Game of Thrones: Ready, Willing, and Ableism

The Hound Sando Clegane and Tyrion Lannister as portrayed in the Game of Thrones TV show (HBO/Warner Bros Television)

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

One of the most fascinating things I’ve found as I immerse myself in Game of Thrones this winter, is how completely underwritten it is by the pathologies of modern American culture. Despite GoT’s defenders repeatedly proclaiming it “historically accurate”, handwaving away problematic elements present in the works by attributing them to that supposed accuracy, there are attitudes present in both books and show that cause them to be as much products of their time as any book set in the present day.

As a history fan, one of the things I’ve found culturally informative about not only the show, but the books as well, is that they contain a very modern view of disability that I can’t really interpret any other way than ableist.

To give credit where it’s due, there is definitely disability representation aplenty in GoT. It’s certainly refreshing to see differently abled characters like Bran Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Sandor Clegane, Jaime Lannister, Hodor, and Willas Tyrell (in the books) facing unique challenges navigating their world, while still being presented as complex and interesting people with agency of their own. I acknowledge and applaud this fact, while also humbly pointing out that we once thought that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was super duperly feminist because it had a strong female lead.

In other words, doing the bare minimum (aka “representation”) isn’t good enough. We should strive for better. Even as Game of Thrones put characters with physical differences in the forefront of the story, it simultaneously otherized and even dehumanized them (in the case of Bran, literally) by having people constantly react to their existence with shock, horror, revulsion, and pity. Further, in the case of several of these characters, their challenges are presented as their defining feature. Complaints about this treatment may be written off by some in the name of historical accuracy, but as is so often the case with Game of Thrones, “historical accuracy” is really nothing more than a convenient excuse for defenders of GoT to hide behind while they deflect fair criticism.

The truth is, during the Middle Ages, disabilities were enormously common. Aside from conditions one might have been born with, most people, even the rich, were hard pressed to make it through such a tough life without sustaining injuries or suffering illnesses affecting their capabilities or appearance. While some people did believe that injury and illness was the hand of God punishing sinners and treated the disabled accordingly (as they do to this very day, sadly) this attitude was not at all universal. Caring for people with diminished capacity to care for themselves was seen as a virtue. For example, the Catholic Church taught the Works of Mercy, which explicitly instructed the faithful to comfort and care for the afflicted not only physically but emotionally – visiting them and comforting them, not shunning and isolating them. Nuns and monks dedicated the efforts of entire religious orders to doing nothing but attending to the sick and disabled, and families and communities cared for their own as best they could. Hospitals were built to take care of the people who had no one to care for them; though many of these hospitals later became terrible places to sequester away the poor and disabled, as originally conceived of, they were intended to fulfill a societal responsibility towards those in need of assistance.

Even forgoing historical reality and applying the rules of the Game of Thrones fictional world logically, surely in violent Westeros there would be gobs of people who had been maimed in sword fights, in riding injuries, from illness, etcetera. Seeing people affected by these conditions would be commonplace and unremarkable in such a world. Yet GoT treats these circumstances much as we do in the modern day, as life-ruining flukes, as lightning strike events that the unaffected characters see as pitiable, rather than reacting with empathy.

We are expected to believe that in this world in which there are constant altercations and a great deal of danger present even in just day to day life, that not only are most of the characters we meet immune to such misfortune, but that they retain superior attitudes towards others that were not so lucky. It strains belief that anyone living in a world similar to that of the Middle Ages as presented by GoT, would look at a disabled individual askance. If one had that attitude, they would be a very lonely person indeed. Yet we encounter that sort of prejudice again and again in Game of Thrones, where unaffected characters react with disproportionate loathing to those with physical or mental differences.

People like Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister would undoubtedly have encountered many, many people with terrible scars and missing/damaged limbs over the course of their lives, and they would not have reacted as if those things were in any way remarkable. Because they wouldn’t have been!

Only in the modern world are we largely immune from seeing sickness, death, disability, and ugliness on a daily basis. Only we modern people would be surprised or shocked by seeing human suffering in all its many forms. Only in the modern world do we imagine ourselves immune from such things. Obsession with presenting a flawless physical appearance is a modern day pathology that simply was not present in the past.

Another modern attitude many GoT characters display is an ableist belief that disabled people would be “better off dead”, with an implication that life has no value unless you are living it in a perfect physical vessel. But during the Middle Ages, the notion of taking one’s own life for something as transitory as appearance would never have been treated with such a cavalier attitude. The Social Darwinist notion of “do the world a favor and kill yourself” is a modern invention, its basis in the eugenics movement of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Not only was suicide abhorred in the Middle Ages, but misfortune was often seen as God’s Will, a test of faith to be endured – some even went so far as to believe the disabled were closer to God and would get to heaven more easily. Those who died by their own hand were considered to be subverting God’s will, the greatest of sins. Laws prevented people who had killed themselves from receiving a proper burial; those who committed suicide would have been buried at a crossroads with a stake in their heart, oftentimes after desecration of their corpse.

Suicide also brought great shame onto a family – and since doing one’s duty for the sake of the family’s honor is a strong motivation in Westerosi culture, it’s unlikely that self-harm would enter a person’s mind lightly. Yet several characters engage in suicidal ideation in Game of Thrones, in many cases because of physical disability. It sends a message of worthlessness that I find quite gross, especially given that it’s not at all rooted in medieval reality.

Perhaps most damning of all, we’re expected to believe that these characters, among the richest and most powerful people in Westeros, are still seen as unlovable and undesirable for no other reason than their disability. In the books, Willas Tyrell is the heir to Highgarden, is by all accounts handsome, kind, intelligent, and yet because he needs a leg brace and crutch to walk, is presented as an inferior specimen, incapable of finding a wife. He’s offered up as a disappointing second choice to Sansa, and Cersei actively despises the suggestion of having to marry him because he’s disabled. This makes NO freaking sense except when viewed through the lens of modern day ideals of physical beauty.

So prevalent is this brainwashing, we assume it has always been this way. But it hasn’t. In the Middle Ages, women would have been lining up to marry Willas Tyrell,¹ and should have been, if we are supposed to consider GoT “historically accurate”.

In European history, there existed a family called the Habsburgs who eventually became so inbred that they developed distinctive facial anomalies from it. Yet this didn’t stop them from marrying into royal families all throughout Europe, until the birth of Charles II of Spain, who was severely disabled both mentally and physically. Charles II was also infertile, having only one withered testicle, according to those in the know. (Believe it or not, as I did not examine Charles II’s testicles personally, this is admittedly hearsay). Despite his physical condition, Charles II was married twice. Please don’t insult our collective intelligence by claiming the supposed unmarriageability of any Game of Thrones character due to their disability alone is in any way “historically accurate”.

Aside from the lack of historical accuracy, there’s the pitfall of treating disabled characters as if they must always be both incredibly cool and also forever above criticism — Tyrion Lannister most especially.

I will mostly absolve George RR Martin here, since he’s dedicated to the proposition of making Tyrion a flawed and even often unlikeable character, but over the course of the TV show, Tyrion loses a lot of his complexity in favor of being rewritten as a modern day hero. Book Tyrion is a sexist, a classist, an intellectual snob, a petty and vindictive bastard, he’s sexually exploitative, and he believes as much in the superiority of being a Lannister as any of his family.

Book Tyrion is those things to such extent that at times they lull him into such a false sense of security, enabling people like Catelyn Stark get the jump on him. But Show Tyrion is only allowed to be those things when there’s a clever quip to be had out of it — and on the show, no one else is allowed to be even a little clever in his presence. Show Tyrion runs rings around Jon Snow, and while Catelyn gets the better of him, he’s still several steps ahead of her, mentally speaking. This is quite unfortunate, because in changing Tyrion from foible-ridden anti-hero to ubercool socially progressive mascot, Game of Thrones series writers David Benioff and DB Weiss undermine not only several of the other characters, but what makes Tyrion such an important figure in terms of representation — his three-dimensionality.

Turning Tyrion into a heroic noble guy just trying to make the world a better place really starts to border on making Tyrion Inspirationally Disadvantaged (though TV Tropes has this down as “averted” for Tyrion, I suspect that paragraph was written during the first four seasons of GoT, rather than the last four.)

Another example of how the books are altered for the sake of the show in a way that seems ableist is when the Hound, Sandor Clegane, who in addition to bearing physical scars, fears fire to such extent it’s a full-blown mental illness, fights Beric Dondarrion.

In the books, after being burned in this fight, the Hound ends up crying and begging for help. He’s legitimately affected by his circumstances, so much so that Arya is disgusted by his supposed cowardice — and this is an important step along the way to Arya becoming more sympathetic towards the Hound, in addition to being a very moving scene. But the show simply uses it as another opportunity for the dude to hurl an insult, thereby retaining his crown as Coolest Character Ever. This is not an accurate representation of what it means to struggle with mental illness, which has a way of generally making you seem LESS cool in front of people, not more. Like so much in Game of Thrones, they get it so close to right in terms of disability representation, and then at the last moment, veer off into the weeds.

From a writer’s perspective, the single most frustrating thing I find about the ableism inherent in GoT is that many of the best characters had solid narrative reasons ASIDE from the physical to be the people who they were. Beyond being a dwarf, Tyrion was mistreated by his family because his mother died in childbirth when delivering him, and because his arrogant father would never allow Tyrion to create a life for himself on his own terms. If those circumstances had not occurred, his disability would have been nothing more than a nuisance – not unlike Willas Tyrell’s leg. And Sandor Clegane was a bitter self-pitying person not because of his scarred face per se, but because his brother abused him, and his parents covered it up.

Valid reasons were right there for the writers to use. The “these guys are uggo” card did not need to be played at all, and yet it was played, over and over again (and over, and over, and over). I’m not saying their challenges were not worthy of being plot points, that would be silly, but truly, there is no excuse for putting such a HUGE emphasis on their physical appearance (especially in the show, because neither of the actors² is uggo, no matter how much makeup you put on them) other than ableist attitudes held by the writers.

One of the main pushbacks I encounter in my pop culture writing is the eyeroller who disdainfully says things like “Game of Thrones is just a TV show!” as if I’m in some way an obsessive nincompoop for bringing any of this up. But problematic beliefs are like belly buttons, we all got em. That’s why it’s so important to talk about difficult topics, particularly things that tend to get swept under the mat otherwise like ableism, because otherwise it’s too darn easy to forget they’re there. If we leave these assumptions unexamined, they will never change, and vast swaths of people will continue feeling marginalized and unrepresented. And that’s shitty.

Whether it’s minority representation, the oppression of women, or people with disabilities, the way these subjects are addressed in media are worth discussing. It’s garbage in, garbage out – if everything we take into our brains serves to perpetuate cultural attitudes we don’t even know we have, then our attitudes will continue to be trash. When you know better, you do better, and as both artists and consumers, we will never know better without holding up the media we consume to the light and giving it a good examination to see what we’re really doing.

If ableism doesn’t affect you personally, great, you probably already have lots of other media where you see representations of yourself to fall back on. As for me, I don’t think good enough is good enough, and I exhort creators to work harder at including three-dimensional characters from a variety o

1. There are fan theories that claim the reason why Willas Tyrell is as yet unmarried is because George RR Martin has something planned for him. Ok. The author still presented the character as less than desirable for the sole reason of his disability, which is both ahistorical and ableist.
2. Both actors are in shows that investigate issues of ableism far better than Game of Thrones did. An amazing movie I highly recommend is The Station Agent, starring Peter Dinklage (this is such a good film I actually own it, and bought it many years before GoT was even a thing). And if you’re in the mood for a very strange show, Rory McCann plays a character basically the polar opposite of the Hound in The Book Group. I can’t exactly recommend the latter because it’s Not Good Really but the plot arc involving disability was interesting and well done. In both cases the characters are portrayed as three dimensional and desirable both sexually and as friends (an important distinction, since in GoT Tyrion even has to buy himself a friend). Yet the issue of ableism is not at all glossed over.