I’m late with this. I know that. But in my small defense, I’ve been waiting for my thought sto settle, trying to figure out what to take on, how to frame it, how to work up the energy to go through it, and gods, has that been hard.
Remember True Blood? If you’ve been here or ever spoken to me, you’ll remember how easily the end of that series still sets me off. None of the characters, or at least the ones I gave a shit about, had satisfactory endings. Everyone was only in-character when it suited the moronic plot and the rest of the time they were blithering idiots and/or jerks. Characters that were objectively bad people (Bill, Tara’s mother) got redeemed and characters who deserved better (Tara, Nora, the Bellefleur girls) got murdered and forgotten for no reason. What had been the queerest show I’d ever seen devolved hard into compulsory heterosexuality. I thought I’d never be that disappointed in a show again.
Go ahead and laugh. I know I brought this on myself.
Game of Thrones managed to do all of this but worse, except the queer part because when you only have one canon queer (of a whopping five) left standing there’s not much more to mess up. I’m legitimately ashamed to have gotten so many people into this show because I should have seen this coming. I should have seen that this wasn’t going to be some great tiumph for me and mine in the end. I shouldn’t have let myself hope against hope that this expansive fantasy world might actually belong to someone who’s got disabilities or isn’t heterosexual or isn’t well-off or isn’t white or isn’t cisgender or isn’t a man. Or at least that it wouldn’t betray everyone in those categories.
Let’s look at it by the numbers.
The big characters with physical disabilities didn’t all do horribly, probably because all three (Jaime [Nikolaj Coster-Waldau], Tyrion [Peter Dinklage], Bran [Isaac Hempstead-Wright]) are otherwise lucky. Jaime’s storyline devolved into a giant mess and resulted in countless bitterly hilarious awkward interviews. I’ve never given a damn about Jaime except for when Brienne (Gwendoline Christie) does (and even then only somewhat) but this was objectively insulting. I actually loved the scene where he knighted Brienne and I would much rather have had that be the end of them. Then Jaime would ride off with the explicit statetd intention of killing Cersei and die tragically and Brienne would go about her life. (More about this later.)
Tyrion did okay, I guess, from what I can tell (remember, the last three episodes are all word-of-mouth to me because I didn’t torture myself like that). I mean, aside from being a wishy-washy, disloyal, unattractively self-serving dum-dum.
And Bran is (somehow) the king! The king of Westeros is a paralyzed trauma victim and occultist, and a character I personally have long considered my weird son. Great! Except… no, not really. For one, Bran neither wanted to rule nor knows how. When he was the sitting Lord of Winterfell, lords attendant did all the real work, and after that he spent years on an extended camping trip. He’s wise, but not particularly compassionate. He’s also, when you get down to it, a one-boy Big Brother: if he so chose, he could use all his superpowers to surveil Westeros into a fascist state. He’s very likely to be used somewhat puppetlike by lords and his council. And what’s even the point of acknowledging the North as a sovereign kingdom if the Queen in the North and the King in the South are blood siblings with virtually identical (presumed) agendas?
Yara (Gemma Whelan) is, as mentioned, the only queer left standing, and she’s been a plot device since the end of season six. I assume she’s alright, but mostly in that figureheady way that the butch white girls are to prove that B&W don’t hate women. (They do, and this doesn’t disprove that, which we’ll also get into later.) Ellaria (Indira Varma) is dead (and had her character assassinated on top of it), Oberyn (Pedro Pascal) and Renly (Gethin Anthony) are long-dead per the books, Loras (Finn Jones) was peak Sad Gay and is dead too. They didn’t bother to show-canonize Nymeria (Jessica Henwick) as bi even though she is. Lots of characters should have been queer, and not just because it’s me talking and I want to queer everyone. Etcetera. Maybe the one gay male sex worker of relevance, Olyvar, made it out okay, but it’s not likely. Whee!
Speaking of sex workers, guess how many of them made it out? Not Doreah (Roxanne McKee). Not Ros (Esme Bianco). Not Shae (Sibel Kekilli). Not anyone else we know. That’s cool and fun.
I guess it’s neat that Gendry (Joe Dempsie) is the Lord of Storm’s End now. +1 upward mobility. And Gilly (Hannah Murray), well, we’ll get to that soon. Not everyone less-than-noble totally sunk into misery. Cool.
Brown people, however… well, here’s a depressing fact. Grey Worm (Jacob Anderson) is the only surviving POC character. This is where I start feeling really bad. I’m still kicking myself for putting my wife anywhere near this show, but particularly regarding the Sand Snakes’ deaths and backlash; I feel like a gullible idiot for thinking they couldn’t possibly kill Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel) after that. They wouldn’t possibly be that stupid. Even if they’re racists and misogynists, they wouldn’t want to show their asses like that. Well, they showed them, and I hate them for it, and I hate that I hoped they wouldn’t. There is not a single character we met from Dorne who made it to the end of the series; the vast majority of Dothraki have been killed one way or another. B&W are not looking great, but at least the fandom wasn’t shit about Missandei like they were about Dorne.
As far as we know, everyone is cis, so nevermind that category. (They could have just had Sarella/Alleras Sand and then we’d have a not-cis person, but Sarella/Alleras is Dornish so they’d be dead too, so never mind.)
And now, the women. As mentioned, Arya (Maisie Williams), Brienne (Gwendoline Christie), and Yara have butch immunity. Brienne did also suffer the double-whammy of being last seen pining and having to sacrifice personal comforts to achieve her dreams. They weren’t going to fuck up Arya, though, so that’s something. The other women officially left standing are Gilly (who is in crassest terms a breeder and a belonging of Sam’s [John Bradley West] and therefore safe) and Sansa (Sophie Turner). And of course I’m happy with Sansa being the Queen in the North, but I’m really not happy with what all led to it. It was always kind of my read that the point of Sansa was quiet strength, “have courage be kind,” being smarter than everyone and surviving but still also managing to hold a tiny bit of hope and the like in her heart. Definitely not becoming what hurt her. The later seasons made Sansa skeptical and cold, judgmental and reactionary, full of internalized misogyny (presenting as abject girlhate) and, honestly, racism. She basically became a Republican. What really got me was her discussion of being a rape victim, because whether or not they intended it, that made it seem like she was almost glad to have been raped so she could be stronger, and on a meta level that suggests that she was allowed to succeed because she accepted what the patriarchy did to harm her (unlike, well, a lot of the female characters who didn’t make it).
On that note, we only needed one mad queen, and it was Cersei (Lena Headey. One mad queen is a compelling villain. Another popping up to fill her void is misogyny. Cersei’s madness was well-established and longlasting, product of trauma and conscious action both. Dany (Emilia Clarke) went mad as a plot twist that was also designed to gaslight thousands of people or posisbly teach you never to trust anyone. They took a character who’d been abused, underestimated, betrayed, basically tortured, who’d lost almost everyone she’d ever cared about, and right up through 8.03 she was still trying to help others and change the world. She was presented in a way that suggested that she didn’t have to be physically combative or butch to be strong (not that those things are bad, but some of us aren’t that). They portrayed her as a hero for years and then abruptly said no, just kidding, your genetics are a bitch and you’ll never be more than your mental illness, which by the way makes you homicidal, deranged, and in need of being put down.
I, a person with mental illness albeit a different one than Dany’s, find this atrocious. (The psych minor in me suspects Dany is bipolar amongst other things, but that’s another story.) I, a person who used a wheelchair even only for a few months, am also appalled by “Bran the Broken” but that’s also another story. Cersei was a bad person who made active choices to do bad things when she could have done better ones and knew that. Dany did (some debatable things usually in the name of good but largely) good things right up until they decided to flip her switch. Cersei deserved to get stabbed by her lover (or if not Jaime, Arya) for her crimes, not crushed by a building. Dany deserved, if not to be a living hero, then to die as one.
Basically, what I’m saying is that if B&W’s message was “nothing will ever change, so accept the white supremacist patriarchy and give up,” they did a good job. Otherwise, and even still, yikes.
–your fangirl heroine.
partlydrawn 