worse to Cheer For or Against Daenerys? by Katherine Murray

It’s hard to ignore that this is a white woman from a foreign nation who feels it’s her birthright to teach a bunch of brown people how they should behave. … On the flip side, watching a woman lose power on Game of Thrones always seems to involve watching her be sexually victimized somehow, which I can’t really get on board with, no matter how awful she is.

Why I Will Miss Ygritte’s Fierce Feminism on Game of Thrones by Jackie Johnson

Ygritte was fierce, she was vibrant, and she didn’t take any shit. Ygritte’s feminism was multi-dimensional, and for me she will always be missed.

When Brienne Met Jaime: The Rom-Com Hiding in Game of Thrones by Victoria Edel

But in that web of gloom, there’s this beautiful shining light: Brienne and Jaime. And while rom-coms are not often praised for their realism, to me, this couple is the most grounded, sensible thing about the show.

Game of Thrones: Catelyn Stark and Motherhood Tropes by Sophie Hall

Catelyn Stark’s main function in the show is to be a mother to Robb Stark, a prominent male character, whereas in the book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, she is so much more than that. … The show creators are here relying on mother tropes in order to set up the characters; Catelyn is now the nag who only cares about her family and nothing else, whereas Ned is now the valiant hero who wants to seek justice.

Game of Thrones: Is Jon Snow Too Feminine for the Masculine World? by Siobhan Denton

Whilst ostensibly male in terms of gender, Jon Snow’s character is arguably definably feminine through his actions, motivations and interactions with both female and male characters. … This is not to suggest that Jon’s character is not masculine; certainly his actions in battle signal him to be a hero in the archetypical sense, but I am suggesting that Jon Snow’s masculinity coexists with a feminine expression…

In Game of Thrones the Mother of Dragons Is Taking Down the Patriarchy by Megan Kearns

While many women orchestrate machinations behind the scenes, no woman is openly a leader, boldly challenging patriarchy to rule. Except for one. Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen.

Another Dead Sex Worker on Game of Thrones by Amanda Rodriguez

Even after the finale of its fourth season, the HBO series Game of Thrones continues its reputation for unpredictability and for subverting our genre expectations. However, a glaring pattern of predictability is emerging: all sex workers with significant roles will die horribly. Think about it.

“Love No One But Your Children”: Cersei Lannister and Motherhood on Game of Thrones by Sophie Hall

Cersei Lannister is cunning, deceitful, jealous and entirely about self-preservation. Yet, her show self seems to tie these exclusively with her relationship with her children… Why is motherhood the go-to in order to flesh out her character? Why can’t she be separate from her children, the same way the father of them, Jaime Lannister, is?

The Occasional Purposeful Nudity on Game of Thrones by Lady T

In fact, the difference between gratuitous nudity and artistic nudity is not that difficult to discern. Even Game of Thrones, the show that puts the word “tit” in “titillation,” occasionally uses nudity in a way that isn’t exploitative and adds to a scene rather than detracting from it.

Controversy is Coming for Game of Thrones by Rachel Redfern

Here’s the thing–for all of its controversy (which isn’t hurting the show’s viewership, I’m sure), people are still connecting to this show and are connecting to the terrible, senseless, often difficult situations that they have to struggle through. Game of Thrones offers us, and its characters, no clear way out of mess, no neatly tied up episode endings, hell, even the most devoted fans can only speculate on the series’ ending. This show hosts both the unknown future and the sadly familiar past of familial dysfunction and bad romantic choices.

Sex Workers Are Disposable on Game of Thrones by Gaayathri Nair

When we are introduced to Ros, she is working in Winterfell but as war approaches she decides to try her luck in King’s Landing expressing the view that if all the men leave for war there is not going to be much for her in Winterfell. Once there she goes from being “just a sex worker” to getting involved in the politics of the realm by becoming the right hand woman of Little Finger and subsequently double crossing him by becoming an agent for Varys. However despite her many interesting qualities and potential for interesting storylines, Ros basically exists for one reason to provide exposition regarding male characters on the show while naked. She is sexposition personified.

Masculinity in Game of Thrones: More Than Fairytale Tropes by Jess Sanders

Boys are judged on their ability to swing a sword or work a trade, criticised for showing weakness, and taught to grow up hard and cold. Doesn’t sound unfamiliar, does it? Masculinity is praised in Westerosi society, as it is in our own.

Game of Thrones: The Meta-Feminist Arc of Daenerys Targaryen by Amanda Rodriguez

The journey of Daenerys Targaryen is a prototype for female liberation, one that charts women’s emancipation over the centuries and encourages us to push harder and dream bigger for even more freedom now.

Here There Be Sexism?: Game of Thrones and Gender by Megan Kearns

I recognize that there’s a difference between displaying sexism because it’s the time period and condoning said sexism. But this IS a fantasy, not history, meaning the writers can imagine any world they wish to create. So why imagine a misogynistic one?

Motherhood in Film & Television: Spawning the World: Motherhood in Game of Thrones by Rachel Redfern

One of the aspects that struck me in the show though, is the portrayal of motherhood. Far from being absent or swept to the side, the film’s mothers are a driving force in the plot development and are some of the most multi-dimensional of the series (credit has to be given to the actresses who play them).

Gratuitous Female Nudity and Complex Female Characters in Game of Thrones by Lady T

Yes, Game of Thrones is a show that loves its nudity. HBO is known for gratuitous displays of naked ladies in many of its show, but Game of Thrones might as well exist on a network called HBOOB.

Game of Thrones Season 2 Trailer: Will Women Fare Better This Season? by Megan Kearns

Luckily, Season 2 will see an influx of new characters, including lots of female roles. Huzzah! The “Red Priestess” Melisandre of Asshai (Carice van Houten), female warrior (!!!!) Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie), noblewoman Lady Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), Ygritte (Rose Leslie), the Ironborn captain (double !!!!) Yara Greyjoy (Gemma Whelan) named “Asha” in the novels. Wait, a sorceress, warrior and ship captain?? More women in leadership roles?? Sounds promising!

‘Game of Thrones’: Is Jon Snow Too Feminine for the Masculine World?

This guest post written by Siobhan Denton appears as part of our theme week on Game of Thrones. | Spoilers ahead.

“There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; … identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” (Butler: 1999, 25). Judith Butler’s concept of gender as being performative and defined by actions rather than a universal identifiable notion is entirely apt when we consider the gender of Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow. Whilst ostensibly male in terms of gender, Jon Snow’s character is arguably definably feminine through his actions, motivations and interactions with both female and male characters.

The majority of critique and discussion on Jon’s character has, thus far, focused upon either his overt masculinity or his progressive feminism. This is not to suggest that Jon’s character is not masculine; certainly his actions in battle signal him to be a hero in the archetypical sense, but I am suggesting that Jon Snow’s masculinity coexists with a feminine expression, and it is this coexistence that leads to the events at the end of season five.

Interactions with men

Jon’s interactions with men clearly demonstrate this sense of coexistence. He is both intensely masculine, respected by the men of The Night’s Watch, and thoroughly feminine in his interactions with both Sam and Olly.

Take for instance, Jon’s first interaction with Sam Tarly. Jon is already respected by the men of the watch, and we witness him intelligently coaching and instructing his fellow men in how to improve their fighting technique. As Sam arrives, his appearance is openly ridiculed by the men as they comment both on his weight and his subsequent perceived weakness. As Sam is beaten and humiliated, Jon rapidly steps in and requests that the actions cease. His interruption draws comment from Ser Alliser Thorne who remarks, “Alright then, Lord Snow, you wish to defend your lady love?” This comment, in which Thorne attempts to highlight a male and female dichotomy between the two is notable. For Thorne, Jon’s defence of Sam marks him as explicitly male with Sam fulfilling the female role, but for me, this defense highlights a feminine and in turn a maternal nature to Jon. His connection with Sam is based on pure emotion at this point: he has no knowledge of his character but has responded to him on a visceral level.

While some may comment that such a defense links to Jon’s sense of nobility and honor (a trope that is regularly linked to masculinity), there is no real honor in stepping in for a man who cannot defend himself. At this point in the narrative Sam is pitiful and Jon’s interception further marks out Sam’s current pathetic nature. Thus, Jon has not acted upon honor, as he would be all too aware of the manner in which this interaction would be interpreted, rather he has acted upon a desire to care and look after others, a quality more stereotypically linked with femininity. After Jon has successfully defended Sam, Thorne orders Jon to “clean the armory as that’s all [he’s] good for,” further reducing him to a typical feminine role of the domestic. Thorne’s disdain for Jon seems to stem from his clear desire to protect and tend to others, as there is no place for such behavour in The Night’s Watch (women are banned from remaining at Castle Black).

Jon places himself in direct conflict with both Thorne and the overtly masculine men of the Watch when he later notes that the men should no longer bully or humiliate Sam. As Jon informs the men of his desire for Sam to be cared for, his motivation is once again linked to a romantic interest as Sam is referred to as Jon’s “girlfriend.” Here, Jon’s embodiment of masculinity and femininity is clearly apparent: his motivation stems from a feminine connection but his manner of dealing with the situation is violent and thereby stereotypically masculine. This intent, combined with such action, clearly marks him as different from the other men. Jon is unique in his approach and, whilst initially respected for it, it is soon apparent that for the other men who simply embody masculinity, Jon Snow cannot remain.

This coexistence of intent and action is again apparent in Jon’s interactions with Olly. Interestingly, this happens once again in a moment in which Jon is acting his most typically masculine and coaching Olly in developing his fighting technique. Notably, Jon’s focus in this interaction is his desire to ensure that Olly is able to protect himself, instructing him on numerous occasions to “keep your shield up.” Olly is not being coached in how to kill, but rather how to defend. Jon’s aim is to ensure the safety of the young boy rather than training him to become an efficient killer.

Interactions with women

Jon Snow’s most formative female relationship is that with Ygritte, the Free Folk (Wildling) woman with whom he falls in love. It is worth nothing that Jon, formally directed to being the masculine counterpart in his relationship with Sam, is here relegated to the feminine role. Ygritte’s superior hunting knowledge and her difficulty in understanding why any girl should ‘swoon’ immediately mark her out as functioning in a conventionally non-feminine manner. Her focus in this interaction is upon violence and possession, remarking to Snow that, “You are mine,” whilst Jon’s focus is once again on seeking to protect the lives of others. Ygritte is unfazed by the prospect of their death and in her possession of her lover, expects him to remain her possession beyond death.

Her constant refrain of, “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” highlights the hierarchy in their relationship. It is useful here to utilize Deborah Tannen’s difference theory, in which she highlights the variances between male and female conversation. Indeed, much of Tannen’s theory, in which she highlights six contrasts between male and female language, are particularly pertinent in the discussion of Jon’s nature. Take for example, her discussion upon the concept of independence (the male characteristic) and intimacy (the female characteristic). Tannen notes that men are more concerned with status and thus focus more on gaining independence. Men risk losing their status if asking for permission and thus reducing their independence, but through his allegiance with the Night’s Watch, Jon has lost all independence, as Ygritte readily points out to him. It is she that is truly free and she recognizes this, whilst Jon has neither sought independence nor recognized that it is lacking.

In a similar manner, we can see that when considering Tannen’s concept of conflict (the male characteristic) and compromise (the female characteristic), Jon once again aligns himself more with the female characteristic. He seeks a compromise with the Free Folk (Wildlings) after their defeat at the hand of Stannis Baratheon, identifying and understanding that conflict and violence is futile. Ygritte, prior to her death, is entirely focused on conflict: she sees no sense in compromise regardless of Jon’s interjections. She questions his lack of conflict when he informs her that he is a Stark, unable to understand or even identify with his approach.

Ultimately, it is this notion of compromise that results in Jon’s apparent death at the end of season 5. The men of the Night’s Watch are unable to reconcile themselves with his approach to dealing with the Free Folk (Wildlings). For the men, who only embody masculinity, a compromise signals weakness. In order to coax Jon into the trap set for him, the men appeal to his emotional, and thereby feminine side, by attempting to engage him emotionally (informing him that news of his uncle has arrived). Is this to suggest then that a character who readily embodies both masculinity and femininity cannot exist in this patriarchal world? Sam, another character who arguably exhibits both genders in his actions, perhaps recognizing the precarious nature of such an existence, has physically removed himself from Castle Black, and in doing so has, thus far, survived. For Jon Snow, whose emotions ever connect him to Castle Black, there could be no such escape.

References:

Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge.

Siobhan Denton is a teacher and writer living in Wales, UK. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Film and Television Studies. She is especially interested in depictions of female desire and transitions from youth to adulthood. She tweets at @siobhan_denton and writes at https://theblueandthedim.wordpress.com/.

“Love No One But Your Children”: Cersei Lannister and Motherhood on ‘Game of Thrones’

This guest post written by Sophie Hall appears as part of our theme week on Game of Thrones. | Spoilers ahead.

Love her or hate her, Cersei Lannister is definitely one of the most intriguing characters in Game of Thrones, both in the novels and the TV show. Her popularity was enough to earn actress Lena Headey two Emmy nominations and spawn endless Cersei reaction gifs. However, if you were to run her character’s actions and motivations in the novels alongside that of her show counterpart, you can notice one major difference; how motherhood impacts her character in each medium. Cersei Lannister is cunning, deceitful, jealous and entirely about self-preservation. Yet, her show self seems to tie these exclusively with her relationship with her children, whereas in the books, she is a lot more separated from them in her motivations.

In the first novel of the series, A Game of Thrones, Cersei uses manipulation, her sexuality and murder in playing “the game of thrones.” She toys with Sansa Stark’s aspirations and naiveté in order to get her to inadvertently aid the Lannisters. She tries to seduce Ned Stark in order to keep his silence (long enough to kill him, anyway) on vital information from her husband Robert Baratheon and, when that failed, takes the King out of the picture herself.

However, show creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt the need to add another weapon to her arsenal in order for her to play the game: her children. After her lover and brother, Jaime Lannister, pushes child Bran Stark from a tower and he becomes comatose, Cersei visits his grieving mother Catelyn Stark. She sympathizes with her pain, recalling the heartbreak she suffered when she lost her child she had with Robert. It’s obvious that Cersei’s intentions here were to throw Catelyn’s suspicions away from the Lannisters, but Cersei’s pain was also plainly earnest.

What I find problematic with this, though, is the fact that the creators felt the need to add this weapon to this character in order to give her more depth, as if why she uses her other weapons wouldn’t be enough. There are reasons deeply explained as to why she targets women and uses them for her own gain; the troubling reason why she uses her own sexuality and what she feels she gains when ordering the death of others. Why not just explore those aspects? Why is motherhood the go-to in order to flesh out her character? Why can’t she be separate from her children, the same way the father of them, Jaime Lannister, is?

The fact that the showrunners fabricated the fact that Cersei gave birth and grieved the loss of her and Robert’s child in the show remains problematic for another reason. In the novels, when she once got pregnant by Robert, she had an abortion. If the creators feel that Cersei exercising her right over her own body isn’t a valid enough reason for her decision, is the fact that she conceived the child through rape not enough? Are the creators of the show really trying to suggest that revealing Cersei to have had an abortion too much of a flaw, that her show self must selflessly love her children from conception, no matter the father or circumstance?

Cersei using her children as a weapon is apparent throughout the entire series, whether it’s for her own motivations or to garner audience sympathy. In season 2, there is a storyline where Cersei’s son King Joffrey orders the execution of his late “father” King Robert Baratheon’s bastard children in order to secure his place as ruler of the seven kingdoms. Cersei laments this to Tyrion later, breaking down over the fact that she has raised a monster.

Conversely, this devastating act is actually committed by Cersei in the novels. The prospect of power is so vital to her as she feels she has been denied it due to her gender her whole life. Now that her husband is dead, she doesn’t want to lose this newly acquired power and jeopardize the survival of her children. Also, the fourth novel, A Feast for Crows, reveals the act was partly motivated by revenge against her husband for his flagrant infidelity which humiliated her.

Again, these flaws disrupt David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s black and white view of motherhood; that if you are a mother who does not care for children, you have no substance. This rings true in how they made Catelyn Stark seek repentance for not loving Jon Snow as her own child and how the Wildling mother Karsi would not kill wights to save her own life, as they happened to be children. Complexity in motherhood seems to be a flaw that the creators always have to right.

The most simplified version of Cersei in relation to her children came in season 4. After the death of her eldest child, Joffrey, she immediately believed that her younger brother Tyrion was responsible. Cersei’s way of ensuring that he was found guilty was to manipulate the other players of the game to her side. She visits Margaery Tyrell, who’s betrothed to Cersei’s youngest child Tommen, asking for her aid in making sure Tommen is supported ruling the seven kingdoms. Her showing concern over her son’s well-being is honest, but genuinely trying to gain Margaery’s sympathy over the situation isn’t. Cersei does the same again when she visits Oberyn Martell to supposedly discuss her daughter’s well-being while she resides at Oberyn’s residence in Dorne. Later in the episode, Oberyn calls Cersei out by stating, “Making honest feelings do dishonest work is one of Cersei’s many gifts.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZKgxzW4J3o”]

However, in the novel A Storm of Swords, the way that Cersei plays the game has nothing to do with her children at all. Aside from making Tyrion lose the support of his friend Bronn, which was included in the show, one of her most devastating schemes was using Shae, Tyrion’s lover, against him. In Cersei’s first chapter in A Feast for Crows, upon finding Shae’s corpse in her father’s bed, Cersei recalls how she promised Shae security if she would testify with damning evidence against Tyrion in court. Yet, Cersei doesn’t follow through on her promise and discarded Shae when she got what she wanted from her.

Cersei’s move was omitted from the show, where if handled right, could have revealed a lot about Cersei’s character. Throughout the book series, Cersei suffers from internalized misogyny, as even though she is the first-born child of the family, her father had no respect for her because she’s a woman. Her whole life, Cersei vies for power in a society where it is so easily given to men and in doing so, she comes to loathe her own gender because of it. Even though she believes that she should be queen of the seven kingdoms, she feels that she is the exception because of her family status and she mistrusts women in general.

Cersei wants power so desperately but she’s never been taught how to use it and therefore makes a mess of things when she gets it (hence her season 5 storyline). She makes enemies of women she should have made her allies. Cersei is a walking disaster of a character, with the book series delving into her psyche and giving a critical commentary on the effect growing up in a misogynistic environment can have on a woman. Despite this, her number one priority that the show creators keep reinforcing is the safety of her children.

Likewise, a vital piece of Cersei’s backstory was discarded. In the opening scene for season 5, there is a flashback of Cersei receiving a damning prophecy that a younger, more beautiful queen will take all that she holds dear and that her three children will die before she does. Given the Cersei from the show’s devotion to her children, this is obvious motivation for Cersei to believe that Margaery will be a threat to her family. However, the show chose to omit this line from the prophecy:

“And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands around your pale white throat and choke the life from you (A Feast for Crows, page 611).”

Cersei later discovers that ‘valonqar’ means “little brother” in High Valyrian. Cersei believes that it’s Tyrion (she never considers Jaime) and that’s why she harbors so much hatred for him. This information was clearly not necessary for the showrunners, as it has no direct tie to her children.

This ultimately leads us to the mishandling of Cersei Lannister’s defining scene: her walk of shame. As mentioned previously, author George R.R. Martin has shown us that Cersei will do whatever she feels necessary to her to hold onto power. In A Feast for Crows, Cersei laments her son and his new wife ruling the seven kingdoms:

“I waited, and so can he. I waited half my life. She had played the dutiful daughter, the blushing bride, the pliant wife. She had suffered Robert’s drunken groping, Jaime’s jealousy, Renly’s mockery, Varys with his titters, Stannis endlessly grinding his teeth. She had contended with Jon Arryn, Ned Stark, and her vile, treacherous, murderous dwarf brother, all the while promising herself that one day it would be her turn. If Margaery Tyrell thinks to cheat me of my hour in the sun, she had bloody well think again. (A Feast for Crows, page 387).”

From then on, Cersei embarks on a narrative driven to garnering the respect she never received due to her gender. She imprisons Margaery, partly due to her being a threat to her power and mostly due to her belief that she is the younger queen in the prophecy she received when she was a child. She refuses help from her uncle Kevan, believing she is capable enough to rule single-handedly. Cersei tries to manipulate religious organization The Faith Militant, which dramatically backfires. This causes her own imprisonment, and what is the first thing she is punished with? Her sexuality.

After admitting to sex outside of marriage, she is made to walk the streets of King’s Landing naked, whilst its people throw garbage at her and hurl gendered slurs. Cersei isn’t receiving the punishment of a lifetime for being a terrible ruler; she is being shamed for the thing she feels has been hindering her entire life: for being a woman.

Even though the show keeps this scene, the context is different. Cersei has Margaery imprisoned mainly due to her overprotectiveness of her son Tommen, less so for her insecurity of her status. Therefore, when she is arrested and punished, it doesn’t ring with the theme that Martin originally intended. You still understand as an audience member of the television series that what happens to Cersei is sexist, but the whole event seems more of the outcome of Cersei’s plunders rather than a greater commentary.

The Cersei Lannister in the A Song of Ice and Fire series is desperate for people to see beyond her gender. Maybe David Benioff and D.B. Weiss should listen to her.

Sophie Hall is from London and has graduated with a degree in Creative Writing. She is currently writing a sci-fi comic book series called White Leopard forWasteland Paradise Comics. Her previous articles for Bitch Flicks were on Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and director Andrea Arnold. You can follow her on Twitter at @sophiesuzhall.

‘Game of Thrones’: Catelyn Stark and Motherhood Tropes

Catelyn Stark’s main function in the show is to be a mother to Robb Stark, a prominent male character, whereas in the book series, ‘A Song of Ice and Fire,’ she is so much more than that. … The show creators are here relying on mother tropes in order to set up the characters; Catelyn is now the nag who only cares about her family and nothing else, whereas Ned is now the valiant hero who wants to seek justice.

This guest post written by Sophie Hall appears as part of our theme week on Game of Thrones. | Spoilers ahead.

Season 5 of Game of Thrones proved to be the most controversial season to date, where the show’s already notorious sexual violence escalated to an all-time high with the non-canon rape of the teenage character Sansa Stark, as well as Cersei Lannister surviving rape. This sparked endless debates on whether the show’s treatment of rape was only to be there as shock value, or whether show creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were trying to expose the hardships that women endure in a patriarchal society (I’m in favor of the former). Although this is a topic that has rightfully been brought to light and criticized, there are many other troubling issues that the creators handle awkwardly in Game of Thrones. One of the most troubling for me? Motherhood.

Let’s start with one of the first point of view character to be introduced in the novels: Stark matriarch Catelyn Stark (née Tully). Whenever someone asks me who my favorite characters are in Game of Thrones, I’m usually met with quizzical looks when I reveal one of them to be Catelyn Stark. Their responses I usually get vary from, “Why?” to ‘Really, she’s one of my least!” But the one that I found irks me the most is, “Who, Robb Stark’s mother?” Catelyn Stark’s main function in the show is to be a mother to Robb Stark, a prominent male character, whereas in the book series A Song of Ice and Fire, she is so much more than that.

Let’s cover Catelyn’s overall arc in the first novel, A Game of Thrones. Towards the beginning, Catelyn receives a letter from her sister Lysa saying not to trust anyone in house Lannister as they killed her husband. This prompts Catelyn to beg her husband Ned to go to King’s Landing with them to act as Hand of the King so he can spy on them. After her son Bran was pushed from a tower and crippled, this only added fuel to the fire and caused her to kidnap Tyrion Lannister as she believed him to be the culprit. Towards the end of the novel, after discovering Ned had been executed, Catelyn realizes that war is not worth it when innocent lives are lost, and pleads against her son Robb and his supporters going to war: “Ned is gone… and many other good men besides, and none of them will return to us. Must we have more deaths still?” (A Game of Thrones, Page 769).

However, in the pilot episode of the television series, Catelyn and Ned’s roles are reversed. She begs her husband Ned to stay with her and the family in Winterfell whilst he insists on discovering the truth. The show creators are here relying on mother tropes in order to set up the characters; Catelyn is now the nag who only cares about her family and nothing else, whereas Ned is now the valiant hero who wants to seek justice. Although, as season 1 was the most loyal season to its source material, a lot of Catelyn’s agency was retained. She still imprisons Tyrion Lannister in order to seek justice for her son and she acts as a strategist for her son Robb. She is the one to even organize the marriages between her children and Walder Frey’s, showing that she is willing to sacrifice her children’s personal wishes for the greater good.

However, when the creators started to veer from the novels, Catelyn’s arc became less relevant to them. In the second novel in the series, A Clash of Kings, Catelyn is informed that her two youngest children, Bran and Rickon, have been murdered at their home in Winterfell. Overwhelmed by grief, Catelyn makes the impromptu decision of releasing Jaime Lannister as a trade for her daughters who are being held hostage in King’s Landing. This is a continuation of Catelyn’s arc; she was the one to beg Robb not to go to war for fear of further death, and when her greatest fears were realized, she went behind his back in order to preserve life.

However, in season 2, Catelyn releases Jaime Lannister without hearing of her children’s demise. The reason? She wanted her daughters back. In the show, we have not heard Catelyn objecting to going to war or how she is constantly haunted by the prospect of innocent lives lost. For the creators, the only reason given for Catelyn’s actions are that she’s a mother, and therefore wants her children returned. The show even seems to go on and demonize Catelyn’s motherly reason, as Robb then imprisons Catelyn for this betrayal until the end of season 3, an act he never commits in the novels. Instead of the fact that she has seen what war does and how senseless it is, they removed her character development and had her commit an on the surface illogical act because she only cares about her children.

Also, the creators removed Catelyn’s sexuality. The show is known for having exploitive sex scenes (the term “sexposition” was coined from this show), yet the sex scene with Catelyn and her husband Ned Stark was mysteriously cut. Healthy, consensual sex (with the only thing missing being Beyonce’s self titled album playing in the background) between a middle-aged married couple with children is apparently too much for audiences of a HBO show to handle.

Then, season 3 happened and proved to be the final nail in Catelyn’s mother-shaped coffin. Her screen time and prominence to the narrative was reduced drastically, with her son Robb overtaking her, even though he is not a point of view character in the novels. Hell, even Theon’s character, who didn’t even appear in the third book A Storm of Swords, had more screen time than Catelyn. His narrative consisted getting repeatedly tortured, mutilated and sexually assaulted by his captor Ramsay Snow. Even though this could be seen as important to Theon’s overall arc in the show, the fact that Catelyn’s story was given prominence over his in the source material should indicate to the creators which character to focus on.

In the second episode of the season, Catelyn converses with Robb’s new bride, Talisa Maegyr, over her late husband’s bastard son Jon Snow. It has been made apparent in the show and in the books of Catelyn’s dislike of Jon; he is the walking reminder of her husband’s infidelity during the early years of their marriage. In the novels, this is something she never apologizes for or even questions. This is one of the prominent flaws that readers have found with the character.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k_HWCIT8nY”]

However, in said episode, she shows remorse over her treatment of Jon Snow and even blames herself for the current war due to the fact she couldn’t love “a motherless child.” Now, the fact that she feels so much death and destruction because she refused to mother a child that was a result of her husband’s affair is problematic enough in itself. But the fact that the creators felt the need to dedicate Catelyn’s minimal screen time to absolving this flaw in herself shows how they view motherhood. They feel that a female character’s maternal instincts need to take center stage of her storyline, even if there’s no real call for it.

The majority of the characters’ flaws on Game of Thrones have been altered from their original sources. But if we compare the removal of these flaws in comparison to Catelyn’s, it’s quite disturbing. For example, in the show: Tyrion Lannister killed Shae out of self-defense rather than in cold blood, Theon Greyjoy never raped serving girl Kyra when he took Winterfell, and Oberyn Martell never physically assaulted the mother of Obara Sand when he took his daughter away from her. Are the creators hereby suggesting that murder, rape and domestic violence are on the same page as not being maternal to a child that is not yours?

The most pivotal scene for Catelyn in season 3, nay the whole series, was the Red Wedding. In the novel A Storm of Swords, after Walder Frey ambushes the Stark army and Robb, Catelyn pleads for Robb’s life — and is denied. After losing what she thinks is all of her children save Sansa, she pointlessly kills one of Frey’s grandsons and is then killed herself. However, finding Catelyn’s corpse discarded in a river, character Beric Dondarrion resurrects her using the powers he inherited through his religion. The Catelyn we are greeted with is not the same Catelyn, though — she has turned into the thing that she was trying to avoid since the end of A Game of Thrones –– a senseless, bloodthirsty source of destruction; the epitome of war itself. She becomes Lady Stoneheart.

The importance of the continuation of Catelyn Stark’s storyline is highlighted by this interview with the novels’ author George R.R. Martin:

“Well, I wanted to make a strong mother character. The portrayal of women in epic fantasy have been problematical for a long time. These books are largely written by men but women also read them in great, great numbers. And the women in fantasy tend to be very atypical women… With Catelyn there is something reset for the Eleanor of Aquitaine, the figure of the woman who accepted her role and functions with a narrow society and, nonetheless, achieves considerable influence and power and authority despite accepting the risks and limitations of this society. She is also a mother… Then, a tendency you can see in a lot of other fantasies is to kill the mother or to get her off the stage. She’s usually dead before the story opens…”

Here, Martin shows us that even though Catelyn is a female character who has accepted the problematic gender roles of her society, she is no less important than the willful Arya Stark, the warrior Brienne of Tarth, or the conquering Daenerys Targaryen.

But this is how it went down in the show: after Robb’s storyline comes to an end, so does Catelyn Stark’s, and she never reappears in the show again. Save for the added sexual violence, the removal of Lady Stoneheart’s character after she did not appear in the season 4 finale was one of the greatest disappointments for fans of the novels. By removing her arc, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss removed the crux of what A Song of Ice and Fire is about: that war makes monsters of us all. The director of the finale, Alex Graves, had this to say about the character’s disappearance:

“Well, she was never going to be a part of it. I know it caught on on the internet, and people really started to believe it. I think the bottom line is that there was so much going on, at least from where I stood, that it wasn’t something to get into because, you know, when you get into taking Michelle Fairley, one of the greatest actresses around, and making her a zombie who doesn’t speak and goes around killing people, what’s the best way to integrate that into the show?”

In a show that added not only one but two rape scenes that arguably contributed nothing to the plot, I think it says a lot about how the creators feel about the mothers of the show: if the characters have no children to mother, then there’s no point in them being on the show at all.

Sophie Hall is from London and has graduated with a degree in Creative Writing. She is currently writing a sci-fi comic book series called White Leopard for Wasteland Paradise Comics. Her previous articles for Bitch Flicks were on Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and director Andrea Arnold. You can follow her on Twitter at @sophiesuzhall.

When Brienne Met Jaime: The Rom-Com Hiding in ‘Game of Thrones’

This guest post written by Victoria Edel appears as part of our theme week on Game of Thrones.

There’s a girl. She’s an outsider, derided for her looks. Girl meets a handsome, golden boy. Girl hates boy. Boy hates girl. Girl and boy are thrown together by a situation outside their control. Girl and boy begin to slowly like each other, their bickering boarding on flirtation. Their new bond is tested, they tell each other their secrets, and they help one another. Just as they balance starts to shift, girl and boy no longer have to be together. A mean, beautiful woman mocks the girl for loving the boy. The two are separated, perhaps to never be together again.

That’s three-quarters of the plot of many romantic comedies. The girl might be nerdy, or wear glasses, or dress badly, or whatever Hollywood has decided is supposedly unattractive that year. The boy might be popular or have a fancy job or be a successful athlete.

It’s also three-quarters of the plot of Brienne and Jaime’s storyline on Game of Thrones. She’s a tall, stereotypically masculine woman who longs to be a knight, and he’s the most handsome and — probably — the most reviled man in Westeros.

Many Game of Thrones fans would claim that the show’s appeal is “realism” — anyone can die, good guys and bad guys are almost indistinguishable, nothing is guaranteed. But those viewers have confused realism with pessimism. Sadness is no more “realistic” than happiness, defeat no more honest than victory. (Of course, what “realism” even means in the context of dragons and magic in a fictionalized world could be its own think piece.) Game of Thrones gets too gloomy for me sometimes. It doesn’t feel real to me — it feels endlessly contrived.

Brienne of Tarth is tasked with delivering Jaime Lannister to King’s Landing, ordered by Catelyn Stark to trade him for her daughters. After they get kidnapped by a roving band who cut off Jaime’s hand and threaten Brienne with sexual violence, they start to come together. And they share some gorgeous romantic moments, namely his confession about why he killed the Mad King and when they escaped the bear pit. Their love is apparent, if never uttered aloud.

When they finally reach King’s Landing, you can see the sadness on their faces as they realize what this means, that here they cannot be together. And Cersei drives this home when she mocks Brienne for loving Jaime. In a teen movie, she’d be a cheerleader. In a rom-com she’d work for a fashion magazine.

And so Jaime sends Brienne off to try to finish her mission, to protect the Stark girls, giving her a new suit of armor and a new sword. Like any good couple in Act Three of their story, they don’t say “I love you,” but you can see it in their eyes.

The most recent season contained not a single Jaime and Brienne interaction, which might explain my decreased interest in Westeros. But I remain hopeful that this unlikely pair will reunite before the series ends, even if they don’t get to ride off into the happily ever after I want them to have.

In many movies and television shows, supposedly “ugly” women are still stunningly beautiful, their flaws just small quirks. Think of teen movies with makeovers that amount to removing a pair of glasses and getting a blow out. But Brienne actually represents a different standard of beauty, one that would not be appreciated in her fictional world and is rarely appreciated in ours. So when this handsome, flawed, but (arguably) good, man loves this flawed but wonderful woman, it means something different.

I see myself in Brienne. We’re domineering, strong women (though she would clearly win in a fight) who aren’t traditionally beautiful, who beautiful, handsome men usually overlook. There are no fat women who get to be main characters in Game of Thrones, so Brienne is the character I’m left to identify with.

It sounds bizarre to say the romantic storyline I relate the most on television right now takes place on a show with dragons and magic and endless war and mysterious ice monsters and the woman is a super-tall warrior and the man is an incest-y blonde with one hand — and yet.

Perhaps this says more about the rest of television than it does Game of Thrones. On shows with traditional romance, everyone is stunningly gorgeous. And on shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or You’re The Worst or The Mindy Project, where they’re deconstructing romance from the inside, everyone is still beautiful. Fat women are set apart from these love stories, almost completely absent from TV. And having Brienne is not the same as having a fat woman, but it’s the closest I’ve got.

In a way, Jaime and Brienne’s story is also deconstructing and analyzing the rom-com genre, since it places the tropes in an absurd environment. Jaime is this very despicable person for a long time, until his relationship with Brienne begins to change him (and even then, his actions in King’s Landing are not without reproach, though that’s a can of worms for another time). But maybe that reveals the truth of rom-coms that is often lost in silliness — people can make each other better, they do change, and they do love each other in spite of the odds.

If this really were a rom-com, they’d get married and live in a shack somewhere winter never comes. But this is Game of Thrones, so they’ll probably accidentally kill each other or something. But I just want to see them kiss. Even if they both die immediately after. I just want a weird-looking lady to be loved and kissed by a very handsome man. We get the reverse of this all the time. And if Game of Thrones did this, maybe it would, for a moment, live up to its claim of “realism,” of being daring and different.

Victoria Edel is a writer, funny person, and loud-mouthed fat lady. Follow her on Twitter @victoriaedel and retweet your two favorite jokes. She really needs the ego boost.

‘Game of Thrones’: Does It Feel Worse to Cheer For or Against Daenerys?

It’s hard to ignore that this is a white woman from a foreign nation who feels it’s her birthright to teach a bunch of brown people how they should behave. … On the flip side, watching a woman lose power on ‘Game of Thrones’ always seems to involve watching her be sexually victimized somehow, which I can’t really get on board with, no matter how awful she is.

Written by Katherine Murray, this post appears as part of our theme week on Game of Thrones.

As usual, Game of Thrones is a Choose Your Own Interpretation that always ends in tears.

One of the major cliff-hangers leading into the sixth season of Game of Thrones is the fate of Daenerys Targaryen, queen of Meereen, widow of Kahl Drogo, heir to the Iron Throne, and holder of a thousand other titles. After amassing a large army and conquering several cities in Essos (a separate continent from where the main action takes place), it looked like she was about to hit a reversal of fortune. A rebel/terrorist group called Sons of the Harpy staged an attack against her in Meereen, and she fled on the back of a dragon to parts unknown. She was immediately surrounded by a Dothraki army, and previews for season six featured images of Targaryen banners burning while a Dothraki narrator intoned, “You are nobody, the millionth of your name, queen of nothing.”

The Dothraki are known for raping the women they capture and, disturbingly, the full trailer for season six features a split-second scene in which it looks like someone tears Daenerys’ dress off her body.

The dress-tearing scene is still in our future, but the season premiere confirmed that the Dothraki immediately took things to a rapey place, after finding Daenerys alone. There’s a (somewhat) pleasant surprise in that she’s able to talk her way out of danger by telling them she was married to a different Dothraki rapist at one point, which makes her off-limits to them, but the entire situation leaves me feeling confused about who and what I’m supposed to be cheering for.

Like most rulers on Game of Thrones, Daenerys can be horrible, and she has the extra disadvantage of starring in a story line that seems kind of racist. From a pure narrative point of view, it also makes sense that a character who’s had a lot of good fortune lately is due for new challenges ahead. On the flip side, watching a woman lose power on Game of Thrones always seems to involve watching her be sexually victimized somehow, which I can’t really get on board with, no matter how awful she is. It’s different from a situation where you don’t know which of two people to cheer for, and feel torn between them because they both have good points – this is situation where I feel bad about any possible outcome for just one person. Unless she rows away in a boat forever like Gendry, I don’t see how this can end well.

Why it Feels Bad to Cheer for Her
Daenerys is kind of an asshole. She inherited her brother’s sense that ruling others is her birthright and she’s proven herself to be arrogant on more than one occasion. On top of that, she makes rash decisions that affect millions of people’s lives – she crucified the entire ruling class of Meereen without asking any questions about the internal politics of the city or whether some of them were actually opposed to slavery (which, as we find out later, some of them were). She’s also horrible to Hizdahr zo Loraq, an advisor she kidnaps into a sham marriage just so she can ignore his advice in more settings.

None of that makes her worse than any of the other power players on Game of Thrones, but it feels bad to cheer for her because Dany’s story, unlike most of the stories in Westeros, also has some gross colonial set pieces in it. It’s hard to ignore that this is a white woman from a foreign nation who feels it’s her birthright to teach a bunch of brown people how they should behave. The fact that Game of Thrones also hasn’t invested in developing many of its non-white characters means that we see almost everything in Essos through the eyes of foreigners who find it strange and disgusting. I’m not saying I disagree – slavery and forcing people to fight to the death in a pit is disgusting, but so is a lot of other stuff on this show, and we’re asked to see those things as being a normal part of this world. We’re asked to see Essos as savage and exotic, instead, and it’s hard to feel good about the racial component of that division.

People who defend the Essos story line generally argue that we’re not necessarily supposed to agree with what Daenerys is doing, but the way the scenes are dramatized makes that hard to believe. Daenerys’ sacking of the slave cities in Essos is staged as a series of Hell Yeah moments, starting when she tricks a slave trader into giving her an army for nothing and then uses the army to kill him. It’s great that she sets the slaves free, but she waits to do that until after they’ve sacked the city for her, and the show doesn’t really engage with the concept that someone who’s been born into slavery might not know what to do with an offer of freedom. The whole point of the scene where she offers to free her slave army seems to be to reassure us that they’re technically there of their own free will because she gave them a thirty-second window to leave.

The only person in the slave army who’s ever individually identified for us is Grey Worm, and there’s a weird, condescending scene where Daenerys tells him that he can choose his own name, and he says he’d rather keep his slave name because it’s the name he had on the glorious day she freed him. I’ve unpacked this elsewhere in the past, but suffice to say that that is a terrible line of reasoning, this scene only exists to tell us how amazing Dany is, and a lot of the slave plotlines and themes are like that.

The shallow characterization in the Essos story line, the icky colonial vibes, and the boring pattern where Daenerys just succeeds at everything she does all make me want her to fail. Unfortunately, it feels just as bad to cheer against her.

Why it Feels Bad to Cheer Against Her
There’s definitely a pattern on Game of Thrones where we’re supposed to cheer for the underdog. Part of what makes Daenerys such an awesome character is that she spent the first season making lemonade out of some of the worst fucking lemons that anyone’s ever seen. She was abused by her older brother, sold into marriage, raped multiple times, made to feel she was worthless, and somehow managed to dig in and transform a losing hand into a winning one by doing ridiculous stuff like eating the heart of a horse. The army of slaves and dragons she has is the only thing keeping her safe from more victimization, and cheering for her to fail is basically cheering for some new, horrible man to torture her some more.

There’s always a sense in which we cheer against the people with power in Game of Thrones, but with characters like Daenerys and the series’ second most powerful female character, Cersei, there’s an extra element where you have to remember that they live in a world where women are treated like garbage. That’s why I couldn’t be happy, last season, when Cersei finally started to lose her grip on power in King’s Landing. Yes, she’s a horrible person, but – as the show reminded us – the avenues she has to get and hold legitimate power are limited and the danger she’s in without that power is huge. I thought it was a terrible idea for her to be Hand of the King (because she’s a mean, selfish person who doesn’t have the interests of the common folk in mind), but I also thought it was terrible that everyone told her she couldn’t be just because she’s a woman. I thought she sort of deserved to get hoist by her own petard after arming religious fanatics to take down one of her enemies, but I also felt uncomfortable that it led to a scene where she had to walk through the streets naked while everyone called her a whore.

I had the same uncomfortable feeling when the khalasar horses started circling Daenerys in last season’s finale. A feeling that she was in an unfair, bullshit, gendered, misogynist danger and that, as much as I think she deserves to have her schemes blow up in her face, I didn’t want to go through another cycle of her getting raped by a horse lord. And I didn’t want to feel like the show thought that was titillating, or that I should enjoy it because it’s delicious when powerful women are turned into sexual objects.

I’ve been asking myself how it’s different from being happy that Stannis and Joffrey got killed – or even being happy that Jon Snow got killed, ‘cause I was kind of happy for that – and the only way I can explain it is to say that, on Game of Thrones, getting killed is not a penalty that’s based on hating someone for their gender. Getting killed is not a thing that’s steeped in a layered, complex, gross, disgusting refusal to see women as human beings. Being raped is. So is being publically shamed for your sexuality. So are a lot of other things that I don’t wish on female characters, even if they’re kind of horrible sometimes.

At this point, I don’t even know what to hope for from this story line. Do I want Daenerys to take back control of Meereen and keep being a colonizer? Do I want her to sail to Westeros and abandon the people she claims to have liberated without a backward glance? Do I want her to go back to the Dothraki and get treated like an animal or piece of property? Do I want her to die and be reunited with her awful rapist husband whom the show is convinced I should somehow like?

My brain keeps flashing back to details like that brothel a few days’ ride from Meereen, where the sex workers dress up like Daenerys, except their butts are showing. And I keep thinking about how, just like in real life, in Game of Thrones, it’s impossible to talk about how you think a woman’s using power irresponsibly without a bunch of other people climbing out of the woodwork to tell you that women shouldn’t have power at all. There’s a sense in which I would like to see Daenerys fail as a ruler because she’s terrible at ruling, but also a sense in which I’m aware that there are other people who want to see her fail because it reinforces a worldview where women are only good for sex.

It leaves us in a lose-lose situation no matter what happens, because the terms are so skewed by sexism.

What I really want is for Game of Thrones to be the product of a different culture – one where threats of rape aren’t hard-baked into gender relations. One where super-colonial themes would be present because the show had something to say about them, and not due to an apparent oversight. The way things are right now, I don’t have much to cheer for.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

Let’s Talk About the Children: War and the Loss of Innocence on ‘Game of Thrones’

Children have always figured prominently in ‘Game of Thrones,’ but their presence seems especially meaningful this [fourth] season, as we get a clearer glimpse of the war’s effect on bystanders, people not entrenched in political intrigue and behind-the-scenes strategizing.

This guest post written by Amy Woolsey originally appeared at Wicked Stupid Plotless and appears now as part of our theme week on Game of Thrones. It is on the fourth season of the television series and is cross-posted with permission.

When watching Game of Thrones, HBO’s contentious, wildly popular fantasy series, it’s easy to get caught up in the Big Moments, the ones that light up social media and generate a week’s worth of think pieces: Ned Stark’s beheading; the Battle of Blackwater; the Red Wedding; so many deaths. But the show isn’t all about shock and awe. In fact, some of the best, most memorable moments this [fourth] season have been the quiet ones, often involving nothing more than characters talking. There’s the circuitous beetle-crushing anecdote that Tyrion tells Jaime in “The Mountain and the Viper,” delivered with tortured intensity by Peter Dinklage, just before the climactic, explosive duel scene. Daenerys’s flirtation with Daario in “Mockingbird.” Any scene between Missandei and Grey Worm, whose tender relationship is perhaps the show’s most welcome addition to George R.R. Martin’s novels.

There’s a reason why, even in a season teeming with game-changing, water-cooler-ready incidents, “First of His Name” remains my favorite episode. Although relatively uneventful, it contains a wealth of perfect little moments that might seem inconsequential on the surface, but actually have profound implications for the characters and their world. Take, for instance, the scene where Podrick Payne confesses to Brienne, “I killed a man.” It’s a simple, four-word line, but for a character that had previously functioned as little more than comic relief, it constitutes a miniature, heartbreaking revelation. Pod may be hopelessly earnest and awkward, but he’s far from the naïve simpleton we and Brienne thought he was; despite his lack of formal training and experience, he’s just as capable of taking a person’s life as a knight of the Kingsguard.

At its heart, season four is a narrative of disillusionment, watching as each character is deprived of his or her innocence. In the premiere, Arya Stark, not yet a teenager, sticks her newly reclaimed Needle into Polliver’s throat to avenge her friend, Lommy Greenhands. A contemptuous smirk lingers on her face even as her victim chokes to death on his own blood, yet whatever catharsis this death brings is only temporary. Arya doesn’t hesitate to revel in her victory; instead, she simply wipes her sword clean and continues on her journey with the Hound. In an interview, Maisie Williams says that Arya is “being eaten from the inside out… She’s got a hole in her heart. She fills it with all these eyes that she’s going to shut forever, and she’s just turning black from the inside out.” Ultimately, killing Polliver is not the act of a girl obtaining justice for her fallen friend; it’s the act of a girl who has lost – or is in the process of losing – her soul. A deliberate, cold-blooded murder, devoid of feeling, performed with matter-of-fact calmness. With this, Arya has officially been indoctrinated into the culture of violence that reigns over Westeros.

This season has received criticism in some corners for its abundant, almost gleeful use of graphic violence, especially against women. On one hand, I don’t blame anyone who’d rather not spend his or her nights watching people’s heads being crushed or chopped off, and the violence can be occasionally excessive or poorly executed (I complained about a certain scene with Cersei and Jaime as much as the next person). At the same time, though, a lot of the criticism strikes me as overly simplistic. As George R.R. Martin himself said, Westeros is “no darker nor more depraved than our own world,” and omitting or downplaying the violence would be a betrayal of the series’ intention, which is to present the past in all its true horror, an alternative to the glorified, sanitized version we usually see in fantasy stories. If it’s hard to tolerate at times, that’s because it’s effective. Fictional violence should be hard to tolerate. It’s saying something that even in an era when seemingly half the shows on network TV feature serial killers, the carnage in Game of Thrones is still genuinely shocking and gruesome.

While the show undoubtedly does employ violence as a form of spectacle (is it even possible to avoid that in a visual medium?), I don’t think it has, as Sonia Saraiya puts it, “gotten in the way of Thrones’ fundamental truth… a lens that offers not just brutality, but also the assiduous follow-through of healing, grieving, and surviving.” If anything, this season has been all about the follow-through, the way war can invade even the most remote areas of the world and tear apart not only communities and families but also individuals, forever transforming the lives of those it touches. It’s never explicitly stated, but you can detect evidence of war’s devastation, of people struggling to cope with their scars, in snippets of dialogue like Pod’s and in character arcs like Arya’s – again, the little things. Trauma, the show contends, involves more than mangled bodies and troubled minds; it’s a process of moral erosion, the gradual disintegration of personal values in the face of a brutal, uncaring reality. Violence, like power, corrupts.

“Everywhere in the world, they hurt little girls.” Cersei’s blunt response to Oberyn, who assures her that “we don’t hurt little girls in Dorne,” represents a moment of uncharacteristic sincerity for the Lannister queen as well as an unexpected reminder to the audience that, despite her powerful, confident veneer, she is broken inside. Unbeknownst to her companion, Cersei has been subjected to repeated sexual assault throughout her life, first at the hands of Robert Baratheon, her husband, and then Jaime, her brother and paramour (as much as I wish we could pretend it didn’t, for all intents and purposes, the scene in the Sept happened and can’t be ignored). Perhaps more than anyone else, she understands the key to survival in Westeros, which essentially amounts to a willingness to use and be used by others whenever necessary, to discard your humanity for the sake of self-preservation. As Oberyn discovers too late, this world isn’t exactly kind to those motivated by passion and noble ideals.

Other characters are slowly starting to comprehend this fact. Daenerys began season four as the self-proclaimed Breaker of Chains, a benevolent ruler determined to free the slaves of the cities she defeats. It’s becoming more and more apparent, however, that conquering is not the same as leading, as she resorts to increasingly harsh methods in an effort to maintain power over her subjects; the Daenerys that liberated the Unsullied would be appalled by the Daenerys that ordered the execution of 163 people and called it “justice.” The last time we saw Sansa, she was walking down a staircase in the Vale, dressed in an elegantly low-cut gown and bathed in angelic white light. It’s treated as a triumphant moment, and in some ways, it is: Sansa Stark, the girl who once swooned over fanciful tales of castles and chivalrous princes, all grown up, no longer a timid victim. But then, you remember what brought her here – a barrage of physical, emotional and psychological abuse inflicted by the boy she used to idolize, among others – and the moment becomes as ethereal as the light in the background, the triumph an illusion. She may not be helpless, but she’s still a victim, just another pawn in a system governed by forces beyond her or anyone’s control.

Not coincidentally, the season [four] finale, airing tonight, is titled “The Children.” Children have always figured prominently in Game of Thrones, but their presence seems especially meaningful this season, as we get a clearer glimpse of the war’s effect on bystanders, people not entrenched in political intrigue and behind-the-scenes strategizing. As it turns out, most children in Westeros either wind up dead, like the slaves nailed along the road to Meereen and Elia Martell’s infants, murdered by the Mountain, or turn into killers themselves.

“The Watchers on the Wall” puts a kid right in the middle of the fighting, contrasting the surrounding bloodshed with shots of Olly, a boy whose parents had been slaughtered in a wilding raid, cowering in a corner. For a while, it seems as though Olly is being framed as a symbol of innocence, a saint amongst monsters, but in a twist that diverges from the source material, he shoots and kills Ygritte, partly in an effort to aid Jon and partly as retribution for his father. The death itself isn’t what’s significant so much as Olly’s smile: proud, not a flicker of visible remorse. There’s something chilling about it – the realization that even at such a young age, Olly has already joined and helped perpetuate the cycle of violence and revenge that has endured throughout the history of Westeros, passed from generation to generation.

In truth, there are no children in this world, at least not in our sense of the term. Growing up here means living long enough to become hardened and wear your cynicism like armor. When it comes to the game of thrones, no one is safe or innocent, not even children.

Amy Woolsey is a writer living in northern Virginia. Since graduating from George Mason University, she has interned at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and contributed freelance articles to The Week. In her free time, she consumes, discusses, and generally obsesses over pop culture. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr, and she keeps a personal blog that is updated irregularly. She has previously written about The Bling Ring and Phoenix for Bitch Flicks.

Bowed, Bent, and Broken: Examining the Women of Color on ‘Game of Thrones’

With the women of color being so scarce in the show, it’s just as important to look at the quality of these portrayals. While ‘Game of Thrones’ does give us some strong women of color, many of them are portrayed problematically in their own ways: either put into subservient roles, exoticized, demonized, or otherwise discarded by the narrative in ways that the white characters aren’t.

This guest post written by Clara Mae appears as part of our theme week on Game of Thrones.

I often feel conflicted about HBO’s Game of Thrones and its portrayal of women. On one hand, the show has given us some of today’s pop culture feminist icons: women like Brienne, Arya, Daenerys, and Olenna, who show us what it means to persevere in a male-dominated society despite differences in age and social standing. On the surface, so too does the show give us dynamic women of color: characters like Irri, Missandei, Shae, Talisa, and the Sand Snakes, some of whom were updated or added in for the benefit of the show’s audience (of which I am a part of exclusively, having not read the book series).

But with the women of color being so scarce in the show, it’s just as important to look at the quality of these portrayals. While the show does give us some strong women of color, many of them are portrayed problematically in their own ways: either put into subservient roles, exoticized, demonized, or otherwise discarded by the narrative in ways that the white characters aren’t.

The first image we get of women of color in the show is not… flattering, to say the least. In the pilot episode, we see the women of Khal Drogo’s khalasar writhing topless and being mounted in plain sight as Daenerys looks on in disgust. Daenerys is dressed in a light, airy dress while the dark-skinned Dothraki women gyrate in dirty clothes. The audience is meant to see these women as “savages,” and Daenerys the character we sympathize with — an uncomfortable task, you can understand, if you happen to look more like the Dothraki women than Daenerys herself. To contrast this terrible first impression, we later meet Irri, a kind and headstrong woman who is gifted to Daenerys as a handmaiden — really, just a euphemism for “servant/slave” in this context, as another handmaiden, Doreah, mentions that “your brother bought me for you” and, y’know, they’re not actually paid for their services.

Irri is the first woman of color we meet who expresses any degree of humanity. She teaches Daenerys the Dothraki language, mends her clothes, and cares for her. It’s a subservient role, clearly, and one that’s problematic when you look at the fact that the only women of color we’ve seen up to this point are either barbarians or servants. But the narrative tells us Irri is not unhappy in her station — and in fact seems to take pride in it — and so her lack of agency goes by relatively unremarked upon. And social standing aside, Irri is a strong character in her own right. She’s proud of her culture, is equal parts firm and compassionate, and has no qualms about speaking out against the men in her male-dominated tribe.

But Irri is ultimately not given much to do as a character outside of her subservient role to Daenerys, and unfortunately, the narrative ultimately discards Irri for Daenerys. Irri is killed off-screen in Xaro Xhoan Daxos’ home when the dragons are stolen. When Daenerys stumbles across Irri’s body, she briefly shows distress, but yells not a second later, “Where are my dragons!” Irri’s body, then, suddenly becomes just another object in the room. The narrative here is clear: Irri, as helpful and supportive as she was to Daenerys, ends up mattering very little at all.

Irri is then replaced with Missandei as Daenerys’ translator and cultural ambassador. Missandei, like Irri, is also a servant to Daenerys: “You belong to me now, you do what I tell you to,” Daenerys tells Missandei after buying her from her former master. Again, we have an uncomfortable power dynamic between our white female protagonist and another woman of color; but with Missandei, at least, she’s given more to do than Irri ever was, and is all around one of the most long-lasting and positive representations of a character of color on the show.

Although Missandei starts out as a servant, she quickly grows from simply being Daenerys’ translator to her confidant and advisor on the council. She’s shown to be intelligent and quick: she can speak nineteen languages and advises Daenerys about the fighting pits of Meereen. Daenerys herself becomes very fond of Missandei and indeed ends up seeing her as a close friend: when she believes they’re both going to die in Daznak’s Pit, Daenerys holds Missandei’s hand in a sign of trust and love.

Most notably, Missandei is also given a chance at romance with Grey Worm. Through Grey Worm’s eyes we see Missandei as someone who deserves to be looked upon reverently: an important contrast to the images of the gyrating, savage women of color we saw back in episode one. By giving Missandei a romance, she’s elevated above simply being a servant or a background character: she’s someone who matters and who is worthy of love. That, if anything, is one of the most valuable portrayals a woman of color can see reflected back at her.

Missandei is not the only woman of color romanced on the show. Shae is Tyrion’s clever and outspoken lover across several seasons. To be clear, Shae’s actress is Turkish; Turkey straddles the border between Europe and Asia. The actress has spoken about being type-cast as a “foreigner” in European films. The show also plays her off as an “exotic Other” regardless, so I thought it appropriate to include her here. Shae is a rather feminist character: she outwits Tyrion in their first meeting, and is shown to be just as clever as Varys and Littlefinger when necessary. She’s incredibly protective of Sansa: she quickly pulls a knife on a serving girl who tries to tell Cersei about Sansa’s period. She’s compassionate and loving towards Tyrion, a sharp contrast to how the other characters treat him. She’s all around a positive improvement from her book counterpart, and an example of how a character doesn’t need to be a queen to be able to take control of her own story.

Yet Shae’s characterization begins to quickly unravel in season four. The narrative suddenly turns her cruel, thoughtless, and petty — an attempt to put her back on track with her book counterpart, despite George R.R. Martin saying book versus show Shae are “certainly two different characters.” Shae then becomes the tawny jezebel in Tyrion’s life: she lies on the stand about Tyrion and Sansa, despite how much she sincerely seemed to love both of them. Tyrion later stumbles across Shae in his father’s bed — a somewhat inexplicable conclusion, as the show never makes it clear whether she’s there by choice or by blackmail. But then it doesn’t really matter, because Shae is brutally choked to death by Tyrion in a gratuitous snuff scene: her body splayed out with a gold Lannister chain dangling from her neck. The scene focuses more on Tyrion’s pain than Shae’s, and in the end Shae is fridged in order for Tyrion to finally find the determination to kill his father. Despite being such an integral character in the show, the narrative ultimately discards her.

Then we have Talisa (whose actress is half Chilean), the other woman of color romanced on the show. She’s introduced in season two and she’s tough as nails: the first thing she does when we meet her is saw a man’s foot off. Talisa is Not Like Other Girls: she vows to never go to dances, and instead travels the countryside tending to the wounded. As a creation of the show writers, Talisa is Robb’s equal in many ways: she trades quips with him, is of noble birth (although not from Westeros), and is just as stubborn. Although some have pointed out that the show writers made her a bit too much of a Strong Female Character, a Mary Sue of sorts, she is regardless the portrait of a confident woman driven by her own moral compass.

It’s difficult then to reconcile Talisa’s “Mary Sue-ness” with how utterly her life falls apart. Talisa and Robb make some singularly bad decisions together, the worst of which is getting married despite both being fully grown adults who are aware of Robb’s “debt that must be paid” to the Freys. Talisa becomes one of the sources behind Robb’s and Catelyn’s fractured relationship, and indeed Talisa is placed strongly in opposition to Catelyn: young versus old, change versus tradition. As the audience is more familiar with Catelyn than Talisa, it’s difficult to not feel resentful towards her for embodying everything Catelyn is not.

This of course all culminates in the Red Wedding, which Talisa is present for when her book counterpart (Jeyne Westerling) was certainly not. Talisa’s death is vicious and startling; a painful reminder of how often the women of color are written off the show. So although the show writers seemed to take two steps forward by creating Talisa, a strong woman of color presented as Robb Stark’s equal, they then took several steps back by giving her one of the most unpleasant deaths that any woman has suffered on the show.

Then we have Ellaria Sand and the Sand Snakes. We meet Ellaria in season four: she’s fiery, viper-tongued, and sexually free. After Oberyn’s death, she becomes relentless in her quest for revenge, and she sets her sights on Myrcella: “Let me send her to Cersei one finger at a time,” she demands of Prince Doran. Ellaria is unhinged; an angry demoness who is given little characterization beyond her need for vengeance.

Ellaria rallies her daughters and stepdaughters the Sand Snakes, who are younger and more bloodthirsty than their book counterparts. The show writers have reimagined them as tanned jezebels out to torment the sweet Myrcella, who really, has done nothing wrong except be related to Cersei up to this point in time. While Tyene, Nymeria, and Obara are interesting in their own rights, they are not given much characterization beyond just acting as Ellaria’s weapons. As Neil Miller writes at Film School Rejects:

“The Sand Snakes have become villains of the story, hellbent on doing harm to Myrcella in their blind quest for vengeance…It has made them one dimensional characters, stereotypes who will potentially become more known as ‘The One With the Whip’ and ‘The One with the Daggers’ than well-rounded characters. They are caricatures, whereas Oberyn was a dynamic and fully fleshed-out character.”

Worse, the narrative pivots the story so that instead of it being focused solely on Ellaria and the Sand Snakes, it instead becomes the story about Jaime and his heroic rescue of his niece/daughter. The Dornish women, then, are given little agency over their own plotline: they simply exist as Jaime’s antagonists that he must overcome in order to triumph.

All in all, Game of Thrones doesn’t do so great with its women of color. Three of them are dead, leaving us just Missandei — the one positive portrayal — and the bloodthirsty Ellaria and the Sand Snakes. With the debut of season six, I’m hoping we’ll see not only the Sand Snakes getting more characterizations, but new characters of color introduced. I’m going to be crossing my fingers for a lot of things. But looking at the show writers’ poor track record, I’m also not going to be holding my breath.

Clara Mae is a twenty-something year old English grad from UC Berkeley who works somewhere in the San Francisco financial district. If not at work, is probably off eating ramen, petting dogs, or attempting yoga. Blogs too little and tweets too much at @ubeempress.

Everything That’s Wrong (And a Few Things That Are Right) with ‘The Magicians’

Watching ‘The Magicians’ can be a lot like watching a real magician. One who’s not very good and keeps using such obvious distraction techniques that you want to rebel by looking at exactly what you’re not supposed to notice. And what we’re not supposed to notice here is an almost total lack of character development, followed by the thought that sperm is magic.

Written by Katherine Murray.

[Trigger warning: Discussion of rape and sexual violence]

Watching The Magicians can be a lot like watching a real magician. One who’s not very good and keeps using such obvious distraction techniques that you want to rebel by looking at exactly what you’re not supposed to notice. And what we’re not supposed to notice here is an almost total lack of character development, followed by the thought that sperm is magic.

The Magicians just wrapped up its first season on the SyFy network (Showcase, in Canada) and it was, overall, pretty disappointing. A TV show is not the same thing as a book series and, even though I was a fan of the books The Magicians is based on, I wasn’t expecting – or even wanting – it to be a faithful recreation of the source material. I did want it to tell a good story, though, and that’s where some of the narrative changes let me down.

Don’t get me wrong – I understand why the writers did most of what they did. In adapting the books for a TV series, they faced some difficult challenges:

The first book in the Magicians trilogy, which follows the adventures of Quentin Coldwater and his group of friends, is initially set at a magic school called Brakebills, but the action later moves to the magical land of Narnia Fillory and Brakebills becomes a footnote in the overall story. Because the first few episodes of a new TV show teach the audience how to watch it, there was a danger of setting up the false expectation that The Magicians was going to be about a bunch of students at a magic school.
The second book in the Magicians trilogy backtracks and spends about half its text explaining what Quentin’s friend, Julia, was doing while he was at Brakebills. This is vitally important to the story in book two, but Julia isn’t around that much in book one, and readers could be forgiven for forgetting she existed after she failed her Brakebills entrance exam. On TV, it’s hard to tell a long story in flashback and have it seem compelling.
Let’s be real – it would cost a lot of money to depict things exactly as they happened in the books.

For the most part, the solutions the writers came up with are good. They’ve accelerated the timeline of the original story so that the series hits its major turning points faster; they include action that takes place in Fillory and otherwise outside Brakebills right from the start; they place a lot less emphasis on classes, studying, and other especially school-like activities that take place at Brakebills which stops school from structuring the show; they cut back and forth between Quentin and Julia so that we can see their separate narratives unfold in real time; and they invent a character called Kady who moves between both stories and helps things feel connected.

All of this makes sense in theory – the problem is that, in practice, everything happens too fast.

The Magicians tries to cram all of book one, half of book two, and select revelations from book three into 13 episodes – that’s not even including the brand new plot points, story lines and characters it’s introduced. Some of the narrative choices kill two birds with one stone by collapsing multiple plot points into each other – Quentin needs a reason to be friends with Alice, Penny, and Kady and he also needs to accidentally summon a beast to the school; what if they all accidentally summon the beast together? But things start to fall apart when it comes to character development.

Repeatedly, season one of The Magicians expects us to believe that people undergo major changes in their feelings, perceptions, and relationships with lightning speed. Repeatedly, we’re asked to buy into emotionally-heavy plot developments with barely any time to explore what they mean. Quentin’s friend, Elliot, is torn apart by having to kill his evil, body-snatched boyfriend… whom we’ve known for about forty minutes. Elliot, later has to make a major, life-changing decision about whether to enter into a magical contract that would force him to stay in Fillory forever and never have sex again and he literally has 90 seconds to go on an entire emotional journey that leaves him okay with that idea. Quentin and his sometime-girlfriend Alice seem to be together for about five days before they break up and, in the season finale, she gives him a speech about his character that seems hollow because they barely know each other. The show rushes through a major plot point about how Alice’s older brother turned into a fire monster when he was at Brakebills and then doesn’t deliver the pay-off for that story in the season finale, leaving it as a random thing that everyone got super upset about for exactly one episode.

The most annoying example I remember, though, is a new plot line about how Quentin’s father is dying of cancer and believes that Quentin has wasted his life by being a weirdo. In the space of one episode, we are introduced to Father Quentin and his cancer, and the story of how, when Quentin was a kid, he ruined his father’s favorite model airplane and his father tried to glue it back together and just made it worse. At the end of the episode, Quentin goes back to his father’s house and uses magic to put the airplane back together, proving that he’s not just a weirdo and he’s finally done something with his life. And all of that is great, except that I’m supposed to believe Quentin’s dad just happens to keep that broken airplane from ten years ago in his living room at all times so that he can drag it out to hold a grudge against his son thereby providing an opportunity for metaphorical redemption. The writers know that they need to establish the backstory behind this airplane before the payoff where Quentin fixes it with magic, but the journey between establishing the conflict and resolving it remains too short, direct, and convenient. The same thing could be said for almost every major conflict in the first season.

The characters are also drawn in a pretty shallow way, likely because there isn’t time to develop them more. They always do and feel and say exactly what they need to do and feel and say to lurch from one plot point to another, but there’s no organic sense that these are real people, changing over time.

And that’s not even getting into the stuff with Julia.

Straight up – one of the things that impressed me about the second book in the Magicians trilogy is the way that Lev Grossman deftly, subtly, sensitively handled Julia’s back story, which involves a traumatic assault. Julia is Quentin’s childhood friend, but she fails the exam to get into Brakebills and then he’s kind of a dick to her. She goes off on her own and tries to learn magic on the streets – something that he’s kind of snobby about later on – and she has to do a lot of things that she’s not proud of and face a lot of choices that people like Quentin never have to deal with. Eventually, she makes some friends who become her whole world, and, just as everything looks like it’s finally coming together for her, it all gets blown to pieces.

Spoilers for the books and the TV show, but Julia and her friends try to summon a benevolent god to help them, and instead they get tricked by an evil god who kills most of Julia’s friends and rapes her when she tries to save another woman in her group. The book really conveys how horrible this is, and how it was more than just a physical assault – how it took everything Julia had, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and made her a different person. The book is all about how she keeps trying to deny that anything changed, but how it’s only when she accepts this (horrible, traumatic) experience as part of who she is that she becomes stronger. Learning what happened to Julia and watching how she changes also teaches Quentin that he’s not the center of the universe – he learns to have empathy for others, and appreciate that they’re the heroes of their own stories, taking their own journeys, facing their own challenges along the way.

In the TV show, we don’t have enough time to appreciate all the layers of Julia’s emotional journey. She’s angry for a couple of episodes, hangs out with some ne’er-do-wells, makes friends with some people we don’t get to know very well, and then all of a sudden, she’s like, “I know I haven’t always been a great person, but this is my redemption and I want to help everyone.” Again, only for a couple of episodes before the whole thing goes sideways.

Because Julia is still in contact with Quentin in the TV show, and because it needs to make sense that she would help him move the plot line forward when she should be in emotional turmoil, the writers (pretty cleverly) invent a twist where, initially, it seems like Julia successfully summoned the benevolent god, and the benevolent god gave everyone exactly what they wanted, and they all went away somewhere to be happy, which explains why they suddenly vanished. The flashbacks we see of this beautiful moment all have cold lighting and zero sound, which makes them seem creepy. In the next episode, we learn that this is a false memory that a fellow street magician put in Julia’s mind to protect her from remembering the truth. When the false memory is removed, Julia loses her composure, and we see a terrifying (but simplified) scene of how she was attacked by the evil god.

That’s all okay, up until the part where Julia’s complicated quest to reconcile her memories of trauma and become a stronger person is replaced by a plot point where god spunk gives you powers.

I’m just gonna say that again – in the TV show, having the semen of a god inside your body gives you magical powers. That is why Julia has more power in the final episode. That is why Alice has more power in the final episode, too – Julia was raped and Alice drinks a mason jar of semen.

Also, spoilers for the books again, and spoilers for the TV show if this ends up happening later, but – in the books, Alice is the strongest magician and Quentin’s group of friends, and, when they finally face their nemesis the branch-faced beast (in the show, he is a moth-faced beast) she turns into a fire monster like her brother did. It’s horrible but kind of awesome and heroic at the same time, because she tries to do something good and she’s the only one strong enough to do it. In the TV show, Quentin realizes before they fight the beast that Alice is the strong one and gives her a mason jar full of semen to drink. Then, when they reach the actual fight, Alice doesn’t get to do anything before she (apparently) gets killed. Odds are that this is so she can survive somehow and stick around next season, but it’s still a weak ending.

Look, the TV show does a lot of things right. Casting Arjun Gupta as Quentin’s frenemy, Penny (which makes Penny a lot more likeable and charismatic), creating the Kady character to bridge the two stories, getting out of Brakebills faster, inventing a time loop that sort of explains why the TV show is different from the books, letting Quentin have his awkward bisexual three-way without having some kind of panic attack in the process, trying to misdirect the audience about who the beast is, trying to mislead us into thinking Quentin is the most important character so that he learns a lesson when he’s not, following Julia right from the start, simplifying some of the story elements to work with a limited budget – there are lots of good choices.

But, amidst all of those good choices, there’s also a sense of anxiety in the first season. There’s a sense that this might not be interesting enough, or people won’t get it, or they won’t think it’s exciting, so we need to pad the story out with sex and violence and rely on shocking plot twists to keep everybody invested rather than building a complex set of characters and relationships that earn their payoffs over time. It’s as if the show fears that, if it takes the time to build something solid, everyone will get bored and leave before it’s done. In that sense, its a lot like How to Get Away with Murder, Orphan Black, and Mr. Robot, in that it just keeps changing direction to throw us off balance. That kind of thing isn’t sustainable over the long term, and it makes me worried that the series won’t ever find its feet.

The Magicians has already been renewed for a second season, and I’ll watch it. But I hope that now that they burned their way through half the source material, they will stop jumping between huge plot points and give the characters more room to breathe. My other hope is that they retcon it somehow so that drinking semen doesn’t give you powers. WTF.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.