Game of Thrones: Bad Romance

Daario Naharis and Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones (HBO/Warner Bros Television)

The author is writing a series while rewatching Game of Thrones. The other installments can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.

When I was a preteen, my dad let me watch a very very very much not ok for kids movie that you’ve probably heard of — The Road Warrior. The reason why he let me do this peculiar thing was because he’d read a review that said “this movie has no sex in it.” After we watched it, including an extremely graphic rape-murder scene, he was like “huh, maybe that review said there was no romance, not no sex.”

And then he shrugged and IDK, probably signed my permission slip so I could go on the school field trip come Monday morning, or maybe he helped my stepmother pack me a nutritionally balanced sack lunch. The two genders, amirite?

Not only is rape not sex, romance is also not sex. Romance and sex often get conflated with each other in people’s mind’s, but when it comes to fiction, they are much further removed from each other than my poor clueless dad realized. Just ask Jane Austen.

This may come as no surprise to some of you, but I consider myself something of a student of romance in fiction. I read it, I write it, and I write about it, not only because I personally enjoy it, but because I think romance is important from a feminist perspective.

Romance is something that is often pooh-poohed by men and written off as “chick lit”, inferior to anything males enjoy. Even some women pooh-pooh the very notion of enjoying romantic scenarios as a sign of patriarchal brainwashing (to whom I heartily state – you do you) — again, a sign of inferiority. Romantic tropes are ignored, subverted, mocked, belittled, and when they are included in a story, it’s often merely as a means to an end, like the old girlfriend in the fridge ploy.

But if you stop to think about romance before decrying it, you may come to the same conclusion I did: human beings put so much time into pursuing love, it’s downright bizarre how easily many folks just write off not only the genre of romance, but even just romantic elements within genres.

Let’s be honest, romance is written off mainly because wimmen like it, and wimmen have cooties, therefore their interests are easy for men, who make most works of entertainment, to ignore. Or as I discussed in my piece Romance Before Bros, dissing romance is not only bizarre, it’s sexist as hell. Sex, on the other hand, is alive and well and crammed into just about everything.

Take, if you will, Exhibit B (for boobs) through T (for tits), otherwise known as Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is notorious for sexposition (that’s one word, not two, Google with care) in which important information is revealed to the audience against a backdrop of people having sex, because we’re all so dummmm we can’t pay attention to anything that isn’t crammed full of breasts. Makes ya wonder how Abe Lincoln got thru the Gettysburg Address without a topless can-can kick line behind him, doesn’t it?

One of my absolute least favorite moments of Game of Thrones is an utterly ridiculous sexposition scene (and those of you who watched the show will know this scene — everyone else, it’s not appropriate for sharing but I can just about guarantee ya, it’s available online) in which Littlefinger, despite being allegedly crafty and highly secretive, for some reason tells his whole life story while two prostitutes have sex in the background. In his spare time when not inexplicably and uncharacteristically revealing his Machiavellian ways (the first rule of Machiavellian ways, is that you never talk about Machiavellian ways), he criticized their sexual technique.

Reminder, this was in the first season. There were signs we were not in the best of hands right from the jump, peeps. I humbly submit that if you can’t make a pretty damn interesting character’s backstory compelling without resorting to sexposition, you probably shouldn’t be at the helm of a multi-million dollar TV series, but I digress.

Therein lies the rub (er, so to speak). Even though GoT is chock full of sex, the vast majority of that sex isn’t romantic in the slightest. Over eight seasons, we see lots and lots of coitus, and very little of what leads into it, except when it’s rapey, in which case we see what leads into it in exacting detail. Literally no one gets happily married, or even into a loving relationship between equals. Only poor Gilly successfully has a baby, and that baby is her father’s, and that baby is a critically relevant plot point that couldn’t be cut from the story. Because I suspect that if the GoT writers could have cut the squalling brat and replaced it with a heaving bosom, they would have.

Dudes don’t like babies in their sex show! DUH! Doesn’t that strike you as IDK, just a little bit WEIRD? There are roughly 700 characters in Game of Thrones, and a fair number of them are women, yet every marriage ends in disaster, and there are precisely no babies born to any of these horny jerks.

There is no happily ever after for anyone, not even in the form of a subverted trope. Worse still, the handful of pregnant women – Daenerys, Cersei, Robb’s wife Ol’ Whatshername – have insanely horrible things happen to them while they’re in the family way. In fact, my original title for this piece was called “Don’t Be a Cis Woman in Westeros” because pretty much every female character bearing a name who displays even the faintest whiff of classic femininity is raped and/or murdered for her trouble, and then additionally a whole lot of unnamed beskirted characters get it too.

Quick refresher — Dany — raped, has a stillborn baby, and is murdered, Cersei — raped by her own brother and killed while pregnant after all of her kids die, Robb Stark’s wife — gruesomely murdered while pregnant, Sansa — raped, Catelyn — murdered, Shae – murdered, Ygritte – murdered, Missandei – murdered, Melisandre — dries up and blows away, as old women do, Margaery — exploded, Roz — death by crossbow. Even wily crone Olenna Tyrell gets poisoned, and I’m forgetting like twelve other feminine characters here who met grisly ends. Gilly survived by getting into Sam’s good graces, but in the book, she has to give up her baby to do it.

Suffice to say, if you have foofy hair and favor low cut bodices, you are not going to fare well in the Land of Ice and Fire. Only Arya and Brienne — both sporting the unclassic femininity the type the writers at Jezebel love — survive relatively unscathed.

And that’s great if you’re a Grrl-Power type who don’t need no man, but not so much if you’re an irredeemable man lover like me who actually enjoys things like stolen kisses and smoldering glances and happilys-ever-after. I could have even lived without the ever after if I got a few happilys for my gals along the way.

Despite it being the most sexiest show in ever, or whatever, n the Game of Thrones TV show, there was not a single sexual scenario in which a woman got laid and it meant something and her life wasn’t completely destroyed because of it.

Here is where some clever sort of person will come along and say “but they were SUBVERTING the romantic trope in favor of REALISM!” No. No they weren’t. They were eliminating the romantic trope entirely to make way for more Ramsay Bolton torture porn, you-go-girl action scenes, and bare boobied brothel babe action by giving a big ol’ middle finger to women who are so desperate to see women characters in ANYthing that we’re willing to put up with all this shit just in the off chance something a little nice happens for a feminine character along the way.

But nothing ever did. Sorry, but I don’t find the “sure, kid, you got raped, but you learned something along the way, here’s a crown for your trouble” plotline in any way empowering at all. And as for realism, stow it, because as I stated a couple of paragraphs up, it is ridiculously unlikely that in a world in which marriage and producing offspring was super duperly important, that none of these people managed it even one damn time over the course of what appeared to be many years.

Even less realistic is that in a show that was supposed to be sexy, the only women seeming to enjoy sex (after the first season, anyway, and Khal Drogo and Daenerys did not enjoy what I would consider a fairy tale romance) are the whores getting paid for it. Oh, and of course Arya Sue, the character who gets to do everything she ever wanted without any cost for it. No, Brienne getting a pity f–, locker-room-talked-about in a salacious way, and then dumped is not sexy, but thanks for asking.

I’ve talked and talked (and talked, and talked) about what went wrong with the Game of Thrones TV show, and I think one of the main things the show lacked is any sense of a female perspective. While this lack of a woman’s touch shows in many ways, the complete lack of romance is a massive part of it.

Game of Thrones as presented by the horndogs at HBO is not really for me, is it? It is a man’s story, written for men, by men, representing the interests and passions of men. Dudes don’t want babies in their sex show. Ok, sure, I can accept that. But it appears to me that dudes don’t want love in their sex show either, not even a little around the edges, and that, I find I really really do miss. Even Daenerys having some fun with Daario felt a lot more directed for the men in the audience and not me.

Because Dany didn’t love Daario, it didn’t mean anything, and while I did not mind at all seeing Dutch treat Michiel Huisman without a shirt on, it felt cheap instead of hot. Daario is a male slut meant as a wish fulfilment avatar for the men in the crowd, and it didn’t speak to the princess in me.

Look, love matters. Love, in Game of Thrones, is CANON. We’re talking about a plotline that began with Rhaegar Targaryen falling illicitly in love with Lyanna Stark, a faked kidnapping, a secret wedding, and a bouncing baby boy, which registers 9.5 on the Lifetime Movie Romance Richter scale (points deducted for dying in childbirth).

Yet David Benioff and DB Weiss looked at all these characters who could have got with each other in anything other than the most demeaning, horrifying, and perfunctory of ways, and were just like “nah”. Now, you may be wondering why I’m giving George RR a pass here, and it’s because upon rereading the books, I think he may have some romantic tricks up his sleeve yet. Nor did GRRM expend massive amounts of plot time on sexposition and torture porn at the expense of romantic elements. While I admit I did not love the way Georgie Boy wrote a few of his scenes¹ he is nowhere near as guilty of overseasoning his fictional stew with sex and underseasoning it with romance as his erstwhile proteges Benioff and Weiss.

That the Game of Thrones TV show completely dispensed with any notions of love or romance or long-term stability in even a single relationship, yet has come to be seen “empowering” despite how completely phallocentric it is, I think, is a damning statement on the lack of choices that women face when it comes to our fiction. We have so few female characters we can truly relate to, that even Game of Thrones appeals, because we’re so desperate to connect with a fictional woman telling some part of a real woman’s experience (even the shittier parts) that we’ll glom onto anything that gives just a taste of what speaks to us, even if it’s otherwise problematic. Seeing women doing anything, anything at all, is better than seeing women doing nothing. But settling for mediocre at best is, well, mediocre at best. Me watching Game of Thrones feels a lot like what being in a loveless marriage must be like – yes, you still have to put on a happy face and act appreciative for the scraps you get thrown, but when it comes to your own needs for affection, closeness, some sort of loving connection, girl, you gonna have to look elsewhere for it.

And now they’re taking the romance out of fiction too. Aside from the pages of a 1983 Danielle Steel novel, is there anyplace a woman can seek refuge, or does everything have to be tailored to male tastes while female ones are ignored completely?

I don’t know, but damn, I hope not.

Sex scenes are like soy sauce. When you need that salty goodness, nothing can replace it. But no one wants soy sauce in a creme brulee. And you for sure can’t count on a heavy application of Kikkoman to make up for other flavors your dish is lacking. I think the reason I am so obsessed with Game of Thrones is because all the ingredients were there. I took a big bite of it, and it was almost heavenly. I wanted to like it, I truly did.

The trouble with the tv adaptation of GoT is that someone used way too much soy sauce when what they needed was whipped cream. It wouldn’t have taken much, but a little more romance really would have made the final dish a lot more palatable.

Sex is good. I like sex. But sex without love leaves me cold, even in fiction. You can’t have a land of ice and fire with no fire.

1. I don’t want to belabor this point because GRRM sometimes takes undeserved heat for choices Benioff and Weiss made, dude has a bit of an issue making extremely young girls be more sexually forward than is remotely plausible. Most famously, Benioff and Weiss changed Daenerys’ wedding night from ridiculously consensual to non-consensual, and though that was a very raw and shocking scene, I think they made the right call on that (if perhaps for the wrong reasons). Sansa and Tyrion’s wedding night was also rightfully cleaned up for TV. I understand the sequence in the book was meant to be disturbing, but the out-of-character bold behavior from a scared little girl was upsetting enough to make me physically ill after I read it.