I’ve seen a surprising number of people questioning the inclusion of Rhaenyra’s menstruation in the latest episode.
I confess I found the scene rather refreshing.
The objection seems to rest upon the idea that it was unnecessary, or that Rhaenyra already had more than enough to contend with. She is grieving. She is attempting to govern. The weight of the crown grows heavier by the hour. Why, then, burden her with one more hardship?
Curiously, I think that is precisely the point.
Life has an inconvenient habit of refusing to separate its burdens into manageable chapters. It accumulates them. Grief settles upon responsibility, responsibility upon fatigue, fatigue upon the quiet banalities of the body, until the distinction between the extraordinary and the quotidian begins to dissolve.
People grieve whilst going to work. They receive dreadful news whilst making dinner. They lose loved ones without warning. And yes, women quite often discover that an already difficult day has become rather more difficult through no fault of their own when biology decides to make its presence known.
Life, rather inconsiderately, does not postpone itself for biology. Neither, it seems, does the Iron Throne.
What interested me most was that the scene did not present menstruation as a dramatic revelation or a symbolic threshold into womanhood. Fantasy has already done that countless times. We have seen periods treated as markers of innocence lost, as moments of embarrassment, or as little more than reminders of fertility.
Sansa is perhaps the clearest example. Her first period serves primarily as a narrative threshold. It announces that she is now considered ready for marriage, and with it comes the dreadful realisation that marriage to Joffrey has become inescapably imminent. She hides the blood not because of the menstruation itself, but because of what it signifies.
This felt considerably more prosaic.
And I mean that entirely as a compliment.
Rhaenyra does not cease to be queen because she is menstruating. She does not postpone petitions. She does not ask the realm to wait until next week. She must continue ruling whilst grieving, whilst exhausted, whilst bleeding.
Media seldom presents menstruation in this manner. More often, it is symbolic, sensationalised, or quietly forgotten once it has served its narrative purpose. Here, it simply exists alongside everything else. That, to me, feels remarkably authentic.
I applaud it. It is raw. It is real. It is one of the rare occasions where I find myself commending the writers for allowing a bodily reality to remain precisely that: a bodily reality, neither diminished nor imbued with undue symbolism.
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