“Winter: How Does It Even Work?”
“Last, finally, okay, I have to say it: the dragon between Daenerys legs that Jon makes friends with. I mean… this is not a show where the relationship between sex and power is ever very convoluted; most of the time, subtext is just text. So, what has Jon done when he put his hands on her beast? Her beast that she has to explain to him is terrifying to many people, but actually very beautiful? And he’s… well, he’s not totally convinced? The dragon likes him, but it’s not clear that he likes the dragon.”
“Let’s overthink that. Remember last year when we talked so much about phallic symbols? Sarah, you asked “will this show admit that the phallus is separate from the penis?” and you suggested that “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.””
“The show constantly flirts with it, but, as you observed, “you can’t commit to overturning the patriarchy and still ask your viewers to unquestioningly embrace what seemed like about 45 minutes of toasting Jon’s dick.””
“If there is one thing this dragon is not, it is not a dick. It is also not a phallus, and the fact that it’s a different way to execute people than head-chopping is at least consistent with the sense that dragons are an alternate form of symbolic power to the “cut, stab, and penetrate” kind.”
“Dragons, for Dany, are the ability to take a formed, made thing—a wagon, a body, chains, an institution of slavery, The Wheel—and turn it into an unformed not-a-thing, the same way that Cersei’s wildfire was the power to un-make an entire religion.”
“If the phallus erects monuments to its power, Mad Queens use fire to burn them down.”
“Does the show have an ethics for this power of unmaking? Certainly, her dragon ethics are different than what Tyrion wants her to do: he counsels imprisonment and she responds that she’s not here to put people in chains. She respects the men who she incinerates, actually, and she gets results.”
“Until she doesn’t. Until she suddenly starts letting the boys tell her what to do, and falling in stupid love for Jon Snow, whose once unreasonable request is now, strangely, being treated by everyone as if it’s reasonable.”
“Two utterly overdetermined inevitabilities seem to loom over the proceedings: Jaime will kill his sister-wife, and Jon will marry his aunt. The phallus will take control of the dragons.”
“I think the problem is that, ultimately, the show doesn’t have any new ideas, especially where the intersection of gender and power are concerned. It has a half-glimpsed sense of the limitations of the old stories, but its critiques of patriarchy and feudal institutions don’t magically turn into a vision for a replacement; it gets a charge from blowing things up and announcing that it will break the wheel, but it can’t really think of a follow through that will earn it.”
“And so: the show creates a non-penis-based symbolic power, the dragon as expression of feminine potency… but it can only narrativize that power as the power to un-make.”
“Dragons are the power everyone tells you not to use, because it will only make people hate you; dragons are the Trump card you lose the game by playing.”
“This is more than a strange thing to do with the concept of motherhood, which is, of course, the power to create. By subsuming motherhood into negation—and by sidelining the lady queens so as to engineer and focus on a band-of-brothers mission to defeat death—the show turns its burst of fiery dragons into a plot hole.”
“Your beasts are very beautiful,
Aaron”
Sarah Mesle, Tarly Men Who Don’t Listen to the Women Who Are Trying To Save Their Dumb Lives
“I do not care if it’s “realistic” (gag me) for an older, more experienced man to know more about the world and its machinations than a teenage girl who’s never done anything but go to assassin school, watch her family be violently murdered, and successfully make her way alone across two continents. I also do not care if it’s “realistic” for two sisters, deep in the weeds of cultural misogyny, both of them, to have such deep seated antipathy towards each other’s machinations of gendered power that they would “realistically” let tensions about fancy clothes and bedrooms forestall the chance of growing a relationship.”
“I do not care about any of it. What I want is to watch Arya and Sansa, under Brienne’s good guidance and bolstered by her support, kick ass all over the north. I want to watch the majestic strength of their ability activate like wonder twins and, mixing cartoon references, leave Petyr Baelish flailing in the air like Wile E. Coyote. I want to watch the lords of the North chant in unison for the unified Stark Daughters, just like they did for Jon Snow. I want their friendship to be as strong as Dany’s dragons, just as potent, and perhaps more versatile.”
“(I also want Sansa to do all of this while wearing exactly the same leather waist harness and fur shrug she’s already wearing, proving yet again that the Game of Thrones costume team is more narratively on point for this lady viewer than any of the writing staff. I mean, Sansa’s clothes can imagine unconquerable womanly power, even if her plot line can’t.)”
“I just can’t sign on for any more screen time in which women’s relationships get fucked with for the sake of some idiot screenwriter’s idea of narrative suspense.”
“Last week I was so excited about all the ridiculously huge imagining the show was doing, and it just felt so shitty, this week especially, to see all that retract. We can have dudely gangs of misfits plunge into the wild on completely nonsensical plans, but we can’t have two sisters get along. It just makes me hate everything.”
“Why do women’s experiences, and their friendships, so often carry the ballast of realism for the rest of this show? Why can’t we imagine women as friends?”
“And Gilly! Yes, again, believable, not troubling in the way that the zombie-theft plot is, that Sam would totally let his manly emotional frustrations roil right over the top of Gilly’s major plot revelations; it’s very believable that he would give her a book to read (wife as office assistant, sigh) and then not listen to her read it, but also how boring. How much less interesting, to me, than what could have happened, which is Gilly actually recognizing the content as well as the form of her knowledge and making something happen in this story rather than just nurturing up the next Tarly dude who will, presumably, like his father and his grandfather, not listen when a woman tells them what they need to survive in this world.”
“All I’m saying here is that this was an episode of Game of Thrones that was brutally fractured into two very different stories, whereby men get gang-of-misfits heist dramas — even if they are shittily executed dramas of improbable zombie theft — and women get divided, pitted against one another, ignored. Or, put differently, white men with dumb dreams get to indulge their wish fulfillment and women get something like realism. Does this sound familiar, this insistence on making the space for male desire, at all cost? In a normal week it would just be wearying. This week it feels like another turn in the widening gyre.”