Theon Greyjoy
Ned Stark also had a half-ward/half-hostage called Theon Greyjoy. We’re introduced to his character as he kicks about an executed man’s head like a football.
Despite fighting alongside Ned’s eldest son for a time, Theon soon betrays everyone and takes over the Stark home of Winterfell.
Since he can’t find Bran and Rickon, the youngest of the Stark children, Theon does the next best thing and murders two farm boys so he can pass them off as his real targets.
Theon feels sort of bad about killing two innocent children, but strangely no one else sees much of a problem with it. Everyone’s angry with Theon because they think he murdered Bran and Rickon, but once he confesses that they were only two random non-rich children, everyone immediately welcomes Theon back with open arms. Yes, this does happen more than once.
Reek
Soon after murdering those children (no, I’m not letting that go, and neither should you!), Theon gets captured by another psychopath called Ramsay Snow, soon to be called Ramsay Bolton. Ramsay tortures Theon for fun, up to and including cutting off Theon’s penis.
Strangely enough for a time when basic hygiene isn’t a thing, Theon doesn’t die as a result of this. Instead he becomes Ramsay’s servant, aiding him in all his sick games. And yes, we are meant to like him now that he’s been mutilated, in spite of his being a child murderer.
Escape!
After Sansa Stark is married to (and raped by) Ramsay, Sansa is understandably annoyed that Theon killed two of her brothers, but just like everyone else she accepts him as her friend the moment he reveals that the children he killed weren’t important.
The two of them escape Ramsay, because in Game of Thrones, there’s always another character waiting to save you if the author’s on your side.
Euron
Theon returns to his island home to help his sister get elected king of the Iron Islands, but they lose to their uncle Euron Greyjoy. Euron considers joining Daenerys in the war, but eventually he settles for an alliance with Queen Cersei.
Theon, meanwhile, flees with his sister, both firmly on whatever this show considers the good side. Peasant children be damned!
Brienne of Tarth
Early in the second season, Catelyn Stark meets a female knight named Brienne, who swears fealty to Catelyn in her quest for revenge.
As we’ll see with other characters, whenever a main character happens to be a woman who’s good at the stereotypical “masculine” pursuits, Martin goes out of his way to desexualize her.
Remember that he sexualizes most of his female characters, including children. In Brienne’s case, she supposedly only became a knight because she wasn’t pretty enough to fetch a husband. Martin thus feels the need to remind us every few pages how “ugly” she is.
Jaime’s Sob Story
Now that she’s besties with the Wicked Stepmother, Brienne obviously knows that Queen Cersei’s twin brother Jaime Lannister is a murderer who threw her friend’s son out of a window. Her first task as Catelyn’s sworn knight is to make a hostage exchange: Jaime for Catelyn’s daughters.
Along the way, the two of them get captured, and one of their captors cuts off Jaime’s right hand. Jaime also saves Brienne from being raped, but she’s not about to be friends with this child murderer just because of one good deed. That is, until Jaime tells her an irrelevant sob-story about why he committed an unrelated murder, which causes Brienne to fall madly in love with him.
Revenge
Once Brienne gets Jaime back home, she switches sides. Jaime sends her to find and protect Sansa Stark. After wandering aimlessly for a while, during which time she gets revenge on the man she wanted to kill, Brienne saves Sansa and escorts her to the Wall to reunite with Sansa’s cousin Jon. Like most of the other characters, Brienne doesn’t really need to exist, and the plot would probably have been pretty similar without her.
Melisandre
I’ll keep this one brief. There are a lot of barely-developed religions in Game of Thrones, but by the end it turns out that there’s only one god, and his name is the Lord (of light).
Melisandre is the Lord’s priestess, his representative in Westeros. She’s a religious fanatic who burns innocent people alive as sacrifices to her god, and most of her powers come from having sex with any man who’s descended from anyone who’s ever been called a king.
Yes, this includes the children of usurpers and pretenders. At one point, Melisandre ties a fourteen-year-old boy to a bed and rapes him. Unsurprisingly for Game of Thrones, it’s eroticized rather than vilified.
Yes, this includes the children of usurpers and pretenders. At one point, Melisandre ties a fourteen-year-old boy to a bed and rapes him. Unsurprisingly for Game of Thrones, it’s eroticized rather than vilified.
Shireen
Melisandre serves a claimant called Stannis at the beginning of the story. Stannis has a young daughter called Shireen, and as one might expect, Melisandre convinces him to burn her alive.
Stannis supposedly loves his daughter while her mother hates her, but because she’s a woman, it’s Stannis’ wife who tries to save their child. After Stannis and his wife are killed, Melisandre resurrects Jon Snow and joins his side.
Is it any surprise, given what story this is, that Melisandre is one of the “good guys”? According to the story, her goal is to save the world from the White Walkers, which supposedly makes all her messed up acts “the right thing to do.” As is the usual fashion of Game of Thrones, we learn in the end that this murderer of countless innocent people was right all along.
Jaime Lannister
Cersei and Tyrion have a brother called Jaime, who’s in an incestuous relationship with his twin sister. All King Robert’s supposed children are actually Jaime’s inbred bastards, and to prevent people from finding out, he throws Bran Stark out a window.
Cersei and Tyrion have a brother called Jaime, who’s in an incestuous relationship with Cersei, his twin sister. All King Robert’s supposed children are actually Jaime’s inbred bastards, and to prevent people from finding out, he throws Bran Stark out a window.
Jaime also had a hand in the incident that resulted in Tyrion being payed to rape a woman (see above), which Tyrion somehow doesn’t resent.
Few characters in the show care about those things, as they mostly just hate him for killing some nutter who was burning people alive years ago. Of course, the moment he tells someone why he killed the murderous tyrant, they forgive Jaime for murdering innocent children, too!
Twin Rape
Like many characters in Game of Thrones, Jaime exists primarily to spout Martin’s usual rhetoric about how morality means nothing and child murderers are just as moral as anyone else… yada yada yada. Jaime gets captured by the Stark family and loses a hand, but Brienne of Tarth falls madly in love with Jaime the moment he tells her a sob-story.
Jaime finally returns to his sister, but she’s not interested in sex because he only has one hand. Soon after that, their son Joffrey is murdered. Jaime then rapes Cersei right next to their son’s rotting corpse. This is to have no impact on plot, nor on any of the characters or relationships, and indeed it’s never mentioned again. This is Jaime’s dialogue from that scene:
“You’re a hateful woman. Why have the gods made me love a hateful woman?”
Jaime Lannister, to his twin sister Cersei
Cersei protests:
“Jaime, not here, please. Please. Stop it. Stop it. Stop. No. Stop it. Stop. Stop. Stop. It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right.”
Cersei, clearly saying “No!”
But Jaime forces himself on her, saying:
“I don’t care.”
Jaime the Rapist
As an aside, the show’s creators denied that what is obviously rape is, in fact, rape. I should also mention that Jaime is supposed to be one of the few characters who doesn’t approve of rape, but he does it anyway and it’s swept under the rug. The director has stated that it was “consensual by the end.”
Jaime’s a Bad Father
There’s a filler arc where Jaime fails to save his inbred daughter from assassins. She’s murdered by way of a poisoned kiss from a woman, which may or may not be homophobic—I’m not sure. Jaime doesn’t care much, in any case, as he only cares about Cersei and himself.
Arya Stark
When it comes to the main characters in George R.R. Martin’s series, you can bet that if a female character is good at traditionally masculine things, she’ll be described as unfeminine in appearance.
Ned’s younger daughter Arya is no exception, called “Horseface” by her sister Sansa. Arya starts playing with a young boy around her age, but he’s killed by Prince Joffrey’s bodyguard Sandor “the Hound” Clegane.
Arya and the Hound
After the execution of her father, Arya goes from place to place, getting captured and running away, over and over again. It’s really boring, but eventually she’s kidnapped by Sandor, the man who slaughtered her friend.
Sandor is all too willing to kill children and seems to enjoy it somewhat, but he refuses to steal and says, “I’m not a thief.” Arya points this out, saying, “You’re fine with murdering little boys but thieving is beneath you?” Sandor replies, “A man’s got to have a code.”
The way this is all framed suggests that the show expects viewers to see this as a philosophical tidbit of deep wisdom. According to this show, we the audience should give serious thought to the possibility that killing children might be morally preferable to stealing.
It’s Okay if You’re a Protagonist
We of course learn later that Sandor is willing to steal provided his victims are a cripple and his daughter, and the show hammers in the message that this is entirely reasonable.
This is in keeping with a running theme in the show: even the most bloodthirsty actions are not wrong, because evil is an inherent character attribute irrespective of one’s actions or motivations.
Sandor’s crimes are okay because he’s inherently a good person; he can’t become a villain any more than the Night King can become a hero. It doesn’t matter what he does. Why else would Cersei’s evil acts be demonized while equally horrific deeds on the part of characters like Daenerys and Catelyn are practically glorified?
Arya Stark of Winterfell
Arya parts ways with Sandor and trains to become part of an order of assassins, but after her training she leaves the order. She goes home, gets revenge on some side-characters, and then returns to her cousin and surviving siblings.
Game of Thrones’ Mechanical Plot
It seems to me that throughout this series, Martin has always done at most the bare minimum for something to be considered competently-written.
The characters, for example, feel like they were made from a checklist: name, background, flaws, half-assed redeeming quality, sexual kink—done!
Plot development feels no less mechanical, as it consists mainly of formulaic soap opera plotlines that play out with all the artistry of a computer algorithm.
But really, when you have as many characters as Martin does, I’m not sure it’s possible to give any of them the attention they need in order to be interesting. This is why you probably shouldn’t have so many of them.
Moreover, if you have a thousand background characters at your disposal, it’s easy to have a few of them show up out of nowhere and save your heroes whenever they’re in a tight spot. This is exactly what Martin does most of the time.
Early Breaking
This isn’t so big a problem compared with most of the things that make Game of Thrones terrible, but the characters’ story threads diverge too quickly for the reader to care about their relationships to one another.
All the characters who know each other go their separate ways very early in the narrative. This makes it hard to be invested in any of their relationships, even if you can bring yourself to care about them as individuals.
Until the final two seasons, we barely see anyone interact with people they’ve known for any length of time. This makes the story and characters feel as though they have no connections at all, sort of like a video game protagonist with amnesia. In fact the reader has very little understanding of what their relationships are beyond the times we’ve seen them act like arseholes to each other.
In The Lord of the Rings, we became invested in our nine central characters before the Breaking of the Fellowship at Amon Hen. We’ve seen the four hobbits interact with each other for the first two of six parts, and the entire Fellowship for the second of those parts. This makes it more interesting when we do see them split into smaller groups. If we’d not seen Frodo and Sam travel with Merry, Pippin, and Aragorn for so long, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting when they’re forced to travel with Gollum instead.
Lack of Morals
Let’s get this out of the way. Game of Thrones is not a story where bad things happen to good people and bad people get away with all of it.
This is a story where there are no good people in the first place; everyone is portrayed as just as evil as everyone else, and we are asked to sympathize with all of them. Actually, scratch that! Some people are framed as particularly evil: namely, women and poor people.
Almost all character attributes are merely informed traits, meaning we hear about them rather than seeing them in how the characters behave. This is particularly true of a character’s moral standing. Fans will insist that good and evil are meaningless, but the characters agree so near-unanimously on who’s good and who’s evil that it’s hard not to think those are the author’s views coming through.
Bran Stark may not be able to walk anymore, but he’s still an arsehole.
Concerning the traumas faced by the supposed heroes, Game of Thrones consistently uses this to gain sympathy from the reader, often shortly after the character in question committed some monstrous act.
Their motives are reprehensible, as are their means, but when we see them mutilated our natural human empathy kicks in. Normally we like a character because we find their thoughts or actions admirable or relatable.
Hell, we might even like a character just because we find their thought processes interesting. But George R.R. Martin wants us to like his characters because of what happens to them—a textbook example of lazy writing in action.
Paedophilia
I mentioned in the section on Daenerys Targaryen that Martin eroticizes child sex scenes. Many fans will insist that he’s showing the Middle Ages the way they really were, but there’s a difference between showing us something horrific and expecting us to enjoy it. Even a cursory look at Martin’s writing shows that he’s doing the latter of the two, as shown by this line from Daenerys’s wedding night.
“Yes,” she said, and she put his finger inside her.
A Game of Thrones
Go on: look at those words and tell me that’s not intended to turn the reader on! Of course, this being Martin, he’s describing a thirteen-year-old having “consensual” sex with a fully-grown man. He does rape her later on (shortly before she falls in love with him), but it’s clear that we are meant to view this scene as consensual and sexy.
Mindset of a Pedophile
The fans certainly weren’t pleased when the show’s creators made it a more unambiguous rape scene; many protested, saying that it was consensual in the books. But how can it be consensual when she would have been raped had she refused? More importantly, how can it be consensual when one of the two is thirteen years old?
Martin always falls back on the excuse of historical accuracy. Unfortunately for that excuse, the show’s characters are often shown to regard pedophilia in much the same way as modern people. That virtually all of them are themselves pedos doesn’t change that.
Khal Drogo is said at one point to “like his women young.” Tyrion Lannister, despite wanting to rape his child bride Sansa, expresses dismay at her age and refuses to admit his perverted attraction to others. These are not the actions of people whose cultures altogether approve of child marriage; they are the actions of pedophiles, plain and simple.
The Word “There”
There’s also a bit earlier in the story where Martin describes how Daenerys is sprayed with perfume in preparation for her wedding.
A dab on each wrist, behind her ears, on the tips of her breasts, and one last one, cool on her lips, down there between her legs.
A Game of Thrones
Martin’s use of the word “there” is, I think, significant. First of all, it differs greatly from standard fantasy prose, which would have been more similar to “… down between her legs” or even just “… between her legs.” More importantly, is that in this context the word marks an attempt at erotic coyness.
George R.R. Martin uses the word “there” frequently when describing women’s genitals, and although it usually seems like his vocabulary merely failed him, it’s almost certainly deliberate. He’s trying to make whatever he’s not describing seem sexy.
She hoped [her husband’s seed] would quicken there.
A Game of Thrones
Another problem with using the word “there” so much is that, by the very nature of the medium, the reader only has the author’s words to go on. No matter how coy you’re trying to be, using the word “there” without explicitly stating where “there” is can easily become confusing.
Rape
Game of Thrones isn’t much better in its portrayals of what is undeniably rape. Portraying rape is not enough to make your story realistic; if you must portray rape, you have to portray it realistically. In real life, at least half of rape victims develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the rest of them usually develop at least one of numerous comparable disorders.
Rape is portrayed in Game of Thrones as a singular event that, while perhaps unpleasant, results in little trauma following the event.
Indeed, often shortly after a woman is raped, Martin will go out of his way to show us that she’s actually far, far more evil than her rapist, who is just as often portrayed as sympathetic.
Rapes are seldom brought up after their completion, as though victims of rape don’t suffer unimaginable anguish for years upon years afterwards. Rather than a hideous trauma that affects the victim’s mental and physical well-being often irrevocably thereafter, Martin throws it in as window-dressing for his audience’s sole benefit. Then he claims he’s making the story realistic when he makes the rapist the hero.
Imagine It in Texas
Imagine if a modern white author wrote a story set in Texas in the 1930s. The story’s heroes are all white people, and they all treat black people like absolute garbage—up to and including physical violence. At no point in the story do the heroes see the error of their ways or even consider for a moment that their actions might be wrong.
In spite of what the story shows us, the author goes out of his way to be as non-judgmental as he can be. Indeed, he seems more critical of black people than he is of his racist heroes. Every other character talks about how good and upstanding the heroes are, and the author himself shields his characters by saying that “everyone was like that back then, so don’t judge them.”
Now, while it’s important to understand that every person is a product of the society they exist in, this story employs its society only to excuse everything its white characters do. At the same time, the story seems conspicuously uninterested in condemning—or even critiquing—the racist society of the 1930s Deep South, let alone neo-Confederates today.
What would the reaction to such a story be? Obviously, the average reader would already know that slavery is wrong, and they might understandably assume the story was harmless fun. Particularly if they’re white and have thus spent their life believing that the legacy of slavery lies in the distant past.
Outside of that privileged bubble, things aren’t quite so nice. Black people are still living in the fallout of slavery, and although the vast majority of people now recognize slavery as the evil that it is, there are still many young, right-leaning white men who long to return to an objectively worse time.
Many people in the former Confederate States of America still actively revere their slaveowning ancestors, and they get along well with other white supremacist ideologies such as Nazism. Even if we know that slavery is wrong, there are racists who would feel vindicated by such a pro-Confederate book.
A Story for Misogynists
Likewise, we might know that rape is evil and be able to read Game of Thrones while condemning the story’s rapist heroes, but that doesn’t mean everyone who reads it will experience the story in the same way.
There is a movement of mostly young, angry white men—closely associated with the aforementioned Nazis and neo-Confederates—who call themselves the Manosphere, including incels, pick-up artists, and so-called “Men’s Rights Activists.”
What all these groups have in common is a deep hatred of women. Those in the Manosphere are unambiguously in favour of rape, which they blame on the victims using rhetoric not unlike what we see in Game of Thrones.
Even if you can tell the difference between good and evil, a story that vilifies women and makes excuses for rapists is going to make misogynists feel vindicated and empowered.