Cersei and Jaime Lannister, as played by Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
So I had this idea, awhile back, to do a “mid-season check-in” for year 4 of Game of Thrones. Flash forward a little bit, and suddenly we are 3/4ths of the way through. :P But, as this is Memorial Day Weekend, and since there is no new episode tonight, I figure why not now?
Natalie Dormer pointed out to me last week that Margaery has a freedom many women lack because her family is run by a woman. Now Sansa's been sucked into that dynamic.
Sophie Turner: Yeah, and it's very refreshing to see Sansa kind of sucked into that as well, because all her life, really, she's been surrounded by men. I mean, apart from her mother. Even Arya has this very boyish, tomboyish way about her. I think that's partly the appeal of Olenna and Margaery – they're so alike to Sansa in that way that she feels this connection with them, this bond with them. Because she's such a strong individual female joining the ranks of Olenna and Margaery, both incredibly strong, it works. It's a very powerful threesome, I feel.
I'm glad to hear you use the word "strong." It's probably kind of important to reclaim the concept of "strong female characters" from characters who can physically kick your ass to simply mean female characters who are strongly written.
Sophie Turner: I think the strong thing about Sansa is the fact that she doesn't fight. Fighting alone can be seen as a very strong thing to do, but the fact that she doesn't fight and she doesn't strike back is probably her best trait. Having to resist the urge to fight back – which, you know, I'm sure she has – is in itself one of the best things about her. In that sense, she's very strong, and she's very strong-willed, and she has willpower. That's very important in this world, because if someone had fought back they'd be dead. Because . . . Joffrey. [Laughs]
Why Sean Collins will always be among my top favorite Game of Thrones/ASOIAF critics
Been thinking a bit about justadram's meta from Monday on the subject above. ASOIAF is an incredibly violent series, but most of the violence stems from warfare or some sort of corporal punishment for crimes. During these instances, both in our history and present, we tend to relax taboos on brutality, and people like Gregor Clegane can, unfortunately, exist without much impunity.
The two major instances of spousal/betrothed abuse come from Robert and Joffrey Baratheon. Both are kings at the time, with very few restrictions put on their moral behavior. Another book-spoilers example is Victarion Greyjoy who, in his backstory, beat his wife to death. I have no tried and true response for why Balon allowed this to go unpunished, except to say that the Iron Islands are a brutal and usually misogynistic society, far more so than Westeros proper. ASOIAF book nerds who haven't read Sean Collins' thoughts in why Victarion is the most horrible character in the series should head over to boiledleather.com.
But for me, the most horrible character has to be Ramsay, and perhaps he strains the most credulity. He's attacking his own countrymen (and more often women); why hasn't anyone put a stop to him yet? Maybe this is an extreme example of the lawlessness of the North with Ned dead and civil war raging in the south. I could go into more spoilers, too, about why this horrible piece of fungus is allowed to live yet, but suffice to say that it's high time Westeros set up civil courts like the ones justadram included in her meta.
And just in case you're reading this--completely off topic here--I loved your Stitching, Knitting, Weaving series! I'm not usually one for Hunger Games fanfic, but I found your story to be incredibly moving. Thanks for sharing. :)
Debunking the modern-day mythos about the "right" way to be a girl
In Defense of Sansa Stark
I love bad-ass, sword-wielding heroines as much as the next person (Arya and Brienne are two of my other favorite characters in anything ever), but the focus on this sort of female character — the oft-cited “strong female character” — seems to suggest that femininity is still bad, and that women can only be strong by adopting stereotypically male roles and attitudes. There’s nothing wrong with Arya declaring that being a Lady does not suit her and forging her own path, but saying that all female characters must take this attitude is as sexist and dismissive as saying that all female characters must be weak and take a backseat in events. Femininity is not bad, just as masculinity is not necessarily good.
Most of this article is spot-on for me; may quibble here and there with story specifics, but the paragraph above is important in a macro-sense of how we are taught to identify to female "heroines" in this day and age. Just read the comments for how prevalent it is to downplay Sansa's character strengths of kindness, adaptivity to dangerous situations and subtle proactivity to better her situation (unless, of course, her choices can be used against her.) But RCVBard's comment at the bottom puts this in more of a real-life context than perhaps anything I've ever read before: As a Black woman, I can identify with this. Chances are, it was the Sansas among my ancestors who are largely responsible for me being here and being able to type this comment.
Conversations with the Creators: TV shows about plot vs people (even prostitutes)
From a Terrence Winter (Boardwalk Empire showrunner) interview with Slate Magazine in preparation for season three:
Slate: Are there any female characters in Boardwalk Empire who are happy?
Winter: It’s not a very happy world that we’re depicting, so I don’t know that that’s exclusively about women.
Slate: But the only way for women to get anything is by manipulation and deception.
Winter: Women had just gotten the right to vote. I think the world that they have to negotiate often includes trying to figure out how to work your way around the male-dominated society to get what you want. Also, a lot of our female characters aren’t exactly role models. They’re showgirls and whores, so they’re already people who are prone to bad behavior. You’ll get some manipulation and skullduggery there, just as part and parcel of who they are and what they do.
Rather simplistic, don't you think? First of all to delegate sex workers and showgirls to simply "bad behavior" people, to only vaguely mention one way that female characters act and not to bring up any specific people (I mean come on, Terry, there are two of them in the main cast, aka billed names at the lineup. Just two!)
Compare this with Bryan Cogman (executive writer of Game of Thrones) as interviewed by Alyssa Rosenberg when season two wrapped.
Ros becomes this throughline in Westeros, she’s passed through not every character, but she’s had contact with most of the major players who tend to discount her as a prostitute. It’s as if she’s the secret main character and audience stand-in. She’s a focus for emotion in the show, and vulnerability and reaction, but she sees a lot more than anyone else gives her credit for. Yes. I’m glad you see her that way. There’s a great divide in the fan community about Ros, which I think is pretty unfair to Esme [Bianco] who’s done an absolutely terrific job playing the part…In King’s Landing, for the most part, you’re seeing things through the eyes of the nobles, and Ros gives you a window into the class of people they take for granted. It was fun this season to sort of explore those people on the margins. The other whore, Daisy, also did a fantastic job. In a weird way, it’s a bizarro Sansa story. They both come to the capitol with big dreams and an idea of what it’s going to be like, a romantic vision. You see Daisy getting a little tour of the brothel and it’s as if she’s in Disneyland, she’s wide-eyed, “This is classy! This is a classy brothel, finally!’ And what she doesn’t realize is the classy brothel is probably the worst place to work. So that was kind of a sad little arc to play with.
Like many book fans, I don't agree with all of the changes that the showrunners made to Game of Thrones season two, but at least Bryan Cogman explained many of them, in detail, using specific character examples AND acknowledging the reality that the lives of women (even prostitutes!!) mean more than just "bad behavior." I may still not believe that all of them worked, but he came out there, acknowledged the changes from the book and outlined the show's reasoning, which I really respected.
Winter's interview lends itself to the belief that the bulk of the BE story is made up of increasingly volatile ethnicities, and "colorful characters" who basically only act violently. His pseudo-academic history of criminal violence in the 1920s is largely a connect-the-dots plot dance about accented men in expensive suits shooting each other over ridiculous slights and deals gone bad. Other storylines exist (tangentially, and not as mentioned in the interviews I've read/listened to) but they all tie pretty quickly back to the gangster lifestyle.
The GoT adaptation, as detailed by Cogman, is about characters--Ros, Daisy and her similarities to Sansa, Brienne, the Lannister siblings, Robb and Talissa, Robb and Catelyn, Stannis and Davos, Theon, Sallador Saan, Xaro and Pyatt Pree, the Reeds and Arya are all mentioned with varying character details. And even in the show they're all very different people on very different journeys.
Boardwalk Empire season three tomorrow…been debating since the end of season two if I should keep watching. No, not because they killed Jimmy. (Maybe because they killed Angela instead of doing a bohemian Greenwich Village spinoff, dammit!) I bought why Nucky would do it, though Jimmy’s sudden suicide desire seemed a bit out of left field. He also was, arguably, one of the more complex characters on the show. My biggest reason for debating watching is because I know that my grandparents, both Italian immigrants living in NYC in the 1920s, would disapprove. (I mean, they boycotted The Godfather.) And this season we’re moving past actual historical Sicilian thugs into completely fabricated ones. (My maternal heritage isn’t doing much better with Arnold “Ford-Would-Piss-His-Pants-Over-This-Manipulative-Jew-Bastard” Rothstein.)
Only two big reasons why I’m curious to watch this season. #1—Harrow wants Tommy to remember his mom, Angela, despite Gillian’s desire to replace her (though honestly, Angela’s dead either way, so what’s the big payoff, self?) #2—Maybe Nucky/Margaret won’t be the flagship romantic couple after all. He has a new mistress…hopefully not another ditzy stereotype like Lucy, but someone of actual interest. But I kinda doubt the season will end without some sort of Margaret/Nucky reconciliation. Part of me wants it…mostly because I don’t want one of the few women on this show to be killed off. My feelings about Margaret’s character are complicated, which I’ll go into below. (OK, there’s also some teasers about her getting re-involved in women’s issues. :/ DAMMIT, I’M SO EASY.)
There’s been a lot of arguments about Game of Thrones’ treatment of female characters, particularly with the sex scenes (which, I agree, are warranted to a degree.) But I can easily compare that to the mindless violence of BE. Maybe most characters come off as inconsistent or one-dimensional because we are too engrossed in whatever capitalistic shoot-out or gruesome killing is going on. As for the characters themselves…well…
I was watching some reruns of BE season two and saw some parallels between the women of one show and the women of another. I disagree pretty staunchly that BE does a better job portraying women. (For example, both shows feature a bevy of unnamed prostitutes running around for the enjoyment of wealthy men.) Here are some comparisons I’ve found between the featured female characters.
Gillian Darmody/Cersei Lannister. Both victims of sexual abuse/patriarchal society that subjugates them for men’s pleasure, these women turn vindictive and aim to further themselves through their sons. The fan response to Gillian, at least on the HBO forums, completely flip-flopped between seasons one and two—in the former, she was a working woman trying to provide stability amidst evil Angela’s lazy, self-serving ways. In the latter, as it became increasingly clear that she was driving Jimmy down a path he was more conflicted about, the tides turned, which was cemented by the incest (another trait she shares with Cersei, at least generally.) To me, she came off as manipulative, vengeful, falsely sweet (the female sin,) embracing the showgirl mentality she was thrust into, and only occasionally showed the rawer sides of her abuse (re: the scenes with the Commadore after his stroke.) I’m on the fence about whether her incest with Jimmy was sensationalism or a legitimate story arc. It’s probably real enough that I should give it a break, but part of me thinks that they put it in there just to cement her role as a black hat villain.
Cersei, in the books, is more fire than ice—increasingly unstable in her desperate grab for power. The show makes her icy and shovels several of her own faults to her son, Joffrey. It also makes sure that we know that she was an abused woman—which is evident in the books, though the show makes a point, imho, to paint her as sympathetic in that regard. Her incest with her brother, Jaime, seems less about vanity and more about loneliness. Several of her lesser qualities are still there—she lashes out irrationally at Tyrion over Myrcella, she’s a bully to Sansa, and she continues to back her son on the throne, even though on the show she knows that he’s psychotic. I think that her scenes with Sansa in “Blackwater” prove that she’s still the bitter woman who wants power and abuses others because she was abused. Very complex characterization at hand.
Margaret Schroeder/Catelyn Stark. Both seen more as “the good guys” (in Catelyn’s case either because her fans respect her complexities as a mother and her haters as a Robb proxy, at least.) I’ve been trying to decipher who Margaret is since season one, and can only conclude that the writers are as disjointed as I am (I mean hey, she’s not a gangster; is she really worth the time of a full personality?) Sometimes I think she stumbles upon interesting plot arcs—I loved her as a women’s libber, I loved how vulnerable, prickly and lonely she was with her family and Owen (and the servants!), and I especially loved how she’s using religion to compensate for Nucky’s sins . Maybe that last one finally, finally tied together the crazy threads of her personality from before—her vanity with stealing the lingerie, her attraction to Nucky as a father figure to her children, her bipolar responses to his immoral business, which she’s increasingly aware of. Next season, dare I hope she seem more cohesive as a character than fractured?
Catelyn’s big problem in the adaptation is that the writers attempted to make her more sympathetic by stripping away her own agency about wanting to stay with Robb because he needed her more. Instead, on the show, she chooses to go home to her babies and it’s Robb who sends her off to be political. TV Robb at least knows that she is an asset. :P Despite all this, she never does get home and she still kicks ass with the Baratheon brothers. Her friendship with Brienne and speech with the Karstarks are also awesome and show that she’s not afraid to assert herself as a power player in her own right. In both show and book, she obviously does what she does for the good of her family, which extends to releasing Jaime, whether out of grief or out of concern for his life/value as hostage. As for the scene with Littlefinger in the tent, I don’t see how that robbed her agency (and Michelle rocked it :D). In the book she had Tyrion’s word that her daughters would be returned to her; on the show, Littlefinger’s. But her reason for releasing him, as stated before, was indirect to these encounters anyway.
Angela Darmody/Sansa Stark. Both used as secondary characters on their respective shows, unfortunately, though there’s a lot more to them. Angela with her art and her desire for a bohemian life, and Sansa with the Dontos storyline that was never explored. But even given all that, we do see Sansa save Dontos’s life, we see her sass Joffrey, we see her keep her composure during abuses, we see her exhibit some agency during Blackwater, we see a burgeoning relationship with Shae (which I wish was more explored.) I’m also not as bothered by her near-rape as many fans…it seems like something that could have happened, and it dovetailed nicely into some other issues (a scene with the Hound to illustrate his concern for her, a scene with Shae about class inequality and a tie-in to the panic she feels about her period/becoming Joffrey’s bride.) I’m hoping we get more of her next season, especially given her proximity to certain, favored characters. As for Angela, well we’ll never get more of her because she’s dead. I appreciated her arc last season, where she was struggling in her role as a wife in a marriage that never quite came together and briefly exploring her art/relationships with Harrow and Louise), but I found it at least as secondary to the show as Sansa’s, if not more so (8 out of 12 episodes, vs 7 out of 10 in season two. I’d also argue that Sansa was a relatively big character in Blackwater whereas Angela (as with all women except Margaret) was never a big character in any episode.) One exits the show dead, and the other is alive to keep growing in season three.
Lucy Danziger/Ros. There’s really little argument other than to say that Lucy was painted as a trollop. Sure, in season two, we got to see that she was lonely and desperate as she wasted away, pregnant, in Nelson’s apartment. And then she manipulates Nucky and Nelson for the money (that she’s owed, yes,) dumps the baby and is gone forever, at least given what I’ve read. Very different from Ros who seems to be given a new role at the end of season two. Granted, her role as “topless whore” was pretty one note until then, and the scene with Joffrey is my least favorite of the season; completely unneeded. Even so, it’s obvious that the writers care about their little show invention—they made her shrewdly aware of her surroundings from day one, someone who has to be self-reliant, rather than Lucy who seesaws between needy ditz and exiting manipulator. I’m a fan of Varys using Ros as a spy; it seems if the show is going to keep her around, at least they will flesh out her storyline a little.
And my final point is that GoT has several more female characters with legitimate storylines/roles that go beyond Babette greeting patrons at the restaurant. Including Brienne, Asha/Yara, Melissandre, Margaery, even Shae I’d say, Osha, Talisa and Ygritte to an extent as well, and oh yeah, Daenerys and Arya. :P In BE, honestly the only other female character I can think of who had a legitimate arc was Esther Randolph. She seems to be gone next season as well, which is a shame. I’m far more interested in her story as a female district attorney in the 1920s than a fictional Italian thug’s. Don’t we have enough real ones already? Zzzz.
