Right now with Hodor, I think it’s even sadder. It was made very clear that either Bran or the Three Eyed Raven are responsible for taking a seemingly bright and personable stableboy and turning him into somebody who either can constantly see his own future demise and is so traumatized by it that the only thing he can do is say “hold the door,” or somebody who has been stripped of agency to articulate any will of his own other than the purpose for which he has been used.

Kornhaber: There was ambiguity over his mental faculties, and this episode made it clearer that something really was deeply different in him.

Mayer: Yeah. It’s very interesting to see the fan reaction to this. He is being now either being retroactively rewritten as an automaton whose job was just to hold the door and who now is valorized because of this great sacrificial death—or somebody who is being painted as a Christlike figure who knows perfectly well what his own death is and how horrible it is.

Both of these things bother me a little bit because a character who had the potential to have agency was now turned into one of these other disability tropes: He was a heroic sacrificial figure, or the figure of lost purity and innocence. You see that over and over again in literature, like Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, or Lenny in Of Mice and Men, or if you want to go into popular culture, Forrest Gump.

There’s something else: Bran, who of all people should have some empathy for Hodor, is kind of an abusive little shit. Because Martin makes it very clear in the books—and this is another way that Hodor has will and agency—Hodor does not want to be warged into at all. He fights him, but obviously he doesn’t have the mental ability that Bran does. And then he curls up like a beaten dog. Hodor could break Bran like a twig, but he doesn’t want to be violent; when Samwell gives him those dragonglass weapons, he doesn’t want to take them till he’s ordered to. And when you get to that scene where he snaps his chains and then snaps his tormenter in half, that’s not him, that’s Bran. Hodor is horrified by what’s happened. Bran’s always using an excuse: “I just want to be strong again,” “I won’t do this for too long”—that’s the logic of the abuser.

Hodor’s supposed to be loyal anyways. You could just have Bran tell Hodor to hold the door and have him die sacrificially. But I think it’s very interesting that the show shows this early violation against a kid who could have grown up to be a perfectly functioning and very colorful adult.

Kornhaber: The point you made earlier about the show reminding people of their fragility—it seems like this revelation about Hodor’s past is another example of that. It wasn’t something he was born with.

Mayer: Yeah, and that’s the reason, I think, people react so viscerally to the show. Look at the reaction [videos] to any particular horrifying episode of Game of Thrones, like Shireen being burned to death or the Red Wedding. If you watch people’s body language, they are acting as if they themselves are being physically hurt, right? A lot of them will start curling into themselves. They’ll start touching parts of their bodies like you do when you’re injured. And if you look at the comments afterwards, you see the kind of thing where [it’s like] people dropped something on their foot. A lot of them are not even able to articulate complete sentences: “FUCK THIS FUCKING SHOW!” or “I can’t even, I can’t, I can’t.”