I’ve written a great deal this season about the ways in which prestige television, traditionally considered the provenance of middle-aged male anti-heroes, is actually strikingly attentive to the experiences and worldviews of young girls. And as Game of Thrones closed out its third season on Sunday, and as Mad Men reached a high point of its sixth year with Sally Draper’s discovery of her father’s latest infidelity, they seemed to be strikingly in parallel. Both shows have many concerns. But among them is what happens when girls lose their fathers, whether to death, divorce, or simply grown-up incompatibility.

Arya Stark loses her biological father Ned Stark to violence, specifically to an execution ordered by King Joffrey Baratheon. Joffrey’s a vicious young boy who’s entirely out of his depth in his role as king of Westeros, but he has father problems of his own. The man who raised him as a son, Robert Baratheon, dies in the first season of Game of Thrones after he’s gored by a boar on a hunt, his reflexes dulled by the wine his wife Cersei has encouraged his squire to overserve him. And Joffrey’s dogged by rumors (which are, of course true), that the violent, mercurial, unfaithful Robert isn’t his biological father at all, but instead, that he’s the product of the long-running sexual relationship between his mother Cersei and her twin brother Jaime. Jaime is lost to Joffrey in the swirl of the War of the Five kings, captured by the Starks in battle, disappearing into the countryside on the run with Brienne of Tarth after Catelyn Stark frees him, stripped of his sword hand by Locke, and ultimately come home a changed man. When Joffrey orders Ned Stark killed, he’s doing so to kill his own doubts about his parentage, his legitimacy, his right to the throne on which he sits, as well as to commit an act of cruelty against Sansa Stark, who is naive enough to have condemned her father to prison, and then naive enough to believe that she can save his life.

But while Sansa doesn’t acquire another father figure, instead falling into the custody of her prospective mother-in-law Cersei Lannister, and then the bevy of Tyrell women, Arya gains and loses several other older men in her life throughout the course of the series. There’s her dancing master, Syrio Forel, the former First Sword of Braavos, who is hired by Ned to instruct Arya in swordplay when they move to King’s Landing. To a certain extent, Syrio’s a surrogate father, proving Arya company that Ned’s unable to give her while he’s tied up with the duties that come with being Hand of the King. And he also does what Ned can’t quite do directly, training Arya on the basis of her talent, rather than her gender. And Syrio doesn’t just give her lessons: he also gives Arya the beginning of a new philosophy and a relationship to death, a defiant “not today!” a force that many other women in the series feel powerless against. When the knights of the Kingsguard come for Arya as part of the Lannisters’ attempt to sweep up the Starks in a single set of operations, Syrio acts more like a father than an instructor, giving Arya the opportunity to flee, even, it seems, at the cost of her own life.

She runs into the arms of the man who will become her second surrogate father, Yoren, a Brother of the Night’s Watch who’s come to King’s Landing on a recruiting mission that’s largely been a failure. Yoren’s decision to take Arya in is impulsive and decent, but they’re matched in many ways. Like Syrio, Yoren’s willing to treat Arya like a boy, cutting her hair, urging her to keep her gender a secret. And he trains her like a boy, too, sharing with her the story of his own childhood family loss, and teaching her the mantra of revenge that sustained him until he was able to avenge that loss and run off to join the Night’s Watch. But he dies, too, in an attack on their party, and Arya’s left alone again.
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The finale of the third season of Game of Thrones featured a whole bunch of major developments, including Arya going full murderer on some minor Freys, Dany taking Yunkai, and Jaime Lannister’s less-than-totally-joyful reunion. But it also ended a season that made significant changes to George R.R. Martin’s novels, both in the moment, and in terms of the implications of this season for events that Martin hasn’t yet resolved in prose. For those of us who have read the novels, here are five questions that the third season raises both for Martin’s novels, and for how events will play out in subsequent seasons.

1. What happens at Joffrey’s wedding? In Martin’s books, Jaime Lannister makes it back to King’s Landing after Joffrey’s wedding to Margaery Tyrell, not to celebrate, but to mourn the death of his unacknowledged son with his sister Cersei, after someone poisons Joffrey during the nuptial feast. That timing means that Jaime can’t do much to avenge Joffrey’s death in the moment, except to visit his brother Tyrion, the main suspect, in prison. But even though Jaime’s been maimed, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t want to take immediate action to try to keep Joffrey alive, or to exact violent revenge against whoever he suspects of killing his son. This is, after all, a guy who pushed a little kid out a window as one of the “things I do for love.” What’s the wedding going to look like now?
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The National Republican Congressional Committee this morning posted what was supposed to be a clever riff on HBO’s hit fantasy series Game of Thrones: an interactive map called “Game of Dems.” The feature was supposed to highlight the various alliances and supporters behind Democrats like Elise Gomez Reyes. It’s a cute idea, with just one problem in its execution. The map the NRCC produced looks a lot more like the maps of Middle Earth from J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings franchise, down to the fonts and brushwork illustrating mountains, than it does any extant map of Westeros or Essos, the continents where George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire is set. Given that there’s a very comprehensive set of Game of Thrones maps extant and available for purchase, this oversight doesn’t just make the NRCC looks dumb: it makes them look lazy or cheap, distracting from the actual message they were trying to get across, which is not a bad one.

This seems like it’s a silly thing to harp over, but it gets at an important point. Conservatives vacillate back and forth between bashing popular culture for its amorality or immorality, or lack of positive portrayals of conservative characters and conservative values, and badly wanting to exploit pop culture tropes and develop their own benches of celebrity spokesmen. But it’s only possible to do the latter if you make a deep study of popular culture, so that you have a sense of what’s relevant to mass–and particularly youth–audiences, and so you can riff off culture and imitate its cadences.

Witness the debut today of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s public Twitter feed. The picture her staff selected for her profile is the same one made famous by a Tumblr called Texts from Hillary, which imagined her in hilarious correspondence with celebrities like Meryl Streep and other political figures like Mitt Romney. Her first tweet from the account was a shout-out to the followers of that Tumblr, letting them know that “I’ll take it from here.” Her biography on the site, in addition to her other accomplishments, lists her as a ” hair icon, pantsuit aficionado,” both riffs on traits that she’s been criticized for in the past, and that she’s successfully made light of, most notably referring to her supporters as “the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit” at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Where the Republicans tried to bash Democrats and came across as clueless about the very franchise they were trying to exploit, Clinton’s twitter feed makes her look Aware Of All Internet Traditions. Whether fine-grained internet jokes on that level are necessary for a political campaign, they’re a way of creating clever buzz and positive micro-news cycles for people who can employ them deftly. But screwing up pop or internet culture references damages both the message you were trying to get across with them, and your own cool quotient. If you want to sit at the table with the kids playing Dungeons and Dragons and debating Game of Thrones rather than flipping it over and calling us dorks, you might want to know at least the basics before you try to act like an expert.

This post discusses plot points from the June 9 episode of Game of Thrones. During this week, I’ll publish a series of posts on a number of aspects of the third season, but in this piece, I’ll focus on the third season finale.

The title of the third season finale of Game of Thrones is “Mhysa,” the Ghiscari word for mother, and the title that’s given to Dany by the freed slaves of Yunkai at the end of the episode. But it’s a fitting title for an episode that’s substantially concerned with what it means to be family, whether you’re born into it, chose to affirm it, or build it from the ashes of your shattered life. And it’s also an hour of television that’s a powerful reminder that what happens in family, and who counts as family, always emotionally powerful questions, matters rather more in a system of governance based on hereditary monarchy, and one that begins to explore the emotional and governance risks of building a family that’s the size of an entire nation.

The nightmare of a family you’re born into, especially when that nightmarish family has become entwined with the state, is never more clear than in the small council meeting where Tyrion learns of Robb Stark’s death. “Write back to Lord Frey,” Joffrey says, thinking not of the implications for his nation, but of his personal vendettas. “Thank him for his service. And command him to send me Robb Stark’s head. I’m going to serve it to Sansa at my wedding feast.” Tyrion, who’s extended his protection to Sansa Stark at their wedding in the matter of their bedding, with help from his father, tries to intervene again, and provokes another nasty confrontation. “Everyone is mine to torment,” Joffrey declares. “You’d do well to remember that, you little monster.” “Monsters are dangerous,” Tyrion shoots back at him. “And just now, kings seem to be dying like flies.” And Tywin, once again, backs up his son, telling his grandon, “Any man who must say ‘I am the king is no true king,’” then sending him to bed without supper.

But the decision that follows, about the moment when Tywin decided he would accept Tyrion as a Lannister, and make him part of the family, is so painful it’s almost not worth scoring the points with Joffrey. “A good man does everything in his power to better his family’s position, regardless of his own selfish desires,” Tywin order Tyrion to get Sansa pregnant–he doesn’t care about the young woman’s trauma, just securing the Lannisters’ interests. And he finds himself musing to Tyrion about what those ties mean to him. “The day that you were born. I wanted to carry you into the sea and let the waves wash you away. Instead I let you live. And I brought you up as my son. Because you’re a Lannister,” Tywin tells him. Blood means overcoming even disgust.
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This season of Mad Men hasn’t done much for me this season, something Sean T. Collins and I discussed at length in an episode of Bloggingheads earlier this week. But one scene has lingered with me, bright among the haze of marijuana smoke and misery: the sight of Don Draper taking a seat by himself at a table for two at Bobby’s summer camp, and watching his ex-wife, Betty, with her new husband, Henry Francis. The day before, Don ran into a newly-slim Betty at a gas station where they’d both stopped for directions, and the two of them had staged a sexual reunion in one of the cabins. Where previously, that might have been an act of self-loathing on Betty’s part, the way she sought out an anonymous stranger for sexual affirmation when she and Don were still married, and an expression of Don’s overpowering charisma, the polarity between them was reversed. Don sought out Betty, who in previous seasons had called him on the phone as if she missed him. And where Don had always meandered home from his sexual liaisons to a resentful Betty, this time Don was disposable, a fling, someone to indulge and discard. Like an inverse vampire, Betty was fresh, rejuvenated, and flirtatious at breakfast in the morning sun with Henry, while Don, stuck against the wall and in the shadows, seemed drained. The sexual power that had once been exclusive to Don in their relationship was now Betty’s, too. And without that advantage, Don was at a loss, experiencing, for the second time in the season after Sylvia broke it off with him, what it meant to be cast off as he’d disappointed so many women before.

The sequence, more so than any other image of Don looking drugged, or miserable, or at a loss this season, was powerful because it illustrated not just that Don is unhappy, but why he’s unhappy and unmoored. Much like Roger Sterling discovering that his smooth lines don’t work on a woman who’s drugged out of her mind, and for reasons that seem incomprehensible to him, has picked out a shorter, less impressive man for the evening, Don Draper is learning that, absent the forces that conferred extra sexual and economic power and freedom on him simply because he was born a certain gender, it’s a lot less fun to be Don Draper.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about the show’s heavy reliance this season on the characters reacting to the welter of historical tragedies that marked 1968, “Ostensibly, Mad Men is a show about ‘the ’60s.’ But stories ‘about’ particular times almost never work. Stories about people work.” And the way to make stories about eras work is to explore what happens to very particular characters as they’re buffeted by world historical forces. That doesn’t mean that the characters have to stand in for their demographics–in fact, precisely the reverse. Details like Roger’s embrace of acid culture, or Joan’s decision to preserve the myth of Greg as her son’s father in part because of Greg’s service in Vietnam lends him a glint of heroism he never really deserved work because they’re human and particular, grounded in the characters we’ve come to know so well. But it does mean that the forces of history are more interesting when they’re writ large than when the characters are checking off boxes, reacting to political murders, racist assassinations, racially-demarcated riots, and protests against the war in Vietnam.
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The June 2 episode of Game of Thrones has already become broadly notorious for an event that in the George R.R. Martin novels becomes known as the Red Wedding. At a celebration of the wedding of Edmure Tully to the daughter of Walder Frey, a notoriously unpleasant major lord who controls a strategically important crossing—a union that makes up for the fact that Robb, who’s named himself King In The North, broke a promise to marry that same daughter—things go disastrously wrong. Despite the fact that Walder Frey has extended his protection to Stark, Stark’s pregnant wife Talisa, and his mother Catelyn, it turns out Frey’s cut a deal with the rival House Lannister, and to avenge the slight Robb gave the Freys, he has them all murdered.

This burst of violence was shocking because it resulted in the deaths of characters who were fan favorites, but one of the killings has produced particular revulsion among some viewers of the show. Talisa, who is pregnant, is stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen, a method of murder that’s intended to make sure there’s absolutely no chance her fetus could survive her own death. Game of Thrones hasn’t shied away from violence against women, whether Sansa Stark, Robb’s younger sister, is being beaten and stripped by King Joffrey Lannister’s guards while she is imprisoned in King’s Landing, or Ros, a former sex worker who became a gifted spy is being ordered to beat another woman, or ends up shot full of arrows, both acts the result of Joffrey’s fusion of sexuality and brutal sadism. But the attack on Talisa seemed to stand out for some viewers even in this context as uniquely stomach-churning, evidence that the show is participating in some of its characters disgusting enjoyment of violence against women.

Though Talisa’s murder is unspeakably cruel, it didn’t read that way to me. Rather, the decision to kill her by killing her fetus made, within the astonishingly cold-blooded context of the Red Wedding, a great deal of sense. A comprehensive attempt to make the Starks extinct would include an attack on everyone in their family line, born and unborn. And as an attempt to make Robb Stark feel unspeakable emotional pain before his physical death, an attack on his wife and his unborn child that he has to witness while he is physically incapacitated is a twistedly brilliant thing to do. As Talisa died and Robb held her, the focus was on their faces, and their shared pain, just as they’d shared joyful glances during Edmure’s wedding vows, and flirted during the banquet. Our sympathies and focus were on them, rather than on a pornographic contemplation of the violence to which they’d been subjected.

But Talisa is part of a larger tradition of television women who die during childbirth, or are subjected to terrible violence during pregnancy or labor, something Jessica Valenti highlighted on Twitter on June 4. I collected the conversation that resulted from her observation below:

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This post discusses plot points from the June 2 episode of Game of Throne.

“And why would I let him do that?” Walder Frey asks Catelyn Stark at the culmination of what will come to be known as the Red Wedding, the massacre of Robb Stark, his wife Talisa, the child Talisa is bearing, and many of the Stark’s closest allies, when Cat begs him to let her son go, and foreswears vengeance if only he’ll grant her that mercy as a mother. “On my honor as a Tully, on my honor as a Stark, let him go or I will cut your wife’s throat,” Cat, who was quick enough to spot the other woman hiding under a table and to grab her, and put a knife to the younger woman’s throat. Instead of being shocked or cowed, the older man shrugs. “I’ll find another,” Walder Frey says.

More than anything else that happened in this episode of Game of Thrones, or really, that has happened this season, that profoundly callous remark is a perfect encapsulation of a medieval mindset. And it’s a reminder that we are visiting a world that’s meant to be a harsh critique of our sentimental romance of an era of knights and chivalry that’s as persistent in us as it has been in Sansa Stark.

The Starks’ disastrous visit to the Twins begins with a ritual that constitutes a promise: Walder Frey offers the Starks bread and salt, they eat of it, and with an air of extreme boredom, Frey tells them: “My honored guests. Be welcome in my walls and at my table. I extend to you my hospitality and protection in the light of the seven.” Fittingly, for an episode centered around vengeance for the breaking of an oath, “The Rains of Castamere” is full of promises made and broken, and subtle, beautiful moments about what those promises mean to the people who offer them and destroy them.

“By the sight of the seven, I hereby seal these two souls, biding them as one for eternity,” the Septon at Edmure Frey’s wedding ceremony begins the service. It’s one of the only ceremonial acts in the episode that will actually hold. “I am hers and she is mine,” Edmure, gratified by the beauty of his bride, says with an actual sense of reverence for once, as Robb and Talisa exchange glances, still newlyweds in the moment when they recall their own vows, said furtively in a warcamp tent, and compare them to this charade made happy by Edmure’s pleasure in the woman selected to married him.
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Well, this video by comedian Rachel Bloom is pretty wonderful. And it’s a reminder that the next time someone complains about the brutality in Game of Thrones, you can always tell them that torturing Theon Greyjoy may be unpleasant, but at least Westeros isn’t constantly getting wiped out by plagues:

The New York Post treats a reveal it got yesterday as a guess-that-name gossip item, but the word that a Game of Thrones actress didn’t want to do any more nude scenes raises more interesting and important questions than the simple question of who it was:

One of the stars of “Game of Thrones” is refusing to appear in any more nude scenes, according to a cast member.

“One of the girls in the show who got her [dress] off the most in the first couple of seasons now doesn’t at all,” Oona Chaplin, who plays the noblewoman Talisa Maegyr on the show, told reporters in London over the weekend.

“She said, ‘I want to be known for my acting not for my breasts.’ ”

Chaplin refused to say which actress it is.

I absolutely support any actress who doesn’t want to do nudity, particularly given the disparate pressure on women to take their clothes off on-screen, and how often that nudity is used as fan service rather than for narrative emphasis or to grow characters. But I do think it’s depressing that we’re at a point where actresses feel that they’re faced with a choice: getting nude, even when said nudity might provide an important character moment or punctuate a scene in a moving way, or be taken seriously. Game of Thrones, in its first several seasons, particularly through its use of sexposition—sex scenes that appeared in the show to make more visually, er, stimulating, scenes where characters explained backstory or politics—helped make that feel more like a choice.

But it’s done a great deal in this third season to make nudity equal-opportunity across genders, and more importantly, to demonstrate that you can be naked and do serious acting. Seeing Brienne of Tarth lunge, nude, out of a bath to confront her antagonist and former prisoner, Jaime Lannister, wasn’t about presenting her body for our consumption as a sex object, but to demonstrate that she wasn’t afraid to be naked in front of a man who had sexually shamed her for loving a king who would never want her. Seeing Robb Stark and his wife Talisa naked together after a bout of marital sex was a display of their intimacy and comfort with each other, as well as the fact that they were still in the early stage of their relationship, when their nudity was still novel to each other. And seeing Jon Snow stripped of his furs was also to see him stripped of the vows he swore as a member of the celibate Night’s Watch: wildling Ygritte’s seduction of him rendered him emotionally and physically naked.

Getting naked is a serious business, something that happens consensually between adults, non-consensually a way of victimizing someone and making them feel powerless, non-sexually as a way of demonstrating comfort, or necessarily to provide care to someone who is vulnerable. Nudity can be funny without making the person who is nude risible, and sensual without making the person who is naked an object. That we still have trouble with those ideas suggests we have a lot to learn as viewers, and that our popular culture has to be more precise in the way it teaches us to absorb the nudity it puts on screen.