The Fetishization of Pregnant Women’s Dying Needs to Be Studied in HOTD and GOT Seriously.
The way GoT and HotD repeatedly use pregnant women’s deaths as some kind of ultimate symbol of tragedy genuinely needs to be studied. Women don’t need to be pregnant for their deaths to be horrifying or. Yet pregnancy keeps being added to scenes as though the existence of an unborn child automatically makes a woman’s suffering more meaningful.
Why Does Every Woman Need to Be Pregnant to Suffer?
And the weirdest part is that the pregnancy itself is treated as an additional spectacle. The camera, the dialogue, the imagery, the emphasis on the stomach, the unborn child, the mother’s fear all of it turns reproduction into another layer of suffering that the audience is supposed to react to. Instead of simply allowing a woman to die as a person with her own relationships, ambitions, fears, and history, the story sometimes makes her reproductive body the centerpiece of the tragedy.
This is a woman who already was forced to watch her child getting killed/murdered in front of her. And somehow the writers moved past that without giving her much space to process it, and how and why she eventually forgave the people responsible.
The one time and the ONLY time we really saw Helaena show genuine anger and fear when Alicent tried to force an abortion on her. So she’s trying to protect her child “that’s mine” and then making Helaena going to kill herself while pregnant, with the child she’s supposedly to protect that was still inside her?
Why does the pregnancy even need to be there? What’s the point?
Making Helaena pregnant just to have her die by suicide while pregnant is completely unnecessary to me. Her pregnancy becomes part of the whole spectacle of her death, like her body and the unborn child have to be there to make the scene even more horrific. Whatever they were trying to say with it, I think it’s fair to ask why pregnancy keeps being attached to some of the most horrific endings given to the women in these stories.
It gives you that whole think of the unborn baby! Oh god! emotional shorthand, similar to what GoT did with Talisa being pregnant during the Red Wedding and being stabbed in the stomach. D&D didn’t understand that a woman doesn’t need to be pregnant for her ending to be tragic. Having a pregnant woman stabbed repeatedly in the belly wasn’t even GRRM’s stroy, and it never happened in the books.
Jeyne Westerling, the character from the books, isn’t even present at the Red Wedding in that way and does not die there. And it wasn’t necessary to make Robb’s death tragic. The massacre, Catelyn’s horror, Robb’s murder, were already tragic.
D&D basically added the pregnancy specifically to make the scene more horrific, and then did the same kind of thing with Cersei by having her final moments revolve around her unborn child and her crying about not wanting her baby to die.
And apparently they even considered making Daenerys pregnant so Jon Snow would be stabbing her while she was pregnant. Thankfully, they didn’t go through with it.
Also let’s not forget HotD allowed Viserys to cut open Aemma while she is still conscious in order to try to save the baby. The whole scene is graphic, with the camera focusing on her pregnant body being cut apart while she’s terrified and begging them to stop.
Again, the woman’s reproductive body becomes the center of the horror.
In the book, Aemma dies after a difficult childbirth. The show instead turns it into this extremely graphic scene where her belly is cut open. Obviously, depicting traumatic childbirth isn’t inherently sexist. Pregnancy can be dangerous, and HOTD is allowed to show that.
The problem is the repeated tendency to make women’s reproductive bodies the visual centerpiece of their most horrific moments. I’m not saying Aemma can’t die while pregnant. Again she dies pregnant in the book too but my problem is with how the show chose to portray it.
Aemma could have died pregnant without having her abdomen opened on screen. Helaena could have had a tragic ending without dying while pregnant. Talisa didn’t need to be pregnant and stabbed in the stomach. Cersei didn’t need pregnancy to make her ending tragic.
And that’s what makes the pattern uncomfortable when you put Aemma, Helaena, Cersei, and Talisa next to each other. Pregnancy and motherhood keep being used as an extra layer of suffering for women.
This is also Biological essentialism because they’re reducing gender to supposedly natural or biological characteristics and treats those characteristics as to what women are. When stories repeatedly make pregnancy, and reproductive organs the defining features of women’s suffering, they can unintentionally reinforce the idea that women’s bodies are what make their stories uniquely important.
That is not feminist because a woman does not become more valuable because she is pregnant. Her death does not become inherently more tragic because she is carrying a child and her suffering does not need to involve childbirth or reproduction for the audience to understand that she has been victimized.
A pregnant woman is usually supposed to symbolize life, hope, and the future. That’s what makes repeatedly using pregnant women’s deaths as the ultimate symbol of horror feels so disgusting and disturbing. As if destroying the mother and unborn child is supposed to make the scene more meaningful.
If the writers keep making women pregnant just to make their deaths more dramatic, then at some point you have to ask that why does her being pregnant have to make her suffering more tragic? Why isn’t her death already enough???
And then removing Maelor… IS a big problem.
I honestly think removing him creates a much bigger problem for the story. If Maelor died at Bitterbridge, you could have had the smallfolk genuinely horrified by what happened to an innocent royal child. You could have had people blaming Rhaenyra and her supporters, whether that blame was fair or not. If he died in King’s Landing, you could have created an entirely different kind of political backlash against Rhaenyra.
Instead, the story risks making the Storming of the Dragonpit feel like something that happens because another political actor engineers it. These people already have reasons to hate the ruling class. They’re starving.
Let people become terrified of the dragons and let Helaena’s suffering become one of the final things that pushes them over the edge.
Make the smallfolk look at this woman, who was already traumatized by losing her child, and see another innocent person destroyed by a war that the royal family created.
That would actually make the Storming of the Dragonpit feel like a human reaction. Instead, if everything has to be the result of someone’s plan, you lose part of what makes the revolt interesting. The smallfolk stop having their own agency and just become pieces being moved around by the people at the top.
At the end of the day Helaena’s tragedy doesn’t need another layer of pregnancy to make it sad. She already lost a child and was already traumatized.
She was already trapped in a war she never wanted.
That is enough!
