“At the level of language, this show was about the miserable wastefulness of violent patriarchy. But how to square that with the full half of this episode spent in wrenchingly rendered blood and gore?”
“You know, I think a lot my complaints about Game of Thrones boil down to demanding that it be psychologically coherent and consistent (or just socially non-nonsensical) when that might be asking it to be a different show.”
“This show seems more interested in building a vast and beautiful architecture of plots: it likes to create symmetry within episodes (and within the show as a whole) where characters and plotlines (and shot composition) echo and mirror each other. It can be pretty neat! But because it “thinks” so structurally, as a show, it often loses track of individual characters, or loses plotlines. Perhaps too simplistically, it gets so interested in forms that it sometimes doesn’t think below the surfaces?”
“Aaron: I agree with you: this show is all about enjoying what it critiques.”
“But that initial Ned Stark claim was one of this show’s key statements of ethics: you should be responsible for what you do. Which is not a bad response to the world, really: given an imperfect world, and given the importance (the show thinks) of a stable social order, violence will happen, and people should exercise it consciously, consistently, and efficiently. Ned Stark: a good dad!”
“But he’s been gone from this world for a while now, and his children are left to navigate it without him. And would it really work, for Sansa to cut off Ramsay’s head herself? Ned’s mode of politics works really well for strong men with swords. If we want a world where women, too, can claim power — a power that is not a primarily phallic power, based on the ability to cut, stab, and otherwise penetrate — we need a different ethics.”
“These ethically ambivalent emotional moments, portrayed across women’s faces (also, Cersei’s response to Jaime, when he rapes her) are when Game of Thrones most successfully takes advantage of its visual medium. Because we can’t know exactly what these women are thinking, we are forced to think about ourselves — as interpreters of them. And attending to the ways we interpret women is something our world really needs to do!”
“I do think the battle has a certain kind of very formal, visual logic to it, if we start from the presumption that Jon Snow hasn’t really gotten his head around being alive again, and, actually, kind of wants to be dead again. If we think of it that way, then the battle plays out his re-immersion in life. It’s very Freudian: death drive, melancholia, and dream logic.”
“First, we see Jon alone, riding towards certain death:”
“Suddenly, he is faced with an onrushing army, which will overwhelm him:”
“It does, and he is lost in the mass of bodies:”
“It really seems like he’s going to die at that point, doesn’t it? The sad violins, the receding sound of the fray, the loss of details and definition? But then, inexplicably, he doesn’t: he fights his way to the surface, gasping for air (like he did when he was first raised from the dead).”
“And then he emerges:”
“And joins his squad:”
“Successful symbolic integration into the social order!”
“And, of course it’s a hyper-violent masculine and patriarchal social order he’s re-joined, but it’s certainly an interesting allegorical fantasy about rebirth. Plus, he doesn’t quite do it on his own; he fights his way to the surface, but he’s still stuck in this press of bodies and meat. He needs Doctors Sansa and Littlefinger to cut him free:”
“I feel like there’s lots of room to think about what kinds of symbols these are, and what kinds of re-birth this show can imagine. Like any dream, the more you draw out the latent logic behind what is manifest on the screen, the richer and weirder it gets.”
“Aaron: Ugggh, exactly. This show kills its monsters when it doesn’t want to kill off its protagonists, which is such a cop-out for this show, of all shows.”
“I particularly loved it because it was some powerful political knowledge that she earned particularly through her subject position as a sacrificial woman. Jon thinks the battlefield has taught him how the world works, but this show gets behind Sansa’s perspective. It’s not honor or strength that protects you. In fact, when power is moving through your body (her body, Rickon’s body) “no one” can protect you. Your individuality is lost in the logic of how you mean, politically.”
“But there’s something about watching him win on the battlefield, the exteriorization of his abuser’s mystique, the effect that a manipulative sadist can have on his victims (which we, the viewers, are also affected by) that make it seem impossible to outwit or defeat him; the way he maneuvered Jon Snow into the shield wall of death on top of Mount Pilacorpses was incredibly horrible, in exactly that way. It confirmed everything you fear, when he gets in your head. Even Sansa’s inside knowledge was essentially “he will have already planned for whatever you’ve planned, so don’t do that thing, do something else.” But how do you beat someone like that?”
“Sarah: That would have been really good! Sansa’s point to Jon was so great: “Don’t do the thing he wants you to do.” What she’s basically talking about is consent. And another way to say that is that Sansa learned about Ramsay’s battle tactics from her marriage: how you can be raped by someone you have already consented to have sex with. Sansa knew that Ramsay wanted to marry her, and she thought she could maneuver, work within the terms of engagement — to use a term both sexual and military — he offered. And what she learned is that she was wrong. But Jon couldn’t hear that, because Sansa couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) put what she knew in military terms. Here again, the show is just leaning in to this womanly knowledge; she is exactly right!”