TV
With a prequel due on 22 August, the franchise has a golden opportunity to right its wrongs
Warning! Game Of Thrones spoilers
L adiesand gentlemen, winter is coming. And by that, I mean more Game Of Thrones will soon be hitting your TV screens – and, yes, somewhat inevitably, your social media timelines. I know, I know, you’re still not over the fact that Bran Stark won the Iron Throne, but such is life and such is the entertainment industry. A new prequel series, called House Of The Dragon, follows the Targaryen dynasty 200 years before everything in the original GOT takes place – and with any luck, it will bring just as much drama.
A lot of us – as in, a lot; 5.8 million people tuned in for the May 2019 finale in the UK – lived for that drama, much of it in the form of the show’s incredibly divisive plotlines (see the aforementioned Iron Throne thing) and holy-shit-that-just-happened twists. Spurred on by the prequel announcement, a rewatch reminded me of all this, but also of something else: the way GOT went out of its way to punish the women it created.
I’m talking about the overwhelmingly gratuitous female nudity. The many, many, many rape scenes. The complete lack of agency for a single female character. The physical abuse, the verbal abuse, the power abuse.
Allow me to further refresh your memory with some specifics: a very young Daenerys Targaryen is sold into marriage, then raped by her husband, then falls in love with said husband in a Stockholm syndrome-y way. (See also: her eventual descent into madness and a murdering spree.) Sansa Stark’s storyline begins with her being passed around like a bottle of tequila at a party, from one man to another, and ends with her crediting her rapist and abusers for her strength. For much of the series, Brienne of Tarth cared more about her knightly duties than anything else – until she’s reduced to tears because a man slept with, then left her. I could go on.
By the end, GOT killed off or grossly betrayed nearly every female character. The show’s creative team and its biggest fans have defended this move as ‘reality-based’. Back whenever this was, women would have been treated like dirt, they argue. Seriously – George RR Martin, who wrote the novels upon which GOT is based, said it would’ve been ‘dishonest’ to leave out sexual violence ‘if you’re going to write about war’, when men would have held all the positions of power.
But... ‘Game Of Thrones is fictional, so to focus on men as the proactive makers of history and on women as largely differential victims or crazy antagonists is an entirely artistic choice,’ says Ayelet Emma Regev Junger, a television and film producer. ‘If a series can have dragons, it can also have empowered women, especially considering the latter do in fact exist in t
