What you see above is original concept art from one of my best Davos related spin off pitches. I have been tweaking the finer details for many years. Please do not steal it.

REAL TALK: Since we have reached the point in the show where we meet Dany, and since I love potentially alienating huge sections of the internet, I’m going to do something I probably shouldn’t and talk, somewhat, about gender representation in Thrones. More specifically, I’m going to look at how Thrones portrays and subverts some commonly used tropes in the fantasy genre. I’m not going to bother looking at the whole show because that’d be even more stupid than this already is, just Dany in the first episode, with possibly some references to further episodes, and also the books. This isn’t wholly going to be about gender, but since Dany is a woman, it’s naturally going to come up somewhere. You may think this ill advised, but no advice was sought, so it’s actually fine.

Something to keep in mind: this psuedo essay will basically consist of me, a man, talking about a show written by two men which adapts a book written by another man. You may feel that this renders any talk of gender portrayal completely spurious. I feel this is an absolutely valid criticism, and won’t blame you if you decide not to read further.

Conversely, you may be in the opposite camp, and assume that by employing ideas from a critical perspective you deem invalid or dangerous (i.e identity politics) I am hamfistingly (this is a word now) or perhaps offensively inserting politics where none were previously. I would counter this by saying that every representation of people in any media whatsoever is inherently political because those characters have an identity, and assumptions about a non-political ‘default’ identity are actually huge political statements in themselves. Much like how every opinion is a philosophical position (It is), every portrayal of a fictional character acts as an implicit or explicit ‘text’ regarding the society that created them. Cultural norms are not rendered inherently valuable or correct by virtue of their ubiquitous-ness. Here is a super scientific representation of this argument illustrated via the medium of badly drawn robots:

You may well think this is some Grade A horseshit, which is cool with me, but it’s going to be quite long, so you should probably find something better to do with your time. If not, welcome. Please help yourself to a slice of ham from my enormous fist.

Final Warning: Every time I get to a point that I want to make absolutely clear is potentially a super ignorant statement that I am probably not qualified to make you will see this mole:

This is the Eternal Mole of Clumsy Conjecture. You will notice that despite his can-do attitude, he is ultimately blind. By the time we’re done, I feel you will know him well. ONWARD!

Part 1: Elevating Pulp, Grounding Tolkien

As different as ASOIAF’s universe is from most ‘adult’ fantasy, a great deal of it is still stitched together from tropes commonly encountered in the sort of pulpy paperback shlock you might associate with hilariously impractical boob armour and swashbuckling barbarians with tragically misguided saviour complexes . The TV show, being a TV show and needing its viewers to instantly recognise certain thematic threads and character archetypes for ease of immersion, implements these tropes to a greater degree than the books. Renly codes instantly as gay through his charming, fashionable demeanour and Brienne’s feelings towards him stem from a schoolgirl crush because he was the only boy at prom that asked her to dance, Yara is strong and wilful and therefore must be made less threatening to men by having no interest in sexual conquest of them, because television.

So why does the show feel the need to simplify character motivations or create entirely new ones so they fall in line with well worn stereotypes? Because people generally approach fiction with certain expectations and new ideas and unfamiliar situations make people question things. When the audience is questioning, they are not immersed, and a lack of immersion is anathema to ratings.

However, because subversion of these tropes is inextricably woven into the DNA of GOT’s source material, the show still comes off looking pretty progressive, especially in comparison to things like the above image.

Who is the woman Conan is holding?

Does she have a name?

What interesting dilemmas and decisions and twists of fate have led her to this moment in time?

Can she actually walk perfectly fine and is just letting Conan carry her to give him an inflated sense of his own comically masculine identity?

Who cares, right? Only boring people with secret agendas to destroy everything fun about big dumb fantasy stories ask these kind of the questions. The thing is, if you have intentionally left a big gaping hole in your story because you expect me to fill in the blanks based on whatever innate assumptions you think I’ll make about a characters role or lack thereof in your fiction, don’t be surprised when I pick it apart like the flimsy marshmallow it is.

I imagine GRRM asked some similar questions to these about the assumptions made by fantasy as a whole, although I’m sure he asked them in a much more insightful way, and was wearing a much cooler hat. I doubt he was the first person to ask these sort of questions though, because not all fantasy is Conan. Some fantasy is LOTR, a much more structurally sound marshmallow. If Conan is the sort of power fantasy created so awkward dudes can dream about getting revenge on the popular kids with a big axe, LOTR is a parable of sorts about the dangers of this sort of vengeful thinking, and how accepting our flaws and weaknesses can actually make us stronger.

So how different is LOTR to pulp fantasy in its representation of different types of people? The source material is pretty comprehensive. Tolkien invented languages and cultures, so it’s natural to assume that he would have put some thought into how different types of people in those cultures interact with each other, and what agency they have in regards to the larger story. Here’s a thing about agency though: Fiction occupies a contradictory space where it needs to convincingly represent reality to be effective, but also, needs to impose some sort of cohesive, logical order on story events to be coherent. But life doesn’t work that way. Life has plot holes. Big gaping ones. So fiction must necessarily send its characters on journeys that carve out spaces of cause and effect both within and without the fiction. The author’s hand has to be apparent somewhere, and there’s always going to be a point where choices have to be made outside of a characters natural arc to what sort of message the author wants to send. So if we say that fiction is 50% art and 50% artifice, the artifice eventually has take precedence over the art, and this is where choices have to made by the author over what type of reality they want to craft, not just what type of reality makes narrative sense. This is where the amount of agency characters have, and how that agency is applied, becomes a statement on the writers intent. Unfortunately, If you look closely , you’ll find there aren’t actually any characters in LOTR, just archetypes.

This is the Lesser, Slightly Woker Mole of Clumsy Conjecture. He has grown more aware through an intensive program of corrective oracular surgery, and thus does not make overt political assertions. Woke as he is, he is still but a simple mole, and will sometimes make sweeping statements about works of art in support of a larger point. Say hello. You may encounter him again.

So, once more: LOTR leans too far on its own plot devices to give its characters genuine agency, rendering them sort of hollow. A character without agency is not a character, it is an archetype.

You might notice I use that term quite a lot, so let’s break it down a little.

For the purposes of fiction, an archetype is basically a stock character. In fantasy, it is the chivalric knight, the swooning maiden, the evil, cackling magician or the wise wizard. If we want, we can go slightly deeper than this, into the works of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, who broke down mythological archetypes and explored how these archetypes relate directly to the human subconscious, respectively. Their individual works are numerous and illuminating, and I cannot recommend them enough, but I’m not going to explore them extensively here because any attempts to paraphrase their ideas would essentially involve watering them down. Basically, an archetypal character is a character that embodies a set of values and has a specific mechanical function in the narrative framework, rather than displaying actual human traits. I understand that whether you feel this is an issue or not will largely depend on whether you think human beings are consistent in their values, their speech, and their actions, or whether, like me, you believe that human beings are messy bags of contradictions who may be Frodo one day and Sauron the next, depending on the circumstances. Effectively, the people who populate LOTR are narrative devices with legs and capes and magic swords who are called into action when required to make some philosophical point or other relating to the works’ larger messages about power, corruption, and heroism.

So why are archetypes bad? Surely anything that makes it easier for the audience to grasp the underlying themes of a story is a good thing?

I believe that archetypical characters are bad because, like clichés, they freeze meaning. They are neat packages of pre determined, easily understandable signifiers, and do not invite or reward scrutiny of any kind. They also do not allow for personal interpretation, and a capacity for interpretation is what makes fiction valuable for everyone, not just people who automatically relate to the specific set of values your fiction represents.

For arguments sake, let’s pretend each one of these character archetypes is a unit of language, which, effectively, they are. But since a unit of language is an empty signifier for some aspect of reality, and we all experience reality differently, the more evocative units of language have vastly different meanings depending on the users lived experience and…

Hang on. Semiotics is hungry work. Please excuse me while I make a delicious sandwich.

Thanks. Now where were we? Ah, that’s right. Sandwiches.

We can probably agree that the best type of sandwich is a delicious sandwich, but the contents of that sandwich will likely differ depending on who you ask. An archetypically ‘good’ character is a sandwich, wrapped in tin foil, with a sticker that says ‘delicious sandwich’ on it. We marvel at the heroic actions of this brave sandwich, stick with them through their sandwichy struggles, and think damn, that is a sandwich I can get behind. I hope things work out for that sandwich. I sincerely hope that one day, people will look at me the same way they look at that sandwich. What we can’t do is have interesting discussions about whether or not it is a good sandwich, because we’ve already been told – That sandwich is delicious. We are not given room to talk about the individual merits of their various fillings and condiments because the story has already let us know that they are all in aid of unquestionable deliciousness.

Aragorn and Gimli and the Hobbits and Legolas and Gandalf 1 and Gandalf 2: Old Man Jesus Edition are delicious sandwiches. Sauron and the Orcs and Saruman are bad sandwiches, possibly coated in some sort of terrible condiment, like a four year old mayo. Boromir is a delicious sandwich that attempts to become more delicious by coating himself in this ancient mayo, but then scrapes the mayo off himself in a final act of redemption. The limits of this metaphor are becoming painfully apparent. Suffice it to say that when a story only employs archetypes, the scope of that story is reduced to a metaphor for life, rather than a representation of it. A metaphor is a map, and a map cannot possibly encapsulate every nuance of the thing it represents. Archetypes are anathema to realism, and realism is required to give a work the verisimilitude it needs to make any genuine progress over the narrative trappings of the past.

I think this is probably a good time to say that despite all this, I still love LOTR. It might be shallow, but most movies are, and as far as shallow things go, it’s pretty cool for what it is. Guess who my favourite characters are?

As it is difficult for me to satisfactorily create suspenseful timing with just words, I’ll just tell you. It’s these guys:

ORIGIN STORY TIME: In the wider Tolkien lore, there’s actually a few different theories, but the one LOTR goes with, and my personal favourite, is that the orcs used to be elves. Ethereal, beautiful, wise immortal elves, tortured and driven insane. For my dollar dollar bills, that makes them the single most tragic and interesting thing about the whole trilogy. I wonder if this aspect of them is given any further consideration? Do we get a scene where an orc finds out about this and has some emotional revelation? Do we get some sort of redemption arc or growth or any nuance whatsoever? We do not. All we get is a rampaging army of ugly dudes in black armour who we know are objectively bad because they are trying to stop people who are objectively good. This is what GRRM had to say about ugly dudes in black armour:

‘The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that.’

This kind of black and white morality in storytelling isn’t only unrealistic, it’s reductive to the point of being dangerous. Stories make societies. People need narratives and values to give their actions meaning. This is how propaganda works. If the most ubiquitous stories in a society’s popular culture espouse a clear cut, us vs them, black and white mentality, how likely is that society to embrace nuance in the way they treat otherness?

At this point, you may have been waiting patiently to get annoyed at me talking about gender representation. Congratulations. This is where these two points converge, moulding together in a chimera of awful decisions. Welcome.

Mole Alert

Superficially, this bit from Return of the King is cool as fuck. It not only plays with gender roles in fantasy, it uses the language of fantasy itself to make a cute pun while it does so. It’s subversion-ception. Except its sort of plastic. All we’ve really seen Eowyn do at this point is fawn over Aragorn and get vaguely irritated at a structure that places her within a specific role . I know that, on some level, it’s cool that LOTR even acknowledges these issues, but Eowyn’s supposed triumph here does not elevate her so much as it places her in a space where the highest achievement she can make is to be able to do what men do, too. Her agency is only autonomous in that it allows her to reach the heights that male characters have already decided are inherently valuable. Her arc is defined by the other. This emancipates precisely nothing. A goal achieved in spite of something is a victory that exists in the shadow of the thing it is trying to overcome. Again, I put the mole there for a reason. I might be missing the mark massively, but I feel that Eowyn’s arc is such a heavy handed fable that it ultimately devalues itself. As I’ve already said, LOTR has no characters, so larger points about structural cultural bias can only ever exist in the realm of rhetoric. Eowyn is not a character, she is a narrative tool. She has no flaws and therefore no agency, because her characteristic goodness exists only to serve the wider parable.

Also, and this is the super important bit: because all objective evil in the narrative has been relegated to Sauron, vanquishing him is presented as a catch all solution to any social, political or personal ills in middle earth. Eowyn’s arc is only important insofar as it contributes to the success of the Big Epic Battle between all that is good in the world and all that is bad. And that is stupid as fuck.

Shit, I almost forgot that we were supposed to be talking about Daenerys. BUT OH WAIT NO I DIDN’T DAMN I AM A SNEAKY GENIUS. Onward.

Part 2: That bit from the books where Dany shits herself.

At the beginning of season 2, Thrones actually does a very brave thing, and makes Dany look like she’s having a really bad day. After being abandoned by her Khalassar and travelling through the Dothraki Seas for weeks on end, with little food or water, we see her ragged, exhausted, dehydrated and covered in the filth of the plains. This, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a fairly believable depiction of the consequences of Dany’s situation. In terms of actually daring to dishevel, disfigure, or otherwise de-beautify any members of the main cast though, Thrones never really repeats this, but I feel that this seemingly insignificant detail is telling of the willingness of the early show to place realism and consequence above polish and aesthetics.

There is another event, present in the books but absent in the show where it should appear chronologically at the end of season 5. After escaping Meereen on Drogon, the dragon

Drogon the Dragon

Drogon is actually a really stupid name for a Dragon

after escaping on Falkor, just before being surrounded by Dothraki, Dany shits herself. She properly and fully shits herself.

‘Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelt fouler. By the time the moon came up, she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew’

Now, I feel that if this had been in the early books, there’s a good chance the show would have actually gone through with it. I can’t prove this, of course, but I have a suspicion it might have happened. Its absence, I believe, says something about the space Thrones occupies as an artifact in pop culture, and doesn’t actually have much to do with concerns over storytelling.

I mean, it can’t be to do with storytelling, can it? Because if you were concerned about telling a story, having someone like season 5 Dany with all her magic dragons and perfect hair and purely virtuous motivations wouldn’t make sense anyway. But the later seasons of the show give exactly zero watery Dothraki desert shits about realism, what the later seasons care about is being iconic. This is why Jon Snow has his face smashed into an anvil and torn up by a eagle and gets his soul literally replaced by an evil god and turns out, if anything, more heroic and better looking. Also, he hangs children. I was a bit concerned about this, and tried to talk to people about it, but they just kept shouting KING IN THE NORTH at me like that was an answer to something. Then I realised that as far as the show was concerned, it was.

As far as the show is concerned, Olly made the unforgivable transgression of wronging Jon, and therefore deserved to die. If you watch the scene again, you might notice that the camera lingers on Olly’s face just a little bit too long. I can’t be sure of this, but I genuinely think this was done so people who wanted to make memes could get a screenshot easier. KING IN THE FUCKING NORTH.

By this point, Jon had teamed up with everyone’s favourite walking dick joke dispenser, Tormund Giantsbane. I.e the man who slaughtered most of Olly’s village. I don’t think anyone could really blame Olly for wanting revenge on Jon as a character. Conversely: Jon as an Icon is untouchable. He is a handsome, righteous protagonist and also features quite heavily in marketing materials. He is a delicious sandwich, and any actions taken against him or his interests are presented as objective evils. Unfortunately, this is also the route the show ends up taking Dany down.

I am not saying that having Dany shit herself would somehow have solved the shows problems and turned it into some sort of masterpiece for the ages. Ser Twenty Goodman of House Bad Pussy fucked that possibility deep into the ground already. But I do think the absence of this scene is a microcosm of the larger issue here. Namely: Thrones absolute refusal to allow any sort of ambiguity over whether or not its main characters are basically flawless superheroes. This might seem, superficially, like some sort of form of respect for the characters. It might even look, in the case of Dany, like feminism. But if you can’t show your character making a dick out of themselves because you feel that will somehow break their illusion of respectability or heroism, then the foundation on which this heroism is built is the flimsiest marshmallow of them all.

OK THAT’S COOL BUT I THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO BE ABOUT THE FIRST EPISODE

It would have to be right? Because if you read all this way and I didn’t include how everything I’d just written somehow relates to Dany’s initial portrayal on Thrones, then it would basically just be a list of long, marginally related tangents. Ok, so maybe it was. But I wanted to cover all the bases first. ONWARD.

Part 3: I actually use some examples to back up my long winded conjecture (Sort of)

WAIT

Do you hear that rumbling from the ground below? Something is in the tunnels, preparing to emerge en masse…. What could it possibly be?

Can you hear me? My god that was terrifying. I honestly did not know moles were capable of such bloodshed. If you’re still here though, I guess we can continue.

Ok, right off. Emilia Clarke is fucking brilliant in this first scene. I don’t buy Dany in the later seasons at all. The whole benevolent conqueror shtick does not work for me. But there’s an exhausted subtlety to the performance here that works so, so well. We first see Dany staring out on Pentos, in what we can imagine is a rare moment of private, dreamy introspection. It is immediately broken by Viserys calling her name, and we see a look that tells us everything we need to know. Viserys’s voice tears through her solitude like a talon, and her dreaminess gives way to a solemn weariness.

“There’s our bride to be”

Again, it’s a little thing, and it’s given more exposition later, but immediately we know that Viserys views Dany as a resource, as something to be traded for personal power. As he attempts to ‘correct’ her posture (literally shaping her form), and inspects her body in the same way he might shine a coin, her distant, dead stare speak volumes. She exists in a state of fear and subservience to the point where she uses numbness as a defence mechanism. Thrones is doing a powerful thing here. The women Conan carry are portrayed as fearful and subservient. But numb? No. Because Dany’s numbness suggests being forced to display these traits is taking an enormous toll on her vitality and mental well being, rather than just being a default state for a fantasy damsel.

“I need you to be perfect today, can you do that for me”

Any chance you could, you know, abandon all agency in this plot and act as the shiny coin, I, the dethroned handsome prince, use to trade for my magic sword? Cheers love.

It’s absolutely not that subtle, but its rapidly established and pretty well done, imo.

We get a nod to Dany’s Targ heritage as she lowers herself in the bath, but the affecting part here is it shows just how far she’s detached herself from the physical reality of her situation. Numb to the heat, numb to Viserys’s touch.

As Dany meets Drogo, who Viserys sets up us a pretty scary dude, there’s more focus on her trepidation. Again, we are reminded that even though Viserys is the one with all the titles, and Dany is ‘his sister’, this is undoubtedly her scene. Decisions over her fate have been made without her input, but agency is reinforced through viewpoint. Showing a character have awful things happen to them is not the same as tacitly endorsing these awful things, as long as agency is maintained through giving the audience a stake in that character’s well being, and how these events affect them personally. There is no ambiguity through lack of attention to how Dany feels about this shit.

Notice how even though Viserys has set this whole thing up, Dany is still the focus here, even when Viserys is the one talking. The focus on Dany’s emotional state remains prominent, while Viserys is blurry and given secondary consideration.

We get some walking exposition, and Dany is shown to be trailing along behing Viserys and Illyrio while they make plans on her behalf. Even though she is not the focus here, there are no big close ups of Viserys still. When Dany interrupts, she fills the screen.

“I don’t want to be his queen”

Viserys, I think your shiny coin just spoke. I did not know coins could do that.

Viserys then says something about horse fucking, which is pretty grim, but if you’ve been paying attention, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise. To Viserys, Dany is a tool to maintain his agency, but to us, again, Dany’s emotions are the focus, so her agency is maintained.

The wedding scene doesn’t build on this stuff too much, it’s world building , although it does further make Viserys look like a dick, and anything that makes Viserys look like a dick colours his oppression of Dany as a negative thing. There’s also this:

Viserys looking on in horror as Dany, not him, is the one presented with the figurative magic sword in the form of her dragon eggs, demoting his self supposed protagonist status to the role of a background part. Sorry mate.

Dany gets her horse next. In the books, this is sort of the point where she takes the first steps into regaining her agency. Seperated from Viserys, she gets (back) on her horse, both literally and figuratively taking the reins. She then proceeds to bound around and do some cool horse tricks. Seriously, she jumps over a fire pit, it’s awesome and makes absolutely clear that the horse represents the first signs of her freedom. In the show, they wanted to drag this arc out a little bit longer, starting with her sexual conquest of Drogo, which I suppose is a bit more clear to a TV audience, but I prefer the horse thing. Also, there’s the next scene coming up.

Ok, so, I had considered absolutely not touching this at all. Even with the biggest mole in the world, I’m not sure if I can fully make clear how unqualified I am to make statements about the portrayal of rape, so I’m dividing what I think of this scene and why I think it might exist into two possibilities. Keep in mind this scene is completely different in the books, but also keep in mind GRRM was heavily involved with the show at this point, and had to green light everything

Possibility One: George was not consulted on this scene, or his voice was ignored by the showrunners. They inserted rape where there was no rape previously for shock value, to reinforce the otherness of Drogo and the unfamiliarity and scariness of Dany’s situation, and to make it seem more significant when she does start to regain agency.

Possibility two: George was consulted on this scene, and decided that it’s actually less harmful for Dany to be raped than to have her agree consensually to sex with a man she has just been sold to, and to enjoy it. This is what happens in the books.

Maybe I should not have touched this at all, but I felt it would have been intellectually dishonest or flippant to ignore its existence, and my attempt with these pieces is to get under the hood of the storytelling a bit. I was going to add another paint drawing to lighten the mood but I am actually pretty exhausted after writing that.

Ok, next time I actually move on to episode two. See you then x