By Andrea Peterson

My first reaction to hearing the Game of Thrones RPG was being published by Atlus was enthusiasm, despite early warning signs. Atlus is best known for the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series—and more recently the psychological to the point of bizarre horror platformer Catherine. But Persona 2: Innocent Sin and Persona 3 remain among my favorite games of all times, the latter marrying JRPG elements with a relationship building system that is best described as bordering on dating simulation. At first glance a publisher who specializes in JRPGs in contemporary settings might seem an odd choice to help bring the gritty medieval world of Westeros to videogames. But these games all share a common and strong linear narrative-focused game structures that gave me hope Atlus would guide Cyanide Studios into creating an experience worthy of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series (and the much-lauded HBO adaption). .

Atlus games’ emphasis on relationship development and pushing the envelope of using videogames as storytelling platforms about the good and evil in worlds where the line between reality and fantasy blur seemed a beautiful, if unexpected, fit for the intrigue-riddled saga of A Song of Fire and Ice. As another guest post on this blog noted, the strength of the Game of Thrones lies in the drama of the interactions between a rich set of characters with complex motivations, rather than on the battlefield in a hack-and-slash adventure.

Despite being set in a universe that shares more similarities with traditional western style settings of Skyrim and Dragon Age than most JRPGs, the intricate web of political alignments and betrayals that have already been set in proverbial stone as Game of Thrones canon seemed a prohibitive barrier to the more open concept exploration that define recent western RPGs. A game fleshing out stories in the extended universe of Westeros seemed a perfect stylistic companion to the rich personal narratives that so define the books and HBO series. JRPGs from the more traditional Final Fantasy to Atlus’ own Persona series tend rein in the sheer scope of settings and player options in favor of delving deeper into the quest at hand and character development, creating experiences defined by the story being told with combat as an important, but secondary, secondary aspect.

Unfortunately, the Game of Thrones RPG takes this tactic too far: The storyline is by far the highpoint, to the neglect of nearly all other aspects. The graphics feel dated, particularly compared to other recently released fantasy RPGs, and despite subtle strategy elements the combat is an exercise in repetition that left me at times wishing I could skip them a la Jennifer Hepler’s suggestion. This is especially true because the game follows parallel tales of a veteran of the Night’s Watch and a Red Priest returning to court after self-imposed exile and the way they cross pths with familiar faces from the HBO series. It would have been a satisfying standalone addition to Westeros lore if the gameplay and presentation weren’t so lackluster.

At the end of the day I became increasingly frustrated by the ways the game fell short of Atlus’s usual standards and Game of Thrones‘ potential. It does provide a platform for more engaging stories set in the Seven Kingdoms, but the execution of the game play falls short of its clear ambitions. I still enjoyed playing the Game of Thrones RPG because of my affection for the source material, but it left me wishing it had another year to incubate so it could develop a combat system with more nuance and graphics matching the visual polish of the HBO series. Ironically, the incompleteness of the experience probably was tied to a marketing decision to push the game out in time with the end of this season of Game of Thrones. The game is not a definitive failure and while I know better than to expect every licensed game is going to be a Chronicles of Riddick, it’s still disappointing to see a collaboration and concept with such promise pushed to market prematurely.

EW’s Ken Tucker, in his season-end roundup of the year in television, is sick of anti-heroes, or more specifically, turned off by American Horror Story, which he calls “a deeply despairing show.” He writes:

Indeed, at this point, the edgiest thing a producer could do would be to mount a stylistically daring, well-acted show that was free of bleakness, snark, or the promise that we are being shown the corrupt underbelly of any given profession. Even though I’m not a great fan of it, Once Upon a Time exhibits a generosity of spirit I can applaud, and I’m glad it’s a success. While it comes on as a dark, edgy show, Person of Interest is another ratings hit that is actually, if you watched its progress over the season, quite open to the goodness of humanity — for what is this show really about, at bottom, if not the redemption of the wounded souls of Jim Caviezel’s Reese and Michael Emerson’s Finch, and those to whose aid they come? A Gifted Man might have been similarly uplifting in an interesting way, but something about the show took a wrong creative turn early on; perhaps that’s what star Patrick Wilson was at least in part referring to when he said the series was ultimately not what he “signed on for” in a tweet after it was canceled. And Smash: For all the carping that I and other critics did about it, there was never any doubt that creator Theresa Rebek wanted to share with network television viewers the same bursting joy for the musical-theater experience that she has felt, even if it was only Megan Hilty who occasionally came close to embodying it.

At Salon, Willa Paskin has noted something related, though not precisely the same: a return of moral clarity and easily hateable villains to shows like Downton Abbey, where good and evil are precisely delineated in sweeping, emotional terms, and Game of Thrones, where loyalties may shift constantly but Bad King Joffrey is the worst.

One of the things that’s interested me about the Age of Anti-Heroes is a sense in many of the great cable shows that it takes a bad person to accomplish certain kinds of things. On The Wire, Jimmy McNulty would be vastly less effective if he was a paragon, a knight of Baltimore flashing brass instead of Valyrian Steel. In Damages, lawyer Patty Hewes has to be ruthless to the point of murder because the corporations she goes up against are so powerful and amoral that someone has to sacrifice herself and her humanity to oppose them effectively. Breaking Bad initially considered whether cancer-stricken chemistry teacher Walter White had options other than cooking meth to provide a nest egg for his family after his death when his son set up an online fund for his treatment, but moved past that idea. And part of Walter’s evolution into a monster has been his inability or unwillingness to stop his life of crime once he’s laid away that money and his wife has found a way to launder it—he doesn’t just need to be the one who knocks, he wants to be. The Sopranos is entirely dedicated to the question of Tony’s efficacy: he enters therapy in the first place because his issues are making him ineffective, and Dr. Melfi ultimately decides she can’t continue to participate in perfecting him.

But in this new crop of clearer-hearted shows, there’s much greater trust in the idea that you can still be a decent person and beat the bad guys. On Once Upon a Time, Emma Swan may get a little feisty occasionally, but she’s fundamentally a good-hearted person, which is precisely what makes it possible for her to pick up a sword in the finale and slay a dragon. Her goodness gives her courage. Downton Abbey operates on a much smaller scale, but the show is fundamentally a romance that trusts Matthew and Mary to find their way to their hearts and to each other. Now that they’ve come around to each other and plan a union that will both satisfy their families’ financial needs and the pulls of their own hearts, does anyone seriously doubt that Sir Richard will emerge victorious? Revenge has an anti-heroine for its lead, but she also has a best friend who constantly tries to draw lines for her, who doesn’t want to see her debased both for her own good and for the success of her plan. On Grimm, Nick’s work against fairy-tale monsters has two purposes: it keeps his community safe, and brings him closer to a true understanding of his family. And of course Parks and Recreation finished its fourth season with an affirmation of the idea that a passion for public service and kindness can put you over the top, even in a world and in an arena that doesn’t often reward those values.

None of this means that anti-heroes can’t be good spiky fun (ditto for villains). But there’s something morally and artistically reinvigorating about the idea that there’s more than one way to tackle difficult problems, and that the struggle to hold on to goodness is a worthwhile enterprise to engage in and story to tell in and of itself.

In the never-ending quest to milk George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” franchise for every last piece of Lannister gold, enterprising developers have turned to another medium: Facebook. Via Kate Cox of Kotaku:

“Game of Thrones Ascent will take place in HBO’s version of George R.R. Martin’s sprawling fantasy world. Developer Disruptor Beam plans for the game to focus on the spirit of backstabbing political wheeling and dealing that forms so much of the backbone of the series, by using Facebook’s social connections to let players forge critical alliances. Players take on the role of petty nobles in the Seven Kingdoms, who ‘claim their birthright by choosing which of the great houses they’ll swear allegiance to, securing their holdings, developing their lands and personal reputation, and assigning sworn swords to quests.’”

In the wake of the HBO series’ breakout success, there have alreadybeen several botched attempts to produce a Game of Thrones video game. I’m not much of a gamer these days, but I am a noted sucker for video game tie-ins based on my favorite TV shows; in my younger years, I was fan enough of both The Sopranos and Lost to play their awful, wholly unnecessary video game adaptations to completion.

Game of Thrones is the latest series to draw the attention of game developers. Last year, developer Cyanide released A Game of Thrones: Genesis, a bland real-time strategy game set centuries before the events of the series that used the Game of Thrones setting as the barest of window dressing (masochists can but the game on Amazon for $5). Though A Game of Thrones: Genesis was poorly received, Cyanide got another crack at the series with last week’s new release Game of Thrones, an action RPG that features voicework from several of the HBO series’ actors and a Stan Lee-esque cameo by George R.R. Martin. While both Game of Thrones and its reviews are more impressive than its real-time strategy predecessor – and it includes quests with options that at least attempt to offer some nuance – it’s clearly nothing on the level of, say, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or even Mass Effect 3.

Why is it so hard to make a video game of Thrones? It’s certainly easy to see why video game developers would be drawn to the Game of Thrones universe: there’s already a large, passionate built-in fanbase, and many of the all-time best video games are set in worlds full of swords and sorcery. But any Game of Thrones adaptation that starts with fighting has already missed the point. We’ve seen how far fighting gets you in Westeros – just ask Khal Drogo or Ned Stark. A Game of Thrones game that invites the player to cut through swaths of cookie-cutter enemies undercuts one of Game of Thrones’ central themes: every death matters, and every killer is risking their life by doing the killing.

The real survivors in Westeros are characters like Tyrion, Varys, or Littlefinger, who have largely shunned swords in favor of politics. That’s the experience that a Game of Thrones game should attempt to replicate, and that’s why Game of Thrones Ascent is the first adaptation of “A Song of Ice and Fire” that has piqued my interest. I’m inherently skeptical of all Facebook games – once Farmvilled, twice shy – but it seems to me that Disruptor Beam’s concept cleverly uses the complex, amorphous social network of our actual lives to replicate the complex, amorphous social network of Westeros. That’s what Game of Thrones does best, and that’s what a video game of Thrones should do, too.

This post contains spoilers through the May 20 episode of Game of Thrones.

“The Prince of Winterfell” may be a lot of plot setup, but it’s also an episode that illustrates one of the things I love about the scope of Game of Thrones: it’s a big enough world that when coincidences happen and surprising combinations of people come together, they can feel even more miraculous than dragons or white walkers. But that space also means that people can forge different paths than the ones reserved for them by their station and gender.

Brienne of Tarth’s made those choices again and again throughout her life, whether she’s choosing knighthood over the life of a nobly bred lady or loyalty to Catelyn over a conventional oath of fealty to a leige lord. But in this episode, her choices are juxtaposed particularly sharply with those of her inverse, Jamie Lannister. Jamie is a man, and not just any man—”Do you remember Jamie at 17?” Tyrion asks in reflective wonder, considering his talented older brother—but a preternaturally gifted specimen of manhood. He was born to the knighthood Brienne has to fight every day to claim for her own, and instead of upholding the code she worships, he’s spattered it with gore. As they go on the run together, Jamie may enjoy taunting Brienne, asking her first “Have you known many men? I suppose not. Women? Horses?” and then “Has anyone ever told you you are as boring as you are ugly?” But he’s losing the very battle he thinks he’s goading Brienne into. “All my life, men like you have sneered at me,” she tells him. “And all my life, I’ve knocked men like you into the dust.” Jamie may never have the struggles with his gender and vocation that Brienne suffers every day, but she’s vastly more secure in the knighthood she chose than Jamie ever was in the white cloak that suffocated him.

Then, there’s Talisia, who was “raised to be a proper little lady.” She explains to Robb, in a speech that newcomers to the series should remember very, very carefully (along with another important bit of foreshadowing)* how she came to transcend her own state:

When I was 12, my mother and father went to a wedding. Weddings in Volantis last for days…we couldn’t bear to be inside…every child in Volantis was in the bay that day…Drummers were playing for coppers in the east bank. I was treading water, talking to a friend, when I realized I hadn’t seen my brother. I called his name. And then I started screaming his name. And then I saw him, floating face down, and my heart just stopped. I dragged him from the water. My friend helped me, I think, I don’t even remember. He was so little. When we pulled him on to the riverbank, I screamed at him and I shook him, and he was dead. Just dead. A man ran over. He had a fish tatoo on his face. In Volantis, the slaves have tattoos..This man worked on a fishing boat. And he pushed me out of the way. You have to understand, for a slave to push a highborn girl, that’s death, a terrible death…He started pressing on my brother’s chest again and again and again, until my brother spat up half of the Rhoyne, and cried out, and the man cradled his head and told him to be calm. I decided two things that day. I would not waste my years planning dances and masquerades…and when I came of age, I would never live in a slave city again.

Robb’s been attracted to her all along, but it’s this tale of personal alchemy that unmans the young king, leaving him unable to honor his obligations or resist a woman who performed the kind of transformation he needs to undergo in reverse. Making love to her is an act of transgression, a violation of his pledge to pay for the bridge crossing with his future. But if Talisia became what seemed impossible, perhaps Robb can find it himself to transcend his lack of training and take up his kingship, finding a way to become “one of the good ones.”
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This post contains spoilers through the May 13 episode of Game of Thrones.

I enjoy watching Game of Thrones so much, and identify so deeply with some of the characters, that occasionally—horrific violence and lack of proper sanitation aside—I forget that they exist in a profoundly different era. Last night’s episode explored one of the psychological ways in which that’s true: what happens when people who have lived their lives governed by others’ wills find themselves confronted with the prospect of choice.

First, there’s Dany, who in recent weeks has become a less admirable character as she’s refused to assert her will or even attempted to discern it. It’s one thing to insist that her claim to the throne of Westeros is good in foot-stamping terms, another to actually devise a strategy of her own beyond the offers the members of the Thirteen are willing to make her. Her vacillation, and her rebuffs to the people who attempt to help her through a deliberative process, leave her vulnerable. Last week, she found her dragons stole and her khalasar slaughtered. This week, she finds that the deed’s been done by men of greater vision and will than she currently possesses, who saw in her a way to claim Qarth for their own. Will can’t merely be affirmed in this conflict, it must be asserted.

But is it possible for it to be complete? Tywin Lannister’s conduct this week suggests that he knows Arya to be false, but wants to keep her with him anyway. “If you’re going to pose as a commoner, you should do it properly,” he warns her, letting her know both that he sees through her facade and that there are limits to his tolerance, to this whim in the midst of his exercise of his will. “Have you met many stonemasons?” Arya asks, testing Tywin as he tests her facade. “Careful, girl,” he warns her. “I enjoy you, but careful.” Even a man of iron will has some remaining softness for a girl who reminds him of his daughter, but it remains an open question whether this whim will fortify Tywin’s will or be his doom. She still has one death left to dispense, after all.
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I hadn’t seen the covers for the Game of Thrones comics adaptation until Latoya Peterson tweeted this one out in horror:

It’s amazing how even an original, powerful franchise with its own following can get squished into comic book conventions even when they don’t fit very well. Here, Dany’s a standard comic-book babe with an impossibly tiny waist and significant-sized breasts, even though her character has just hit puberty in the scene from the novel depicted here. Even if she’s been aged up, as she was in the show to make the depiction of her marriage to a Ghengis Khan-like barbarian less problematic, the way she’s portrayed here is about serving her up as a delectable object, not to explain how frightening what’s about to happen to her is.

Even worse may be this cover:

The scene that’s depicted here? The one where Dany looks like she’s having an orgasm? It’s the moment after she, in extreme grief at the loss of her husband and the fact she’s been abandoned by her people, does something that everyone around her thinks is suicidal, but that turns out to be an act of vision that makes her a critically important and sought-after leader. Also, all her hair burns off. But no, that couldn’t possibly be what’s important here. What’s important is that she look devourable, whether by dragons or by men.

This post contains spoilers through the May 6 episode of Game of Thrones.

There’s a lot going on in tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones, but many of the developments shared a common, nasty thread: the lack of real control people have in Westeros over their bodies and sexuality, whether they’re high born or low, in King’s Landing or Beyond the wall. For a number of the female characters, there’s an ugly coming to terms with what men believe is valuable about them, and with their ability to control what’s so crudely reduced to a commodity. Cersei cannot save her daughter Myrcella from the same kind of arranged marriage she found so odious, and tells her brother Tyrion, who has brokered Myrcella’s marriage into Dorne, that she hopes he becomes vulnerable by loving someone as Cersei loved her daughter so she can wound him in the same fashion.

Joffrey, if he hasn’t demonstrated how much he hates Sansa by stripping and beating her before the court, only reinforces how little he values her continued well-being by telling his guards “Let them have her” after Sansa is chased off by men who mean to rape her. It’s the Hound, a man who insists he stands apart from chivalric tradition, who returns to save Joffrey’s ostensible lady, telling Tyrion when the Hand thanks him, “I didn’t do it for you.” There’s pleasure, it seems, in not reducing a woman to a womb, to a piece of dismembered meat as the rampaging crowd does to a septa in Joffrey’s entourage. And the fate the Hound saves her from is a shock to Sansa, even after everything that’s been done to her by the man who was once her ideal. “He hated me, the man who hit me,” Sansa tells Shae. “I saw it in his eyes. I never met him before, but he wanted to hurt me.” And it’s the former prostitute who’s left to explain to Sansa the intersection of seething class rage and misogyny. “You are everything he will never have,” Shae explains to Sansa. “Your horse eats better than his children.”

Dany isn’t assaulted the way Sansa is. But as she tries to first command and then bargain her way into the ships and armies she needs to launch an invasion, she’s presented with a stark economy in which the currency is units of her body—a night in her bed for a ship, a lifetime for untold riches. “Does he think I’ll whore myself for a boat?” she asks bitterly. The spice merchant who cuttingly informs Dany that “I admire your passion. But in business, I trust in logic, not passion” may be turning her down, but he’s at least doing her the compliment of asking her to bargain with something other than her body.
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io9 has a great interview with Brit Marling, the writer and star of low-budget sci-fi movie Sound of My Voice, which, as I told y’all on Friday, I liked very much. I wanted to pull out part of the interview where she talks about how frustrating it is to come up against the same obstacles and challenges for female characters—particularly the tendency to use sexual assault as a default major obstacle for a dramatic heroine:

When Zal and I write [the two wrote Sound of My Voice together] sometimes you find yourself in a passive position. And you have stop yourself: “I set out to write a story about a strong woman acting with agency. And now here I am having her be sexually assaulted by somebody so she can achieve something else.” You have to tell yourself to stop.

And you realize that so much of this stuff is the same narrative being recycled over and over again, because a lot of it is happening unconsciously. We consume, we watch, we take it in, we create, it’s this negative feedback cycle. When I see things like Bridesmaids I get really excited. That film was really subversive and widely consumed and entertaining, but also saying really interesting things on female friendships and weddings. It was making fun of it all, that was refreshing, I hope we see more of that…

As an actor, that’s why I started writing. I came out to LA and I would read these things, you are hard pressed to find a script where the girl is not sexually assaulted or raped or manipulated or a sex toy — an object of affection. It’s always about the way men are looking at her. And cinema, traditionally has been about how men are looking at women. I do think we’re breaking that up now with more female directors, I think we’re starting to see the female gaze.

I think this is right. I should say that I have no problem with works that deal with women getting raped that are explicitly about examining the consequences of sexism. One of the reasons that the arc of Sons of Anarchy where Gemma is raped is so powerful is that it’s about the way she and everyone else around her deal with their internalized sexism: the men who rape her think she is a weak spot for the motorcycle gang she’s affiliated with, Gemma thinks her husband will put her off because men need to “own their pussy,” and her husband seduces her back to disprove that assumption. Similarly, as I argue in this book chapter I have coming out about A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, I really believe a lot of that series is about tying together sexual assault and monstrosity.

But rape doesn’t only happen to women, and it’s not the only thing that happens to women. You can lose your job, your house, your car, your kid, your best friend, your business, your family, your faith, your following, your office. If men are reaching for the worst thing that can happen to women and choosing rape out of a deficit of imagination, then that’s having a character be sexually assaulted for shock value. If you want to tell a story that’s about the worst thing that happened to a specific woman character, you should be thinking very specifically about her and less about your and the audience’s default answer to a question.

This post contains spoilers through the April 29 episode of Game of Thrones.

Much of the time, the power of Game of Thrones comes from watching people we love manipulated by forces beyond their control—or by the decisions of those they are powerless to influence. Sansa’s limpid eyes can’t restrain Joffrey’s murderous streak; Catelyn’s choices are subordinated to her husband’s sense of duty and her son’s war; Brienne and Sam can’t help being born into bodies that make it impossible to live up to the ideals assigned to them by station and gender. But this week, we see characters severed from the ties that bound and constrained them by tragedy, mistaken identity, and offers of new opportunities—and as a result, we see them faced with, and in some cases, making choices that will have significant implications for them, and for the world that is being radically reshaped around them.

The first person to be cast into the wind is Brienne, who loses her king and the identity and legitimacy he briefly granted her by making her a member of his Kingsguard, when Melisandre of Asshai’s monstrous offspring murders Renly in his tent. In her grief, she swears “I won’t leave him,” but Cat has to remind her of her choices, and of the necessity of making one, cautioning “You can’t avenge him if you are dead.” Once she’s free from her oath to Renly, Brienne ends up choosing a new liege lord, one that’s both beyond the menu of options Cat saw for her, and that’s in keeping with her strict application of the code of chivalry and flexible thinking about who can embody it. “I do not know your son, milady,” she tells Cat. “But I would follow you if you would have me. You have courage. Not battle courage, but a woman’s courage.”
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My friend Anna Holmes wrote her column for the Washington Post this week about the nudity of Game of Thrones in which I’m the main voice speaking out in the show’s defense. I ended up writing her some long thoughts on the subject, far more than she needed, so I thought I’d condense them here because it turns out, though I’ve written about almost everything else when it comes to the show, I haven’t written about nudity and its uses. So here we go…

When my friend Myles McNutt popularized the term sexposition last year to describe scenes in Game of Thrones where one character explains a concept while other characters have sex unrelated to that conversation in the same frame, he came up with something really funny and useful. But I think people have ended up suggesting that all the sex and nudity in Game of Thrones is prurient rather than relevant. And I feel really strongly that isn’t true.

I’d say I think they’re being somewhat more thoughtful in season 2. There are scenes in season 1 that are just ludicrous—Littlefinger’s yammering around his prostitutes, the Dothraki wedding sequences. That said, I feel nudity is a driver of personality more the show gets credit for in Season 1. I really like the good cheer of the prostitutes bursting in on Tyrion in our introduction to the character. I rarely feel like it’s okay to use female nudity solely to advance our impression of a male character, but given the show’s very impressive investment in Peter Dinklage as a sex symbol, I thought that scene was kind of remarkable. I also liked the scene of Ros flashing Theon as she leaves for King’s Landing, a moment that showed her comfort with her body as a commodity while also reinforcing Theon as kind of a randy idiot. And Dany’s nudity at the end of the finale felt powerful to me for the same reason Margaery’s does: her femininity is as exposed as it can get, which should make her vulnerable, and instead it’s a moment of triumph and dignity for her.

This season, there have been a couple stand-alone examples that have felt particularly important to me. When Theon has sex with the daughter of the ship captain who’s bringing him back to his childhood home on Pyke, the show spends a lot of time lingering on her face and body, neither of which are particularly conventionally attractive. But Theon ends up complicit in our judgement of her. He tells her to shut her mouth so he won’t have to look at her teeth. He ignores her requests to go with him when he leaves the ship, and ignores her when she says her father will punish her for sleeping with him. He’s using her, and assumes that because she’s an ugly girl, she ought to be sexually available to him and grateful for the attention. The whole scene, including her nakedness, is about explaining Theon’s sexual entitlement, his voraciousness, the inflated sense of self that will later lead to his spectacular humiliation.

I felt the same way about Margaery Tyrell’s scene with her husband, Renly Baratheon. The scene starts with him acknowledging how beautiful she is. But he’s profoundly uncomfortable with her naked body, repulsed by the sexual attraction he knows he’s supposed to be feeling. The contrast between her beautiful body and his reaction, which I thought was a really beautiful piece of acting, is part of what makes the scene. The other part of what makes the scene great is her utter comfort in her body, in her nakedness. Margaery may be a woman, and she may be in a situation where most of us might feel sexually vulnerable. But she’s better equipped than her husband to talk about the fact that they need to get pregnant, and quickly, and she’s more at home in her body, what her body craves, and what other people want her body to be used for than Renly is.

Even Melisandre’s sort of cheesy seduction of Stannis Baratheon bears literal fruit in the terms of a quick-gestating smoke monster.

And I thought the scene where Joffrey orders Ros to first beat Daisy and then rape her with a scepter was the perfect example of why people shouldn’t dismiss nude scenes and sex scenes as they come up in the show and forget that they might pay off later. We meet Daisy when Ros is giving her a tour of Littlefinger’s brothel, including scenes where she’s instructing other prostitutes on how to fake pleasure with clients more convincingly. We see Daisy naked in an interrupted tryst with Pycelle, huddling naked on the floor as her client gets his beard cut off and sent to prison, and we see Tyrion pay her off, adding a tip and a smile. These scenes, as well as non-sexual ones like Daisy crying over a colleague’s murdered child, give us a relationship with these small characters (neither of whom exist in the books, by the way). And then we see these women turned against each other, one forced to torture the other at pain of death. Without those previous scenes, Joffrey would be torturing anonymous whores. With them, he’s torturing people. That arc gives Game of Thrones a lot of credit with me. I’m hard-pressed to dismiss a silly sex scene now, because how do I know it’s not going to pay off painfully later down the road?

And we actually don’t see a lot of the female characters nude. Two of them are children. Catelyn is a widow deep in mourning. On a factual note, Lena Headey may be naked less as Cersei because she has significant tattoos and covering them up would be a lot of work, so it may just be a tech thing. Brienne is a knight. Interestingly, we haven’t seen Shae naked at all this season, though she is Tyrion’s lover and a sex worker. I guess I don’t mind seeing women naked at the same time that the show is giving them personality and humanity they don’t have in the novels. The show may make Ros and Daisy naked, but Ros is literally a line in the novels and Daisy doesn’t exist at all. Now, they’re people to us, and hurting them makes us feel pain.